Entering Germany for the first time

For the next weeks the front remained static in our area, except for patrol actions. The Battery moved with the 500th Artillery to Guedertheim in support of the 36th (Texas) Division, to Uttwiller in support of the 103rd Division and then to Ettendorf to rejoin the 14th Armored. At Uttwiller, our gunners engaged two ME109’s and shot one of them down. Otherwise, action was light with the biggest battle being fought against deep snow and biting cold.

In the north, the Third Army was beginning to run wild again as it launched its Saar/Palatinate campaign. On March 15, the Seventh Army joined the fray, kicking off from its Moder River line against light opposition and driving to the German border again. The Battery entered Germany for the first time at 6:30 a.m. on January 23 a few miles west of Wissembourg and plunged into the mountains for an end run against the Siegfried Line at that point.

Here a Negro tank destroyer battalion leading the column had surprised a German horse-drawn convoy on the road and created a "Valley of death." Dozens of horses were killed or broke loose from their hitches to run panic stricken along the roads, which were covered with dead Germans and enemy equipment of every description. Many of the horses had been pulling tanks which were out of fuel -- a testimony to the effectiveness of Allied air raids on German fuel supplies. From the surrounding forest, hundreds of German soldiers were emerging with their hands behind their heads to surrender.

The tank destroyer battalion was one of the few Negro combat units active in Europe.

I talked to a couple of the fellows who were sitting in their tank destroyer reading the latest issue of the Army newspaper, Stars & Stripes. They had just read that Hitler was forming a new homeland defense force to be known as the “Volksturm.” These people would be senior citizens armed with such weapons as shovels, clubs and pitchforks.

“Pitchforks!” one of the tankers exclaimed. “Man, they’re sharp! I don’t want to meet up with any of them Krauts with pitchforks.” I had to laugh at the irony of that remark coming from someone who had just helped shoot a well-armed German column to smithereens.
Our advance continued for the next two days as the Division overran Herxheim and Bellheim to reach the Rhine River. Battery personnel aiding in the mop-up operations gathered in more than 100 prisoners in three days.

At one time, we had three German soldiers sitting on the hood of our jeep as we drove around looking for some MPs to take charge of them.

The Division then retired to the vicinity of Berg Zabern and Wissembourg for five days of regrouping and resupplying. This gave us a chance to inspect some of the pill boxes and fortifications of the famed Siegfried Line. Some of them were quite spacious. One had an automated mortar firing system with the mortar shells attached to a conveyor belt that would drop them into the firing tubes at quite a high rate of speed. The mortars were already zeroed in on various key spots surrounding the pillbox.

These could have been formidable weapons but we had driven right past them because they were unmanned. The German soldiers who should have been manning them had probably been captured when we surrounded the German 7th Army in France last August.