Meeting the ME-262

I was greatly disappointed in the loss of our trailer loaded with barracks bags containing our personal items. Unfortunately the textbooks for a philosophy course I was taking from the University of Wisconsin had just arrived and were among my possessions captured by the Germans. A couple of days after our withdrawal, I persuaded Captain Kelly’s driver to go with me by jeep back into the mountains to see if we could reach Barenthal. Perhaps the Germans had not found our trailer parked in the courtyard of a house on main street?

The road on which we had retreated seemed to be in pretty good shape so we kept going, headed back to Barenthal. About a mile from there we were beginning to think that we would make it when a couple of low flying P-47’s buzzed us. As we stopped to watch, one of them circled around and began a high speed dive directly toward us. A few hundred yards from us he released two bombs which sailed over our heads and landed about 500 yards in front of us. Machine gun antiaircraft fire erupted from the Germans up ahead as he sailed past them. We spun the jeep around in record time and headed back down the road from which we had just come. That was the end of our attempt to rescue our belongings.

Meanwhile the German attack on our front had shifted eastward as their tanks came over the border from Germany to reach the towns of Hatten and Rittershofen, not far from the Rhine River. Our Battery moved to Reimerswiller guarding the 500th Artillery Bn., whose guns mauled the enemy during one of the fiercest tank battles of the war. Hatten and Rittershofen became a graveyard of German and American tanks, and the towns themselves were virtually wiped off the map. Fighting was from house to house and even room to room. We were close enough to hear the noise of the battle and also to hear an unfamiliar noise as some of the Luftwaffe’s secret new ME-262 jet fighters made their first combat runs.

The ME-262 jets could carry enough fuel for only about 15 minutes of full throttle flying so they were stationed just across the Rhine where they could reach our front lines. In order to conserve fuel, their tactic was to climb high into the noonday sun, then cut their engines and come diving down at high speed with their rapid-fire cannons blasting at their targets. Our gunners had never seen anything traveling that fast. They could not aim far enough ahead of the planes to score any direct hits. On the other hand, the ME-262’s were largely ineffective at hitting anything because of their high speed. One of them had aimed at our half-tracks and we could see the marks in the snow where each round had hit the ground-they were about 20 yards apart.

The next day we were ready for those fast flying jets! Battalion headquarters had sent each of the antiaircraft crews a new map marked with numbered grids (or squares) of our local area. As soon as anyone saw or heard an ME-262 they were to get on the radio and report what grid he was seen in and what direction he was heading. Based on that information, all guns in the direction he was heading would commence firing into the air in hopes that the plane would fly into the curtain of bullets. Surprisingly, the system worked! One of the ME-262’s was shot down while being fired at by both Battery A and Battery B of our 398th AAA Battalion. Our Battery also claimed the destruction of two ME-109’s on that day.

On January 20, the Seventh Army (to which we were then attached) decided it wasn’t ready to attack Germany’s West Wall fortifications and opted to pull back to a more defensible line along the Moder River in Alsace. We received orders to proceed to Hatten and Rittershoffen along with the artillery and a platoon of tanks to protect the rear of the withdrawing forces from the possibility of a German advance.

This was a very sad operation. The roads were clogged with civilians who had heard about our withdrawal and didn’t want to greet the Germans on their return to the Alsatian villages we had liberated. There were old men pushing wheelbarrows loaded with family possessions, young women pushing baby carriages and children scampering along with our retreating columns.

We took up firing positions on the outskirts of Hatten and waited for the last of our troops to clear. Then the engineers set off plastic explosive charges attached to the trunks of trees lining the highway so that they would fall across the road from each side. As the last of the engineers pulled out, we began our slow journey away from what had been the frontlines. All guns on the half-tracks and tanks were pointed to the rear, as we expected that a German tank column would try to follow us.

But all was quiet. We found out later that the Germans, also, had decided to retreat. They were withdrawing northeastward to their fortified lines while we were withdrawing southwestward to the river!