T-4 'Wac'

T-4 Wesley Harrell, 2nd Platoon, C Company, 712th Tank Battalion. Photo courtesy of Don Knapp.

   I received an email yesterday from the nephew of Wesley "Wes" Harrell, who was a tank driver in the 712th Tank Battalion, and whom I interviewed in Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1994.
   "My uncle served in Company C of the 712th from Normandy thru Germany," the nephew wrote. "He was a Sherman tank driver and lost two tanks in battle that I know of that you wrote about. He never spoke about his service. I only learned about it shortly before his death back in 2003. I am putting together a shadow box for future generations of my family to remember him as both of his sons (my cousins) have already passed -- neither of them ever had children. His wife (my father's sister Laverne) is now in a nursing home in Hobbs, NM. I want to finish the shadow box so she can see it. It will have the flag from his military funeral as well as the medals he was awarded, photos, his dog tags, T/4 patches, a certificate from the 712th Tank Battalion Association, etc. ...
   "I wish I had spoken to Uncle Wes more about his service but like so many it just wasn't something that he spoke of. My childhood was spent reading military history books of those that served in WW2. I was in my late 30s before I even knew that I had a hero in my own family. I know Uncle Wes never would have considered himself a hero, but he always will be one of mine.
   "I look forward to hearing back from you -- and thank you for both your father's service and your efforts on behalf of these supremely brave men."

    T-4 Harrell, a.k.a. T-4 Wac, was of special interest to me because he was involved in a battle that took place on March 16, 1945 -- coincidentally, his nephew's email arrived on the eve of the 73rd anniversary of that battle -- in the village of Pfaffenheck, Germany, which his platoon leader, Lieutenant Francis "Snuffy" Fuller -- said in a letter to Hubert Wolfe, whose brother Billy died in the battle, was his "worst day in combat."
   It was Harrell's tank commander, Don Knapp, who gave him the nickname Wac.
   "We had access to coveralls which I liked," Knapp said when I interviewed him at the 1994 battalion reunion in Cincinnati. "They were all one piece, and it enabled you to crawl around because sometimes if you had to crawl through the basket in the fighting compartment down into the driver's compartment, you didn't get caught on things. But I guess he liked the two-piece fatigues that were made more for infantry. They had baggy pockets on the side to keep things in, and in the process of getting out of the driver's compartment he sometimes got his pockets caught. And he was a little broad in the beam, he was just a heavyset, well built young man, but I said, 'Man, you've got a butt on you like a Wac.' [WAC stood for the Women's Army Corps.] So the name stuck. And he didn't mind, because he was that kind of a person. He resented nobody.
   "I remember one time we were clearing out from some woods and he caught the 75 a little bit on a tree and he almost put the gun out of battery, and I went down and I guess I kind of stomped on his head, and that night I said, 'Babe, I'm sorry, I just got mad at you.' And he said, 'Oh, that's all right. I shouldn't have done it, it's a dumb thing to do.'"

   The battalion crossed the Moselle River on March 14, 1945. On the night of March 15, C Company's 2nd Platoon was in the village of Udenhausen when it learned of the battle taking place in the nearby village of Pfaffenheck. Lieutenant Francis "Snuffy" Fuller said he would proceed to the village in the morning, as it was too dangerous to travel at night.
   Harrell was driving one of the platoon's five tanks. His tank commander was Sergeant Lloyd Heyward of Decker, Michigan, who took Knapp's place after Knapp was diagnosed with "combat exhaustion" a couple of weeks before. The gunner was Johnny Clingerman of Zanesville, Ohio. The loader was Pfc. Billy Wolfe of Edinburg, Virginia. The assistant driver, or bow gunner (also called the bog), was Koon Leong Moy, of New York City, whom the platoon had nicknamed Chop Chop.
   On the morning of March 16, the second platoon approached Pfaffenheck through an apple orchard, as Fuller preferred to avoid the road leading into town.
   "When we went into town," Harrell said during that 1994 interview, "they told us to drive up beside this building. They told us they were firing at hidden guns. There were a lot of guns in town.
   "They'd already got the first tank. Then they told me to move out, and I started to pull out from behind that building. And when I did, why, that 88 went through the side, and we had about 180 gallons, maybe 200 gallons of gas in that thing. And man, it caught fire just like that [he clapped his hands loudly]. Of course we had drills before to see how fast we can get out of them tanks in case of fire. Me and Chop Chop, I don't know which way he went, but when I got out, they were firing with small guns, machine guns, at me because they was hitting pretty close to me. And I crawled to a hedge, a pile of dirt, and I hid behind there.
   "And then they quit. I don't know whether somebody knocked him out or what, but they didn't fire no more."

   Of Harrell's crew, Pfc. Billy Wolfe and Sergeant Hayward were killed. Johnny Clingerman lost an eye, Moy was burned on his hand and face, and Harrell's eyebrow and hair were singed. Jack Mantell of Milwaukee, the loader in Lieutenant Fuller's tank, was killed, and Sergeant Russell Harris, one of the other tank commanders was killed.
   One company of the 90th Infantry Division suffered heavy casualties in the battle. The village cemetery is the final resting place for 100 members of the 6th SS Mountain Division.

Front Row, from left: Russell Loop, Indianola, Illinois; Joseph Rickel, Racine, Wisconsin; Lloyd Seal, Orange           , Texas. Back row, from left: Jack Mantell, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, KIA; Lt. Francis Fuller, Tonawanda, New                     York; Carl Grey Jr., Oswego, Kansas; John Zimmer, Macedon, New York; Otha Martin, Leguire, Oklahoma.                     Photo courtesy of Don Knapp.

  

Billy P. Wolfe, Edinburg, Virginia, KIA Pfaffenheck, March 16, 1945.

Russell Harris, Decker, Michigan, KIA, Pfaffenheck.

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"Goering's Gifts" (Pfaffenheck, Part 2)

Fritz Gehringer, a veteran of the 6th SS
Mountain Division North, standing in
1995 beside the tree where he was wounded
five times on March 16, 1945.

   "Don't go. You'll only humanize them."
   That was my supervisor talking when I told her where I was going on my vacation in 1995.
   Over the years, as I gathered the stories of the 712th Tank Battalion, I, myself, became the subject of a handful of stories, like the time, having heard Jim Flowers tell the story of Hill 122 several times, I supplied him with a detail he seemed to be grasping for and he blurted, "Who's telling this story, me or you?" Or the time, knowing the answer but not nearly suspecting the force with which it would be delivered, I asked Otha Martin if he was at Pfaffenheck. "Pfaffenheck," he repeated coldly, fixing me with a stare. "The Sixteenth day of March in '45. I was there. I can tell you every man that was there." And he proceeded, with remarkable accuracy, to name the five crew members of each of the five tanks in the second platoon of C Company, including his own, that took part in the battle.
   My own interest in Pfaffenheck goes back to 1987, the year I first attended a reunion of the 712th, where I met two sisters, Maxine Wolfe Zirkle and Madeline Wolfe Litten -- twins -- whose brother Billy was killed at Pfaffenheck when they were 16 years old. Billy was 18. There are some pretty remarkable twists to the story, but long story short, John Zimmer, a member of Billy's platoon, had contacted the sisters so that he could deliver a plaque in Billy's memory. Thus started a journey of discovery for the sisters. Because I was beginning my own journey of discovery at about the same time, the two journeys crossed paths. In 1992 I interviewed Bob Rossi, who described the battle at Pfaffenheck although neither he nor I knew it was Pfaffenheck he was talking about. The newsletter reprinted a letter written by  Byrl Rudd, the platoon sergeant, to Ray Griffin, the newsletter editor, describing the battle. And Rossi showed me a copy of a letter written by Lt. Francis "Snuffy" Fuller to Hubert Wolfe, Billy's older brother, who was in the 78th Infantry Division. Hubert never showed the letter to his family, and didn't tell his sisters about it until he was on his deathbed.
   As I gathered the stories of the battalion, I always asked about Pfaffenheck. And then in 1995, one of the veterans told me there was a notice in the 90th Infantry Division newsletter saying there would be a ceremony in Pfaffenheck commemorating the 50th anniversary of the battle.
   I wrote to the person who sent in the announcement and said that I wasn't a veteran but that I had interviewed several survivors of the tank battalion that fought there, and that I would like to come to the ceremony.
   I got quite a shock when the reply came: I would be very welcome to come, only it was not being put on by the village, but by the Germans who fought there.
   Not only that, but this was an SS outfit. And I'm a Jewish kid from New York. At least I was a kid some 50 years ago, or 35 years before this ceremony was to take place.
   Needless to say, the letter gave me pause. Byrl Rudd's letter described the SS troops his platoon encountered as "fanatical," and Fuller's letter said pretty much the same, indicating that they fought almost to the last man. On the other hand, I spoke with a 90th Division veteran who was captured by the 6th SS Mountain Division, Reuel Long, who lived in Minnesota. He wanted to go to the ceremony but couldn't get a low-cost airfare and had to cancel. But he said that he was captured at Pfaffenheck and his captors treated him very well and with respect; it was not until he was sent to the rear that he suffered abuse. And just by coincidence as I was reading a book called "Raid!" about the attempt to free General Patton's son-in-law from a prison camp, I came across an account of another soldier who went out of his way to say that the 6th SS Mountain Division treated him well when he was captured.
   The liaison, whom I can't name because he wrote a book about his experiences under a pseudonym, stressed that the division was fighting in Finland for much of the war and was not in any of the areas where atrocities attributed to the SS took place. He said that it was basically an elite fighting unit. When I pointed out that the couple of references I'd seen to the battle described them as fanatical, he said they knew the war was lost but that they thought that by continuing to fight, they could gain time for a negotiated settlement, and that they were fanatical not in their devotion to Hitler but in their devotion to the comrades beside whom they'd been fighting for three or more years. And he wrote a letter to Paul Wannemacher, the battalion association president, saying that he owed his survival to the fidgety trigger finger of a tank gunner, who fired five rounds at almost point blank range into his machine gun position, and yet he survived. (There was a touch of humor when he wrote this, but in his book the scene is absolutely terrifying).
   In a way, I guess, my supervisor was right. I arrived at Pfaffenheck a day before my hosts, and encountered two of the German veterans, Fritz Gehringer and I don't remember the other's name. Because we were the only three there, they took me on a little sightseeing tour, the highlight of which was the tree beside which Gehringer was standing when he was struck by five bullets. He said to make matters worse, they were hollow point bullets, which were against the Geneva Convention.
   As we stood by the tree and Gehringer posed for a picture, the other veteran said that they had just that morning broken into a house and found some food, and ate for the first time in a couple of days. And he said that the division had recently gotten a number of replacements, whom he said were described by the battle-hardened veterans of the war in Finland and the Vosges Mountains as "Goering's gifts" -- Luftwaffe trainees who were reassigned as infantry replacements

Pfaffenheck in 1995. Lieutenant Fuller's five tanks approached the village
through what was then an orchard off to the left on March 16, 1945.

.   My supervisor was right. These were veterans of the Waffen SS, but to me they were humans. It was a strange feeling during the ceremony as I watched one of their veterans place a wreath in the cemetery at a monument dedicated to the anti-tank platoon, knowing that its weapons had knocked out three of Lieutenant Fuller's five tanks, killed four members of his platoon and wounded several others. And it was an even eerier feeling meeting the veteran who fired the antitank gun that struck Sergeant Hayward's tank, cutting off his legs -- he was later killed either by a sniper or machine gun fire as Fuller and his gunner, Russell Loop, tried to carry him between them to safety -- and either killing Billy Wolfe instantly or burning him to death inside the tank. It was a very strange feeling indeed, to learn at the banquet -- where my hosts set up a table for me to interview some of the veterans, with two of them acting as interpreters -- that the fellow who fired the antitank gun was in turn wounded -- likely by Sergeant Loop, who claimed to have gone up to the second story of a house, taken a rifle and picked off the members of the gun crew that disabled his tank -- and allowed to return to his family after getting back across the Rhine, and then, either weeks or months later, turned himself in so as to become a prisoner of war because he was unable to find work.

The grave marker of Gunther Degen, a battalion
commander and Knight's Cross recipient, who
was killed at Pfaffenheck.

   When they held the ceremony in 1995, the Germans were expecting protests because anything to do with the Waffen SS was frowned upon in Germany. There was a significant police presence, but perhaps because it rained that day no protesters showed up.

   I returned from that reunion with about six hours of interviews in German with only the brief synopses by my two interpreters. I learned that the 1995 ceremony was unique only in that it marked the 50th anniversary of the battle, but that the veterans of the 6th SS Mountain Division North gathered in Pfaffenheck every year on the anniversary of the battle because 100 members of their division are buried in the village cemetery, and more are buried in the nearby town of Buchholz where there was another pitched battle, but one that to the best of my knowledge did not involve my father's tank battalion. When I went with the German veterans to the ceremony in Buchholz, they showed me an antiaircraft gun preserved in the village, that had been used against the ground forces. One of the men killed in Pfaffenheck, Sergeant Russell Harris, was struck in the head by a shell from a 40-millimeter antiaircraft gun.

   One thing I will say is that while I found the German veterans to be very human -- I remember overhearing something about Gehringer's wife suffering from depression, and Gehringer himself, who was the burgomeister of a medieval town called Rothenburg on the Tauber, would die the following year -- I can't say as much for some of the younger people who attended the ceremony/reunion. There was a young museum director I think from Koblenz who brought with him a rusty old pistol that had been found in the forest, and he was trying to confirm that it had belonged to Gunther Degen, and I very much sensed that he was more upset than most of the veterans that the Germans lost the war. And there were a couple of young what seemed to be neo-Nazis from Switzerland. I also sensed that my hosts were at least a little bit uncomfortable with what to some is the cult status of the Waffen SS.

   Those tapes -- and another three hours worth from 1996, when I returned to Pfaffenheck for their reunion, but more about that anon -- languished on a shelf until last year, when I heard from two men in Germany who belong to some sort of archeology club and were researching the events at Pfaffenheck. I was able to put them in touch with one of my hosts -- the other has since passed away -- and I sent them copies on CD of the interviews, which they promised to translate, although I haven't yet received the translations.

(Next: The Mark of a True Soldier)
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The Memorial Day CD

My mother, may she rest in peace, loved to knit. For some odd reason she never made me a sweater, although she made several for other members of my family. Maybe it's because I never asked. She passed away in 1992 at the age of 67. I have a couple of remnants of sweaters that she made for my siblings, one she never finished, the other has a couple of holes in it, they don't exactly fit, but I've always kept them as a reminder of her.

Jack Sheppard, the company commander of C Company in the 712th Tank Battalion, also loved to knit. He suffered what likely was a pretty nasty concussion during the battle for Hill 122 when a shell struck his tank while his head was sticking out. He had serious headaches for years, maybe decades after the war, until a doctor suggested he take up knitting. The concentration somehow helped immensely with the headaches.

Me, I weave. Not shawls or blankets, I'll leave those to the folksy artisans who populate craft fairs. I weave stories. Not just stories, but audio snippets of interviews I've done.

This year, for my third annual Memorial Day CD, I've woven, as best I could, the story of Pfaffenheck, using excerpts of interviews with the Wolfe twins -- Maxine Wolfe Zirkle and Madeline (pronounced Mah-de-lean) Wolfe Litten -- as well as with Otha Martin (with comments from Andy Rego), Bob Rossi, Russell Loop, Francis "Snuffy" Fuller and Wes Harrell.

Except for the Wolfe sisters, all of the principals in this story have passed away, so there's no going back to the source for clarification. And even Maxine and Madeline, who are identical twins, I have difficulty telling which one is which. The interview with Otha Martin, which is pivotal to the story, was conducted rather informally in the hospitality room at a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion in the mid-1990s, and the excessive background noise prevented me from using some of the audio. I hope that the audio I did use from that interview is understandable.

Pete DeVries, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, told me he doesn't tell war stories because the stories that are told should be about those who never got the chance to come home. Billy Wolfe, Jack Mantell, Lloyd Heyward, Russell Harris are four such young men.

There is more about the battle at Pfaffenheck in my previous entry, and there will be more in future entries. I don't know if it is due to my shortcomings as a writer or to the fact that the written word is no substitute for the voice of the person who was there and who is telling the story. I leave that for you the reader/listener to decide.
Listen to an excerpt:

"So long kids, and if I never see you again, goodbye"

"I'm giving you a di-rect order!"

The story of Pfaffenheck, which I've chosen for this year's Memorial Day CD, is more than two hours long, and thus fills two audio CDs. For now it is only available in my eBay store. Or, in the immortal words of Lieutenant Francis "Snuffy" Fuller to Otha Martin, you can call 1-(888) 711-8265 and say "I'm giving you a di-rect order!" for this year's Memorial Day double CD, which, incidentally, costs $5.95. Mention you read about this in my blog or on my facebook page and receive the 2010 and 2009 Memorial CDs as a bonus.