Aachen: The U.S. Army's Battle for Charlemagne's City in World War II (37 page)

Brown then made sure everyone was certain of the communication protocols and knew their passwords. He checked to be certain his platoon leaders would always have someone on their SCR-536s; he told them one of his radiomen would be carrying an extra SCR-300 belonging to the Ranger Platoon so he could maintain contact with everyone, and also have two ways to talk to Lieutenant Van Wagoner. “I then checked to see that everyone knew the signals to lift fires, and to call for fires. Final watches were set, and the time was 1140 hours when we did this. All the platoon leaders were then directed to return to their men and give them these instructions.”
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Of this final briefing, one soldier remembered: “Half in jest, but with butterflies in our stomachs we christened the coming operation either ‘Operation Massacre’ or ‘Operation Decimation.’ It was now thoroughly obvious to us that the job ahead was to be a rough one.”
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By this time Captain Brown was back in the battalion CP with Lieutenant Van Wagoner and his communications sergeant. Lieutenant Colonel Learnard came up to him while he was going over some final details and handed him the written order from regiment. It simply told him what he already knew he had to do. “You will neutralize and destroy all enemy activity on Crucifix Hill. You will then organize and prepare a permanent defense on the hill and be ready to repulse any and all counterattacks.”
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The time of the attack was set for 1330 hours. Completely satisfied with Brown's preparations, Learnard looked him straight in the eye, saluted him, and simply said, “Good luck, Bobbie.”
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Whatever thoughts he now had Brown kept to himself, yet he had to have some concerns going through his mind. He was relying heavily on air support when the attack began, but when the tanks were stopped that morning, the air liaison officer, who was in one of the VHF-radio-equipped Shermans, never made it up to the CP. Two prearranged flights of P-47s would still fly their missions, but there would be no further air support as Company C's attack evolved. He had little time left to ponder this. By now the opening rounds of the scheduled artillery barrage were pounding Crucifix Hill. The loud Pratt & Whitney “Double Wasp”
piston engines of the fighter planes roared overhead; the rounds delivered from their .50-caliber machine guns toward Crucifix Hill were deafening. This was it. Bomb doors opened; 2,500-pound payloads dropped, too close it seemed—roughly 200 yards away, but behind the fast moving men, not to their front.

Then, more things started to go wrong.

An enemy forward observer on the southern slope of Crucifix Hill brought down a tremendous barrage of artillery fire on Brown's men; it was believed the batteries delivering the rounds were positioned in Aachen. Numerous American casualties resulted before anyone could even get close to their assigned pillboxes. The Ranger Platoon also took fire from two boxes on a ridge closer to the hill. Through all of this, Brown and his command group still raced forward and then he, his radio operator, and a runner were able to jump over an embankment and dive into a muddy ditch that provided some cover. A call came in on the SCR-300 moments later: Shell fragments had wounded Lt. Joseph W. Cambron, the Kentucky native and leader of the Ranger Platoon. Seconds later another call arrived on the 536: Van Wagoner reported that both of the assault teams were completely pinned down at the base of the hill; no one was moving.

Brown's platoons had been able to get over to Crucifix Hill because the Germans had concentrated their fires on the Ranger Platoon. “Although they were pinned down,” Brown would lecture later, “they were taught that as long as any member of an assaulting force could maneuver, you were not pinned down.”
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But at that moment Brown was frustrated because they were not moving, so he decided he would have do something about this.

As if reading his mind, his radio operator yelled, “Jesus, the air force and the artillery didn't do a goddamned thing to those pillboxes, did they! What the hell happens now?”
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Brown, having absorbed the totality of the situation, responded with, “I guess I'll just have to take them myself.”

The startled radio operator then uttered an incredulous “Sir!” as if to question Brown's sanity, but the determined captain, never taking his eyes off the gun barrels peeking out of the apertures of a camouflaged pillbox, responded flatly with, “What we'll need are a couple of pole charges. And throw in some satchel charges, too.”

Brown's runner nodded, and then said, “Guess the only way to do this is to send up some engineers, eh Captain?”

“No, I wouldn't ask a man to commit suicide. I said I would do it myself.”

Lt. Charles Marvain, the 2nd Platoon leader, had managed to work his way forward with a couple of his men by this time, so someone threw a satchel charge loaded with sixty quarter-pound blocks of TNT on the end of a three-second fuse over the bank to Captain Brown.

I picked the charge up and crawled to the pillbox in front of me, and then I ran up to the aperture. At the time an enemy rifleman opened the back door and started out. However, when he saw me, he dashed back inside. I jumped at the door and tried to slam it shut, expecting to trap them all inside; however the excited German had left his rifle in the doorway. I instead opened the door, pulled the fuse on my charge, tossed it inside the bunker, slammed the door and jumped back over the embankment as the pillbox and its occupants were blown up.
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Brown then hightailed it back to the ditch his men were in just in time to receive another call on the SCR-300, and this time Van Wagoner was on the channel; Lieutenant Cambron had been hit a second time, yet the Ranger Platoon had been able to take their assigned pillbox. “But my assault platoons were still pinned down, and receiving more artillery and mortar fire,” Brown explained later. “My runners and I picked up more pole and satchel charges so we could move over to another pillbox. Then we fired a yellow smoke grenade from the south side of the pillbox we wanted in order to signal the 155mm guns in Eilendorf to lift their fires so we could make the assault.”

But “we” really meant Brown had gone alone again. Armed with two of the explosive charges, he took a wide, circuitous path up a 100-foot rise, crawling much of the way under the trajectory of continuous enemy fire coming out of the box. As he worked his way closer, machine-gun rounds started spraying the ground around him. Dirt flew up, slapping him in the face; bullets ricocheted off nearby rocks, but the fragments missed him. He could not get to the rear door this time, so before the Germans could even try to emerge from the box, Captain Brown rose up
and charged the front aperture, pulled his charge's fuse, threw it in, and then dove into a nearby crater. Seconds later the pillbox exploded. Certain the Germans were reeling from the concussions inside the box, Brown dashed for the aperture yet again, this time casually lobbing a TNT-loaded satchel charge in; from the bottom of the hill his men could see more explosions, then smoke and flames rising into the air, much of it from the pillbox's vents.

At some point Brown received a wound in one of his knees, but he ignored it. When he got back to the base of the hill, he was told Lieutenant Cambron had been hit again, this time while he was attempting to aid a wounded sergeant, and had been killed.
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Cambron's communications sergeant took command, but all he could do was keep his men under cover; withering small-arms fire was still coming in from what seemed like every direction around the platoon.

By now one of the squad leaders from Brown's own 2nd Platoon had also been hit, but the sergeant who took over bravely told him his men were nevertheless prepared to launch an immediate attack. Captain Brown needed no urging, but he was pleased his men were starting to get their own courage up. “The squad had a flamethrower, so I assigned them to a third pillbox, which they went after, and with the help of a good rifleman to keep the aperture on another closed, a fourth pillbox was soon neutralized. This relieved the pressure on both assault platoons.”
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And while this was happening, Brown had charged up Crucifix Hill yet again, by himself, to go after one of the largest pillboxes on the summit. By now the 60-foot massive stone cross, in place since 1890, had come down, probably as a result of either the air strike or accurate American artillerymen getting even with the Germans for using it as an outpost to direct fire at them.
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An 88mm gun was on the nearby pillbox's dome toward which Brown was charging, short barreled with a turret that revolved a full 360 degrees. On both sides of this weapon were .30-caliber machine guns, and above them were a pair of 20mm guns. Rifle or machine-gun muzzles poked out of every lower aperture; approximately forty-five Germans and three of their officers manned this box. There was also a steel door in the rear of the pillbox that faced another thick slab of concrete located right behind it—what Captain Brown determined was most likely the entrance to an underground bunker that held supplies for the defenders in the main box.

There he waited until a German soldier came out and started making his way down into the bunker. When he emerged, his arms loaded with shells, Brown quietly snuck up on him just as he was heading through the back door to deliver this load to his comrades. With perfect timing, Brown waited until the stocky German put his ammo down to close the door, then he lunged at him, dropped a lit satchel charge at the man's feet, slammed the door in his shocked face, and ran like hell as a tremendous explosion lit up the summit of Crucifix Hill.

Captain Brown had chosen not to head back down the hill at the moment. As he explained to his artillery liaison, Captain Marshall, later that night:

I decided I better hop over the other side of the hill and see what Jerry had. Didn't want to be caught with a counterattack coming up the other side, and no idea what was there. So, I ran over the top and just then a machine gunner gave me a burp. So I hit the dirt. Lucky to be in this little hallow. Stuck my head up. Got a blast. Wiggled over to the right after a time. Stuck my helmet up on my hand. Got another blast. Couldn't go right or left now. Knew we'd have to get our holes dug, so there was nothing to do but come straight back over. Jumped and ran like hell, and that gunner only nicked my arm.
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Brown was actually wounded twice this time, once on his elbow and before that on his chin; he dismissed the latter wound as “just a scratch.” After he went down the hill to rejoin his men, Brown remembered, “I saw that three more pillboxes had been reduced from actions of the assault platoons, so I sent a runner back to give Lieutenant Van Wagoner an oral order to move up all the remaining detachments and the support platoon to one of the fortifications, then for him to proceed to the battalion command post to let the battalion commander know the situation.”

Lieutenant Colonel Learnard was incredulous when he got the word. It was inconceivable to him that all this could have already happened; it had only been forty minutes since the attack commenced.

But those closer to Captain Brown knew better. The same sergeant who had questioned his sanity before Brown went after the first pillbox
this time exclaimed, “You did it, Sir! That finished ’em for good. The hill is ours!”
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Brown's modest reply was simply, “Good, it was the only job they expected us to do.”

Just after 1410 hours, Brown and his small command group trekked up Crucifix Hill to survey the damage to the German fortifications. Lieutenant Snyder, commanding the 1st Platoon, had been wounded earlier, but he led his men in checking other pillboxes. Brown ran into the 2nd Platoon's Lieutenant Marvain as he was coming off the hill a bit later; the lieutenant told Brown he wanted to show him something. Together they went down toward a pillbox on the lower slope of the hill that overlooked the small cemetery that Brown had used for cover when he did his reconnaissance before the attack; it was no longer manned. Nine Germans lay dead around its perimeter.

When a smiling Brown turned away, he caught a hand signal from Lieutenant Snyder out of the corner of his eye; all the pillboxes in his area were also cleared. Brown ordered his support platoon to move up right after this, and then he radioed Lieutenant Marshall and asked him to line up artillery fire for the back side of the hill; Brown knew the Germans would counterattack, likely that very night. He then concentrated on his wounded men; they needed to be evacuated to the battalion aid station in Verlautenheide. To solve this problem, Captain Brown went over to the POW cage, ordered the German prisoners to attention before him, and then told them to remove their bunks from the pillboxes they had been defending so they could use them as stretchers.

Other problems were not as easy to solve. Brown's flank was badly exposed because Scott-Smith's Company A, attacking through a ditch that led in from Haaren while Brown was on Crucifix Hill, only managed to advance 300 yards before being stopped. Attempts to move again were halted by all kinds of enemy fire; casualties mounted, putting Lieutenant Colonel Learnard in a position where he had to adjust his plans. He weighed employing direct artillery fire to get Scott-Smith out of the bind his men were in, but at the time he was uncertain of where Company C's positions on the hill were. Learnard decided instead to put Capt. Jesse R. Miller's Company B into the gap between Verlautenheide
and Crucifix Hill, giving Brown the support he would need to hold the hill while at the same time forming a solid line back to the village where Miller would link up to the 2nd Battalion's left flank. This combined defensive wall of American fighting power was now necessary to also prevent counterattacks from the ridge to the east of Verlautenheide.

While Lieutenant Colonel Learnard was satisfied with the day's progress, he still had to concern himself with the fact that the battalion had not cleared the entire zone of enemy-held pillboxes on Crucifix Hill, and that an unknown number of Germans were still housed in pillboxes between Miller's and Scott-Smith's positions. Remembering the tentative mood at the CP at the time, Captain McGregor explained, “The battalion was jutting out to the west like a sore finger with a cancerous growth. The pillboxes were in defilade from our tanks that had finally moved up to Verlautenheide. Rain was starting to fall again, night was coming, and visibility was limited.”
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