Table of Contents

        This first story was not told to me by dad. I believe I heard it from my uncle, Richard Burgess, who was in the unit when called up in 1941.
        It is not all that unusual for a commanding officer to put a lot of faith in advice and counsel from the top sergeant, but that didn't make some of the junior officers feel any better when they thought they weren't getting their full measure of respect from the commanding officer.
        "At one point the unit got a new commanding officer. When he arrived all the officers were out on the sidewalk to welcome him, and when he stepped out of the car they all snapped to attention and saluted. Ferd was nearby, leaning against a tree and having a smoke."
        "The new commanding officer saw him and marched straight toward him. You could see the anticipation in some of the officers' expression: ‘Here's where Brodfuehrer finally gets put in his place.' But the new commanding officer marched right up to him and said ‘Dammit Ferd, haven't you ever saluted anyone?" And they went into the office to have a cup of coffee, leaving some of the officers with their chins on the sidewalk."

LOOK AT THAT, WENT CLEAN THROUGH

        "When the division was staging to go overseas we were busy giving the shots to the troops. To have a little fun and break the rout-ine, some of the boys had come up with a couple of real big veterinary hypodermics and some broken needles."
        "Whenever they spotted a soldier that looked a little queasy, they would make sure he saw a big vet hypo and tell him: 'Now this ain't gonna hurt, much!'. Some of them passed out right then, but if they got past that, the boys would get the guy's arm back where he couldn't see what was going on. Then they would show the poor sucker a broken hypo while saying something like ‘Hey be careful, you went clean through his arm again. And now it's busted off. How the hell are we gonna get that out?' When they would tell the soldier, if he was still conscious, not to worry. The broken part would work itself out in a couple of months."

MUST BE GONNA RAIN

"We had just finished setting up HG in a building, and me and a couple of the boys were out in a gravel driveway having a smoke. There was a little gunfire in the distance from the infantry clearing out the other side of town, and we were watching a little German reconnaissance plane circling over town. One of the boys noticed the gravel jumping at the end of the driveway, and said ‘Must be gonna rain'. About that time the gravel jumped a little closer, and then we heard ‘brrrrrup' on the side of the building just behind us. We figured out pretty quick that the guy in the plane was shooting at us and got the hell out of there!"

   LOOKED LIKE AN ANTHILL  

        "We were a ways behind the lines so we had bivouacked on a ridge. Just below us in a valley a transportation company had taken charge of a bunch of captured Kraut tanks and were taking a rest all around them. It was dusk and we had just built a fire and were fixing coffee when three American fighter-bombers came over heading for the front."
        "When one of the planes came back over the next ridge real low we knew we were in trouble, because the transportation boys hadn't put out the colored placards to identify the tanks as captured equipment. The first plane dropped a bomb on the tanks and popped off a few rounds at us as he went by. Well, it looked down around those tanks like something had kicked an anthill. Those guys were coming out from under those tanks, running around all over the place, throwing placards every which way, and shooting off all the flares they could lay hands on. The second plane came over the ridge, but didn't attack. The third came over, wagged his wings at us, and went about his business. And we decided maybe the top of a ridge wasn't the best place to set up housekeeping."

  THE SIGNAL SERGEANT AND THE SNIPER

        "Our signal sergeant, a real big, heavyset fellow, was running a field telephone line up to the front where the collecting companies were working. The line was on a reel mounted on the back of a jeep. He would just drive along and the line would reel out."
        "When he got to where he could hear small arms fire, he decided he was too big a target, so he took the reel down and began crawling in a shallow ditch alongside the road laying the line by hand. Now this ditch wasn't near as deep as he was big, especially when trying to drag the reel of phone line."
        "He had gone a few yards when he heard as shot, and the bullet hit 'thump' in the side of the ditch about a foot in front of him. Well he tried to get himself as low in the ditch as he could and started crawling again. He had just gone a little bit when 'thump' again just in front of his head. This happened a few times: crawl a few feet 'thump', crawl a few feet, 'thump', and so on. Then he  heard someone laughing. When he finally got enough nerve to lift his head and look around, he saw a Kraut sniper up in a tree just a little ways ahead of him. He got up and ran as fast as he could back to the jeep, which wasn't all that fast. That just made the kraut laugh harder. He never took another shot at him."

   HONK THE HORN AND GO

        "The infantry was fighting in a forest against a German regular army outfit, not the SS fanatics. Our boys had tried to mount an attack across a clearing but had been beaten back, leaving quite a few wounded exposed in the clearing."
        "Our collecting company was trying to figure out how to get them out, but the Krauts had the clearing covered. A couple of our boys said they thought maybe they could drive an ambulance into the clearing, and by keeping it between the Krauts and the wounded for cover, get the guys out a couple at a time. They got the go ahead to try it."
        "They pulled ambulance up just out of sight, had a couple of shots of ‘liberated' cognac to steady their nerves, put the ambulance in low, floor boarded in and charged into the clearing. Well, the Kraut commander could be heard to order a cease fire. Our boys picked up an ambulance full and took off. From then on they would nose the ambulance into the clearing and honk the horn. The Kraut commander would order a cease fire, and our boys would fill the ambulance. They were able to get all the wounded from the clearing."

  THEY CAN'T HIT US

        "Another time with exposed wounded we weren't so lucky as to be facing an outfit that honored medics crosses."
        "Every time the collecting company boys would stick their heads up they would get shot at, and they finally decided it wasn't any use to keep sticking their heads up for target practice. But a young lieutenant decided different. To instill the proper attitude in his men he stood straight up and yelled, ‘Come on men, they can't hit us!' Well all hell broke loose, and the lieutenant was blown right back to where he started. Fortunately he wasn't seriously wounded, but he took a couple. I'm sure the lieutenant didn't see much humor in the situation, but later the boys got quite a chuckle out of it."

POPCORN

        "At one point we were in Luxembourg for quite a while, and an old woman there sort of adopted us. Several times she invited us to eat with her, and it was a nice break form the routine."
        "One of the boys got some popcorn from home and he took it to share with her. She had never heard of popcorn, so the boys showed her how to oil and shake the pan to make it pop right and left her to fix it."
        All of a sudden we heard pans crashing and a lot of yelling from the kitchen. When we rushed in we discovered the boys had forgotten to tell her to put a lid on the pot. Popcorn was all over the place. She would have nothing to do with popcorn from then on"

  POTBELLY STOVE

        "I had a 3/4 ton truck for the headquarters. Early on we 'liberated' a small potbelly stove and mounted it in the back
of the truck. That way we could have hot coffee and food when the mess section wasn't set up."
        "A couple of the boys figured out that if they went out on a dark night wearing MP brassards they could stop a supply convoy ‘looking for escaped prisoners.' When looking through the trucks sometimes a ham or a side of beef would accidentally fall out alongside the road."
        Some of the officers figured out that we often had food that couldn't be found in their field rations, and they would join us for supper. They were careful not to ask us how we managed to make canned stew look and taste just like steak."

 
HABEN SIE EIN BLEISTIFF?

        "After the German surrender, and just before I came back to the States, we had some German girls working in the headquarters. Most of them spoke little or no English."
        "One day one of the was going up to everyone saying. ‘Haben sie ein Bleistiff?' All the boys she went up to just shrugged their shoulders, so she would go to the next. Finally I said ‘For crying out loud, give her a pencil!' At that, one of our officers said, ‘You damn faker, I had a hunch all along you could speak German!'"
        "I didn't remember much German from my childhood, but if any-one even thought you spoke it they were always getting you up in the middle of the night to interrogate some prisoner. I knew just enough to get hauled out in the middle of the night, but not enough to do any-body any good, so I let them wake up somebody else."

   DOCTORS   

        Although I don't recall any specific stories, my dad often mentioned the marvelous work done by doctors like Everett Brillhart under impossible conditions. He said "Those GPs did things in a tent to save boy's lives that civilian specialists wouldn't have tried in a hospital."

- Richard Brodfuehrer, 1991

Courtesy of Dr. Sidney Branson, South Windham ME