THE GREAT JEWEL ROBBERY
We finally go through the Siegfried Line and start a great end run across Germany. We’re moving so fast they pile us into two ton trucks. We go along faster than tanks. Sometimes, we come to a town and there will be German civilians in them. There’s been no chance for the civilian population to evacuate. These towns have never been bombed. Some of them are still there, complete with women and children.
We first do what we call ‘clearing’ in each town. This means going through each house, cellars and all, seeing that there are no soldiers hiding. As we roll into these towns, armed to the teeth, there are often women at the windows. Some guys just head for the women, some look for booze, wine or schnapps, and some go after silver or gold. Everybody has his particular loot. We’re way ahead of the MPs, so nobody’s stopping us.
I get to be real expert at finding where the Germans hide their jewels. Usually they’re in dinky safes behind paintings. I blow the locks off with my rifle. My rationale is they’ve probably stolen all this stuff from the Poles, the French or the Jews from all the countries where they’ve ravaged, robbed and killed. We think of ourselves as the great liberators, ‘liberating’ all this loot.
Now I know more about it. I realise I often was taking their personal property and many times this property had sentimental and family value to them. But I was nineteen years old, a scared and unwilling dogface soldier, working myself up to being a mercenary. I didn’t want to work the rest of my life if I could avoid it. If I could bring some of this stuff home and sell it, I’d have a real nest egg.
I did learn to pop diamonds and other precious stones from their settings like popcorn. I don’t want the settings, just the gems. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, anything that looks valuable I shove in my field jacket pockets as fast as I can. I abandon the settings, just move right through the houses, one after the other. I don’t touch anybody. People are too scared to say much. Sometimes they try to resist, mostly women and old men, but not much. We’re worse than the Russians, all right.
Every evening I take these jewels and, using the little cloth patches we use to clean our rifle barrels, sew my day’s haul into the inside of my combat field pack.
Finally, after our great wild run, we settle down for a few days. There’s one kid in our outfit whose father is a jeweller. He sees what I’m doing and peers over my collection.
‘Good God, Wharton, you’ve got a fortune there! I wish I’d thought of that, it’s the smartest thing of all. It’s loot you can probably get home.’
He looks carefully through what I have.
‘I don’t care what fence you go to. That stuff is worth ten thousand dollars or more, easy. And since you don’t have the settings, nobody can identify them. Only be careful, wait a while after the war before you try to sell any of it.’
I’m also thinking of putting these gems inside the filter can of a German gas mask. That would be classified as just a souvenir, no trouble. There are quite a few gas masks we’ve gotten from the Germans. They’re a crazy kind of souvenir, almost as crazy as the poor Krauts hauling them all over Europe, but everyone is sending one back, maybe for Halloween they could be used as masks. We’d all ditched the huge packet that was our own gas mask long ago.
I figure I’ll take the charcoal out, mix the stones in, then put it back together again. I have my plan all worked out, but I don’t get to do it that way.
6. AFTERMATH
CELEBRATION
The war’s over on the ninth of May, VE Day they call it. My way of celebrating the war being over is personal and nearly gets me another court martial. Our Captain tells us that at midnight, the war’s officially over. We’re out in the fields, sleeping in tents, the weather’s warm, there isn’t much in the way of action. We have our big surprise coming about a week later.
I’m waiting in my tent until the hands of my German officer’s watch, with a luminous dial, cross over each other and show midnight. Another piece of war loot. I know some people who have six or seven watches up and down each arm. They have them set for Chicago time, Los Angeles time, New York time, and so forth; spend all their time winding them.
Anyway, just at midnight, I have my M1 standing straight up between my legs, pointing at the V forming the top of our tent. VE day right? Rolin Clairmont’s sleeping beside me. I brace the butt tight between my legs and, at the moment of midnight, fire off eight paced shots right through the tent.
I look out our tent flap. The whole camp, everybody, comes tearing out; they can’t see where the firing’s from. People have rifles out and are running around like headless chickens in their skivvies. I come crawling out of our tent and yell, ‘Yippee, the war’s over. Hooray!’
I think for a minute there someone’s going to shoot me, especially Rolin, who’s shaking his head as if his ears are falling off.
They jump me, and drag me into the Captain’s tent. He’s half asleep and half dressed. The platoon explains it to him, all at the same time. In a while he figures it out.
‘Wharton, why the hell did you do that? You deserve a section eight!’
‘Well, Sir, nobody seemed to be celebrating. Here we are; we’re alive. We somehow got through this war. At least we’re not going to die in this war, maybe we’ll die in another one, somewhere else, who knows. But it’s worth celebrating, Sir.’
He stares at me smiling, and gets to laughing. Then the rest of the company starts laughing. Captain Wall doesn’t do anything really. I just need to serve an extra guard to make up for the sleep everybody lost. There it is, that’s the way I celebrate the end of the war. Little did I know.
FLAME THROWERS
About a week after this it’s getting to be summer warm for the first time. It’s the kind of weather I thought we’d have when we started this war by landing on those beaches. For months, we’ve been sleeping in all our clothes, taking our shoes off as usual, tucking them in the bottom of the sack and then being ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Now, I’m sleeping in just my shorts and OD undershirt. I don’t even have socks on. I’m practically a civilian.
Well, where we are now, it’s been quiet for more than a week and we’re settled down in a little forest. It’s very pleasant, like camping out. The field kitchen’s actually caught up with us. I’ve learned to say ‘haben sie eine?’ Fresh eggs we have not had. I’m not really sure where we are, somewhere in what became East Germany.
We’re all in our tents, sound asleep. I have my pack at my head, with my loot in it, tucked in at the top of the tent in the little triangular shaped back. I have it tucked up there to be safe. Rolin and I aren’t making too big a deal of it. I’ve made my plan for trying to get these home, I am carrying a Kraut gas mask in my duffel bag, my looting days are over. I feel … it’s hard to explain, I don’t feel guilty about those jewels. I truly feel I’m liberating these stones from the enemy, the Germans. They’re the enemy, and we’re so conditioned, after all the misery and killing, to think of them that way, not as human beings. What the hell, taking their jewellery is nothing compared to what they’ve done.
Then, in the middle of the night, there’s all kinds of hollering, shooting and shouting. I run out of the tent. At first, I can’t figure what it’s all about. It looks like German commandos or SS or something, but turns out to be a group of Hitler Youth with their leader wearing a uniform like a boy scout leader and carrying a sword. These are all kids, twelve to fifteen years old at the most, and they have handmade flame throwers, with garden sprays and gasoline. These contraptions are amazingly effective. The little devils are spraying every which way, spraying the tents, spraying the whole camp, hollering and screaming at the same time. They have some small arms, too. I take off like a rabbit, with just my rifle, that’s all, and I run barefoot, in my shorts, over the pine needles, doing everything I can to get out of there fast.
We reach another little wood, and they’re still running around spraying everything. They also have Jerry cans filled with fuel oil and they spread
it around, too, and light that.
When we finally come back after chasing off those kids, most of us naked or only half dressed, we have a hell of a time putting the fires out and saving what equipment we can. Our tent is totally burned and just about everything in it. What I’m interested in is my loot. I go back there and fish around in the charcoal and ashes. There’s nothing. I don’t know just what happened, but almost everybody’s field pack has been taken. I guess wearing them makes the kids feel more like soldiers or something, ready for the next war. Rifles and pistols are left, only the field packs are taken, nothing else, not even the blankets that weren’t burned. And with the field packs these kids and their boy scout leader have disappeared into the night. Luckily, I have the canteen with the scarves tied up on the branch of a tree.
Well that was the end of my career as a jewel thief. But some kid must have gotten a nice surprise if he unsewed some of those patches.
MASSACRE
There is a very sad story, and one which I never told my children, for good reason. I still have a hard time facing up to it inside myself. I’m having a hard time trying to get myself to write it. I guess that’s why I put it off till last. I want to tell it as honestly as possible.
I’m sent back to the hospital again because I’m still having troubles with dizziness. They do a series of tests but they come back and say there’s nothing wrong with me. It takes fifty years for me to find out what’s wrong. But the army does an electroencephalogram, and there is nothing abnormal showing in my brain. They just figure I’m dogging it and send me back to my outfit.
I’m trying to figure when this would have been. It’s all so jammed together after all the years. I know it was before the war was over and after the collapse of the German army. It’s before the Hitler Youth attack.
I’m put in charge of a company group, a Tiger patrol unit again. This is not I&R, it’s an aggressive patrolling group and it’s formed more or less independently of the company but is part of it. There are eight of us and we are going out after prisoners. The Germans want to surrender, and we give them the chance. It’s not much fun, however. If a bunch of them wants to surrender, and there’s one hard nose who doesn’t want to, he can just open up on us with a burp gun. Too many guys get this far and this is the way the war ends for them.
In general, streams of Germans are dashing as fast as they can toward the West to surrender. They’re trying to surrender to Americans by preference, the alternative is the Russians in the East.
So it’s a strange time of war, it doesn’t last all that long. But we’re out on one of these Tiger patrols when a group of Germans, there are ten of them, step out of a wood and want to surrender. They step into a clearing, waving a flag and throw down their rifles. They’re a raggedy, loose, sad looking bunch. As soon as the surrender is established, after the rifles are gathered up and they have their hands on their heads, I figure the patrol is over.
I put the fellow who’s been in charge of this patrolling group before I came back from the hospital, in control. I want to take a walk by myself to the CP. When I get back there, I sack out in a pup tent without reporting, figuring I can do that later. I’m on the edge of tears. I’m beginning to feel I need to turn myself in to the medics and just say I can’t go on, take whatever they do to someone who has combat fatigue.
As I say, things are relatively easy; we’ve been in the same place for two days and in those times, that’s a long time to be in any one place. I don’t know why we’re here, or what’s going on. I’m mentally out of it. The bigger mechanism of the war is beyond me and doesn’t really interest me enough. I know it would be easy for me to get killed. I don’t care enough any more.
But then, the guys come in and they don’t have the prisoners. I’m shocked.
‘Where are the prisoners?’ I ask the one I put in charge.
‘Ah, they tried to escape so we shot the bastards, Sarge,’ he answers.
Immediately I don’t believe him. I know these guys are really a strange group. But I also know they’ve been in this anti-tank battalion the whole war, and have never had to fire in anger.
These old time anti-tank guns didn’t make any sense any more, so all during the war these guys have just been scared to death, waiting. They’ve had seventy five mm guns that they’ve had to haul around behind jeeps and shoot tanks. A seventy-five mm gun has practically no chance of knocking out a German tank. A jeep has no chance of surviving a hit from an eighty eight mm mounted on a tank, either.
With the invention of the bazooka, anti-tank warfare ideas changed completely. The old anti-tank battalions are useless. They’d never really been used and so are finally broken up and distributed. This is how they came to be in this company patrol group. Bad luck for everybody.
I begin to suspect what’s happened. I go to Captain Wall, and tell him how I’ve taken the patrol out and we’d captured ten Germans. I tell him how I came in earlier expecting them to bring the prisoners in. Now, I’ve found out they didn’t bring them in and they say the prisoners tried to escape so I think they shot them. I should have kept my trap shut, not having reported earlier, but I’m scared, angry and not thinking well.
Captain Wall is a decent man. He wants to find out what really happened out there as much as I do. I’m convinced they’ve massacred these men. We go out to find out what happened. Several members of the Tiger patrol squad go with us. They are now beginning to intimate what really happened. They start yelling about Malmedy – where Americans who surrendered were shot by Germans – and all the other atrocities of the Germans which are beginning to become known, and so forth.
I realise these are just a bunch of vicious, violent animals and I’ve done a really wrong thing, leaving them on their own. In court, later on, some turn witness and tell how the squad leader and one of the scouts tortured the Germans, shooting them in the legs, then the arms, before they killed them. One tells how one of the Germans pulled out a wallet with photos of his family and started crying.
Some of them are feeling guilty about it all, but the worst of them are proud of themselves, consider themselves avenging patriots.
We go back to where they’ve hidden the bodies. They’ve put them in shallow graves with brush and pine needles raked over so no one would find them until we’d all be off and gone. I vomit when we dig the bodies up. The CO turns white and looks away. He’s furious.
He wants to convene a general court martial on this. However, he’s told if they do this, the entire massacre will go into the Congressional Record. The officers don’t want this in the Congressional Record, a public record that anyone can read. They don’t want the American people to know for one thing, and for another they don’t want the Germans to know, because it could be used as propaganda to keep soldiers from surrendering.
So instead they make a special court martial out of it. No one really talks too much about what really happened. The guy who’s in charge of the patrol, the one I’d replaced, is the one who’s really responsible. He instigated and egged on the other members of the patrol into doing it. There are some who really didn’t shoot and they give evidence. Everybody is sentenced from two to ten years in Leavenworth, a federal prison, as well as dishonourable discharges, the whole bag.
I’m told by the chief of the court martial that I was responsible, I should have stayed on till the end of the patrol. There was no justification for my having left them. I was in dereliction of duty. But Captain Wall testifies and protects me pretty well. They break me to private again, take away another six months’ salary. No matter what, it doesn’t mean anything to me any more. Within a month, Captain Wall has me back as squad leader. We become good friends. What we’ve shared brings us together.
It’s a really bad way to end a war. If there’s a good way to end a war I don’t know what it is, but this was a bad way to end one.
At the final sentencing, the bastard who got ten years, sees me in the courtyard as they go out. He yells, ‘Better watch out Wharton. In
ten years you’re not safe. I’ll have your ass.’
This really upsets the Colonel in charge of the court martial who tells this rotter he’s exactly the kind of person the army doesn’t want and he’s a disgrace to his uniform. They strip him of his stripes in public.
But I’ll tell you, when the first two years are over, I’m nervous, then for ten years more I sweat it out. I don’t know whether they all served their full terms or not. I want to put that part of my life behind me. The brutality of it all is sickening. How low human beings can come when you take the leash off them. I still have something of this feeling in me. I don’t have much confidence in my fellow human beings even sixty years later.
I know how easy it would be to trick the young and everyone else into going off and fighting another stupid, meaningless war. I know how humans will turn on each other, the way cats and dogs will, in the right situation. I know from myself what one can do in the name of greed, in the name of power. These convictions lodge in my soul and have been difficult to shake. They change me.