|
By Al Zdon
Herb Suerth said one reason he has such a clear memory of his time in combat is that it was so brief. He served 23 days during the Battle of the Bulge before a German
.88 artillery shell ended his military career.
"Other guys in the 506th might have a tough time remembering because they had over 200 days in combat. One day blends into another, just trying to survive. But I can
remember it all."
Suerth grew up on the northwest side of Chicago and mainly attended Catholic schools, graduating from De Paul Academy in June of 1942. He was 17 years old.
He started at Marquette University
as a mechanical engineering student, but with the war going on, and the 18-year-old draft imminent, Suerth quit school and decided to enlist. "If you enlisted, you got your choice of what branch of the service you
wanted to be in."
On Dec. 8, 1942, he joined the U.S. Army and the Corps of Engineers. He was sent to Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, for basic training as a combat engineer.
"I didn't like it at all, but of course you
weren't going to get out of it just by saying you didn't like it."
What Suerth disliked the most was training in deactivating land mines. "I don't know how they ever got guys to do that job."
The young soldier
got a break, although a temporary one, when the Army put him in the ASTP program and sent him to college at the University of Pennsylvania. The respite didn't last that long, though, when the ASTP program
folded.
Suerth first went back to basic training, and then did several months in New York City, training in electrical engineering.
"We lived down by the Bowery. I think it was the Broadway Central Hotel, and
it was run by a madam. The first two floors were working girls, but the security was so tight that I never even saw them."
The next big move was overseas on the Queen Mary, and he landed in July of 1944, just
after D-Day, in Scotland. "We got to ride the train the full length of Scotland and England, and it was just gorgeous. We had those long, summer days."
Suerth ended up in a replacement depot with about 1,000
other engineers, some of whom were anything but eager to get into the fighting. "A lot of the guys were older, with families. They had been electricians before the war. They used to sit around and talk about how
they would avoid combat by shooting off their toe or sticking Fels Naptha under their armpit."
Suerth, on the other hand, was ready to go. When he and his buddy saw a posting that they were taking applications
for the airborne divisions, they immediately went to their company commander.
"He told us that we couldn't do that. He told us we were in the service forces and we couldn't volunteer for the airborne. He said we
couldn't switch, and so we were dead in the water."
Ten days later, though, all the replacement engineers were mustered for an announcement. "Congratulations," the officer said. "You are all now in the
infantry."
It turned out the Army had a greater need for people toting rifles than people toting slide rules. Suerth's friend was accepted into the 82nd Airborne, and Suerth was accepted into the 101st.
"I
went to jump school at Chilton Foliat, and I remember that the day we got there we got to put on our patches – no wings, of course. And we got to wear jump boots, but we couldn't blouse our trousers. You never
want to do that before you get your wings."
The commanding officer at Chilton Foliat was Captain Sobel, who was made famous in the Band of Brothers book and television series at a martinet who was hated by his
troops. "But I only saw the guy once, and he made no impression on me."
The sergeants who ran the flight school, though, did make an impression on Suerth. "I think they picked sergeants because they couldn't be
court martialed. To get those jobs, I think they had to have something in their service record that listed them as 'diabolical.' They did everything they could to make you quit."
Suerth remembers one major who
did a bad roll in jumping off the 15 foot tower and ended up with a mouthful of sawdust. He spit the sawdust out, an act the sergeant in charge didn't like. "He made the officer run around the field with his arms
outstretched yelling, 'I am a bad major, I spit in the sawdust.'"
On some training days, the volunteers were forced to do as many as 500 pushups in an eight hour period. "Sometimes when you were doing pushups,
the sergeants would get down beside you and do one-armed pushups while you were doing two-armed. They'd be about six inches from your face yelling, 'You want to quit? You want to quit? Give up now and you can be out
of here by lunchtime.' And some guys did that."
Suerth stuck it out, though, and made it through his first practice jump. "It was the first time I was ever in an airplane."
The rest of the 101st, which was
stationed nearby, went to Holland in August, 1944, as part of Operation Market Garden before Suerth got his third jump in. In the end, he did his five jumps and got his wings, and he did a couple more just for the
experience.
Right around Thanksgiving, Suerth was sent to France to join Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne. The division was licking its wounds and resting at Camp Mourmelon
near Reims after the tough fighting in Holland.
Replacements were generally not treated well by the veterans, but Suerth said he had no problems. "I don't remember any of that negative stuff at all. I think I
was smart enough to keep a low profile."
One of those combat veterans, Earl "One Lung" McClung, had the bunk opposite Suerth in the old French barracks that housed the 506th at Mourmelon. "Except that there was
only one layer of bunks on McClung's side, and there were three layers on my side, and as the junior guy, I got the bottom bunk."
Seuerth had reported to his platoon leader, Lt. Ed Shames, and he announced
himself with his complete name, including the "junior" at the end. Shames immediately tagged Suerth as "Junior" and the nickname stuck throughout his brief stint with Easy Company and through all the reunions
since.
Suerth said the 101st needed recuperation after Holland. "They told me it was rainy, drizzly or sleeting most of the time. And then at the end, it turned into trench warfare, and airborne units are not
outfitted for trench warfare. They had been sent over in summer uniforms and that's all they had."
Suerth recalls that one day at Mourmelon, soon after the 506th had returned from Holland, a general inspection
was called. The men were not happy about it, and one of the unhappiest was McClung, known to his comrades as one of the best soldiers and perhaps the best shot in Easy Company. But McClung was not a spit and polish
guy.
"One by one, the guys would come and say, 'Hey Mac, give me your boots.' And another guy would say, 'Hey Mac, give me your blouse.' And other guy would take his ODs. In the end, they got One Lung ready for
inspection. It wasn't that they just wanted to help him, it was because they knew that if he got gigged, the whole company got gigged."
In reunions in later years, McClung admitted to Suerth that he "was the
worst garrison soldier in the army. But he made up for it in combat. He could smell Krauts."
Easy Company took it easy during the first weeks of December. Suerth even put in for a pass to Reims on Christmas Eve
so he could go to the cathedral there for services. It never happened.
"I remember on Sunday, December 17, Buck (Sgt. Buck Taylor) came in and said, 'We're going up.' There was complete silence in that
room."
Most of the men were simply not prepared to go back into combat. There was no ammo dump at Mourmelon, and the men only had what ammunition they had brought back from Holland.
"A lot of the guys had no
winter gear, no rifles, no machine guns. I was lucky. I had my jump boots, my overcoat, my galoshes and all of my equipment. I had done some training in the Blue Ridge Mountains the year before and so I had a little
idea of how to live outside. I brought all kinds of socks.
"I even had needle and thread because I knew in cold weather the gloves stuck to the rifles and ripped. It was just little things like that."
Suerth,
and some others, spent the night sewing extra blankets to their sleeping bag to increase their warmth.
He even had a new rifle, but he had never fired it.
The men were loaded into large grain trucks. "There
was a platoon in each truck. There were no seats, but it didn't matter because we were too crowded to sit down anyway. The top of the walls of the truck just came up to our helmets, so you could stand on your tip
toes and look out."
The company spent 18 hours in the trucks, heading for a destination unknown. "The weather was terrible, but we stopped often enough to get a little exercise. In the truck, we could stay
warm because there was plenty of body heat. We could hear planes all through the night and we knew they weren't ours."
On the morning of the 18th, the trucks stopped just short of Bastogne, a small city in
Belgium where most of the highways in the area came together. The men could hear small arms fire not far away.
For Suerth, it was his first chance to see Easy Company in action. "The scouts went out, and the men
were walking in 15 yard intervals. No one gave an order. It just happened. That was their training, and that's the way they were."
The first thing the airborne troops encountered, though, were not Germans but
Americans. As the 506th marched up the outside of the road, the troops who had taken the brunt of the German onslaught staggered down the middle.
"I saw an American army in retreat. It reminded me of the pictures
of Washington at Valley Forge. They had bandages around their heads, no overcoats, no weapons. They were running away, but nobody even thought to stop them. They probably would have been useless anyway."
Suerth
had a couple of bandoliers of rifle ammunition and grenades strapped to his uniform, but he still had his unfired weapon. The next day, his sergeant set up an electrical wire reel as a target and let Suerth zero in
his M-1.
The platoon marched through Bastogne and headed up the road toward Foy. The Germans were coming in the opposite direction down the same highway. "We were determined to stop what was coming."
The first
night was spent in farm country, and the men burrowed into a haystack with just their heads sticking out to stay warm. "In the morning a shell came over the top of the haystack. One of the guys jumped out and
started racing around the haystack. The second time around, I asked him where he was going. He said he was just trying to get to the other side of the haystack."
The company stopped just short of Foy and deployed
into a nearby pine plantation in the Bois Jacques Forest.
Seurth's foxhole mate was a GI named Frank Sobeleski from International Falls. "I dug the hole while Frank cut down trees to put over the top. I think he
was the only one in the platoon who had a hatchet with him."
Suerth and Sobeleski were on the extreme flank of the company's position, near a machine gun emplacement. "We were the last hole on the left. There was
nothing between us and Bastogne. But then there was nothing between any of the foxholes and Bastogne. There were no reserves."
The foxholes, as Suerth recalls, were about four or four and one-half feet deep. "So
when you stood up you were in good rifle position."
The German shelling was fairly constant. "You'd go to sleep for a couple of hours, and there would be a bunch of new trees knocked down around you. They would
send these screaming mimies at us, they were rockets. They didn't do much damage, but it was psychological warfare."
An attack came on Christmas Eve. "They came in white camouflage outfits, and you could see that
white against the dark trees. It was a bad idea. It wasn't a major attack, but it got our attention."
Most of the fighting was on the other side from where Suerth was dug in. When it was over, he surveyed the
battle scene. "There was blood all over the snow. There were 28 of them dead. We had one casualty. Walter Gordon got a bullet through the neck.
"When we looked at the bodies, they were all kids, 16-17 years old.
Of course, we were only 20 ourselves."
The Germans were pumping most of their heavy artillery into Bastogne. "Compton and Carwood Lipton brought Gordon to the hospital. When they came back they said it was safer
up here than it was in the hospital."
At one point, a German tank was coming down the road toward Easy Company. "There wasn't much we could do, we didn't even have a bazooka. But an American .75 shell hit this
tank dead on. The shell just bounced off." It did cause the tank to retreat.
After the encounter with the white-clad enemy, Lt. Shames sent Suerth out to bury one of the German dead who was lying out in no-man's
land. "I never asked him why he sent me to do that."
Suerth battled with the frozen ground for a couple of hours, and was finally relieved by another GI who finished the grave. "I was a little skittish about it,
and I never went through his pockets or anything like most of the guys did. But I did open up where he had his food. He had some pork roast, and black bread with jelly. It was probably his Christmas dinner. I took
it back to my foxhole and ate it. It was the first food I'd had except K-rations in over a week."
In the second week of January, Easy Company left its foxholes and advanced to the east to where a German position
had been abandoned. "We spent the night in a German hole. We didn't have any sleeping bags with us, and it was the coldest night of the whole battle. We just piled four into a hole, two on top and two on the bottom.
Every couple of hours we'd shift places, and the guys on the bottom would go on top and be the blankets."
After the one-night foray, the men returned to their old positions. "There was incessant shelling. They
knew exactly where we were."
On Christmas, the Third Army broke through the siege and opened up Bastogne. For the first time since they had left Mourmelon, the men of Easy Company got hot food.
But the battle
was far from over. On January 3rd, two men lost their legs in the shelling. Later, the company left the Bois Jacques woods and went to a new position outside a little hamlet. "It was a terrible tactical mistake. We
took over some old Kraut fox holes, and they had them zeroed in. One shell was a direct hit on one hole and two guys were killed."
Suerth was a company runner, and he was sent to the nearest collecting station to
get stretchers for the two. "I don't know why. There was nothing left of them after that hit."
At the collecting station, Suerth delivered his message, and was standing around with four or five other guys in a
circle talking in the dark. "A tank outfit had just arrived, and one of the tanks was on a hill just beyond us, about 15 feet up. Someone sitting on that turret lit a cigarette, and that was all the Krauts needed.
They fired a shell at the tank."
The shell came down short, and exploded about 10 feet from Suerth and the others. "It just blew me up in the air, and I landed in the snow. Everyone else was killed."
"I tried
to raise my legs, and I couldn't. It turned out that a shell fragment had passed through both my legs and had gone right through the femur in both my thighs. A medic came over and gave me morphine. I thought both my
legs were gone.
"The funny thing was that I never lost consciousness through the whole thing. I remember the medic going around to each of the bodies. He said, 'This one's dead. This one's dead. This one's
dead.'"
Apparently assuming that Suerth was too badly injured to survive, the medics never even applied tourniquets. "They thought I was dead and it was just a matter of time."
Somehow, though, the shell
fragment had missed the femoral artery, and when Suerth didn't die, the medics finally picked him up and the put him across a Jeep. "They didn't tie my legs down, and we were going through a plowed field and my legs
were bouncing up and down. I was screaming so much, that I finally told them to hit me in the head to knock me out so the Krauts wouldn't take a sound shot at us. But they just kept driving."
The Jeep brought him
to an aid station at a Belgian farmhouse. Suerth was laid on a kitchen table, and the doctor came to examine him. "He took some medical scissors and tied some gauze around them and poked them into one side of my
leg. Up to that point, I must have been in shock, because I couldn't feel the pain. He pushed the scissors into the right side of my leg, and they came out the other. I said, 'Oh, that hurts.' And he said, 'Oh, I
wouldn't doubt that.'
He was next taken to a field hospital in a convent, staffed by what the Americans called "flying nuns" because of their aerodynamic headgear. It was noon of the following day.
"I remember
hearing a saw at the next table, and they took a guy's arm off. I knew they always left the amputations until last, because they assumed you weren't going to die.
"They got me on the table and the doctor was
scrubbed up and was ready to go. A corporal was about to give me some anesthetic. I said to the doctor, 'Are you going to take my legs off?' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Are you bullshitting me?' He said, 'No, I'm not.'
I said, 'Okay.'"
Suerth woke up with a body cast from his rib cage all the way down. It was only about 50 degrees in the room and the wet plaster was cold. Still, Suerth asked the nurse to take the blanket off
his feet.
"I looked down, and I could see ten toes. That's all I needed to see. I fell asleep and slept for 24 hours."
When he was able, he quickly wrote a V-mail to his mother telling her what had happened.
He had never quite got around to telling his parents that he was in the airborne. "Luckily the V-mail got home before the telegram from the government. The telegram just said I was missing in action."
Suerth
never put a foot on the ground for the next nine months. He had to go through skeletal traction to allow the bones to mend together and not be pulled out of place by the body's muscles. "I told people later that if
they ever wanted to torture anyone, they should put them through traction. It's like red, hot wires in your legs."
He also found out another little trick of the medical trade. "I looked down one time when they
were dressing the wound and I saw these bugs crawling out of the wound. I yelled for the nurse. It turns out that they put maggots under the cast to eat away the dead flesh. It keeps any infection from
starting."
Suerth had come over on the Queen Mary, and he went home on the Queen Elizabeth, another luxury liner converted to a troop ship. He arrived in New York City on April 13, 1945, the day that President
Roosevelt died.
He was taken to Schick Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. He later convalesced at a hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida. After his nine months being bedridden, he was able to begin rehabilitation and spent
an additional nine months learning to walk again.
Suerth was discharged and returned home to Chicago in May 1946. He soon resumed his education at Marquette where he earned a degree in engineering. He met a
nursing student named Monna there, and they were married in 1950.
The two had nine children and 15 grandchildren.
Suerth worked for number of companies through the years including Westinghouse and
General Electric. He was in sales and marketing where he could use his engineering background to good effect.
Eventually he ended up in Minnesota where he was director of Marketing and vice president for Lief
Brothers, retiring in 1990. The family lived on Lake Minnetonka for years, and now the Suerths live near the lake in Wayzata.
Suerth has been active in the Easy Company reunions, and is now president of the Men
of Easy Company, a non-profit organization.
|
