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Aaron Elson: Describe the action where Joe Madonna was killed.
Len Goodgal: I think that Harry Dingman could describe it better, because he was up there that day on the 13th of January, but Joe Madonna was a great soldier, and he was a great soldier in Normandy and in Holland and in Bastogne. He was up on top of the fence I recall before that happened, screaming at the guys because we got chased out of positions up on the top of that hill in Foy, and he was up there, just about tears in his eyes, crying, "Don't run! Don't run! Don't run! Go back, hold them," and we held our line on the top of that hill at that point. He really deserved to be honored, because he did the job. I don't know whether he ever got medals or not, because the war progressed too fast. Normandy happened. Holland happened, and then Bastogne happened. It happened so fast from June to December that half the guys never got the medals or the honors they deserved.
Aaron Elson: What about, Frank, what you were talking about before, when you were shooting at the lights.
Frank Miller: That was Christmas morning. We had a lot of shelling after the 22nd for a couple of days there, then when we were coming down a road, single file on each side, it was early, 6 o'clock in the morning, just getting light, it really didn't get too light until about 8 o'clock or so, till the fog cleared. And we were coming -- this was my company, I don't know where everybody else was, in those days all you knew was what went on in your own group, unless someone told you otherwise -- and we were going along this road when something started shooting, and all these tanks were coming in through the fog, about five or six tanks, maybe seven, I don't know. But Captain Cody had said, everybody, we were like sitting ducks on the road, and like he said, the tanks rode down the road usually. Anyway, he ordered us up the side of this little hill, and at the end was a forest. And he said to line up along the perimeter of the forest. And the idea is so you're not silhouetted against the snow completely.
And we just were in a long line more or less of guys set up, and all we had were the weapons we were carrying, we didn't have anything heavy. But these tanks came up and started firing, and at the time, what happened I guess, we didn't know there was infantry on the top, but they apparently had a bunch of infantry guys riding on the tanks. So when they started firing, they said "Fire at the flashes," because you know, ground fog early in the morning -- you can see it here, in the morning mists, you can't see anything for sometimes 40, 50 feet. Then they were firing and we were firing, we just kept shooting back and forth, it seemed like everybody was firing at once, and there were lots of flashes, you'd fire at flashes.
And when it finally cleared, around 8 o'clock it was over, it was only for an hour and a half, two hours, when the thing finally cleared, by 8 o'clock usually the ground fog rose up a little bit and you could see everything, there were a good hundred Germans, at least 60 of them were dead in that area. These must have been the guys riding the tanks. And two of the tanks had gotten knocked out. Somebody knocked them out with a bazooka. Then the rest turned away to go down the road, and that's when we found out the tank destroyers were in the woods, two of them that hadn't done anything previously because I guess they couldn't get a shot at them. Once the tanks turned abreast -- because they would have knocked them right out if they knew they were there -- once they turned sideways these guys opened up and knocked out a couple more. And then two of them went on down the road.
Aaron Elson: One tank was captured intact?
Frank Miller: One of those tanks later, yeah, was captured in the town. I'm not sure what town it was.
Aaron Elson: This was Christmas morning?
Frank Miller: Yeah. Christmas day.
Len Goodgal: There was snow on the ground.
John Miller: There was a lot of snow. It snowed all the time.
Len Goodgal: I recall going over a field down that hill into a wooded area in the evening, and observing the German tanks and artillery that was lined up in back of Foy on the other side, and we were sent on patrol with an officer that hadn't been in combat before and two other guys that hadn't been. Nobody would volunteer. Somebody go out? Why me? This officer had to take three other guys. Finally I said, "Okay, I'll go with you." I figured the guy, he didn't know where he was, he just got into combat, and these other two guys volunteered, too.
We crawled through the snow, we're practically on the ground, till we got to the woods. And they were firing shells at us on top of the hill while we were out. We waited till evening to come back up that ridge. And I remember when you say the fog, the fog lifted about 10:30, 11 o'clock. It was foggy and we took that much time to go up the side.
Frank Miller: It depended on the area. The lower areas, the fog would rise and hang on the mountains or on the hillsides.
Len Goodgal: Do you recall the planes coming in and strafing us?
Frank Miller: I didn't say it lifted entirely. At one point walking down the road we were strafed.
Len Goodgal: By our own...
Frank Miller: Yeah. We didn't know that at the time, I thought they were German planes.
Len Goodgal: I remember the woods in front of us, we called for aircraft support, and the planes would strafe the woods in front of us.
Frank Miller: They didn't know the difference between the Americans and the Germans. And we had no identifying thing, like in Holland we had those yellow panels.
Len Goodgal: That's true. A number of guys were being strafed, but when they would come out, they knocked the hell out of German tanks. When that fog lifted, the Germans were in trouble. When it settled, we were in trouble.
Frank Miller: See, the fog was intermittent. It would rise, and then it would dissipate, but it would be up a little higher.
Len Goodgal: There were times when the sun came out.
Frank Miller: That was after December 26, that was after the first resupply, then it started, after the weather got a little better. But then the fighting got worse, if you remember.
Len Goodgal: I wasn't there then. I came back.
Frank Miller: When did you come back?
Len Goodgal: I got wounded and I was sent back. But the guys went from there to Hagenau.
Frank Miller: He had socks in his helmet so his head didn't get trenchfoot.
John Miller: Oh, that's what it was.
Frank Miller: But your feet got hit by a trench.
Len Goodgal: Oh, it isn't funny either, they nearly cut my toes off.
Aaron Elson: They did or they almost did?
Len Goodgal: They almost did. But they went down to Hagenau. There's another river, there, the Ruhr.
Frank Miller: The Moder.
John Miller: The Moder River.
Len Goodgal: Whatever it was, they were on a river there, there was action there, too, but not much, they were just along the line.
John Miller: We went down there because it was a very quiet area. All they had was a little patrol action down there. We were down there, I guess to give us a rest and regroup a little.
Frank Miller In January. January 3rd, 4th, 5th. I think in our book they list it as some of the bloodiest times.
Len Goodgal: Christmas Eve, they bombed us. They were throwing anti-personnel bombs back in the town. We'd hear the planes, we used to call them Bedcheck Charlie or some damn thing. They came over and they would drop anti-personnel bombs. You could always tell the German planes. Their engines were not synchronized and I didn’t ever understand that, because ours roared like all one engine. Theirs go rrgghhrggh, you could hear them. You knew it was their plane when you’d hear 'em cranking over. They'd drop anti-personnel bombs.
Aaron Elson: What was an anti-personnel bomb?
Len Goodgal: I think when they landed, they, gave off fragments.
Frank Miller: Some bombs are made to blow up buildings, and other bombs are made just to wound people. You know, they had a lot of crap in them, I guess, that would do damage.
John Miller: Same as artillery shells. Some were meant to blow things up, then they had anti-personnel shells that were fragmentation, the same as grenades. When they exploded, there were all these little sections.
Aaron Elson: Which was the concussion grenade, the potato masher?
Len Goodgal: There was a potato masher that didn't have a fragmentation thing on it. It had metal ribs on the outside that would explode, and those things, the concussion was just, well, it was powder put together to blow up. But they were heavier, the other ones.
John Miller: And they didn't throw them like we did, they took them and whipped. We could get ahold of them.
Len Goodgal: GIs could somehow throw those things with a whack! You'd get them going and they'd go up in the air and just really go. A GI could really throw them. Some guys have been known to grab them and throw them back, but you didn't know whether you're gonna get it or not. If you saw it and threw it back quick, a grenade had around five or six seconds.
John Miller: Five seconds.
Len Goodgal: You pull it and say one...two...three and throw it, what the hell, when we were in training I'd pull the thing and throw it.
Frank Miller: And then count.
John Miller: You'd throw it. One. Two. Three...
Frank Miller: It's like when we jumped, you know, we used to go out the door, hit the ground, then the chute would open.
Len Goodgal: Did you ever see a box mine? It was like a box, if you ran over it, and it was an Italian mine, they would plant it in the ground, and if a tank or something ran over it it would blow it up. And I didn't know what they were, it looked like a flower pot to me, a guy told me it was a box mine.
Frank Miller: They had all kinds of things.
Aaron Elson: You were wounded at Bastogne?
Len Goodgal: Yes.
Aaron Elson: What was the medical treatment there like?
Len Goodgal: Oh, they were back in the monastery. Some of the guys were with the outfit, we had a medic.
John Miller: It was a convent, actually, where they had walls around there.
Len Goodgal: I was in that convent.
John Miller: That was that picture, where the 501st truck exploded.
Len Goodgal: I was laying next to a guy that had a shell in his head, his brains were hanging out and he was still breathing, they were just waiting for him to die. I mean, what could they do for him?
Doc Feiler was there, and another doctor was there. Two doctors. They did jump some medical guys in a few days later. They captured our medical company, and that was a big problem.
John Miller: The first couple of days, the whole medical company was captured. So the only medics that we had were.
Len Goodgal: Feiler and another doctor. Feiler, he was doing all the surgery. He was a dentist, but he was doing all the surgery with the guys, with some other physician, I don't remember whether it was Lyon or somebody.
Aaron Elson: Did they have morphine?
Len Goodgal: Everybody had morphine. We had morphine kits.
Frank Miller: No, we didn't have those kits then.
Len Goodgal: Sure you did, jump kits, you had a kit. Your first aid kit had a morphine shot in it.
Frank Miller: We had that little packet with the [sulfanilamide] powder in it. That's all I had. In Holland we had the thing we jumped with on our helmet. That little pouch that had morphine in it.
Len Goodgal: That little pouch you had on there that they gave you, when we jumped in Normandy we had it, and we had it in Holland, I took it with me. We had it in Holland, we had it in Bastogne, it had a morphine syrette. They told you to put it above the wound.
John Miller: Jam it in and squeeze it out.
Len Goodgal: And we had a sulfa packet in there, too.
John Miller: That was the powder he was talking about. Put it on the wound.
Frank Miller: Later on, when Boone got shot, Cokenauer was cutting his pants off and Boone was yelling, "You're cutting my balls off! They shot my balls!" We said, "Lay still." I guess Cokenauer was so nervous, he's got his trench knife and you know, you could shave with those damn things we sharpened them so much. And he's cutting his pants, and he's cutting his leg. Finally, one of the squad sergeants took the damn knife, and he cut the pants off and he said, "Ahh, it's only a flesh wound." It went through the fat part of the leg. The pain probably went up that way when he initially got hit. That's when we used that pack and I never used it for anything else, but I had opened it up and I remember scraping all the sulfa powder on him and then giving him the thing, but I never saw any syringe.
Len Goodgal: We had a little syrette.
John Miller: It had a little needle on it.
Len Goodgal: I don't know if they had more than a quarter or half a grain maybe. It wasn't too much, but if you shot a quarter gram of morphine it could addict you.
I was going to tell you about Zeole. He was in Holland and he was cleaning his .45 and it was loaded and he shot the head of his pecker off. Cleaning his .45.
Aaron Elson: Who was this?
Len Goodgal: Zeole was a cook in my company.
Frank Miller: How was he cleaning it if it was loaded?
Len Goodgal: He was cleaning a .45, I don't know what the hell he was doing.
Frank Miller: Oh, you mean he was wiping it clean.
Len Goodgal: Whatever, and he had a shell in the chamber.
Frank Miller: That's why he was a cook.
Len Goodgal: Charlie Shettel said he saw it happen.
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