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(c) 2009 Aaron Elson
Arnold Brown: Now I’m going to tell you another incident, one that stands out very strongly with me.
The battalion commander called me back and said the division is organizing a special operation, and that they need one rifle company. He said they requested that the 358th Infantry Regiment supply the rifle company, and that the regiment called on our battalion to supply the rifle company, and he said they specifically suggested that I take it.
The mission was a guerrilla warfare type operation. They would assign me an objective behind the enemy lines, and my mission was to take this rifle company to that location, take that objective at night, and the division would attack – when I say division, I mean they would designate somebody from our battalion to attack at daylight the next morning. And the mission they assigned me was supposed to aid their success.
I suppose that I was successful in these operations. If I had not been successful, I wouldn’t be able to tell the story. On one of those operations, so many unusual things occurred that I would like to present it in detail.
My mission was to sneak through the German lines at night and occupy a piece of critical terrain that was overlooking a German village that sat behind the dragon’s teeth in the Siegfried Line. The battalion would attack at dawn the next morning to capture this town. I would be in a position where when they started their attack, I could fire into this town and also deny the Germans use of this critical terrain.
If they successfully attacked that town and some of the Germans started to run out and escape, this would be the logical way for them to go, so we would also be in a position where we could kill them if they tried to escape.
Before I started out on this mission, they sent me a new artillery forward observer. I received a call from battalion, regiment and division that this was this lieutenant’s first experience in combat, and for me to look out for him, that he was a general’s son.
To this day I don’t remember his name, and General Patch lost a son in that war about that time and putting two and two together it could possibly have been General Patch’s son.
To accomplish the mission I had to make a map reconaissance during daylight, to be able to guide the company to its location. There was no road or trail to guide on, so I had to do it from the outlines of the vegetation, the trees, and the contour of the land.
It so happened that this particular night was one of those nights that was so dark you literally could not see your hand before your face. And since I’m the only one who can get this company to that location, we proceed in one line, by holding hands. Now, can you picture 150 men lined up behind me holding each other’s hand?
As we moved up through the first wooded area we had to go through, there were evergreens. If you’ve ever been around evergreens on a moonless night with no stars, can you realize how dark this is? As we were moving through this group of evergreen trees, we heard some Germans approaching our position. And by the sound of it, they were going to cross somewhere in this line of troops behind me.
I cannot give orders. That would give our position away. All I could do was whisper to the man behind me to pass the word along to take care of these Germans wherever they crossed. Of course you know how sound travels when it’s loud at night. So it sounded to me like, my god, I believe they’re walking over my troops behind me already, and I was thinking maybe I’d better yell back and do something.
About that time I heard a few muffled rifle shots. So these men had laid there in a prone position and let these Germans – I don’t know if it was two or three of them – walk right on top of them, and gut-shot them.
Well, these Germans were carrying some hot chow down to one of their security posts that we had bypassed. And the story the men told me was that those guys that shot those Germans sat there on their bodies and ate those hot sandwiches. But this is the way it happened in combat.
So then we get up after this and move out again, and we come to the end of these evergreens. Now we have an open field to cross before we get into this high ground and wooded area which was our objective. Our objective was to go in these wooded areas in the front edge of it. Then it was clear down to this village, and we would take a position along the front of the woods. But, I looked and listened before I moved out from the cover of these evergreens. I realized that even though it’s dark, we could possibly be silhouetted against the skyline. And I could hear a group of Germans talking in clump of bushes to my right front.
Well, I have to do something. If we go across this open field there’s a possibility that we could be silhouetted against the skyline and they might see us. So I called up two men with automatic rifles. I said, "Do you hear those Germans jabbering over there in that clump of bushes?" And they said, "Yeah."
I said, "When we start across this open field, I want you to spray the bushes with automatic rifle fire."
Being in the service I knew, what do these Germans do? They’re going to do just like anyone would do. If somebody suddenly opened up on me, I’m going to hit the ground and head for cover. So these automatic rifles started spraying that clump of bushes and we moved across that open space to those other trees and they didn’t fire one round at us. And I said, "Look, we’re behind their lines. They don’t know whether this is one of their own units making a mistake or what." So I begin to realize – I’ve been on two of these operations previously – that actually, this is a lot better behind their lines than it is attacking a fortified position when they’re waiting for you with their guns zeroed in, so it can be in a way, if you don’t get too scared it can be fun.
We got in position on the edge of those woods, on this high ground that sloped down into this village that was our battalion objective at dawn. So all we’ve got to do now is sit there and wait.
While we were waiting, a group of Germans left the village. It was only a small patrol but they were approaching our position. Now this is going to give us away before we want our presence to be known. So I have to do something.
This was my solution. I called up three men that had rifle grenades on their rifles and had them put phosphorous grenades on their rocket launchers. I put them in position and gave them the angle; my idea was that I was gonna fire these phosphorous grenades where they would land behind this group that’s approaching us, and of course, this field had some grass and stuff growing up, it would set that on fire, and that way we can see them and they can’t see us. And sure enough they walked right under this, the rifle grenades went up and exploded behind them. They didn’t shoot one round at us. Those that weren’t killed dashed back to the village.
Well, they know we’re here now.
Later on, there was a German straggler, or someone from the village who was worried about his friend. He’s coming up from the village, and as he’s approaching where we were in those woods, he was hollering for somebody by the name of Heine, Heine, Heine, walking right into our laps. Well, here again, I can’t holler, I just know these men are trained, the first guy they’re gonna come to is either gonna capture him or kill him. And lo and behold we had one recruit, this was his first day out, and if this wasn’t the one he approached to and he came up there hollering, "Heine!" and the recruit froze, and the German reached over and started pulling his pant leg. Then the squad leader jumped up and hit that German over the head with his rifle butt and captured him.
Aaron Elson: Wait, what was he doing with with the pant leg?
Arnold Brown: Well, I don’t know, he actually bent over there to shake him. He thought it was a German, that the Germans were up there. Well, you know, they could have oddballs in their army just the same as we have now.
So at daylight, they started sniping at us, and do you know, the only one they hit was that German, he was laying there on the ground, and let me tell you where they shot him: right between the legs. I never heard anybody groan and moan like he did. There was nothing we could do except give him a shot of morphine, and one of them men said, "Don’t worry about it, your own men shot you." You know, very cruel. And he died.
Now I get a call from battalion. They tell me they’re not going to launch this attack. I’m behind the enemy lines, my neck’s stuck out and they’re gonna leave me there. And the reason was – after we got in position I could hear tanks and vehicles rolling around, and there was a big crowd of Germans in that village – they said intelligence had reported that position had been reinforced with a German armored division and we cannot take it. They said to stay up there and withdraw under cover of darkness. Well, this sounded good if the Germans would cooperate.
But like I said, now the Germans know we’re there. So they start firing 120-millimeter mortars, you know how wicked those things can be. And we’re so close to them that we could hear the mortars popping out of their tubes. So I sent a man to the right flank and another man to the left flank to shoot an azimuth, where they could hear the mortar rounds coming out of the tubes. They brought those azimuths back and I plotted them on a map.
Aaron Elson: To what?
Arnold Brown: To shoot an azimuth. I sent a man to the right flank and the left flank to shoot an azimuth, where those lines would resect. So I brought these azimuths back, I plotted them on a map, and it showed a bunch of gullies in that area, so I figured that would be a good place to set those mortars up. Then I gave the location to this lieutenant – the artillery forward observer I was supposed to look out for. And he went up and established an observation post, and he observed the artillery fires and got them on those gullies. And the Germans stopped firing.
There was a bunker – the Germans had those scattered out all over those areas there – so we had the command post set up there, and the lieutenant came back down to the bunker, and we were just sweating it out now, hoping that they don’t bother us anymore so we can bug out when night gets here.
Later on that afternoon, why, those mortars open up again, and I hear them popping out of the tube. In fact, they were coming from about the same place. So I told this lieutenant to refire that concentration. And all he needed to do – they had already zeroed in on that location, and we’d given it a number – all he had to do was call and say, "Fire concentration, 235," and then go up to the O.P. Instead, he decides to go up to the O.P. and then call in the fire order. And on his way up to the O.P., one of those mortar rounds landed between his legs. Can you imagine the shape he was in? I went up there, and one leg was thrown this way and the other one that way, and I talked to him. At that time, shock hadn’t set im yet.
I said, "I’ll have a medic come up to take care of you." That was Ed Madden, he was the medic. So when Edward Madden got up there, he was already dead.
The Germans didn’t bother us anymore after that. We fired that concentration, and the mortars stopped shooting.
We waited till night, and they told us to bring all of our equipment and bring our casualties back. This lieutenant was 6 feet tall if he wasn’t an inch, I can see him now, and he graduated with honors from college and got an appointment to West Point, his father’s a general, he’s general material, he needs to get this, we call it punching their ticket, combat experience, and then to get killed on his first day out, it’s embarrassing for me, but how can I stop this? You see what I mean? It’s his time, that’s all there is to it. I’m around that area where the mortars were firing, why didn’t one of them fall between my legs? How do you understand these things?
We had only two men killed, one Pfc and this lieutenant, and we had to carry them out.
When we got back to our lines, I was challenged, and I didn’t know the password. They took me all the way down to the battalion C.P. so they could identify that I wasn’t a German in an American uniform.
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Arnold Brown: In another one of those operations I went on, we were going in to take a village. Let me add that during these operations, Patton had the Germans on the run, and we were hitting so hard that they were never able to set up any good security or defensive positions.
They sent me in to take this village, and as we’re moving down on the village, why, the Germans are moving out. So they were sending some type of a towed antitank weapon into position to cover this withdrawal, and it was horsedrawn. They hadn’t put it in position by the time we arrived, so we knocked out this crew of that horse drawn weapon and moved on in.
Can you picture now men going into buildings to see if there’s Germans in them, it’s night, walking in a room and turning on a flashlight to see if anybody’s in there? Well, they did this at this one house, the squad leader went in there and informed me. He says when they went in this bedroom, there was a man and woman in bed, so he was getting ready to say, "Excuse me," and he says the man was jumping up and he started putting his clothes on, and he’s putting on a German uniform. He was in there sleeping with this French gal. So they took him prisoner.
These are some of the unusual things. Now just think, the hazard these men are going through in going through these buildings. They don’t when they’re going to run into a German, suicidal or otherwise.
Aaron Elson: And what happened to the horse? Did you have to shoot the horse?
Arnold Brown: In that skirmish there, they killed the horse.
I’ll mention one more of these missions. This was a daylight operation. We had an objective, and in moving to this objective, we ran into a German security outpost, and we captured it. They didn’t have any communications, to even send word to the rear. I don’t know what good they could do out there, to warn the Germans about the approaching enemy, but anyhow, we captured them and they didn’t get any messages back, so the Germans didn’t know that we were approaching.
We were screening out through some woods. I’m approaching with two platoons following the scouts out, and when we reached the edge of the woods, I said, "Stop." I wanted to observe before we proceeded across the open ground. I went forward, and with my field glasses I searched the first hundred yards back and forth. It must have been thousands of yards across this open space. You know how rolling terrain is. And then I searched back another hundred yards and so on and so forth, and we got way down to the end of there where this other strip of woods were, where we wanted to cross this open field and approach it, and saw a movement. We saw some Germans were leaving that patch of woods and were approaching us. And if they stayed on this little trail that they were on, they’d come right up in front of these woods and turn right in front of us.
I said, "This is an ideal ambush." So I got busy. I put my two light machine guns in position first. I said, "I’m going to blow a whistle to start this. You start at the front of the column and search back, and you start at the rear of the column and search forward." Then I placed some automatic rifles in position at certain sections of that, because I knew as soon as we opened up the first blast, they’re going to hit the ground. And then I positioned my support platoon, and I had my mortars in position. I knew they were going to hit the ground, so they were already set up and had their distance and everything. And I said, "When I blow the whistle a second time, everybody cease fire. The support platoon now will dash out with fixed bayonets and grab anybody that’s alive as a prisoner."
Now can you imagine, these Germans walking along there, and laughing, talking like anybody will and then all of this hit them all at once. And this was in the winter, it’s snowing now. So the platoon dashed out there, and they said there wasn’t any fight left in them, and they said, they’re laying in the snow, praying. And there was one man in that group who got away. He started running back across the field, and darn, the machine guns were firing at him, you could see the tracers, and do you know, not one of them hit him. I felt bad about that, we let one of them get away, and then I thought, man, let him get back there and tell them what happened to the rest of them.
But you don’t plan these things. You’re out there, and something’s occurring, you just do what you have enough training to do. They taught me when I received my tactical training that the worst thing you can do in combat is nothing. To do something, even if it’s wrong. And I remembered this, so I’m going to do something.
The next thing that occurred to me, the battalion commander called me down to the battalion CP and said – no, I’m sorry. My senior citizen’s mind is working. Now we’re going to approach Dillingen. That was on the Saar River. So we cross the Saar River. Our objective was Dillingen, Germany. We crossed it on assault boats. And it was at nighttime. And in taking the first building that we approached, there’s a stairway outside the building, and this squad went up the stairs through that building. And I heard somebody running down those steps just as hard as they could go, and I’m wondering what the heck happened. I started stepping down the foot of the stairway. About that time I’m hit on the shoulder and there was a German running down there, and before I could get my gun up to get him he ran out through the dark.
In this little suburb of Dillingen, I forgot the name of it, there was a pillbox. So I assigned one platoon to knock out this darn pillbox. They assaulted the German pillbox, and came under fire from a second pillbox. So I took my support platoon, and we maneuvered up through these buildings, and we got up into the second story of a building and we could look across and down onto this pillbox.
Well, there was a German in a trench outside the pillbox with a rocket launcher. I had a man with an automatic rifle in the platoon, and I told him to get in the window and shoot the German. So he shot at the German and missed.
Now the German is swinging that rocket launcher around to fire into the room where we are. So I didn’t have time to take any other action except to take him out myself. And I shot him with a .45 pistol. There was another German who shot back at me, because I felt the wind from that bullet as it went between my neck and right shoulder. And I had shot through a plate glass window, that’s about 70 yards. The effective range of a .45 pistol they say is 50 yards, so I had my guardian angel helping me there, although I was an expert pistol shot.
When I felt that bullet go over my right shoulder, I turned around, and there’s a soldier dead behind me. He had been looking over my shoulder, and he was dead before he even hit the ground.
Then we cleared out these buildings on this side of a large railroad track. This railroad yard was two or three hundred yards wide. There was one German pillbox setting right out in the middle of the railroad tracks, and the Germans occupied the buildings on the other side of the tracks. So we had a little wait here, since they hadn’t gotten the bridge across the Saar River, and the Army Times gave us a writeup as the longest bridgehead without getting any rations. We all laughed about that, and the reason was this: There was a meat packing company in this part of the town, and we were cutting off choice steaks and having steak and eggs three times a day.
But eventually we were going to cross the railroad tracks to take the rest of the buildings. So I’m walking up and down the front line of my company trying to boost morale, like any commanding officer would be doing, and I come across a building which I thought would give me good observation into the German occupied part of the city.
I went up two flights of stairs, and I said to myself it was a good observation post because there was an artillery team up there. There was a forward observer and a radio operator, and they were observing for targets in enemy territory.
Just as I arrived at that position, I saw a vision.
It was just like observing a wide angle TV screen. I can see these Germans, in their uniform, with their distinctive steel helmets. I said they were resecting that radio position. The radio was on and it was letting out beams, and they were beaming in on it, according to my vision. It was all in my mind. Nobody else could see it but me, but it was just as clear as watching a TV set. I saw them transmit this information to their fire direction center. I could see the German fire direction center communicating. I saw them send it out to one of their guns, to fire this mission. I could see these Germans getting ready to fire that gun.
I hesitated. I said, what should I do? Should I tell these men to move? If I tell them to move and nothing would happen, they’d think I was cracking up and I wouldn’t be effective as a commander. And then if you analyze a little further, it was only for my eyes, apparently.
When I hesitated, I felt something pushing me toward the stairway, just like wings, pushing me at the top of the head, the bottom. When that occurred, I didn’t hesitate. When I got down off the last step of the stairway, an artillery shell exploded in that room and knocked out the radio and killed both of those men.
So this was my evidence that I was going to survive this war, and I did have a guardian angel.
Now, these other things that I will tell you or have told you, you can mark them down as lucky or coincidence. But that one wasn’t, was it? Nobody has ever explained that to me. I’ve even told my minister about it, and they just brush it off as post traumatic stress disorder. Even religious people don’t think it’s anything. But I’m telling you just exactly as I remember.
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Arnold Brown: My first operation in the Battle of the Bulge was in the town of Niederwampach, in Luxembourg. A and B Companies had attacked Niederwampach and they were held up, so they asked me to go around the left flank and attack from the rear.
In an attack position such as this, I always attacked with two platoons forward and one in support, and my position is always in between and slightly to the rear of the two attacking platoons, so I can keep abreast of what’s going on and if I need to commit my support platoon, I’ll know where to do it.
In approaching Niederwampach, the two platoons split up a little bit, so the village in my immediate front had not been cleared. I entered this building with my command group. When I say command group, that was just myself, my communications sergeant, the radio operator and my messenger.
We entered the barn part of this building, and when I first entered, I turned around and started to say, "I don’t believe there’s anything in here." There was a platform of hay on the right side, the platform was about waist high, and the hay was a little higher than that, and this hay started to move. So we squared off toward that hay with our weapons, and a German said, "Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!" Which meant, "Don’t shoot."
I said, "Hande ho! Hande ho!" Put your hands up. So they put their hands up and come out and surrender, there must have been about ten or twelve Germans.
When they surrendered, there was another group of four or five men who came out from the stall behind us, and they surrendered. I heard a commotion over my head and I looked up and there’s a German descending from his rafter up there, and I noticed that he had hand grenades around his waist belt, and he came down and surrendered.
To this day we don’t know why they did this. I bring it out just to show you how lucky I was all through this combat over there. And then I had my other platoons clear out the other buildings, and we captured Niederwampach.
From Niederwampach, we were to go and take Oberwampach.
Before we left, the battalion commander informed me that the situation was serious, but it wouldn’t become critical as long as we could prevent the Germans from widening the gaps in our lines. And they were sending me into Oberwampach, which was on the shoulder of this breakthrough, with orders to hold it at all costs. Don’t let the Germans widen the gap.
In moving across the open fields to get to Oberwampach, we came under machine gun fire from a position on our right front. So I said to the radio operator who’s carrying the SCR300 radio on piggyback right beside me, I got the transmitter radio calling for artillery fire to neutralize this machine gun fire. This radio operator now is shot through the head and falls dead at my feet while I’m on the transmitter making that message. There are bullets whizzing around pretty close.
Instead of getting artillery that time, one of the tanks that we had in support took care of the machine gun nest.
Another man picked up the radio and we moved on into Oberwampach, and took Oberwampach with very little resistance. It was about dusk, and before I got my security all arranged, why, a German halftrack towing a 120-millimeter mortar and a crew of 12 had moved into our midst. We didn’t know it at the time, but they moved into one of the buildings. They didn’t know we were there and we didn’t know they had moved in, until I sent my messenger back to one of my other platoons, and he went back to the building where this platoon had originally been, he opened the door, and it was full of Germans.
It looked like we’d have a firefight right in our midst. Two platoons were going into position, so I took my other platoon and gave them the mission of knocking out or capturing these Germans, and I told everybody in the company to keep their heads down because we’re going to have a fight right in our midst.
So this platoon got in a semicircle around that building, and they opened up on it. They fired a few rifle grenades, and when the rocket launchers fired, one of these Germans put up a white flag. But only six of them surrendered. See, that’s what the Germans will do sometimes, they’ll surrender some while the others get away. So in the dark these other six escaped through the darkness while we stopped shooting.
Well, these Germans are all 6-foot blonds, and they have Adolph Hitler shoulder patches. They were part of Hitler’s elite guard. In other words, up until this time they had been protecting Hitler’s headquarters, and this is the first time I guess that they had actually been committed to hard fighting.
So we were literally fighting Hitler’s supermen. They all had the same blood type, so that if they had to have a transfusion, they didn’t have to check it out, they’d just take one man to another.
Aaron Elson: What did you do with them? Did you send them back to the rear?
Arnold Brown: I questioned them, and found out that they were part of a panzer division that was moving into this area. Then I sent them to the rear.
Based on that information, I asked the battalion commander to send me some more weapons to defend against an armor type attack. So he sent me up a platoon of tanks and a platoon of tank destroyers, and I deployed them. And it’s a good thing, because the Germans launched an attack at 3:30 in the morning. And if we hadn’t rushed up those tanks and tank destroyers, they would probably have overrun us the first night.
Let me add this: This little knoll, the high ground on our right, gave us good observation of one of the Germans’ supply routes to the troops that surrounded Bastogne, and we were shooting up those vehicles. So they sent elements of a panzer division to knock us out. And we ended up in somewhere between a 36 and a 72 hour battle, night and day. When the Germans were not making a ground attack, they were bombarding us with artillery fire and direct tank fire.
All of their attacks were at night except one. And this was their last attack. I’ll get into that in a moment. But when these battles were going on, two of my senior platoon sergeants came to me and said, "Captain, this is the roughest that we’ve ever experienced." They said, "We think we had better withdraw. If not, we’ll probably have to surrender."
And I had to tell them that we’re going to hold until the last man.
I was no hero. Those were my orders. Knowing that at some time, if the Germans got these tanks into our position, we’re out of ammunition, and there’s nothing we could do to resist, I would surrender or tell the men to bug out. But I couldn’t tell these men that at that time.
Now these sergeants were brave. They’d fought the Germans longer than I had. They’d fought the Germans in Sicily, in Africa, now they’d been with me from Normandy in five major battles through the French Maginot Line, the German Siegfried Line.So they were just stating the facts, and I agreed with them. But I had to do what my job was at the time.
We did hold. And rather than go into a lot of these operations up until the last attack, it was either on the 18th or the 19th of January, the Germans made their main effort to overcome us, and they made this attack in daylight hours.
They hit my right flank where I had a platoon on this knoll that I told you about with four tanks and I estimate a platoon of infantry. Coming across a big long rolling ridge to our front we could count 11 German tanks. There was infantry riding on the tanks. There was infantry in halftracks following over this ridge just as far as we could see, and they were shooting everything they had while they were moving in.
I got on the telephone with the battalion commander, and I asked him to give me all the artillery fire he had available.
He turned me over to the artillery liaison officer of the battalion, and he asked me to zero one gun in on this target.
I had two observation posts set up, one in the right platoon and one in the left platoon, with wire communications to them, so through them we relayed information. We zeroed this one gun on this target, and the artillery officer said, "Fire for effect."
He had nine battalions – that’s 108 artillery pieces – that hit that target at one time.
You never saw such a slaughter in all your life. These Germans were turning around and withdrew, they didn’t make a tactful withdrawal, it was every tank and every man fleeing for his life. Nothing could have overcome that. It’s impossible. My men, some of them were firing standing up, like shooting ducks in a pond, but they were so far away they’d be lucky if they hit anyone.
The Germans withdrew and they didn’t fool with us anymore.
One other incident took place that I think is of interest.
I had my company command post in Oberwampach set up in the home of the Schilling family. When the Germans were shelling us, a five-year-old boy got excited and dashed out the front door, right into the impact area of the artillery. A 20-year-old soldier dashed out to rescue the little boy.
They were both mortally wounded.
The soldier asked someone to rub his left arm, he claimed it hurt him. I did rub his arm, and he turned blue and died.
The little boy died slowly in his mother’s arms, and to see this – you read about these things – but to see the grief this mother was going through of her son being killed by something they had no control over, it really brings some strong lessons to you.
This soldier’s name was Sergeant Whitfield. He was 20 years old. I recommended him for a decoration and he got it. Now he was a true hero. He gave his life trying not to defend his own life, but to rescue an innocent little boy, and truly he earned his decoration.
Aaron Elson: What decoration did you put him in for?
Arnold Brown: A Distinguished Service Cross.
After the battle, we also picked up a German soldier who had been wounded. He had been shot in the leg apparently with a .50-caliber bullet, and he laid out overnight in this freezing, subzero weather.
Both his arms and both his legs were frozen stiff as a board. He begged us to shoot him.
I couldn’t do it. I asked for a volunteer. Even if he survived, he’d have to have both arms and both legs amputated, and this could have been a mercy killing. But these battle hardened soldiers that had been fighting Germans a few minutes before would not volunteer. One soldier, out of sympathy for the suffering and bravery of this soldier, lit a cigarette and held it to his lips so he could smoke. Another soldier brought him a hot cup of coffee and held it so he could get coffee until we got the litter jeep up there and sent him to the rear.
I’ve always been curious to know what happened to him, but I believe he would have died before they got him back to the aid station.
After this battle, well, I’ve got to pat myself on the back. The division decoration board section came down and they said that with what happened down there the men deserve some medals. They said, "We want to write you up for a DSC."
And I said, "No." I said, "Every man in the outfit deserves it as much and some of them more than I do," and I was really being honest about it. I wasn’t trying to collect medals. I was trying to save as many of these men as I could from getting killed in this terrible war. I don’t know whether I would have received it or not, but I wouldn’t even let them write it up. But I told them about the experiences of this platoon on the right flank, I had to withdraw them a couple times because the Germans wrestled that knoll from us and we retook it, that there were some heroes up there and for them to check that out and see if they could find out who deserved it from that group.
A couple of weeks later, the battalion commander informed me that there was to be an exchange of foreign decorations, and that a British Military Cross would be presented to one officer per infantry regiment, and that in our regiment, the regiment had asked that each battalion submit the names of two officers for their recommendations and their preferences. From among those names they chose me to receive the British Military Cross. I take this as the best reward, or best compliment that I could have for my experiences during World War II.
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Arnold Brown: After the Battle of the Bulge, there was still some fighting to do. I’m not going to mention all of it, just a couple of incidents I think are of interest.
We had to go through German Siegfried Line again. They assigned me ten pillboxes to knock out, and they assigned the company on my left ten pillboxes to knock out.
We got in position and jumped off at daylight. At 9:30 I called the battalion commander and told him that the mission was accomplished. He didn’t believe me. He started arguing with me that I hadn’t taken those ten pillboxes. He said the company on my left hadn’t taken the first pillbox and was having heavy casualties.
What I did was this: I have nine rifle squads and ten pillboxes. That means that one rifle squad would have one pillbox, and the last squad would have two. If we knocked out eight, the last two ought to be easy.
I assigned each squad an engineer demolition team and one tank. These men were to keep that pillbox buttoned up so that they couldn’t fire on the demolition team, which had to go up and set the satchel charge and blow it. If there’s some foulup and it didn’t work, then the tank would run up and put his muzzle of the gun right at that pillbox, you can imagine what this will do to the troops inside. That was my plan.
The rest of the company, while one squad was doing that, we were to fire at every pillbox, make sure every aperture is covered. The whole mission is to protect that demolition team.
Okay, so when that one’s knocked out, then we had additional firepower to keep the others buttoned up while the next squad took their pillbox out. Do you get the picture? And it worked just like clockwork. The only casualty we had, there was one group of Germans who happened to be in a trench between two pillboxes, we didn’t know they were there, and the men they fired on were just slightly wounded. So we knocked out those ten pillboxes with a slightly wounded man or two.
Aaron Elson: Did the Germans surrender or were they killed in the pillboxes?
Arnold Brown: Some were killed, but most of them surrendered. So the battalion commander called me down to headquarters for me to explain to all the officers in the battalion how I worked on those pillboxes. The only reason I’m trying to say this, look, I had nine years of training and experience before I got into combat. No matter how smart a guy is, it’s no reflection on him, they’re good men, you can’t send a person because he’s got a college degree to OCS for 90 days and make a combat leader out of him, not really psychologically or they don’t know tactics. You can’t teach them in that amount of time.
Aaron Elson: Speaking of psychologically, how would you deal with people when they had reached their limit?
Arnold Brown: Everyone has their limits, there’s no question about it. You could almost pick those out that were going to crack up. And you could almost pick out those that were going to get killed, they’d bring it on themselves. And whenever I would get in these positions where I would start to entertain the idea that there ain’t no way I can survive, I’d push those thoughts out of my mind. And I just trusted in my Supreme Being and on a guardian angel because He’d already proved to me that there was one there, you see? I might add my men may have thought I was brave, but they’d better give the credit to the Supreme Being because I was scared all the time.
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Arnold Brown: You know, they say that the infantry is cannon fodder, well, this is true. And I was in this specific situation that would bring this out.
There was a certain village that division or regiment thought it was important to capture. They knew that it was occupied and filled with Germans, and it would be too much for an infantry force alone, so they were going to use an armor and infantry team. But there was some critical terrain on the left of this village that they wanted to secure.
My mission was to cross this open field in front of this village and go over a little ridge. I was to cross that and go and take the woods over on the other side.
Well, I don’t know what is there, but I know that here I’ve got to make this attack with my right flank exposed, and close enough that the Germans can fire at us. Of course, they’re going to have it under artillery fire. And we were so close that some big hunks of shrapnel from that artillery fire fluttered across and landed among us, but that’s the chance we had to take.
I organized, my two platoons forward, and I said, "When we leave this covered position, we’re not going to stop until we take our objective." Because I knew if we ever stopped in that open field, we’d be under a crossfire.
This is strictly an old infantry assault standing up, marching fire to the front, my other platoon was in line where they could marching fire sideways into a building on the right. So we launch this attack and sure enough, here comes some fire from the village, but we had enough artillery fire on it to make them kind of inaccurate, they couldn’t enjoy their shooting. And then on this little ridge where this road came down a couple of Germans jumped up and ran back to those woods which were our objective. So as we come over this ridge where this road was, in those woods out there, I don’t know, maybe a couple of hundred yards away, I could see some white smoke rings coming out of the edge of the woods. So I started yelling to the men, "Fire everyplace you see those smoke rings!"
One of them said, "That’s our own artillery!"
I said, "That’s enemy artillery!"
And it was. Because then they depressed those guns and started firing at us point blank. They fired at my right platoon, and they missed the men and the projectile went into the ground and exploded. The ground was soft. Now remember, these were guns placed there to knock out tanks. It wasn’t the regular 88 artillery type, it’s strictly for knocking out tanks, so they don’t let out as much shrapnel.
Then that gun that fired at that right platoon swung over. I was still moving forward, and I was close enough that I could look down the muzzle of that gun. Now you talk about fear, if I’d have been a private I would have hit the ground. I would have disobeyed the company commander’s orders, I’ll tell you. I’d have hit the ground until he fired anyhow. But what could I do? As the commanding officer, I could never show any fear to my men. So I just stood up and moved forward. But ours was a small group, apparently, so the gun swung over and fired at my left platoon. He got a direct hit on a man, blew him all to pieces. The biggest part was a leg from midcalf down with the combat boot on, it blew it up in the air a few feet and it fell, and when it landed it looked to me like it kind of quivered. I can close my eyes and see that today.
When the Germans saw they were not going to stop us, that gun crew that fired that put their hands up. And I said, "Shoot the sonofabitches!" At the time I was so damn mad that I wanted to. But they didn’t do it. They took them prisoners. The other German gun crews left their guns and ran down through the woods, and my men were chasing them trying to shoot them down, and I finally had to stop them because they were getting scattered out and disorganized, and the Germans might be going to attack us.
Another time we were in march order – this is the last one I’m going to tell – we were marching down the road, single file on either side, and the Germans came in with two or three aircraft and started strafing. So we deployed on both sides of the road and I ran off into a little clump of bushes. And I looked up and saw what I thought was the largest bomb in the world fall right in my position.
I didn’t have time to run or do anything. So with my training, I lay down on the ground flat. I stuck my fingers in my ears and opened my mouth and relaxed. You know why I did this? Well, if you don’t get shrapnel, the concussion from a bomb will pick you up and bounce you around a little bit, I might get bruised, but it won’t burst my eardrums if I open my mouth. It would knock the breath out of me but it wouldn’t burst my lungs if I let it go out and relax.
After a period of time, nothing exploded, and I know it had plenty of time to hit the ground. What had happened was they had dropped their spare gas tank, and I thought it was a bomb. It looked just as real.
Aaron Elson: One other thing, did you cross the Rhine at Mainz or Boppard?
Arnold Brown: You know, you keep reminding me of these things that I haven’t thought about in many years. I participated in an attack on Mainz. As we came over this big ridge into that city, they were firing at us with antiaircraft guns. But when we penetrated their defenses, the German battalion commander surrendered his battalion to us. Now this is kind of a compliment in a way. Of course, they always told me the first thing you want to do is separate the officers from the men in case some of them want to be heroes and take some action.
The first thing I did, I put one of the lieutenants in there to take the officers back in this room and hold them while we were disarming the group. I had a whole group lined up on one block there in the city, and there was one chair in that room. A German lieutenant sat in that chair, and after a while a captain came in, so the lieutenant jumped up and saluted the captain and the captain sat in the chair. And then the battalion commander, he was a major, we brought him in there. The captain jumped up and saluted, and the major sat down. They still had rank even when they were POWs.
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