War memoirs of John J. Carrigg © Copyright 2005 Catholichistory.net
Part III (Part I) (Part II) (Part IV)
We were in the house for a short while and could hear the German machine gun firing. Their rate was much higher than ours. Ours was da da da. Theirs was blip blip blip. (Do you get the difference?)
Later that morning our mortar squad moved out of that house and joined another unit up the street, where we set up our 60 millimeter mortar behind a 3 foot wall and began firing on the French Chateau some 300 to 400 yards from our position.. The Germans were shelling our position with large mortar rounds and we assumed they were directing that fire from the Chateau that gave them good observation on our position. They were firing a big mortar probably like our 81 millimeter mortar. One of their rounds landed near our position and I was hit by shrapnel in the leg and the posterior. My leg hurt and I walked with a limp for a few days.
A sergeant from C company, Sgt. Brewer, moaned to me as he lay next to me, “John that round sent shrapnel right through my trenching shovel and into my ass.” It was almost as if he was offended that the trenching shovel had let him down. It should have stopped that round. Interesting thing is—to me at least—I didn’t know that he knew my name. He was from C company and I from B company. A company is 250 men and there would be quite a few men in your company whose name you would not know.
Fortunately Captain Herman sent me back to get more ammo when the Germans dropped a big one very close to our squad and five of them—DiNunzio, Wolman, Podliski, Thompson, and Brown—became casualties. We were firing our 60 mm mortar at the chateau and Captain Herman was supervising our mortar squad for some time and he said, “Carrigg, you better go back to the village square and get some more ammo,” which I did. So I went back, picked up as much as I could carry and headed for our position when I ran into the entire mortar squad—all of them mobile but full of shrapnel. The worst wounded was Curley Wolman whose right eye was lying on his cheek. They all headed for the aid station and were evacuated. I am not sure exactly where—it was to some large French city to the east of Nennig. The doctor at the aid station offered to evacuate me but I said I would stay. I knew if I went back to the rear I would never want to come back.
I talked to Albert DiNunzio yesterday, June 24, 05, and asked him where they sent him (some were sent back to England). He said it was a big French city but he didn’t know the name of it. He said some years after the war he had an x-ray for something and the technician asked him if he had been in a war for, she said, the X-Ray showed shrapnel still there.
Captain Herman was killed that afternoon. I was told it was sniper fire that got him. A graduate of Culver Military Prep, and a fine man. He might have saved my life when he sent me back for more ammo. I still remember him in my prayers. RIP.
For all practical purposes we no longer had a mortar squad. The night of January 25 I spent in the basement of a nearby house which really was the neighbor of the house where we had set our mortar. An old sergeant was in charge—by old I mean probably 35 or 36. I didn’t know him or where he came from and all the guys were strangers to me. But the sergeant was clearly in charge and he set up our night watch. To get down to the basement of that house you had to walk down outside steps at the bottom of which was a dead German soldier. Someone had put a door on that body and when we stepped on it to enter the basement it rolled on and off his body. A really macbre touch.
The old sergeant arranged the night watch for the house next door. Four of us stood watch on the second floor of that bombed out house. Sharing our watch was a dead American soldier lying in one of the rooms, who had the combat infantry badge on his jacket. Earlier in the evening our First Sgt. August A. Beneditti had given me the sign and counter sign for the night. It was “thick throat.” So while we were on guard duty around midnight, three or four fellows came along the road in front of the house. I was quite sure they were Americans but I ordered them to halt and they stopped. I said, “Give the sign.”
The trio had forgotten it and there was some discussion among them and one of them said “thick or thin or some *$#% thing” and I said, “Pass,” and they did. Their vocabulary was very American.
On January 26 they pulled our unit off the line and I spent the day in a French village where I ran into Dana Bunker, a soldier from C Company who was in a very depressed state. “How long do you think we are going to last?”—he asked me this several times. His company on the flank of ours had been under heavy fire through the night. Bunker said he had made many promises that night. He said his night on the hill was just awful and he didn’t think we would ever get out of this alive.
That night we were billeted in the upstairs of a convent. There must have been a dozen soldiers there. Bunker was so glum. Bunker and I carried on a whispered conversation for a while in that convent attic. So I said good night and headed for my bedroll when a sergeant came in, counted us, and then announced: “Fellows you are all going back to your unit.” Bunker let out a curse like the cry of the damned. I will never forget that. So we headed downstairs, loaded up in our trucks, and were taken to our unit. The next morning at the breakfast call you could have all the bacon and eggs you wished because our casualties were so heavy. It was eerie, so many guys were gone.
Bunker by the way survived the war, but that fateful night he was convinced he was doomed. I was in touch with him for a brief while after the war and then the trail grew cold.