For this patrol, I asked for volunteers. About five hands went up. Among the volunteers was a man

named Shapiro. I was very proud of him, but I knew from experience that he couldn’t walk 10 feet in the dark

without getting lost. I was disappointed that our best man, Gus Kyle, had not volunteered. When we got up to

go, Kyle put on his helmet and grabbed his carbine. I said, “Where the hell are you going?” He replied, “I’m

going along to take care of you. You’re not smart enough to take care of yourself.” Again, I never argued

with Kyle.

            Our objective was to find out where the German positions were. We were walking down the streets

of Forbach, behaving like a well-trained unit and arguing about what we were going to do next. This was

quickly called off when a German about 20 feet to our left and above us called for us to halt and then

commenced firing with a bolt-action rifle. We could hear every click. I fired one burst from my

Tommy gun and was fascinated at the amount of flame that came out. I dove over three of the men to get

away from the sniper. One at a time, each man got up and tiptoed across the road. Had one man run, it

would have been curtains for the rest of us.

            As soon as all of us were across the road, we ran madly for the middle of a field. When we started

counting heads, we realized Shapiro was not with us and Shapiro had the radio. I went back looking for

him without too much enthusiasm. When I returned to the group, I fell over them since their parkas were

perfect camouflage. When we got back to the company command post, we learned that Shapiro had

called in asking, “Where am I?” Through the use of landmarks, they talked him back in about 45 minutes.   

            Sometimes you do things when the results are quite different than you anticipate. As many times

as we corrected them, our heavy weapons company would drive their communications jeep between two

of their machine gun positions. This, of course, pinpointed their positions to the Germans. I observed this

while I was on the radio talking to the Jumper. He said curtly, “Well, stop them!” I was about 100 yards from

them so I fired a burst from my Tommy gun over their heads. The driver didn’t even hit the brakes. The two

men just dove out of the jeep. The jeep continued down the road and eventually hit a tree. They were

somewhat upset with me, but we never saw the jeep again.

            We got little news except we knew we were spread very thin to allow Patton to move north and

help eliminate the “Bulge.” On the morning of January 18th, we loaded into trucks for a trip to the little

town of Sessenheim.