High sides of a landing craft partially hid an open truck, a short-barreled cannon, a dozen soldiers. In shallow water, the craft rose upward from the back as a swell of surf rolled forward underneath. Settling, the craft ground abruptly on the sand of Utah Beach. The front of the box boat fell open and the truck roared to life. Private First Class Byrnes Goldey grabbed a handhold as the vehicle bounced out of the landing craft and up the beach, dragging an abbreviated cannon.
Goldey and company were ashore in France with the United States 79th Army Division. Ahead lay months of combat and privation and ultimate victory in Europe. By hard fighting, Allied forces would chase Hitler's Reich to its capital and demand unconditional surrender. But victory would come one day, one hardship, one battle and heartbreak at a time.
"We landed six days after D-Day," Goldey recalled in his Pickens County living room. "Our mission was to take Cherbourg."
A little west of Utah Beach (the western-most beachhead of the D-Day landings) the city of Cherbourg presented a developed harbor where ships might dock and speed the flow of supplies and men to Allied forces then pounding German-held France. But German soldiers still held the harbor city, soon to be bottled up at the end of a long and broad peninsula.
Ashore, Americans found moving heavy trucks and equipment through the French countryside was a problem. "The biggest trouble over in France are the hedgerows," Goldey explained. "That's what they use for fences instead of regular fence."
Thick, tall hedges made tough barriers even to tanks. In time, enterprising Army engineers developed a toothy attachment for their tank fronts to knock holes in the hedges. Early on, the Allies had to find existing paths through the hedgerows and plod through bottlenecks created at the gaps.
The day of their landing, Goldey's unit camped on its way to Cherbourg and moved on the city the next morning. "We set up our cannons outside of Cherbourg," Goldey said, "and we'd fire ahead of the infantry. We had one-o-five Howitzer short-barreled cannon." One-o-five describes the inside diameter of the cannon barrel in millimeters –– one hundred five millimeters.
"We stayed up with the infantry," Goldey said, "right behind them, and used them [the Howitzers] as anti-tank guns. We had what they called forward observers."
Forward observers operated in teams, Goldey explained. Normally a team paired a corporal or sergeant with a lieutenant. "They were up there with the infantry," Goldey said. "If they saw a tank or anything, they'd notify the company where the tank was located."
Goldey said a captain commanded the cannon company. In battle, the forward observer called by radio to a cannon company lieutenant. In turn, the lieutenant communicated by telephone to the cannon battery to direct fire on to the battlefield.
Goldey did not man a Howitzer. “My job was on outpost,” he said. “We had three different outposts every time we set up.” Outposts were machine gun nests positioned 150 yards from the cannon battery to the left, right and behind the guns. "My position was usually on the right," Goldey said. "As soon as they started setting up the guns, you knew where to go. If we got attacked on our flanks, our job was to protect the batteries. We used .50 caliber machine guns on the outposts and Browning Automatic Rifles."
Six Army privates manned each outpost. Through the night they kept watch in pairs –– two hours on watch and four off. Off watch, the soldiers slept underground. "We dug a hole, and that's what we slept in," Goldey said.
A sergeant supervised them. "The only one we reported to was the sergeant on the gun we were protecting," Goldey said. Sixty years beyond the battle smoke, Goldey no longer recalls his sergeant's name. "The only thing I know about him was he was Polish, and he was from New York," Goldey said. A tough character? "Uh-huh, he was," Goldey said.
Drafted at age 20 out of Oxford, Pennsylvania in March 1943, Goldey was just 21 years old in France. He did basic training at Camp House, Texas on his first trip south. Goldey was fresh out of boot camp when he joined the 313th's cannon company. What he learned about Howitzers, he learned on the job.
In line of battle before Cherbourg, Goldey's unit was watching its back. While the Americans attacked German hold-outs in the city, the larger part of the German army lay behind them. From his outpost, Goldey could not see how the battle progressed.
"All I know is all hell broke loose," Goldey said. "I couldn't see anything. All I knew is where the guns were firing. The artillery was firing in there and everything that you can think of."
Artillery units set up long-barreled Howitzer field pieces behind Goldey's cannon company and lobbed shells into Cherbourg over their heads. At the same time, big guns on Allied battleships pounded the city from the English Channel. Goldey said the city surrendered by evening, but his unit never entered the town. "Not our company," Goldey said. "We left Cherbourg and started toward La Havre."
For most of the following twelve months, his regiment fought a running battle across France and Belgium, north into the Netherlands and finally east into Germany.
With more than a half century gone since then, Goldey's recollection of dates and places has grown hazy with the years. As on a battlefield masked in smoke, scenes emerge like images snatched from a dream. Whole battles remain hidden in the haze.
"The next one I remember real clear is in the winter of 1944 about the time of the Bulge," Goldey said. At the Battle of the Bulge, German forces broke through an inexperienced American army, stretched thin in Belgium's Ardennes Forest. This German counter-offensive around Christmas 1944 threatened to undo what the Allies had gained since D-Day.
"We were at Weissenbaum," Goldey said. "I remember that it was so cold. It was supposed to be one of the coldest winters they ever had. And slightly after the Bulge started, they started to move us out towards it. We were on the road day and night."
For 72 hours, Goldey and his crew trucked through the cold and snow, dragging their Howitzer. "Ammunition and everything was in the truck," Goldey said. "All of our equipment." The open truck had no covering over the bed or the cab. The driver steered from an open cockpit behind a windshield. “I sat on the left-hand side of the driver,” Goldey said. “I was also the assistant driver.” Goldey rode, straddling a spare wheel, mounted to the side of the truck.
Overnight, soldiers tried to catch some sleep in the back of the truck, bundled in their winter uniforms. "We wore overcoats and a helmet with like a stocking cap underneath," Goldey said.
"We didn't get all the way to the Bulge," he said. The 79th Division was diverted to the Netherlands to battle the Germans there, but the enemy withdrew toward Germany without a fight. Allied command put the 79th pushing the Germans as they fell back.
"They sent us on towards the Rhine," Goldey said. "It was set up and move, set up and move." The infantry fought every day. On the move, Goldey's crew ate C-rations and "whatever else we could get a-hold of," he said. "We enjoyed getting into Germany, 'cause they usually had plenty of potatoes and sauerkraut in the basements."
Goldey grew up near Amish country, he said, and was favorably familiar with the food German's ate. Officially, the Army banned the practice of foraging for food. "They didn't allow it," Goldey said. "But whenever we went into a town, we'd be assigned to a certain building. And they didn't know what we did after we went inside there."
Goldey said German civilians made themselves scarce when American soldiers moved in. "They were scared to death," Goldey said. "We just took what we wanted. The civilians just kind of stayed out of the way."
On the American run to the Rhine, the German air force was less accommodating. "A plane came around the side of a mountain," Goldey remembers, "and I was on a .50 caliber [machine gun] with a high tripod, which we used for airplanes. He opened up on me on both sides of me."
Strafing bullets, fired from the airplane's wings, made parallel hit paths on the ground to both sides of Goldey as the plane passed over. "I opened up on him," Goldey said, "and when I did, I just froze on the trigger. And when I ran out of ammunition, they came out and pulled me off the machine gun. I don't remember it, but that's what they tell me."
The plane was a Messerschmitt ME 109. "It didn't come out as lucky as I did," Goldey said. "He went over and crashed." Goldey inspected the wreckage up close. He still has a photo of the downed plane, he said, somewhere among his memorabilia.
In early March, Goldey's unit crossed the Rhine River. "They put pontoon bridges across," he said. "The engineers done that. And they had regular landing craft which they used. The battle was always ahead. You could hear it." It pounded during the day and usually played out at dark. "Very little fighting was done at night," Goldey said.
"After we crossed the Rhine, they moved us into a town where they had a displaced persons' camp," Goldey said. "My company had about 500-some Russian and Polish displaced persons to take care of." The people were forced-labor slaves recently liberated from German concentration camps. Goldey said the challenge to this assignment was keeping the two groups from killing each other.
"The only thing we could do was keep the Russians and Poles separated in two different areas and feed them," he said. "We had a big [food] warehouse in the center of the camp, which we had to keep guards on every night and every day."
Word of the German surrender May 8, 1945 came down by Armed Forces Radio. "A corporal, a sergeant and myself found a brewery," Goldey said. "And three days later, they found us. We were close friends, but I can't remember their names now. The corporal, he was from North Carolina."
For Goldey, there was still more soldiering after the war. "We were there quite a while," he said. "They sent me to Frankfort. I was driving a truck, hauling wood out of the mountains for the German people to heat with."
"I didn't come back from there until December," Goldey said. He re-crossed the Atlantic on a troop ship. "I landed in New York December 22, 1945," Goldey remembers. He also recalls sighting the Statue of Liberty as his ship entered New York Harbor. "It was early in the morning," Goldey said. There was cheering on the deck. "I was so happy I couldn't even speak," Goldey said.
"They sent me to Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania," he said. "Indian Town Gap was about 100 miles from home. They told us there that there would be no passes [to leave the base] until after Christmas, and fifteen hundred of us took off and went home. I went back to camp on the 27th of December, and I was discharged on December 31st"
The Army forgave the unauthorized Christmas leave. Goldey's bunch had earned it. For their rolling fight in Europe, each man in his regiment won the Bronze Star.
Last September 21, the French Consulate in Atlanta hosted a ceremony to honor American veterans who fought in World War II to liberate France and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. In battle again, this time against cancer, Goldey missed the ceremony. "At that time I was at Northside Hospital having a PET scan made," Goldey said.
So the French Consulate sent a letter. It contains these words:
“May we all remember the lessen history teaches us time and again: that LIFE, LIBERTY and PEACE are based on the mutual respect of all human beings for one another, regardless of religion or race, and that we must wage a never ending battle so that these fundamental rights may exist.”
To an old soldier, it was a letter of thanks. "After sixty years," Goldey reflected. "I just got it a couple of weeks ago." |
|
