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We were taught to safely unearth land mines. Some of them were big and some of them were smaller. The big ones were called Teller mines. They are either named after a guy named Teller, or Teller could be a big dinner plate in German. Either way, they carried a lot of explosives in them. You would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet and if you heard Tink! Tink! Tink! you knew there was something dangerous underneath. You had to be very careful. So you would clear away the dirt and then ask the help of the one guy in your platoon who was an expert at defusing mines—who really knew what and where all the wires were. He would take out a whisk broom and lightly dust away the earth surrounding the mine and proceed to disengage the fuse. I couldn’t really see exactly what he was doing, because we were a good twenty yards away hunkered down beneath our steel helmets. Lucky for me, our expert always defused them without a mistake.
Other land mines were trickier. They were set up with trip wires. Soldiers could be walking, hit the trip wire near them, and then you’d hear a click and an S-mine, a canister filled with all kinds of shrapnel that we nicknamed a “Bouncing Betty,” bounced up about chest high and for a radius of twenty feet, destroyed anything around it. If you heard that click, you knew that the mine was in the air, and you hit the ground as quickly as you could and buried your face in the earth because it exploded in a conical manner, so as close as you could get to the ground, the safer you were. Running was not an option.
We were also taught to search and clear unoccupied houses of booby traps. What’s a booby trap? Well, for instance, if you were sitting on the john and pulled the chain behind you sometimes instead of the flushing sound you might hear a loud explosion and find yourself flying through the air. Which would mean that a booby trap was positioned in the water closet above the toilet. So before troops could occupy a domicile we had to be very sure it was cleared of booby traps.
Being a combat engineer was not easy, but one of the nice advantages was you didn’t have to carry an M1 Garand rifle, which was pretty heavy. You were supplied with an M1 carbine, which was a much lighter rifle and gave your shoulder a wonderful rest.
In addition to clearing mines, combat engineers were taught to build makeshift structures to span small rivers or creeks. They were called Bailey bridges. It’s like a giant erector set. It’s constructed on one side of a river or a creek, and then it’s swung over the water and drops down on the other side. They were light, practical, and strong enough to support the weight of 6x6 trucks or even a Grant or a Sherman tank.
One night, while assembling a Bailey bridge I thought I heard Germans singing on the other side of the river. The ja, ja at the end of each phrase was a dead giveaway. I thought the sound of the singing was terrible, and I decided to teach them what real singing sounded like. So I picked up a big bullhorn, went to the bank of the river, and started singing à la Al Jolson:
“Toot Toot Tootsie goodbye.
Toot Toot Tootsie, don’t cry.
That little choo-choo train
That takes me
Away from you, no words can tell how sad it makes me.”
When I finished the song, I thought I heard coming from the other side of the river (where the Germans were) a round of applause and, “Sehr gut! Sehr gut!” (“Very good!”) Maybe it was my imagination, but anyway it makes for a good story.
When our training in Normandy was over we boarded more 6x6 trucks and made our way through Belgium down to Alsace-Lorraine. I was lucky to get through Belgium on my way to Germany a couple of months after the Battle of the Bulge. Had I been born six months earlier, I probably would have been fighting in that and who knows what would have happened? Anyway, luck was with me and the Germans were finally in retreat and life got a little better and a little safer.
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We were stationed in Saarbrücken, which was right on the border of France and Germany. Even though the war was still on, there was a French-German restaurateur who kept his restaurant open. It was a blessing in disguise. You could actually get Alsatian dishes. So instead of Army chow my buddies and I would get to eat onion soup, bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, and French bread. And to drink there was either German beer or French wine! It was a lucky little island of gastronomic happiness. As I said, it was right on the border between France and Germany. There was a huge period painting hanging over the fireplace of the restaurant and it was double-sided. Depending on which side was winning, the painting would either display a picture of the kaiser on one side or, on the other side, Napoleon. We were lucky to get the Napoleon side.
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The 1104th combat battalion was attached to the Seventh Army, and, like I said before, the Germans were retreating. Our job was to use our combat engineer training in land mine and booby trap detection to clear the dwellings in newly captured territories. It was hard work, not to mention scary work, but we went over everything with a fine-toothed comb. To this day, even though I’m not a soldier and I’m not in Germany and I’m not in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode I have a tendency to stand on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap…which hardly makes any sense in a restaurant in New York. Needless to say, I never saw any—but I still breathe a sigh of relief every time I look in and just see water.
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One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we found a case of German Mauser rifles near an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt action. Sure enough, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white ceramic insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about twenty-one dollars when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: “Get back to the base immediately!”
When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving rapidly all over the place. My company commander told us that Army communications had been severed. It seems that some telephone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh!
I quickly realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. So knowing that we were really not in danger, I gallantly offered to take my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent us off with a salute that connoted something like, “You men are a brave bunch.” We never let on.
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