Signal
Corps Successes How
Seven Signal OCS Graduates From Class 42-06 Built The
103rd Infantry Division’s Signal Company
– Part IV of IV –
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continuing...
Being relatively free of war damage, it
was natural that Shifferstadt became one
of the destinations of choice for those
people driven from their own bombed out
homes, throughout Europe. When the 103rd Signal Company arrived
in town, they found
the place teeming with displaced persons
from Poland, France, Russia, and
Czechoslovakia. To assist the CIC unit
in rounding up these people, as well as
coaxing German troops out of hiding, the
Company sent one of its sound trucks
around the city… blaring messages in
multiple languages.
Within a week however, it was time to
move on. The Infantry was moving through
Germany more quickly now, and the 103rd
Signal Company’s help was needed not
just to provide communication, but to
provide forward occupation duty too. As
the system worked, the 103rd, moving in
lock step with the Infantry in order to
provide them with front line
communications, were Johnny on the spot
when it came to filling in and providing
occupation duty after each battle ended.
However, since the Infantry had a duty
to press forward after each battle, and
they needed the 103rd Signal Company to
push forward with them, in each case
another unit to the rear would have to
move forward to take over the
occupation duty the 103rd had been
providing, so that they in turn could
move forward with the Infantry.
Thus it was that their short period of
rest in Schifferstadt came to an end, as
they pushed out toward a set of distant,
purple mountains. As they moved forward,
they began to see the real Germany…
fertile farms, towns with church
steeples, all dotting plains and hills
for as far as the eye could see.
On through Bohl, paralleling a railroad
line, and then marching through orchards
and vineyards, they headed for Musbach.
Past mansions with towers and gables,
and even modern gas stations and
factories, they moved on until they
reached Neustadt. In awe the men moved
into the town, noting that it was almost
entirely made up of rich estates and
mansions. With cherry and apple trees
blooming along a sparkling creek, the
men bivouacked to begin their next stint
at occupation duty.
On April 5th some of the men moved off
again. This time headed for Darmstadt
and Worms. To coordinate with other
units, one squad was sent off to make a
“jeep run” to the 411th, headquartered
at Oggersheim, and from there on to meet
with the 409th up at Worms (around 25
miles away).
What they saw looked
idyllic. Fertile farms with long strips
of grass alternated with some of the
blackest soil ever seen… all being
tendered with farmers plowing with
horses and oxen. Yet that wasn’t what
impressed them… for along their way the
squad sent out to coordinate with the nearby
units came across something they had
never seen… a superhighway, the "Reichsautobahn
Kaiserlautern." There before their eyes
lay a four lane highway (two lanes each
way) of concrete and modern overhead
interchanges.
For these American boys from the
Midwest, seeing something here that they
had never seen back home, the case had
been made: Germany was in fact a
powerful, advanced nation that needed to
be taken serioiusly, despite its
fascist, totalitarian dictatorship, and
its peoples' prevalence towards racism,
anti-Semiticism, and every other form of
phobia you could imagine from hatred of
gypsies and gays to people with
congenital defects.
- - - - -
On Friday, April 13, 1945, the telegram
machines in the 103rd Signal Company
began to hum. For hour after hour they
spit out messages: President Roosevelt
had died. Some of the men actually
cried. Others quietly walked away, head
down, wondering what was to become of
the war now.
With silent deference, telegrams
announcing his death were posted around
the unit, with their edges blackened in
respect. The same was done throughout
the towns they occupied, along with
messages being sent to every unit the
103rd Signal Company then served. Many
of the men commented that it was strange
to see German civilians walking the
streets, crying.
By the end of April the men were getting
restless. It was clear that the war was
going well, because combat engagements
were now few and far between. Yet oddly, the lack of combat
was having a negative effect on the men.
They were letting their guard down,
becoming lazy and doing less than an
effective job at the work they did do. Some
got drunk, others just went walkabout.
Searching the town for hidden guns, the
men often passed over as many as they
found. Carrying messages by jeep from
one place to another, the men too often
sped like crazy, acted carelessly and
caused accidents. On those odd occasions
when Red Cross girls passed through
town, it took an immense effort to keep
the men in order.
It came as no surprise then when
on April 21 the men were ordered to pack
up and head south and east, very rapidly,
into and through Bavaria. It seems that
the 103rd I.D. was back on the hunt, and
renewed combat was in the offing. To
help move the men quickly to where they
were needed, they moved out in trucks
that took to the Autobahn. With smiles
all around, the men spoke of how the
Nazi war machine was beginning to
crumble. This they were sure of, they
said, as their trip down the Autobahn
uncovered remnants of a formerly
formidable enemy… surrendering POW's,
abandoned war materials scattered
everywhere, and more death and
destruction than had been seen before.
Through Pfedelbach, Murrhardt, Ober
Urbach and Kircheim they passed. For
hundreds of miles they moved forward,
through Geislingen, Lonsee and
Horvelingen, until they crossed the
Danube at Ulm on, April 26, 1945.
Between the 28th and 30th of April they
traversed Krumbach, Ketterschwang,
Bidingen and Steingaden. On and on they
went… heading for Austria.
Pointedly, as they moved through Germany
itself, towards Austria, the landscape
changed yet again. This time except for
the detritus of war, they saw
less physical destruction than anywhere they had
been. On a relative basis, the landscape
was untouched, likely as not because the enemy was
retreating so fast that combat
engagements were related more towards rear
guard holding actions than any actual effort to fight
the U.S. Army.
Yet destruction did exist, as evidenced
by the number of destroyed and abandoned
German fighter planes scattered all
along the Autobahn. Since the U.S. had
destroyed nearly all of Germany's air
fields, the Autobahn was being used for landings and
takeoffs. With the pace of the war
increasing, and no place to fly the
planes to, the German Luftwaffe simply
left them where they were, and
retreated.
Most
fascinated by all of this, and as Signaleers knowledgeable
of advanced technologies, the men
crowded around the jet planes they ran
across… something they had never seen,
they were curious to understand both the
science and mechanics of these things.
To add to the
strangeness of the scene, the
countryside was now populated with
mountains dotted with high-roofed alpine
homes, steep roads full of curves, and
more often than not road blocks and mine
fields to keep curious lookers out.
It’s at about this time that the men of
the 103rd Signal Company rolled into the
town of Landsberg, Germany (in
southwestern Bavaria), and
discovered six concentration camps where
victims had died by the thousands… from
every form of atrocity one could think
of,
including starvation and exposure.
Strangely,
Adolf Hitler had been imprisoned in Landsberg before his rise to power.
Among the things he did while there was write his famous "Mein Kampf"
manifesto. One
wonders whether his being
imprisoned in this city had anything to do
with his ordering the setting up of the
concentration camps in this particular
town? Even more incredibly, to add to the
strangeness and morbidity of this town's
history, it was in this
same Landsberg prison that Hitler,
Rudolph Hess and Maurice Grebel shared a
suite of rooms, while they were
imprisoned for mounting the abortive
Munich beer hall putsch.
As to how the concentration camps were
discovered, the men of the 103rd Signal
Company reported that when they entered
the town, while it was inhabited, all of
the shutters on all of the windows of
all of the houses were closed. Oddly,
there were no people on the streets.
Soon though, they found out why.
Reconnoitering the town and its
outskirts, one group of Signaleers took a road
out of town, where they found a barbed
wire fenced area. When they drove to the
gate they were surprised to find that it
was a work camp full of Frenchmen. Breaking the
gate down, they told the inmates that
the area had been captured by Americans.
They were told in return that there were
other work camps, for other
nationalities, further down the same
road. Looking down the road, they
saw smoke billowing up, in the distance.
Hurriedly remounting their vehicles,
they headed off down the road in the
direction of the smoke, where they found
yet another camp, except this one was
different. What they saw was that the
barracks were below ground, most with
grass and dirt tops, but wooden sides...
and worse, all
had
been set on fire, with the occupants in
them.
Breaking down the gate and entering the
compound they set about trying to rescue
those they could. Later they found that
this compound was known as Lager No. 2. It turned out to be a
forced labor camp for Jews. Now, without
their German captors, over 5,000 of them
sat about in their soiled, striped uniforms,
nearly starved to death and in
horrible condition.
As the men moved through the camp
offering rations to the
people,
one old man approached Corporal Fader, a
Signaleer, and said in Yiddish, "I don't
want food, I want a gun to go after the
SS."
He told the men that the SS troops had
just left, and that if they gave him a
gun he was sure he could catch them.
Corporal Fader calmed the old man, even
while it instantly registered in his
mind that he needed to get out of the
camp as quickly as he could, get back to
town, and notify HQ of both the
existence of these camps and the flight
of the German overlords that ran them.
At the same time, he knew he needed to
see to it that someone back at HQ
swiftly organized relief parties to
return to the camp and take on the
enormous task that lay ahead... of
saving those that could be, and
cataloging the rest of the story both for
posterity and to support future war
trials.
As he drove back into town he realized that now
he knew why the
houses all had closed shutters, and the
streets were abandoned. “The people of Landsberg knew of these camps and were
afraid of what might happen to them."
Later, as he worked
as part of a team of men that searched
the houses in town, he remarked again that in
each house he went into the woman of the house
(especially those with children in them)
would
immediately protest, "Nicht Nazi."
Yet in the closets of all the houses he
searched, he "found uniforms with
swastikas on the sleeves.”[1]
In their diaries, other Signaleers wrote
of their experience in Landsberg. One of
the Signaleers wrote...
“Inside the electrically charged double
fence were rows of huts built in the
ground, with only the roofs exposed. In
these huts were crammed approximately
5,000 human beings, although none could
even be called beings, much less human
in the condition in which we found
them.
“They were starved until there was
nothing left but skeletons covered with
skin. Most of them could not possibly
have been nourished back to life, but
the sadistic SS men who were in charge
of the camp were not satisfied with
that.
“They packed all of the living ones into
the huts and set fire to them, after
removing all their clothing of
course. Very methodical these Krauts.
“Many were roasted alive. Others escaped
from the huts only to be stopped by the
electrically charged double fence.
“Those who were too weak to move were
clubbed and beaten to death on the
ground. Many more were stacked like cord
wood in a long deep pit. Untold numbers
lay under the charred ruins of the
filthy holes they lived in.
“The next day we brought the citizens of
Landsberg (the men only, because we
Americans were too soft to ever think of
showing the women anything like that) to
the camps to bury the grisly remains of
those poor creatures.
“The American guards would not let them
move the bodies with their shovels. They were forced to pick them up with
their hands and carry them respectfully
to the mass grave that had been dug, and
to lay them gently in it.
“The people of Landsberg professed to know nothing about the camps,
but they knew. How could they not know?”[2]
Today we know that what this Signaleer
said is true. We know that in the towns
that surrounded the concentration camps
in Austria and Germany up to 93% of the
people who lived in the towns worked for
the Nazis. Yet the day after the war
ended, inquiries into these same towns
indicated that not a single person...
not one... zero... of the townspeople,
said that they worked for the Nazis. Nicht Nazi.
And the story continues today. Asking
about in these towns what one will hear
from the elderly that still live in
each community is "I didn't know of
the things that went on inside of the
camps in our town." – or – "I didn't
know what the Nazi's were doing." – or
worse still – "I was just a soldier. I
was just following orders."
Six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
It is a worthy note that seven Army
Signal Corps OCS graduates from Class
42-06, and the men of they commanded,
saved some of those that didn't.
- - - - -
May proved to be an important month for
the men of the 103rd Signal Company, as
the war ended on May 8, 1945. The
Company Report from May says little
about this event… in typical fashion, it
speaks only of military matters.
COMPANY REPORT - MAY, 1945
The enemy for the first five days of May
were still fleeing headlong for the
safety of the Bavarian Alps, but the
103rd Division and attached elements
gave them no opportunity to slow up for
reorganization. This pursuit
necessitated the extension of already
abnormally long lines of communication,
but contact was maintained with all
spearhead elements by radio, which at
times had to be relayed due to
mountainous and atmospheric conditions.
Yet finality was just around the corner.
On May 2 the unit's Company Commander,
Captain Beck, one of the original
graduates of OCS Signal Corps Class
42-06, commented in a letter home...
“So Adolph Hitler is dead! He certainly
caused a great deal of trouble for one
man. Perhaps by the time you get this
all the Nazi big-wigs will be dead. I
hear, to-night, where the Krauts in
Italy have finally surrendered. But, as
far as I am concerned, the Krauts still
fight on. At least, here they do.
“What really gets me, though, is this "Nicht
Nazi" plea that the German civilians
give when we take their town. Oh! they
have always hated the Nazis and how they
loved the Americans! In the meantime
their homes are full of swastikas on
flags, belt buckles, walls, etc. After
spending about 12 years "heiling"
Adolph, they are now 'Nix Nazi.' "
He went on to comment on the lack of
humanity and callousness of the German
people.
“They live in the most beautiful homes I
have ever seen, while on the outskirts
of their town or possibly a few miles
away is a concentration camp where
Poles, Jews, Russians, Czechs,
Hungarians, etc., live as cattle in
emaciation and rot. Trains go through
these pretty towns daily, loaded with
the dead stinking corpses of the poor
devils that were tortured to death,
piled up like slabs of beef, while Jerry
and his happy healthy family went about
their life of "Kultur."
“I saw freight cars standing, on now
blown tracks, loaded with garments of
murdered people. In one car was shoes,
thousands of them. In another was pants
and so on down the line.
“The people look normal, act normal and
have normal living habits. But, inside
them they seem to have the heart of a
beast. Gen. Eisenhower's
non-fraternization policy is fairly
effective. The people are given the cold
shoulder.”
The next day, 3 May 1945, Captain Beck
continued to pour his feelings into his
letter home.
“The German system of oppression
includes the utilization of the
conquered people as slaves. That's
right, slaves the same as the U.S.A. had
prior to the Civil War.
“If you think that the people had
nothing to do with it, you are
wrong. Each German family had their own
personal slaves, the number being
determined by the wealth and prominence
of the family. The slaves were either
Poles, Russians, Czechs and in some
cases French. These slaves lived with
the family either in the attic or cellar
and performed daily chores that would
normally fall to the family to perform.
“If the German had a business or a
factory the prisoner(s) worked there. To
the German, it was something perfectly
normal and to this day they claim to be
anti-Nazi."
Over the next few days news of the end
of the war spread its way throughout
continental Europe. Slowly at first, in
one town and then another, the people
would hear that Hitler was dead and that
Germany had surrendered. In spite of
this, with so many German military units
in so many places, it took time for the
formality of surrender to take place.
In
some cases German military units caught out
in places like northern Italy tried as
they could to cross over into Austria,
rather than be taken prisoner in Italy.
In others, not knowing for certain if
the rumors of the war ending were true
or not, German units fought to defend
their positions. Over time however, the
countryside grew silent… as units put
down their arms and waited to be taken
prisoner.
Stories of the men of the 103rd Signal
Company taking German prisoners during
this period abound. Not fully aware of
whether the German soldiers they came
across knew that the war had ended or
not, every encounter between the two
sides pulsed with danger. In one case a
squad of Signaleers approached a town
that seemed to be deserted. As they
entered the town square they brought
their vehicles to a halt… the silence was
eerie. Eventually, a few children
appeared from some of the nearby buildings
in the town,
cautiously approaching the Americans.
Not knowing if this was a trap or not,
the men looked to each other for
support.
One of the men brought out that old
American peace offering… candy, and sure
as shootin’ once the kids took it they
laughed and danced about. With this a
few elders ventured out of their
houses… out from behind the closed
curtains they had been cautiously peering out
of.
By the time everyone came to realize
that the Americans weren’t going to
shoot up the town, the town square was
full. A celebration ensued, and everyone
seemed pleased.
As the squad packed up and headed back
to their unit, the Team Chief noticed
that some wire lay along the side of the
road. Following orders to police up all
reuseable wire, he ordered the men to
begin re-spooling it. One of the men
followed along behind the truck, pulling
wire from the side of the road to the
middle so that another could coil it
onto a spool. As he did this, he noticed
that off to the side, about 200 yards
ahead, a large number of German soldiers
were slowly walking toward the road the
men were traversing.
At first the Signaleers were concerned, opining
that if the war was over, why were these
German soldiers out in the field with
their weapons? Slowly however it began
to dawn on them, perhaps they had come
to surrender?
The officer leading the German troops
headed in a straight line for the tail
end man pulling the wire into the middle
of the road. Not knowing the U.S.
ranking system, he was heading for
perhaps one of the lowliest ranked men
in the entire U.S. Army, to surrender.
Seeing the officer heading for him, the
Private began to worry, until he
realized that all of the men in the
group were wearing soft caps… i.e., they
had discarded their helmets. As the
Germans got closer, they began to hold
their arms up, and began shouting
"Surrender!".
The Private just stood there,
fascinated. When he looked forward to
the Signal truck, he saw his compatriots
doing the same. Everyone just stood
there, staring and looking at the group
of Germans with amazement.
Slowly the officer came up to the
Private, saluted and
spoke something in German that clearly
implied that he was surrendering. With
that he unbuckled his sword and pistol
and presented them to the Private.
Taking charge, the Private motioned that
everyone should line up and follow the
Signal truck… after a quick word or two,
the driver of the Signal truck headed
off down the road, back towards
Innsbruck. There the Signaleers turned
over their prisoners to the first group
of M.P.s they ran across… before turning
around and heading back again, to finish
the job of mopping up the wire that they had
found.
This kind of event was not unusual. Days
passed, and things got even quieter. So
quiet that many of the men of the 103rd
Signal Company commented that the
silence of peace was strange to the ear.
Many found it difficult to believe that
no front line existed. While for others,
lurking beneath the exhilaration of
being part of the winning of the war,
they found their souls full of dark
anticipation as to what was to come…
anticipation haunted by reminders that
the war in the Pacific was still going
forward, still going strong.
What next, they asked each other.
On May 9, a hot day, the men knew it was
official… the war was indeed over. They
knew this because a Victory Parade was
held in Innsbruck on that day…
Innsbruck, Austria, the place where they
were now bivouacked.
In the parade “The
103rd Division passed in review for
civilians and military on the River Road
Drive. The higher brass looked military
and stern. Parts of the Regiments passed
after the band, then a Task Force, then
attached units such as Artillery with
their 105's and 155's, then the 614th
T.D.'s, 781 and 761st Tank Battalions.”[3]
And so it was over. The long journey
that began at Camp Howze now came to an
end in Innsbruck. Starting with a long
train and boat ride that took the unit
through Britain to a landing at
Marseilles, then on to learn the art of
field combat as they pushed their
way up through the French countryside to
St. Diè. Then through a long,
frustrating winter of fighting in Alsace
and the Vosges, to be followed by a
rapid paced spring campaign that touched
on everything from the Battle of the
Bulge, to the Siegfried Line, and then
on to the Rhine and a dash down through
Bavaria and the Austrian Alps… it was
all finally coming to an end.
While the men did not then know what was
ahead of them as far as the Pacific War
was concerned, they did know that as a
Signal Company the European chapter of
their existence was over, and that they
had not only come through it well, but
performed beyond the call.
e f
Editor's Note:
Having worked your way through this four part
series, it would not be right for us to
leave you, our readers, here, in
Innsbruck, Austria, wondering what
happened next.
For your pleasure, next month we will
return with a short addendum to this
story. In this bonus piece we will tell of the unit’s
occupation time in Europe before being
sent back to the U.S., their homecoming,
and their glee in hearing that the war
in the Pacific ended before the unit was
sent out again, to do its part in Asia too.
Join us next month on our August Home
Page for The Final Chapter – How Seven
Signal OCS Graduates From Class 42-06
Built The 103rd Infantry Division’s
Signal Company.
Footnotes
[1] Quotation taken from online extracts from the
diary and notes of Tech Sergeant Seymour Fader, 103rd Signal
Company.- To return to your place
in the text, click
here.
[2] Quotation taken from online extracts from the diary and
notes of radioman “Andy” Pierce Evans, 103rd Signal Company.- To return to your place
in the text, click
here.
[3] Quotation taken from online extracts
from the diary and notes of Staff
Sergeant John Donlan, 103rd Signal
Company. - To return to your place
in the text, click
here.
Reference Sources
Various backround material taken from
Fighting in the Val de Moder; Lise M. Pommois, Association
Les Amis de la Libération de Pfaffenhoffen; C. Delbecq, 1989
- Alsace (France).
Many of the comments and quotes in this
series, and especially in this article, were taken from the excellent book
entitled 103d Infantry
Division Signal Company Remembrances; 1918 – 1945,
by William F. Barclay. Some portions of
the text in this article are a literal
rewrite of a few parahraphs of that
book. The text of the book is currently in the process of being placed
online, and is available in partial form at this
link.
Of note, text and
pictures are being added to the online version by the son of
Captain Beck. We have depended heavily in our quoting the
writings of Captain Beck, and in using
his observations to add color to this
story, on information contained in this
book, which information most certainly
must have come from Captain Beck's son
Andy Beck. Our expressed gratitude for
his having provided it for inclusion in
the 103d Infantry
Division Signal Company Remembrances;
1918 – 1945,
and for the chance to quote from it
here.
In addition to the above, generally, quotations shown, unless otherwise
identified, were excerpted and extracted
from 103d Infantry
Division Signal Company Remembrances; 1918 – 1945,
by William F. Barclay. However, because
of the extensive use of what we
believe was Barclay's
book as source material for other
deep web sources, from which we in turn
extracted data for use here, we can not
say with certainty that the material
used here originally came from Barclay's
book. Notwithstanding this, the nature
of the quotations and stories appearing
in such deep web sources leads us to
believe that it was originally sourced from
Mr. Barclay's book, and accordingly we
wish to provide credit here.
Pictures from various online sources.
When shown without identification, no
identifying source was able to be found.
The Patriot Files; dedicated to
the preservation of military history;
www.patriotfiles.com.
Generally, map graphics and references courtesy
www.103rdcactus.com.
Papa's War, Evans, Pierce;
Limited Publication, 1995; various
online sources.
Report After Action: The Story of
the 103rd Infantry Division;
Mueller, Ralph; Turk, Jerry; Printing
Office, Innsbruck, Austria.
Index of /Sexton/103rd; deep
web sourcing.
103D Infantry Division Signal
Company History, online as a
Pierce-Evans.org project.
103rd Infantry Division,
Wartime Press.
Miscellaneous fact checking: The Patriot
Files; an online resource dedicated to
the preservation of military history.
Photo of German soldiers surrendering
outside of Dachau reproduced courtesy of
Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and
Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
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