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WWII History: This is part two of a three-part written memory of WWII. It was recorded by Bud Laws, uncle of the club photographer Dave Laws (3rd Para Bde.), and provided here courtesy of Dave and with permission of the author. All photos shown with this article are from Bud Laws's private collection, taken during his service in the war and during occupation duties in Germany and Czechoslovakia. |
Bud Laws
314th Infantry Regiment
79th Infantry Division
The first part of Pte Laws's story ended with him serving as an artilleryman with the division. His unit had just crossed the Rhine in March 1945 after fighting in the Ardennes against Operation Nordwind, the German winter counter-attack south of the 'Bulge'.
From there on things moved rather rapidly. We would stay in one position just about long enough to dig a foxhole and then move. We were in one spot where the road went straight ahead past us. We were off to the right side firing in the general direction that the road went. After a few hours we moved up the road and came to a tee, where we had to go right or left. We went left to a small town and settled in for a while.
The commanding officer had a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back of it, like the old Desert Fox show on TV. He loaned me the jeep. I drove the jeep and another fellow manned the machine gun. We went out looking for wine cellars. It was one of the first priority items. We had run out of wine.
We headed back towards the tee in the road and there were a few fellows sitting there taking a break having a smoke. We kept going. We'd been down the other way. There was nothing there. So we went straight ahead. We went through a couple of villages and didn't see anything that looked like a wine cellar or a tavern or anything like that, although usually they had one. I felt that something wasn't quite right. I stopped the jeep and asked my buddy if he had the same feeling I did. He said yes. It then dawned on me that none of the villages had sheets hanging out their windows (a symbol of surrender) so we turned around and headed back. FAST!
It was about five miles and we came across the same fellows we had earlier. We asked them if they knew where the front line was. They said no, but they were company A, which was a rifle company, and they were going to go on down that road. We told them they could go another five miles before they would find anybody because we hadn't seen any German soldiers. Then things were quiet for quite a little while.
We moved up to another position along side a raised railroad track. We were there for a few days and had all kinds of excitement. One night there was an artillery barrage with airbursts. The next morning one of the fellows in the company raised his head up to get out of his foxhole and his nose hit something sharp. He took a flashlight to investigate. A sharp piece of shrapnel had come through the dirt and the wood over his foxhole and had stopped about two inches from his nose. From then on until the war was over when we moved into position that fellow never stopped digging. He would dig down as far as he could and throw the dirt out. Then he would start at one end of the foxhole and dig down and throw the dirt out to the upper end. Sometimes he'd be down three layers before he'd quit. It scared the day lights out of him.
Pte. Bud Laws at Ft. Lewis
The area was littered with bags of explosives that go into artillery shells. There were two different types we saw. One was German and the other was British or American. I forget what we had in ours. Ours were in bags of seven looped together. We always cut at least two off for our cannons. I never looked to see what was inside the bags. There were two types of explosives lying loose on the ground. One looked like a reed, about the size of a piece of macaroni, but black. It was built like bamboo. It had a straight stretch across it, a web, another straight stretch and another web. Then we found some that looked just like spaghetti, twelve inches long or better. We would bundle some up as tight as we could with electrical tape. We would leave the back end open and stick two pieces out to act as a fuse and fire it like a skyrocket. Just something to do, but noisy.
One fellow was kind of a character. He was always getting into some kind of trouble. One of the things that he did was to light off these tubes of explosives that looked like long black macaroni, throwing it up into the air scaring everybody. One could light one end of that and throw it in the air and it would take off with a whistle then bang when it hit the web, then go in a different direction, hit the web and bang. Pretty quick a sergeant came down and told us to knock it off. The raised railroad track was maybe one or two hundred feet from where we were and the Germans were on the other side of it. So we quit.
In another place we were, just to the right of us, thoroughly camouflaged, was a huge artillery gun, similar to what they had for a railroad gun or a battle ship gun. How they ever got this gun into place, I'll never know. It was a big gun. It didn't fire very often, only on schedule at specific sites. We didn't know it was there. I was in the command post, which was in a house, talking to the commanding officer and one of the sergeants when they fired it the first time. I had my helmet on, thank goodness. The lieutenant did not. The ceiling came down and all the glass blew out of the windows. We thought the house had received a direct hit. I went outside and discovered there was a huge gun that had gone off, and all we got was the concussion. It shook the lieutenant up a bit for a few minutes when the ceiling hit him on the head. Then we walked down and talked to the gunners. They agreed to let us know the next time they were going to shoot it. It had just about destroyed the house we were in.
We started moving fairly rapidly after that. Things started happening so fast that I can't remember the order in which they happened. Some of the incidents that I do remember rather vividly happened during the time the ground was still covered with snow. The Germans had an observation plane that used to come over about the same time every night. We called it bed check Charlie. Whenever any plane crossed the front lines at night, both German and American anti-aircraft units would open fire. It was quite a sight to see a wall of orange tracers meeting a wall of white tracers for a stretch of two to three miles. I could not understand how even a bird could fly through there without being hit. Quite often, both sides would light up the front lines with flares attached to parachutes to prevent the opponents from infiltrating the lines. It was a beautiful sight over the snow- covered ground.
In another location the snow melted while we were there. When all the snow was gone we realized we were in the middle of a minefield. We got orders to stay put until the engineers could clear the minefield, which they did. They did us a favor by using a bulldozer to scoop out a huge ditch. We covered it up with a roof and dirt and had an underground barracks until the snowmelt flooded it. Then we had to build bunks out of branches to keep our bedrolls dry. We lashed ammo crates together to form a raft to get in and out with.
One day, one of the officers came by our foxholes and asked if any of us wanted to be Second Lieutenants. He said they would send us back to Paris for six weeks, and then we would come back to active duty as an officer. We asked him if we would return to our own company, and he said, no, that we would be sent to a rifle company to serve as patrol leaders. Considering the short life span as a patrol leader, none of us cared to take him up on his offer. About this time, a P51 fighter plane dropped its auxiliary fuel tank in a field next to us. The rest of the time we were there, there was a constant odor of gasoline in the air.
We were outside of Duisburg, Germany on Easter. Duisburg had a large town square made of cobblestones. Just before Easter, the combat soldiers found time to get into a lot of trouble. One of the fads that they developed was to find tuxedo jackets and top hats. They would collect all the German medals that they could find, including some that were intended for woman who had had numerous children. They would pin all of these medals onto the tuxedo jacket and wear the jacket and the top hat. I remember seeing one fellow attired like this, driving a large open German touring car, offering to sell the car and the complete outfit for a pack of cigarettes. It seemed that some general had taken advantage of the lull in the fighting to visit the front and did not figure that this was proper military attire. Everybody was ordered to get back into proper military uniform.
Since things were quiet, I walked up to the Front to visit a friend of mine who was in a line company. We could look out a window and see the German troops lined up for chow across the courtyard. They weren't doing anything so we weren't about to start anything. We watched them. My buddy's machine gun was upstairs, aimed out a window. While we were talking downstairs, that went off and the Germans scattered. We ran up to see who was stupid enough to fire it. It was a German girl. She shot near them to scare them. She thought it was great fun, but of course, they started firing back so I had to get back to my company.
As I recall, Easter Sunday was the beginning of a new offensive. We proceeded out of Duisburg into some farm country, orchards. It was interesting, the snow was pretty well gone, it was pretty. It was a nice spring day. Things were pretty quiet. Occasionally you would hear a shell going off. The Germans had a rocket-firing device similar to what we had. It would create a whistling sound, like if you threw a pipe through the air or something, which is basically, all it was. It would tumble end over end and make the whistling sound. We called it a "screaming meemie". That's what it sounded like. You could not tell where it was coming from or where it was going due to the way the sound traveled.|
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There were three of us leaning out a window looking out across the valley, where the Germans were, to see if we could see any puffs of smoke or anything. The fellow that drove the jeep for the commanding officer pulled up along side of the house and came in. The commanding officer was standing right behind us with his arms spread out around our shoulders looking out the window between us when this fellow came in the house. All of a sudden there was a big blast and the house shook. There was a door to the basement directly behind the window. We made a dash for that and took the commanding officer right with us. We ended up in a heap, on the basement floor with him on the bottom. Since there was no more activity, we went out to see what happened. It turned out the jeep driver had several hand grenades hanging from the dash of the jeep. The pin had come out of one of them, causing them all to explode. That jeep looked like a sieve.
Friend of Pte Laws posing next to downed German plane.
Shortly after that, we moved up to a town called Mengede. We had a pretty comfortable place there. There were six of us quartered in this one house. It was a nice little house. It had stucco walls and a metal blackout shield that would collapse down. You could wind it down and up on the outside of the windows so no light would escape to the outside at night. It was also a good repellant for any shrapnel or anything like that.
I was in the house with the blinds closed. A mortar shell went off just outside the front door. I ran out to see what happened and where it came from. A young boy, maybe 10 or 12 years old came out from behind the fence with his hand blown off. He had found the mortar and the mortar shells and had decided to try to hit us. He almost did. So I got the company medic to take him into the field hospital.
Somewhere about this time, I got a three-day pass to a rest camp in Heerlen, Holland. It was close to where we had waited for the Rhine crossing. The people Henry Ford and I stayed with were two to a house. We stayed with the Zeegers family. He was an engineer for a coal mining company. Just before I got the pass to this other town, I heard that they were just a few miles away and had had the baby. It was a boy. I told my mom earlier that that's what they thought it was going to be and could she find a baby boy outfit and send it to me. I got it just before I got that pass. So I delivered it to them and got to see the baby.
Mengede was in the middle of a coal mining area in the Ruhr Valley. Our job, primarily from that point on, was to get all of the displaced persons (we called them DPs) out of the forced labor camps into decent housing, organize them by country and then arrange for their transport back to their homes.
The DPs, themselves, became a problem. As soon as they had some freedom they wanted to go kill all of the Germans that had been their guards when they were in the forced labor camps. They would burn houses and all kinds of things. We had quite a few of them in that area.
We were not allowed to speak to the Germans at that time. We were standing guard duty twelve hours on, four hours off, around the clock, seven days a week. There weren't enough of us to go around.
The first run they sent me out on was one place that was an ex-forced labor camp. It had a high wall around it with a great big gate. It was just before dark. They dropped me off and said, "we don't know when we'll get back." I said "ok." I had no idea where they were going and they didn't either, I don't think, because they were dropping people off and it was dark.
I was out there and one of the people in there, I think he was an Estonian, came out. We tried to strike up a conversation that just didn't work. I lit up a cigarette and offered him one. He took it. He was really excited. He thought that was great. He thanked me and headed back inside. Pretty soon I heard this terrific commotion going on inside. I had a little fire out there, a small one; I had built to keep warm and to have a little bit of light. I heard this commotion and didn't know what to do. I had no communications.
I looked up and against the skyline I could see a building moving. It was about 12 feet long by 8 feet wide and it was moving toward the gate. I thought, 'what in the hell is going on?" Then they brought it out, set it up right beside the gate, tore the one wa11 off, broke that up for firewood and built me a stool. That was my guard post. Just because I gave the guy a cigarette. So I gave them all the rest of the cigarettes I had and split them up. It was pretty neat.
We had our own guard posts up too because there were several Germans still in the area. We had two of them calling in that they were under fire so they were shooting at them in the dark and they were returning it. Come daylight we found out there was a canal down there. The truck that had dropped me off had gone back further down this canal and dropped two guys off at one spot down there. Then they went on down and found a bridge. They went across the bridge and then came back on the other side and dropped another guy, dead opposite, without knowing where they were on the other side of the canal. The guy over there had lit up a cigarette, and pow. We were supposed to shoot at anything that moved. That guy, of course, thought it was a German shooting at him so he'd shoot back. They spent the whole night shooting at each other.
Since fraternization with the Germans was illegal, we all did plenty of it. I remember one night another fellow and I met two German girls and offered to walk them home. They agreed. It was dark and drizzling out, and we could see one tall coal pile outlined against the sky. We used that to navigate to their place and back. After we got to their house, we met their parents and my friend stayed to visit with them for awhile, and I headed back to my company area. I looked up to the sky and instead of one coal pile, I saw two, about a mile apart from each other. Since I didn't know which one was at Mengede, I chose the one on the left and started walking. At that time, we were in more or less unfriendly territory, and our guard posts had orders to shoot anything that moved at night. We also had a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it that did a roving patrol. Needless to say, I was more than just a little nervous!
Bud Laws with friends taking a flight with the AAC.
Many of the residential areas were built into a square with a courtyard in the middle, some with one side being a fence to keep people out. I was along side one of the fences when I spotted the jeep headlights coming my way. The fence was approximately seven or eight feet tall, but somehow I managed to get a hold of the top and climb over. I fell down the other side into a muddy garden with the barrel of my gun jammed down into the mud. After the jeep passed, I was too covered with mud to be able to climb back over the fence again, so I broke into one of the apartments and went out the front door.
I finally spotted one of our guard posts and knew where I was. In order to get from where I was to our quarters, I had to get around the guard post then cross a wide bank of railroad tracks. There were rose bushes and ditches on either side of the road, with the ditches being full of water. I didn't think much else could go wrong until I spotted the jeep headlights again. This time I lay down in the ditch full of water and waited for the jeep to go by. I finally got back to my quarters about an hour before I was due to go back on guard duty. Fortunately, I had some clean, dry clothes to put on. However, I did have to clean my rifle before I could go on duty. This was not the best night I ever had.
After the Germans surrendered, the British Army was to take over the area that we were occupying. We were to go down to Czechoslovakia for handling of additional displaced persons. Shortly before we were to leave, a British soldier came up to me on the street and asked me a question. He had such a heavy cockney accent, that I couldn't understand him. After about the third time he had repeated himself, a young German girl standing nearby told me in German what he had said. I could understand the German better than I could understand the cockney accent and answered his question. This really made him mad, because he said that the bloody Americans could understand German, but couldn't understand the King's English, and went storming off. I thought it was kind of funny.
Somewhere in this area we were stationed in a small village that had heavy woods with high hills and a castle on one of the hills. A river with an arched stone bridge over it was located in the middle of the village. One night I was assigned walking guard duty for the downtown portion of the village. It was fairly chilly out and fog was beginning to form down over the river. A shop was cooking sauerkraut and the odor was overwhelming. As I reached the center of the bridge, my imagination began working overtime. I could remember a movie I saw in the States about a werewolf and another about Jack the Ripper. The surroundings at that location were very much like those in the movie. About this time, a dog started howling up the river a ways. It was all I could do to keep from running back to the Company.
When we were ready to leave Mengede to go to Czechoslovakia, I was the last man on guard duty the night before. I was told who to wake up the next morning, since we all had to be packed and ready to leave on the convoy. I had all of my things packed except my blanket. I went to the next room to ask a Sergeant where my blanket was, and he said he had it, but he was through with it and I could come and get it. So, I did. When I pulled the blanket off him, he and his girlfriend were naked as jaybirds. He did know how to get the word to the rest of the company to get them to round up, that it was time to leave. While we were lined up to leave with our convoy, all the girls in town were hanging onto the trucks and crying their hearts out because their boyfriends were leaving town. We didn't fraternize, we were just friendly.| Mr. Laws's written memories will be continued in the next newsletter. |
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"Cross of Lorraine Division"
The divisional insignia of the 79th Infantry Division (shown here), was first chosen in WWI. After successes in action WWI in the french province of Lorraine, the division chose the french Cross of Lorraine as its symbol. In the traditions of France the Cross of Lorraine is a long-standing symbol of victory. During WWII it was also used by the french resistance forces and the Free French Forces as their national symbol.
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