'Dad Tells the Truth Once in a While'
A burning tank, dueling tracers in the Battle of the Bulge
In my Substack titled A Death in the Bulge, Captain Jim Cary described assigning a platoon of “light” tanks to protect a vulnerable flank of the 90th Infantry Division just a short time before he was wounded. Because my interviews with veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served, were conducted over the course of several years, I sometimes would hear differing accounts of the same event spaced several years apart, and not realize the connection at first. At other times, such as the tragedy of Hill 122 or the battle of Pfaffenheck, I would collect as many accounts of an event as possible, knowing in advance that they were connected.
This story begins at a reunion possibly as long ago as 1991, with an impromptu interview with Walter Galbraith, who had just finished telling two of the funniest stories I would record. One of the blessing/curses of those early reunions (early for me; the battalion had been having reunions for years) was the background noise. It was a blessing because there were so many animated voices going at once whereas the background noise would fade as the years claimed more and more members of the Greatest Generation; and it was a curse because while I was usually able to transcribe much of what was said, the audio in some of those early recordings was not suitable for reproduction.
Galbraith was a gunner in D Company, the battalion’s so-called light tanks. These were the first two of his stories:
When we were in Germany, I forget what part of Germany it was in, but we had (unintelligible) the week before that, and so some of the houses only had just a wall up, so the GIs put their bedrolls against the walls. It was in wintertime, to keep the wind from ... so, anyway, the last man on guard, in the tank, had to make sure that you pulled the ammunition. It was my tank, so I climbed up on it in the morning, and my eye caught the brass. Who the hell did that? So I pulled it down.
What I first went up there for was to check Little Joe. Little Joe is the motor that turns the turret. If you press your thumb on one side you start the machine gun; if you hit the other side you hit the cannon. So I got in and I saw that brass, I pulled it down and I cleaned out the chamber, I cleaned out the ammunition, and I threw it back in, and the breech came up. Now, if that fired, it comes back 18 inches. I had my hand like this, on the guard, and if that had come back ... I remember when I came in there it was to check on Little Joe, so I reached over like this and when I did my hand came up, and I hit the damn cannon. I could feel the breech coming like that. The periscope was in front of me, and like I saw the road blow up; I blew the whole goddamn road up. And I thought, Oh, my god, did I kill somebody? That's the first thing I thought about.
So I reached up. I raised my seat, and I looked out, and I didn't see anybody walking around with no head on, and I felt good; I didn't care what they did to me, I hadn't killed anybody. And all of a sudden the company commander, the first sergeant, all the guys are walking up to that big hole that I made in the road, and I figured, well, I'd better go face the music. So I walked up there, and I was just gonna say, “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” and the first sergeant says, “Jesus. I drove over this road three times this morning and that goddamn mine didn't blow up.”
So Andy Schifler says, “That was no goddamn mine,” and I grabbed him by the back of the neck; I said “You shut up.”
Another thing that happened, while we were in basic training, we had to learn how to ride a motorcycle, the tank, cars, so anyway, after we got familiar with it, it was the old tank, and when you shift, that's with the rivets in them, you know, the old type, that was our practice. So you shift into first, second, third, fourth, by that time you're looking this way and the tank is going that way. The only directions that the driver would have is that the tank commander would press him on the shoulder, to tell him to stop, right shoulder turn right, left shoulder turn left. [He may have meant press him on the head to stop.]
So we had to go through this obstacle course with these tanks, and each had turns. I went through it, and then somebody else went through it. There were two huge trees, great big trees, with just enough room for a tank to go between them. So when you're driving, they said don't stay in first all day, which some guys would do. As soon as that tachometer went so many thousand rpms, you had to shift.
Anyway, the instructor's sitting beside the bow gunner, and the driver's going, and the instructor would tell you keep your eye on the tachometer. My turn came and I went through the trees, and I'm looking through the periscope, it looks like the trees are moving. So you've got a little spot like this. I see these trees, and I come like that, and go right between them.
Then this fellow got in, and we called him the Professor, I can't think of his name, but it was his turn, and he, if you asked him a question, he'd say, “Well, uh,” it took him all day to tell you, but when he finally came up with an answer, he had a vocabulary that big. So we get in the tank, and he’s driving, and we're going, and the instructor said “Keep your eye on the tachometer.”
“Ow-kay.” He talked like Mortimer Snerd, so he'd go like that, and again the instructor said “Keep your eye on the tachometer.” So we finally come to those two trees. I saw the tree move in front, and I thought at the last second he’s gonna pull on the lever and go right between the trees. Then Bang! He hit that goddamn tree, and ruined the tank's transmission, and all the tree's branches came down on top of us, I landed on top of the bow gunner, the tank commander landed on top of the driver, and everything got quiet for a second. Then the instructor said something like “God damn you.” I can't think of his name. And he said, “Well, you told me to keep my eye on the tachometer, didn't you?” That's about the funniest thing I can tell you, but those are the two things I can think of right now.
Ow-kay. Now for the story about the Battle of the Bulge, January 9, 1945, Nothum, Luxembourg, which I would hear of years later from Captain Cary’s perspective, and also from that of Dale Albee. This again is Walter Galbraith:
I'll tell you another one I just happened to think about. I was thinking about the funny ones; I just thought of this. This is in the Ardennes; I think it was the Ardennes. We had come to this open, you could see for miles. And over here, this is the forest over here, I could see these Krauts going back and forth. I was admiring them for a minute. All of a sudden they stopped. They were Germans, and they saw us. And they started firing like hell at us. So the best thing for us to do was to get the hell out of there. So we come right around, we're still facing those guys. We had these panels on the back of the tank so you could see us for miles, our airplanes won't bomb us; we had these pink, orange. So we came around that forest like this and then we turned into the forest. In the meantime they’re shooting at us and they’re knocking the branches off the trees, and not hitting us; I guess they couldn’t get down far enough.
So anyway, we finally get in, and we lost a couple of tracks, and we had to stay there all night, because our tanks wouldn’t move. That night, they kept shelling, and I heard tanks moving, and I said, well, we can't fight anybody in the dark, you know, some kid with a throwing stick [panzerfaust] could knock the hell out of you in the dark. And I said, “I can hear the medium tanks, I guess they’re leaving.” And all of a sudden I saw a flame go up.
I said, “There’s a tank on fire,” and I says, “Shit, they hit one of our tanks.” So anyway, we had turns sleeping, and I happened to be awake. Lieutenant Albee was sleeping, and I didn't know where the other guys were. So I’m looking out, and I see somebody run across in front of the tanks, a silhouette, and I said “Jesus,” and I looked again, and the Germans had a different helmet, there was something about the hook or something on the helmet that got my eye, and I said “Albee, Albee,” and I woke him up. I said “I think those are Germans running across the flaming tank.” So he got his binoculars out, and in the meantime I got my turret turned facing right at that tank, and he said “Yah, they are.” So we started shooting. I was firing the machine gun and the cannon, and he’s firing the .50-caliber machine gun on top. And we heard, “For God’s sake, stop firing! You’re killing your own men.”
And Jesus, my head shrank. I said, “Oh my god.” And then he got his binoculars out again. He said, “No, they're Heinies,” and he started firing again. And I started shooting like hell at them. And even then they kept hollering, “No, you’re killing your own men!” And then all of a sudden we saw our pink tracer go this way, and then we saw a white tracer come back, and then we knew that that was the Germans. Because we had a pink tracer, and they had white ones. And when that came back, boy we just bbbrrroom.
Then everything was quiet for a while. I kept my machine gun ready for anybody who might come across, I'm in the tank, and someone starts climbing up the side of the tank.
“Who’s there?”
He says, “Who's in charge here?”
I said Albee. I said, “Albee, wake up.”
So he says, “I'm Sergeant so-and-so,” I wish I could remember his name. He said, “I just got out of the hospital.” He said, “I'm not worth shit.” That's how he talked. And he says, “You know what happened?” He says, “You see that tank over there that's on fire? That's a German tank." I thought it was our tank that was really knocked out. So anyway, what happened was, he says, “You know how we are in the dark? You can't see shit.” He said, “I had to climb out of the tank,” and he says, “This German tank is coming up the road. I had to tap the guy on the back to tell him to turn the turret,” and then when he got it lined up, through his eye, he just kept firing, and knocked the shit out of that tank.”
So that was over. So he got off. A few minutes later, somebody else started climbing up on the side of the tank. And I don't know what the hell, I was scared. Anyway, I'm ready to throw a hand grenade back or anything they had. I had it all in my mind what I was gonna do. Anyway, it was a colonel. Now goshdammit, he gave us his name, I'm Colonel So and So, I don't know today whether it was our colonel, Kedrovsky, or whether it was an infantry colonel. And he says, “You know what happened?” Had they gone by, he says, this would have cut the whole advance or whatever the hell they did. And that was it. And then he left.
The next morning, we left the tank there I guess, and we got in a truck or something. The next day I guess we got in another tank.
I didn’t interview Dale Albee until 1995. He missed a lot of the reunions because he was very involved in the West Coast chapter of the Purple Heart organization, which had their reunions around the same time as the tank battalion. Eventually I went to Prospect, Oregon to interview him at his home. That interview is the basis of “From the Cavalry to Czechoslovakia.”
Interestingly, in Albee’s version of the event, he woke Galbraith up, whereas Galbraith recalled waking Albee up. Nevertheless, here is Dale Albee’s version of the story.
“I had orders to go up to a crossroad and contact this commander out of B Company,” Albee said when I asked him about the Bulge.
“Cary?” I asked.
“Cary. That’s — let me write that down,” Albee said, “because Cary, I have a story on him.
“I was sailing down the road, and I noticed this German tank burning right over in the ditch, and up ahead is a curve, and this captain stepped out and stopped me. And he said, ‘Where are you going?’
“I said, ‘I've got to go up to the corner and report.’
“And he said, ‘If you do, you're gonna be in enemy territory. You're on the front line now.’”
I told him I was supposed to come up, and he said, ‘Well, just pull on over here, we want you to guard the flank over here’ — I think it was Wiltz was over on the side there. So I pulled over there. And that night is the night that we had that firefight. The Germans went between us and the [burning] tank and they had two columns, and the old German captain out there was hollering ‘Don’t shoot! We’re Americans!’
“Galbraith was asleep, my gunner, and it just happened to be that it was my turn on guard, and I had a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the turret of my tank. Well, between me and this burning German tank, this column, I could see them moving, and they were wearing the Wehrmacht hat, you know, with the brim. And Americans don’t wear brimmed hats, they wear the helmet. So I opened up. I hollered at Galbraith. I opened up with my .50 and he jumped in on the coaxial .30, and we started firing this way. We got white tracer coming back at me this way. All of a sudden behind me I get white tracer coming at me too, and then my second tank starts red tracer. And what we had was two columns. One was between me and the burning tank and one was between me and my second tank. And then out here in the distance came this voice, ‘Don’t shoot! We’re Americans! I’m an American captain! You’re killing your own men!’
“Americans don’t fire white tracer. So we continued firing on them.”
“But that must have made you think for a second,” I said. “Did you…”
“No, no, uh-uh,” Albee said. “You don’t stop and think. See, in the first place, the minute you saw that first white tracer, as soon as I saw those caps, no American cap was gonna be out there with Germans, because they had the long brim on the Wehrmacht hat. So we just kept on firing. And then later on they gave up and came in. I forget how many we captured and how many we killed, but this was a German captain that could speak English that we got.”
“And you captured him?”
“Yeah, we got him. If I remember right, I think we killed 20 that night.”
“Now Galbraith said that right after that, somebody else came up to the tank and it was a colonel, and American colonel?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Albee said. “One that came up was on a .50-caliber machine gun that was dug in in the road right beside my tank, and he didn’t fire a shot. And later he apologized to me and I said, “I don’t blame you a bit.” With all the stuff that, if he’d have stuck his head up there he’d have got killed. So I didn’t blame him.
“On this story, I had told this story to my two sons, and when we went back to Fort Knox to the reunion, we were sitting at the table and my son who was in the Navy at Norfolk, and my younger son who was in basic training at Fort Knox, all came to the reunion. And we were sitting at this table, and across from me this guy says, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I wonder who ever took,’ he says, ‘You’re from D Company,’ he says, ‘Who ever took over Coe’s platoon?’
“And I said, ‘Well, I did.’
“And he says, ‘You know, I’ve always wondered, I was up on the line and here came this stupid ass down the line with these tanks — he only had four of them —’ and he said, ‘he’s on his way up into the German lines when I stopped him.’
“I said, ‘Oh?’
“And he says, and my two kids are about to crack up, and he says, ‘Yeah. You know, I never knew what happened, because about fifteen minutes after that I was wounded, and I went to the rear and I never did find out.’
“And I looked at the two kids and kind of grinned at them and they grinned back, and I said, ‘Well, you know, you’re looking at that stupid ass.’ I said, ‘I’m the one that was in those tanks when you stopped us right up there.’ I said, ‘You had that German tank burning, didn’t you?’
“He said, ‘Yeah. Well, I always wondered.’ But the reason is, the kids, they were real interested in the war and it just kind of, you know, brought it out, well, Dad kind of told the truth once in a while.”
Wait, there’s more! In his excellent book, “A Tank Gunner’s Story,” the late Louis Gruntz Jr.
, whose father was in B Company, described the incident from his father’s perspective:
Joe Cavalieri was a gunner in one of the other tanks positioned near Dad that night. His tank was situated in some brush on the side of the road that ran between Berle and Pommerloch. In the middle of the night the Germans launched a counterattack to regain Berle and Pommerloch with four tanks. As the lead German Mark V Panzer headed along the road, the German commander was standing in the tank’s hatch and apparently did not see Cavalieri’s tank. When the Panzer was about twenty yards from Cavalieri’s tank, the German commander fired a flare to light up the area, but the flare had a short fuse and only lit briefly. The duration of the flare’s light, however, was long enough for the Panzer to become visible in Cavalieri’s sights. When Cavalieri opened up at that point blank range, the Panzer erupted in flames.
Cavalieri’s action thwarted the counterattack; the other three Panzers and accompanying infantry quickly retreated. Unfortunately, the flames from the destroyed German tank illuminated the entire area and all the American positions became visible. Dad said that weapons were firing from all directions the entire night.
About an hour after Cavalieri knocked out the Panzer, two columns of infantry advanced toward the 712th, one column on each side of the road. T/Sgt Dale Albee* of D Company opened fire on the advancing soldiers. During the firing a voice was heard calling on one side, ‘Stop firing, for God’s sake stop firing! We’re Americans, we’re GIs returning from a patrol! Please stop firing!’
After the firing had ceased, the voice was heard again. “We’re Germans. We want to give up and be taken as prisoners of war.” Twenty-seven prisoners were taken and an undetermined number of German soldiers had been killed. The journal of D Company reported that throughout the night the area was subjected to artillery and rocket fire.
*You’ll note that Galbraith referred to Dale Albee as Lieutenant Albee. He may have been leading the platoon as a sergeant, but would later receive a battlefield commission.
