Jim Flowers, Doc McConahey, a Dog Story, and Me
How I became a story at a reunion of my father's Tank Battalion
During the years that I went to reunions of my father’s 712th Tank Battalion, I not only heard many amazing stories, I even became part of a few stories myself.
One of my favorites involved Jim Flowers, whose very act of survival afforded him iconic status among battalion veterans as well as one of the three Distinguished Service Crosses awarded to members of the 712th.
Flowers led a platoon of four tanks into an ambush after coming to the aid of a battalion of the 90th Infantry Division that was cut off and surrounded on the plateau atop Hill 122 in Normandy on July 10, 1944.
After leading K Company of the 358th Infantry Regiment down one slope of the hill, all four tanks were knocked out by concealed antitank guns, with three of them bursting into flame. Nine of the 20 crew members were killed, while several others were wounded or captured.
Flowers’ right foot was shorn off by the shell that penetrated his turret. He managed to pull his gunner, Jim Rothschadl, who was badly burned, out through the turret and then pulled himself out and dropped to the ground. That night and the next, he and Rothschadl lay in no man’s land, during which time “friendly” artillery fire tore off the lower part of his left leg.
Claude Lovett, on the right in the picture above, led the patrol which discovered Flowers and Rothschadl on the morning of July 12; Dr. William McConahey, on the left in the picture, treated Flowers when he was brought to the aid station. Dr. McConahey, who would go on to a career at the Mayo Clinic, wrote one of the best World War II memoirs I’ve read, “Battalion Surgeon,” in which he described Lieutenant Flowers’ arrival at the aid station.
But first, how I became part of a story told at the battalion’s later reunions. As I said, Jim Flowers held iconic status among the veterans, and whenever a new grandchild or nephew was brought to the reunion, Flowers would sit down with them and tell his story, which took about 45 minutes from start to finish and always had the kids wide-eyed.
As I often would sit nearby, I had heard the story many times. Flowers, who was from Texas, spoke with a slow drawl, and would sometimes pause while he plumbed his mind for a detail that was eluding him despite having been described dozens of times.
This one particular time, the pause was especially long and Jim appeared to be having more difficulty than usual digging out a detail, an understandable event considering he was getting on in years. So I figured it would be okay if I supplied the detail, which I did.
Jim fixed me with an icy stare and said, rather angrily, “Who’s telling this story, me or you?”
Paul Wannemacher, the battalion secretary, witnessed this and enjoyed retelling it.
Now, back to Dr. McConahey’s story:
The following is reprinted from “Battalion Surgeon,” copyright 1966, by William M. McConahey.
During these battles [in Normandy] I treated hundreds of wounded soldiers and I saw many incredible things. Here I might mention three of the cases that stand out in my mind.
The first concerned a young tank officer, a second lieutenant. When his tank had been knocked out by an 88 during the fighting for Hill 122, one of his feet had been virtually torn off. He had pulled himself out of his disabled tank, and a passing aid man had stopped the bleeding and bandaged the wound. Then an enemy counterattack threw back the Americans, so for two days the wounded man lay out there in No Man’s Land. During the seesaw fighting back and forth many shells fell near him, and one large piece of steel shattered his other foot. The young fellow pulled off his belt and applied a tourniquet to the leg.
Later, when one of my litter squads found him and brought him in and I heard the story, I expected to see a moribund patient, but such was not the case. He was calm, cheerful and not in shock. In fact, he was in excellent general condition, although both feet hung in tatters and would have to be amputated.
When I remarked to him that he was in surprisingly good condition, he smiled and said, “Well, Doc, I just had the will to live!”
In the second case a 19-year-old boy was wounded on patrol one night. He was the leading scout of a small patrol which ran into some heavy enemy machine-gun fire, and he fell with a compound fracture of the femur (thigh bone). He knew no one could find him in the darkness, so he crawled a half-mile back to his own lines. Don’t ask me how he crawled on a broken femur, but he did, and he was not in shock when he arrived at the aid station some time later. He said he needed no morphine, but I gave him some before I splinted his leg.
“Is the chaplain here?” he asked.
Then, as Captain Ralph Glenn, the Protestant chaplain with our battalion, stepped forward, the boy said, “Chaplain, I know that God spared my life out there tonight. Won’t you please read from the Bible to me?”
So, as I worked, Chaplain Glenn read to the lad.
The third is a dog story. One evening a soldier was shot in the shoulder, so he started to walk back to the rear to the aid station, but he became lost in the darkness. Finally he crawled into an abandoned foxhole to wait for morning. A short time later he heard a noise and was ready to shoot, when he saw that the noise was made by a little dog. The friendly mongrel jumped into the foxhole and curled up beside the boy, where he stayed all night long.
The next morning, after daylight, the soldier started off again in what he thought was the right direction, but the little dog tugged at his legs and made quite a scene, apparently trying to get the boy to go in the opposite direction. This the boy finally did. As it turned out, the dog led him back to the American lines. Had he kept on in the direction he had selected, he would have walked into the German lines, to death or some wretched prison camp.
After we had dressed the soldier’s wounded shoulder and laid him on a stretcher, the little dog jumped up on the boy’s abdomen, lay down and would not leave. Since the soldier had formed a strong attachment for his benefactor and did not want to leave him, we loaded the stretcher – soldier, dog and all – into the ambulance and sent them on their way to the hospital.
Jim Flowers: “I’m now standing in the middle of Hell”
My book “They Were All Young Kids,” available at amazon, is about Jim Flowers’ platoon and the battle for Hill 122. The battle is also described in detail in “Tanks for the Memories.”
Great News: Battalion Surgeon is being re-released by Mayo Clinic Press in May and is available for pre-order at Amazon!