Look out for booby traps

A lesson learned on a battalion's first day in combat

Yesterday, July 3, 81 years ago, was the 712th Tank Battalion’s first day of 311 days in combat. It was a day that would almost instantly transform enthusiastic, gung-ho young and slightly older men who had trained for as many as three years into battle-hardened veterans almost overnight.

I don’t remember who it was, a veteran of the battalion’s C Company, who told me about his company commander delivering a lecture in training about booby traps, and then on the first day in combat that same company commander was wounded by a booby trap. He thought that was kind of funny, but it also illustrates the difference between theory and reality. Luckily, I had an opportunity to ask the aforementioned company commander, Jim Cary, about the booby trap.

Jim Cary

“We arrived in Normandy on June 26, 20 days after D-Day,” Jim said, “and were immediately attached to the 90th Infantry Division, and this operation was set up for July the 3rd. The 90th was, at that particular stage of development of the Normandy campaign, remember, after the landing they drove clear across the peninsula and cut it off, then they turned south and took Cherbourg. [He’s pointing to some kind of illustration; I think he was demonstrating with his hands, so you’ll have to use your imagination a bit.] Well, they had a right flank, if this is the Cherbourg peninsula they had a right flank that was sort of angled down like this. They wanted to swing this thing up around like this. St. Lo was in here someplace, and the 90th was attacking this area here to try and push the German forces back that way. So I had C Company then and we were to support, it wasn’t the 359th, it might have been the 358th or 357th [Infantry Regiment], which one was C Company supporting? Anyway, when we jumped off, our tanks were right there and immediately made contact with the infantry, and moved out.

“They hit a strong point. They were like this, two platoons like this, one platoon back here. I was up here in a halftrack, coming right along behind. There was a firefight up here in a ditch, or a sunken road, that was [Lieutenant Henry] Duval’s platoon. The tanks came around and there was a German machine gun nest there and they shot that up, and the Germans pulled back. And I came upon that scene right in behind there and there were Germans trying to surrender or they were on the ground, wounded, from this machine gun nest right here, and there was a GI lying on the ground in front of them, also wounded, and he starts shouting at me; he wanted help.

“There was a brush barrier, and I tried to vault over it. It was booby trapped, and the thing went off. And I thought that most of it went back of me, and maybe it did. It knocked me flat as a pancake, and knocked me a little bit cuckoo for a while. I was pretty well stunned.

“Anyway, I took part of the blow in my left side, and that’s what I felt. I pulled up my shirt, when I recovered enough to get up, and I was skinned up a little bit there, but there didn’t seem to be any damage. And the back end of my raincoat was all blown to pieces.

“We got up and went on, and later in the day had another firefight. I was in my tank by this time. We went out on a road junction and fired at the basement of a house where the infantry thought the Germans were hold up as they made an attack. We poured fire in there and that attack went pretty well; they made a little progress.”

“Did anybody come out of the basement?” I asked.

“No, we never found out if there was anybody in there or not. It’s bothered me a little bit. There could very well have been Frenchmen in there, but this was a situation where you had to go along with what they wanted you to do.

“So my tank started missing, having a lot of trouble with the engine. It was fairly late in the day. I was also starting to have some trouble walking. I went back to the company bivouac area, and the next morning I was in a lot of trouble. I was having trouble walking, and I could feel liquid running down my back, and I was sore, so I went into an aid station and that’s when I found out I had a penetration wound here in the left thigh. I had cuts across the back, not too deep. One of them was fairly deep, but superficial type cuts. And the doctor says — no, I was dealing with a ward boy, an enlisted man — he said, ‘You’ll have to go back. They can’t handle that thigh wound here.’

“I said, well, I’m not going to, something to the effect that I couldn’t do that or something. And I started to leave.”

[Here I’m going to interject that this was a theme I would encounter many times in my interviews, especially early in combat, of men who were injured or wounded and were reluctant to leave their comrades, to the point of one tank commander, upon being told he would have to go back to the rear, pulling a gun on the person telling him, and returning to his platoon. Such loyalty diminished as the war went on, and the men learned to respect the conclusions of the medical personnel, along with the understanding that they could indeed be replaced on the front. In the case of Jim Cary, the battalion’s motor officer, Harlo J. “Jack” Sheppard, was placed in charge of C Company and remained in that position until the end of the war.]

“He went and got a doctor,” Jim said, “and the officer came over to me and said, ‘You have to go back. That has to be taken care of.’ He led me to believe it could be done in a few days and you’d come right back. I’m not trying to paint myself in heroic terms here, but that was what I thought was going to happen. I didn’t think I was hurt that badly. But he said, ‘You could lose that leg if you don’t get that slug out of there.’

“So I went and told Colonel Randolph, and went back, and they evacuated me. But instead of being operated on in a field hospital, they sent me back to another, much larger, medical establishment further back.

“As soon as I found out what was going on I tried to call Colonel Randolph. I spent almost four hours trying to get through to him. You had these wet noodle lines, the field telephones, and you get so far and then the call disappears.

“So I didn’t get back until; they opened up the leg and took, it was a rock that had been blown, and I had all kinds of dirt blown into the wounds back there. They were festered up. I got back in September, and took over B Company.”

“You said your raincoat was shredded,” I said. “What was the weather like?”

“Oh, it was raining, not raining hard or anything like that. But it was cold and it was misty, and once in a while you’d get a little bit of rain, but you definitely needed a raincoat.”

“Who took over from you as company commander?”

“Sheppard did. So when I got back, I took over B Company, in closing up to the Saar. As we were closing up to the Saar we had a lot of tank ditch obstacles to get across, and I started working with people in our company and with the engineers of the 90th Division to find ways to get across those tank ditches. We had a bulldozer tank, and we’d try to break down the banks, and sometimes you could do it and sometimes you couldn’t. You’d take a bangalore torpedo and blow it and try to loosen the ground and then maybe you could get the blade of the dozer tank into the ground enough to take that embankment down and get across the ditch.”

“How did the bangalore torpedo work?” I asked.

“Well, it’s just like a long firecracker. It’s about five or six feet long, it’s loaded with explosives, and you could shove it into something or you could lay it across something and blow it.

“We finally came to an area where we were really, the Saar River was only about a mile away and there was this huge ditch there, and we didn’t quite know how to get across it. The infantry didn’t want to get down there without some tank support. So I put together a plan, and we rehearsed it, where we took two, what you call A-frame tanks, that’s another piece of equipment you had was a tank with an A-frame on the front it it, and mounted, each one could carry a section of bridging. And we rehearsed it, where one tank would go up and lay the bridge down and then retreat, then the other one would go up and lay the bridge down and then retreat, then the other one would go up and lay the other bridge down, and it worked, and we worked out a plan to go out. They gave me whatever I wanted, to go out at night and get a bridge laid across this antitank ditch so we could close in on the Saar River.

A tank with an A frame (photo taken during training)

“We sent infantry out and they established a bridgehead on the other side; they could get across the tank ditch but the tanks couldn’t. They established a little bridgehead on the other side where we were going to lay down the bridge. Then I brought this small task force forward and led the first tank up to the tank ditch and he laid down his piece of bridging. There was an engineering lieutenant there workingwith us. Then he was pulled back and backed up off to the side of the road here and then the other one was brought up, laid down the bridging, and then we came back. And then we brought [Lieutenant Bob] Vutech’s platoon up, and they went across. And then the attack moved up to the Saar River. That’s what I got the Silver Star for.”

“For that operation?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “I felt kind of bad about it to be very frank with you, because nothing happened to us. It was kind of spooky out there, but nothing happened to us. About a half a mile off to our left and infantry patrol went out and ran into another German patrol and got the hell shot out of them; they got knocked out. But that’s the wages of war.”

Lecture Alert: If you’re in or around Connecticut on Saturday, July 26, I’ll be speaking about my book-in-progress “Tales of Love, Food, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War 2” at the new World War II Museum, Research & Education Center,” Connecticut’s first museum dedicated solely to World War 2, in East Hartford. Please check out the event’s facebook page and let your Connecticut friends know about the program.