Memorial Day 2024, Part 9
A look behind the names on a monument
This Memorial Day series of nine newsletters (and counting) began as I looked at a pair of photos of the monument to my father’s tank battalion in the Memorial Garden of the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky. I was humbled by how many of the 99 names on the Honor Roll I didn’t recognize and thought I could say something about those among the fallen that I did. As it turned out, with the help of researcher Kaye Ackermann, whose father, Rolland Ackermann, was also in the 712th Tank Battalion, and a book by the late Louis Gruntz Jr., “A Tank Gunner’s Story,” about his father’s experiences, along with online resources such as Find-a-Grave, I have been able to say at least a little and sometimes a lot about almost all of the names, although some challenges still lie ahead.
Frank L. Shagonabe: A Native American from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Shagonabe was killed alongside Quentin “Pine Valley” Bynum and Lieutenant Wallace Lippincott in Bras, Luxembourg on January 14, 1945. According to a December 7, 2009 article in the Muskegon Chronicle and available online at mlive.com, Shagonabe’s parents were divorced and Frank lived with his mother until he was sent to a boarding school for indigenous children (these schools are very much in the news these days for their role in trying to strip Native American children of their cultural heritage), while his only sibling, Harlin, lived with his father until the father was sent to prison for alcohol-related crimes. The brothers lost touch with each other.
After he was killed, Frank’s personal effects were sent to a family on whose farm he worked, and whom, according to the article, he called “mom” and “dad.” After the couple passed away, their daughter inherited the small box of Frank’s effects. She told the Muskegon Chronicle she hoped to locate a relative before donating the items to the local historical society. Eventually, either she or the newspaper was able to locate Frank’s brother, Harlin.
Personal effects of soldier killed in WWII reach his brother 65 years later - mlive.com
Although three crew members of the tank were killed and two survived, one of them, Roy La Pish of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, remained in the military, and was killed in Vietnam.
Paul Shannon: “I don’t know why it pops into my mind,” Bob Hagerty said when I interviewed him in 1993 (Bob was one of 14 sergeants in the battalion who received battlefield commissions), but one of the last actions of the war, when you were actually firing at them, being fired on, guys being hit, hurt, whatever.
I think almost my whole crew was injured, and I had to take another man's tank, then carry on with the infantry. Remember Herman Pascione, you didn't know Herman? I think that day he might have been my platoon sergeant, and my tank was disabled, and my crew was largely disabled, and I told Herman I'm going to take your tank and your crew, and see if you can get a jeep and take these guys back and get another tank. But the action was such that my tank was first, and then a fellow named Harrington, he was the sergeant in charge of the second tank, and the one German gun hit both Harrington and me. It was kind of strange.
Aaron Elson: One shot?
Bob Hagerty: No. It hit us separately. But our intention was, we had come down, say, Kincaid Road [in Cincinnati], and we were told that there was a farmhouse in which there were a number of Germans just down this side road. And the infantry made a little detour, we made a little detour, and I think we fired a few shots in this barn, and the Germans came out with their hands up. So the infantry got them flushed out and got them started back toward the rear, and that action was apparently over with. So then we were going to go back onto the main road, such as it was. I pulled out first, and we had our hatches open, you know, after the little firefight, we pulled up to the road, Harrington came behind me, he pulled on the road, first thing you know, somebody hollered “We were hit!” and I went back and Harrington's tank was smoking.
It was all so fast, and this German was off the road in a little wooded path, he had laid his gun I guess on that little junction, and when he saw something he fired. And we didn't find out until later, that was a disabled German tank up there, couldn't move the tank so he decided to make somebody pay. And he did. And in the action, Harrington's driver was killed, and one of the first vehicles that came up behind the column, it was just tanks and infantry, a jeep came up and the chaplain was in the jeep. Normally he wasn't up front, you know, looking for action. I don't know why he came there that time, but anyway, he arrived, and he said "I'm glad to see you."
“Yeah,” I said. "You know, Shannon didn't make it."
He says, "I know, but you did."
Like that was more important. It was a strange thing to say. But, you know, you didn't often have men killed inside the tank; it didn't happen a lot. I think in the case of Harrington's tank, it might have been the same shell, you see, Shannon was driving with his head out; we didn't think at the moment that we were in danger, we'd just cleaned out that danger, so he's driving with his head out, and the shell that hit Shannon broke the leg of his loader. But an armor piercing shell has got a hell of a lot of velocity, it's going to do some harm, because it was already rattling around in the tank.
I never did go back to the chaplain and say, "What made you say that?" But what made it sad, though, was this must have been, I'll bet it was within a week of the war ending, and the Germans were giving up right and left, you'd see huge groups of them being marched to the rear, it was obvious that their back was broken. It was only a matter of making it official, and this Shannon was a married guy, he had children. It seems such a sad thing, for him. He had been a replacement, I don't know how long he'd been with us, but he'd been with us long enough that there was a lot of good feeling toward him.
And the captain told me to write the letter, which was customary, and you don't expect to get an answer or an acknowledgment or anything like that, you try to stress the fact he was a brave man doing, you know, what he had to do.
Roy Sharpton:
Tom Wood was the gunner in the Sherman tank in which Sharpton was the driver from Normandy through much of the campaign, until Wood was burned and evacuated prior to the Battle of the Bulge. “Me and Sharpton, we had four tanks, no, five tanks hit, and after that we heard that they said that you wouldn't have to go back up if you had five tanks already hit, if you were in them,” Wood said at the 1995 battalion reunion in Louisville, Kentucky. “But then he got killed in [the Battle of the Bulge], but he was a good man.”
Phil Eckhart joined the platoon as a replacement, possibly after Wood was evacuated, and kept a diary, which was given to the battalion association by his widow. Following is an excerpt:
It was Friday, the 12th of January. We ate chow and pulled out for the next town. As we were going through a field, we met about two thousand prisoners coming back. We stopped there for a while and got out of the tanks. All of a sudden the Germans started to throw in the artillery, and we made a dash for our tanks. One of the shells hit just as I was going in, and I heard the assistant driver call out. The concussion had knocked him down. His hatch was open, and when they had quit he made a dash for it. Not very far from there had been a mare and her colt walking around a haystack. When we came out they were both laying there dead.
About three tanks behind us the driver and an infantry lieutenant were hit. The tank driver was Roy Sharpton, and he died later on. We asked the captain how he was, and they said that he was improving; next thing we knew he was dead. I have a ten dollar bill out of my first Army pay, and one of the names I have on it is his.
Roy Sharpton was born on January 15, 1922 in Glencoe, Oklahoma. He died on January 15, 1945 on his 23rd birthday.
Ronald Wayne Slick: I mentioned previously that D Company, the battalion’s complement of “light” tanks, kept its own log which was more detailed than the after action reports, although in the case of February 20, 1945 the main difference is that the D Company log included names.
20 February 1945: The 3rd Platoon advanced to the crossroads North of Binscheid and met stiff opposition and road blocks. Two enemy machine gun positions were knocked out, several Germans killed, and two prisoners taken. At a point several hundred yards from Binscheid, heavy enemy automatic fire was encountered. The Infantry being unable to advance, Lt. Albee’s tank pushed through them in an attempt to knock out the automatic weapons. At a point 300 yards NE of the town his tank was disabled by mines. He called for his next tank to come up alongside of him. Doing so, this tank hit mines in the same tracks the first tank had taken. The driver, Tec. 5 Slick, was killed, Pfc. Vydra and Pvt. Whitfield suffered broken legs and other leg injuries, and S/Sgt. Murphy was injured around the face. The two tanks were road-blocked to such an extent that the remaining tanks could not maneuver around them or bring effective fire on the enemy guns. At this time the Infantry was subjected to artillery fire and withdrew about 600-700 yards. The tankers evacuated their wounded assisted by their two P.W.’s, and helped in the evacuation of the Infantry wounded.
My 1995 interview with Lieutenant Dale Albee is even more detailed.
Dale Albee: It was after the Bulge. We had been sent out, and I was working with Mike [an infantry liaison]. I think the 4th Armored was going down the main road, and we were going off to the side to clear villages like we normally do, keep everything clear on the flank. And we came up to this little hill and stopped. Old Mike motioned to me to come forward, so I dismounted and went up, and we looked out over Binscheid, the town. The road came down around this way and came into the town. And in this field out here there's a creek, right down below this little bluff. In this field out here are Germans all over the place, with their holes dug, and just walking around. They didn't even know we were there.
So we figured, well shoot, this is like most of the other towns, they've got them out to protect the town. We called back for infantry, and waited for about an hour and a half, and they sent the infantry up. They sent 15 green infantry. Handlebar Hank, I'll never know his name and I wish I knew it because bless his soul, but old Handlebar Hank, the sergeant, was the only oldtimer. He had a big handlebar mustache and his name was Hank, that's the reason we called him Handlebar Hank. So Mike said, "If I send jeeps, anything can knock them out. How about if you can lead out and go down the road, I'll fire for support here and then I'll get the support down to you right away, and then we'll fan out and go on into the town."
Okay, fine. So we got all set, and I took off in my tanks and went over the hill and we opened up on these guys here and we gave the infantry time to get around and get in position so they could sweep around this way and then protect me as I came over the hill.
We sailed over the hill and opened fire. I went down this little dip and just went up, and oh, just topped the rise, and I was planning on stopping just beyond that rise and opening up. Well, right there is where I set off the mine. And of course, it knocked our tank out. So we dismounted and got behind the tank. There's a damn machine gun right straight ahead of us firing on us but we all got behind the tank, and I hollered, "Send up my second tank!" Well, the second tank, and that was Sergeant Murphy in it, came up right in my tracks. And they got up, oh, maybe twice as far as from here to that bush from me, and they rolled across and all of a sudden there's the damnedest explosion.
Later on we learned that what it was was the Italian box mine, and what it does, it's a big box that goes across the road, and it's got two cutters. And when you roll across that it cuts a wire and sets off the thing. Evidently, the light tank wasn't heavy enough to cut it completely, so when they rolled over they cut it. When that exploded, it blew the whole bottom of the tank in, and of course stopped the tank right away. So I ran over, and the hatch was blown loose, threw it up, well, Slick was the driver, I knew he was dead because he was just kind of slumped forward like that, and the whole back end of his head was gone, and his back was just shredded. And the little assistant driver, he couldn't stand up, so I grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up, and just threw him over, and then ran up. Murphy was crawling out of the turret by that time, and I just helped him out, and Holt was trying to get out. [This was the second or third time William Holt was wounded. The first time was when his tank ran over a string of mines in Normandy and was flipped completely over].
Aaron Elson: Now how did you go into the tank?
Dale Albee: I didn't go in. I just ran up on the front slope plate, and stood right there like this is a hatch right here, and this is the driver, I knew he was dead, so I just stepped over here and here's the little bow gunner, and I grabbed him like this, and where you get the strength I don't know, but I pulled him up like that and his legs were broken I don't know how many times below the knees, and that's the reason he couldn't stand up to get out. And then I just ran up here, and right here is Murphy, and helped him over, and then I saw Holt was getting out. And then instead of jumping behind that tank, I turned around and ran back to my own tank, behind it.
Handlebar Hank was laying in the road; that explosion knocked the living daylights out of him and he just kind of jumped up and then fell, and this damn machine gun opened up. You saw the tracers come by here like that that missed him. And then the second time he came back it walked right up over his shoulder. I ran back, got Handlebar Hank, pulled him over here and got him into the ditch between me and my tank, and then we called for artillery support because I knew we couldn't do a damn thing, and there's two Germans right in here, so you know, the old "Kommen Sie Hier Macht Schnell Mit der Hande Ho Oder Ich Schiessen." We captured those two Germans.
In he meantime, the Germans started throwing artillery in on us. So I called back and said, "Send us help," for support, to get the wounded out. And the fences there were kind of like a pole fence, so we'd reach up and grab those poles, put two down like that and we took our coats off and our tanker’s jackets and run the sleeves through it, we made stretchers. And I had to call back and had my two remaining tanks open fire to pin anything down and then we got everybody out of there that was wounded, including, we made the two PWs help us carry them. And it was the last time I saw Handlebar Hank. We radioed back to send a medic up, and they sent a medic jeep up, and old Handlebar Hank was laying on a litter on this medic jeep, and he had a cigarette, hands all bloody and blood all over, puffing, and he looked over at me and I said, "How are you, Handlebar?"
He said, "I got me a million dollar wound. I'm going back to the States."
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