Once Upon a Time in the Siegfried Line

More on Habscheid, where my last Substack subsided

Grayson La Mar

In my last Substack, Once Upon a Time in the Battle of the Bulge, three of the four crew members interviewed — Bob Rossi, Tony D’Arpino and Ed Spahr — eventually were assigned to a new tank while Lieutenant Jim Gifford, who was wounded, was recovering in England. Eldon Holmes, the platoon sergeant, was the crew’s new tank commander. On February 8, 1945, that tank was then knocked out during the battle of Habscheid, a village in the Siegfried Line.

That interview took place during the 1992 Harrisburg reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion. The following year, at the battalion’s 1993 reunion in Orlando, Florida, I sat down with Grayson La Mar, who was driving one of the other tanks that day.

“You were in Lieutenant Lombardi’s platoon?” I asked. Charles Lombardi was the original third platoon leader in Company C. He was injured prior to the Battle of the Bulge, and Gifford took his place.

“Yes, I drove for Lombardi for a while,” La Mar said. He spoke softly with a North Carolina accent. “They shifted. When I first got over there, we lost a lot of boys killed or hurt, and we had a lot of replacements coming in. They might take you out of one platoon and put you in another, if there was a new arrival, because you knew what you were doing, and the other guys, a lot of them hadn’t had the training that we had.

“I drove for a fellow called Sagabiel for a while, and he got killed [Christian Sagabiel was wounded but survived, and passed away in 1980.] Then I drove for Sergeant Holmes, and then I was Holmes’ gunner for a while.”

“Were you in the tank when Holmes was wounded?” I asked.

“I was in the platoon,” La Mar said. “Holmes was the platoon leader. We were on top of this field. We were taking orders from a 90th Infantry Division lieutenant, and we didn’t run into anything. So we were supposed to take up positions the next morning, and since we didn’t run into anything he wanted to go on down to the bottom of the hill, in the valley, and stay down there.

“So by daybreak, it just, all of a sudden all hell broke loose. We had four tanks and a tank destroyer. They threw a shell in the tank destroyer, killed all of them. And one boy, we could see, they broke his leg or something, he just tried to climb out, then they threw another round in there and finished him off.

“Then they got the second tank I believe it was. So when they got that, that left three tanks. Sergeant Gibson, he didn’t know what the rest were gonna do, but he’s gonna get the hell out of there, and he’s the only one that got out.

“When he left, Holmes followed him. I automatically backed up and followed Holmes. When I got to the top of the hill, his tank was sitting in the middle of the road burning. I couldn’t get around it, so I had to go off into a field, and when I did, my back end blew up. The shell came in there and that set me on fire.

“It took three tries to get the hatch open. See, the hatch would hit the gun barrel. The gunner was killed and nobody could operate the gun to get the barrel out of the way. Finally, on the third try, I slipped by. If the gun was over a quarter-inch more, I’d never have got out.”

[Actually, no member of the platoon was killed, but the after action report lists one member as SWA, or seriously wounded in action, meaning he had life-threatening injuries, and this might have been the gunner. Interestingly, in another recent Substack, Walter Galbraith remarked that tankers were told not to close their helmet straps because the concussion from a shell striking the tank could break their neck.]

“The concussion from the shell blew my helmet off,” La Mar said. “When I got out, there were blazes all around and I had to keep my eyes shut, so naturally I was in the dark. The tank commander, he was hanging over the side; he said, ‘Help me!’ He got his heel blown off.

“I dragged him off into the snow and I just fell in, too, there were about ten inches of snow. I drove my head in the snow. And Holmes, he was laying out there in the field. A jeep came up there and got him and got me, and that other guy [possibly the gunner who was seriously wounded]. Carried us back there in some kind of cave or something, a tent or some kind of cave. They put some kind of powder on us [this was likely sulfanilamide, an antibiotic powder that was widely used in World War 2]. It smelled like grease. They put that all over our head, where we were burnt. And they put him in one ambulance and me in another. I remember them giving me a carton of cigarettes. He says, ‘Take these. It might be a long time before you get another one.’

“So they got me to the hospital. They put me in a chair, kind of like a barber chair, I remember that, and put some more of that stuff, and done me up like a mummy, just wrapped gauze all over my head, and I wore that for 18 days. They just cut holes for my nose and mouth and my eyes. Got a shot every four hours, man, I never had saw so many needles in my life. Stayed in bed, and stayed there for 18 days.

“When they took it off, it was just like you stuck your head in some ice water. A lot of my skin came off. I didn’t have no beard or eyelashes or nothing. In fact, I can wash my face now with a rough washrag and roll the skin up on my face; it’s just been that way ever since. When I wash I don’t bear down. I just rub lightly. It makes my face raw to rub it hard.

“But I had orders there to go by some bivouac area and pick up another tank, and they showed me where to go to find my platoon. I didn’t even go back to the company. I went on back out on the line. Right from the hospital.”

“Who was the gunner who was killed that day?” I asked.

“I'm trying to think,” La Mar said. “My assistant driver was a fellow named Whiteheart; he lived at Winston-Salem. Well, I thought he had got killed. But see, under where he was sitting he had a trap door; all he had to do was throw a switch and the thing would fall out. About fifteen years after the war I reckon it was, or maybe longer, not much longer, he came walking around my house one day after we got home, and that really give me a shock because I thought he got killed. He got burned, but nothing seriously. We visited a couple of times; he lived in the next town, about twenty miles away. He worked for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. And his wife left him while he was gone, but he got married again after that.”

“His wife left him during the war?” I asked.

“Yeah, and run off with somebody else.”

“Were you in the tank that ran over a mine in Normandy, with Cardis Sawyer?” I asked? [Sawyer lost his hearing that day, and was replaced by his assistant driver, Tony D’Arpino.]

“No, I never did hit no mines. I just lost one tank is all I ever lost.”

“Was Klapkowski ever your gunner?” I asked.

“He was the gunner for Lombardi when I was the driver. See, I was in the first platoon then, and Klapkowski was the gunner, Lombardi was the tank commander, Whiteheart was the assistant driver, and I don't remember who the loader was. I’d know the boy if I could see him but I can't recall his name. As far as I know, let’s see, Lockhart, he drove the fourth tank, he got killed. [Actually Lockhart was the tank commander.] That was the one that [Buck] Hardee was in and Lupe, Guadalupe [Valdivia]. Guadalupe lives in Topeka, Kansas, he was a little Mexican, and Hardee, he lives up close to me. When we're by there we'll go down to see him.”

“Was Lockhart killed the same time that Hardee was wounded?”

“Yes. Lockhart was his tank commander. And later on, after the shelling and all, the fighting eased down, we had gone as far as we could go up that street, where there was a river on one side of us, and a kind of a wedge type thing, and Lombardi had told me go down there and bring his tank up there. See, the Germans had gone, got killed or captured or whatever. I went down there to get his tank, and Lockhart was laying on the side of the road aside of his tank, and a big old hog had walked up there and started to chewing on him. Another boy shot the hog. I guess the animals eat everything they can get ahold of. That’s ridiculous. I didn’t have a gun on me myself, I never did carry one. I did have a .32, a little bitty one. I got it off a German officer, but you could look at that thing and it’d go off. I had it in my belt, and I come out of my tank one day and that thing went off. I threw that thing as far as I could throw it, down across the wood. Man, that thing’d ruin me. And I had the purtiest dagger you ever laid eyes on; you could shave with that thing; it was about two feet long.

“It was a short sword, and it had the handpieces on, it looked like gold, and a handle that looked like blue marble. It was a beautiful thing, and I carried that all the way through the war, and when we came to catch the boat back home, we stayed in tents, and they said, “Lay everything out on your bunk,” and somebody stole it. There wasn’t supposed to be nobody in there, but somebody knew I had that thing. That’s the only thing I wanted to bring home. I loved that little sword so.”

The battle of Habscheid figures prominently in a new book, “A Hero and Advocate for All Others,” by Kaye Ackermann, Laura Bailey and Reagan Steele, about World War 2 veteran Vern Schmidt.

Vern, who recently turned 100, is still a very active member of the 90th Infantry Division Association. He joined the 90th as an 18-year-old Private First Class along with two other replacements following the Battle of the Bulge. Ten days later, during the battle at Habscheid, his life was spared through a quirk of fate, either that or the fact, according to the book, that his father and many neighbors and friends back in Reedley, California, were daily reciting the 91st Psalm in the hope that he would be kept safe while many were falling to his left and right (the 90th suffered the third-highest rate of casualties in the European Theater). Both of the replacements with whom Vern joined the platoon were killed within yards of him that day.

Unlike many veterans who experienced the traumatizing horrors of combat, Vern has devoted much of his life to closure, looking up kin of the buddies he lost, traveling to Germany numerous times with family members to revisit the sites where the division fought, even finding a flier his platoon helped rescue after a B-17 was shot down in Czechoslovakia.

Kaye Ackermann’s father was a veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion and although he rarely spoke about the war, she has since become a leading researcher and has helped many “next gens” learn about their veteran’s experiences and records. Laura Bailey is a contributor to the World War S.H.E. Substack.

“A Hero and Advocate for All Others” is a quick and compelling read, and while Vern was just one soldier, his experiences were shared by countless combat veterans who rarely if ever spoke with their families about their experiences.

Vern Schmidt on a visit to Germany: