Smokey Stuever's War Part 4
White lightning, Hill 122, a mouse in a foxhole, and a Bronze Star
In case you missed them:
[Now, back to my 2005 interview with mechanic Ed “Smokey” Stuever of the 712th Tank Battalion]
Smokey Stuever: When we were leaving England to go to France, our convoy finally got on the road and was going, and we come to the last little town on the Southampton coast, and most of the 712th Tank Battalion went straight ahead and got on a big boat, but we got stalled because one of the trucks had a flat front tire, and we changed that, and the English people from that town was gathered all along the road and a Englishman said to me when we were pulling away, “Boy, you lads did great! Only 15 minutes.” Well, that was wonderful. So we had to catch up and we were going’ like a bat out of hell up these cobblestone streets, they’re narrow, and we come to the top of the hill, and the building was here and on that side was a cemetery, there was buildings on that side, then it went down towards the ocean, and I could see the big boat out there. And I thought that’s where supposed to be going.
Finally the MPs right at the corner pointed at our number, “Hey, go that way.” So Shorty had to make a swing around that corner and them cobblestone streets, well, they just skidded, we went right through that wall right into the cemetery. Ohhh, I said to the people, “I’m sorry, we had no control of this. They gave us the last minute to turn ...”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, don’t worry about ... come back when it’s over with, will you? Come back and visit us?”
Aaron Elson: Were you in a truck or in a tank retrieval unit?
Smokey Stuever: I was in the tank retriever unit, and we got on a landing craft vehicle with seven vehicles and they put me in charge, so I lined them up. I’m trying to remember who that guy was, the first guy off, I thought it was the welder, Cannon, but it wasn’t him, he had too much weight, he had a big heavy truck, it was somebody else. So when we left England we got about halfway across and the sea was pretty rough, and the back end would come out of the water once in a while and it would hit the water with kind of a smack, and one time it broke the propeller shaft, so we couldn’t move. We just floated around two days and nights. Oh, that was agony. The guys were seasick, hangin’ over the side. You could reach over the side, I did, to keep sober, I’d throw that seawater in my face, it’s ice cold, and it refreshed me. I’d play around with the water, and uh, looking for mines, floating mines, and stuff like that. And watching for periscopes, you had nothing to do, so finally somebody came by, and in our boat was still blood, I don’t know how many trips it made before, there was stink, oh gosh. You know, it was getting where it was really getting stinky, they apologized for that, they never had time ‘cause as soon as they got back they had to load up and go again.
When they got us back to England, I bet it only took ‘em about 15, 20 minutes, and boy did they go at top speed, they shot across, and by that time the English Channel was getting calm, so we really moved fast and we were at Utah Beach in no time at all. When we got there we were a little ways from shore, and he started prodding with a long pole, then finally he hit five – “Oh, 5 foot, okay, that’s good, everybody off!” So they let the door down and the first truck got off, he just went off and down in a deep hole he went, a bomb crater. So the guy running the boat says, “Hang on, we’ll swing her just a little bit ...”
I says, “Good, I’ll go right by him with my recovery unit and I’ll get him.”
So as I went by him, he’s sitting in the water, I says, “Make sure you got it in neutral, and I’m gonna throw the ring around your hook,” and in order to do that I couldn’t reach it so I had to get in the water up to here, standing on his bumper, and I felt that hook and put the ring on there and got back up, “Take ‘er away, Shorty.” Then they give the signal, Shorty go. I told Shorty, “Keep it at 15,000 rpm all the time, don’t let up on it, keep that motor high.” Boy, that’s, you know, you let up, you’re gonna conk out. So we got him in, dropped him off, and went back out, got another one, and, somebody else was bring another one in. There were three failures ...
Aaron Elson: What do you mean three failures?
Smokey Stuever: Three of them, they conked out in the water. They didn’t waterproof their unit properly, you know, and I went to waterproof school in Bristol, England, to teach these guys to cover their wiring and all that, and if they didn’t cover the air intake properly it sucked in water, you know. So we all got together and the major running the guidance, he says, “You guys line up along that fence and get your stuff in order, and when you’re all ready to go, let me know.”
Aaron Elson: What kind of vehicles were these?
Smokey Stuever: Uh, they were, let’s see, six trucks, did I have a halftrack? I had my tank recovery unit and Bellows’ 10-ton wrecker and five trucks. There was the welding truck, parts truck, a couple of other trucks. Well anyway, when we got on shore, then Bellows says, “Stuever, something’s wrong. I got no brakes.” And he says the air pump’s runnin’, you know, it’s connected with the motor, and he says, “You can hear it pumpin’,” and I says, “Well, let me follow the air lines down.”
I got by the back wheels and I could hear pss-pss-pss-pss ... and then I finally felt it and the air brake cylinder, it’s a big flat thing about that round and about 20 screws in there, nuts and bolts, and there’s a little vent, and that’s where the water got in, and it turned all the dust in that diaphragm into ball bearings, and they rolled around in there, then it held the diaphragm open, let all the air out. So I cleaned that thing out, put it all back together, it was all right.
And we had two of them we had to drain the oil out because water got in the motor, the guys didn’t do it right. That was my fault because I should have checked their work, but I had too much, you know, and then on the tanks they had these big old air vents put on there to suck air in, but I don’t think I had one, I don’t remember, maybe I knocked it off, I didn’t like that thing on there.
Aaron Elson: Okay, so then you joined up with the outfit?
Smokey Stuever: No, we got everybody together and made sure everything’s running right, and it was about an hour before dark, and I took off. I waved to the major, he’s up the line there, I waved to him, I’m leaving, so I went up the road and we went about a mile and we come to an intersection, I mean a crossroad, not an intersection, and there was a machine gun on that side and a machine gun on this side. I says, “Where’s that tank outfit that’s supposed to be up this way?”
“Tank outfit? There’s nobody up here. There’s Germans up over there. We’re the outposts.”
Oh-oh. Boy, did we make a U-turn. We got back there and the major says, “What happened?”
I says, “We got to the outpost out there and there’s nobody on the other side but Germans. That’s no place for us.”
And he says, “Well, get your men over here and have them dig in.” There was a big circle there with evergreens, it was like a center, you know. So we lined up all along there, and these guys didn’t want to dig, you know. He said, “Be sure and dig in for the night.” They were all wore out, they’re tired, so they were all sleeping, and about 10:30, 11 o’clock at night the artillery start comin’ in. Boy, you could hear a lot of scratchin’. Even me, me and Shorty, we dug a hole behind the tank, you know, back of the engine. It came out this way, we had a lot of armor on top of us, see. With just enough room for two people.
Aaron Elson: When did you see your first dead German?
Smokey Stuever: Oh, it wasn’t far after we got past where the paratroopers were hanging, their parachutes were hangin’ in the trees, and that famous photo of a parachute hangin’ on a church, in that area, a little bit past that. Gettin’ near Ste Mere Eglise. But on the way, everybody’s pickin’ on me, “Hey, you got a recovery unit there, get that durn tank out of the way,” or “Disabled truck buried in there. Get him out of there.” And then when we got just past that church, there was a tank knocked out and the road was real narrow, and it was creatin’ a lot of problems to get around it, and this guy says, “You gotta get that durn tank out of there.”
“I don’t know where I’m gonna take it.” Then I said, “Oh, wait a minute. We’ll take it back to that church over there.” There was a big empty space in the front of the church. So, we had good signals, hand signals, this way, that way, you know, pull on this lever, pull on that lever, squeeze, that means give it a little bit. And this meant stop, shut the engine off. Different things like that. And we pushed that doggone tank, boy, just like experts, we pushed it right in front of the church by the door and left everything wide open. And finally somebody from out outfit came back looking for us and found us, so all of them went ahead except my tank and the recovery unit, Bellows and me. We didn’t get there until days later. When we were at Ste Mere Eglise we had jobs to do there. Finally when we got there, “What were you doin’, playing hookey?” You think, they think we’re fooling around.
Aaron Elson: What was your reaction the first time you saw ...
Smokey Stuever: A dead German? Let’s see, it was right after that church deal, there was some dead Germans. In our bivouac area, our camping area, we had some Americans dead there and buried there, and after Shorty got killed, they came in there and dug them up. But they were sittin’ there eatin’ their lunch. And it was in an area near a ditch, and that’s where I learned where the German infantry was trained to move, under that hidden camouflage, natural, you couldn’t see ’em in there. And man, they had the bottoms of those ditches, creeks, where they ran, you know.
And that time when I got drunk and I took the keys away from Captain [Kenneth] Laing and put him on guard duty with me, did I tell you about that?
Aaron Elson: No.
Smokey Stuever: In Avranches, that’s a very narrow corridor of land in Normandy, and the Germans were all around us, you know, mostly on the right of us. So we came to a farming area and there was a nice wheat field and there were some nice vegetables growing in the area, it was kind of open in the area, but on the one side was a road that had a creek running alongside it, all camouflaged, and then there was a camouflaged area going through where we camped for the night, working on these tanks.
I got up on top of my tank, before I got drunk, and I was lookin’ the area over with my binoculars, and I saw this wheatfield and in the center of the wheatfield there was all mashed down like people had laid in there, but I couldn’t see nobody and I didn’t think nobody was sleepin’ in there. But during the night there was a lot of movement, and so somebody came out with a bottle of mirabille, white lightning, and ohhh, it didn’t much, but I really got smashed. And when Captain Laing come up there just before dark with little Princie drivin’, I says, “Wellll, well, what have we got here?” And, “What do you want?”
“Well, we want to see what you guys are doin’?”
“Well, it’s time you show up around here.” I reached in there and took the keys out. I says, “You’re gonna stay here with us tonight and see how it is. You’re gonna get a taste of this shit.”
And oh, he was pleadin’ with me, ohh, I put the keys in my pocket. “Put him on with me at midnight.” I don’t know if we had two hour shifts then or one hour shifts.
So, during the night, it was a big, beautiful bright moonlight night, and I had him in a foxhole over there and I was over here and he’s making all kinds of noise and he’s crawling around. I said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Are you trying to attract the Germans and let ‘em know where you’re at? You’re creating an awful disturbance here. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, there’s a mouse in my foxhole.”
I crawl over there on my belly and I see him over there. Wham! I hit him with my fist and I, “Here’s your damn mouse.” I threw it out. Now get back in there and be quiet.
[If this sounds as difficult to believe to you as it did to me, when I asked Smokey without the tape going how he could order his company commander to pull guard like that, he said that he had something he could hold over his captain, in that he witnessed the officer trading gasoline for booze with some civilians, most likely in England. Also, Princie was Theodore Prinz Jr. of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.]
The next morning, I couldn’t believe what I did that night, so I handed little Princie the keys and they took off. But before that, the guys in our outfit, were shootin’ down on that row of hedges, you know, the people out there wouldn’t answer. “Halt! Who’s there?” No answer. Then we hear ‘em running down the road. And I went out in that field and I laid, it looked like corn, or I don’t remember what it was, it was only about this high, and I laid in there to see if I could see movements. You lay low and then you, if a gun flashes you see what the hell’s going on. A lot of the jobs we did you couldn’t use no lights, we went by the flashing, ohh, went by flashes. Like changing tracks on a tank one time along a railroad track, it was in an open area and we didn’t dare light a cigarette or have a light, and we went by flashes. Boy, we did a tremendous job of changing the track. Oh, there was a problem with the idler. What happened there was the idler came loose and the track came off, and it was quite a job to get it back on there and then figure out what the hell was wrong, and then, they’re all adjusted. All at nighttime. All by flashes, gun flashes.
Here was this village over here with a high wall on it, and the tank, a big tank, broke through the wall, and then a D Company tank went down the road with five infantry guys on it, [Actually this was two infantrymen riding on the tank; Smokey apparently is confusing this with an incident later in the war in which several infantrymen were riding on a tank that went over a cliff, crushing them] one of them had a Browning automatic weapon, a BAR gun, a big, heavy thing, you know. And these five guys are riding on the back end of that damn tank, and they, now I’d say a quarter of a mile from town down the road, there’s a big tree over here on this side, then over here was a patch of young evergreens, big ones, and there were, Germans were hidden in there, delayed action it was called, see. So this light tank went down there, and when it hit that it flipped it like a pancake, and it chewed them guys that were on the back end, oh man, and my guys, they couldn’t pick up these pieces of body, they were vomiting. Ohh, I can’t do it. And I said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, get them canvasseses and put ‘em down there,” and I’d throw the canvas over them and roll it in there, and take them away. And then I picked up this piece of flesh. An earlobe, a guy’s nose, mouth.
“How can you ... Ohh, how can you do that? Ohhh...” That’s all I hear, you know. What the hell. Well, I had the stomach for that shit because I was born and raised on a farm, we butchered pigs and I went through all that stuff. But my own guts was boiling, ohh. It was drastic.
Well, we got them bodies and we got the truck and got it out of there and we turned that tank over and turned it around, and started to go out, and I said, oh boy, “Hold it. Hold it.” I says, “Let’s thank the Lord.”
“Why?”
“We’re still here. Lookit over there.” There’s two mines didn’t go off,” and we’re working all around this. I says, “How come you guys didn’t step on that thing?”
Jiminy! They hugged me.
Aaron Elson: In that tank that flipped over, two men survived of the four-man crew.
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. They crawled out a hole where the transmission was. It was tore out of there, and man, that hole didn’t look very big. And they squeezed through that dang hole. They didn’t dare crawl out the escape hatch, the Germans would shoot ‘em. I don’t know if that’s what killed the other two guys. But when we first got there, the Germans were shootin’ at us with small rifle fire, so Bellows and I and somebody else jumped into this tow truck and we drove around that side of that forest, and then we saw that jeep taking off and I give ‘em a blast of .50-caliber, that baby talks the language they respect.
Aaron Elson: Did you hit them?
Smokey Stuever: No, I don’t know if I hit ‘em or not. We didn’t see no more of ‘em and didn’t hear no more. So, that’s why we went back to work and took care of everything. But, then we had to do something with them mines, and finally we found some red cloth, and there was big dead limb up there. I put that across there and then I got that red flag out there, then when we got to town, I said, “Where the hell’s everybody?” There was nobody around. And I says, “We gotta let somebody know that there’s two mines, and I got a red flag on it,” and then finally the MPs showed up, and I says, “You gotta get the,” what do you call it, ordnance? Not ordnance ...
Aaron Elson: Engineers?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, the mine guys, who took care of the mines. Minesweepers. I says, “There’s two live mines out there, one on top of the other, that didn’t go off.”
“And you’re still here?
Yeah, I said, “Boy, thank the Lord, we did.”
“All right. We’ll get it. We’ll take care of it.”
I told them I put a limb there with a red ... “Oh, good. Good.” Boy. And it was a, oh, about that far from the ditch, or the end in the road.
Aaron Elson: Two feet? Three feet?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, and it didn’t go off. I don’t know if there’s any more over that way, but you could see this side of it. They were just below the surface. They had a way of camouflaging stuff, you know, you take a brush, a branch and dust it off, and it didn’t look like nothing was there.
One time when we were in that minefield, there was a couple of our new tanks tried to go down that side and they got stuck in the soft dirt over there, so me and Kochen, we walked from the, there’s a forest over here, and then we seen these bodies over there, the flesh was blown off their legs, ohh, these guys, they stepped on them little bee-boxes, you know. “Ohhh,” I says, “we gotta get the hell out of here.” And here’s everybody over there, then finally Laing shows up and he says, “Aren’t you going in there to get them tanks?”
“Not until the minesweepers clear it away. I ain’t gonna send my men in there.”
“Ohhh, those tanks are $60,000. You lettin’ them ...”
I said, “Listen, if one of my men gets killed out there, would you go to their parents and tell them how they died? And how they got orders to go in there?”
He walked away from me.
I didn’t want to leave them tanks in there. I went there with Kochen, I wasn’t gonna risk my life until, I wouldn’t be able to get in there because ...
Aaron Elson: Was that during the winter?
Smokey Stuever: No, it was like spring of the year, when the ground was soft. It was the early part. So it had to be in the summertime, yeah. I mean, it was the early part of our movement, I’d say after the Falaise Gap.
Aaron Elson: Now what do you remember about the Falaise Gap?
Smokey Stuever: Ohh, after being pinned down at Hill 122 and the Falaise Gap there, I mean St. Lo, we started moving, and it was hard to keep up, you know, trying to fix things along the way and keep up with the company, “Where are you gonna be tomorrow?” Then they made us go around, you know, instead of coming straight down this way. The Falaise Gap was over here, we come around this way and we locked them in there. They were down in a bowl, it was like shootin’ fish in a barrel. Boy, did they get the stuff. Man, and one area we came to, there must have been a whole truckload of cameras, looted. And they had everything dumped out along the highway. And one guy says, “Boy, Smokey, here’s a good one.” It had delayed action, you know, you could set it and run over there and get in the picture. But my kids wouldn’t leave it alone after I got home, you know, they thought it was a toy, and they ruined it.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about Hill 122.
Smokey Stuever: Hill 122. I think we covered some of it, but I’ll go over it quickly. My first mission on Hill 122 was with A Company. Driving from our bivouac area I went straight up the road, straight up the hill on the left end of Hill 122, on top of the hill was an A Company tank, but before we got there, the Germans opened a lot of artillery fire, mortar fire, on me and they covered the area pretty heavily and so we stopped, and they probably thought I was moving on but the shells were landing in front of the tank. Everybody took cover for themselves and I ran around behind the tank and dove behind the engine area, underneath the engine area, and I laid on my belly with my head turned and hanging onto a two-inch limb that was under the tracks, and a shell exploded up in the front and it mostly went to the left of me but a piece shot under the tank and went into that limb right in the direction of my heart. And when I saw that hot smoking piece of metal in that limb, I backed out of there and I stood, crouched, in the engine well. I thought the least I could lose is an ankle or a foot. And finally it ceased and so I went up on top and surmised what I had to do, and I came back and we moved up there and everybody was prepared to do what they had to do and take a five block section off of the top of our tank and remove a five section off of the tank that was crippled, and it must have only taken fifteen, twenty minutes to change that and we were out of there. We were in an open area next to a wild, wooded area on our right, but across, ahead, of us was a valley and a German Tiger tank, it looked like it was mired in the mud, it was not in action. It made my blood boil.
We got out of there, we took high speed and went right back to camp. But the next day we had to come back in the same area but we went to the right and alongside the road was another road parallel to it and a D Company tank was in a ditch turned over on the side, and we erected it and got it out of the ditch, but we didn’t have it turned around and there was no place to turn around there except about fifty yards up ahead was another little wooded area with some big trees and a little house. It looked like a picnic area. And as we got there some of the guys went in the house and looked around. I was busy having the tank turned around, and we started getting small arms fire, so I jumped behind a great big tree and gave directions, and had Shorty get it turned and ready to aim out, and I told him “Go, on the double,” so he gave her hell and it was flying out of there and I ran top speed alongside of it, and I let him know that I was alongside of him and they slowed up enough for me to jump on, and I had a way of getting that darn tank in movement, and as we went up the road a little ways, they laid a smokescreen between me and the Germans, but we had a problem, somebody didn’t put the locking pin, cotter pin, in that pin that connects the towbar, and it, the pin wiggled out, the tank went crooked and part of it went in the ditch again. And we got it straightened out, but I had to use an awful lot of strength with that Murphy bar which is a great big straightening bar. The towbar was kind of bent out of shape, and I bent it with some help and we got that pin in there and drove it in and locked it in and got the hell out of there.
Then we went straight on across that crossing where we were the day before, and we drove into a dead end area where there was a rock quarry and a couple of fruit trees, I thought there was a small orchard. And we towed the tank under one tree and we hid our recovery unit behind another, and by that time, as we were approaching that area, they were following us along the road with some shells, and one of them landed right alongside of me on the other side of the hedgerow and it threw the whole fence on top of me, it tore my jacket shoulder, clothes, all of it to the skin, I didn’t even get a scratch out of it but it tore my clothes up. That’s how close it came. And it kind of buried our tank. It was sandy soil, we was able to get it all cleaned off, but we, everybody ran for a foxhole and Kochen says, “Stuever, you take this foxhole,” and I jumped in there and there was a, I seen this shiny silver wire between my feet and I look on the other end, underneath the leaves, I could see the ends of a potato masher, and I had enough strength to roll up out of there and I just rolled on the ground away from that hole, I couldn’t even get up, I was so petrified, and Kochen saw me and he said, “What the hell’s the matter, are you hit?”
I says, “Noo, there’s something down in that hole, it looked like a potato masher.”
And he looked in there and he says, “Boy oh boy, there is. Everybody lay low.” He was looking for a big, heavy rock and he found a piece of log. He threw that in there, and it come flying out all chewed up, shredded. I was in, almost in shock from that ordeal.
Then we worked on that tank. We stayed there that night and listened to all kinds of firing, screaming meemies, the burp guns, lots of machine gun fire, and occasional mortar fire. They just wanted to keep us awake all night. But they were coming in around us, not too far.
So the next day we finished the projects and got those tanks and got out of there. Only to get back to camp the third day, they said, “Stuever, you’ve got to go back up there.” It’s up in the middle this time, “There’s a D Company tank took a direct hit.”
So as we were coming to the middle area from the main road, they start firing, and when we got inward a little ways it was starting to get heavier and heavier, and we got pretty close. I was looking out my turret. My turret didn’t have no top on it, it was a repair vehicle, it was not a combat vehicle. It didn’t have the armor, it didn’t have no top on it, but it had hatch covers for the driver and assistant driver. So as we got halfway, Shorty shifted into double low so it would move slowly up the hill, and I was looking through my binoculars to see where the hell to go for that D Company tank, and just then I heard one – when you hear ‘em whistling you don’t worry, but when they’re whistlin’ and they don’t, they stop whistlin’, they’re gonna come pretty close – so I doubled up and put my fingers in my ears, and that shell hit the front end of the turret and exploded within inches of me, and a good thing that I was crouched over because I think I would have got some of it if I was standing up straight. And the next thing, Patsy Barchetta was crawling out of the assistant driver’s area, through the turret area, and he says “Shorty’s dead! Shorty’s dead! Get out of here!” And all the men disappeared. I don’t know how they got back to camp. I was left there alone with that tank in gear, when Shorty got hit he fell with his weight on the accelerator in double low gear and was moving up towards a bunch of gas cans and I pulled on the lever and steered it out of the way and just then a paratrooper grabbed me by the heels and pulled me down in a foxhole and he laid on top of me and I said, “Boy, get off of me, I’m not gettin’ any air,” and when he got off of me I got up and I ran up there and then I remembered to shut the thing, I was trying to stop the engine and it wouldn’t stop by shutting the master switch off, it just kept running. I had to ground the magnetos and then it died. And the thing was on fire. I put the master, uh, fire extinguisher on to take care of anything in the engine compartment and inside the main part of this tank where there’s fire. But there was fire burning around the outside of the turret, so I reached in there and took the hand extinguisher is quite big, and I put the fire out and I threw all the junk that was around the turret off onto the ground, and the medics finally showed up and I proceeded to get Shorty out of there and got all his personal belongings, identification, and assisted them in getting him out of there.
And then the colonel from the paramedics, from the 82nd Airborne, says, “We’ve got to get a driver and get this damn tank out of here.”
And I says, “This is my tank and I’ll get it the hell out of here.”
And I made a U-turn, I don’t think anybody ever made a U-turn like that, it was quite sharp, at full speed. I had that thing floored. I flew out of there and down the road and as I went down the road the Germans followed me with artillery firing until I reached that intersection and they thought I was gonna go straight where that rock quarry was, and if I did I would have got blowed to kingdom come because they put a big one in there that you could bury that tank in just as I made the turn left to go back to the bivouac area, and the concussion was so great it was like a guy took his both hands and slapped me real hard. I could feel it on my face and my ears, and when I got back to camp the doctor was injecting something into the guys so they could relax, and he wanted me to show up and get mine, I says, “I want to stay awake tonight when them damn krauts are coming through here,” because they were in the area a few nights before that, and I had a feeling they’d be back. So I didn’t take my shots.
And that night one of my crew, Ed Shuleski, got out of his foxhole and walked out in the open field, “Come on, you Germans, go ahead and kill me, you killed my buddy Marion Kubeczko, you might as well kill me.”
So I walked out there and got ahold of Marion, uh, of old Ed Shuleski and I told him to “Start praying. That’s what your mother’s doin’ right now back home in church, asking God to save you. Do the same thing. Thank the Lord that you’re still alive. Now get back in this foxhole,” and he passed out. He went to sleep. Never heard a weep out of him.
But the next morning Whitehead was on the other side, and he was next to that creek where the Germans were crawling, and it was just daylight, and he says, “I want everybody to hear me. I prayed last night. I really prayed!”
Aaron Elson: He was an atheist, wasn’t he?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, he was always arguing with Wallace.
Aaron Elson: When you got into the tank and Shorty was dead, what did he look like?
Smokey Stuever: His head was bent over, and in order to get him out of there I had to lift him up, and when I put my hand on his right shoulder in the back, it went in, the hole was so big. Ohh, that got me. And I finally managed to get my hand under his arm and then hand him to the paramedics, and we took him out through the big opening.
Aaron Elson: Did you see his face?
Smokey Stuever: No. He was all over, like this, and the hair hanging down, yeah. Right away the paramedics had a blanket over him, so I didn’t get to see any more. They, too, said the less you see, it’s easier.
Aaron Elson: And what did you feel, I mean this was your closest buddy, your first real casualty.
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, well nobody had any sorrow for me. I didn’t get no sympathy from nobody, and that’s what bothered me most. But finally [Fillmore] Enger come up to me, he was working with Sergeant [Frank] Mazure on the main line, that’s back in the bivouac area, and he was pretty good. So he says, “I understand you need a driver, and you need somebody to fix all them, rewire that.”
And I says, “I know you’re the guy.”
And he says, “I’ll be your driver on one condition. That it’s my tank. On one condition. You take orders from me.”
Aaron Elson: You take orders from him. And what did you say?
Smokey Stuever: That he take orders from me. No matter what, you have to take orders from me, because I’m gonna be responsible. “Are you gonna be responsible for all the men?”
Then he shut up. Okay. Then we shook hands, and I says, “Forget about the radio. We don’t use it. Let’s disconnect that, we won’t bother with the wiring with that, but we’ve got to get this instrument panel, it’s got a lot of shorts in it.” Boy, you hit a bump, phshoo, twenty volts is a real smacker.
Aaron Elson: You got a shock?
Smokey Stuever: Oh yeah. Oh, I’d get a shock, he’d get a shock. Wrench fly out of our hand. Oh, it was a pretty good wallop.
One time I had this old fellow from Utah, eventually I’m gonna remember his name, him and Fernandez, I had them change the battery in that tank. The battery was dead, and that’s 24 volts, you know. And I says, “Be sure that you don’t touch any metal with the end of the wrench. Put your hand on the end of it.” You can’t get a shock. And something went wrong, Pooowwwww! It sounded like a German 88 came in there when that thing went off. And here come ... ooohh, I almost had his name ... he come crawling out of there, wherever his cap didn’t cover was burnt. His eyebrows was burnt. Hair, his nose was burnt. His hairline ... oh, and shaking to beat hell. And I says, “Don’t mind me, hang onto me and let’s shake together.” I says, “It’s over with. You didn’t get hit. You’re not damaged. It’s a hell of a blow.” And old Louie Fernandez, “hhhhhhhh” he finally come out of it, but it’s all like that, one time when he was outside and we were all in the tank and he was crying, oh, that’s the second time that he was trembling, “ehhhhhh,” boy, like a little baby. Like going into shock, it was pretty close to it.
Smokey Stuever: There was a period there after the Falaise Gap when we were down in the valley and the Germans were trying to fire at us and the shells were going right over our heads. Our tanks were pretty well scattered out, and there was German tanks coming down the road, and one of them made a left turn, a right turn, his right turn, and it turned to our left, and they saw that they were running into a crowd of Americans in this valley with the trees and bushes and getting a lot of fire shot at them, and I was trying to shoot ‘em with a bazooka but some tank gave him a pretty good hit and put him out of action, they started burning, and they crawled out of their escape hatch and some come out waving but there wasn’t many of them ran very far. So I was busy trying to dismantle that doggone bazooka because it didn’t go off, and I didn’t want to fool with it any more. I’d rather use the mortar, because I was pretty good with a mortar back in the States, you know, they put us through the mill and I put the second shot right in the barrel and I blew the barrel apart, they had not one target. And then another time judging distance, you know, so it only took two shots, 5,000 yards, that’s pretty far, something like that, 5,000 ... about 5,000 feet. Yeah, 5,000 feet, that’s what it was.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember any of the river crossings?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. There was a couple of them, well there’s three of them, let’s see, let’s get through the first one ...
Aaron Elson: The Moselle?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. We crossed at Koenigsmacher which was north of Metz on November the 4th, on election day when they made the drive on Metz, and there was 5,000 casualties. And we were in there in August of that year, August like the 20th, and they pulled us back because of lack of gas and we laid around Briey, France, until November the 4th, Election Day, and then we made that drive on Metz and we crossed at Koenigsmacher with some airborne group, and they spearheaded the outfit, and they went up there and rigged up a bazooka on a turret plate and set it off and put it out of action. It burned a hole right through it. Boy, how quick and amazing they did that. And Koenigsmacher crossing was real barren, the Germans had every bush within a mile cleared away so that they could see anybody coming crawling on their belly. It was just barren, you know. And I looked over the area and I said, “Boy, how could they get over here without them seeing them?” And they caught the Germans in their long underwear, they come out with their long underwear on. There was one of them laying there on a bench right by the main entrance, it was like this, a big ramp going down there, and the opening was up here but the doors was way over here, and they had the doors opened and they were trying to get the horses to come out of there, and the horses can see in the dark, you know, and they’d rather stay in there, when they came to that opening they ran away from it, they didn’t want to go outside. And here’s this guy laying there, his balls was like that.
Aaron Elson: Big?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. All blowed up, and I don’t know what happened there. What caused that. He was a kraut. And I seen a lot of prisoners in their long underwear the next day, they were going down the road.
Then we went on, let’s see, the next crossing would be, there was two of ‘em, but the Rhine River ...
Aaron Elson: The Saar was next ...
Smokey Stuever: No, we crossed the Moselle where it runs into the Saar, way up there ...
Aaron Elson: The second was Dillingen, the Saar River before you crossed the Moselle again.
Smokey Stuever: Oh, wait a minute. That crossing up there where we forded, we ran across the Moselle River, no bridge, we ran across the water, on the stones, and one tank stopped to shift its gears, and they know better, they were told never stop crossing a stream, keep that track moving, ’cause the rocks’ll fall in there and you’re dead. So that’s what happened, and I chewed them guys out for stopping, you know. And I had to get out there with long bars and pry that rock out, and finally get ’em going, I said, “Don’t you ever stop, just keep it moving.” Now that had, I thought that after the Bulge.
Aaron Elson: Before the Bulge you crossed and then you had to come back.
Smokey Stuever: That was the Saar River, at Dillingen. I went across there with my recovery unit, and I had to use my cranes for some heavy, I thought it was to load up some engines or something, something big and heavy. And when we got there it became dark and we had to work in the dark, and the damn hook was stuck up in the boom and it wouldn’t come down, so I crawled up there and I got the hook loose but it wouldn’t come down, so I swung out and pulled it down with my body and it came down real fast, and as I was gettin’ near the ground I start runnin’ because the shells was hittin’ on top of those apartment buildings, on the roof, and the slate roof was flying around us. I was figuring it was gonna cut me up.
Aaron Elson: Were those our shells or their shells?
Smokey Stuever: Their shells, the Germans. They were firing on us. I was surprised that they were trying to hit us but they were hitting those apartment buildings and puttin’ them on fire, and then they lit up there and gave me enough light to see what I’m doin’. But there again, there was a tank that we abandoned. It was stuck in the mud, they said don’t fool with it, leave it alone, and I looked at it, and it didn’t look like a big job, I betcha if I hooked my tank and a ten ton wrecker on there we could have drug that baby out of there, but there was a house right up there and there was a lot of wires in the woods and it come to the railroad and they went under the stones, and I looked all over to see where it came out. I thought it came across the track and up into that house, but they must have tunneled I believe a long time ago got everything ready, you know, because they were, somebody was calling the shots. And then we were ordered to pull back, oh, it’s a wonder we didn’t get blasted. Well, they knocked that bridge out. There were some people taking care of the smoke pots further up, the smoke blowing this way, the Germans couldn’t see our bridge, but when them guys ran away from the smoke pots, it cleared up just enough for the Germans to see where the, they put that thing out of business.
Aaron Elson: Oh, is that what happened, they ran away from the smoke pots?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. M-hm. Well, I guess the shells came in close to ‘em so they run for cover, and then they didn’t tend to their job.
It was amazing. There was a railroad bridge and it wasn’t damaged or nothing. I was always wanting to go get on that track and drive back, but it was up in the air, you know, it was kind of high. I don’t know how it was on the other end. But the next night, after we pulled back and was back in Dillingen, the Germans moved in that area and then they were firing right on us, and me and my buddies were in the basement of the railroad depot and A Company or B Company was doing guard duty so I didn’t have to post no guards, and so we had a card game going across the street in the middle of the night I had to walk across and get down in that railroad depot by my men, and them guys, they were gonna shoot me.
“Ohhh, I’m Smokey, I was over playing cards and I’m going back by my buddies down in ...” Oh, they ...
“A likely story. Don’t you ever pull that shit around here again.”
Oh boy, they were giving me hell. They damn near shot me. Boy. Then the next day enemy shells came in and they hit the roof of the depot and it tore holes in my coveralls. I had my book of records of all the tanks I worked on, you know, they would accuse me of working on this tank, removing the governor, that was a no-no, you know. And then, they say, “Oh, you worked on this tank,” and I never saw that tank, so I kept records. Then when they saw me with that record book they took that book away from me, and I finally had a little hand book, and I had that in the hip of my pocket and shrapnel tore the damn thing, tore a hunk out of it. That’s where Enger and that other guy from Utah was changing a battery there and it sounded like a shell blew right in the area, everybody run for cover. And when I seen the smoke coming out of the tank I knew what happened.
Aaron Elson: The Bronze Star, tell me about that.
Smokey Stuever: All right, the Bronze Star was an event that happened towards the end of the war when we were moving along I don’t know how many miles a day, at least sixty miles a day. They were leapfrogging to beat hell and I was having a hard time keeping up with them, with these breakdowns, and finally they waited, they holed up in uh, the town, this town sounded something like Barnstable or something like that. It was down in a valley, a farming area, it had farms all around it. And it had a big hay shed in the middle of town, and it looked like it was a phony, uh, we caught up with the company like 2 o’clock in the afternoon and about an hour later or two hours later, they were moving out and they says, “You take your time and fix these tanks and we’ll be up ahead and we’ll keep in touch.” Right when they were moving out there was two girls came through town and Kochen was able to talk Polish, he was talking Polish with them and she told him, and this girl told Kochen that “the place is full of Germans on both sides, up in those woods, in them woods there’s all kinds of people in town with information, and that tank up there along the woods, they’re ready to use that. They’ve got men not far away.”
That evening I could see smoke, like they’re cooking dinner, you know. I could see steam and stuff coming up through the woods, and I bet you there was a lot of them in there. So during the night they liked to fire wild shots through the town, you know, they don’t want to do damage to their property, so they fire overhead and around, around the depot area, and glance off of the tank.
The next morning we take a walk around town and it looks awful weird, and when we saw that one window suddenly close we know we were in for it, and then they start firing at us from that one farm barn, and we thought we’d go to that barn and blast the doggone thing out with hand grenades and what we had, and, there was Bellows and I we started across first, and the other guys were gonna watch and see what happens. And when we got across the bridge they start firing at us, and we quickly ran and Bellows went down one side of the road and me on the other, we ran up the ditch and the bullets were flying right down the middle of the road, hitting the blacktop and glancing off. We got back and I says, “We gotta make a run for it.”
So I said, “Somebody dismantle the guns and I’ll dismantle the tank.” I disconnected the magnetos so they couldn’t start the engine or do anything with it, and somebody, one of the guys, was pretty good with the guns, I don’t know whether it was Sandy or somebody, no, we didn’t have Sandy with us. Well, anyway, they took part of the breech with them.
We left with two tanks and we’re goin’ down the road and we come to this intersection, and I was riding in my usual cradle next to the big boom by the assistant driver’s hatch, I would sit in that corner and I would be quick to tell the driver which way to go or whatever. And when we come to this intersection I looked up and here was a guy from the second story window pointing his rifle at me, and I don’t know why I did it but I saluted him, I gave him a salute, and he put his rifle down and he stood there looking at me, and that gave Bellows, he was following me in his wrecker and he had Arthur driving at the time because he was eager to get some shots back at ‘em, and he must have shot up at there, and he got the guy away from the window anyway, and we got out of his sight quickly because of the hills, and we went up, oh, about five miles and we found a little town and it was completely vacant, there wasn’t a soul in it, and we weren’t far from that wooded area where all those Germans was in, and there was big battles going on that next night. There was a lot of activity going on, we could hear it. But then some Russians came into our area and they started creating a lot of problems, they were throwing rocks through the windows and taking sharp knives and cutting up the beautiful kitchen tables and stuff like that, and I says, “You guys get out of here, go! We don’t want you here. Go down that road there. Go! Out with you!” So the other guys, they all stood with me and pointed their guns at them, and they went. So they followed them a little ways, made sure that they kept going. So they walked pretty fast gettin’ out of there, I don’t think they even hung around the area. So they must of went on and got caught.
But we stayed around there for about three days and nights and finally it got quiet, and I said, “Let’s take a drive.” So we drove down to the intersection and we finally saw some paramedics, an ambulance. It was coming up, and he said he had orders to go north past that town where we were in, and I says, “How far back is the first American groups?”
“Oh,” he says, “quite a ways.”
So, ohh, let’s make a run for it. So we did. We kept going and going, and ordnance had just moved up with a bunch of new equipment, and that morning Laing was there and he says, “You must have just missed him. How come you guys didn’t come together? He just left and I turned him down. I said we don’t have nothing for you.”
So I says, “We’ve been repairing and changin’ engines, we kept these damn things goin’ all through the war. It’s time we get a break.”
And he says, “Yeah, ohh, you guys did all that changin’ engines.”
I says “My crew can change an engine in four hours.”
“Well, you must be the guys we hear about.” So, he says, “I’ve got a couple of tanks ...” I think he gave us three of them. Three new Ford tanks. And I had enough drivers to drive ‘em back. And we come back blowin’ our sirens, Lookeee! And Laing, he couldn’t believe it.
Aaron Elson: So that’s what he put you in for the Bronze Star?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, and then Bennett just said, “We sent out a report you’re missing in action, so we’ve got to get the news out.” So I guess they caught it in time, you know, that it didn’t get sent out from headquarters, you know, the general headquarters in the area.
Aaron Elson: What happened at Hof?
Smokey Stuever: Hof, Germany? Hof was the last German city on the Czech border. We went into Czech, and Pilsen brewery, we were driving along and we heard that the Pilsen brewery was right up ahead, so we drove up there and we had some hash and stew left over, and when the worker saw us giving him cans of food, “Ohhh,” he says, “go around the back, get good beer.” So we drove around and we got a big barrel of beer. But there seems to be something wrong now between that and when we left Czechoslovakia. When we left Czechoslovakia they came after me in a jeep and they says, “Stuever, you’ve gotta go home. You’re leaving. They want me to pick you up and bring you back.” Well anyway, we were in this damn Czech town and them communists, they hated us, they wanted us out of there. So we got everything else and we got the tank running, I had a couple guys, a driver and an assistant driver so that, you know, it’s hell driving a tank all by yourself, you’ve gotta have somebody, so we had a couple of people with them tanks. And we got going early the next day, and as we were leaving I noticed a disturbance in my trailer underneath the heavy tarp, there was something moving under there, and I heard some little noise, and I know a little bit of German, and I says, “Hal die Muhl,” that means “Hold your mouth.” You know, “Shut up.” And then I heard, “Shhhhh”
So, as we got down the road, then I went out and I looked, and here was a woman with three little girls in there. And then I said, “There’s a town over there.”
“Oh yeah, I was hin gehen,” I want to go there, you know.
So, on your merry way. We weren’t supposed to cater to no Germans, but them kids was what touched me, I didn’t care about her. So she was huddlin’ across the ditch and the bushes and headed that way the last I saw of her. We went on, we went near there but we went on the main road back to Hof. Then I laid around there for about a week before I left.
We rode all the way from there to Cherbourg, France, to get on a boat in a goddang boxcar that the poor people rode in, you know, and there was so much scribbling carved in the wood. Oh, gosh.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever, at any point, have to shoot anyone?
Smokey Stuever: No, I didn’t. But we did shoot wildly from where gunfire was coming, we don’t know if we hit anybody or nothing.
Aaron Elson: How about food, what would you eat?
Smokey Stuever: Food was the worst thing that we had. They never supplied me with rations, and we were always away from our company, you know. And the cook never seemed to care, even when I’d see him, I says, “You owe me at least a couple of months’ rations, and I don’t want no hash or stew.”
“That’s all we got.”
And that wasn’t all they had, they had other stuff. The C Rations was good, that was packaged stuff, there was, you know, like scrambled eggs in there and different things, it was like a breakfast thing. But in the Battle of the Bulge I had to go to the hospital. I was throwing up blood and I was passing blood through my bowels, so I went to the hospital and they checked me and they said, “There’s no problem. You’re very nervous. You’re very upset. And you’re eatin’ nothing but hash and stew. Now you take this back to your captain and you tell him that you don’t get no more hash and stew.” So whenever ran across, seen a convoy coming through and there was ration trucks he got stopped. “Go ahead, turn me in.”
Aaron Elson: Who would do that, Laing?
Smokey Stuever: One of our drivers, yeah.
The end!
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