The tale of the telegram
And other stories from a tank battalion reunion
One of the stories that turned me into an oral historian was a story I listened to from the middle to the end in the hospitality room at the first reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion that I went to in 1987. It may well have been the first story that cued me in to the richness of history in which I was immersed. It was told by Wayne Hissong, who drove an ammunition truck, although the story wasn’t about trucks blowing up or anything like that, and I would hear the full version later in the day. I don’t remember if I asked him later to repeat it from the beginning or if he just told it again, as I heard it more than once over the years. And at the 1993 mini-reunion in Bradenton, Florida the story was repeated during a conversation among several veterans. In this excerpt of that conversation, Wayne and Joe Fetsch were reminiscing. The excerpt begins when I asked if they remembered Mayenne — incorrectly, as it turns out, as I had intended to ask about Mairy, but I was still getting acclimatized to the remarkable roadmap of the battalion’s exploits.
Joe Fetsch: I don’t remember much about Mayenne. There was a counterattack at Mayenne but there was a counterattack at Avranches that was bigger. That’s right after they broke out of St. Lo, and they [the Germans] were pushing, trying to get back.
I can remember it was always hot as hell, hot as hell. And we had a Jewish boy — we had three Jewish boys in our company, Flietman, Margolsky and Lewis. And Ockie Flietman, he was a funny guy, out of St. Paul, Minnesota, and he dove in a hole head first and piece of flak of our own antiaircraft went through that and hit him in the ass, and he hollered and came out and he said, “God damn, I’m hit! I’m hit!” And somebody said, “God damn it, Hitler’s still after you Jews.”
Wayne Hissong: I’m the one who told him that. I said, “Flietman, you call these Germans dumb and I said look, out of a whole goddamn company they pick out one Jew and they hit you.”
Joe Fetsch: I knew somebody said it.
Wayne Hissong: He was right beside me.
Joe Fetsch: And then a little while later, where were we, St. Vith, and Harry Moody had found a Belgian .32, and Flietman was, what buildings were left in that town, was on the second floor and it went off accidentally. And Harry was on the first floor, it went up and hit Ockie in the arm. He’s dead and gone, rest his soul. Just died last year. And he never made a reunion.
Wayne Hissong: Nope. And I hunted all over ... one time we were in Minnesota, we were coming back from northern Minnesota, hunting mushrooms or fishing or some damn thing, and I stopped in Minneapolis and I spent three hours trying to find him. I’d call and call and call and I mean I’d get numbers and this and that, never, never did I locate him. Man, I wanted to find him.
Joe Fetsch: When I became president of the company a few years back, first thing I did, Mary wrote to him. I didn’t call him. I said, Ockie, you probably don’t remember me, but, calling him Ockie, I figured he’d remember that more than anything else, because nobody else called him Ockie but Ich. But I never heard from him.
Wayne Hissong: He told me that his folks owned a nightclub, and when he left to come to service, he told me that in the back corner of the nightclub, there was a table for four, and his parents roped that off, and nobody could sit at that table until he came home.
Joe Fetsch: He did make it home. He was all right, though. Christ, could he handle a deck of cards. He could stack a deck on you quicker than look at you. He was a slicker.
By this time I realized I had meant to ask about Mairy rather than Mayenne. It was at Mairy, France, on Sept. 8, 1944, that the battalion engaged in a battle with the German 106th Panzer Brigade. The battle broke out at about 2 a.m., died down, and resumed in the morning. This was where Forrest Dixon, the battalion maintenance officer, jumped into a tank with no engine and knocked out a German tank that was approaching the maintenance area.
Joe Fetsch: At Mairy, I was running past the tank as Forrest Dixon was jumping in. I had stumbled over a molehill. There were a lot of molehills over there, and they’d overrun us that night. In fact, when we went down in that area, I think the German MPs put us down in there.
In the morning, they started over the hill, and Oggia was up in that clump of trees, and he got a Silver Star, with a bazooka. He let the tank come past him and when he got past he hit him in the ass and knocked him out, and that’s what veered that tank. And when it veered, that’s when Dixon jumped in that tank with no engine in it.
Wayne Hissong: That’s where Oggia got the Silver Star. And he got a leave after that. He got to go home for five days or so and then he came back.
Joe Fetsch: A lot of things happened with us. We didn’t know what was going on back at the company. We’d just back off a little bit and they’d bring gasoline to us and exchange cans if you had cans, empties.
Wayne Hissong: That was the only way that we could have ever operated. We had to dispatch drivers and trucks out. What was the name of the guy who was ... But anyway, when we were in France, he was out supposedly delivering water to the tanks, and he’d run into a cider mill. He filled up his whole goddamn truck with hard cider and took it out and delivered it to all these tankers. Why hell, if the Germans knew it then, he had the whole battalion drunk. William Hall! That’s it. I think the whole battalion was about half looped up.
Joe Fetsch: The thing I couldn’t believe, they’d give ammunition drivers a helper, and here we had 1,500 gallons of gas, 300 cans on the truck, by yourself. They only called for 250. We’d stack ‘em this way, then with two flats and then come across again, and that’s how I got 1,500 gallons on my truck. It was sort of like a pregnant cow it was bowed out so far. But those extra 50 cans meant a lot.
Wayne Hissong: One time, just after we broke through the hedgerows, I went back to a depot to get gas, and it was run by colored, so I come back and they said, “Well, you put your cans over here, and you go down there and you fill up,” and I said, “Hey look.” I said, “I need gas, I need it now. The Germans have started a counterattack. They’re about five miles up the road. I need gas right now for my tanks.” I’m telling you, there was a gas can in the air all the time and another one going on the truck at the same time.
Joe Fetsch: You always had what, six, eight, ten trucks, every convoy when you went back for gas?
Wayne Hissong: Just before I got hit, because the supply line was getting so far stretched out, we had talked about having a tank escort from D Company, light tanks. And they said, well, no, we won’t do it just now. Well, I went on that last run, they didn’t send anybody, and then from then on, as I understand it, of course, I didn’t get back, but they had an escort from then on.
Joe Fetsch: I didn’t know either, because you got injured one day, I got injured the next. [Wayne’s convoy was ambushed on April 1, 1945; and Joe was injured in the explosion at Heimboldshausen, Germany, on April 3.]
Wayne Hissong: I was injured on Sunday, April 1st, April Fool’s Day.
Joe Fetsch It was Easter Sunday, because I got hurt Easter Monday. [The exact timing is a little off here, but what the heck, it was 49 years earlier!]
Wayne Hissong: I remember writing home to my uncle, and I told him it was a hell of an Easter parade I was in. But the hell of it was, they sent a telegram to my folks, and the first telegram that they got was that I was missing in action. Then they got another telegram that I was a prisoner of war. Then they got another telegram that I was wounded in action. They didn’t know what was going on, until I got to Paris and got a letter out to them.
Joe Fetsch: Well, see, that’s what happened. We lived in row houses [in Philadelphia], what they call town houses now. And the kid next door to me, he went in, oh, maybe a year after me, and ended up in the infantry, and my mother and my sister had gone out of the house, they’re going up to the store, it’s getting late at night, and it was the same old guy that delivered the government telegrams in the neighborhood. And they see him with a flashlight. And he hits our house and hesitates. And he hits the next house and he hesitates. And he comes back and looks at ours. My sister’s telling me this, now, she says, “I couldn’t hold onto Mom.” He went next door, and he had a letter, the telegram said, “Your son is missing in action.”
So Christ, a week later here comes another telegram, “Your son was killed in action.” Well Christ, my mother went over and nursed this lady for like a week to get her back on her feet. That was in January, around in the Bulge time is when he got killed. Here comes April, the first part of April, and here’s the same little guy again, he’s got his light out. And my mother’s seeing him coming up the road. It made her sick, she damn near died. She damn near died. Then she was scared to open the envelope, that telegram. My sister opened it, and it just said that I was wounded.
Wayne Hissong: When I got hit my mother was in the hospital. So when Dad got the first notice, he went to the doctor and he said, “Doc,” he says, “how are we going to explain this” to my mother? “Look,” he says, “she looks for a letter from him about twice a week or something.”
“Weeellll,” the doctor says, “you just leave that to me. I’ll find some way to explain it to her.”
So he got these telegrams. Three telegrams. He got two one day and then one the next day, all of them conflicting with one another. So Doc, he went in one morning to my mother, and he sat down beside the bed and talked to her, and examined her, and he said, “Boy,” he says, “you know, that son of yours, he is one tough sonofabitch.”
And my mother said, “What?”
“Well,” he says, “they kicked the hell out of him, but he’s all right,” he says, “he’s gonna make it.” He said, “Don’t you worry now. He got beat up a little bit, but he’s gonna make it all right.”
She accepted it, and that was it.
I was talking about this afternoon, how fortunate I was, how fortunate you were, to get hooked up with an outfit like this.
Joe Fetsch: And we could have gone either way. We could have stayed back with the 10th [Armored Division].
Wayne Hissong: And according to Les [Lester O’Riley, then the battalion association president], we weren’t scheduled to go overseas. We were supposed to be a training outfit. And the goddamn trains got crossed up; well, maybe that’s a good thing, because who knows what would have happened. How long would we have been at Fort Knox? Looking back onto it, at the particular time, there were some parts of it that were painful, but looking at it now, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Joe Fetsch: You could have all the money in the world and not buy the experience. And the camaraderie. And we were kids, too. You’re talking 21, 22, 23.
Wayne Hissong: I think one of the hardest things I had to do, when I went into the service, there was four of us went in together, and one of the fellows, Mitchell, John Charles Mitchell, B Company, he and I graduated from high school together. He was in B Company, I was in Service Company, we went through everything, we got overseas, and he was one of the first ones in the battalion to get killed.
And when I came home, I mean, now his mother wrote me I don’t know, two or three letters overseas and wanted me to detail to her what happened.
And your letters were censored, you couldn’t tell much. And I really couldn’t tell her too much, only what I had heard
Joe Fetsch: And then they would clip it out. They would censor your mail.
Wayne Hissong: And then when I got home, My dad met me at Plymouth [Indiana], at the railroad station, about 2 in the afternoon, and we got home, and we went to the little town of Argos, so finally we went to my brother’s house, and I said, “Well, I’m gonna go uptown, Dad,” and he said, “Well, I’ll go with you.”
And on my way uptown, he says, “Now, I want to tell you,” he said, “Mitchell’s mother is waiting for you.” And she worked in a dry goods store on the corner. No way I could get around her, absolutely no way, hell, I could have went forty different ways and she could still see me, and I’m walking down the street, and boy, here she comes across the street. And she wanted to know how it happened. And man, I could just tell her so much.
He was a tank driver. At one time, he was considered one of the best tank drivers there was in our battalion. As I understand it, they came around a bend in a road that was blind on his side...and he was engaged to a girl in England to marry, and his mother, now let me get this straight, he had wrote his mother and told her that he was gonna get engaged to a girl in England, and he went overseas before he got a chance to get the ring, and his mother got the ring.
Joe Fetsch: His sister had sent this gal a wedding gown and everything else. Good looking gal. She was a twin.
Wayne Hissong: We graduated from high school together, enlisted together, and went through basic training and everything, and we got separated, and there was only so much I could say.
This last story was the one I heard at that first reunion, although this was recorded in 1993. I would later meet Orval Williams, who was in the tank with John Mitchell when he was killed (and Williams wounded). The shell that penetrated their tank and wounded Williams in the turret, partially decapitated Mitchell seated below Williams in the driver’s compartment. I can only surmise that Wayne knew this and chose not to share such a detail with Mitchell’s mother, although it’s conceivable Wayne didn’t know all the details. I also would meet and interview Dan Diel, the tank commander in which Mitchell was killed.
The war was over for Orval Williams, whose hand and arm were badly injured, but when I went to Macalester, Oklahoma to interview him, he blamed his tank commander for getting his buddy killed. This was one of several instances I’ve encountered of veterans holding a grudge, which I hope to address in a future Substack. Williams said that while his time in the battalion was such an important part of his life, he could never go to a reunion because he was afraid he would see Sergeant [later lieutenant] Diel. The irony is that if he went to a reunion, the animosity likely would have evaporated and that anger would have been gone. The upshot was that the 75 millimeter cannon had a high-explosive shell in the breech, and when the tank turned a corner it was staring down the barrel of a German tank maybe 100 yards away (I’m guessing here). Sergeant Diel called for Williams, the loader, to remove the high-explosive shell and replace it with an armor-piercing round, which was the textbook thing to do, Diel said, and it gave the German time to fire first. If he had fired the high-explosive which was already in the breech, it wouldn’t have penetrated the enemy tank but it might have thrown the German gunner’s aim off or bought enough time to get off an armor-piercing shot. But because Williams was wounded and evacuated, and wouldn’t return, he never got a chance to express his anger at Sergeant Diel and say what the hell were you thinking?
Thank you for reading and sticking with my Substack while I’ve been preoccupied with re-launching the Kassel Mission Chronicles podcast. Jim Bertram, the president of the Kassel Mission Historical Society, and Linda Dewey, my co-host, both agreed that the podcast needed a bit of music and a proper introduction, which meant I had to learn how to add music, which meant watching a bunch of YouTube videos which of course made it look easy. Easy my eye, as my mother used to say. But I’m just waiting for my co-host to OK the finished product and then it’s on to the next episode, but I plan to keep these Substacks coming as well. And if you’d like to check out the Kassel Mission Chronicles, they’re on all the major podcast outlets, as is my original podcast, War As My Father’s Tank Battalion Knew It (103 episodes!).