'Where the hell is my other shoe?'
This is a true story, Jim Rothschadl said.
“You know, there are some things a guy really remembers.” Jim Rothschadl said. “We came into a field, this was before Hill 122; we came into a field late in the evening. A small, little field; there had been a battle there the day before, and we came into this field, and I got out of the tank. There were bodies laying all over. They had to have been there for quite a while, because they had rigor mortis. And lo and behold, here come some jeeps, I don't know if anybody ever told you this, some jeeps with trailers, and this was a special crew that done this. So I was watching them. I couldn't believe this. They’d pick ’em up and throw them in the trailers, guys with arms sticking out, and legs sticking out. They couldn’t get many in the trailers; they were small trailers. That stuck in my mind.
“Well, anyway, freedom isn’t free. All the freedom we have comes with a price tag. All those guys that lost their lives there. And the only real heroes, you’ll find those beneath the white crosses and the Stars of David. Those of us that made it back were the fortunate ones. The only heroes are out there in the cemeteries.
“When I was in the hospital in England, I was looking around for people that I knew. It was a huge place, and on the end of every bed was a tag, with name, rank, serial number, and what else was on there; whether you were Protestant or Catholic. And they gave the units also. So I was looking for guys from the 712th [Tank Battalion], or the 90th [Infantry Division], or the 82nd Airborne. I knew some guys from the 82nd we'd trained with. So I go back and forth there, and one day, by god, I ran into a guy from my company. A fellow by the name of Coleman. He was the second cook in the kitchen all the while we were in Benning. So I said “What the hell happened to you?” His leg was all, he had a big cast all the way down his leg.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘them sonofabitches. One day they got short a loader in a tank and stuck me in a tank.’ He never was in a tank. He said. ‘They showed me what the hell to do,’ and god damn it, he got his knee in back there, I told you where the recoil from the breech, that's what smashed his leg. Smashed his whole knee up.
“Another guy I got to know in the hospital, his name is Fred Czarny. He was in the bed next to me in the hospital. I was already married at the time, to this wonderful lady. I went home on a furlough and got married. And my fingers got stiff, like pieces of board. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t bend them for a long time. This Fred Czarny, he would write for me. I would dictate to him.
“He stayed over there in the hospital, and he said, “‘When you get back to the States, send me a fifth of whiskey,’ named the kind, too. So when I got to Halloran General Hospital, I was going to keep my promise. I said to the nurses and doctors, ‘By god, I want to send this guy a fifth of whiskey.’ But there was a rule, you can’t send no whiskey overseas. You can’t do it, he said. I begged him. But I couldn't do it.”
“How was he wounded?” I asked.
“He got hit in the back. He was kind of heavyset. He had a lot of meat on him. He got hit by an artillery shell that just glanced over his; he was bent over. It just made a damn rut, an indentation on his right side. He lost control on that side. He was writing with his left hand.”
It was Lieutenant Jim Flowers who suggested I interview Jim Rothschadl, his gunner during the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy. Flowers, who lost both his legs and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, said Rothschadl was an Indian, and like most Indians, he was very stoic. What kind of Native American name is Rothschadl, I wondered. But when I got home and looked him up, his address was smack dab in the middle of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
Turns out he wasn’t Native American after all, you’d think Flowers would have known that! His father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant who came to South Dakota, well, I’ll let Jim explain.
Aaron Elson Now, tell me how you came to live on an Indian reservation?
Jim Rothschadl: My mother and father were born in Czechoslovakia; what is now Czechoslovakia. At the time when they were there it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They came to this country when they were 15 years old. They didn't know each other at the time. And they settled in a little Czech settlement in South Dakota, not far from Yankton. There were all Czechs there who had immigrated earlier. And one of the guys, one of the farmers, sponsored my dad. He was an indentured servant. He had worked three years for this fellow. The guy paid his passage and guaranteed him a job. My dad was one of five boys in his family, including a twin, his twin brother Martin. And his twin brother Martin was supposed to come the following year, but something happened and he didn't come, and my father ended up here alone. The rest of his family was in Czechoslovakia. By the way, his brother Martin, he got drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, and he became a lieutenant. I have a picture of him with his lieutenant's uniform on. My dad’s twin brother. And he was killed over there, at the end of the war. The First World War.
Anyway, my dad and mother were living in South Dakota, in a Czech settlement near Yankton. And of course he worked this thing off. Then he got a job in a — we’ve been down there a number of times — he worked in a cement factory in the winter months, and in the summer months he was a dray man. He hauled dray from the depot to various business places. And he also hauled beer to all the saloons. And he saved up a few dollars and he bought a house in Yankton.
While they were down there, there were a whole bunch of other Czechs there, and some were related to us, cousins. There were about six families that were related. And one day they were, I don’t know where they were, if it was in a saloon, but there was a brochure. And these guys, my dad and these other guys, wanted to farm. They were born and raised on a farm in the old country. They didn’t own it because big shots owned all the land, nobles and barons owned all the land. By god, lo and behold, they found this brochure stating that there’s virgin land for sale. It didn’t say nothing about an Indian reservation. Virgin land for sale. A little bit down, and there were no lending agencies like the FHA. Luck Land Company, called Luck Land Company in Waubun, which is still on the reservation. These guys were bankers, and this was an Indian reservation. And of course my folks didn't know this. And some time way back there, the government allotted — there’s 800,000 acres on this reservation. They brought these Indians up and put them on the reservation. There's a village over here called White Earth, that’s where they settled them. After they were here for a while, those Indians, the government said ‘Oh, gee, there’s 800,000 acres here, we’re going to give each one of you 160 acres, and you should start farming,’ they told these Indians. So each Indian family got 160 acres; if they were a bigger family they'd get 240. These were called allotments. And they never had to pay taxes. Well, they were all allotted this land. And then a few years later, to make a long story short, the Minnesota Legislature — I know all about this — the Minnesota Legislature requested the United States government, the bureau of Indian affairs, to let the Indians sell their land if they wanted to. And Indians never were interested in farming. They hunted together and they fished together and they shared everything. They were never meant to be farmers. But they had these allotments. And these land barons here, the bigwigs, wanted to make some bucks. They got the Congress to pass a law, I think it was called the Klapp Act or the Nelson Act, letting Indians sell their land. And of course, they were hoodwinked into selling it real cheap. Like two dollars an acre, or three dollars an acre. I went through all the records in the Bedford County courthouse, and found out every parcel, how much they paid for it. I had to do it because I was a county commissioner, and we went through a court thing, a land claim settlement, because some of the Indians claimed it back. But anyway, these bankers, these three guys, Davis and Walter and another fellow, talk about ripoff artists, they had a bank, and they went around and they offered these Indians two dollars an acre, or four dollars or five dollars. Then they got title to this land. Then they sold it to my dad and all these other Bohemians that came up here, they sold it for $50 an acre. And they financed it, 14 percent interest. Way back there, 14 percent interest. And they weren’t told it was an Indian reservation. They didn’t know it. Hell, they could hardly talk English. They didn't know it until they settled here. Even this place right here, her dad, this belonged to an Indian. There were no buildings, nothing here. Her dad bought it from the same company as my dad did.
Aaron Elson: How many acres did your father buy?
Jim Rothschadl: My dad bought 160 to begin with, and so did John. They bought some more later on.
My dad, he loved this country with a passion. On the Fourth of July, he’d say “Well, boys, no work today. Today is the birthday of the United States of America,” and even though he was hard up, you know, it was during the Depression years, he made sure that we had some firecrackers, and we got some marshmallows and some wieners to roast, and we had three little flags to put on the hood of the Model A or the Model T. He thought this country was great. And I thought more about him, when I was over there, about the value, and his values, than I did about Old Glory itself.
There were times when all of us, when times got bad, when we said ‘Hell, let’s get the hell out of here, we’ll go AWOL — we were just kidding, none of us ever did. But I said to myself, ‘Boy, I would never, ever disappoint my dad, doing something like that.’
On the afternoon of July 10, 1944, the first platoon, Company C, led Company K of the 358th Infantry Regiment, 90th Infantry Division, down the steep slope of Hill 122, where they were surrounded by German paratroopers of the 5th Fallschirmjaeger Division.
“I was afraid like all of us were,” Rothschadl said. “Some of the guys, we were told in training, ‘Don’t freeze.’ I guess a few guys did; I just heard that, you know. They got so petrified or frightened they just froze. But I kept saying to myself, I kept reminding myself, ‘Don’t freeze. Watch.’ So I didn’t freeze. But I was damn scared. Because you know, you’re sitting there without too much visibility. I had control of the turret; I had control of the gun up and down. I had manual control and I had electrical control. I had two buttons I could push, one for the 75, to fire, and one for the .30 caliber. But I also had manual, in case the electric went off. There were manual triggers for both the 75 and .30.
“The turret had a toggle in it, that was electrical. But it also had a little wheel there, so you could traverse it manually. There was another wheel; one was for traversing the turret, and the other was for raising the gun up. When my tank got hit, the little wheel was right in front of me, and it knocked four of my teeth out. It just broke them off. So I remember that wheel pretty well.
“And I had two sights there. The .30 caliber and the 75 were coaxial.
“I felt sorry for my loader. He was sitting in a position, you’d have to look inside of a tank; the breech on these 75 cannons is a huge breech. The shells were about two feet long, so that breech was big, and when you fired, it went back almost to the back of the turret. It made a hell of a racket. He was sitting back there, on the side of us. He had a little porthole on the side of the turret. It had a little handle; he could open it to throw out the casing. Otherwise, he couldn’t see anything at all. So his job, of course, was to feed the belt if the .30 caliber was firing, and to load the 75. It was a hell of a position. For another reason. To try to get out of it. And of course the danger of that recoil.
“We had extra barrels along for the .30 caliber. We were told to fire short bursts, or the barrel would get too hot. So he had a pair of big asbestos gloves, mittens. And he would screw the barrel off, and put another one on. The barrel would get so hot that it would kind of bend a little bit and the goddamn bullets would fall in front of the tank. It would get that hot if you fired too many rounds without stopping.
“We could see that because there were tracers; even in the daytime you could see where you were firing. He had a tough job, [Ed] Dzienis; that's a story in itself. A miraculous story.
“How he got out?” I asked.
“Yes. There was an escape hatch in the floor of the turret, but the turret had to be turned just a certain way.
“Anyway, we thought, and so did Flowers, that he was killed. In fact, sometime after I got back here, after I got discharged and came home, I got a listing of all of the Gold Star mothers, and she was listed there, his mother. So I thought Edward was killed over there. But I don’t know all the details yet. I did call there, and I wrote, and I did get a letter about eight, ten years ago from one of his sisters.
“What I gather happened, he got that damn hatch open, the turret must have been just right, and went out, and got captured. That’s what I understand. He was captured, and he was a prisoner. That’s what one of his sisters said. She said he was taken to a place and he told her ‘thousands of Americans,’ he said thousands of prisoners. He got kind of mixed up, you know. When he finally did get back, when they found him, he must have lost his dog tags, and it was months and months before they finally found out that he was alive.
“When I found out about it I was shocked. But he did make it back, and these two sisters took care of him, and one of them wrote me a letter. It was garbled. But he remembered me in the letter. He remembered me. We was pretty good buddies. We used to call him Mother Dzienis.”
“I was going to ask you about that. Louie Gerrard, who was in one of the other tanks, said that that was his nickname; he was like a mother hen.”
“He kept watch on us. He prayed for us all the time. He prayed the rosary all the time. We went out sometimes in these towns and stuff and got some beer; he tagged along and he would never drink, and he would make sure we got back. We used to call him Mother Dzienis. He was a nice fellow. It’s sad. He passed away. He made it back, but I guess he never was the same.
“Who else would have gone out through the turret? Flowers says he gave you a hand, and pulled you out through the turret. How did you get out?”
“Well, I can recall it. I know exactly, like it happened yesterday. We were going along there and we were firing.
“Were you firing the big gun or the machine gun?”
“The machine gun then, because they were on this hill, going up this slope, and they were dug in. Close together, lots of foxholes. And some were on top, working the machine guns. Hundreds of them. I was firing the .30 caliber most of time; that’s when Dzienis had a problem getting these damn barrels in there fast enough. I was too damn heavy on the trigger.
“And they were firing at us, with small arms and rifle grenades.”
“The rifle grenade wouldn't penetrate?” I asked.
“No. Damn near. They were magnesium, phosphorus. It would weld itself onto the tank, and almost go all the way through. They would aim at the turret circle. If one hit there you couldn’t turn the turret. Some tanks were knocked out of action just because of that.
“And then when that first shell hit the tank, big shell, hit the right front, I presume it hit the sprocket I think, and we stopped. And when it hit, the tank went up.”
“It lifted the tank up?”
“God damn right it did. It lifted the front end way up, and it come on down. The motor was still running. It was an 88 went through; I'm sure it was an 88. It was a big shell; the 88 is a high-velocity. Anyway, Flowers was looking for it, that 88. And he was telling me, ‘Move from the middle to the right. And I was trying to. I quit firing the .30 then; we had already been hit. And I remember Gary, Horace Gary, he was the driver, he started swearing down there. He started to swear, ‘God damn it, let’s get out of this sonofabitch. We’re sitting ducks. Let’s get the hell out of here.’ And Flowers told me to traverse to the right a little bit. He was poking me in the back. He was standing right behind me, see, I was sitting in the gunner’s seat, and he was saying something about over to the right, and I was trying to pick out something but I couldn’t, through the periscope. I did see a heat wave, where the blast was from. And I think I fired one round in there. I just pressed the damn trigger.”
“Do you remember what kind of ammunition you fired?”
“I’m not sure which kind. I think it was an H.E. [high explosive.] That’s what we would have used, because it was a field piece, an 88 field piece. We had the A.P. [armor piercing] too and we had white phosphorous. But anyway, this all took place in a matter of seconds from the time the first one hit.
“I think Gary was pretty angry that we didn't get out earlier.”
“At this point the tank was not on fire yet?” I asked.
“No, it was not on fire yet. And Gary and [Gerald] Kiballa were making all this, they were arguing. Anyway, it was a few seconds time. Thirty seconds, or whatever. The second shell hit. And that came through the turret. And that’s what knocked his leg off, Jim’s. [His right forefoot, actually.] I didn't know it at the time. There was this god damn humongous explosion, and racket, and heat.
“The turret was open. It immediately caught fire. And the shell went right on through; it had to have been an A.P. If it had been H.E., I wouldn't be sitting here. It had to be an armor-piercing, and it went right on through. Those German 88s were known, they could hit the front of a tank and that 88 would come right out the back end.”
“Really?”
“You’re damn right. They had double the velocity of our 75s. Double. The 88 was a powerful thing.
“I remember I was burning, and I was hooked onto a, I was plugged into a radio thing there. I was trying to get up from my little seat. I remember thinking just for a moment about unplugging the radio. But then of course it was flaming inside. I got out, by myself, as far as my armpits. That hole isn’t very big up there, you know. Then I fell back in. And Jim Flowers — when I first got out as far as my armpits, I seen him laying right alongside the tank, flat on his back.”
“He was out already?”
“He was out, and flat on his back. And I seen then, I had my visibility, his leg was off about here, and I seen blood squirting out. Then I fell back in.”
“When you said the leg was off, you pointed to a point about midcalf?”
“Six inches below the knee. And then, he must have seen me, because he was laying there looking up at me. He came back on the tank.”
“He came back on the tank?”
“He came back on the tank. And then he helped me. I kind of revived and I got up and got some air, and I got about as far as my belly here, and he let himself off because there wasn't enough room there with him, he let himself fall again and I seen him fall backwards onto the ground. And I managed, because, hell, by then my clothes were burning. It's a good thing I had three sets of clothes on.”
“You had...”
“A set of o.d.'s. [olive drabs] And we had a set of impregnated fatigues.
“What were they impregnated with?”
“Some awful crappy stuff. You know what fatigues are? They were impregnated, and they were kind of stiff, and they were supposed to stop gas. Poison gas. They were impregnated for that. And on top of that, just before we went to France, they issued each of us combat tank pants and a combat tanker’s jacket. So we had three sets of clothes on. Some of the guys in our outfit, it got so hot in there they took some of them off and then they got burned really bad.
“When I finally got myself out I let myself fall head-first, and he was still laying there. I hit the ground — now I had my senses — I hit the ground, of course, we had been told, they went over all this, you’ve got to get the fire out. And I started to roll. And lo and behold, lo and behold, all of a sudden, plunk! I just fell down into a hole. It may have been a bomb crater. Sometime ahead of us they had been bombing with these Mustangs and these Thunderbolts. There was a hole there; I presume it was from one of those. It was four or five feet deep, and there was a lot of loose dirt. I plunked down in there, and covered myself with this dirt. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.
“I was laying there for quite a while, and my hands were all burnt, of course, and my face. I stuck my hands into the dirt. Anyway, and the god damn devils were firing at us.”
“Where is your helmet at this time?”
“I don't know where my helmet went. My tanker's helmet. It probably fell off when I hit the ground.” And then I could see tracers going over top of us. See, there were a lot of infantry with us. A whole company. One company. But anyway, I laid in the hole there, and of course it didn’t swell up right away. So I lay there, and the firing stopped, to almost nothing. And by that time it was almost dusk, evening time. And Jim Flowers crawled from where he was laying by the tank and right ahead of us, not more than 25 feet ahead of us, was a hedgerow, okay? And almost directly in front of our tank and off to the side of it was a hole in the hedgerow; it was made in there by either a bomb or something. There was a hole. These hedgerows are quite high, four or five feet high, and here was this hole. At the time I didn't know he was there, but Jim crawled, from where he was he crawled through that hole. The hole was six or eight feet wide. Five feet wide. He crawled through there, and lay down on the other side of the hedgerow. And I was laying about, I would say fifty feet or a hundred feet from the tank. I rolled the other way, toward the back. Not directly back but off to the side, from this hole. After a while, when things quieted down there, he was calling for me. He called my name. I could hear him plaintively. So then I crawled up in this damn hole.
“My tendon was cut. I had a pair of shoes on, and I don't know if it was a gunshot or a shrapnel wound, but it cut the tendon off. I could take my right foot and pull the toe up until it touched the leg. And it didn't hurt. Anyway, I crawled over there. I kept following his voice. And the first thing I came through this hole and there he was laying there.”
Flowers and Rothschadl spent two nights in no man’s land, during which time so-called friendly artillery fire tore off Flowers’ other foot, and both men were rescued on the third day.
[For a more detailed account of the battle, in which four tanks were knocked out and nine of the 20 crew members were killed, read my book “They Were All Young Kids.”
“Tell me about,” I said, “you said that Kiballa was your closest buddy. Would you go out drinking together?”
“Oh yeah,” Rothschadl said. “Whenever we left camp, whenever we’d get a pass in the States we went together. He and I and [Clarence] Rosen, Dzienis, and we had a couple of guys from Minnesota, {Linden] Fellbaum. We kind of stuck together.
“But Kiballa, now this Jim Driskill, you got that [the tape recorder] on?”
“Yes. Do you want it off?”
“No. Leave it on. Jim Driskill was one hell of a good guy. He was maintenance platoon sergeant. And it was his duty to go up after, whatever, and check the tanks and find the bodies and identify them. And the first sergeant generally went with him, old [Floyd] Spearman, an old guy
.“Anyway, when we were still in England, this is kind of a little side story, when we were still in England, this Driskill and I were good friends, I liked the guy, he was a raw-boned Texan, a farmer. About a month before we went to France or something like that, we were all issued a new pair of shoes. Everybody got a new pair of shoes. And his platoon, maintenance platoon, didn’t have to stand inspection. We did. The line troops had to stand inspection every so often, get shined up. So I happened to get a damn pair of shoes that were kind of, had a little fuzz on, they were hard to keep the shine on. But I got them, you couldn’t say “No, I don't want these.” You took what you got. But I couldn’t keep a nice polish on them, so I was kind of bitching about that a little bit to Jim one day, because I think just the day before we had an inspection and the inspecting officer bawled me out for not having my shoes polished properly. (chuckling) It was crazy. And Jim says, “Jesus, I’ve got a nice pair of shiny ones,” he said. And the same size as mine. We wore the exact same size.
“But soon as we got the shoes, you know, you had to stamp your name and serial number in them, with indelible ink, inside your shoe there. Name and serial number. So I had already done that with mine, and he had done it with his. So I was sick and tired of catching hell for not having polished shoes. ‘Hell, let’s trade,’ he said. ‘You take my shoes and I'll take yours.’ Fine. So we did. We traded shoes. And I forgot about it. We traded shoes.
“And of course, when this thing happened, when I got hit down there, it blew my shoe off. I didn't know it at the time, but it blew my shoe off. And when he and his group came up to our tanks some days later, to see what they could salvage or they could find, he said he was walking around there — he told this to my wife and I, we went to Texas to see him — there was a shoe laying, he said. He picked it up, and god damn, it was Jim Driskill’s.
“And I hadn't heard from that guy since Day One. So he sent me a letter. One day here comes the mail and there's a letter from Jim Driskill. He never had my address, see. Somehow or another he got ahold of my address, so he wrote me a letter. So my wife got the mail and there was this letter from Jim Driskill. And the first sentence, she got a bang out of it too, my wife, the first sentence he says, ‘Where the hell is my other shoe?’
“We happen to have a son out in Arizona, so one time we were driving to Arizona, and I thought I’ll stop and see the old boy. It was about 400 miles out of the way. He lives in the town of Claude, Texas, in the Panhandle. So we stopped at his place, and visited with him for quite a few hours. And we talked about that shoe, what a coincidence it was, walking out there and looking for this grizzly stuff out there and here he finds a shoe with his name in it.”
“Did he know at that time that you had been rescued?” I asked.
“I don't think he did at the time. He didn’t know what the hell. But anyway, getting back to Kiballa, from his version, Kiballa was killed getting out of the tank. He was halfway out when he got shot.”
“Flowers says that Kiballa was killed leaving [after he got out of the tank.”
“He was just getting out of the tank. Jim Driskill knows this; he got halfway out of the assistant driver’s seat when he got hit between the eyes, with a bullet. And he burned up. Jim Driskill said that he looked like a roasted duck.”
“So his remains were half out?”
“If you get a chance, you should talk to Jim Driskill. He was with us from Day One, and he was with the outfit till the end. I found out a lot from him, a lot of the details of what happened to some of the guys. He could give you some really accurate history. He's just a swell, prince of a guy. He's older than me, quite older, he's seven years older than I am. Too bad he’s so far off. One time I didn't hear from him for a while, and it turned out that he, I wrote to him and didn't get an answer. Months went by. So I called the directory down there and got his phone number, and I got ahold of him. He had been in the hospital for a number of months. But he got out of that.
“We had such a nice visit with him, and he got pretty emotional. Seeing all his buddies, and everybody just loved the guy.”
“That’s a true story about that shoe,” Jim Driskill said about a year later, when I visited him in Claude, Texas. “He [Rothschadl] was single, got over there in England, he liked to run around a little bit, but he had two pair of those split leather shoes. [Actually Rothschadl would have been married by then.]”
“Now when you say run around, run around with girls?” I asked.
“Well, he’d go out; I don't know if he’d go out and find women, but he'd go out on passes, and he couldn’t shine those split-leather shoes. And I was ahead of him in the line when they was issuing shoes, and they gave me two pair of smooth leather shoes. So we worked out a trade where he could have a pair that he could polish, so that's all right; I kept a pair that I kept greased up, you know, working on those tanks, I'd get my shoes greasy. I cheated him, I said, ‘Well, you could have these, they’re greasy.’ He said, ‘I’ll clean ’em up’ So I let him have those and he gave me a pair of split-leather, so I began to wear those to work on tanks. And then when Byrl [Sergeant Byrl Rudd] and I went up there and lookin’ around, there was a shoe layin’ there. And I picked that shoe up, just wondering whose shoe that was, here D7105, that was my shoe that I had traded on Jim.”
