Holiday memories: Battle of Bulge gives G.I. cold, hungry Christmas

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By Tory Brecht | Monday, December 24, 2007 8:32 AM CST | () comments

James Schaefer of Davenport, a World War II veteran, shows some of the medals he earned during the war. Schaefer took part in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and spent Christmas that year cold, hungry and fighting for his life. Buy this Photo

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Holiday Memories

The fresh-faced troops of the 42nd Rainbow Division rolling off the transport ship in Marseilles, France, just after Thanksgiving 1944 thought they were in for mop-up duty.

The U.S. Army had the Germans on the run, pushing them up through the Belgian and French forests and expecting to begin the race for Berlin soon.

James Schaefer — a young recruit from Cleveland in Company I, 232nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd — shared the optimism until he hit the front line near Strasbourg, days before the Germans launched a counter-offensive that would go down in history as the Battle of the Bulge.

“When we left the U.S., we were winning the war,” he said, adding that things were going so well the troops in his company were given only one clip of ammunition, two mortar shells and no artillery support.

That would prove to be a major problem beginning Dec. 17, when elements of the German army hit allied troops hard along a line stretching from northwest Belgium down to the Rhine River near Strasbourg on the Franco-German border where Schaefer was positioned.

“We were in skeleton lines, with guys about 50 yards apart,” he recalled. “We weren’t expecting any trouble.”

But trouble came to them in the form of enemy planes and infantry, giving Schaefer a frightening and surreal Christmas he would never forget.

“We suffered our first casualties Christmas Eve, when two guys got hit,” he said.

Schaefer and the troops of the 42nd were battling more than the Germans.

The weather was unnaturally cold and foggy, with the thermometer plunging to 10 and 20 degrees below zero. The men were on the very front lines, the closest troops to Berlin, and had no shelter. They scrabbled through frozen dirt to dig shallow foxholes, were short on C rations, short on ammo and stripped of their overcoats because a thick fog made it hard to tell friend from foe.

“They took our coats away from us, since the Germans were wearing long coats, so if you saw someone with a long coat, you shot ’em,” Schaefer said.

The officers kept the men on the move, switching them back and forth between regular trucks and amphibious “ducks” to try to convince the enemy that the Americans were there in greater numbers than they actually were.

Staying on the move meant leaving the cooks and other support personnel behind, which is how Schaefer found himself in a tiny, much-damaged village in the Alsace-Lorraine province of France on Christmas Day with nothing for a holiday meal but a frozen-solid can of C ration franks and beans.

Although there were civilians around, the brass had warned soldiers to be careful. Alsace-Lorraine had been fought over by the French and Germans seemingly forever, and there were partisans of both sides in each town and city.

“When we came into a village, the people would always put up American flags or white flags,” Schaefer recalled. “But one time, we were in a retreat and were going hell bent for election and the villagers had German flags up before we even got out of town. They were playing both sides of the fence there.”

So Schaefer, motivated by hunger, tried in vain to dig out his icy can of beans with a knife.

“Some of the gals from the village were coming down and giving the guys drinks of water,” he said. “I saw this lady come out, and she saw me trying to dig out the can, and she indicated she’d heat it up for me.”

Schaefer hesitated.

“They warned us before we got to the front not to eat food and to be leery of any water we drank from civilians, because it might be poisoned,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘I might not even be here in the next few minutes,’ so I let her take them.”

The nameless villager disappeared into her house and emerged minutes later with a steaming can of hot pork and beans.

“They were hot and delicious, and I savored every bit,” Schaefer said.

That momentary spark of normality in the midst of madness has stuck with Schaefer for 63 years. He will remember it as about the only good thing that happened in a miserable Christmas of 1944.

“The way things were going, I tell ya, morale could have been higher,” he said. “I won’t say it was low, but we felt like we’d been given a bunch of propaganda. We left winning the war, and when we got there, we weren’t winning.”

But they kept fighting.

Through December and on until his unit was finally pulled back in February, after the German offensive had been thrown back, Schaefer and men like him battled over every inch of ground.

“When you’re up on the front, everyone else is behind you,” he said. “Each guy has his own war. Each guy has his own war.”

Tory Brecht can be contacted at (563) 383-2329 or tbrecht@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.