Driving with the Devil Read online

  Eastern Belgium had been overrun by Germany in World War I but regained its independence after Germany's defeat in that war. In 1940, Hitler reclaimed eastern Belgium as part of his “Third Reich.” After the success of D-day and the U.S. Army's invasion of mainland Europe, the Allies began closing in on Germany's western front, in preparation for a full-scale offensive. Hitler, meanwhile, was making plans to blast through the Allied lines—thereby splitting the coalition in two—then to plow west into Antwerp and negotiate peace from a position of strength. But Hitler didn't expect the fierce Ninety-ninth Infantry, nor the brutal winter and its waist-high snows, nor the turning-point Battle of the Bulge, which signaled the beginning of the end for the Third Reich.

  Parks entered that historic standoff in mid-November of 1944. Because Parks's 394th Infantry Regiment, and much of the 99th Infantry Division, lacked combat experience, they were assigned to a region far south of the point where military officials expected the Germans to attack. But within days of arriving in the Ardennes region, Parks's regiment suffered its first fatalities. The leader of a reconnaissance patrol was “ripped from head to groin” by enemy machine-gun fire. Two of the men sent to recover the body were also killed—just a tepid prelude to one of the toughest battles ever fought by the U.S. Army.

  On December 12, 1944, Parks and the others were told to stuff all their personal possessions into duffle bags, stack them up, and begin moving farther east toward the enemy. They'd never see those duffle bags again. The men knew their war was about to get serious, even though creeping through the pine trees with fingers on the triggers of their army-issue M-l rifles felt “melodramatic and unreal,” as one soldier put it.

  After three days of eerie quiet, the riflemen of Parks's D Company (a subset of the 394th Infantry) continued to advance through the snow, followed by the rest of the company's machine guns and mortars. Up ahead, the earth suddenly exploded. As one soldier described it, “Mortar bomb explosions ripped the air with hot metal, dirt, snow, and rocks… thousands of bullets snapped, crackled, and whined, all searching for yielding flesh and fragile bone.”

  Hitler's generals had taken the U.S. Army by surprise, and the four-day battle that began December 16 would determine the course of the war in Europe. Parks's regiment was among the few in a position to stop the German armored divisions from cutting deep into Allied territory and achieving Hitler's goal of bisecting his enemy's defenses.

  At first, Parks and the others tried digging into the ground to hide from the fusillade, but the frozen ground was unyielding and their fingers quickly became bloody and frozen. Then came the “sssst-WHUMP” of artillery fire and the plop-plop-plop of incoming mortar rounds, followed by their concussive explosions and the whizzing release of shrapnel. Rockets called screaming meemies, which “sounded like howling wolves,” tore into pine trees and the limbs rained down on the soldiers. Then came the buzzing of bullets and the “BLA-A-AP” of German machine pistols called burp guns.

  Through it all keened the shrieks of the wounded and dying. By the end of that first day of battle, Parks learned that most of his company's rifle platoon had been slaughtered.

  Parks had by now been promoted to technical sergeant, under orders to oversee and maintain the company's trucks and armored vehicles. His job as a “T-sergeant”—Parks joked he was a “Model T” sergeant—kept him back from the front lines, stationed with the vehicles in his care. Still, German bombs dropped all around, day and night.

  For the next four seemingly endless days, Parks and the Ninety-ninth Infantry were attacked again and again by screaming platoons of German soldiers dressed in white camouflage suits, who emerged like ghosts from the thick mist. Some advances were so thick, U.S. soldiers just aimed forward and began firing, their bullets cutting down enemies like scythes mowing tall grass. One night, Parks's company was pum-meled for ninety minutes by heavy German mortar and artillery fire. When the bombing ceased, German patrols suddenly appeared from the rear, where Parks's trucks and jeeps were parked. They had outflanked Parks's company, which fought back with mortar and machine-gun fire. They successfully repelled the German attack, and Parks's company sought a better position farther away from the front. After a mile-long sprint to higher ground, Parks ate his bland K rations but would not get another meal for three days.

  The Americans were wildly outnumbered. Some platoons were wiped out entirely, their soldiers killed or captured, while many other platoons lost half their men. Scores of young men had their arms and legs blown off, and during the hasty retreat, their dead or dying bodies were often left behind, crushed into muddy roads by advancing German tanks and trucks. U.S. Army commanders finally decided to pull even farther back, to a high ridge called Elsenborn. Parks and the others fled along slushy, muddy roads, fighting their way through dangerous villages. Officers urged the men on toward the hot coffee up ahead, but there was no coffee. At night, they marched single file, dejected at having been forced to flee, disgusted by the ruined roadside bodies of comrades. “They couldn't bag us fast enough,” Parks would recall years later.

  One of Parks's duties during that time was tending to the dead. He and his men would occasionally stop and bury American soldiers. More than once they stacked frozen German corpses in a barn. On December 19, Parks reached the hilltop of Elsenborn Ridge. He and the others were told this was their new home and to start digging foxholes. It took most of the night to dig a hole six feet square and five feet deep, and over the next twenty-four hours, wounded soldiers continued straggling into the encampments that would become the U.S. Army's final stand.

  Parks's men now had the chance to notice a transformation. They had remembered how, back in training, he had escaped the marching sessions with his bribes of moonshine, how he'd disappear at night to sleep with his girlfriend in their Texas love nest. But on Elsenborn Ridge, Parks seemed all business and, for the first time in his two years with the regiment, seemed willing to be part of their war.

  “How come you decided to start working?” one of Parks's platoon mates asked.

  Parks was now thirty years old, a decade older than most of the others. Back home, he'd left behind lucrative businesses, his son, and a passion for racing cars. Parks never thought the war would drag on this long. He thought he'd be back in Atlanta by now. But the past few horrific days proved otherwise. His shaky nerves had become hardened. He was angry and now felt he had no choice but to fight.

  “I'll do anything to get this damn war over with,” Parks said.

  The very next day, the Germans attacked from behind a hedgerow down the hill. Parks's platoon leader and platoon sergeant were killed when a shell exploded in their foxhole. But Hitler's troops were quickly mowed down by U.S. machine gunners atop the ridge, and many of the Germans subsequently surrendered. It was the first of many hard-won victories against a larger, better-armed, and persistent German opponent.

  During a brief lull in the fighting five days later, on a crisp, clear Christmas Day, Parks and his men shared cookies and cakes from home, melted caramel candy bars into their coffee, curled up with letters from home, and listened to the ringing of the church bells in the nearby village, now occupied by Germans. After that brief respite, Parks and the rest of the Ninety-ninth Infantry would spend the next five weeks repelling unpredictable German efforts to cut through their depleted lines of defense.

  Immediately after that crystalline Christmas, the snows came. Almost nightly, snow blanketed the ridge and packed the openings of the foxholes. Dawn then bloomed with soldiers, one by one, popping out of their snow-covered foxholes—”like some oversized gopher,” one man later wrote, “like a deranged garden sprouting mushrooms.” The men's faces were blackened with soot from the makeshift lanterns they'd devised, using bottles or cans and, as wicks, strips of sock or blankets soaked in gasoline.

  During the day, Parks occasionally got sent on patrols to strike against German positions. His olive-drab uniform was an easy target against the backdrop of snowdrifts. The Germans in the
ir white camouflage suits would loom suddenly out of thick fog and snow. Day after day, Parks's luck held, as he watched others get shot by those ghosts.

  At night, Parks curled into his corner of the two-man foxhole but slept fitfully. He and his foxhole mate were supposed to take turns on watch. But when it came to such crucial matters as his life, Parks wasn't comfortable trusting others. Most nights, Parks stayed awake, too, fearful that the other guy would fall asleep on watch.

  Rations were delivered every few days. Parks melted snow in his helmet to wash his hands and face but went weeks without bathing. Many of those who survived that terrible January got frostbite, and Parks was again glad that he'd swapped his army-issue boots for heavier civilian boots and that he'd brought extra pairs of wool socks.

  On January 30, the standoff finally came to an end. Parks and his regiment were ordered to attack through waist-deep snow against the entrenched Germans. “Move out,” came the order. An drab olive hulk of men marched straight ahead into the invisible enemy's machine-gun fire. Those who weren't immediately cut down couldn't believe they were still alive, still walking. But the first attack ended in an exhausted, demoralizing retreat. Then came another order. “Get ready, boys. We attack again in twenty minutes. HQ wants those woods.”

  It would take two more attacks to finally reach those woods, on January 31, when the snow turned suddenly to rain. The Germans were finally in retreat, but the U.S. Army had paid dearly. Parks helped stack frozen American corpses like firewood.

  Through February and March, the Ninety-ninth Infantry pushed the German army farther east, out of Belgium and into its homeland. The Battle of the Bulge and the terrible winter at Elsenborn Ridge were over. The United States was now on the offensive, and Parks's optimistic commanders allowed him a three-day pass to Paris, where Parks and his colleagues ate like wolves and drank champagne and spoke broken French with pretty young women—a surreal escape from the ungodly carnage. When Parks rejoined the 394th Infantry, they kept pushing east against the retreating Germans, past signs that read in English, “You are entering Germany, there will be no fraternization with any German.”

  On March 10, Parks was among the first U.S. soldiers to cross the Rhine River. At the town of Remagen, German regiments fired ceaselessly onto the railroad bridge below them, trying to destroy the U.S. Army's prime means of entry into their heartland.

  Parks led his trucks and jeeps across the bridge, past the crumpled bodies of dead soldiers, feeling exposed and terrified. Other troops marched single file, jumping across holes in the bridge. The crossing seemed to last forever. Some men, their hunger outweighing their fear of German bullets, stopped to grab K rations from the packs of their dead comrades.

  Fierce fighting continued on the hard-won east bank of the Rhine, where Parks and his fellow soldiers—many of them from the South— were surprised to be joined by the black faces of newly arrived troops. Due to a shortage of infantry, and the desires of African American soldiers to swap kitchen and laundry duty for battle, General Eisenhower had ordered the integration of black platoons, which now fought side by side with white soldiers and helped drive the German army back toward Berlin. The soldiers of Company K joined the 394th in mid-March, making it the first fully integrated U.S. Army regiment since the Revolutionary War.

  For the next month, the 394th and Company K pushed deeper into Germany. Parks drove through town after town, surveying the heartbreaking destruction of once-beautiful villages, where German children with pails begged for food. Photos that he and his colleagues snapped captured the woe of their melancholy task. In some photos, Parks's company mates are clowning around, pretending to chug from empty champagne bottles. Behind them are scenes of carnage: debris-choked streets, twisted train tracks, smoke rising from crumbled stone homes and churches. One photograph shows cold-looking German soldiers crouched behind the wire fence of a POW camp.

  In photographs of that period, Parks appears somber, subdued. When the men found stashes of wine or champagne in a cellar, he never got drunk like the others. He had never developed a taste for drink. Not the champagne in Paris nor the moonshine back home. There was nothing to celebrate about pilfering hooch from a beaten village.

  At one town, soldiers stopped at the rural home of a German farmer, his wife, and their beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, a farm that could have fit into the hills of northern Georgia. In the tree-shaded yard, surrounded by a privet hedge, sat a 1937 Ford. The Americans took turns driving it up and down the rutted lane, until the transmission seized and the car ground to a halt. The soldiers apologized and left. Parks just shook his head, watching the German family stand helplessly in their yard.

  Through April of 1945, as springtime flowers bloomed on trees and in fields, Parks and his regiment continued to plow across Germany's industrial heartland, attacking the retreating pockets of German resistance. On April 12, President Roosevelt died at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, south of Atlanta.

  A few weeks later, after crossing the Danube, the Ninety-ninth Infantry received orders from headquarters to “cease active operations.” At first, there were no cheers of jubilation. Troops refused to believe their war could be ending. Later, another message relayed a more explicit message—the “unconditional surrender” of Germany—and smiles blossomed across the faces of T-Sergeant Parks and his weary men.

  Parks sailed home from Marseille, but instead of being delivered to Georgia, a paperwork snafu landed him in Florida. He had to ask one of his workers in Atlanta to pick him up and drive him back home to Georgia. On September 27, 1945, Parks was officially relieved of duty. More than eleven hundred of his colleagues in the Ninety-ninth Infantry had been killed and more than four thousand injured. Parks, amazingly, sustained hardly a scratch.

  Parks and the entire 394th Infantry were officially honored by General George Marshall for repelling the enemy attacks at the Battle of the Bulge. The 394th, said Marshall, had been outnumbered six to one; was repeatedly attacked from the front, sides, and rear; but held their ground without allowing the enemy to breach the Allied line of defense. In a strongly worded letter of commendation, Marshall wrote of the “tenacious stand,” “the unflinching courage,” and the “overwhelming odds.”

  Parks was personally awarded a Good Conduct Medal and a Distinguished Unit Badge, both of which he put into a safe-deposit box, and then got back to work. He considered himself “one of the lucky ones,” even though the chatter of gunfire and the screams of dying young men would remain inside his head for many years.

  Parks would soon learn that he'd been fortunate compared to Red Byron.

  Byron's introduction to his own battlefield began with a slow, aerial descent toward the jagged, volcanic, snow-blanketed Aleutian Islands, which stretched in a crooked chain off the southwest corner of the U.S. territory of Alaska (to be named the forty-ninth state in 1959). The islands created an east-to-west barrier of sorts between the north Pacific and, above that, the Bering Sea. The strategic military value of the islands lay in the fact that they were among the closest U.S. territories to the Japanese mainland. And, for the Japanese, these islands presented an enticing stepping-stone toward the U.S. mainland.

  The Japanese struck first, taking hold of the virtually uninhabited westernmost Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska in 1942, while the U.S. Army created an air base and headquarters of its own on the island of Umnak, roughly five hundred miles east of Kiska.

  Despite terrible weather, relentless snows, hurricane-force winds, and gauze-thick fog that caused navy ships to grope gingerly and sometimes clunk into one another, U.S. troops managed to build another, larger airstrip on the island of Adak, just 210 miles east of Kiska, in late

  1942. That's where T-Sergeant Robert Nold Byron reported for duty as part of a massive deployment preparing to attack Kiska in the spring of

  1943. Soon after Byron's arrival came the big, lumbering U.S. airplanes. Lots of them.

  Despite Henry Ford's unseemly admiration of Adolf Hitler
, and his oft-repeated claims to be a pacifist, Ford had largely ceased production of passenger cars in 1941 and set about becoming the nation's third-largest defense contractor.

  Back in World War I, Ford had experimented with the role of peacemaker. In 1915, he'd sailed to Europe on a so-called Peace Ship, seeking to “get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.” But Ford's stab at international diplomacy ended with embarrassing failure when European leaders declined to even meet with him and the press ridiculed his efforts. Afterward, he turned his attentions back to what he knew best: building things and making money. Ford profited handsomely from the First World War. Despite a famous prewar vow to burn down his factory rather than turn it into a tool of war, beginning in 1917, Ford began manufacturing tractors, airplane engines, ambulance chassis, armor plating, soldiers' helmets, and gas masks.

  He had publicly vowed not to keep a single penny of war profits, but he kept it a mystery where those World War I earnings ended up. Ford similarly found a profitable role for his factories as World War II began. Ford churned out jeeps, trucks, airplane engines, and tank engines. But his main contribution to the war was the result of Ford's obsessive efforts to build a bomber airplane called the B-24, nicknamed the “Liberator.”

  In early March of 1941, on a day when Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall had been racing at Daytona, Ford had unveiled his plans to build the world's largest factory at a rural site south of Detroit. To be called Willow Run, the mile-long factory was designed to turn out a B-24 every hour. Ford later called his B-24 manufacturing days “the biggest challenge of my life,” days that likely contributed to the stroke he suffered that same year; Ford spent many weeks resting and recovering at his Georgia retreat during 1941.

  Due to a shortage of Detroit-area workers, many B-24 laborers came from the South, so much so that the Michigan town of Ypsilanti became known as “Ypsitucky.” When the plant was up and running in 1942, the Detroit newspapers gushed that Willow Run held “a promise of revenge for Pearl Harbor.”