War memoirs of John J. Carrigg © Copyright 2005 Catholichistory.net
Part II (Part I) (Part III) (Part IV)
Mortar rounds were very expensive so we got only one practice session with a live mortar round. Most of our time was devoted to what we called a dry run where we would simulate firing the mortar. Captain Herman was the commanding officer of company B and a fine man. He arranged to give me a furlough so I could get home to Buffalo for a ten day period in the Fall of '44.
We shipped out for Europe from the port of New York on election day of 1944. Our unit was on a British ship, the Samaria. We were part of a large convoy of vessels. An escorting Destroyer was ahead of us weaving back and to on the horizon, looking for and listening for German subs, but by this time the submarine threat had been pretty well eliminated.
We had one big complaint. The British cook made pretty awful coffee and he was finally replaced by an American mess sgt. and the coffee improved noticeably. The displaced British cook looked like Jimmy Durante and he was angry over his rejection and paced the deck cursing out the “bloody Yanks.”
About twelve days out from New York we reached Southhampton, England. We were put in a large tent city near Tidworth, England. It was another pleasant interlude. The southern part of England is very beautiful. I loved it. It is ironic but our squad leader Walter Podliski was very anti-English. I don't know why. He thought their box cars on the railroad were so tiny, they were contemptible. I told him their fighter planes were very good—the Spitfire, etc. He didn’t want to hear that. It is so interesting. I grew up in an Irish Catholic home and never heard one word of criticism of the English. Where did Walter Podliski get that anti-English view, I do not know. He was a good fellow. He was badly wounded in the war. He once came to Buffalo to look me up after the war and talked to my mother. I was in Steubenville at that time and I just didn’t follow up on it. I regret that profoundly.
After we put into Southampton around the 20th of November 1944, we had a couple of weeks to do a little sightseeing, the highlight of which was a visit to Parliament, which was meeting in the House of the Lords because the Commons had been bombed out. One of my buddies, David Wrubel, a graduate of Bowdoin College, arranged the whole thing. To get into the Parliament you had to be a guest of an MP. David Wrubel was a smooth operator and arranged to have us (Wrubel, Willard Hield, and I) get into the Parliament as a guest of MP Sir Jocelyn Lucas. The exciting thing about it all was we were seated in the balcony directly above Winston Churchill. He was being questioned by members of Parliament, mostly on the subject of post war housing. At one point Herbert Morison, a Laborite, pressed Churchill very hard and fired a question at him which was in the nature of “When are you going to quit beating your wife?” and Churchill's answer was unforgettable: “If I should attempt to answer that question I would fall beneath the parliamentary level the questioner always strives to maintain.” Cheers, cheers, from Churchill's side.
I got so excited that I almost fell out of the balcony and if I did I would have landed right on Churchill. A sergeant-at-arms, noticing my excited state, came over and firmly grabbed my shoulder and warned me about unseemly conduct. It was a great event. Wrubel did much better than I in translating the Latin inscriptions at Westminister Abbey. Bowdoin College produced Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and many years later, David Wrubel. That visit to Parliament was memorable.
On January 4th, 1945 our Division moved to the continent, We sailed from Southampton to LeHavre. As we approached the French port, a tug came out to guide us into the harbor, which had been badly damaged in the war and the captain of the tug shouted to our ship and I heard him say “une moment.” I said to some of the GIs there, “He said, ‘Just a moment.’” Immediately I became an interpreter. “Do you know that stuff Carrigg?” “Will you be our guide when we get to Paris?”
We moved east cross northern France during the next two weeks. We spent one night in a World War I battlefield. The shell holes were enormous. As we approached the French-German frontier we could see the artillery flashing on the horizon at night. “That's where we are going,” was my thought.
Somewhere (in France and before Nennig) I met a Catholic priest, a chaplain. A new bishop had been appointed in Buffalo—typically Irish with a very Irish name (O'Hare, Duffy, Burke??) [Editor's Note: probably Bishop John Francis O'Hara, later Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia], and I made some reference to that fact. This chaplain happened to be of Polish origin and he didn’t appreciate my comment and responded somewhat along the lines that the Polish had been very faithful Catholics and were not appreciated and passed over, etc., etc. Since I had triggered his response with my typical unfortunate remark, I felt bad and wished I had kept my mouth shut. But as my mother used to say, “you would have been a wise man if you kept your mouth shut but you opened it and gave yourself away.”
Sometime in the winter of 1945, I saw my first dead German soldier. He was lying in a snowbank in a small rural French town, in a perfect state of preservation. A young guy in full uniform with his dog tags on his chest. His name was Ernst Kraft. I still include him in my prayers. My thought was, “If I am lucky I won’t end up like Ernst Kraft.”
The Germans were damn good soldiers. The Brits called them Jerries, almost a term of affection, I thought. I remember a British soldier telling me about a river crossing—maybe the Rhine—and one of their wounded fell into the river and the British solder said: “ a Jerry soldier saved him,” pulled him out of the water. That kind of humanized the German soldiers even though they were serving Adolph.
Finally, on January 25, 1945 our unit was committed. We entered the town of Nennig on foot around 5 am. The action there was all part of the Battle of the Bulge that ended, I think, on January 28th. Nennig sounds German but it could be French. The area was mixed.
It was snow covered and very cold. There were lumps of snow scattered around in the town square. I learned later they were anti-tank mines. Our mortar squad was put in a house on a narrow street that was blocked by a knocked out German tank with a dead tanker lying in front of it. There had been some very violent action in that town before our unit moved in. A short time after we occupied the house one of our tanks hitched a cable to the German tank and tried to pull it out of the way but failed to budge it. A short time after our tank withdrew there was a tremendous explosion that lifted my helmet off my head and I thought the Germans had dropped a one-ton bomb on the village square, to learn later that the explosion was caused by our tank running over a pile of mines that caused the death—it was rumored—of 17 of our soldiers who had bunched up around that tank as it backed down into the village square.
It was a catastrophic error made by a green outfit. Someone in charge should have ordered those mines gathered up and put out of the way. I saw those guys—then casualties—piled up the next day or two like cordwood between two houses. One of them was Harry Gligiroff from C company, one of my friends. He was from Detroit. I spoke to him that morning as we moved into Nennig.