Mount Up! We're Moving Out! The World War II Memoir of an Armored Car Gunner of D Troop, 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized, 14th Armored Division

Mount Up! We’re Moving Out! The World War II Memoir of an Armored Car Gunner of D Troop, 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized, 14th Armored Division

Vernon H. Brown, Jr.

Military Monograph 59

Bennington, Vermont

2012

First eBook Edition (October 2012)

First published in 1999 by the Merriam Press

Copyright © 1999 by Vernon H. Brown, Jr.

Book design by Ray Merriam

Additional material copyright of named contributors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

The views expressed are solely those of the author.

ISBN 978-1-300-30820-1

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Foreword

In every great world conflict one finds the little folk who trot beside the Juggernaut car of the God of war.

—Winston Churchill

This is not a war story, nor is it a story about war; rather it is a story about men whose lives happened to become entangled in a war. The material for it has been derived from several sources; first of all from Troop and Platoon diaries in my possession which were written during the months of occupation shortly after the end of the conflict; secondly from the published history of the 14th Armored Division, and lastly drawn from several published texts which pertain to the events and places which are depicted.

That it is written in the first person was not my original intention, as it is meant to be a narrative about a team of which I was only one player, but once started this seemed the only practical way to accomplish the end product. It should be remembered, however, that each of us looking at the same scene sees it in his or her own reflection, and had it been recorded by another the results might very well be different.

Lastly, I think it should have a dedication, most works do, and I would like to dedicate this one to:

James T. Taibi, Staff Sergeant, Army of the United States, those who knew him know why, and to all those who followed the siren song of the maiden known as Lili Marlene…

—Vernon H. Brown

10 December 1998

Chapter 1: Embarkation

I suppose one might say that the big adventure for the men of D Troop, 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized (which was our official name), really began on October 8, 1944, when following a long cramped train ride we arrived at Camp Shanks, New Jersey. The journey which started in Camp Campbell, Kentucky, where we had boarded the drafty old coaches was finally over, and morale took a noticeable turn for the better as the men spilled stiff-legged out onto the station platforms and fell into some sort of loose formation.

Before we left Camp Campbell we had each been issued all new clothing along with shiny new helmets and helmet liners so that the group resembled a sea of green colored recruits rather than the well-trained organization that we actually were. For weeks we had been preparing for this moment, painstakingly counting and marking each article of clothing according to strict regulation right down to socks and underwear, inventorying and surveying each piece of personal equipment, along with the numerous weapons, vehicles and their spare parts. For once the rumors had been right! Soon we would actually be off for the war in Europe.

Camp Shanks had a unique flavor all of its own. Tarpaper barracks in subdued camouflage colors, set among the scrub pines of New Jersey, so different from the sturdy green and white buildings of our former home. There was also an indefinable air of excitement about the place. This was the staging area for the New York Port of Embarkation (POE), and the start of the Big One for which we had trained so long and so hard. Here we practiced going down the side of a ship via a cargo net with full pack and personal weapons, stripped the Division patches from our clothing, were warned to tell no one which unit we belonged to, and of course, last minute shots, physicals and orientation lectures. Pfc. Ray Scrivani was caught at an inspection without his dog tags and had his only leave to New York City canceled. We began to get the message that this was dead serious business.

From time to time shiny new toys were issued to us, and to my delight I received a brand new entrenching shovel that folded back on itself, a small folding pickax, and also a rather dull hatchet, each of which came with its own canvas case and had attachments by which one could fasten them to the pistol belt. Unfortunately, by the time I added these, plus my canteen, bayonet, and first aid pouch to the belt I had to expand the thing so far that it would no longer fit properly around my 28-inch waist, but rather hung there much like a gunslinger of the old west. Not only that, but any kind of movement was almost impossible to accomplish without tripping over one of the appendages and causing me to fall headlong. At that point in time my Main Occupational Specialty, or MOS, was to man the .50-caliber machine gun in Cpl. Willard Cage’s Peep (the armored soldier’s name for a jeep) and while he and the driver of the vehicle, Pfc. Dick Kling, had received the same versatile shovel as I had, neither had been awarded either the pickax nor the hatchet, and I could see that this rankled. After all, Cage was a Corporal and I was not only a Private but a new guy in the outfit to boot having just been assigned to the division from the 23rd Cavalry, 16th Armored Division. My previous outfit was to remain in the States, and as the Fourteenth was alerted for duty overseas I was one of a number of replacements brought in to bring it up to full combat strength. Various suggestions were forthcoming relevant to team players and a pooling of resources in an effort to separate me from my new gifts from the Army, all of which fell on deaf ears. I might have been new to the outfit, but I wasn’t new to the Army, and anything issued to me was my responsibility and therefore remained in my possession.

Finally, on October 13th the Division cleared Camp Shanks late in the afternoon, each man heavily laden with everything he owned from gas masks and personal weapons, to duffel bags and musette bags, either hanging from our necks, slung over our shoulders, or dragged along the ground. Overseas movement #4252-Y, otherwise known as the 94th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized) of the 14th Armored Division, was on its way!

A short hike to the railhead followed by a brief train ride brought us to the Weehawken ferry terminal, where we were warmly greeted by a band playing a peppy Roll Out the Barrel (this was to be the last band we heard until the cessation of hostilities), and ladies of the Red Cross passing out the coffee and doughnuts which we were to come to know as the staple of their trade. To this day when I think of the Red Cross, visions of coffee and doughnuts swim into my mind’s eye. Many of the men whose homes were located in parts of the country far from the seacoast expressed shocked surprise as the flat decked ferryboat—which in the dark they took to be part of the pier—suddenly began to move, and they found themselves floating out in the dark harbor now girdled by the myriad lights of the City of New York. Still others lying huddled on the cold deck inside the vessel, largely indistinguishable from the mounds of equipment that surrounded them, visibly worried that this was the ship which was to take them to Europe. To their everlasting discredit, there were those amongst us who knew better, yet went out of their way to foster that notion among the suffering greenhorns.

We sailed from Staten Island the morning of October 14th, 1944, aboard the General James Parker, a former United Fruit boat previously named the Panama. It wasn’t until late the night before that the now weary troops finally disembarked from the ferryboat, struggled once more with their duffel bags, weapons and miscellaneous gear only to stand in endless, long lines of O.D.-clad men all waiting to board the ship whose steel gray side we could see alongside the pier. The ever-present Red Cross was there once more with their coffee and doughnuts, the front of our helmets now bore the chalk mark number of our ship’s accommodations in the likelihood we got lost, and eventually we were allowed to struggle up the gangway and down into the cold gray interior of the ship which was to be our home for the next thirteen days. One might think that arriving at the end of the day’s journey, which must have then been around midnight, would have cheered everyone up, but the sight of steel pipe bunks stacked five high between the floor and the overhead, and the light bulbs which never went out was a sobering prospect. We had been divested of our duffel bags which was a help, and in their stead issued Kapok life jackets and badges with our ship’s accommodations on them which we were warned were never to leave our person as long as we were on the ship.

Life aboard the troopship soon settled into a boring sort of routine to which we were rapidly able to adjust because as good soldiers this sort of a treadmill came naturally to us. What we were not used to was the motion of the ship, the bow rising slowly and purposely up, up, up—only to drop suddenly into the waiting sea with a terrible crunch heard throughout the vessel. Anyplace you looked there were seasick soldiers clinging to anything securely fastened down and crouched in heaving heaps of abject misery. While aboard we were only fed two meals a day instead of the traditional three, because that was all that the brightly lit mess halls