A Tank Gunner's Story: Gunner Gruntz of the 712th Tank Battalion Read online

  Fonthill Media Limited

  Fonthill Media LLC

  www.fonthillmedia.com

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  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Louis G. Gruntz Jr., 2013

  ISBN 978-1-62545-023-4 (PRINT)

  ISBN 978-1-78155-383-1 (e-BOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Fonthill Media Limited

  Typeset in 10pt on 13pt Sabon LT

  Printed and bound in England

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  CONTENTS

  Dedication and Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue: World War II to a Baby Boomer

  1. The Flight – Journey to the Past

  2. Training for War

  3. The Sherman Tank

  4. The Beaches of Normandy

  5. The Hedgerows

  6. The Breakout

  7. The Purple Heart – August 7, 1944

  8. Return to Action – Fortress Metz

  9. The Mud of Lorraine

  10. The Battle of the Bulge

  11. The Siegfried Line and into Germany

  12. V-E Day and Occupation

  13. Alsace and Ancestors

  14. The Last Time I Saw Paris

  15. Going Home

  16. Other Casualties and a Never Ending War

  17. The Final Battle

  Epilogue: Thanks Dad

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Dedication and Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to my family – my parents who lived the story and witnessed the inception of this book but did not live to see it published – my children and grandchildren for their enthusiastic support that Paw-Paw’s story be told and who will become, what Henri Levaufre describes as, “Keepers of the Flame”.

  Special thanks to Aaron Elson, whose father was in the 712th Tank Battalion, for his journalistic expertise, his critical review and his unceasing encouragement to bring this work to print.

  Introduction

  The palest ink is better than the best memory.

  Chinese Proverb

  Many World War II veterans have gone to their graves with their individual wartime experiences remaining untold. With America’s “Greatest Generation” rapidly fading into history, the sadness of their loss is compounded by their stories disappearing with them. Sixty years after World War II, the surviving veterans of that great conflict were passing away at the rate of 1,200 per day. My father, Louis Gruntz, was among the 1,200 veterans who answered the final roll call on February 7, 2004.

  Throughout my boyhood and early adulthood, my father rarely talked about his experiences during the war. Despite my questioning, Dad’s answers never contained any graphic details about his combat actions. I knew only very basic information about Dad’s days as a soldier – he was in a tank in Europe and was once wounded.

  For over forty-seven years, most of these details would remain a mystery to me, but in 1994 Dad’s years of silence ended. He and I spent thirteen days in Europe retracing the battle route of his unit, the 712th Tank Battalion. Each night of our trip, I made journal entries regarding the stories he related to me that day.

  We returned to Europe in June of 2000 for a monument dedication ceremony in Périers, France. The monument was in honor of the 90th Infantry Division and the 712th Tank Battalion’s liberation of Périers in 1944. My mother and my two youngest children accompanied Dad and me on this second trip as we again retraced his battle route of 1944-45. Once more Dad recounted his experiences at different points along the way. This time my son and I recorded and videotaped Dad’s stories.

  Subsequent to these trips, Dad talked more freely to the family about the war. All of my children urged him, “Paw-Paw, you should write a book about the war.” Dad politely declined. Instead he entrusted his story to me orally with instructions for me to reduce it to writing.

  While many artifacts and the official histories of World War II are being maintained, professional historians also recognize the importance of preserving for future generations the stories of the individual veterans of that war. As an avid amateur genealogist, I also recognize the importance of preserving Dad’s story for future generations of my family.

  This is primarily an account of Dad’s story told to me during our 1994 trip. It also touches on my continuing journey to learn about Dad’s experiences, which did not end after that thirteen day trip, and my research for the accounts of others that witnessed these same events. I began this task prior to Dad’s death and he reviewed much of the early transcripts for accuracy.

  As with any journey for knowledge, my journey to learn of my father’s wartime experiences would also teach me just how much I didn’t know. I would discover that there is much more that I will never know or fully appreciate about his days in combat. But, with respect and love, I have undertaken his charge to me. This undertaking is not only for preserving for future generations the story of one veteran, but also for my children, grandchildren and generations of my descendants yet to come in order that the story of their ancestor, Cpl Louis G. Gruntz of the 712th Tank Battalion, will be remembered.

  PROLOGUE

  World War II to a Baby Boomer

  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

  American soldiers of World War II returning home had a profound effect upon their country – a marked increase in the birth rate. By 1947, the year I was born, the post-war baby boom was shifting into high gear. Several years later the moniker Baby Boomer was used to describe children of my age, and this generational name has been applied to us Boomers ever since.

  Dad was 28 years old when I was born, and as I reflect back on our life as a family, I realize he always seemed older than his years. I truly believe his experiences in combat produced this effect. Dad, like many veterans in the late ’40s and early ’50s, tried to forget the war, but as all of the veterans would discover there were some things they could not forget. The veterans who returned home to civilian life in 1945 were not the same boys they were on December 6, 1941. Their experiences and memories of World War II became part of them and would remain with them all of their lives. Their life experiences impacted their actions and behavior in the ’50s and ’60s as we Baby Boomers grew. Perhaps it is for this reason that we, the children of World War II veterans, continue to have a fascination with the events that occurred in those years before we were born, and the desire to pass this fascination to our children.

  Upon Dad’s discharge from the Army on November 1, 1945, he came home with a uniform and small box of wartime souvenirs. The uniform was packed away with moth balls and the cardboard box was tucked away in the corner of the top shelf in the bedroom closet. That box laid secluded for almost a decade since Dad was anxious to resume his civilian life, start a family and put the memories of wartime experiences behind him. The story of my parents’ lives during the war years, like that box in their bedroom closet, was beyond my reach for much of my early life.

  Hi-Way Cleaners. (Author’s collection)

  After their wedding in 1942, Mom and Dad had lived at Dad’s family home on Bauvais Street in Metairie, Louisiana. When Dad entered the service, Mom, moved back to her home with her parents on Brooklyn Avenue in the adjacent neighborhood in Jeff
erson Parish. After his discharge, there was no separate residence for Mom and Dad to call home. Although my Aunt Clare still lived at home with my grandparents, there was still room enough for Mom and Dad, consequently, they established their marital residence, temporarily, at the Casteix family home at 478 Brooklyn Avenue.

  Immediately after the war, there was, naturally, a down turn in the military industries. Dad’s pre-war job at the shipyard was no longer available. He took the civil service exam and applied for a position with the United States Post Office. After waiting several weeks with no reply, he decided to go into the laundry and dry cleaning business with my maternal grandfather, Ernest Casteix. After all the paperwork had been completed for this business partnership, the postal service responded with a job offer, but by then it was too late, the laundry business was underway. Dad declined employment with the post office.

  Living Room photograph. (Author’s collection)

  My grandfather and Dad did not have a long commute to work. The cleaners was located in the rear yard of their home and fronted on Jefferson Highway, a major thoroughfare from the city to the only bridge in the area that crossed the Mississippi River, the Huey Long Bridge. The partnership operated under the name Hi-Way Cleaners.

  After I came along in 1947, the household was beginning to get crowded. Mom and Dad purchased property up the street, in the 300 block of Brooklyn Avenue, not far from the dry cleaners/laundry. Dad spent several months building our future family home.

  My earliest recollections of childhood are in that home that Dad built. Even though Dad rarely mentioned the war, it seems as though I always knew Dad was in the Army; perhaps because of the military photograph that hung in the living room of our home. Mom purchased a 16x20 lithograph patriotic photo mat and frame for Dad’s picture taken in his uniform. I never recall a time when the photo was not displayed.

  At the end of the war, my mother had also purchased a book entitled The Fighting Men of Louisiana, published in 1946 by the Louisiana Historical Institute. This leather bound book, similar to a college yearbook, contained photographs of men from Louisiana who served in the military during World War II. In 1950 I somehow got hold of this book, along with a pencil. I began to exercise my three-year-old artistic talents on many of the photographs in that book, with the exception of Dad’s photograph. I don’t recall the incident or discipline meted out for that transgression, but I am sure it was impressive. Even now, I refrain from making notations on pages of books I own.

  In 1954, I was seven years old, the age of reason. It was about that time I began to ask my father the question heard by just about every father of that day, “What did you do during the war, Daddy?”

  Dad’s answers were usually short, with little detail or he usually changed the topic and talked about incidents that usually did not involve combat. Dad’s wartime experiences were otherwise rarely mentioned, although he did tell me that he was in a Sherman tank in Europe during the war. On a few of those occasions when I inquired about the war, he went to his closet and retrieved the box that had been stored since 1945. The box of souvenirs contained French and German coins, a Nazi flag, German binoculars, along with some photos taken during training and after the war. During the 1950s, the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart Medal, and his other World War II decorations were stored in that box in the closet, along with a German P-38 pistol and a German bayonet Dad obtained toward the end of the war.

  Mom and her young artist. (Author’s collection)

  To me the most curious contents of the box were two pieces of fragmented metal. When I asked about these, Dad told me the pieces were from his tank – when it was hit by a German bazooka and he was wounded. I asked if the doctors had removed these pieces from his wounds and given them to him. He said “No, if I had been hit by such large fragments, I would have been killed.” Dad found those large chunks of shrapnel in his personal belongings in his knapsack, retrieved from the damaged tank. When I asked if he had any scars from his wounds, Dad then showed me his back which was peppered with black powder burns where small pieces of shrapnel had lodged.

  Even during these accounts, Dad never went into any great detail about the events surrounding combat. I have since discovered that this was a common occurrence by the men in those days who had been on the battlefield just ten years earlier.

  I remember asking Dad if he had learned how to speak German during the war. He indicated knowing only a few phrases. Due to their frequent requests, the German children taught Dad and other GIs the phrase, “Haben Sie Sie Schokolade?” (“Have any chocolate?”).

  Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the name New Orleans was mostly synonymous with Mardi Gras. When people from other parts of the United States discovered we are New Orleanians, the conversation inevitably shifts to our annual pre-Lenten celebration. Rex and his Krewe rule our city each Mardi Gras Day as the organization parades through the streets of our city. The festivities have become so popular that there are numerous organizations (krewes) which parade on different days for approximately two weeks prior to Mardi Gras Day; these other krewes frequently adopt the names of mythical Greek or Roman gods.

  It is hard to imagine life in our city without this annual celebration occurring.1 Yet, during the years of World War I and World War II, all Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans were cancelled. With most of the men off to war, the merriment and mirth of the remaining citizens in the “City that Care Forgot” was replaced by the care and concern for the war effort. The historians of our city refer to Mardi Gras Day during these years as being ruled by the Krewe of Mars (the god of war) in lieu of the Krewe of Rex.

  It was during the Mardi Gras season of 1954, when Dad joined the Krewe of Carrollton, that I first recall Dad talking with others about the war. After Dad’s initial parade ride, my Uncle Charlie, Dad’s brother-in-law, asked him, what did it feel like to be riding high atop the parade float traveling through the huge crowds in the street. Dad said the throngs of joyous people, shouting along the parade route, reminded him of when his tank rolled through the liberated towns in France. The newly liberated French were celebrating wildly. When American soldiers came through such towns, the townspeople greeted them with wine or cider. They were yelling deliriously, waving flags and banners, and throwing flowers on the tanks and other American vehicles as they came by. Even after ten years, while celebrating a joyous Mardi Gras event, Dad could not escape memories and flashbacks of the war.

  In the mid-1950s Baby Boomers were in grammar school, it was also the golden age of television. Being a typical middle class household – Dad worked and Mom was a housewife – we soon had one of those electronic marvels in our living room.

  My initial boyhood perceptions of war came mainly from TV portrayals of the military, albeit the military in the nineteenth century. The cavalry soldiers of Fort Apache in the Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, were my first introduction to military ranks. But my introduction to the glory and valor of combat was the battle of the Alamo and the figure who was idolized by all boys of that day, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

  Each day when signing on and signing off, the television stations would play the National Anthem and show newsreel combat footage from WWII. The image that sticks out in my mind the most was the film of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

  During the mid to late 1950s, one of my favorite childhood traditions was going to the movies at our neighborhood theater, the Arrow Theater on Jefferson Highway. Every Saturday night the parents in the neighborhood had an automatic baby-sitter; all the kids in our area went to the movies. Horror movies were in vogue, as well as westerns and, of course, war films.

  It was about this time that I also became fascinated with another war, the Civil War. Being a Louisianian, I wondered if any of my ancestors had fought for the Old South. Dad advised that no one from the Gruntz family was in the Civil War; they had not emigrated to America from Alsace until the late 1800s.

  All of these movies of my youth, whether Civil War or World War II, usually
had the same moral theme, the good guys wore white hats and good always triumphed over evil. Naturally, we rooted for the American soldiers in all of those John Wayne World War II movies. One of the earliest war movies I remember was Audie Murphy’s autobiographical account of war, To Hell and Back.

  The other boys in my class watched the same TV series and movies that I watched. We reenacted many a battle on the playground at school. When we were shot, we fell to the ground with all the dramatics of any Hollywood actor.

  Many New Orleanians in the ’50s, as well as decades before and since, have tried to escape the hot and muggy summers of the city by going to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain or to the Mississippi beaches to enjoy the cooler breezes off of the Gulf of Mexico. My parents purchased a small parcel of property on Merritt Lane in Waveland, Mississippi for such purposes; my maternal grandparents had a similar small lot of land in Slidell, Louisiana. Dad and Mom, as well as my grandparents, bought Higgins Huts for their respective vacation homes and weekend retreats. During the war, Higgins Industries in New Orleans, owned by Andrew Higgins, manufactured the D-Day landing crafts for the military. These landing crafts were made primarily of plywood. In addition to these landing crafts, Higgins also utilized his factory to manufacture plywood housing kits for use by the military. The housing kits, known as Higgins Huts, were inexpensive, relatively light and mobile and easy to erect. After the war, Higgins industries sold the pre-fabricated house kits to the public for approximately $250.00. A finished Higgins Hut consisted of two bedrooms, one bath and a living room and kitchen area. Our cabin in the country was Dad’s retreat from the toil and pressures of the workplace.

  The post-war purchase of military Higgins Huts by civilians was not an isolated business occurrence, as many businesses and individuals purchased surplus war materials during the 1950s. I remember the advertising gimmick used by stores to attract attention to a grand opening or other event in those days before television became widespread. Huge rotating search lights mounted on trailers shot beams of light into the night sky. There is no doubt that this enterprising advertising device in the 1950s brought back memories to many veterans, recalling the wartime use of these devices during air raids.