Fort George G. Meade: The First 100 Years

126 THE FIRST 100 YEARS
with that damned 20-millimeter antiaircraft gun. You remember.”
Reynolds nodded and turned to me. “That should have been
worth a Purple Heart, don’t you think?”
I agreed. The last man I met was a cook who earned a Silver Star.
When I asked how, it seems when the German SS units were hitting
the area in front of the 741 st , the unit was conducting maintenance
and changing engines. With no time to spare, they towed the
Shermans without engines next to buildings and had a gunner set
the gun ready to fire. Then they found “expendable,” non-tankers to
sit in the tanks and keep their eyes on the sight. The inexperienced
soldiers were told to shoot as soon as the sight picture changed
color.
The gentleman told me he was put in one of those tanks and he
waited. It got dark and he waited. He heard machinegun fire and
he waited. He was told the 2 nd Division guys were firing to make it
impossible for the German armor to see them.
Then the cook heard engines getting louder and louder and he
waited. Then he felt the earth tremble and he waited. And suddenly
the sight picture changed, going from black to grey! He pulled the
trigger. The tank gun recoiled rearward with an immense crash, the
tank jolted to the rear and filled with thick, black smoke.
“Oh my God! I’m hit!” he thought.
The cook jumped from the tank, leaving his M-1 carbine and his
helmet behind. “I ran for my life, because I knew the Germans were
hot on my heels. I ran until my lungs were about to explode. When
my legs couldn’t go any further, I just fell, face first into the snow
and waited for one of them to pierce my ribs with a bayonet. I
figured, if I were lucky, I might end up in a prison camp.”
And he laid there, catching his breath in the quiet December
night, and nothing happened.
“I slowly got up and I was all alone,” he said. He looked around
and got his bearings and made his way back to American lines,
convincing a sentry he really was an American without a helmet and
a weapon.
A couple days later, the cook and a couple of other men went
back to the tank. There it still sat, next to the building, standing
guard over his helmet and carbine. And there too, maybe 20 feet in
front of him was a dead German tank with a neat hole in its side.
“I didn’t go exploring it,” he said. “If I killed someone, I didn’t
want to know.”
My visit with the men of the 741 st was just one example of some
of the reunions of some of the men of the “Greatest Generation”
that I had the pleasure to attend. To have been able to listen to their
war stories and share in their experiences was a privilege that I feel
I can’t appreciate enough. And all I can do to repay them is to keep
alive the heroics and sacrifices they made.
***
(Pg. 124) Members of the 741 st tank practice escape from their
tank.
(Above) Malcom Reynolds, (Below) Phil Fitts stands next to a
large piece of shrapnel. Fitts nearly drowned on D-Day.