One young lieutenant of the 101st Airborne became obnoxiously loud. As fer as he was concerned, the 101st Airborne had won the war almost single-handedly. Four young lieutenants from the 1st Infantry Division, one of the crack infantry divisions, finally had enough. They escorted the young airborne lieutenant off the patio.
Some thought they were taking him home and tucking him into the sack. Such was not the case.
Suddenly, there was a great commotion overhead. Each of the four 1st Infantry lieutenants had grabbed an arm or a leg of the airborne lieutenant; they were swinging him back and forth over the fourth-floor-balcony railing. At the count of four, they threw him off the balcony and screamed, “Geronimo! Fly, you S.O.B.!”
To the amazement of those below, the lieutenant flew in a spread-eagle position from the fourth floor toward the patio, but he landed in the middle of a large awning that stretched from the edge of the building, then rolled off one side and fell into a cactus bed. He was so drunk that he was completely limp; the only injury he sustained was a few cactus needles in his butt. The fall apparently sobered him up enough to navigate back to his hotel alone.
The Bomb
Our leave was rapidly drawing to an end. In a few days we would return to Darmstadt and prepare to depart for the Pacific. About half past ten one morning as we were sitting on the patio of the Miramar Hotel drinking coffee and relaxing, a young French boy came down the street distributing the Stars and Stripes newspaper, a GI publication free to all servicemen. He was hawking it at the top of his lungs just like an American newspaper boy selling an “extra.” I got a paper and brought it back to our table. The date on the paper was August 6, 1945, and the headline read, “Americans drop atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.” The article said we had developed a secret atomic bomb with an explosive capacity of twenty thousand tons of TNT.
Everyone looked at me; they knew that I had gone to bomb disposal school.
I was just as shocked and surprised as they were, and I had no idea what it really meant. My first reaction was that we had indeed developed some kind of super explosive; however, I did not believe that it was an actual atomic explosion. Talk of nuclear power and nuclear bombs appeared to be Buck Rogers-type thinking; I thought that those developments would be at least a hundred years away. It never occurred to any of us that this new bomb might appreciably shorten the war.
Early on the morning of August 9, we boarded trucks to head back to Marseilles to catch our train to Luxembourg. When we arrived in Marseilles, the French newsboys were hawking another Stars and Stripes announcing that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Gradually, I realized that this was more than just a super explosive, that maybe we had developed a real atomic bomb, but I was convinced that we would still have to invade Japan to finally bring the country to its knees. I think that most of the soldiers felt the same way.
On the trip up the Rhône Valley, I was jammed into a compartment with seven other junior officers. After we had completely exhausted our repertoire of stories about whiskey, women, and pleasure, the conversation finally turned to war. I realized that all the exaggerations were a reflection of the pain and suffering that these men had been through and that this was their way of letting off steam. Somebody finally broke out a deck of cards and some dice, and the crapshooting and poker games went on late into the night.
The Survivors
We arrived in Luxembourg about midmorning and were told that 3d Armored Division trucks would pick us up about half past four that afternoon. We would have the rest of the day to explore the city.
Other than some shelling during the Battle of the Bulge on the northern outskirts, this medieval city had been relatively undamaged by the war. We walked around, crossed the stone bridge over a big canyon park formed by the river running through the middle of the city, and had a leisurely drink and lunch at one of the many bars and sidewalk cafes. Then we visited the Luxembourg Theater, which had been taken over by the army and showed free movies twenty-four hours a day.
The theater, the largest in Luxembourg, was typical of the large movie palaces built in the late twenties and early thirties. Elaborately decorated like a Moorish palace, it had two balcony levels and two rows of box seats on the sides. We got good seats in the middle of the first balcony and settled down to relax and enjoy the movie, Dark Victory, starring Bette Davis. The film was interrupted about every fifteen minutes with announcements for such and such a unit to report to Plaza Square.
I had already seen the film, so I let my mind wander to our terrible tank losses. Major Arrington’s order to prepare final combat loss reports had given us the losses for the entire division. Of 158 M5 light tanks, we lost more than 100 percent. (Although the M24 light tank that replaced the M5 was far superior in both firepower and armored protection, it was still too light for major assaults.) Of a total of 232 medium tanks (including 10 M26 Pershings), 648 were totally destroyed in combat and 1,100 needed repairs. Of these 1,100, approximately 700 had been knocked out in battle. This meant that we lost 1,350 medium tanks in combat, or a total loss of 580 percent. It was obvious why we soon ran out of trained tank crews and had to substitute raw infantry recruits during the Battle of the Bulge.
I had mixed thoughts about the capability of Japanese armor. Japanese tanks were reportedly extremely light and much inferior to ours in firepower and armor, but the Japanese reportedly had gotten the complete plans and specifications for the German Panther tank some time ago. If the Japanese could manufacture Panther tanks in large numbers, this could pose a major threat. But even if Japanese armor posed no major threat, we had every reason to believe that if the Japanese infantry fought as tenaciously as it did in the South Pacific islands, it would inflict severe losses on us. Our men felt that an invasion of Japan would be extremely bloody and costly to both sides.
Suddenly the screen in the movie theater went blank and the lights started to brighten. We all stood up to look around; at first I thought that this was merely another announcement telling a particular unit to meet their trucks in the plaza. But then the theater manager’s voice came over the speaker loud and clear and in perfect English. “We have just received a BBC broadcast that the Japanese have agreed to unconditional surrender.”
The effect was stunning. Some of the men stood speechless and in a daze; some fell on their knees and started praying; some broke down and cried. I said a silent prayer, thanking God for my deliverance. It was as if we had all been on death row and had suddenly been given a reprieve. Time seemed to stand still and merge into eternity while three thousand young soldiers realized that by the grace of God we had all at last become survivors.
Epilogue: The Coin
During World War II, The Huntsville Times published the names of the young men when they were sent overseas. In early September 1943, when the 3d Armored Division was sent to England, my name appeared.
An elderly lady, a long time family friend, called my father and said, “George, I see your son Belton has gone overseas.” After he replied affirmatively, she asked that he come by, as she had a gift for me. My father called on her the next day and she gave him an 1825 fifty-cent coin. (This was not a particularly rare coin at the time; it had an appraised value of $38.00.) She said the coin had a story behind it and that my father should pass the story on to me with the coin.
It so happened that this coin was carried by her husband’s great-great-grandfather as a good luck piece in the Mexican War in 1840. It was then passed on to his grandfather, who carried it in the Civil War in 1862. It was passed on to her husband’s father, who earned it in the Spanish American War in 1898, and he, in turn, passed it on to her husband who carried it in World War I, in 1917. As they had no more sons in her branch of the family, she wanted my father to send it to me. She hoped that I would carry it safely and that I would not have to pass it on to any future sons who I might have in any future wars. I carried the coin as a good luck piece throughout World War II in Europe, and I still have it today.