I have a friend who is now about 75 years old. He is the father of a friend of mine, but he and I have hung out quite a bit, to the point where I would consider him someone I know on his own as a friend, not as just a relative of a friend.
He has a Silver Star from serving in World War II. He was part of a Ranger team that was left out of the grinding part of the war, and brought in when someone had a "tough nut to crack", as he put it. Kind of a special forces type squad.
They developed some specific techniques, had some good soldiers, and what he claimed was most important, they had good officers. He fought in Europe for 30 months, and has some idea of what he is talking about when the conversation turns to "getting shot at", as he puts it.
He told me a story a while back about some fighting they did in Antwerp. This was house to house fighting, toe to toe with some quality German outfits. He said they started the day with a squad on each side of the street, him in charge of his squad, and his Sargeant in charge of the squad across the street. The worked together, pacing each other as they moved forward, apparently avoiding the dangers of getting too far ahead of each other.
He said that at the end of the day, a day where he started with 8 men and himself, he had 4 men and himself left, with the other 4 men either dead or wounded. His Sargeant across the street had suffered similar casualties.
At the end of the day, after 10 or 12 hours of some of the nastiest fighting he said he had seen(including his D-Day landing), each squad had taken a total of 8 houses on their side of the street.
At this point in the story he got a look that seemed as if he was mulling an old problem, still no answer readily at hand.
"David, the worst thing about that type of fighting was that I don't think we made a single mistake all day, and we still ended up with half our men wounded or dead."
Posted by dglynn at April 2, 2003 01:07 AM