Kasserine Pass. Anzio. Omaha Beach. Huertgen Forest. Each place was a killing
ground for American GIs during World War II. Ken Fritts was at them all --
sometimes the target, most often helping pick the targets.
From the Allied landings
in November 1942 on the North African coast near Casablanca to Germany on
VE-Day, Fritts was part of the 34th Field Artillery, Ninth Infantry Division.
For all but the first days in North Africa, he was part of a forward artillery
observation team, whose job it was to spot targets for the 155mm rifled cannon
fired by Battery C of the 34th.
The assignment often
put his team and himself in harm's way. At Kasserine Pass, they stood alongside
British soldiers as the Allies put a stop to Field Marshall Irwin Rommel's
advance. On D-Day, they landed on Green Beach in the pre-dawn hours - before
the infantry arrived -- to sneak past German positions and get themselves
inland to call in naval bombardment in support of advancing American troops.
Fritts was drafted
into the U.S. Army just before the war began from his job at the A&P
grocery store on West 26th Street and Brown Avenue in Erie. He went from
his introduction into the Army at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania to
Fort Bragg where he received basic training followed by advanced training
in gun mechanics. He was assigned to Battery C, 34th Field Artillery. His
job was supposed to be to maintain the big, 155mm guns. But the realities
of war changed that.
It happened when the
9th Division landed in North Africa in November 1942, as part of Operation
Torch, which was America's first ground action against the Germans in World
War II.
With the 34th Field
Artillery was Matt Geiger, a quarterback with the Blue Streaks, a minor league
football team in Erie, who had entered the Army with Fritts. They went through
training together from basic on through their assignment to the 9th Infantry
Division. They steamed across the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia to French
Morocco's Atlantic coast. On the long transatlantic voyage, Geiger said he
couldn't wait to get there, thinking they would be landing in Spanish Morocco.
"He wanted to meet one of them Spanish girls."
The Vichy French opposed
the American landings. Lives were lost.
"Matt didn't make it.
He got killed the first day." Losing him hurt, and still does.
Geiger had been part
of the 34th's forward artillery observation team. With his loss, the commander
decided quickly that the unit needed FAO teams more than gun mechanics. Fritts
got the assignment. "He said, 'Fritts, you're not doing anything. Come on
up here.'" With the guns' long range, the 34th needed a team to spot targets
and report corrections to the firing solution. "We took observations of distance
and movement. Sometimes they (the enemy) were miles away; sometimes we were
on top of them."
The four 155mm cannons
used by the 34th were of World War I vintage. They weren't just old, they
were intended for a different task than combat. "They had a brass plate on
the front saying 'For target practice only,'" Fritts recalled. Maybe they
were meant for training, but here they were in the Army's first combat against
the Wehrmacht. Old as they were, they could still fire up to three 100-pound
shells per minute, reaching up to 20 miles away.
"They could blow a
tank away in a hurry," Fritts said. "Many's the time we had to lower the
barrels to point blank and fire. When they hit, the tanks were done."
By the end of the North
African campaign, all but one of the guns would be out of action from hard
wear. "They just wilted, we fired them so much." They would be replaced in
the next campaign in Sicily with new, more accurate, split-tailed 155mm howitzers
that could fire four rounds a minute. "They could drop a shell in a guy's
pocket. Church steeples would always take a beating. They were easy to spot
and we would sight in on them." After a few shots had been fired and corrections
made, the battery would be told to fire for effect.
Fritts' FAO team was
always out. "Sometimes we were out in front of the infantry. You didn't want
to do it, but you had to. The infantry always liked us, though. They watched
over us because they knew their life could depend on it."
"There were four of
us. One carried the radio, another carried the radio battery. The officer
carried binoculars - a tripod with a telescope. We had a vehicle. A command
car was too conspicuous. We got rid of the jeep and usually used a three-quarter
ton truck, a weapons carrier. We would go as far forward as we could. Sometimes
we would be miles away and sometimes we would be on top of them - wherever
we could get an observation. How far would depend on where the hills were.
We would crawl up the hills with our gear, leaving the vehicle where it couldn't
be seen. The radio equipment I carried was no heavier than a small television
set. It wasn't too bad at all.
"While the officer
was sighting, we'd look around in all directions. We were usually armed with
M-1 carbines. We were a prime target. So we looked real good.
"The nice thing was
that when it got hot, we could move out. The infantry had to stay and take
it."
Except for the officers,
the team stayed together through the war. "They were my family. I got very
close with them. We four got along real well. One buddy came from Muncie,
Indiana, and would marry the heiress to the Ball Canning fortune. And there
was Jack Rowe, who moved to California after the war to become an artist."
The first officer they
had was Captain "Easeport ED" Carpenter. "He was a long and tall drink of
water. He could go up mountains faster than you could shake a stick. He was
a good captain and the troops respected him."
Carpenter eventually
was promoted to colonel and moved on. Replacing him was a French-speaking
officer named Gobele. Because he could speak French, he was often able to
get directions from French farmers while the 9th Division was in France or
find out from them if any Germans had come through.
"We four were all over
the place. We only split up when our division met the Russians at the Elbe.
Then they started to send guys home." Soldiers were sent home following a
point system based largely on time served and action seen.
"I had enough points
by then to take 10 guys with me."
North Africa
The early part of the
North African campaign was not too hard. The first opposition the 9th Infantry
Division ran into was the Vichy French. "The French were a snap. They didn't
want to fight. When we did run into real resistance, we knew we were up against
Germans." The Germans had better tanks and had control of the skies most
of the time.
The critical moment
of the campaign came in mid-February 1943. Field Marshall Irwin Rommel sent
two of his best Panzer divisions against strung-out American units along
the southern flank of the Allied positions. The U.S. units, mostly the 1st
Armored Division, were not well led, had equipment inferior to the Germans,
and were green. The Germans sent them running. The 9th Division's artillery,
including the 34th, was sent forward to help stop the German advance.
Fritts' FAO team was
put in place to watch for the advancing Germans and report firing coordinates.
The Germans came on, getting too close.
"To save our skins,
we had to back off. I was lucky. Somebody left a half-track with an antiaircraft
gun in the back. Nobody was around it. Well if the thing runs, I'm going
to take off with it because I couldn't run fast enough. It was pretty good,
but I didn't go too far. They had troops there to stop us.
The FAO team soon found
themselves alongside British infantry near the town of Thala not far from
Kasserine Pass. The Germans were pushing hard here, too.
The American artillery
joined with British guns and the scratch British ground force to stop the
advance. Rommel could have made it through, Fritts said, but he thinks Rommel
lost his stomach for the fight.
"I could never figure
out why he didn't push through. He could have pushed us right through to
the Mediterranean." Part of the reason, according to military historians,
is that the heavy opposition put up by the American and British convinced
the Germans they were up against a stronger force. That's when Rommel lost
his stomach for going farther.
About the British,
Fritts said, "The British were good fighters. I wouldn't want to fight them.
"I'll never forget,
one day we were down in the lines trying to get an observation and here's
this British rifleman. He was shooting away there. It was quite a skirmish
going. Then he says, 'Hey, it's 4 o'clock.' They said OK and stopped firing.
They had to brew their tea. They had to have their tea, just like we had
to have our coffee."
Even after Kasserine,
the North African campaign was tough, Fritts said. The Allies did not have
the superiority there that they would have as the war progressed.
The hot days and cold
nights of North Africa gave way to the hot days and bugs of Sicily in July.
There, the 9th Division came up against the Italian army as well as Germans.
The Italians were not a problem. "I think every Italian soldier in Sicily
had a big, white handkerchief. We were driving by once and 300 of them came
out with white handkerchiefs, crying out 'America! America!' They didn't
want any more fighting. Once we hit the Germans we hit more resistance, but
it was more of a rearguard action."
Even so, the 9th was
pretty badly cut up in Sicily, Fritts said. "We didn't have enough fighting
power to go on to Italy" in September. The division would later be sent to
England to get new equipment and train. Fritts' unit would also get a new
commander - William Westmoreland, the general destined to lead American forces
in Vietnam a generation later.
The 9th bivouacked
for a time at the foot of Mount Etna, a Sicilian volcano. "It was always
warm there. It was like a Garden of Eden. The farms were just loaded with
fruit. We unloaded the farm there of all kinds of fruit, even bananas."
But before going to
England, the forward artillery observers of the 34th Field Artillery would
get an assignment sending them into one of the hottest spots of the European
Theater - Anzio.
The Allies had bogged
down in Italy in 1943. Trying to swing around the main German defense line,
American and British forces landed at Anzio. Before they could advance very
far, German forces bottled them up. Anzio became a small beachhead with a
horseshoe of hills manned by Germans and their artillery. No place on the
beachhead was safe from German fire.
"We were at Anzio for
three days," he said. "We only made it 500 yards inland. The first night
we were there, we got the call to get back. It took us two days. The reason
is we had so much equipment there and the Germans were dumping so much stuff
on us. Everything was so concentrated, that no matter where they shot, they
hit something. We were stumbling over our own feet. I was glad to get out
of there."
Only Anzio was worse
than Kasserine, Fritts said.
The Battle of Piccadilly
Once off Anzio, they
were on their way to England. The 9th Division was tagged for the upcoming
campaign in France. In the meantime, it would train in Andover, England,
and relax.
"We trained a lot of
troops. The regular gun crews like us would break the new guys in. It was
a very complicated job - to sight in artillery. You had to have pretty good
boys and the time had to be right.
"We had a lot of fun
there. The people treated us real good. And if you liked fish and chips,
there was plenty to eat." The only thing that made it dangerous was the V-1
buzz bombs that hit London.
In England, they fought
"The Battle of Piccadilly," Fritts said, smiling. It was the Battle of Britain.
"We had a lot of fun there."
One time they went
to a bar in London, then decided to go to another bar. They stayed there
for a short while but the action was no better, so they headed back. "When
we got back, the first wasn't there. It had been wiped out."
All through the spring
of 1944 they trained and prepared for the invasion of France. Fritts had
trained with Marines for amphibious landings in Virginia in 1942, had landed
in North Africa that November and now faced the prospect of making the biggest
landing of all.
"We knew we were going
to invade. We didn't know when. One day, we had a pass to go to Ireland.
Then they said, 'No way, this is it.' We started loading up."
D-Day
While the 9th Division
was not scheduled to land in France until several days after D-Day, something
different was planned for the forward artillery observers of the 34th Field
Artillery. They would land BEFORE the 1st Infantry Division assault forces.
They would go ashore with a naval officer, head inland and call in gunfire
from naval ships offshore.
On the way across the
English Channel, Fritts felt OK. "I figured I made it this far OK. The rest
of the guys felt the same. We just wanted to get this over with and get home."
They went across the
English Channel on a wooden boat. About 50 of them were aboard. Well before
dawn they stopped. "We stopped just out of sight of land and then got into
rubber rafts."
His raft held eight
members of the FAO team plus two sailors. "They told us on the way in there
we would have to go as far inland as we could."
The teams had split
up. The men in Fritts' team paddled their way to the Green Beach sector of
Omaha Beach. Going in was frightening. "Your rear end is all puckered up."
They landed at a place
anyone who watched the movie "Saving Private Ryan" would recognize and moved
a half-mile inland. "It was the same beach you saw in the movie." Well before
the action started, they stepped ashore.
In the dark, they made
their way past the Germans' concrete bunkers. "We could hear them talking
inside. That was scary. We thought, 'What if they see us.'
"We had a little red
flashlight to see enemy mines. We figured there weren't any mines because
the Germans were walking all over the place. They wouldn't mine their own
troops."
"I think the first
shot out of the cannon from the battleships pretty near got us. We didn't
know the range of the ship. We called 'fire one for effect.' Yeah they did.
It went practically right on top of us. Thank God they missed us. Those shells
sounded just like a freight train going over your head."
The FAO team got the
half-mile and stopped. German troops were on the move. "There were only a
handful of us."
The day was one of
mass confusion.
Naval gunfire fell
around them in the day. "The naval guns weren't that accurate and most of
the shots were meant for the beach."
One of the first shells
landed so close to their team its shrapnel knocked out the radio battery
pack. "So we never got a signal off to the Navy. All we could from then on
is wait - just post guards and wait."
But the action around
them was not so intense and, in fact, they saw few targets for naval gunfire
anyway.
It was much different
than what the infantry faced those first hours on the beach.
"I never knew how bad
the invasion was until I talked to some of the guys afterward. I didn't see
it, period. But the movie Private Ryan hit it pretty close."
Other scenes from the
movie were like some of the action Fritts saw. "The tank battles were pretty
close. We never got into hand to hand like they did. But we would hear about
them and fire into those kinds of situations."
The night of June 6,
Fritts had a close encounter with the enemy.
"They had lots of K-9
dogs and some were loose. I saw this one come wandering over our way. I grabbed
this German overcoat that had been hanging out to dry, I suppose and wrapped
it around my lower legs. The dog came over, took a sniff, must have figured
I was German and just walked away."
There were times during
the war they called artillery onto their own positions.
"We knew it was coming,
so we could get underground."
During the Normandy
campaign, "St. Lo was a bad situation. We wanted to drive through there.
They sent the bombers over and the wind shifted, moving the smoke over us.
The bombers started hitting us. Some were hitting about the same as two doors
away. That was close enough."
Once the breakthrough
at St. Lo was made, the 9th Division was on its way, fighting across France,
then Germany, finally stopping at the Elbe where it linked up with the Russians.
Across Europe
The difference between
the move across Europe and the North African campaign was that units could
be rotated out for a rest. There weren't enough American divisions in Africa
to do that.
"Just after St. Lo,
we hit a mine. It blew us out of the truck. We were standing there wondering
what the heck we were going to do now. Pretty soon, we look up and see a
column of tanks coming down. In front of them is Patton. He yells down, 'Get
that thing out of the way. Let my killers through.' He just took his tank
and pushed it right through.
"The thing that saved
us was that we had sandbags piled in the floor of the truck. They made us
do that because of the mines. Shrapnel would come right through. That's what
saved us."
The 34th Field Artillery
wasn't always the one dishing it out when it came to artillery fire. The
Germans would fire back, trying to knock out the guns that were giving them
such trouble. On one of those occasions, Fritts was back with the rest of
the battery when German shells began to hit around them. He dove into a slit
trench, then rolled onto his back to light a cigarette. Wham! Something landed
on him. It was Father O'Connor the Boston priest who was the unit's chaplain.
"How ya doin', Fritts?"
the chaplain asked. Pulling a brandy flask out of his pocket, he looked down
on the young enlisted man, and asked, "Need a snort?"
After Fritts got a
snort, the priest asked if he had enough cigarettes. Fritts said he was and
then the priest got up and ran to the next slit trench.
"What a guy he was."
After the war, O'Connor organized unit reunions. "I wanted to go, but I could
never make it. I was always working."
In April 1945, the
9th Division's relatively quick move across Germany came to a stop at the
Elbe River. "We were stopped there for a couple of weeks. We wondered what
was going on. We had been all posed to go to Berlin."
Did they want to take
the fight to Berlin?
"Not really," he answered
quickly. "We had had enough. We had been all over Europe and Africa. This
was enough. I think we could have gone on and taken Berlin in a week because
up to this time the Germans had just been disappearing in front of us." The
Germans, he thinks, would not have put up the fight to hold Berlin that they
did against the Russians.
"So we just sat there
at the Elbe. We saw all these planes going over all the time. It was frightening.
We never knew when we would be the target - even from friendlies."
Then one day a bunch
of tanks rumbled up to the opposite riverbank.
"We didn't fire on
them and wondered why. We called headquarters and asked them what to do and
they said not to fire, that they were Russians. Then we saw the crews get
out of their tanks. Some of them pulled off their helmets and their hair
fell down to the middle of their back. They were women."
The steady dose of
combat and contact with the enemy wears anyone down.
"After you've been
in the front lines for a while, your mind just snaps. It happened to one
of our fellas. The young fella Patton slapped was out of our outfit - just
out of high school. We knew of him."
Fritts had another
close call that summer in France.
"We were out trying
to find a position for a sight. We were near a creek bed. We heard these
mortars coming and I jumped for the creek bed. I reached out with both arms
to break my fall and the mortar landed right between my hands."
His right hand was
cut up pretty bad.
"The doctors didn't
think I would be able to use it. I was only out of action for about a week."
Skin was grafted from
a mortally injured soldier onto the hand. "He was about ready to die anyway.
His whole back was blown out. He had stepped on a mind. I never knew who
the kid was."
Fritts was able to
use the hand. After the war he became a tool and die maker, working for a
few years at K.M. Fritts & Sons machine shop. The shop lasted a while,
then closed and Fritts went to work for American Sterilizer until it went
on strike. From there, he went to Snap-Tite for 18 years, first in Erie and
then when it moved to Union City. Getting tired of the long drive each day
to Union City, he took a job with R.M. Kerner until he retired.
Those first few years
home, Fritts would sometimes have nightmares. The sound of a car screeching
around the corner once sent him diving through a lattice to burrow under
a porch, his instincts taking over at what sounded like incoming enemy artillery.
He doesn't talk much
about his service in World War II.
"You just get a funny
feeling inside. So many of your buddies didn't come back with you. I was
fortunate."
Copyright 2000: William
J.
Welch
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