Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

288 Pacifica Military History
their tank destroyers in vulnerable infantry fighting positions about a
mile in front of the bridge.
Mike Popp wrestled our command car to the bridge site at about
0300 hours, February 2, in the immediate wake of one of uncount-able
numbers of artillery barrages. As I watched the miserably cold battlehardened
Company C troopers wrestle the five-by-ten-foot panels of
the double-triple Bailey bridge across an eighty-foot-deep chasm in the
midst of a vertical ice storm, I became convinced that these were men
who would finish anything, literally anything, that anyone could
conceivably dream up to be accomplished by combat engineers.
The bridge, which would be two panels thick and three panels high
with a single-span treadway floor required the placement of 216 fivehundred-pound
panels. When completed, with one end in Belgium and
the other end in Germany, the 180-foot span would be able to support a
forty-ton load moving at six miles per hour.
We opened the bridge to traffic at 1700 hours, February 3, forty and
a half hours after work began. We did so following an around-the-clock
effort by two complete engineer combat companies and with-out
suffering a single casualty or injury despite the incessant German artillery
fire and incredibly dangerous working conditions. Our first customers
were all the self-propelled tank destroyers of the 629th Tank Destroyer
Battalion. And the payoff, soon to arrive, was a coordinated attack, amply
supported by way of the Lanzerath bridge, in which the 325th Glider
Infantry and 504th Parachute Infantry regiments quickly and decisively
cracked the Siegfried Line between Neuhof and Udenreth, just north of
the Losheim Gap.
As soon as possible, the 291st followed the 82nd Airborne through
the dragon’s teeth and formidable array of bunkers and pillboxes
comprising the Siegfried Line. Behind us lay the long-sought breach in
the enemy frontier and ahead of us lay victory, but not without privation
and struggle, hope and glory as we had never seen them before.
*
On February 7, 1945, Colonel Anderson contacted me with orders to
move the entire 291st Engineer Combat Battalion to a new jumping-off
point in the Hurtgen forest. The news was unwelcome and immediately