Free If You Survive by George Wilson Page A

behavior, for he promptly pushed her back into the crowd. It was many, many weeks before the men let him forget it.
    We pushed right on through the center of the city to the northeast corner, which was much calmer. There we were assigned areas for bivouac and cautioned not to wander, since there were still Germans about. I had my men pitch tents in some backyards and told them to stay put. Lessthan an hour later, you might know, two men from another platoon wandered off in search of wine and women. They immediately ran into Germans instead. One of them was shot in the exchange of fire, and the other fled back to the company.
    He ran into an officer on the street and excitedly told him what had happened. The officer at once grabbed all the men he could load onto a jeep and took off up the road after the Germans. Very quickly he ran into the Germans and found himself in a small-arms fight that was too big for his small group. Without telling the men, the officer jumped in the jeep and tore back to our lines for more support. My company was then ordered to attack.
    We marched up the road about a half mile, passing our dead GI, who was sprawled by the side of the road where he had fallen. As we approached a railroad yard and roundhouse where the Germans seemed to be holed up I was ordered to take my platoon on a right flanking move and attack on signal to take the roundhouse.
    We maneuvered behind houses and through backyards until we were in position, and I radioed that we were ready. Instead of being ordered to attack, I was told to withdraw back to the company area. I was told only that there had been a change in plans.
    We learned later that we had been led into another regiment’s combat zone. This neighboring regiment had almost let us have it with their artillery. Fortunately for us, their artillery forward observer was on the ball and recognized us as friendlies.
    The next day I witnessed one of the emotion-ridden French kangaroo courts. There were several defendants, mostly women, on trial for collaboration with the Germans. As each was convicted in about five minutes she was led out onto the porch of a large house, and a localbarber shaved her head. At the end of the trial, the convicted were lined up and forced to march through the streets.
    Their shaven heads made them stand out, and the mob jeered and poked at them and pelted them with rotten eggs, tomatoes, and even paper bags of excrement.
    Many such trials were going on around us, we heard. The retribution was beastly. With their bare scalps, these people were marked for a long time. They had to struggle and beg for the essentials of life. If guilty, perhaps they were lucky. Some of these luckless people might have been trying to make the best of a desperate situation. Some of the women had two and three children fathered by Germans. Others believed their husbands had been killed and so had fallen in love with their captors. For those, on the other hand, who had suffered without collaborating through four years of privation and hunger, the sudden release was emotionally explosive. To them it was not a time to grant mercy they themselves had been denied.
    It reminded me of an occasion back in Normandy when we actually had to shoot a Frenchwoman because she was firing at us. It seems the father of her children was a German soldier, and he had been killed right in the yard of their farmhouse.
    Near the end of the war, I saw the long trains of 40 & 8 boxcars. The capacity of each was stenciled on its side: “40 hommes, 8 chevaux”—forty men or eight horses. Each was loaded with Frenchmen heading for home after four years in Germany as slave labor. I wondered if they had any idea what awaited them. They all were riotously happy.
    After only a day or two on the northeast side of Paris, we again took up the pursuit of the Germans. We started out on foot in two columns on either side of the road, withmy platoon in the lead. At the far edge of town we came upon a large