Free If You Survive by George Wilson Page B

villa enclosed by a stone wall. The huge house had a nice stand of tall pines in front, and the Germans had not failed to build platforms close to the treetops so that they could observe our actions. East of the villa stretched a huge sugar beet field, and beyond that a hayfield.
    Artillery shells began to land among the trees where we stood, and we spotted some Germans out in the beet field about a quarter mile away. Lieutenant Colonel Walker ordered my platoon right out into the open field to clear it out. I sure didn’t like being that sort of sacrificial offering, so I asked him to shell the Germans as we went out.
    In a few minutes our shells began to land among the Germans, and I led the platoon out into the sugar beet field. Our artillery soon became too much for the enemy, and they began waving white flags. I had my men hold their fire, and we waved to the Germans to come on in and surrender as soon as we could stop our artillery from firing on them.
    About thirty of them got up and came toward us with their hands on their heads. We covered them until they reached us and then passed them on to the rear as prisoners. For them the war was over.
    We continued our advance across the open field. It was a very tense business; we were so completely exposed. At one point I just missed stepping on a terrible antipersonnel mine we called a Bouncing Betty. Three tiny prongs showed through the earth about three inches from my foot.
    I instantly yelled
“Mines!”
and told my men to watch where they walked. Those things really scared hell out of me. They were completely hidden, very deadly. They work in two stages. Stepping on one of those prongs or touching a trip wire with five pounds of pressure sets off the first stage. The mine shoots up like a small rocket, and whenit’s about ten to twenty feet high it explodes again. The second explosion scatters hundreds of ball bearings in every direction, like a shotgun. No one is safe within forty yards of the device. The second explosion is so close to the first you hardly have time to move. Falling down, which is the natural reflex, just exposes more of the body.
    Somehow we made it all the way across the sugar beet field and then far into some hayfields where we stopped for the night. At least we were able to make comfortable beds among the haystacks.
    About this time a solitary Frenchman wandered by. It seemed he owned a small fleet of buses, and the Germans had taken them all in their escape from Paris. He knew they were short on gas, and he hoped to find them abandoned and unharmed along the road. We wished him luck.
    Paris was now safely in Allied hands, and the rest of the pursuit was ahead. I hoped our luck would hold out. My platoon actually had not lost a man since Saint Pois.

VIII
THE PURSUIT CONTINUES
    W ith Paris behind us and the German armies in full retreat, we tossed all caution to the wind. Combat teams were thrown together by mixing a few tanks with each infantry battalion. The infantry rode on the back of the tanks or followed in two-and-a-half ton trucks.
    A wild, mad, exciting race seemed to be on to see which army could gain the most ground in a single day. We were in the First Army under General Hodges. The headline hailed the colorful, flamboyant Patton as the hero of the day, boldly announcing, “Patton’s tanks roll fifty miles.” While our First Army usually made about the same distance, we were not mentioned; or, if anything was said, it was usually hidden on a second or third page of
Stars and Stripes
, the Army newspaper. Back home, too, the bold headlines were all about Patton. He did deserve a lot of credit, but we resented the neglect of the First Army and the efficient General Hodges. He never received near the credit he deserved.
    Resistance continued to be very light, and we were able to gain fifty or sixty miles each day. The German rear echelon blew up a few bridges and toppled some trees across the roads at points difficult to detour.