Ah, those Amerikanisch Soldats!
You’ll remember that a couple of weeks ago (in an article, not a column), I wrote about Abbott Weatherly, a local hero who had commanded artillery during the Battle of the Bulge.
This was the last major German offensive of that war and brought about the highest American casualties of any battle in that conflict. While the Germans lost, they did manage to throw the Allied timetable for a loop and probably extended the war a few more weeks than it might otherwise have lasted.
A friend of mine, Paul Merriman, is the son of another man who was at that fight. Like Weatherly, he was an artillerist, though with a different unit (the 736th Field Artillery, Company C, Third Army, handling eight-inch howitzers). He brought stateside a curious souvenir from that fight that Paul was kind enough to let me get a photograph of.
Namely, it was a printed invitation from the Germans for any Yanks in the area to politely surrender.
When one fires howitzers, one needs an observer to tell him how he is doing. Ordinarily, Sgt. Merriman’s unit did this through the services of a soldier flying a Piper Cub. However, the Battle of the Bulge featured insanely bad weather that kept aircraft grounded during much of it. And so, the elder Merriman and two of his buddies were sent to the top of a hill to do the forward observation themselves.
“By the time we reached the destination in our Jeep, it was dusk and our Battalion Headquarters radioed us to stay low, keep radio silence and dig in for the night,” Merriman later wrote.
German soldiers were reported in the area: it wouldn’t be good to have a unit of them stumbling onto a lone American Jeep. And so the men hid their Jeep beneath a low-growing pine tree and the men dug in under two or three feet of snow to sleep until morning.
The next day, they were given the okay to return to base — the weather had cleared and the Piper was out and calling in everything the artillerists needed to know.
“The forest scene was just beautiful, the sun was shining and there was another foot of snow. The Jeep was completely hidden,” Merriman wrote. “Then, we saw foot tracks in the snow just below us and scattered all around the area were these ‘invitations to surrender’ left by the Germans during the night.”
I have dug around online and, lo, not even the Almighty Wikipedia has anything about these “safe conducts.” They’re quite curious.
On one side of a sheet of paper we see a little boy and girl delightedly buying “balloons” made of American candy Life Savers from a happy, Bavarian-looking fellow standing beside his sidewalk cart. A headline reads, “Buddy, here is an idea! Get it?”… as if the German writers weren’t entirely certain Americans would get the joke. The other side of the sheet promised “Safe Conduct” and medical treatment to any soldier who approaches German lines with “a genuine wish to give himself up.”
I guess it would have been a great way to meet Col. Hogan or Sgt. Schultz and fight the war via espionage from the charming confines of Stalag 13…and if you don’t understand that reference, you might want to give your grandpa a call.
Contact Bill Handat email@example.com.