The Great Pillbox Mystery of WWII

Several years ago, my wife and I made a trip to France to visit, for the last time, a few friends she had made while honing her language skills-she taught French for years. While we were there, I took advantage of the opportunity to revisit the area in the northeast corner of the country-Alsace and Lorraine-where I had served in the Seventieth Infantry Division during World War ll, more than sixty years ago. The roamings refreshed memories of our few months of combat, but it also raised a few questions. After we returned home, 1 made inquiries, found answers, and convinced myself that my research merited an article for our Division quarterly. To my disappointment, the article was not published - not interesting enough or not exciting enough, or perhaps too long. As a child of the depression, I hate to throw anything away, so I have prevailed on the Record-Citizen to use an even longer version.

The city of Forbach lies in a salient of French territory pointing toward Saarbruecken, a much larger German city lying across the border. The Village of Spicheren lies just to the east on heights overlooking the boundary. Scrutinizing the vista from the bluffs at Spicheren, an American soldier could hardly fail to shudder at the dragon's teeth and concrete blockhouses of the Westwall, constructed across the border by Hitler as an answer to the French Maginot Line.

On February 17, 1945, my infantry division, the Seventieth, began a push toward Saarbruecken, and within a week our battalion had worked its way to Spicheren Heights and earned a grand view of the Saar valley, as well as our first glimpse of the intimidating defenses of the Siegfried Line, the popular name for the Westwall.

On the French side, along the brow of bluffs facing the border, lay a string of pillboxes, which we had just overrun during our advance. Our company commander decided to use one for a command post and, since his coterie was small and the lodgings large, he allowed the mortar section of our company to bunk on the concrete floor for the night. This included yours truly, since I was serving as weapons platoon leader at the time.

The accommodations were Spartan enough, cold and dark, and yet appreciably safer and more comfortable than sleeping outdoors in a trench or a foxhole, which had been our previous lot.

Next morning at daybreak, several of us were standing outside the pillbox when one of our riflemen appeared out of the heavy fog with ,a couple of Germans who had somehow managed to kamerad their way into captivity, preferring an American POW camp to the dangers of a war which they surely knew was already lost.

Our company communications sergeant spoke German, and he began to conduct an interrogation on the spot. He learned nothing. Rubin persisted, however, and received only blank looks, either because they were dummkopfs who couldn't understand their own language or because they were not sufficiently intimidated-or possibly because the Germans knew as well as we that POWs were supposed to give only their name, rank, and serial number.

Whatever the cause, an increase in volume was called for, and Rubin obliged until he was soon hurling German at them like a drill sergeant.

Consider, please, the dilemma facing one of our machine gunners fifty yards or so down the line - I never discovered which one. Surely, he must have thought, the Germans wouldn't attack with shouting instead of shooting, but, on the other hand -- all that racket in German must have a some sort of a meaning. What's more, although the fog was not quite the hand-in-front-of-your-face kind, he couldn't see us. So he fired his gun in our direction, but, as a compromise appropriate for his uncertainty, he fired only one short burst.

For aiming at a noise, his aim was respectably good. As I remember it, he wounded both prisoners, and one of our guys too. None of the rest of us were wounded, but I had a bloody spot where a tiny fragment of some sort had entered my left jaw-probably, I thought, a piece of a bullet that had splintered against the concrete wall of the pillbox. We hastily switched back to English, arranged a truce, and sent the wounded to the rear.

A few months later, after VE-Day, I was transferred to regimental headquarters, where I, a second lieutenant of recent vintage, was occasionally compelled to converse with our commander, full colonel Sam G. Conley, a West Pointer of seasoned vintage, but no martinet and, I thought, a pretty nice guy.

One day the colonel asked if I had ever been wounded. No sir, only a scratch one time, and I related the circumstances. "Did a medic treat you?" Yes sir, he put a sort of band-aid compress on it.

Next day, a clerk called to ask me when and where. "The colonel said to see that Lt. Krumme gets a Purple Heart."

No protest on my part. Insubordination is not one of my accomplishments, and I had no inclination to look that particular gift horse in the mouth. I was more than pleased to humor the colonel, since, along with the Purple Heart, which I still have in a drawer somewhere, I received five additional points toward an earlier ticket home. (It also gave "Shooting Sam" one more recorded battle casualty in his successful crusade toward generalship.) But it was, and is, somewhat embarrassing to have received a Purple Heart for such a trivial injury. After relating the story to a friend on a later occasion, I felt even more subdued, because he was unkind enough to point out that it might not have been a bullet fragment but a chip of concrete that had penetrated my jaw. To be awarded a Purple Heart for a puncture by a piece of a bullet gives no great status, but to receive a medal for an injury by a chip of concrete is absolutely mortifying.

Almost forty years later, dentist Reid McCullough, examining an X-ray of my wisdom teeth, asked me in surprise, "Say, did you know you had a piece of metal in your jaw?" I could have hugged him! .

Incidentally, a month or so later, an enterprising Stars and Stripes reporter looking for a human interest story interviewed someone in F company and sent back to the States a story about the incident that included the following paragraph:

"Later, a German prisoner was taken, and Lieutenant Krumme was questioning him in German near the pillbox. The voices were low, the evening dark, and the conversation in German. Suddenly a machine gun burst into action; the German was wounded in the back and the lieutenant narrowly escaped injury. It had been a Yank gunner thinking some Nazis were trying to slip up to the pillbox."

And the story went on, mainly emphasizing that our CO, Lt. Eblen, had been leery about occupying the bunker and later considered it be hexed. But the reporter got some of the details wrong. There were two prisoners. I was not the one who questioned them-I didn't know ten words of German. It was not a dark evening, it was a foggy morning. The voices were not low; it was Rubin's aggressive German that confused the machine gunner. Regardless, the story appeared in the "Yanks at War" column in the Tulsa paper, and probably in the hometown papers of the other GI's mentioned. What's more, in one place Eb's name was spelled Elben. C'est la guerre. Or, at the least, c'est the reporting on la guerre.

I had written several letters by candlelight on huckled German stationery while we were in the pillbox. (The verb huckle does not appear in my dictionary, but the term referred to obtaining supplies by irregular means, even to the point of theft. Supply sergeants were appreciated and praised for their huckling abilities. During a spell of combat, one of our companies came across an abandoned jeep, which they liberated and repainted with the company's numbers. If I remember correctly, the deception was not successful for long, but no one was punished-frequently, where many people are involved in a deceit, no one is held responsible. As for the stationery, its letterhead named a factory in Hellenthal, Germany, so I presume it was huckled by a German family on behalf of a recent occupant of the pillbox. They wanted to hear from their soldier boy too. And paper, like everything else, including food, became scarce in Germany near the end of the war.)

Having written letters by candlelight had not exactly made the bunker into home sweet home, but I thought I remembered its location rather well. On our trip to France in 2002, I tried to find it for old times' sake. I spotted several in about the right place.

Some of our division's earlier combat experience had been along the Maginot Line, on the Rhine river and westward in the Low Vosges. As a matter of fact, our company's first casualties were occasioned when our company commander and one of our sergeants were idly snooping around in a pillbox on the Rhine. The Germans had booby-trapped it. Both survived, but neither recovered before hostilities ended, so they missed all the fun.

On our trip I had already visited areas where many such blockhouses had been built. All were still in place, even those which had been constructed in villages. The cost of removing them is certainly greater than the value of the real estate, and the French don't seem to mind leaving them in position. One blockhouse we visited was available for tourist inspections during designated summer hours. Even so, Mother Nature, time, and vandalism do take a gradual toll, and the French authorities have reportedly piled dirt against the doors of some to keep out nosy visitors who might get into trouble and sue.

The pillbox at Spicheren which fitted my memory best was the only one on our trip that was not in its original state. It lay in a half-dozen giant six-foot-thick slabs of reinforced concrete, obviously destroyed by a gigantic explosion from inside. That night, I went back to our regimental history and found a picture of a ruined pillbox with the subscript, "Doughs from the 2nd Battalion blast enemy pill boxes to prevent their recapture by counter attacking forces." Considering the likelihood of recapture and its inefficacy for defense, it was a waste of explosives, but the engineers may have been looking for something to door maybe Eblen requested its destruction as the surest way to eliminate a hex.

I took several pictures, and after I got home, I began to wonder about the pillboxes, because they were not at all like those I had revisited a few days earlier in the Low Vosges. For one thing, they had no doors. None had the thick steel cupolas I had seen on other Maginot Line pillboxes. There were no embrasures to fire through. Not only were they not completed, they weren't even designed right.

So I bought a book on the Maginot Line, and when I found no answers, I bought three more-I have a tendency to overdo. I learned a lot; after all, I was just a kid when the Line was constructed in the early thirties.

For those whose knowledge of history has become vague, recall, please, that Germany's invasion of France in World War I was the second in fifty years. The first led to France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. (The war was misnamed: Prussia was the leader, but the other German states were also parties.) The second invasion, in World War I, would have likewise have resulted in disaster if England, and subsequently the United States, had not joined in the struggle.

Even though the Allies were finally successful in 1918, France remained acutely aware of its weakness. Much of its anxiety was a consequence of the World War I cemeteries covering northern France. The nation had lost almost two million men killed and missing out of a population of forty million. (In WWII, the United States, with several times France's population, lost fewer than half a million.) It faced a Germany with almost twice its population which was already contemplating revenge.

What's more, the French realized that the casualties suffered during 1914-18 would lead to a sudden drop in available conscripts beginning in the mid-thirties. Uncertain of having allies, the nation decided to build a line of forts and pillboxes along the German border from the eastern edge of the Ardennes forests to Switzerland.

And so, in the late twenties, the enormously expensive project was begun.

END OF PART ONE

PART TWO - Summary of Part One - In March, 1945, a dozen or so of my company in the 70th Infantry Division spent the night in a pillbox near Spicheren, a French village overlooking Saarbruecken, a German city across the border. Next morning, in a heavy fog, a German-speaking GI loudly interrogated two newly surrendered Germans. Alarmed by the shouting in a foreign language, one of our own machine gunners fired a burst blindly in the direction of the hubbub, wounding two or three and leaving me with a trivial injury where my cheek was punctured by either a fragment of a bullet or a piece of concrete. In 2002, when 1 returned to the area for the first time, l realized that all of the pillboxes along the heights were unfinished and, unlike other Maginot Line bunkers we had seen, lacked cupolas and embrasures for firing at attackers. I bought several books trying to find out why. I learned that the French, recognizing that Germany was more populous and potentially much stronger, had constructed the Maginot Line along the German border from the Ardennes forests to Switzerland.

The French talked briefly of extending the line of fortifications westward to the Channel, but the water table on the coastal plain was too shallow to allow the construction of effective forts, much less the tunnels that connected them. In the face of unacceptable costs, they convinced themselves that such an extension was not needed. An attack bypassing the Line to the west would have to come through Belgium-which is precisely what the Germans had done in World War I. After that experience, however, the Belgians had constructed fortifications along their German border, and the French planners felt that this time, at worst, the Belgians would delay an attack long enough for the French to swing across Belgium and halt the attack.

As for the Ardennes forests at the hinge between the Belgian forts and the French line of forts, neither Belgium nor France thought that they required strong defenses the French command maintained that "they are impenetrable if certain dispositions are made ... this sector is not dangerous." A judgment disastrously incorrect, it turned out later.

One of the strongest advocates of the defensive line was Andre Maginot, who had resigned as Undersecretary of State for War, at 37, to enlist in the army when war WWI began. He served with distinction and received the country's highest military award, but was at last seriously wounded and discharged. He limped with a stiff knee for the rest of his life. After the war, he served as Minister of Pensions, where he was widely appreciated for successfully reorganizing an abysmally inefficient bureaucracy. When he was offered the position of Minister of War in 1922, the outcry of veterans was so great that he was not permitted to resign, but instead became Minister of War and Pensions. Nothing could be more fitting than to name the new line of fortifications after the nation's most popular veteran, whose early death of natural causes before the line was constructed, was genuinely mourned by the entire nation.

History made it a hollow honor, although the Line itself did not fail-it was never tested. On May 10, 1940, the Germans stopped the long period of inaction that followed the declaration of war (called the Phony War) by feinting an attack through northern Belgium, and then launching their blitzkrieg through the Ardennes, which, as noted, the French had deemed "impenetrable, if certain dispositions are made."

In the first place, no "dispositions" were made. In the second, the French underestimated the power of lightning war, with its emphasis on tanks and dive bombers. Third, the army had fronted the Ardennes sector with ill-trained troops of low morale, mostly older men, married and with families. Disciplined troops might well have survived the blow-in the actuality, the defense melted like butter.

The Germans broke through almost before the French high command realized the danger. Within a fortnight, the Germans were at the Channel. If a hastily organized armada of naval and private craft had not succeeded in evacuating more than 300,000 Allied troops from the port at Dunkirk, England might have been forced to capitulate, as France promptly did.

But, as I admittedly do on occasion, I have digressed somewhat from the subject under consideration, namely, why did the pillboxes at Forbach and Spicheren not seem to fit into all I had learned about the Maginot Line?

According to the reference books, the Maginot Line was generally constructed about five miles from the German border, but in the Saarbruecken area, the line was ten miles or more removed, because the border makes a loop northward and the French preferred to have their line relatively straight. But not a thing appeared that would satisfy my curiosity about a line of pillboxes only a mile or two from Germany.

The authors of books on the Maginot had made some reference to forward observation posts ahead of the main line, but nothing seemed to fit the blockhouses at Spicheren. So I went to the Internet. By asking dumb questions at a Yahoo website about the Maginot Line, I finally got an observation from a French native that the pillboxes were not part of the Maginot Line at all, but were part of the German Westwall. I knew better, of course, because the bunkers were on French territory.

On our trip, I had bought a book, "Chronicle of the Siege," by Jean-Claude Flauss, about the liberation of Forbach by the 276th, a sister regiment on our left flank. In a flash of inspiration, I called information, conversed with the author in my weak French, and sent him an e-mail with all my questions. M. Flauss, who, it developed, is the Archiviste Municipal for the City of Forbach, replied with an e-mail which I have translated as presented below. "On May 28, 1938, Hitler decided to construct what was soon called the 'Westwall,' extending from Holland to the Swiss border. On June 14, 1938, the Fuehrer committed responsibility for the gigantic enterprise to Dr. (of Engineering) Fritz Todt. In the Saarland, 4,100 pillboxes were planned. The defense line thus passed to the south of Saarbruecken, at the foot of the hill at Spicheren. Immense resources were put to work to speed up the enterprise, and as early a October, 1938, Hitler made a trip of inspection to the work sites where almost 17,800 works were to be constructed.

"On October 9, 1938, he came to Saarbruecken to announce that the Saarbruecken sector would again be reinforced. This was confirmed after his visit to Spicheren Heights at Christmas, 1939, during the `Phony War.' The decision was made then to complete the Westwall project by the construction of pillboxes and bunkers on French territory, between Spicheren and Grande-Rosselle, in spite of the fluctuating front line, and during the time that the French border population was evacuated to Charente or the Straits of Dover (the coal miners). After the German offensive of May 10, 1940, then the occupation of Paris, June 14, the construction work sites on French territory were shut down.

"Note that the network of pillboxes and bunkers constructed after Hitler's 1939 Christmas visit was partly responsible for the long siege of 105 days suffered by the population of the Forbach salient and for the very late liberation of this sector, only on March 14, 1945. "In fact, if these bunkers had not existed, it is probable that Patton's Third Army would not have stopped at the edge of Forbach on December 7, 1944, in order to evaluate the German forces occupying the reinforced line of defense in front of Saarbruecken. And Forbach could have been freed BEFORE the Ardennes counteroffensive on December 16, 1944 [the Battle of the Bulge] and Operation Nordwind on January 1, 1945.

"The passage of Hitler at Spicheren was commemorated by a bronze plaque placed in front of the shelter to which he had come, and which naturally disappeared at war's end. On the plaque, one could read: `ADOLPH HITLER STELLUNG,' and below, 'Hier weilte der Fuehrer am 24. Dezember 1939 um 17 Uhr.' [Adolph Hitler Site - The Fuehrer stopped here at 5:00 o'clock on the afternoon of December 24, 1939.]

"And to mark the event, one could hear the bells of the church at Spicheren on the wavelength of the German radio, New Year's Eve, December 31, 1939.

"And this had also one other consequence: the Germans did not take these celebratory bells to make cannons in 1943, as was the case for all the bells of the other churches of the region."

As remarked earlier, the Phony War was the period between the declaration of war in September, 1939, and the blitzkrieg attack through the Ardennes in May, 1940, which led to the British evacuation at Dunkirk and the fall of France.

M. Flauss' kind response gave more background than I had known to ask for. Hitler came to Spicheren Heights because the Battle of Spicheren was the first of a series of rapid victories for the allied German states in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The heights at Spicheren were holy ground, and plaques and statues were still extant when Eddy and I visited in 2002.

(That war ended in the absolute defeat of France. In 1871, at Versailles, the German princes voted to unify their territories, with the king of Prussia as emperor. The French were required to cede Alsace and Lorraine to the new empire. Thus were the seeds of World War I sown, just as a later treaty at Versailles sowed the seeds of World War 11.)

The books I bought did flesh out M. Flauss' story appreciably. I found the following account of the evacuation of the territory in front of the Maginot Line in Vivian Rowe's "The Great Wall of France."

"On August 25 [1939], as Hitler's war of nerves on Poland was reaching its screaming zenith and the Line was at full war strength, the sirens shattered the silence of the night at 2 a.m., the very hour when mind and body are at their lowest ebb ... All the forward zone was immediately to be cleared of the civilian population. Sleepy and bewildered children, puzzled and uncomprehending old women, young wives in tears, were somehow gathered together, their luggage (not to exceed 30 kilogrammes) labeled, places found for them in waiting trains and at five m the morning, with the first glimmer of light, they left for Perigueux [in central France].

"Soldiers perforce become inured to pre-dawn departures, but why it should have been thought necessary to inflict this one upon unoffending women and children at ridiculously inadequate notice has never been explained...

'The civil authorities in the northeast behaved in the manner to which France was to become familiar when German armies overran the country. They lost their heads. To gain a few unneeded hours they swept farmers and farm-workers away, leaving the stock to take care of itself...

"Many animals were driven into the towns and villages beyond the fortified zone to be tended by those who remained."

All this with only a threat of war. It should have been obvious to the French high command that all of Hitler's forces were concentrated on the eastern front, where fire days later Hitler, without provocation, launched a savage attack on Poland. Britain and France responded, on September 3, by declaring war.

Blitzkrieg on the eastern front, but Sitzkrieg on the western front for the eight months of the Phony War, giving Hitler an opportunity to commence the construction of the bunkers that puzzled me so much.

M. Flauss observed, with obvious regret, that the existence of the bunkers probably caused a delay of three months in the liberation of Forbach. During those three months, 121 citizens were killed, about 250 were wounded, 200 homes were destroyed, and an additional 1450 habitations were damaged. Our division suffered several times that number of casualties, but the incompletely finished pillboxes were no factor in our losses. (Company B, 274th, reported capturing six bunkers in one twenty minute period.)

The distance from the German border immediately east of Spicheren westward to the border at Grande-Rosselle is six or seven miles. As our division advanced through the line of bunkers during the war, most of us GI's weren't firm enough in our orientation or our geography or anything else to notice anything strange about them.

Even on my return visit, I didn't wise up at first, because I thought the firing ports had been purposefully covered with dirt by a bulldozer after the war-besides, I was preoccupied in tracing my half-century-old tracks through the woods. This was not difficult, because, except for woodcutters, the woodlands are almost untouched. In the fields and grasslands, the trenches and ditches have been smoothed over, but in the woods, only Mother Nature has done any smoothing, and she works very slowly.

(The trenches were not deep, but in our advance we had earlier crossed an anti-tank ditch, miles long, dug a few hundred yards in front of the pillboxes, that bottomed at about seven feet. The trenches and the ditch had been dug by French locals pressed into service and by Russian prisoners--there was a prison camp nearby. The anti-tank ditch was no hindrance; American tank-dozers built roads across it in short order.)

With regard to the pillboxes, I presume all of us GIs supposed they were a part of the Maginot Line, since they were on French soil. I know I did. (As the mountaineer said about his pregnant wife, "I'm not sure it's mine, but it's caught in my trap.") But on my return trip, the condition of the bunkers and their location and orientation disturbed me enough to require some investigation. Even so, I was quite surprised to learn the truth.

One of the books on the Maginot Line comments that the line's most forward structures were "fortified barracks" to house soldiers "whose job it was to impose an initial delay and to pass the alarm back to the main defenses." If the remaining bunkers of the Spicheren line are similar to the few that I saw, the line was surely designed to perform the same function for the Germans.

Regardless, if I had known the facts, I would not have been so sensitive through the years about the possibility of having been injured by a chip of concrete. After all, it was enemy concrete.

General Orders - 274th Honor Roll