Posted on 12/19/2004 6:45:42 AM PST by csvset
60 years later, Virginia man remembers WWII massacre
By ROBERT MCCABE, The Virginian-Pilot
© December 17, 2004
Last updated: 12:23 PM
|
| Bill Merriken was a member of Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion in 1944, many of whom died in the ''Malmedy Massacre.'' Jill Nance
|
|
After herding the American prisoners into a field on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 17, 1944 , machine-gunners on German tanks opened fire.
Merriken, one of the last to enter the field and closer to the tanks, threw himself on the ground, his face buried in the crook of his left arm.
Though two machine-gun bullets tore into his back – one close to his spinal column – he remained fully conscious, frozen in position.
“I prayed that somebody in that group would survive and come out,” he recalled. “Thank God, I was one of them. I was hoping somebody was still alive that could tell the story.”
Now 82, Merriken sat recently in the remodeled basement of his four-bedroom home in Bedford and shared – as much as his memory and his emotions would allow – the horrific events of that day and what followed.
“I would like for people to know what happened, because a lot of people don’t know,” he said.
Merriken’s account of the “Malmedy Massacre,” as it became known, falls roughly halfway through “The Longest Winter,” a new book by Alex Kershaw about the Battle of the Bulge.
The book follows the publication a year ago of “The Bedford Boys,” Kershaw’s story of the members of a former Bedford-based National Guard unit that was in the first wave at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Nineteen Bedford men from that unit were killed in the first 15 minutes of the invasion.
Merriken, a graduate of Bedford High School, knew many of them.
Later that year, two more men from the Bedford area were among those killed at Malmedy.
Kershaw’s new book, about the German army’s desperate counterattack on Dec. 16, 1944, recounts how an 18-man American platoon held off the leading edge of the German assault at the Battle of the Bulge for 12 hours.
Merriken was not in that platoon but in Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, whose job was to spot enemy locations.
The day after the German attack began, Merriken’s 30-truck convoy collided with a German armored column led by SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper at the Baugnez crossroads, near Malmedy.
“I was in the second vehicle in the convoy,” Merriken said. “We saw shells coming into this field.”
Quickly overwhelmed by German tank and machine-gun fire, his unit soon heard the voice of a German officer in an armored vehicle shouting, “Up, up, up,” Merriken said, telling the Americans to get out of the roadside ditches into which they dove for cover, and to go to the rear.
The battery officer told his troops to surrender, because they were defenseless against an armored column, Merriken said.
The German commanders were already running behind schedule and frustrated, Kershaw said in a phone interview.
“These guys don’t stop for anybody,” he said of the delayed German SS Panzer column. “There’s a big problem with what you’re going to do with POWs.”
Soon after they were captured, the group of prisoners was directed into a field, near a cafe and a few farmhouses.
“I was one of the last to go in,” Merriken recalled. “You’re in the very front, facing the road. All of us didn’t know what was going to happen. I think most of us assumed we’d be prisoners of war.”
Another German armored vehicle approached – perhaps a half-track – from which an officer stood up, took his pistol and shot a prisoner point-blank, Merriken said.
With that, the machine guns on tanks positioned nearby opened up on everybody, starting with those in the rear ranks and methodically moving forward.
“It was over in about 15 minutes,” he recalled.
German soldiers soon moved among the bodies, kicking, poking and prodding them for signs of life. At one point, they feigned offering medical attention, he said.
“ You hurt? You hurt? ” Merriken remembers them asking.
Anyone who responded was shot or clubbed with the butt of a rifle.
One grievously wounded American, clearly in pain, moved near Merriken’s left.
“He was so delirious, he didn’t know what he was doing,” he recalled. “I whispered to him, 'Be still, be still.’”
The man, however, wound up rolling over on the back of Merriken’s legs.
He said two German soldiers walked up to them. “They stood right over us,” he said .
They fired a single pistol shot, which passed through the wounded man’s body and continued through the right knee of Merriken, who never flinched.
He does not attribute that to will power, but to the weight of the man’s body.
When the slaughter was over, more than 70 American soldiers lay dead, many with gunshot wounds to the head, inflicted at close range.
Months after the recovery of the main massacre site, more bodies were found nearby. The monument that marks the site today bears the names of more than 80 men.
Precisely how many were killed in the massacre still isn’t known with absolute certainty. One Web-based account states that more than half of the Americans assembled in the field survived.
Perhaps two hours after the shooting stopped, losing blood and weakening, Merriken somehow found the strength to get to his feet. Dragging his wounded leg, he struggled toward a woodshed, but first came across a German officer running after survivors headed for some woods.
From perhaps 10 feet away, as Merriken tried to cross a fence, the German pointed his pistol at him and attempted to fire, but the gun jammed.
Merriken kept moving.
“I don’t know why it didn’t go off. I can’t tell you that,” he said. “God was with me, I can tell you that.”
The officer continued after the larger group of survivors, perhaps a dozen men, Merriken said.
Eventually, he made it to the woodshed, where he met another American soldier, Chuck Reding, who had managed to escape the massacre unscathed.
Without food or water, in nearly zero-degree weather, the two crawled from one hiding place to another before being taken in by a Belgian farm family, who hid them in an attic.
Merriken refused to let anyone tend his wounds – a decision he believes may have helped save his life. It was so cold, his blood-soaked clothing formed a kind of frozen seal on his back wounds, preventing him from bleeding to death.
He had tried to stop the bleeding from his knee by tightening the laces on his canvas legging .
A teenage Belgian boy, riding on a bike, hid a note from Reding in the sole of his shoe.
Traversing a minefield en route, he took it to the American lines.
The note disclosed the trapped soldiers’ location, leading to Merriken’s and Reding’s eventual rescue.
A lifetime later, in May 1999, while on a trip back to Malmedy, Merriken met that boy – Emile Jamar – for the first time. Only then did he learn the story of how he was saved.
After the war, Merriken came back home to Bedford. He and his wife, Betty, were married in 1958 . After a brief stint helping to run a family plumbing business, he got a degree in business administration and eventually retired as a state auditor in 1985.
Today, the Merrikens have four daughters and eight grandchildren, all of whom live in Bedford. As Bill Merriken met with a reporter recently, some of them were busy upstairs decorating for Christmas.
Though he had occasional nightmares in the years immediately after the war, he’s not sure he’d characterize the massacre as the biggest event of his life.
“I suffered other things, too,” he said. “I don’t know how to express it.”
Reach Robert McCabe at 222-5217 or Robert.McCabe@pilotonline.com.
Amazing story of survival. Thanks for the post.
Yet another thing not taught in our public schools.
This same sort of thing is happening all over the Muslim world, and the MSM has its face buried in the bloody dirt.
You got that right. . .now, if it was American's who did that it would be required reading and tested each term.
I saw the monument at Malmedy. The names of our neighbors makes one sick. As an aside the german commander was killed by an explosion in his bookstore circa the 1970's. It was claimed that it was the French underground survivors that did it.
Just like I don't think the Bataan death march is required course material at any high school history class.
You got that right! I recently received "The Longest Winter" as a gift. It's a terrific (and illuminating) book. The Battle of the Bulge was one of the most decisive events in world history. Hard to understand why it wasn't a topic during the school years.
It seems almost impossible to imagine that battle taking place with today's media covering it.
I don't read nearly as much as I used to; I'll have to read that.
ping
No doubt about the perversion of our schools by the lefties in the teachers' unions. You were fortunate to learn where and what you did.
FYI
Engaged in 1969, I chose June 6, 1970 as our Wedding Day even though I was less than a year old when the actual invasion took place. Using that date, I knew I would be very unlikely to forget our anniversary. I never have. Clever, eh?
In those years June 6th was a very significant date. Nowadays, it is pretty much forgotten as that awful war fades from national memory, with much thanks due to an incompetent and malicious public education system seemingly intent on obliterating so much of our history from our collective memories.
It is more than "sad".
For more information about the recovery process, see Mortuary Affairs Operations At Malmedy-Lessons Learned From A Historic Tragedy
Thanks to all the WWII veterans! To those who came home, and those who did not.
Peiper was murdered by french communists in his home on 14july1971
I'm currently re-reading Robert E. Merriam's "Battle of the Bulge". Merriam was an official historian for the 9th Army and was eventually the officer in charge of the official history of the battle. The book is based on his researches which took place immediately following the battle. In my opinion, it is one of the best accounts of that battle.
My copy is in paperback and published by Ballantine. The original title was "Dark December" and was published by Ziff-Davis.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.