Veteran remembers Battle of the Bulge

By Lance Benzel, of Montana Lee Newspapers - 12/16/2007

Richard Mac McMenemy was presented with a Silver Star for his service in the Army in World War ll in France. Mac served in the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944. David Grubbs / The Billings Gazette.

BILLINGS — Richard S. McMenemy doesn’t remember exactly what he was doing on this day 63 years ago, when German forces launched a surprise attack that would come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

But the veteran of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army will never forget the snowbound trek in which he and thousands of comrades pushed 90 miles north to fortify troops devastated by the attack.

For two days the men walked through ice and snow, alongside the relative few who managed to catch a toe-hold on one of the tanks or jeeps in the column. They knew the grueling trip would end in yet more bloodshed, fought in the same numbing chill after nights without fire.

They didn’t know the battle that began Dec. 16, 1944, would continue for more than a month. The fighting — in which the Allied forces repealed Hitler’s last major counteroffensive — would involve 600,000 American troops and end in the deaths of an estimated 80,000 Americans.

“I have a game I play with my wife,” McMenemy, now 83, said in his office at Mac’s Used Boxes in Billings. “When I leave in the morning, she turns down the thermostat. When I get home, I turn it up. I tell her that I was born cold in Minnesota and that I spent an entire winter in northern Europe in the snow and the cold, usually without any kind of fire. I’m still cold.” McMenemy had just graduated from St. Thomas Military Academy in St. Paul, Minn., when he was ordered to active duty in the fall of 1942. By age 19, he was a 2nd lieutenant commanding a section of mortar in D Company, 1st Battalion, 10th Infantry Regiment, 5th Division.

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he said.

He would be forced to learn. On June 21, 1944 — or “D plus 14” — McMenemy landed on Utah Beach in Normandy, and by the time he marched to the Battle of the Bulge, he was a six-month veteran of fighting, with a performance record that would merit a Silver Star, one of the military’s highest decorations for valor.

McMenemy oversaw 40 men in Company D, a heavy-weapons company. His section comprised three crews of men, who operated 81mm mortars and others who lugged their explosives, packed into 18-pound shells.

The high-angle weapon can be fired long distances from foxholes and behind cover, and when not in use it’s disassembled and carried by three “big men,” making the weapon ideally suited for infantry soldiers.

Getting the deadly weapons to each new battle “took a bunch of bodies climbing hills and crossing rivers and trying to keep out of the way of enemy fire,” he said. McMenemy served as the section’s forward observer, going out ahead of the men with a field telephone and phoning coordinates back to the mortar crews.

“The observer gets orders to wipe out a big clump of forest a thousand yards away,” he said. “So you get on your map and you get the coordinates and you phone them back to the staff sergeant running the guns and he sets up his aiming stakes and does the stuff to make the mortar aim.

“The observer stands out there and says, ‘Now, where the hell did that — ah, there it is.’ “You see you’re 75 yards short or you’re 50 yards north, so you phone that back to the gun man and he makes his adjustment to the aiming of the mortar. Fires another round and it’s, ‘Hey, you’re right on.’ ” McMenemy led his section through countless volleys on the enemy — using a mix of high-explosive shells and what the Army called “smoke,” white phosphorous rounds whose shrapnel burned through everything it touched, including flesh and bone. “Mostly you’re dead very quickly. A bad way to die,” he said.

Scouting for targets thrust observers into danger, sometimes well ahead of the front line. His most vivid memories involve fighting in the six months before the Battle of the Bulge.

One day combat landed McMenemy in a German housing development whose rows of brick duplexes lay somewhere between the enemy and his men in the infantry.

“It was a very fluid situation, one of these things where you’re not sure where your own troops are and you’re not sure where the Germans are, and each of you is trying to find the other,” he said.

Separated from his men, McMenemy sought shelter in one of the homes.

“For some reason, I just felt driven to put myself in the forward unit of the duplex, closest to the Germans, rather than the back unit, which was closest to the Americans,” he said.

Inside, he got out his binoculars and set about getting a fix on his location when the building shook under a tremendous explosion. An American Grant tank had fired a 75mm shell directly into the back duplex, blowing “a hell of a big hole” in what should have been his first choice for refuge. McMenemy, shaken but unhurt, did a quick search of the surviving unit. He opened the door to the basement and found 20 German civilians huddling below, all unharmed.

“Things like that are unpredictable as hell,” he said, in the same steady, matter-of-fact voice he used while recounting other experiences. “War is sometimes a mass confusion. Thousands of men not knowing exactly where everybody is and where they are and what they’re armed with and all of it.” During fighting in the city of Metz, McMenemy sneaked alone into a grand cathedral that brought to mind Notre Dame. Germans had removed the pews to make way for hundreds of wooden crates, all packed with pistols. He slipped a half-dozen into his pack and lingered awhile in silence.

It was for actions near Arry, France, on Sept. 12, 1944, that McMenemy was recognized for valor. In a battle for Hill 386, men from the 10th Regiment fought their way to the ridge and discovered that the source of the German artillery pounding the hillside lay in a “pile of woods” at the base of the hill, out of sight.

To spot the Germans’ precise positions for the mortar crews, someone had to move down slope through 300 yards of enemy fire and shrapnel toward a pillbox being held by a small contingent American riflemen. One man attempted the trip, but the telephone line he unreeled as he went got severed, making communication impossible.

McMenemy gathered up a reel in each hand, put his head down and ran.

“I probably shouldn’t have made it,” he said. “It just wasn’t time.” The citation that accompanied McMenemy’s Silver Star gave an account of what happened next: After running through the “terrific hail” of gunfire and shrapnel, McMenemy reached the observation point, prepared his fire data and “directed accurate mortar fire on the enemy assembly area, inflicting heavy losses and making the subsequent counterattack so weak that it was successfully repulsed.” McMenemy recalls hunkering down as mortars pounded the Germans’ hiding place from right to left and back again for two hours. Return shelling from the Germans couldn’t penetrate the pillbox, but every time a direct hit landed, he and a dozen others were literally bounced around the concrete enclosure.

Looking back, McMenemy gets stuck on the idea that he received a rare honor after walking away from combat while many gave their lives without any special attention.

He points to the soldiers from the 10th Regiment who died to seize the hills around Arry or to Jack Wynne — the brother of his wife, Joyce — who on April 12, 1945, was killed in a kamikaze attack on the USS Rall near Okinawa, at the age of 22. Their sacrifices make him recoil at the suggestion that he is a hero, Silver Star or not, he said.

“I’ve never bought that, because to me, the heroes are the guys who remain in the ground in cemeteries in Normandy and Vietnam. Those are the heroes,” he said.

Newsreels portrayed the war as one flexion of collective might after another, with American troops sweeping en masse to capture Dresden or seize Cologne, he said.

“It wasn’t like that,” McMenemy said, wincing. “It was little groups of squads and platoons and rifle companies, who were aware of only their immediate surroundings and their immediate problems and where is the next piece of cover and the next piece of concealment.

“It was, ‘Hey sergeant, take your squad up that little draw there, or take your platoon over this ridge.’ “It all came down to small groups of men,” he said. “That’s what stuck in my head.” Contact Billings Gazette reporter Lance Benzel at lbenzel@billingsgazette.com or 657-1357.