71st Infantry Division: The Red Circle Division

Trace the history of the 71st Infantry Division, from its inception in 1943 on, in this fascinating account. Nicknamed the Red Circle Division from their insignia, the 71st played a significant role in World War II in Alsace-Lorraine and also in Austria, where they liberated a concentration camp. Features photographs, index, and endpaper color maps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Apr 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781618587428

Book preview

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Turner Publishing Company

412 Broadway • P.O. Box 3101

Paducah, KY 42002-3101

[phone]

Editor: Dayna Spear Williams

Copyright 2001 Turner Publishing Company

Publishing Rights

Turner Publishing Company

Library of Congress #:

00 133697

9781618587428

Printed in the U.S.A.

Sketches on page 4&5 taken from Farthest East by

Gerald McMahon, Yaderman Books, 1986. Used with

permission.

This book or any part there of may not be reproduced

without the written consent of the Publisher. This

publication was compiled using available information.

The Publishers regrets it cannot assume liability for

errors or omissions.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

The Liberation of Paris

Foreword

Publisher’s Message

71st Infantry Division History - A History of the 71st Infantry Division

Recollections...

Those Who Served...

Killed in Action

Methodology

INDEX

The Liberation of Paris

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GENERALS George C. Marshall Dwight D. Eisenhower Omar N. Bradley George S. Patton, Jr. Walton H. Walker

Sketches by Jack Butler

Foreword

A personal note to the men of the 71 st:

My father was an extremely modest man, even telling Cornelius Ryan (author of The Longest Day) when he asked my father to record his feelings throughout that chaotic day on Omaha Beach, that he thought everything Ryan needed to know could be found in the First Division History. (The History reads, after describing in detail the action that took place: There were many heroes on Omaha Beach that bloody day, but none of greater stature than Wyman and Taylor.) Ryan writes about Taylor and others in The Longest Day, but does not mention Wyman.

All of you should be honored that this by the book career soldier learned so much about the practicality and inventiveness and values of American people from the men of the 71st Division. Even though he had been in charge of the First Division troops on that bullet-riddled day on Omaha Beach, it was the 71st Division that he considered his division. It was the soldiers and officers of the 71st to whom he was most devoted.

That is the way my father would want it, for over the years he said very little about his own war experiences. On the other hand he always had much to say about the men of the 71st Division, a division he claimed was as good as any division in the European Theater of Operations, including the famous First Division.

Two stories are particularly telling. Like most of the memories he shared with me about those days, they seem to say more about the men of the 71st Division than they do about my father. They bear repeating.

The first was when he and members of an advance party were standing on the roof of a building in some town in Germany. Suddenly they spotted German tanks moving rapidly into the town from the opposite direction. Members of the party were immediately on their radios identifying locations and directing anti-tank fire. Very quickly the tanks were stopped by the big guns of the 71st. My father would marvel over the speed and efficiency of that operation. And when I asked about it, saying, Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen? He would just shake his head. Of course. He would smile as he said it. But they forgot all the artillery terms they had been trained to use. They just raised hell and brought the rounds right in on target. I honestly think they got the job done faster doing it their own way.

The second was the concentration camp at Gunskirchen Lager. It was impossible for him to erase that grim truth from his memory. I didn’t believe people could do that to other people, he would tell me. Neither could the men. None of us could make sense of these ravished bodies, the horror of that place.

I think it was Gunskirchen Lager that brought him closer than anything else to all of you who served in the 71 st Division. He saw it with you; he saw it through you. It seemed to symbolize for him the special qualities this country has that draws all sorts of people together to protect freedom. To him it made all of you one in facing the deeply serious and formidable task inherited by your generation.

I am sorry he cannot be here to see how this book celebrates your success. He would take great pleasure in your reminiscences. He would be rewarded that the task you shared long ago has kept you together as it has.

Wherever he is, you can be sure that he will forever be saluting the men who served in the 71st Division.

— Willard G. Wyman Jr.

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Publisher’s Message

The 71st Infantry Division takes pride in their valor through sharing their stories and photos this historical album of memories. We salute them for their bravery, courage and loyalty to this nation.

Turner Publishing Company would like to extend appreciation to the veterans for the biographies, stories and photos which make up the contents of The Red Circle Division. Also, special thanks belongs to Mr. Bill Kasson whose support made this book possible.

I am proud of my father’s military service in the Navy during World War II; my brother, who was killed in the Army during Vietnam; my service in the Air Force and my oldest son, who is on active duty with the Marines.

Turner Publishing is honored to add The Red Circle Division to nearly 800 published Turner titles, among which are Legacy of the Purple Heart; Iwo Jima; Airborne 50th Anniversary; American Ex-Prisoners of War; Battle of the Bulge; Korean War Veterans Memorial; Pearl Harbor Survivors; Hump Pilots; Vietnam Fighter Pilots; Vietnam Helicopter Pilots and 101st Airborne.

Sincerely,

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Dave Turner

President

Historic Event: Lt. Gen. Lothar von Rendulic surrenders to Maj. Gen. Willard G. Wyman, commanding general of the 71st Infantry Division, at Steyr, Austria, May 6, 1945.

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71st Infantry Division History

A History of the 71st Infantry Division

by Gerald McMahon

THE DIVISION IS FORMED

In August, 1943, the War Department created the 71 st Infantry at Fort Carson, Colorado, to be one of three small fighting forces designed to operate in the roughest terrain possible with minimum mechanical equipment. Two regular army regiments with credentials dating back to the formation of the Republic, the 5th and 14th Infantry, augmented by the newly formed 66th Infantry, shaped the new division, soon fleshed out by 607th, 608th, 609th and 564th Field Artillery Battalions, the 271st Engineer Combat Battalion, the 771st Ordnance, the 581st Anti-Tank Battery, the 371st Medical Battalion, other support elements, and tough, experienced training officers and NCOs.

The men of the new 71st had no way of knowing that sixteen months later they would be at sea, heading for combat commitment with the 7th Army in the Vosges Mountains in northeastern France. With its makeup, probable training program and experience of its senior personnel, a date in Italy, Yugoslavia, Norway, Burma or the Pacific Islands was a more likely assignment.

Outstanding Battalion Commander

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Ltc Bryce F. Denno

CO, 3rd Bn., 66th Inf.

Siegfried File

But, in the Army, events and destinations entail their own mystery and are not always planned long in advance. Unforeseen developments can alter the best-laid plans of planners — and often do.

As a light division, the 71st was a stripped-down small, tough collection of foot soldiers. Instead of jeeps it had small two-wheeled steel carts. Most important of all, it had 8,000 pairs of feet. The outfit could go anywhere sturdy Infantry feet could take it. The training program in Colorado, and later, the grueling maneuvers at Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in the arid central mountains of California, toughened still further an already tough outfit. Still later after three weeks of rain, the mountain dust of Hunter Liggett turned to mud like most had never seen. After this conditioning, almost everyone was ready to go overseas — just to get out of training designed by fiends and compounded by hellish weather and terrain. The training had achieved a major objective.

Men who have carried the long, heavy, awkward tube of an 81 mm mortar, or the spread-legged cradle of a heavy machine-gun or slept in rocky foxholes, bitten by sand fleas, roasting in the daytime and chilled to the bone at night, can appreciate the term Infantry Desert Training. Those who have not experienced these or similar discomforts can only get a mental picture conveyed by words. The training was difficult, demanding, necessary.

It was a demanding war; it required tough men. The Germans and Japanese had been at it for years and thus had a decided edge on experience. We would only beat them by being tougher, better trained, more determined.

UNIT TRAINING

The War Department decided its needs could best be met by standard 14,300-man infantry divisions and gave up the notion of having three small, light divisions. The 71st division lost 3,200 trained privates and received a like number of college-trained Army Specialist Training Program men, many of whom had had some R.O.T.C. experience, and in May, 1944, headed for Sand Hill, Fort Benning, Georgia for reorganization and still more new men.

From July to October men were assigned from a wide variety of camps and from every section of the country. A dozen junior officers from the Armored School were assigned as anti-tank platoon leaders; several hundred eighteen-year olds came up from Camp Blanding, Florida after thirteen weeks basic infantry training, and so it went. A few new second lieutenants were assigned from West Point, including John Eisenhower, who was assigned to a 14th Infantry rifle company.

We engaged in intensive small unit training, night problems, map orientation, infiltration and reconnaissance problems, extensive range practice, mine and booby-trap familiarization, road marches, drills, VD lectures and a few unit parades. Short passes to nearby Columbus were of little use as the town was literally swamped by infantrymen and paratroopers. There were over 60,000 men in training at Benning at the time. The lucky ones wangled overnight passes and took the bus to Anywhere Else just to hang out in a few civilian bars, sleep in clean sheets and get away from Army routine and chicken for a few hours.

In October, Brigadier General Willard G. Wyman, a combat veteran of both the Asiatic and European theaters, assumed command and was destined to lead the division through combat. He was a tall, handsome man with a ready smile who looked every inch a general. We were also fortunate in having some very competent senior officers who went through our Benning phase and all the way through combat with us.

Significantly, much of our earlier training was under the direction of Brigadier General Onslow S. Rolfe, a former commander of the Mountain Training Center at Camp Hale, Colorado. We continued to benefit from his skill and talent as assistant division commander. Unfortunately, we also had our share of desk jockeys and the rest of us had to carry them. In the rush to organize new divisions, there was not time or opportunity to weed out all the misfits. Every organization had that problem in one degree or another. For some divisions, it was a serious handicap; for us it was mostly just an annoyance.

It was not enough to simply bring thousands of men together trained in a dozen violent and support specialties and expect them to function efficiently. A division is not like a tinker-toy set. Once assembled it must go through a shakedown period much like a new vessel fresh from a shipyard. Unit maneuvers meet much of this need, yet there never seemed to be enough time to smooth the rough edges. Probably no unit ever went overseas during World War II convinced it was over-trained. The demand for fully-equipped units dictate their availability as soon as the roughest of rough edges are rasped down. There is never time to develop a showpiece, spit-and-polish, model division. The main objective is to insure that the unit has enough training to perform reasonably well under competent leadership.

Intensive division maneuvers began early in December, a few men got three-day to seven-day home leaves, and we all headed for the East Coast and a date with troop transports in January.

The fighting in Normandy, the exceptionally high losses in the brutal Huertgen Forest, bad planning by Washington manpower experts and the increasing needs of the Pacific Theater forced the Army to advance the shipping dates of about ten infantry divisions. If we were to force our way into Germany and win the ground war in Europe, we had to cut short large unit training and make do with what training we had to date. We had had the benefit of experience and tactics learned the hard way – on Guadalcanal, in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and thus were far better conditioned to what was ahead.

A 14,300-man infantry division has only about 3,300 riflemen. Its whole purpose is to deliver them, armed, rested, trained, emotionally motivated and ably led at the right place at the right time. If it cannot do this it fails. If it does it better than the enemy – all other things being equal – it may expect to win battles. It will also, inevitably, lose many good men even in the best of circumstances.

It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to describe an average squad or platoon in an organization as large and diverse as the 71st Infantry Division in 1945. The trained, full-strength infantry divisions committed in the ETO during the last six months of the war in Europe had many very young men – War Department policy had earlier prohibited eighteen-year olds from exposure to combat – rifle, machine-gun, mortar, antitank, ammunition and pioneer, and communications platoons tended to have many nineteen and twenty-year old GIs. The frightful burden of combat fell most heavily on this group. Men in the medical services, the armored, engineer and artillery units, while still in their low twenties, were a bit older than the first group described.

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The ugly, bulky, inefficient pregnant puppy gas masks were soon discarded in combat. Hunter Liggett Military Res., 271st Engr. (Lt) Bn.

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Up the long, long trail. Hunter Liggett Military Res. 271st Engr. (Lt) Bn.

Most of the youngest men were draftees and had been in the service only about a year by the time they were sent overseas with the 71st. At least this entry into combat avoided the dreaded and impersonal Replacement Depot system with its cattle-pen do it by the numbers approach to staffing line units. There was some dignity, a sense of belonging, to go overseas in an organized unit.

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Fort Benning, June 18, 1944, HQ, Battery 608 field artillery. Front, Dugstand and Flanagan; middle. Hahn and Harrington; back, Lemanski and Funnell.

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Short, medium and tall: Four combat infantrymen. (Wheeler, Wooley, Lin, Fargo)

Once in combat and we had suffered our first casualties, new men coming in as replacements did come through the ReppleDepple and had no choice as to the unit to which assigned. If a soldier was a rifleman and the 71 st needed forty riflemen, the men with the 745 MOS were placed on a roster, usually simply by the time-honored method of being on an alphabetical list. The division, and in turn regiments, arranged for final assignments to rifle companies. Machine-gunners, mortarmen, drivers, mechanics, wire men, clerks, and so on, went through pretty much the same system. As always, one was a number. It was impersonal; it was crude, but the Army did not have time for niceties and engraved invitations.

The youngest men in the Red Circle Division tended to be nineteen or twenty, most had completed high school (about one in eight had two or three semesters of college). Fewer than one in five in a company were married (the older men, generally); about half were smokers (few were a pack-or-more-a-day-types). They came predominantly from middle-class society; most grew up in small towns or rural areas (even though there were quite a few New Yorkers in some platoons); some had started to learn a trade; the majority were Anglo-Saxon; about a third were Catholic; all were white (the Army was still a segregated organization in a segregated society). Most of the men were of medium height to tall, most weighed from 145 to 165 pounds and their training had made them very proficient with weapons and able to endure forced marches with 55 pounds of weapons, pack and equipment.

Later, in the Third Army, we would have colored tank companies attached to some regiments.

Platoon Leaders in the 71 st, responsible for from 32 to 42 men, were old men of twenty-two to twenty-four and of similar size, weight and social background. Most of these junior officers were products of the various Reserve and R.O.T.C. programs of colleges and universities.

Most sergeants in line units were four to six years older than their men. Many of the sergeants in the 5th and 14th regiments had trained in National Guard units or had been in the regular army. Many other regiments, in 1945, did not have this particular advantage.

The composite, for the 71st Infantry Division, was a young, healthy, adaptive combat force ideally suited to the fast-moving demands of mechanized warfare in the spring of 1945.

A wartime weakness of the American Army was its failure to realize the fact that severe losses of infantrymen are inevitable. Top brass seemed to think wars could be won by machines. It also tolerated the siphoning-off of great numbers of men into every conceivable activity other than the Infantry. It also tolerated from 10,000 to 19,000 AWOLs in the ETO, in France mostly, while better men died in the hell of front lines. All this constituted a gross injustice for the young men who ultimately carried a rifle and bayonet and were expected to use them.

Only one man in ten in the entire Army ever actually was close enough to the enemy on the ground to fire at him, or be fired at – directly – by an armed enemy. Just one in ten. That burden should have been more equitably distributed throughout the entire Army.

There is no excuse for hefty six-foot MPs and 1A clerks when limited duty men can perform such duties. But, no army is perfect. There simply was not enough time to work out inequities and a less than serious effort was ever made to do so.

In spite of some weaknesses in organization, or social awareness, no army on earth could field as many well-trained, equipped and supported infantry regiments as the United States Army in the latter stages of the war in Europe. The Russian and German armies were larger, but not better.

CONVOY TO EUROPE

The 71st Infantry Division left New York Harbor in January 1945 and arrived at Le Havre, France in early February, trained briefly in Normandy and was committed to combat northeast of Nancy on March 10. It penetrated the Siegfried Line, fought hard, moved fast and advanced farther east than any other ground force unit in the European Theater — and never lost an engagement.

THE WAR IS OVER

While one war was over for the men of the 71 st; another war was at climax on islands in the Pacific. Most of the division would be required there, to support the divisions already selected to invade Japan. Very few men of the 71 st would have enough points to go home and well-deserved discharge.

The performance of a military organization is perhaps best described by others. The men of the 71st were very proud of the sincere commendation given each person by General Wyman:

TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE 71st INFANTRY DIVISION AND ATTACHED UNITS. The war with Germany is ended.

Before we turn to a new mission, I wish to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the members of this Division for the splendid accomplishment of the many tasks that have been given it.

From the day you left your concentration area in Le Havre, in a period of 92 days, you have marched, fighting a large part of the way, a distance of 1,060 miles. You have captured over 80,000 prisoners of war, the bulk of them the hard way. From the day you were committed with the Seventh Army south of Bitche, with the XV and XXI Corps, there has been no break in the intensity of effort. Historic names are emblazoned on your memories by the heroic deeds of members of the Division. You were cast through the Siegfried Line to capture Pirmasens, which you did without faltering. Your advance continued to the Rhine where the record of your valor was written in the blood of brave comrades at Speyer and Germersheim.

A sudden change in directive transferred the Division from the Seventh to the fast-moving Third Army where you were thrown across the Rhine to cover the rear of the XII Corps. East of Hanau you were confronted with hard fighting elements of the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord, which you destroyed with every battalion of the Division working smoothly together as a team. On through Fulda and Meiningen, constantly opposed by small fighting groups of the enemy which you did not permit to delay you, seizing Coburg and Bayreuth in your path.

A transfer to the XX Corps gave us new missions when we swept southeast to Velden, Sulzbach and Amberg. You crossed the Regen River at Regenstauf, the Danube at Regensburg, the Isar at Landau, the Inn on dams east of Braunau which were secured only after vicious fighting and major labors of our engineers. We stopped only at our objective, the River Enns, at Steyr, but with patrols thrusting deeply into enemy territory at Waidhofen and Amstetten, the easternmost point reached by American Ground Forces of any U. S. Army in the European Theater.

You have refused to let fatigue, the physical obstacles of mountains and rivers, stop you. The enemy has only delayed you temporarily. You have written a glorious page in the military history of our beloved country. You are veterans proven in battle. May you continue to live up to the high standards you have set for yourselves, whether it be in further battles in Asia or in an occupational role in Europe.

I salute you.

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One bright afternoon on a hillside east of Steyr representative units of the division managed to parade in knee-deep, bright green grass before General George Patton, then cheer in response to his outspoken comments, The companies involved had only a day or two advance notice that they were to dress and drill for the event. Getting into clean uniforms and learning anew to Dress Right! was a strain for a lot of denizens of foxholes barely accustomed to standing erect, but they did quite well. No one was more surprised than the men themselves.

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Wilbur Barnes and Capt. Le Marque, 71st French Ln. O.

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Support convoy passing through a badly damaged town.

General Patton flew in on schedule in a little Grasshopper artillery spotter plane and was met on the ground by a knot of Corps and Division brass. The representative battalion went through the pass-by routine, then stood at Parade Rest to hear the General’s comments.

We had heard that the General said much the same thing to every unit he reviewed and that he laced his comments with more than just a few four-letter words. We were not disappointed. It did not matter that the General gave the same speech to three or four formations a day. It did not offend any tender ears to be described and praised in stevedore terms. We ate it up; we cheered. General Patton was a showman and he could motivate troops. His Speech was well-received and long remembered.

General Patton said we were Damn Good Soldiers. He was right — we were.

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We stayed in Austria about a month, then were pulled back into Bavaria to reorganize for the anticipated shipment to the Pacific. Early indications were that the division would go directly to the Pacific, probably via the Suez Canal, and not get leave stateside.

Two months of fast-action combat had seared enduring memories into the minds of many. Everyone had his own mental list, depending on his own personal experience.

The shock and pain of war is something so intense a person cannot later remember individual faces of concentration camp dead, or the distorted, broken bodies of men killed by artillery, aircraft cannon or mines. What is remembered is often only a blurred impression of an