Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

an audiobook on CD

Liner notes

 The lieutenant:     

 Jim Gifford was 15 the first time he was shot.

“My brother didn’t mean to shoot me,” Gifford recalled more than six decades later, as we drove from Louisville to the Patton Museum at Fort Knox during the 1995 reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion. “In back of my parents’ house we had a big barn, and it had four or five stalls. The doors were always closed on the outside. If you wanted to go in, you’d lift the latch and you’d go in.”

I interviewed Jim at Gifford Motors, the used car dealership he owned in Yonkers, N.Y., after meeting him at the battalion’s 1992 reunion in Harrisburg, Pa. I knew he was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, but that was the only time he’d talked about being shot. At a later reunion, in telling a story I’d heard him tell several times, about the time he and a fellow officer were walking through a field at Maizieres le Metz and the other officer turned to him and said, matter-of-factly, “I think I’ve been shot,” Gifford said, as he usually said when telling the story, “And that’s what it’s like. He turned around and sure enough, there was a pencil thin hole in the back of his jacket. He didn’t feel pain, just ‘I think I’ve been shot.’ ”

This time, he added: “And I should know. I’ve been shot twice.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were only shot once.”

Then he told me the story about his brother.

“We had a .22. And sometimes, stupid kids, you’d shoot the .22, like if a guy was standing there you’d fire over his head. It was crazy, but it’s the way kids were.” At least it’s the way they were in upstate Gloversville, N.Y., in 1935. “You weren’t gonna shoot him but you were just gonna startle him.

“My brother was chasing me, and I ran around the barn and my brother ran around the barn after me, and as I ran up there was one particular stall that was always open and the door went in. So I ran up and hit the door to go in and the goddamn thing was locked and I bounced back just as my brother shot, and the bullet went into my left leg just below the knee and it came out the other side.”

Jim said he was less worried about the wound than about how his father would react, so down to the cellar the two boys went, where they found a bottle of iodine. They poured the iodine into the bullet hole until it dripped out the other side.

“Don’t tell me that didn’t hurt,” I said. I thought about Jim Flowers, the stoic recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross who lost both of his legs in the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy. Flowers described in clinical detail the moment an American shell landed nearby and a piece of shrapnel severed his left foot as he lay in no man’s land the day after the German shell that penetrated his tank tore off his right forefoot. It was only when I interviewed Jim Rothschadl, the badly burned gunner who lay in no man’s land with Flowers for two days until they were rescued, that Rothschadl described Flowers’ scream of pain when the “friendly fire” struck.

“If that’s the way he remembers it,” Flowers said when I relayed Rothschadl’s comments – the two never saw each other after the war – “then that’s the way it happened … as he remembers it.”

The iodine hurt, Gifford admitted.

“I limped around for two or three days,” he said, “and my father said, ‘What happened?’ I said I was playing basketball and I hurt myself. He never asked to look. And it healed. Luckily it was a .22, which is a small caliber gun. If it was a .38, it would have broke my leg.”

 

The loader

 

Bob Rossi, a skinny, short 18-year-old private first class from Jersey City, N.J., was standing in the turret of his tank in the village of Berle, Luxembourg, on the morning of Jan. 10, 1945, waiting for his tank to begin moving when he saw an older boy from his neighborhood, Johnny Burghardt, walking by. Burghardt was a captain in the 26th Infantry Division, which would finally retake the town of Wiltz, Rossi’s immediate destination, a few days later.

“I’m calling him, Johnny! Johnny!” Rossi said when I interviewed him at his home in a retirement community in Brick, N.J., in 1992. “But he didn’t hear me with all that noise around us. He walked into the command post. With that, we moved out.”

Rossi met Burghardt after the war and “he remembered the town after I described it to him. He recalled Berle was a jumping off spot for the 26th, the 35th and the 90th Divisions. That was a big push, for the Bulge.”

Rossi and Phillip “Philly” Burghardt, Johnny’s youngest brother, were best friends growing up. Phillip Burghardt and most of his family burned to death in a fire in March of 1937.

“I was in their house the night before,” Rossi recalled. “Everybody was poor, but the Burghardts were super poor. They had kerosene lamps, and Philly had to go get wood every day down at a yard.

“The night before the fire we were sitting around the stove and Mrs. Burghardt was telling us about death and Irish superstitions, and then Mrs. Burghardt and her brother John Gorman, Charlie, Philly, Florence, Theresa and Veronica all burned to death. They were up on the third floor, and one daughter, Rose Burghardt, was on the second floor, and there was an Italian American club down the street. Danny DeBrita – he palled around with Johnny and Robby Burghardt, who were not home at the time – was standing in the club and saw the fire, and he ran up the street and through the alley, climbed up the fire escape and he kicked in the window, and just about that time, he felt Rose groping for the window. He grabbed her, took her downstairs and brought her across the street. He tried to get back in but the fire was too great.”

A couple of days later, Rossi said, “one of the guys was up there scrounging around, and he found Philly’s medal from a track meet, and he gave it to me because he knew I was his best friend. It was a bronze medal in the relay. And many years later, my wife, Marie, was working at the Jersey City Medical Center with Mary Burghardt, another sister who was married and living elsewhere at the time of the fire. Marie found out who she was, and she told her who I was. Then I gave her the medal.”

 

The gunner

Before the United States entered World War II, 19-year-old Stanley Klapkowski, of McKees Rocks, Pa., went to Canada with the hopes of joining the Polish Army. He wound up in the Polish Navy, aboard a destroyer called the Lightning.

On a run through the North Sea, the Lightning sank a German submarine. As the survivors from the submarine swam to the Lightning through the frigid North Sea waters, said Klapkowski, who was something of a recluse when I interviewed him at his home in McKees Rocks, also in 1992, the crew members pulled them aboard, slit their throats, and threw them back. Today the Lightning is a Polish Naval Museum.

 The Polish Navy didn’t agree with Klapkowski, and vice versa. He refused to swear allegiance to Poland, which would mean giving up his American citizenship, and was treated badly. “I came to fight for you, you %#$^&#;” is the way he described the friction. I would supply a word there, but his voice trailed off into a string of mumbled curses. He said that when the Polish fleet was bombed by German planes in Portsmouth, he was disciplined for passing through officers’ quarters to get to his battle station. He wound up in a detention center, and returned to America when it entered the war. He was drafted and sent to the 712th at Fort Benning.

Klapkowski suffered battle fatigue and drank heavily after the war, and some of his recollections are a tad suspect, not that he made things up. I’m sure he believed everything he said. He was fond of saying things like “I threw about ten shells in there,” when he probably fired only one or two rounds, although he was credited with knocking out an entire column of some 30 German vehicles outside of Le Mans, for which he received the Silver Star.

He described an incident during the battalion’s first day in combat, July 3, 1944, in which he said he was the gunner in a tank with Sgt. William Schmidt when Schmidt was struck in the head by a sniper’s bullet, becoming the first member of C Company to be killed.

“The infantry said there were snipers shooting at us, so he goes down with the tank,” Klapkowski said. “I said, ‘What are you going down there for? We ain’t got no right going down there.’ We weren’t on a mission. He’s going down there shooting, trying to hit snipers out of trees with the machine gun. Instead a sniper got him [Klapkowski pointed between his eyes]. He fell down on me.”

“You were the gunner when Schmidt was killed?” I asked excitedly, thrilled that I had found someone who could describe a scene I’d heard mentioned so many times, since Schmidt was the first member of C Company to be killed..

“Yeah,” Klapkowski said. “I backed the tank out, and then who comes around but an infantry colonel. He says, ‘How did you guys know they were counterattacking?’ We didn’t know they were counterattacking. We were just screwing around. So I told him, ‘Well, the sergeant saw movements.’ He got a Silver Star out of it, too, Sergeant Schmidt. I got the Bronze Star. The colonel said, ‘You stopped a counterattack.’ ”

The problem with Klapkowski’s account is that Schmidt was the platoon sergeant in the Second Platoon of C Company. Tony D’Arpino, who said with certainty that he was in the same crew as Klapkowski from Fort Benning all through the war, was in the Third Platoon. He said Klapkowski couldn’t possibly have been in the same tank as Schmidt. Klapkowski did indeed get a Bronze Star to go with his Silver Star, but Rossi said it was for an incident shortly before he was evacuated, when he fired the .50-caliber turret-mounted machine gun on his tank until it ran out of ammunition, jumped off his tank, climbed on a nearby abandoned tank and continued firing its .50. Rossi, his loader, thought Klapkowski should have been court-martialed for leaving his crew without a gunner.

 

The driver

Tony D’Arpino, a beefy New Englander with a distinct Boston accent, was working with his father in a foundry when the war broke out. He was drafted, passed his physical and was told to report for duty in two weeks, so he stopped going to work. The first morning he didn’t show up, the foreman called D’Arpino’s father over and said, “What’s the matter, is he shacking up?” Tony’s father was aghast. His Tony would never do a thing like that.

D’Arpino began the war as an assistant driver in Lt. Charles Lombardi’s tank. The driver was a Texan, Cardis Sawyer. While going through a gate in a hedgerow in Normandy, the tank ran over a mine. Fortunately, Lombardi had ordered everybody to open their hatches before going through the gate – the sight of a sheep in a tree had alerted him to the likelihood that the area was mined, and if the hatches were closed the concussion could have killed everyone inside the tank. Lombardi, Klapkowski and Ed Spahr, the loader, got out of the tank but D’Arpino and Sawyer, both dazed, remained in their seats. D’Arpino felt something hot running down his pant leg and thought his leg was blown off, until he looked down and saw there was a crack in the transmission case and transmission fluid was running down his leg.

Sawyer preceded D’Arpino into the aid station and even though the blast had left D’Arpino unable to hear, he did hear Sawyer scream. “The hell with this,” he thought, and returned to the tank. He never saw Sawyer again. Lt. Lombardi asked him to take over as the driver.

“Jeez, Lieutenant, I want to stay with the crew,” D’Arpino recalled saying, “but I can’t hear. You might tell me to stop and I’ll keep going and get everybody killed.”

Eventually his hearing came back, but for years after the war, when all was silent around him, D’Arpino would be troubled by an incessant ringing in his ears, until finally he went to see a doctor about it.

“Were you ever in an explosion?” the doctor asked.

 

The loader

If it weren’t for Ed Spahr, a diminutive, elderly gentleman when I met him in 1991, this incident would still have taken place, but these accounts of it would never have been recorded.

I was somewhat disappointed at the 1991 reunion of the battalion, which took place in Detroit. I arrived hoping to interview three veterans I’d met previously – Jim Flowers, Burl Rudd and Forrest Dixon – and only Dixon was at the reunion. Flowers, who lost both of his legs in Normandy, was having trouble with one of his prostheses, and it would be a year before I interviewed him. I never did interview Rudd, who was badly burned in a farming accident a few months earlier and never recovered. I interviewed Dixon at that and several subsequent reunions, for which opportunities I am truly grateful.

But at that reunion, I was like a ship lost at sea, my carefully planned interviewing schedule thrown into disarray. And then I met Spahr.

I’d only begun recording the stories of the battalion veterans two years earlier, and didn’t yet know to ask specific questions like “What were the hedgerows like?” or “Did you take part in the second crossing of the Moselle River?” I had a list of general questions, like “What was the food like?” or “Were you scared?” or “What was it like landing in Normandy?” which questions, as it turned out, still elicited powerful responses. Years later I would scoff when a historian sent Paul Wannemacher, the battalion association’s secretary and later president, a list of “key words” and asked him to distribute it among the veterans so they could send him the recollections the words triggered for a book he was writing. I was discussing the list with some of the veterans when Buck Hardee, a veteran of C Company, said that when he heard me mention “hand grenade,” one of the phrases on the list, it reminded him think of a story.

“We were trying to cross the Saar River and they were floating mines down blowing up the pontoon bridges,” he said. “We were held up in this town there, I can’t remember the name of it. We were sitting in the street, waiting to cross the river, and our tank was right in front of an old home.

“It was a big old Colonial type, beautiful home, and there was a walkway up to the street. We were parked right in front of the walkway, you could see straight up to the front door. And we saw the front door open, real slowly, and a guy came out. He was a civilian, or dressed in civilian clothes, but we didn’t know what he was, you never knew what to expect. But he walked out of the front door, with his hands down at his side. We observed him closely, and he came walking right on out to the street toward our tank.

“We didn’t know what this guy was up to, and he kept on coming. He didn’t make any moves. We had him covered pretty well; if he’d have made any false moves he’d have been gone, I’m sure he knew it. He kept walking, coming right on up toward us. And the closer he got, the more concerned we got. We were afraid he was gonna walk up and get up there close and suddenly toss a hand grenade into the tank, that was my real concern. He came walking right to the sidewalk, right up close to our tank where he could speak with us. He didn’t make a move. I guess he knew he’d better not. And we were so curious, what is this guy up to? He walked right up to the sidewalk, and when he spoke, he talked in English.

“He said, ‘Kill all the sons of bitches. They’ve been f---ing my wife.’

“I never will forget that.”

I never questioned key words again.

But back to Ed Spahr.

I at least knew enough by then to ask if he was wounded. Of the 1,165 men, including replacements, who passed through the ranks of the 712th, 495 Purple Hearts were awarded.

“These scars on my hand,” he said, “I got one time, they had antiaircraft guns, I think they were 20-millimeters, and they hit our tank I don’t know how many times. They didn’t penetrate, but on the inside of the tank a little round spot would get cherry red, and the paint would sometimes catch on fire. That’s what made these little white spots on my hand.”

Then he said: “I was wounded on the inside of my left arm.” He spoke with what I call a Philadelphia accent, although he was actually from Carlisle, Pa. “Lieutenant Gifford, he was our tank commander. Our tank got knocked out, and luckily we all got out of the tank.

“After we got hit, Lieutenant Gifford stuck his head out, and a machine gun bullet struck him around one eye. He had blood all over. Well, when he got out of the tank, I don’t think he thought he was hurt as bad as he was, and he stepped behind the tank, away from the incoming, they were firing machine guns on us, but we were behind the tank. Lieutenant Gifford tossed me his camera and said, ‘Take a picture of me.’

“So I’m standing there with my hands up taking the picture, that’s the only way I could have gotten hit in a spot like that, I had to have my arms up. It just felt like a bee sting. It was no bigger than a small match head that they picked out, it was probably the shell casing off of a .30-caliber bullet.

“I haven’t seen Lieutenant Gifford since. He was all right, but he never came back to the company after that.” (Actually, Gifford did return near the end of the war.)

What a neat story. The following year, at Harrisburg, when Jim Gifford walked into the hospitality room and I saw his name tag, I blurted out: “You’re Lieutenant Gifford!” It was then that I was able to get Gifford, Spahr, Rossi and D’Arpino sitting around a table reconstructing the events of Jan. 10, 1945, with an occasional interruption by John Zimmer, then the oldest living member of the battalion and someone to whom I will always be grateful for at least trying to get my father to come to a reunion; and Forrest Dixon, who was gathering signatures on a get well card for Ellsworth Howard, who was in the hospital after knee replacement surgery that had developed a streptococcal infection.

 

The second time Jim Gifford got shot was around dusk on Jan. 10, 1945, in the vicinity of Wiltz, Luxembourg, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was leading a section of two tanks to clear out what his driver, D’Arpino, described as a “small pocket of resistance” that was holding up the infantry. The tank was struck in the track by a panzerfaust, releasing a shower of sparks inside the tank. D’Arpino threw it in reverse, but the tank wouldn’t move. As Gifford lifted himself out of the turret to man the .50-caliber machine gun, a bullet struck him next to his right eye. A piece of the bullet protruded from his cheek.

He immediately pulled his head back into the turret, and as blood streamed down the side of his face, he asked his loader, Bob Rossi, how badly he was hit.

“You don’t look bad, Lieutenant,” he said. Rossi was lying. “He looked like somebody hit him in the face with a sledgehammer,” he recalled at the 1992 reunion.

Gifford remained calm. He told Rossi to fire the smoke mortar to give them cover when they abandoned tank. In his excitement, Rossi fired the mortar straight up and the smoke shell nearly struck the tank when it fell. He then fired several more rounds and the tank was shrouded in smoke. The German machine gun kept firing but with less accuracy.

Gifford reached his right hand up through the turret, found the trigger of the .50-caliber machine gun, and fired off a short burst. Then the gunner, Klapkowski, fired a burst from the coaxial .30-caliber machine gun. When Klapkowski stopped there was a lull of ten to fifteen seconds before the Germans resumed firing. Gifford ordered D’Arpino to abandon tank first. D’Arpino climbed up through the driver’s hatch and ran back toward the safety of the second tank.

Spahr, the assistant driver or “bow gunner,” also had a .30-caliber machine gun. He fired next and then stopped, while Rossi and Klapkowski abandoned tank. The two ran in a zigzag pattern toward Sergeant Jim Warren’s tank some 200 yards to the rear, as machine gun bullets began to kick up the snow around them. Gifford reached up and fired another burst from the .50, and ordered Spahr to leave the tank. He knew that when the .50 was out of ammunition there would be no reloading it, so at the end of the burst he climbed up through the turret himself. Before he started running toward the second tank he glanced around and saw Spahr stuck in the driver’s hatch.

When he went to Spahr’s aid, he discovered Spahr was not stuck but was trying to reach into the tank to retrieve his musette bag, which contained his shaving equipment, a toothbrush, and various items of loot he’d picked up in six months of combat.

“Forget all that shit,” Gifford said.

When they reached the second tank, Gifford told Sergeant Warren to fire a 75-millimeter armor-piercing shell into the back of his tank and set it on fire, so that it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. Then he removed a camera from around his neck, handed it to Rossi, and said “Take my picture.”

“Jeez, I can’t take your picture, Lieutenant,” Rossi recalled saying.

“I took it,” Spahr said. “That’s the only way I could have got wounded.”

“And there he was,” Rossi said. “He had gotten a Bronze Star that morning, he had the ribbon, his face was all puffed up, blood all over his combat jacket, he says, ‘Take my picture.’ ”

 

Postscript: Jim Gifford very nearly was shot a third time, when a pair of hoodlums barged into his used car dealership, put a gun to his head and demanded money. Jim calmly told the intruders not to be hasty, and then added, “especially with those police cars right outside.” To the best of his knowledge, there were no police cars outside on MacLean Avenue. But unbeknownst to him, a neighbor, seeing the pair of suspicious looking men entering Jim’s car lot, had called the police, and just as the thugs turned to glance out the window, two or three police cars pulled up to the dealership with their sirens blaring. The thugs dropped their guns, turned, ran out the door, and were immediately apprehended.

Oddly enough, no guns were ever found. (Jim, who was in his early eighties at the time, had amassed quite a collection of German articles during the war).

Post postscript: When I was writing “Tanks for the Memories,” my original oral history of the 712th, I showed the manuscript to a distant relative, who worked for the FBI. He took me aside and told me, in strictest confidence, that during an undercover operation he had worked for Jim as a “gofer” while investigating the Yonkers office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. My relative, whose identity cannot be revealed, would bring paperwork to the DMV, where clerks were suspected of taking bribes and selling licenses and registrations. Several of them were eventually arrested, and the story made the New York newspapers and TV stations. Jim, my distant relative noted, was absolutely clean. I never did tell him about my relative’s connection.

Jim Gifford died in 2007 at the age of 87.

 

  

    "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge" contains some graphic language and descriptions of violence that may not be appropriate for younger listeners.

    The set of CDs comes in a sturdy plastic spindle case, and make a unique gift for any history buff.

    

    Please visit our ebay store to purchase or bid on this and other World War II oral history audiobooks by Aaron Elson.