How Dad did it
By popular demand, I will post this one last time. My father was born in 1907. He would have been 100 years old on 12th December 2007. He might not have made it; his health was bad. He was murdered on 3 December 1985. I cringe when I hear the term "passed on." He was "taken" in the worst way. The first shot took him in the shoulder; he knew what was coming.
A righteous God threw his shooter under a truck in the 1990s. There is a 97% probability that one of these two trailer-trash scumbags killed my father.
Years before I was born, my father did something amazing:
I’m not an artist, and hardly computer literate, so that’s the best I can illustrate it. It doesn't even show up here.
What it was, was a two-mile ride that my father and a fellow named Calvin Sticher went on one winter during what has come to be called the Battle of the Bulge. There are no official maps, and I had to invent one.
My old man was born in 1907, and when War II rolled in on America, he was already a “pappy” by contemporary standards. He’d put himself through Georgia Tech by first attending barber’s college and cutting hair during the Depression of the 1930s. He studied radio technology in its fledgling days. When he enlisted in the Third Armored Division following the horror of 7 December 1941, he was assigned to the 143rd Armored Signal Company as a jeep messenger; a rather cushy job for the older guys back then. Dad and Sticher stormed ashore on D-Day in their jeep, and rode with the Spearhead Division from Utah Beach in Normandy to Stolberg, Germany. On 19 December 1944 the German offensive broke loose, and everything collapsed into chaos.
What follows is based upon my father’s recollections to me as a child; official records, and my own walk across what I believe was the terrain they traveled that morning:
When the German offensive kicked off, everything was in flux. The Panzers were rolling, and everyone was hustling to regroup.
Dad and Sticher were sent on a delivery mission of fire coordinates to a field artillery group gathered in some woods several miles from divisional headquarters. The road was a small dirt path that winds between two ridges, a sharply defined one to the east, and a series of rolling hills to the west. They arrived at dusk on the 21st of December, 1944.
The mission for the artillery was to impede the advance of the German tanks through the valley, using the coordinates delivered from HQ via my father. They apparently fulfilled their mission that night, as evidenced by the events of 22 December.
When my father and Sticher attempted to leave the wooded area the artillery was grouped in, they were halted by pickets who declared the road unsafe for passage. There were German tanks out there, the guards said, and they had severed the road connecting the artillery base with divisional HQ.
Dad and Sticher parked their jeep in the trees, and crawled into a culvert beneath the roadway to spend the night. They hoped for better passage at first light the next morning.
Dawn found them confronted with a ground-hugging fog that limited visibility to the length of one’s arm. As Webb and Sticher rolled their sleeping bags in preparation to stowing them in their jeep, they heard voices murmuring in the fog. The voices were speaking German.
My father was armed with an M-1 .30 caliber carbine; Sticher, as driver, carried a .45 Thompson submachine gun.
They stood their ground and waited as the voices approached them in the fog. Four black uniforms of the Waffen SS resolved out of the milky gloom, and stood staring in disbelief at the two terrified GIs who had the drop on them.
What Webb and Sticher had was a colonel and three lieutenants of a German Panzer company. Disoriented in the fog, they had dismounted to scout the terrain on foot prior to leading their tanks down the valley. They had walked straight down the road and into the guns of two hapless soldiers from the other side.
With gestures and threatening motions, Webb and Sticher disarmed the amazed Nazis and marched them up the road to the artillery unit. There they relieved the Germans of a map case. Although it was not a complete order of battle, it illustrated enough information about the impending Panzer threat to be considered a prize if delivered to divisional HQ.
“You can’t do that. There are tanks sitting on the road; we’ve been shooting at them all night long.” So Webb and Sticher were informed by the artillery observers. There was no way out of the valley except the road they’d come in on, and that road was straddled by Tiger tanks.
Without hesitation, Webb and Sticher took the belts from the captured German colonel and secured his arms. Then they placed him in the back seat of their jeep. The fog was still thick, and they set out on the road through the valley.
The panzer commanders, hearing the motor of the jeep, began firing down the valley as Webb and Sticher wove a reckless path toward them. .88 mm high-velocity shells lit up the gloom as the little jeep charged the Tigers. The Germans could not bore-sight their tanks fast enough to get a bead on the jeep, and it wove between two of them, made the right turn, and was out of the valley before the Germans had sufficient time to realize that they had been the victims of a drive-by.
The German colonel spoke good English, and upon his delivery to the American HQ, did not waste time proclaiming the insanity of the two soldiers who had delivered him. An officer from G-2 sought out Webb and Sticher, who had gone in search of coffee and dried eggs in the aftermath of their little adventure. They modestly agreed that they had brought the officer and his maps back to HQ, as it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Webb and Sticher were later awarded the Silver Star for gallantry. Robert S. Webb died in 1985, the victim of an unsolved murder, after 28 years as a Postal Service employee. I do not know what happened to Calvin Sticher. His last known address was in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1947.
I do not draw well, and I do not know if the valley I walked in 1986 was the one my father and Calvin Sticher drove down. I only know what I am told, and wear a German jacket my father snatched from the front seat of a burning Nazi half-track during that epic battle. The rest is history.
I can't recreate the map of the terrain here. Use your imagination.
A righteous God threw his shooter under a truck in the 1990s. There is a 97% probability that one of these two trailer-trash scumbags killed my father.
Years before I was born, my father did something amazing:
I’m not an artist, and hardly computer literate, so that’s the best I can illustrate it. It doesn't even show up here.
What it was, was a two-mile ride that my father and a fellow named Calvin Sticher went on one winter during what has come to be called the Battle of the Bulge. There are no official maps, and I had to invent one.
My old man was born in 1907, and when War II rolled in on America, he was already a “pappy” by contemporary standards. He’d put himself through Georgia Tech by first attending barber’s college and cutting hair during the Depression of the 1930s. He studied radio technology in its fledgling days. When he enlisted in the Third Armored Division following the horror of 7 December 1941, he was assigned to the 143rd Armored Signal Company as a jeep messenger; a rather cushy job for the older guys back then. Dad and Sticher stormed ashore on D-Day in their jeep, and rode with the Spearhead Division from Utah Beach in Normandy to Stolberg, Germany. On 19 December 1944 the German offensive broke loose, and everything collapsed into chaos.
What follows is based upon my father’s recollections to me as a child; official records, and my own walk across what I believe was the terrain they traveled that morning:
When the German offensive kicked off, everything was in flux. The Panzers were rolling, and everyone was hustling to regroup.
Dad and Sticher were sent on a delivery mission of fire coordinates to a field artillery group gathered in some woods several miles from divisional headquarters. The road was a small dirt path that winds between two ridges, a sharply defined one to the east, and a series of rolling hills to the west. They arrived at dusk on the 21st of December, 1944.
The mission for the artillery was to impede the advance of the German tanks through the valley, using the coordinates delivered from HQ via my father. They apparently fulfilled their mission that night, as evidenced by the events of 22 December.
When my father and Sticher attempted to leave the wooded area the artillery was grouped in, they were halted by pickets who declared the road unsafe for passage. There were German tanks out there, the guards said, and they had severed the road connecting the artillery base with divisional HQ.
Dad and Sticher parked their jeep in the trees, and crawled into a culvert beneath the roadway to spend the night. They hoped for better passage at first light the next morning.
Dawn found them confronted with a ground-hugging fog that limited visibility to the length of one’s arm. As Webb and Sticher rolled their sleeping bags in preparation to stowing them in their jeep, they heard voices murmuring in the fog. The voices were speaking German.
My father was armed with an M-1 .30 caliber carbine; Sticher, as driver, carried a .45 Thompson submachine gun.
They stood their ground and waited as the voices approached them in the fog. Four black uniforms of the Waffen SS resolved out of the milky gloom, and stood staring in disbelief at the two terrified GIs who had the drop on them.
What Webb and Sticher had was a colonel and three lieutenants of a German Panzer company. Disoriented in the fog, they had dismounted to scout the terrain on foot prior to leading their tanks down the valley. They had walked straight down the road and into the guns of two hapless soldiers from the other side.
With gestures and threatening motions, Webb and Sticher disarmed the amazed Nazis and marched them up the road to the artillery unit. There they relieved the Germans of a map case. Although it was not a complete order of battle, it illustrated enough information about the impending Panzer threat to be considered a prize if delivered to divisional HQ.
“You can’t do that. There are tanks sitting on the road; we’ve been shooting at them all night long.” So Webb and Sticher were informed by the artillery observers. There was no way out of the valley except the road they’d come in on, and that road was straddled by Tiger tanks.
Without hesitation, Webb and Sticher took the belts from the captured German colonel and secured his arms. Then they placed him in the back seat of their jeep. The fog was still thick, and they set out on the road through the valley.
The panzer commanders, hearing the motor of the jeep, began firing down the valley as Webb and Sticher wove a reckless path toward them. .88 mm high-velocity shells lit up the gloom as the little jeep charged the Tigers. The Germans could not bore-sight their tanks fast enough to get a bead on the jeep, and it wove between two of them, made the right turn, and was out of the valley before the Germans had sufficient time to realize that they had been the victims of a drive-by.
The German colonel spoke good English, and upon his delivery to the American HQ, did not waste time proclaiming the insanity of the two soldiers who had delivered him. An officer from G-2 sought out Webb and Sticher, who had gone in search of coffee and dried eggs in the aftermath of their little adventure. They modestly agreed that they had brought the officer and his maps back to HQ, as it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Webb and Sticher were later awarded the Silver Star for gallantry. Robert S. Webb died in 1985, the victim of an unsolved murder, after 28 years as a Postal Service employee. I do not know what happened to Calvin Sticher. His last known address was in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1947.
I do not draw well, and I do not know if the valley I walked in 1986 was the one my father and Calvin Sticher drove down. I only know what I am told, and wear a German jacket my father snatched from the front seat of a burning Nazi half-track during that epic battle. The rest is history.
I can't recreate the map of the terrain here. Use your imagination.
posted by Robert at 1:50 PM
1 Comments:
Not sure if my first note made it through.
Calvin Sticher was my father. He died in 1994.He is buried in Oconee Hills Cemetary in Athens. He talked very little about what he did in the war. He said that he "went through 5 jeeps" because "the Germans kept blowing them out from under" him. Each jeep was named Peaches. I read in his record that he recieved 5 Bronze Stars but didn't know anything about the Silver Cross. Thanks for the story.
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