Correction Re: Colmar Pocket

In my previous post regarding the “Colmar Pocket,” I discovered I had made some mistakes.  Not understanding military hierarchy I claimed that Uncle Billy and Audie Murphy were in the same infantry unit but that was in error; they were in the same 3^rd Division.  I also thought a Division was a subset of a Regiment but the opposite is true, a Regiment is a subset of a Division.  So, Uncle Billy was in the 30^th Regiment of the 3^rd Division, on loan to the French 1^st Army and Audie was in the 15^th Regiment of the 3^rd Division.

This new information also changes the locations depicted on the map included in the previous posting and it turns out that Audie Murphy is where I thought Uncle Billy was and Uncle Billy is 10 miles to the south.  Here is an updated map:

The Battlefield at Colmar

 For anybody who is interested, this is how military hierarchy is organized:

Army                80,000 to 200,000 men            two or more Corps

Corps               20,000 to 45,000 men              two or more Divisions

Division            10,000 to 15,000 men              two to four Regiments

Regiment          3,000 to 5,000 men                  two or more Battalions

Battalion           300 to 1300 men                      two to six Companies

Company         80 to 225 men                          two to eight Platoons

Platoon             26 to 55 men                            two or more Squads

Squad              8 to 13 men

Bailouts

I know that most people find this kind of topic boring but the calamity that is currently taking place within the European Common Market is insane!  I can only surmise that it is the media's concern for keeping the populace in an upbeat state of mind that keeps them from reporting the gravity of the events.  On the other hand it might be that financial news doesn't include much sex and violence, the topic that seems to sell newspapers.

It looks like Greece is near a settlement over its debt crisis with bond holders agreeing to settle for about half the value of the bonds they hold!  Italy will be next and then Spain, with its 25% unemployment, will follow.  I wonder if they will negotiate the same kind of deals?  If they do, it only seems logical that all the other European nations will follow suit and the worlds investors, one of which is the United States, will lose 50% of their assets.  One by one, the European nations are being bailed out of their debt!

Investors settling for half sounds like what has already happened to the U.S. mutual/retirement funds a couple of years back.  In any other disguise this would be considered a market crash and I think I’m finally beginning to see the light.  Instead of a crash, they are letting the market down gradually, one country at a time so we won’t hear the bang.  We are right in the middle of a world market crash and we didn’t even know it!  It’s a little like biological evolution, it all happens so slowly its unnoticeable.

Before long, the U.S. will enter the second cycle of this "slippery slope" and our bailout will be slightly different.  The U.S. bonds being held by investors, mainly China, are dollar bills.  I predict that we will also negotiate our way out of our debt in one of two ways.  We will try to negotiate with China to reduce our debt by half or, if that fails, we will just print more of those greenbacks and pay them off with cheap paper money.  Either way does not portend a rosy future for the dollar, or world economics.

The Colmar Pocket and Uncle Billy

Colmar is a small town in the Alsace-Lorraine region of eastern France, the home of all things Alsatian.  It was the site of the last German stronghold in France during WWII.  The military referred to the German stronghold as the “Colmar Pocket” and because of the fierce, do-or-die resistance of the German forces, it is sometimes called the second “Battle of the Bulge.”  This is the place and time where Audie Murphy won his Congressional Medal of Honor and where uncle Billy (William Raymond Henderson) found himself in early January of 1945.  Billy had just turned 17 and had just returned to the front after spending Christmas with his family in Sacramento, California.

Uncle Billy on the right, November 1944

General Eisenhower’s plan for invading Germany was contingent on all Allied Forces “closing on the Rhine River” and that meant “collapsing” the Colmar Pocket.  The initial assault on the Colmar Pocket began on the 20^th of January, 1945 when the French 1^st Corps and U.S. 3^rd Division of the 30^th Infantry (Billy’s unit) attacked from out of the forest in a snowstorm.  The weather at the time was later described as “Siberian” with temperatures of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, three feet of snow, and strong winds.  Uncle Billy was there.

Alsace-Lorraine, winter of 44/45

When German counterattacks began, Allied troops were exposed and being unable to dig foxholes because of the frozen ground had to fall back into the tree line for protection.  The retreating soldiers suffered heavy casualties and this is when Audie Murphy, also in the 30^th Infantry (but not Billy’s Division), climbed onto a burning M10 tank destroyer and used its heavy machine gun to cover the retreat of his men.

The Battlefield at Colmar

These back and forth pitched battles continued for 12 days until, on January 31^st, 1945, uncle Billy’s unit reached the Rhone-Rhine Canal, just five miles from the Divisions crossing point over the Colmar Canal.  At this point, uncle Billy’s unit was pinned down by intense German artillery fire.  After a bitter day-long battle, Sgt. Forrest E. Peden dashed through intense German fire to summon help for the ambushed infantry unit but was killed when he returned on a light tank that was hit and destroyed; Sgt Peden posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism.  Uncle Billy was “Killed in Action” on that same day, he was 17 years and 59 days old.

After the War

This is an article written by my father, King Elisha Henderson, for the "Hell's Angels Newsletter" in July, 1989:

I would like to comment on a couple of letters in the “Your Chance to Sound Off” section of your April edition.  The first letter was written by Mr. Palmer of Pittsburgh, PA, who had lost his brother, Joe Palmer, in a B-17 during the war.  In the letter, Mr. Palmer states that he could not remove from his mind, the jubilant scene at a German airfield when the German pilots had just returned from shooting down one of our B-17’s.  I wonder if Mr. Palmer ever had the occasion to view the jubilation our pilots and gunners displayed when we shot down German fighters and bombers.

Within weeks after the war ended in Europe I was sent to Chartres and then Beauvais, France for a couple of months and then to Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany.  In France, being able to speak German, I was able to serve as interpreter for our Prisoners-of-War and through them, learned that they, like myself, were just as anxious for the war to end so that they could get back to what was left of their country and to their wives, parents, and loved ones.

After arriving in Germany, I was bivouacked in Koenigstein about 15 miles north of Frankfurt Airfield.  I had some very enjoyable times with many German folks and some German Prisoners-of-War who had returned from Russia and only rarely did I encounter Germans who carried any noticeable malice towards Americans for the destruction we had done to their country.  Even after all of these years I still communicate with a German family that I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with back then in the fall of 1949.

I too lost my youngest brother, William Henderson, just a few months before the end of the war, but to live with malice all of these years, towards Germans that were just doing their jobs as we were doing ours, would seem to be continuing the war without end; a war directed towards people who never knew Joe Palmer or William Henderson.  So, those of you who still have trouble trying to make friends with the German people, especially after 44 years, think about some of these things. 

The second letter in “your Chance to Sound Off” section was written by Hal Susskind and titled “My Forty-second Mission to Germany” wherein he states that the last time he saw Frankfurt it was leveled to the ground with not even one building left standing.  I must disagree with him on this since I was there right after the war.

Frankfurt, Germany at wars end

I remember the railroad station was leveled to the ground, as were all the bridges around the town and many of the town’s buildings; but I also remember that there were many other buildings in the town that had not been damaged at all.

The most prominent building left standing was the entire Krupp Chemical Works.  Also, it seems like the entire barracks facilities for their workers was untouched.  These facilities served as General Ike’s headquarters for a while.  The most startling thing to me was the fact that the Krupp Chemical Buildings seemed to have survived without a scratch!  It seemed like the entire complex had not even been hit by a single bullet, much less showing any type of bomb damage.  This is even more amazing since these buildings were on some of Frankfurt’s highest ground and were a bright white in color.  I was all the more surprised by the fact that just about every building around the Krupp Facility had been leveled to the ground and wondered how we, and the British, managed to accomplish such a feat without doing some damage to the Krupp Facility.