American Valor Quarterly Issue 11 - Fall 2014 | Page 37

Warren Spahn: Well it all happened
by accident really. We were entered
into the war at the Battle of the Bulge
at Hurtgen Forest. We were green.
When I first came into the service,
they asked me what I did in civilian
life and I said, I was a ball player.
The Army didn’t know what to do
with me. So they put me in the 14th
Army Division where I completed
my basic training. Then the Pentagon
streamlined the armored force and
made it A, B and C company, I was
in D company. E Company was a
bridge company, so they took all the
personnel from the D Company and
made engineer battalions out of them.
And that’s what I went overseas with,
common engineers, and let me tell
you, they were a tough bunch of guys.
You had people that were let out of
prison go into the service. We also
had the dropouts of the Air Force and
every other branch of the service. So
those are the people I went overseas
with. And they were tough and rough,
and I had to fit that mold too.

fire. With the .50 caliber machine gun,
every bullet was a tracer, and it looked
like the Fourth of July. They all had an
area of coverage. I saw German planes
and incidentally, flying over there
trying to bomb us and you could see
sparks where shells hit the planes, but
didn’t take them down.
I remember there was a plane that
we knocked down and this plane was

buried in the ground. The pilot was
nothing but ashes and we checked to
make sure that he was dead or were
going to take a prisoner. But that’s the
way the thing went. We did accomplish
the thing in that we had a bridgehead
across the Rhine River. As engineers,
were trying to reinforce that bridge.
Poles were put in. We added so much
weight to that bridge that it fell of its

We were surrounded by the
Germans in the Hurtgen Forest, and
we had to fight our way out of there.
We worked our way out of there
and we went through Malmedy and
Bastogne with the 101st Airborne. The
Germans had massacred a lot of our
people at Bastogne and we hated them
even more so than we did before.
Then we were ordered to go to the
Rhine River an