Eugene Hollas - Elaine Thomas

My unit arrived at the port of Cherbourg, France, awhile after D-Day in 1944.
I served in the Third Army under General
Patton. We didn’t like him, but the Germans didn’t like him either. He was mean,
mean, mean. I heard him over a loudspeaker once giving the troops a pep talk before
one of the offenses. He told us not to die for
our country, but to make the enemy (those
SOBs, his words, not mine) die for theirs.
Once we got our tanks and half-tracks,
the Third Army moved forward quickly. We
met our first opposition in Metz, France, a
heavily fortified city. That was baptism by
fire, the real thing. It was very creepy there
in the woods in dugouts with the artillery
shelling us. That winter was the coldest
weather they had ever had. You could spit
and your spit would turn to ice.
We met our first serious trouble in the
Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg, France.
The Germans were shooting machine guns
and we were shooting rifles all at the same
time. It’s unimaginable how loud it was.
We had a lot of casualties among our 100
men.
When it quieted down, we were laying
behind logs and fallen trees. I was platoon
sergeant. We heard a noise and saw four
German soldiers coming down a path talking loudly. They must have drunk too much
potato whiskey. They got ripped apart at
about 20 yards. When we went through
their pockets to get IDs, we found pictures
of their wives and children. It made you
feel pretty bad, but we moved forward.
We were getting ready to take a hill that
looked just like Monument Hill State Park
in La Grange. The hillside was so steep
and rocky that we climbed it by grabbing
onto grapevines, weeds and small trees.
We caught the Germans on the top of the
hill asleep, but when they awoke and began
firing on us, they killed a colonel, one of
the 60 to 75 men in our detachment. Then
they fled. We found they had dug a hole in
the ground that was a perfect room with a
chimney in the middle for a fire and a flat
roof. We didn’t stay there long.
We were moving across a flat, open
area, which was very unusual in Germany
because there were so many farms and
towns. When we came around a bend, we
saw what appeared to be an abandoned
shack made of unpainted, rough wood with
no glass in the windows or a door. Suddenly, four Germans started firing on us from
42 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015
I am not a hero. A lot of combat soldiers
had it worse than me. But a question has
always stuck with me: Was I just lucky or
did a guardian angel or the Lord take care
of me?
We were transported from battle to battle in half-tracks: vehicles with wheels on the
front and tank tracks on the back, armored walls and no tops. Time after time, we moved
forward, got out and went into combat.
there killing four or five of our soldiers.
Then they came out without their guns,
holding their arms in the air and saying
in German, “We surrender.” They wanted
to give themselves up. The boys who had
been killed had been part of a close-knit
bunch from Pennsylvania. Cussing the
Germans out, the boys’ sergeant completely blew his cool. He told the Germans, two
of them regular army and two SS (Nazis),
to go behind the house. He shot them. If
they hadn’t killed those boys, the sergeant
would have taken them prisoner, but he
was too angry to let them live. We moved
on and we never saw that sergeant again.
When we engaged a few Germans in
the woods one day, I was laying behind
a tree, my legs spread out behind me for
better balance with my gun. The Germans
would fire mortar shells at us that would
burst and spread shrapnel. I felt something like a powerful puff of wind. When
I glanced behind me, I saw a hole in the
ground between my legs eight inches wide
and four or five inches deep. If my legs
had been together, I would have lost one
or both of them. I decided I should look on
the other side of the tree and when I moved,
a bullet whizzed by my right ear. If I hadn’t
moved, it would have hit my head. The
Germans doing the firing were wearing
Red Cross helmets, but they weren’t medics at all or they wouldn’t have had rifles.
I have two bronze stars and a Purple
Heart with two Oak Leaf Clusters signifying I had three battlefield injuries. The
first time, a bullet tore the skin off my upper right arm. Two or three days later, at
sunset on Christmas Eve, 1944, we moved
forward to take a hill. The Germans fired
“screaming meemies,” mortars so loud
they almost broke our eardrums. One of
them landed about 10 feet away and blew
up, spraying shrapnel that hit my leg.
I give credit to the medics. They were
there pretty fast to load me in an army ambulance and haul me to a field hospital in
a tent. When I was fixed up, they sent me
back to a hospital behind the lines. I wrote
home to say my injury wasn’t bad and in a
joking way told my family it was the nicest Christmas gift I’d ever had - getting
hit and spending 30 days in a warm place.
We had been living outside with no shelter
Veterans’ Voices
even when we slept. Then I went back and
joined my unit again. The second time I got
hit, I was treated by the same doctor and
the same nurse who had worked on me the
first time. The nurse said, “I think we’ve
seen you before.”
Weeks later, we got to the woods on the
outskirts of a railroad complex near Trier,
Germany, that we were supposed to take.
A mortar shell exploded close by and, that
time, the shrapnel hit me in the butt. After
they got through with me at the field hospital, they loaded a bunch of us who had been
wounded on a cargo plane that rattled and
shook so bad I didn’t think we would make
it over the tops of the trees, but we did. It
wasn’t bad being in an upscale hospital in
Paris for another 30 days. Then I went back
to my unit until the war in Europe ended.
By that time, the German civilians were
hungry and the country devastated. It was
bad. When we were stationed in Mittenwald, Bavaria, near the Austrian border, I
saw an old man digging through a garbage
can, looking for food. My grandfather in
Schulenburg was from Austria and this old
See Hollas, Page 45
The Fayette County Record