Fellowship of Dust by William Shaw

Author:William Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press

From Chartres, the 1st Division swung south of Paris via Étampes to Soissons to Mons, Belgium, as it continued to pursue the Germans.

A poster announcing the liberation of Belgium in September 1944.

With advantages in communications and air superiority, the GIs pulverized the German troops. Every German effort at counterattack was repulsed with serious losses on their part. While thousands of German soldiers surrendered and were herded into makeshift cages, others, in their frenzied dash for the Fatherland, abandoned their artillery and their vehicles. Frank and his men happily commandeered a number of the trucks, repainted them with the white American star, and put them immediately into action against the Germans. As they resumed the push northward out of a small town on the Maubeuge-Mons road in their “new” transportation, a half-track loaded with soldiers darted out of a side street and squeezed its way into the column between two of the captured vehicles. This didn’t strike Frank as particularly unusual until he noticed the black cross markings on the side of the truck. At that moment somebody else shouted: “They’re Krauts!” and rifle and machine gun fire instantly poured into the vehicle killing its passengers. That half-track was then quickly repainted and added to the convoy.

By September 7, 1944, the 1st Division had achieved its greatest victory of the war. It had taken more than 25,000 prisoners, leaving an uncounted but approximately similar number of dead German men and boys buried in the fields. Five German divisions had been eliminated from the war and enormous quantities of materiel had been captured or destroyed.

Strangely, what grieved many GIs was not the massive loss of German life, or even the destruction of the French and Belgian towns through which they had come in their pursuit of the Nazi forces. Human death and destruction of property had become commonplace. The sight of dozens of dead horses littering the road side—horses the Germans were now using to haul their weapons and supplies, and horses the Belgians used for their everyday transportation—touched many men deeply, especially the men from rural America who had horses of their own on their farms or ranches back home. But as Frank and his men drove and marched in triumph through the towns and villages of northern France and passed across the border into Belgium during the first and second week of September, their sadness, fatigue, and numbness dissipated. Flush with victory, their confidence and morale soared as newly liberated citizens cheered the Americans and showered their procession with flowers, offerings of food, cognac, champagne, handshakes and back slapping from the old men, hugs and kisses from ecstatic women. As they wove their way through the streets of Mons, Charleroi, Huy, and Liège, this scene was repeated over and over. It had all gone so well. The vaunted Germany army was now crumbling in ashes as they drove through and over them, scattering the fleeing remnants toward the Siegfried line. “Perhaps now we will be home by Christmas,” Frank dared to think.

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