The Tough Days at St. Vith

Location: St. Vith
Weather: Rainy
Trip Status: Credit Card Crisis Day 19

I received a text message from my sister. She is a new mother, and Mom visits her a lot. It said simply “Mom wants to know if your still alive.” This also represents the first communication from Mary on this trip. Dryness runs in the family, and it made me miss her.
No card today. I went to the post office first thing and was confronted with a completely new set of people at the windows than on the previous two days. They had no idea what I was talking about when I went to the window and asked about my letter from Holland. They also both didn’t speak a word of English. It was just like going to the post office in New York.
After a very frustrating 10 minutes trying to explain what it was I was looking for in very limited French, a woman who spoke English finally came to the window. Jennifer was a kind looking blond haired German in her mid-40’s. She asked about my trip, what I was doing, what it was about. She seemed to care about who I was and why I was trying so hard to get this package. She will check for me in the mail bags first thing tomorrow morning and, with some luck, it will be there. She stressed being patient with the Belgian mail system. I can’t really explain to anyone just how patient I’ve been. It’s been fully three weeks since I ordered the new card. I probably could have crossed the ocean in a rowboat by now.
Oh well, I have to think positively. That will give me ample time to check out everything around here in detail, and then some. Due to the rainy cold weather, I’ve made another comb through on the reports, so I have a very detailed idea of grandpa’s locations during the whole battle. It’s amazing that so many men died fighting over this little town in the forest. It’s a small town today so in 1944 it must have been a tiny village.
All in all, today was kind of disappointing. I was expecting the card to arrive at the post, it didn’t and then it rained. Camping in the rain has never been very much fun, although I do retain many fond memories from doing just that as a kid with the family. I remember for a while there, it seemed like we picked the rainy weekends to go camping on purpose. I guess a fringe benefit is that only a select group of people (crazy) go camping in the rain, so you have the forest to yourself.
The day wasn’t a total waste, however. I went to meet Freddy at the family hotel at 3pm as planned. The building itself sits on a long private driveway leading into a ring of fir trees surrounding a pond. There are classical statues of women in various states of undress around the pond. The hotel is an older-looking building probably salvaged from the war because it had been slightly out of town at that time.
I was a little early, and I waited inside the dining room. It was such formal German hunting lodge atmosphere complete with ticking clock, dark wood paneling festooned with ancient looking tapestries and paintings of men from the 1830’s riding horses and blowing bugles while dogs did most of the work.
A woman of about 28 was busy setting the tables for the dinner hour, 3 glasses, 5 forks, seventeen knives and thirty seven bowls to a setting. A glance at the menu let me know the type of clientele the place serves; $400 a plate for a full dinner. Yeah. The amazing thing is that people actually fill this place every night. It’s well known locally, and the chef is excellent.
The chef is, in fact, Freddy who was walking through the door precisely at 3pm excusing himself for being late, and offering me a cup of fresh coffee while he changed into his bike gear. I didn’t really want one, but it quickly became apparent that I was having a coffee and that was that. He snapped his fingers, and the woman who was setting the table went to the bar and starting making me a strong Belgian coffee.
“She will make your coffee, and I will change ok?” Freddy said.
“Ok”
Freddy is a fit man in his 40’s. He rides a German custom built hard tail mountain bike with a Fox fork, some very nice looking hydraulic disk brakes of a type new to me, full Shimano XT and XTR components and Rovell wheels. The bike is about as good a hardtail as money can buy. And, I could tell by the mud splotches it gets used.
The clock continued to tick inside the cavernous wooden hall while my coffee was presented, in correct serving manner, in a small mug and saucer set with Belgium sweet cream, a sugar cube with the hotel’s name on it, and a cookie.
“Danke.” I said to the woman, feeling a little guilty that she had to make this and serve me like some feudal lord.
“No problem.” She replied.
“Oh, English! Thanks so much for the coffee. My name is Gavin.” I held out my hand.
“Rosanna.” She said, while eying my outstretched hand for a second before quickly shaking it and returning to setting the tables.
The clock ticked some more while I loudly sipped my coffee. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a chicken clucking and rattling its cage emanating from the kitchen.
“Do you guys have a chicken in there?” I asked Rosanna.
She looked at me funny.
“A chicken?” I asked again?
“I’m sorry, my English is …”
“Oh” I got why she was so quiet now.
This study in awkwardness ended when Freddy returned to fund me mimicking a chicken with my arms and pointing at the kitchen while repeating the words “chicken” and “egg” over and over again with Rosanna staring at me with a slight grin on her face. I think she thought I was mentally handicapped.
As we pedaled down the tree lined driveway out to the mean streets of St. Vith, we came to the base of a rise on the western edge of the old town. It is a man-made hill which the locals call “billion dollar hill”. According to Freddy, when the army pulled back the Air Corps bombed St. Vith, back into the Stone Age on Christmas day. When the 48th retook the “town” in January, there were two buildings left standing; the train station and railroad workers housing. They were in the train yard protected from the bombardment by a lucky hill between them and the rest of the town.
It was so bad, that the army simply declared it “liberated”, bulldozed the entire town, and pushed the refuse over to the side of the old town walls. This created the new hill. It got its name because into it went all of the possessions, valuables, and infrastructure of the town that had been. No doubt, there are also people buried in the rubble as well.
We made a right at the main traffic hub and soon were pedaling down a rolling country lane surrounded by fields full of sanguine cows.
“Here” he pointed to his left, “was a German roadblock. The Americans never got past this point to the south. Up in the trees beyond, there are many foxholes and trenches. Also, there was an artillery gun mounted in that flat pond there to the right of the crossroads.”
As I looked, I could see all of the depressions in the earth that he mentioned. To the casual passerby, it would look no different than any other crossroads. Here men died. We continued down the road.
Suddenly, we were passed by three minivans marked “Polizie”. One stopped. The window rolled down, and Freddy went up to the driver, a blond haired blue eyed German man in his early 20’s. They exchange a few hurried words, after which the policeman rolled up the window and took off like a shot back towards town.
“They are looking for a couple of kids.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, they said if we see them to call.” Freddy looked at me with a smile that indicated that he wasn’t about to rat anyone out.
“Is there a lot of that around here?”
“Yes, well there is now a lot of foreigners here; Russians mostly, and former Soviets. And, they are isolated. They don’t speak the language, so they are completely isolated. There is nothing to do for them.”
The road we were following came to a dead end.
“Here, this was the road straight to Prum in the south. Now there is the freeway that cut through it, but right on the other side of the freeway there.” He pointed across the now visible superhighway cut to a small grove of trees with a single house under them. “There was the German CP in this area south of St. Vith until they came and took the town from the Americans.” A freeway cut had done what no American or German road block could achieve, and we weren’t able to get to the CP.
We swung to the left and followed the road as it curved downhill. We passed a log truck sitting astride the entire width of the road and hit a little bike trail to the right. I soon found myself in very familiar surroundings because we were cycling past my campsite all of a sudden.
“In those above,” Freddy pointed to the hills that I had climbed a few nights ago finding a trench line, “That was the last ditch defense line for the Americans. They put everyone up there to hold back the Germans. Cooks, Clerks, Staff Officers, Shoe Shiners, Truck Drivers, anyone who could hold a rifle and throw a grenade was on that hill in trenches pointing to the East.”
“They must have been slaughtered.”
“Yes, well a lot of them were captured. Many died, but many also lived.”
At the junction of the trail system, and the forest service road net, we swung our bikes uphill and rode to the crest of the hill. The forest closed in around us, and the trees stood tall on either side of the road, which was becoming more like a paved trail.
“Here, on either side, you will see foxholes.”
I looked. On the mossy covered ground were tons of them; shallow depressions, now melted into the forest floor with six decades of time, but visible in rows, lines and some even connected with trenches. There were also larger pads carved out of the forest floor.
“Those are for artillery or anti-aircraft guns.” Freddy said as we dismounted and walked into the forest battlefield. Within three steps into the trees, he reached down and flung something back at me saying “Here you go.”
It was a twisted metal remnant of what looked like a mortar shell. Rusted, and deformed from sitting in a foxhole for 65 years along with several other undefined pieces of metal laying all about the area.
“When I was young, you used to find ammunition clips, canteens, mess kits, boots, and sometimes helmets. But that was 35 years ago man. Now you find some things, but you need a metal detector.”
“Wow. Are there any live things here? Like mines or grenades and stuff that we have to worry about?”
Freddy laughed and said, “Oh no, they made the Germans clean it all up right after the war.”
I remembered the story that Neik told me about how they did that. They would make the German POW’s comb through an area and pull all the mines out. Then they would make all of them turn around and march through the area that they had just “cleared”. Insurance.
Like a tourist stealing a rock from Mesa Verde, I slipped the twisted piece of rust into my pack; intended use: paperweight.
As we wound down the other side of the hill, down from the battle area, we came to a road and headed toward Mayerode. Halfway to the town, log trucks and sports cars whipping past us on this major highway, we made a quick left up another non-descript looking forest service trail.
“These woods are where some Americans held out after the Germans came through. One of them was found up here by the farmers and there is a memorial to him. As you can see though,” he pointed around us to the thick woods coated with underbrush and little streams, “This is a perfect area for a guerilla war. These woods were very hard for the Germans to clean out.”
We wheezed up the steep trail and finally came to a little grove of apple and pear trees arranged in a semi-circle around a dark marble cross which read:
“Capt. Eric Fisher Wood U.S. Army - January 1945.”
The story of Capt. Wood is famous to those of who are nutty enough to have studied the Battle of the Bulge. Like many others in the 106th Infantry Division, he was cut off behind the Germans when they advanced. As his convoy was coming down the road to Mayerode, the very highway we had just left, it was ambushed. He was the only one who got away and he ran into the hills where we now stood.
With the help of the local farmers, who took a great personal risk by feeding him, he swore to keep fighting his own little war in these hills. Over the course of the next month, German supply convoys were repeatedly ambushed. German railway and bridge construction was blown up. Random outposts were attacked, and the men found there killed. He had gathered a few men with him at this point and they were fighting their own private war.
When Wood didn’t return to his usual farm for food one week in January, the farmers went up into the forest. At the very spot I was standing with Freddy, they found his body, surrounded by 7 dead Germans. Since he had money, his photos and most of his personal belongings on him, it was assumed that he had died last.
I thought about Grandpa, cut off with his men in much the same circumstances as Capt. Wood. What thoughts and fears must have raced through his mind?
We got lost on the ride back, and had to ask directions from a French kid who was getting stoned in his car. He looked more than a little surprised to see two guys on bikes coming up on his car, and asking him stuff in German. Needless to say, I can relate, and of course, he had no idea where he was.
So, Freddy picked a direction, and we headed that way until we came to the main highway, a concrete military road built by the US Army in 1945. It was flowing with traffic because it was now 5:30, rush hour. We hauled ass back south to the turn off for the railroad trail leading to St. Vith. Once on it, Freddy told me that before World War One, the railroads here had been huge, employing well over 1000 people in St. Vith. This didn’t include the Russain slave labor that had been brought here to actually build the things during WW1. This whole area had been part of Germany until 1922, as stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles.
“There are Russian mass graves here,” Freddy continued “one here and one at Eupen. They are marked, 200 Russians Here, that sort of thing.”
Jeez, I thought, what is it with the Germans and Russians? It seems like one country is always enslaving half of the other. Then, I remembered that our own railroads in the US were built primarily by Chinese labor. They did receive wages for the work, but they were treated like slaves, and buried in mass graves as well all along the way. Ours are unmarked.
The ride ended back in town next to the train station, where Freddy’s own grandfather had worked during the occupation.
“He was sent away to the East in the army by the Germans, but he ran away, and came back here hiding in town until the Americans came in September 1944. He then came out of hiding, and went back to work at the railroad. But, when the Germans came back in December, well. It was hard times.” Freddy made a gun out of right hand, pointed it to his head and made a sound resembling a bullet impacting flesh and bone.
“Oh my God,” said, “really? I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well he was a German deserter you know. He was to be shot.”