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Lieutenant Jim Flowers and the battle for Hill 122 This is the story of Jim Flowers, a brash young lieutenant from Dallas whose courage and sacrifice helped turn the tide in one of the bloodiest battles of the Normandy campaign. Flowers' story, along with that of the battle for Hill 122, is taught to French schoolchildren. The story below of Flowers delivered in his own words and those of the survivors of his platoon is virtually unknown in the United States. |
Chapter 7
Louis Gerrard, Part 1
I was in one of those two tanks that took supplies to these two infantry companies that were cut off, they were in the 90th Division. The 82nd Airborne was on our left, and the 8th Infantry Division was on our right.
Lieutenant Flowers had one of the tanks, and I was in the other. I think Abe Taylor was with us at that time. We went over and gave them the supplies and we came back. We had to go a couple of times. One time Flowers didn’t know where the hell he was going; it was so dark he couldn’t see.
All I can remember is we strapped the supplies on the back of the tanks, and we rode across-country and delivered them and came back, that was about the size of it.
We didn’t get any medal for that.
My crew then was Earl Holman; Abe Taylor was the tank commander. I was the gunner. G.B. Kennedy was the bow gunner, and we had a driver named Lochowicz.
I told Flowers, when I was in Louisville [in 1976] – that’s the first time I’d seen Flowers since the day we got hit – I told him Lochowitz wouldn’t drive the tank. So Bailey says, "Get out. I’ll drive the tank." So he drove it, and he got the tank stuck in the mud. It probably was the best thing, or we’d all have been killed, too.
But then, our tank was eventually hit.
Jack Sheppard was the tank commander then. Abe Taylor went into another tank. Taylor was originally our tank commander.
When we bogged down, we couldn’t go anywhere, so Sheppard said, "We’d better bail out." I took my tank helmet off and put my steel helmet on, and was getting ready to come up, when "Balloom!" We got hit right on my side of the tank, and I practically flew out of the turret, the helmet went out and everything.
I was hit in the eye with shrapnel. It also hit my fingers and arms.
I got out and I lay beside the tank. The rest of the crew came around me, and there was a medic; I don’t know where he came from, but he was putting sulfa drugs on my arms when somebody said, "Here come the Germans!"
Holman started getting his gun, and somebody said, "Whatever you do, don’t fire!" Because they would have mutilated us. It was probably a patrol. There were fifteen or twenty Germans.
I told the guys, "Get out of here! Run away, go on!" So they all went, and Bailey got killed getting away. He stayed; he was the last one there, and I kept telling him, "Go! Go!" and he finally – he got killed getting away. Oh, that was a hell of a mess. I lay there, half-dead. And they took the medic with them.
They took my wristwatch. And my brother Jack had given me a ring. It had the word Oran. He got it in Africa. He gave it to me when I was in England, and I wore it all the time. They tried like hell to get that off my finger. They couldn’t get it off, so they gave up on that, but they took my watch.
I didn’t say anything. The medic had told me play dead, don’t say a word, so I was just dead when they came. All I could hear was German; I didn’t know what they were talking about.
The Germans grabbed me by the heels and put me up on a hill. I think they did that so somebody could find me. Then they heard something and they took off real fast. I was expecting a bayonet in the back or the chest, or to be shot in the head, I didn’t know the Germans were going to do. That’s the only thing I could thank the Germans for, they didn’t kill me.
I lay there all night, and then this artillery opened up, and the dirt and cinders, stones were coming off the road, they were hitting me on the head; I said I’ve got to get the heck out of here, so I crawled back up the hill, and I heard someone say, "Get the hell over here!"
There were some GIs in a big slit trench. So I got into that, and I think I must have been exhausted. Then they called for a stretcher, and they took me to a field hospital. They took care of my wounds and put me on a stretcher, and put the stretcher on a jeep, they had another soldier on the other side, two of us going down a big narrow road. Christ, I could hear the small arms fire, I thought I was going to get killed before I got back to the beach.
During the Tennessee maneuvers, I hurt my back. We were going down this road to the railroad yards to put the tanks on flatcars and take them back to Camp Gordon, and we were all very tired from getting the tanks prepared, and the driver fell asleep. He hit this big tree, and I went backward – the tank seats have these prongs sticking up, and it hit me in the back. I was in a hospital for a month.
In the meantime, our battalion was taken out of the 10th Armored Division and they made us a separate tank battalion. I came back, and all the guys said to me, "What the hell are you doing back here? You can get out of the Army. You’ve got the best deal going with your back injury."
I didn’t want to get out of the Army. I told the guys I’ve got two brothers in the service, they’re both overseas, and I’d feel like hell if I got out. Jack and Jerry were both in Africa. How would it look if I come home and they’re still over there? So I stayed in. I don’t know whether I did right or wrong, but I’m still living.
I met Jack in England. In Tidworth. I hitchhiked down after I saw one of his outfit’s vehicles in Swindon. He was in the 2nd Armored Division. I went down with Harold Gentle to see him.
I found out on D-Day that Jerry was killed. I was in England, and I got a letter from my brother Larry who was at home, and it said that Jerry was killed. Right then and there Abe Taylor went up to the captain and told him that I was upset, and Taylor said I have another brother over in Tidworth, and I’d like to get a pass to go see him.
I got out on the road and hitchhiked. Every road was bumper to bumper Army equipment. I finally got to Tidworth, and I saw the division trains – that’s the end of the division; the other part of the division probably was at the coast going over the channel. And I never did get to see him.
After my tank got hit, I was thinking I was going to get killed by these Germans coming, and I was thinking about my mother, what would she say? She took it hard when my oldest brother was killed, and I thought, now she’ll get word another one’s killed. But it didn’t happen that way.
In the days before Hill 122, there was a lot of fighting, a lot of artillery coming in on us and different things.
We took the tanks up to this infantry outfit in back of a hedgerow, and everything broke loose, and they all hollered, "Get those tanks the hell out of here!" Before that, they were hollering, "Get those tanks up here!" I think that happened quite a bit during the war. They want the tanks, then they don’t want the tanks.
One time that we were out of the tanks and artillery broke loose, and everybody was jumping in foxholes, we didn’t have foxholes. I’m pushing up against a hedgerow as far as I can, trying to protect myself ; I couldn’t get back in the tank. The artillery finally let up, and we got back in the tank and got the hell out of there.
Harold Gentle and I were both from Philadelphia. The day I was drafted, we were down at the Reading terminal, and we got on the train, and he said, "Is this seat taken?" He sat beside me, and from then on we were buddy-buddy. From there we went up to New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, where we got all our shots, and the next day we were put on trains, and everybody said we were going to Florida; the guys looked out the window, and they said they saw palm trees. We were headed for a tank outfit in Fort Benning, Georgia; that’s where the palm trees were. We were all in tanks!
Harold Gentle was crazy about his wife. Her name was Helen. She was from Philadelphia. We both got furloughs, and he married her on the furlough. Her cousin was an ensign, and he had to be the best man. Gentle wanted me to be the best man. But she wanted the ensign. He said, "Would you mind?"
He fought with his wife; he wanted me to be the best man. I said, "Harold, don’t do that, I’ll just be an usher, I don’t care." So I was an usher.
We were in Fort Jackson at the time, and she came down and stayed with him. Her mother was a pain in the neck. On the phone one time, she said, "My mother wants to come down." Oh, he got on his hands and knees and prayed, and said, "No, please don’t have her come down." I was there watching him on the phone. So she never came down.
Gentle graduated from LaSalle University. They wanted to send him to officers training school, but he wouldn’t go. So they made him a corporal.
When a new gun would come in to the battalion, he would get all the instructions; the lieutenants or sergeants would give the gun to him and he would explain everything to them. Everybody would be sitting out on the hill, and he would be telling them all about it, take it all apart and put it together.
When we were in France, these Frenchmen would come over to the tanks with bottles of cognac. I didn’t trust the French, but Gentle would be out there taking a drink. I said, "Will you get in your tank?" And there was a dead American laying nearby, they had this bayonet in the ground with his helmet on top of it. He went over and swapped rifles with it. He put his gun in there, a carbine, and he took the M-1.
He’d probably be living today if he went to be an officer, I guess. You never know.
His wife remarried. When I got back from overseas I went to see her in Roxboro. The father-in-law, he understood. He said, "They were all killed in a tank?" He was classified as being missing in action. But they were all killed in that tank. They were all ablaze, and they can’t get out of them tanks.
He was a good kid, Gentle. Paul Farrell was in his crew. I remember the day that Farrell got spooked. I was up talking to him. He wouldn’t get out of the tank. He said he would just as soon get hit in the leg, lose a leg, so he could get the hell out of this. He was afraid he was going to get killed. I guess everybody was.
I remember one time with Abe Taylor, we were supposed to go up to a certain point; we were going up this hill, and Abe went over and he was getting ready to go farther, and some guy came out and said, "Where are you going with that tank?" And he said, "We’re going up, we’ve got to meet Lieutenant Such and Such up there."
And he says, "This is all mined. You can’t go up that road."
And Taylor said, "But I’ve got to meet him."
And I said, "Abe, if you go up that road, I’m getting the hell out."
So we didn’t go up the road.
Boy, those tanks were hot in the summer. On those maneuvers in Tennessee, we roasted. But in the winter they were cold as hell. Just the opposite.
There was a place called B.G. Howard’s in Phenix City. I was there with Gentle one night. Sometimes it’s off limits, and other times they’d lift it. All I saw in there was silver dollars. Any kind of gambling you wanted. There used to be a lot of fights with the 10th Armored Division and the paratroopers.
A lot of times we went out at Benning, me and Gentle and Horace Gary. He was Lieutenant Flowers’ driver. He’s dead now. He and his wife stopped here from Richmond, Virginia, to see me one day. We used to go out on the town together, Horace Gary and Gentle and myself.
Gerald Kibbala was from somewhere near Scranton. We were both Catholics, and we went to Mass together on Sundays when we could. I remember we were at Mass in France, we were kneeling down in the mud, and the priest was saying Mass in the field. That’s the last time I saw Kibbala. Nice fellow. They were all good guys in the service.
I remember coming in, there was a lot of water; Normandy was flooded, and Cherbourg wasn’t taken yet. I saw these MPs out there marching columns of Germans, on both sides of a tank they were coming, and the MPs were hollering, "Go on you bastards, get moving!" And I asked one of the MPs where we were, and he said these guys are coming from Cherbourg. That’s the first time I ever heard of Cherbourg. Then I asked somebody where the 2nd Armored Division was – that’s my brother Jack’s division – and he says they’re over near Carentin or Caen.
So we got in there, and Abe Taylor went up to the company commander – all the tank commanders were there – and found out what we were gonna do, and Abe came back and said we’re going to St. Lo. I didn’t know what the hell St. Lo was about, but they tell me we weren’t going anywhere near St. Lo. I don’t know. That’s what they told Abe.
That’s probably the closest big town they knew. Like we were at La Haye du Puits. We went through that town, it was all on fire.
I was firing at a French villa, a big place; Taylor gave the orders to fire, and we fired in, smoke, everything we were throwing in there, high explosive and smoke and everything, and the Germans were just flooding out of the place. I heard the tank commander, Taylor, "Open up!" These Germans were going across the road, and I got the machine gun going, and I could see, I don’t know whether they were falling down or got killed or what. I opened up, and the bullets went splashing all over the road.
One time we had to get out of the tank and move some dead Americans to go up the road; I’ve seen some of them got squashed, too. What a feeling.
I used to see the cows eating the grass, and the blood just pouring out of them like a faucet, and they’re standing there eating. They said the horses were the same way.
We had a lot of German guns in our tank; the guys would pick them up. P-38s, and a couple of lugers. I saw a lot of bicycles, too. The Germans rode a lot of bicycles. This was a dirt road where I saw a lot of bicycles laying there.
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