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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. Yet it is virtually unknown in the United States. |
Chapter 9
Kenneth Titman’s story
I was in a fight. We were set into a circle, we were called on to go repulse a German counterattack. I forget the name of the German paratrooper unit, but we were supposed to come in there and repulse the attack with our tanks, and they got in there and they surrounded us. They threw everything but the kitchen sink, 88s at us. And all of our tanks were wiped out. I forget the colonel who gave us the order to go in there. Hill 122, that’s where that battle hit.
That’s when I got taken prisoner. My tank blew up. I told everybody to abandon tank. They’ve got an escape hatches down there, and they dropped the escape hatch. The driver and the assistant driver went out through the escape hatch. And the loader went out through the turret and he was on fire. Ken Cohron, the gunner, got killed. I went out of the turret and I got hit in the leg, I’ve got still got shrapnel in the leg. It doesn’t go away.
Cohron got killed right in the tank. An 88 hit him. The assistant driver went out of the top and down the side. He was on fire when he hit the ground.
When I got out, I went for a slit trench, and when I got in the slit trench, here come a bunch of Germans and they stuck a gun at me. I said, "Alles kaput," and they saw my leg was all shot up. They put me on a litter, and they took me back to the rear, and when they got me back there, they took me to an interrogating officer. And he said, "You know, your battle is over. You’re going back to the rear."
I said, "Oh?"
He said, "Yep. The war’s over for you. What outfit are you from?"
I wouldn’t tell him.
He said, "How many men are back there in that tank?"
I said, "I don’t know."
While I was sitting there, when this guy was asking me all those questions, they opened up with a burp guns nearby. And I said, "What was that? "
He said, "That’s somebody who wouldn’t talk."
I figured that’s just a gimmick. So I said, "I’m not telling you nothing."
The Germans to me, a soldier’s just like a doctor or a lawyer, that’s their profession. That’s the way they think. And they appreciate somebody who doesn’t tell them information. If a guy tells them everything, they said, "That guy’s no good." They were smart soldiers.
He said, "We’re going to take you back to Rennes, France, to the hospital, and when we get there you’re going to have good care."
Well, they put me in a meatwagon and they took me back down the road. We had artillery falling all around us – our own artillery – and they took us to this hospital, and they put me in a bed there, and my leg was so bad; it was full of shrapnel and infection was setting in, and a French nurse came around with these sticks – when the wound’s all opened up, they put those sticks on there to try to burn the pus and everything off. That hurt a little bit, and she said, "Just take it easy, because we might get liberated."
They put a big red cross on top of the hospital we were in. We didn’t have antyhing to eat. All we had was peaberry coffee and moldy bread. When I got liberated I weighed 110 pounds. And Dr. Powell, my doctor, told me when I got liberated and they took me down to the field hospital, "If you’d have been there ten more hours you’d have lost your right leg." Because gangrene was setting in. Then they put me on a plane and took me over to Swindon, England. That’s where were at before we made the invasion; that’s what got me, I was back in Swindon. They put us in these tents. Dr. Powell looked at my leg, and he said, "You’ve got a piece of shrapnel up next to your bone and one back behind. We’re going to cut that leg open, and we’ll give you a spinal shot, to deaden it. You’re not going to feel a thing. I want you to keep your head, lay down and don’t move." And he opened my leg up and took out two big pieces of shrapnel, about as big as my thumb.
The shrapnel was pieces of my tank that went in my leg. When the shell penetrated, it exploded right inside. You take about 100 rounds of armor-piercing and 100 rounds of high explosive, and about four thousand rounds of ammunition going off, that looked like a popcorn factory going up through that turret. Shells bursting right out through the top. That’s the way it looked. But I was out of it. I was lucky, too. Just one of those things.
I was in England about six months. When I got healed up, I went back to the Battle of the Bulge. Ray Griffin was the platoon leader. All the guys I had been with were gone. I went back and the sergeant said, "Patton said anybody that was a prisoner of war doesn’t get to go up to the battle. Because if the Germans find out you were a prisoner of war, it’s curtains." So they put me in the Service Company, from there on until we got into Hof, Germany.
There was a Sergeant Bailey. He was from Fort Benning, Georgia. Where he made a bad mistake, he had a German scabbard that he picked up. That was a bad deal when they saw that; they shot him. They shot him right through the head. Because anything you take from the Germans, like a P-38 or anything, they think you robbed the dead. And they don’t like that. If you see a dead German, "Oh, he’s got a P-38, I think I’m gonna get that," you’d just better not. Because if you ever get captured with that gun on you, you’re done.
I didn’t see it, but they told me about it. I could tell a lot of things that happened. But it’s just getting it together.
There’s the 358th Infantry; our 712th Tank Battalion was attached to them. Each infantry battalion had a different company of tanks. They were from the 90th Division, Texas-Oklahoma. They were going alongside of our tanks. Doughboys liked to hang around close to the tank, because they figured with artillery coming in, they’d have a chance of not getting hit. Every time we’d stop our tank and reconnoiter, we had the hedgerows right up in front of us. You’d see Germans coming up the road, prisoners; doughboys had them lined up, taking them back to Normandy. And they’d juice ’em in the butt with the bayonet. They were on the double; they were glad to get out.
One time, when we were in the hedgerows, a girl came running toward our tanks, and she jumped head-first right in the tank. She said, "I don’t want to be out there. I want to be in here!"
The German told me when he was interrogating me, "You’ve got artillery back there that runs off a conveyor belt. I’ve never seen such good artillery." He said, "We don’t have a chance."
When my tank got hit, we were all coming together in an open field. The German 88s got us. They hit my tank and it exploded. I looked around and saw all these tanks running, one tank ran in front of me and hit the tank on the left and both exploded. That’s what I saw. I told my men to abandon tank, and I jumped out of the turret, and hit the back deck. I looked at my combat boot; blood was coming out the top, and I knew I was hit.
When I got down off the tank and looked up, I saw the loader coming out of the turret and there were sparks. That was Stephen Wojtilla. And Cohron, I knew he didn’t come out because I had some of his flesh on my helmet. And then Albert Morrison, the driver, put the tank in reverse, and the assistant driver dropped the escape hatch, and the tank had power enough to back off, and the guys got out by going under the tank. I don’t know where they went after that. I got into a slit trench, and the Germans picked me up and put me on a litter because they knew I was hit.
I was standing in the turret when the tank got hit. The shell went through the front end and exploded, and that got me in the leg; Cohron got hit in the face, and the loader, he jumped out of the turret and he was on fire. I looked back at the tank, and it was like popcorn popping. That makes a hell of a noise.
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