Difference a Year Makes

The circumstances in which you find yourself can be dramatically different from one year to the next. It can be more than being one year older, it can be more than being at work one year and retired the next. It is a rainy mid-July evening tonight, and knowing that there is little I can do outside, I decided to go through some of the letters my father had written home while he served in the Counter Intelligence Corps during WWII. I just happened to open my copied collection to July 4, 1945. In July of that year he was in, if I correctly read his handwriting, Vilshofen, Germany. He notes in the letter that he and "Jack are going to meet Joe for dinner out" and then go to a party. Although he admits it “has been a dull l4th so far today.” The next paragraph begins with “though the 4th hasn’t had any of the loud celebrating (and this was 18 years before my sister Jeanne was born) which usually goes on in the States, it has been a holiday,” but it is the completion of this sentence that peaked my interest when he wrote “and what a relief from last year.” With the war complete and the censors less concerned about what he writes he adds some additional information on where he found himself one year earlier.

American Cemetery in Normandy in early 1950's, with temporary wooded crosses

“I remember,” he begins “we were living in Carentan (which is a port city in Normandy) and I was sent down to the 329 regiment to work that day as that was the 1st day we attacked the enemy. It was an experience I’ll never forget.” Carentan was made famous by the battle fought by the 101st airborne division in June, as part of the  D-Day invasion. Part of these events are captured in the popular video series "Band of Brothers”  which documents the exploits of the 101st.  The history of the 83rd notes that the division’s first command post was in a circus tent near Bricqueville. At this point in the war, the division was under Omar Bradley’s First Army. While there, they received orders to move to Carentan and relieve the 101st Airborne. Carentan, it says “was the roughest and most hotly contested area in the entire American zone.” The 83rd would move in over the course of two nights in late June—the whole division from the riflemen to the headquarters and service troops. As noted by my father, July 4 was to be the first engagement of the 83rd Infantry division who began to arrive on the continent on about D-day plus 15 at Omaha Beach. The fighting would take place south of Carentan, noted in the 329th Regiment “After Action Reports” specifically as Le Plessis. The division history notes that they jumped off the Carentan—Periers road. They were fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy. The hedgerow fighting was perhaps some of the most severe of the war. Not only was it thick with brush and trees, as the name would imply, but there was also a usual significant change in elevation, also implied by its name. American tanks, with their special plow type fronts, were not nearly as effective in the hedgerows as the war planners had thought. They also had not anticipated the density and commonness of this French farm feature. It could well conceal the enemy, and the hardened Nazi fighters took advantage of the territory. As the division history notes “We found hedgerow fighting treacherous, rugged, nerve-wracking, murderous. Even now we find it hard to explain, for it almost defies description.” It goes on to describe the hedgerows as consisting of “gnarled tree roots and vines as tough and strong as iron hoops, all woven together in an impenetrable wall.” They could not see the enemy, nor the enemy see them, but they knew each other was there. Movement was tortured and time consuming, it was simply slow, creeping, crawling and costly.

A special plow on a US tank to battle the hedgerows

Costly it was, the August 8 entry in the “After Action Report” notes that casualties for the battle that began on July 4 and would last most of the month were in the range of 35%.  More specifically another report notes that of the 3058 enlisted men in the regiment, after two days of fighting 2518 were still in fighting condition. In just two days the 329th had 540 casualties. Yet, the situation was actually worse than that, as the casualty rate of companies that came in to contact with the enemy was 50%. As for weather, it was rain, rain, and more rain. Mud was getting deeper, making movement difficult, and more importantly it dampened air support. It would be 21 days later, on July 25 when air support would arrive to provide some much needed assistance. The Germans utilized effective machine gun placement “with maximum field of fire” which was supplemented by mortars and what they would come to realize were the deadly 88’s.

US Soldiers in Normandy, Summer 1944

In that July 4, 1945 letter, my father goes on to say that prior year he was “fairly safe in a fox hole in an orchard, but the boys on the front 1,000 yards away were caught in a hell as they had to go through a swamp waist deep in water.” But he continues to describe what a dire situation the regiment was in when he says that “some got over and were cut off, others stayed in the swamp and a few struggled back and the look they had after their first real day of battle was horrible.” War is hell, and it showed on the faces of the men who retreated from the swamp as they were caught in the fire of German machine guns and 88’s. That first day of encounter, he goes on to say, was also the first day he “saw a German prisoner for the first time…and it was quite an experience. Now we live with them, practically.”

My father, Roy Bernard Hovel, CIC

One year makes a difference. On July 3, 1944 my father and the 83rd Infantry were preparing to enter battle against the Germans in France, but a year later, on July 3 he had taken “the large Mercedes” to what he refers to as some God-forsaken place” and got stuck twice on the way back due to heavy rain. His location, means of transport and means of purpose had changed, only the rain reamained the same.  He then notes that “4 former German army boys helped me out.” However, following that tale, he gets more serious when he writes “It sure is a funny world though and if you could see all that has been going on here for the past 6 yrs and still it would seem all twisted up to you too. I couldn’t even begin to write about everything because it’d take a year or two. I can understand it because it is my work but I guess there are few others over here outside of some CIC men who do. Even many CIC men are surprised to hear of different things and can’t imagine them.” He goes on to recount of having heard a father send his son to a concentration camp, and a son a father. “The Nazi propaganda, education, and system was horrible in its efficiency and the way it would keep the truth from the German people and still attain a horrible end.”  As a member of the CIC he would experience not only the horrors of war, but the ruthlessness of man to a fellow man.

83rd Infantry CIC Detachment, Morning Report
for August 1, 1944

In less than one year the war went from a terrible situation where the victory to secure the beaches one month earlier was almost lost, two ten months later with the total and unconditional surrender of the German army. It would take one year for my father to write about his account of his first experience near the front. July 4, 1944 was for him an experience that was burned in to his memory, and was quite the contrast with the party and dinner he would have one year later. He was part of the 329th regiment during those July days that would feel the wrath of the German war machine, but yet persevere. He would go from life in a foxhole in an orchard among the hedgerows of Normandy to driving a Mercedes on Army business in the south of Germany. Most of all, he saw the hell of war, the terrible cost, and a bittersweet July 4, 1945 where a holiday was interrupted in his mind by the horrors of one year earlier. What a difference one year can make.