| We settled down for the night. About midnight,
Sergeant Bellievue woke me and said the brunette is here and wants
to see Herr Commandant. She was pretty excited. There was a drunk
American soldier down in the cellar with her and her father and
was threatening to shoot the old couple from next door. Bellievue
said, "Take it easy, Lieutenant, it may be a trap." I
grabbed my rifle as the brunette led the way to her cellar. Sure
enough, there was a drunk GI there, waving his pistol around. He
was from Company A, and his buddies were up ahead fighting. I told
Bellievue to take him to Battalion and put him under arrest. Then
the German in her late forties said something. I asked the brunette
what she said, she told me that the woman had a soldier son and
didn't want me to be too hard on this soldier. I was dumbfounded,
but women, no matter what their age or nationality, are always unpredictable.
. . .
Things were really moving fast now. The next morning,
April 6, we climbed aboard trucks and moved forty-nine miles to
Tungeda, the regimental assembly area. On April 7, we moved six
miles to Pfulldendorf. We were in open terrain now, with little
towns and villages scattered here and there. Sometimes we ran
into a little bit of trouble and sometimes we just barreled on
in with no resistance. Lieutenant McAlpin, our battalion S-2,
did a swell job now; he wasn't afraid of anything. He mounted
a .30-caliber machine gun on one of my jeeps and drove on out
ahead and to the side of us, trying to locate the Germans. When
he didn't encounter any resistance, he came back and told us,
and we moved that much faster.
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