Published September 2006 as part of the HonorAir article
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20060923/NEWS/609230335/0/search

Vets Recall World War II

By Jennie Jones Giles
Clint Nichols, 82, drove a tank in the Battle of the Bulge, helped liberate concentration camps and prisoners of war in Germany and was in Austria when the Lipizzaner stallions were rescued.
Today, 63 years later, he is one of four veterans who will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.
Nichols is flying on the HonorAir 2006 flight in honor of the “fellows who didn’t make it back,” he said.
“I could have been one of them,” he said. “I’ve got to count my blessings and thank God I’m going to be on the flight. I’m going in memory of my buddies who didn’t make it.
“I never thought it would happen,” Nichols said. “I want to thank Jeff Miller and Henderson County and the people who gave the money.”
Nichols was born in Clay County. He was 17 when his family moved to Henderson County after their home place was flooded by Chatuga Lake, built by the power company.
He was 18 and working at the naval yard in Virginia when he was drafted by the Army in 1942. He learned to drive a tank for the Third Army, 4th Armored Division, 276th Tank Battalion.
On Aug. 25, 1943, he was on a ship in the English Channel waiting to land with the 2nd French Division on Utah Beach to join the Allies fighting the Germans in Europe.
“I was under Patton’s outfit the whole time,” he said.
It was fierce fighting in France, he said. On Thanksgiving Day, he drove his tank back 60 miles from the front line to have a holiday dinner.
“I finally got over to the kitchen and grabbed a turkey leg, as big a one as I could carry,” Nichols said. “I went back to get my coffee and set my dinner on a rock wall.”
An enemy artillery shell hit the rock wall.
“It broke that wall to pieces,” he said. “That’s as close as I ever came to getting it. If I hadn’t gone back for my coffee, I wouldn’t be here today.”
One of his best friends was among the seven men lost that day.
For 60 years, his family has set aside a turkey leg for him each Thanksgiving.
Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge was a harrowing experience.
“I about froze to death,” he said. “It was 22 degrees below zero. The snow was waist deep.”
They cut poles and drove the tanks onto the poles to keep the tanks from freezing to the ground, he said.
“Mine had rubber tracks,” Nichols said. “The guys who had tanks with steel tracks were just about helpless.”
Nichols drove a B13 tank named Betty.
“They (Germans) always shot at the driver,” he said. “I got shot at several times. I had some shells fall close to me.”
The tank crew had to change the motor three times, once on Christmas Day in waist-deep snow.
“The night we stopped the Germans from going into Bastogne, it was snowing bad,” Nichols said. “Every once in a while I’d see Patton standing up on the back of his vehicle giving the high-ball signal.
“It was so cold and foggy you couldn’t see,” he said. “You couldn’t lay your hand on a gun barrel without sticking to it.”
March 22, 1944, the victorious troops who liberated France drove across the Rhine River into the German heartland.
A sniper had the infantry patrol pinned down in a town near the river.
“We shot out the window where the sniper was,” he said. “It was a woman with a leather jacket. She was up in the building with a German rifle, shooting one soldier right after the other.”
The American soldiers began liberating prisoners of war and Holocaust survivors.
“It was pitiful,” he said. “They were starved to death and didn’t have any clothes.”
One time he was with a scouting party and saw a train hidden in a pine thicket.
“There was nothing but bodies on it,” he said. “They were nothing but skin and bones. It hits you so deep. I don’t like to think about it.”
The soldiers moved through Germany and Austria, where he saw Patton rescue the famous Lipizzaner stallions.
“We guarded the Russians,” he said. “They were going to eat those horses. I saw the soldiers loading those horses on the trucks.”