Published Dec. 15, 2004
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20041215/EXTRAS02/412150319/0/search

Wright recalls the Allied fight in Germany

By Jennie Jones Giles
On Dec. 15, 1944, as other American soldiers began the six-week battle to stop Hitler’s last attempt to gain victory over Allied forces in Europe, Joel Wright was inside Germany along the Roer River setting up defensive positions.
At the time the Battle of the Bulge began, the 104th Division, the Timberwolves, had made the deepest penetration into Germany of any allied division. They were in position near the Roer River.
“We were the left flank of the 1st Army,” Wright said. “My platoon held a little village and a chateau.”
From December until about February, Wright and his men held their positions against German resistance.

Football to war

Wright was attending classes and playing football at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when World War II began. Along with many other college students and athletes in 1942, he chose to interrupt his studies and volunteered to fight.
The Army was recruiting infantry officers from the college athletes, he said.
“Everybody who was able to walk felt like it was our duty to go. I had to get my parents to sign a waiver,” Wright said. “By January 1943, I was down at Little Rock in basic training.”
Wright, who is 82, grew up in Gastonia. He later moved to Asheville, where he attended the former Lee Edwards High School.
On Sept. 7, 1944, he arrived at Omaha Beach in France.
“We were among the first troops to go straight to France from the United States,” Wright said. “It took 14 days to go over.”
Soon his 415th Infantry Regiment was heading for the Netherlands.
“We were to relieve a British outfit in Holland,” he said. “At first, we lost more men to trench foot than getting shot at. Every 300 yards or so, we had to cross a canal, and you crossed a river everywhere in those countries.”
Wright, a rifle platoon leader, said the fighting in Belgium and the Netherlands was rough. His senior officer was James Mauldin of Greenville, S.C., a Clemson graduate.
“Men would go to sleep standing straight up,” he said.
There were booby traps and mines everywhere.
“We had to watch what we were doing,” Wright said. “There were little strands of wire about a foot off the ground used as trip wires.”
The “bouncing Bettys” were the worst, he said. These were set up with three prongs.
“If you hit one, it would set off a charge and grenades would go up in the air, explode and the shrapnel would hit you,” he said.
The Germans also dug ditches and placed the guns inside at turret level.
“They would sit in the ditches and wait on us,” he said.
There was only small German resistance at the Mark River when Wright’s company crossed.
“We didn’t hit resistance until we got across,” he said. “After crossing a little foot bridge we ran into resistance. Two scouts were in front of me. A German tried to give up and a scout shot him. Then the Germans killed one of my scouts.
“After that German was shot, the others weren’t about to give up,” Wright said. “Every time the injured German moaned, they opened up with the machine gun. I took my knife out and put the blade to his throat. I didn’t cut him, but he quit moaning.”
The division moved to drive the Germans from the ancient city of Aachen. As troops moved from village to village, Wright took out night patrols.
“We did most of our stuff in night attacks,” he said. “It saved a lot of lives, but it was kind of scary.”
Before entering the city of Aachen, the troops were dug in at the edge of the woods.
“The fog was so thick, we couldn’t see 10 to 15 feet in front of us,” he said. “We started to dig in and wait on the other outfits to catch up with us. We dug in where we could get the best field of fire.”
Wright went over to a group of soldiers to show them where to dig.
“The Germans opened up and we were in the crossfire,” he said. “Myself and six others got out. My first aid man got killed. I told him to stay back, but he came on. They just cut him to pieces.”
Wright said he was hugging the ground as machine gun bursts were hitting all around him.
“One machine gun burst got me on the cheek, between me and the dirt,” he said. “I made a scramble back 15 feet, got in a trench and dug in.”
Of about 15 people, over half were killed, he said.
Much of the fighting was in towns, from house to house, Wright said.
“In one town, the Germans came up on us from behind,” he said. “We found tunnels connecting the basements of all the houses. We took grenades to flush them all out.”
They waded rivers and paddled across them in boats.
“One time I stepped in a shell hole and like to got drowned,” he said. “I got swept down river and had a time getting back on my feet.”
Snow covered the ground and it was cold.
“I pulled my pants up out of my boots and water ran out,” he said. “I didn’t change clothes, didn’t have any clothes to change into. Occasionally, they would shoot us with a powder to de-lice us. We weren’t worried about clothes. We were worried about staying alive.”

After the Bulge

Wright’s division left the Roer River defensive positions in February as the Americans gained victory over the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans had blown the dam on the Roer River and Wright’s division had to wait until Feb. 22, 1945, to cross. The river had reached its highest peak and had started to recede.
“We crossed the river in wooden boats,” he said.
The Army began marching toward Cologne, Germany, and continued to attack at night.
“One night, just as we crossed into a factory area, the moon came out and you could have read a newspaper,” he said. “We didn’t have live ammunition in the rifle chambers. We could have shot one another at night if we weren’t careful.”
Machine guns began firing at them and the soldiers had to take out machine gun nests as they moved forward, using hand grenades. “We kept hearing noises in the basement of this factory,” he said. “We went down and it was an old ram down there butting around. This was about five stories underground and they had put a ram down there.
“We were the first troops in Cologne,” he said. “Two blocks to the right was the famous cathedral.”
The Rhine River splits the town of Cologne in half.
“The Germans blew the bridge span out just as we hit the river,” Wright said.
Before reaching the town of Ramagen, Wright was given a three-day pass to Brussells. Upon his return, he could not find his unit. He learned his company had crossed the river.
“So I crossed the river and was waved out on an airfield,” he said. “The Germans started shooting at us so we turned around.”
It took Wright about 30 minutes to find the farmhouse where his unit was located.
“During that time a .88 shell came through the farmhouse and killed our company commander and three officers,” said Wright, who was a lieutenant with G Co. “I would have been with them if I’d got back in time. We lost the company commander and the platoon sergeant.”
The division continued to march across Germany, from village to village, routing out the remnants of the German Army and fighting against young men, some younger than 14. They were part of Hitler’s Youth Movement, Wright said.
“Fourteen year olds were shooting at us,” he said. “And they were arrogant.”
Wright said the German civilians he met were more afraid of the German SS than they were the U.S. Army. The people would not resist, but they were afraid to even open the doors.
“They were afraid the SS would come back and find out,” he said.
One of the soldiers with Wright’s company found his grandparents in one German village, he said.
In April 1945, they reached the town of Nordhausen, where they found a large German concentration camp for political prisoners and discovered 5,000 corpses among the 6,000 inmates.
“When we entered Nordhausen, there was a white flag flying out of every window in every house in the town,” Wright said. “And out in the field, stacked like cordwood outside, was more than 4,000 bodies stacked up.
“You could see where nails or spikes had been driven through their hands,” he said. “It was still winter and they were frozen.”
When the Army reached Bitterfeld, soldiers found dormitories of pregnant women.
“They were having children for the Fuhrer,” Wright said. “They were raising children for Hitler. If a woman had so many children, she would get an Iron Cross. They were going to build a super race.”

Elbe River

When the division reached the Elbe River in late April 1945, the troops had to wait on the Russians, Wright said.
“We wound up sitting at the Elbe River three weeks waiting on the Russians to show up,” Wright said. “They made us sit and wait so the Russians could take Berlin.”
Wright and other soldiers had walked and fought their way from the canals of the Netherlands to the heart of Germany. They had undergone 195 days of continuous combat.
While waiting, Wright and other soldiers would fish on the Elbe with hand grenades and go bird hunting.
Wright said when the Russians entered villages and towns in Germany they would burn houses and pillage.
“We saw nude bodies floating down the river after they arrived,” Wright said. “If we had done anything like that, we would have been court-martialed.”
When Wright was discharged from the Army in October 1945, he returned to classes and his position on the single-wing backfield team at UNC with Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice. Wright was co-captain of the team in 1947. He received his degree in commerce and business.
He and his wife, Sara, married Dec. 27, 1947.
He ran Smoky Mountain Trailway bus company in the 1950s.
About 1956-57, he and Charlie Justice started Justice and Wright Oil Co. Justice left the company in 1961.
He has two sons, John and Joel III, and three grandchildren.
Wright served 24 years from 1969 to 1993 as a Hendersonville City Councilman and was mayor pro tem for part of that time.