Published Sept. 18, 2000
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20000918/EXTRAS02/9180319/0/search

N.C. man left school and got a jarring welcome to war

By Bill Moss
John Magness calls it a proud achievement, serving as captain of the 1938 Hendersonville Bearcat football team.
“I played tackle, believe it or not, at 160 pounds,” he said. “They won’t even let you carry water at that weight now.”
The war in Europe was a distant rumble for a nation still staggered by the Depression. Young Johnny Magness was playing football for Appalachian State Teachers College when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
“A good friend of mine was running the draft board at that time, Mr. Few,” Magness said, referring to Columbus “C” Few. “He sent me a little card that said, “Come on home, John, you’re 1-A.”

In March of ’42, Magness left Hendersonville for Fort Bragg. Two years later, in the summer of ’44, he and 14,000 other GIs boarded the Queen Mary and set sail for England to join Gen. Patton’s Third Army.
The barrel-chested general “made us a pep talk before we left England,” Magness recalled. “Nowadays it wouldn’t even make a dent, but then he talked very vulgar. I never had heard it before.”
The boy from the North Carolina mountains turned red as the general assured the American troops they would go through the German Army “’like s— through a tin horn.’ That was mild compared to what else he said.”
On Aug. 11, two months after the Allied Forces launched the D-Day invasion in France, Magness landed at Omaha Beach. The Allies were pressing on through France toward Germany, liberating French towns as they went. His first battle came at Chartres. A raw buck sergeant, Magness led a squad riding on tanks as they pushed into the French town.
“We went in more or less in a straight line so we wouldn’t get in front of each other,” he said. “When we got up about halfway to Chartres, I saw a German get out of his foxhole with a one-shot bazooka. He put a shot in the back of a tank, and that’s the most tender spot you can hit a tank. He knocked that tank out.
“So I jumped off of the back of our tank, and ran over there where the German was. I kneeled down and I pressed the trigger and nothing happened. In the excitement and being scared as I was, my clip had flew out of my gun and I didn’t even know it.
“Cpl. Fesperman had followed me and I didn’t know it, ’cause we’d gotten orders not to get off the tank. … He had his gun barrel right at my ear, and when he fired I thought I’d been hit. I was deaf for two days, but he laid him out and we got back to the tank without any trouble.”
When they pulled into Chartres, an officer ordered Magness to help round up prisoners the Allies had captured in a field.
Magness saw an officer sitting on the turret of a tank, training a machine gun on a line of 12 to 15 Germans.
“He had them take off their helmets and their bandoliers and their belts and all. And as soon as they did, he opened up with a .45 machine gun and was knocking them down like a bowling alley. He ripped across ’em about two or three times.
“Well, that was my first battle and I was so scared I didn’t know what I was doing anyway. So I jumped off and went over there and said, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ He said, ‘Those SOBs killed my brother back on the beach and I’m going to make ’em pay 25-to-1. And you get your back end off my tank and get back over there.’
“He was a captain.”
It was a jarring welcome to war.
“I didn’t quite think it was fair play then,” Magness said. “A little later it wouldn’t have mattered much, but at that time I thought that was a little bit overboard. I got hardened to all this stuff and that wouldn’t have affected me that much.”

Battle of the Bulge

By the fall of 1944, the tide had turned against Hitler. Gen. Eisenhower bet British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that the Germans would surrender by Christmas. There was much to support Ike’s optimism.
On the Eastern Front the Russian army had crushed 25 Nazi divisions and was marching through Poland on the way to the east German border. The victorious Allied forces, racing north and east from their invasion beachhead in Normandy, pressed on toward the Rhine.
The five-year war effort had left 3.36 million Germans killed, wounded or missing and had virtually wiped out the once-vaunted Luftwaffe. In August 1944 alone, the German army suffered 466,000 casualties. Paranoid, shoulders stooped, his hands trembling but desperate to win, Hitler himself planned the last drive through the Ardennes to the crucial port of Antwerp – a counteroffensive he hoped would revive the glory of the blitzkriegs in 1939 and 1940 that had won him control of much of Europe.
Fought Dec. 16, 1944, until Jan. 25, 1945, in the bitter cold, mud and snow of Belgium and Luxembourg, the battle involved more than a million soldiers. When it was over, 19,000 Americans were dead and 62,000 wounded.
On Dec. 17, the 7th Armored Division reached the Belgian town of Saint Vith by bulling its way through a choking mass of retreating supply trucks, artillery units and infantry.
“It was a case of every dog for himself,” Maj. Donald P. Boyer Jr., operations officer of the 38th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 7th Armored said, according to a Battle of the Bulge history published by Time-Life. “It wasn’t orderly, it wasn’t military, it wasn’t a pretty sight. We were seeing American soldiers running away.”
In a matter of hours, the high spirits of the Allied soldiers dissolved. The scene filled the young sergeant with despair.
“There were hundreds of vehicles and men in retreat,” Magness said. “That was one of the saddest sights I ever saw. I just sat there on the hood of a half-track and cried. I had put in three years and I saw three more ahead of me. It looked like it would never be over.”
Pushing east against the wall of men and vehicles in retreat, the enraged Maj. Boyer ordered his Sherman tank to the head of the column.
“If anyone gets in the way,” Boyer shouted, “run over the son of a bitch.”
Magness said, “It was a 50-mile move and we made it in one day. There was a colonel standing there when we pulled in. I said, ‘Where do we go?’ He says, ‘You’re there, you’ve got from the road to the railroad track, that’s your area to keep covered. You’re the front line.'”
As the meeting place of no fewer than six paved roads, Saint-Vith was a critical town to hold in the northern part of the Ardennes. The Germans had crushed the 106th division and were headed for it.
“Our main defense was it was completely flat out in front of us and that sure did save us a lot of trouble,” he said. “We had a machine gun nest up on the railroad track.”

‘10,000 Germans coming’

One night, his men came to him in a panic about what sounded like the whole German army marching toward their post.
“I said I don’t believe they’d make that much noise, but we went up there and sure enough there’s tromping and stomping and carrying on,” he said.
By the time the men got within 100 yards, he could tell they were Americans – 50 GIs from the 106th that had been decimated by the German advance.
“They came on in there and I tried to stop them but there wasn’t any stopping ’em. I said, ‘C’mon, how about joining us?'”
The retreating troops had no guns and no helmets; many had no winter coats.
“They were in full retreat,” Magness said, “and there was kind of a leader and he said, ‘I’m taking these men on back.’ … One of ’em said, ‘There’s 10,000 Germans headed this way and we ain’t going to be here when they get here.'”
Holding a horseshoe line of defense east of Saint Vith, the 7th Armored withstood waves of artillery fire and repeated attacks of the German ground forces. The division held the perimeter of the so-called fortified goose egg for five days. But by Dec. 22, it was clear that if it didn’t retreat, the 7th Armored would be annihilated. The plan was made to load up the trucks, half-tracks and tanks and move out the next morning for safety behind a line held by the 82nd Airborne.
One problem: A thaw had turned the escape route into an impassable field of mud.
“That night it snowed to beat the band and the field froze,” Magness recalled. “It must have got down to 20 below zero.”
The men bundled up their rifles next to their bodies and wrapped in blankets to keep their weapons – and themselves – from freezing. The cold was brutal. But that night it saved the 7th Armored.
“A miracle has happened, general,” Brig. Gen. Bruce C. Clarke reported by radio to his superior, Gen. Robert W. Hasbrouck. “That cold snap that hit us has frozen the roads. I think we can make it now. At 0600 I’m going to start to move.”

—

Although Saint Vith was lost, the 7th Armored had immeasurably helped the wider Allied effort to recover from the German counteroffensive. By holding the town for almost a week, the division tied up an entire enemy corps, blocked a supply line critical to the Nazi advance toward the Meuse River and gave the Allies time to regroup.
Magness’ unit won the Presidential Citation for its role in the Battle of the Bulge. Wounded in that battle and earlier at Chartres, Magness also received two Purple Hearts. He came home with four Bronze Stars, a Silver Star and the Medal of Verdun, for liberating that French city.
After V-E day on May 8, 1945, Magness got some distressing news: The Army declared him essential.
“I thought I’d shoot myself in the foot,” he said.
After 14 months of combat, he was ready to go home, not fight in the Pacific.
“God bless the Enola Gay for dropping that atomic bomb,” he said.
Instead of landing on the beaches of Japan, he sailed into Boston on the liberty ship Benjamin Harrison.
“I was about as happy as a man could be,” he said. “There wasn’t any greater happiness than being able to see the United States again. They had these fire boats out to meet us, shooting up colored streams of water, as a welcoming committee.”

—

On a table beside an easy chair in Magness’ living room sits a book called Duty, the account by Chicago newspaper columnist Bob Greene of the bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the generation that fought selflessly in World War II.
Like his peers, Magness, who is 80, craves neither credit nor glory.
“I don’t want to make it a hero thing, ’cause there wasn’t anybody scareder than I was,” he said. “I stayed hid all I could, in foxholes and in basements. I wasn’t one out front saying, ‘Let’s go, men.’ I just wanted to make sure I got back if it was at all possible.”
After the war, Magness married his high school sweetheart, Suzanne Wisnewski, ran a grocery store and worked for the post office. The war is a long time ago now, but much of it remains vivid.
“I wouldn’t take anything for it,” he said, “but I wouldn’t go through it again.”
Career after World War II: Ran K&M Grocery at Sixth Avenue West and Oak Street, candy distributor, U.S. post office.