Monday
evening we had just arrived in Pilsen taking the city and figured on settling
down for the night. We heard that our air boys had bombed the heck out of Pilsen
just about two weeks before we arrived. They say that really softened things up
a bit. I didn’t see any damage, but then Pilsen is a pretty large city and they
probably had a specific target that wasn’t some place around us.
Just
before we all flaked out for the night, Sarge, two other guys and I received
verbal orders from the Captain that we were supposed to report to the Division
Command Post at 0700 the next morning (which would have been Tuesday May 8). We
were to bring Sarge’s M8 with us.
The next
morning we all hopped in. We had a car commander and a driver. Neither of the
other two guys was a radioman nor a gunner so, apparently, this wasn't to be a
combat mission. We arrived at the Command Post and after waiting around a couple
of hours, it turned out that 8 of us would be driving in two M8s to Nürnburg
back in Germany - quite some distance from here and over quite a few mountain
passes. Nobody really knew for sure how well the area had been cleared of the
Wehrmacht and other enemy forces. Just because the war has been declared over
doesn’t mean the people stop hiding and shooting. We had also heard there were
still quite a few battles going on in Czechoslovakia.
Here we
were in an M8 with no gunner but Sarge says, “Hell, I can shoot.” We also were
carrying written orders for the first time. Obviously, somebody brought a
typewriter along. Our instructions were that we were to show the orders to the
MPs and they’d direct us where to go. I saw the orders and it was like reading
Greek.
