These are my credentials
Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 1:26 pm
SEPTEMBER 19, 1944: The capture of Nazi General Herman Bernard Ramcke was pure and unexpected velvet, but the right climax to the finish of the Crozon Peninsula campaign. Ruthless, hard-bitten, he had already turned down two chances to quit, and had just ducked out of Brest. He was the extra dividend on the training in the Deep South, the Arizona desert, Northern Ireland, and then the hard hacking down from the Ay River into the knowledge of what it is to play for keeps.
Smashing ahead on the heels of its own artillery barrage, one hour before the attack of September 19, the 3rd Battalion, 13th Infantry, caught the Germans piling out of their shelters, before they reached their positions. As the assault companies drove north, the reserve company, Company I, was left to clear a strip of west beach, heavily salted with pillboxes and coastal guns.
Platoon Commander 1st Lt. James M. Dunham, leading his men through the emplacements, spotted the white flags first. And so Lt. Gen. Ramcke might have been his baby. But a German medic insisted in precise English that the general was waiting below in a dugout for the American commanding officers. He wanted a first class surrender.
In a few minutes Brig. Gen. Charles D. W. Canham, assistant division commander; Col. R. A. Griffin, 13th Infantry commander; and Lt. Col. Earl L. Lerette, 3rd Battalion commander, had gone to inspect their catch, 75 feet underground.
"I am to surrender to you," Ramcke told Gen. Canham through his own interpreter. "I want to see your credentials."
Gen. Canham pointed to the eager dogfaces crowding the entrance with their M-1s. "These are my credentials."
This blunt phrase put the Nazi in his place, and paid dramatic tribute to the real power behind America's armies — the G.I.
Smashing ahead on the heels of its own artillery barrage, one hour before the attack of September 19, the 3rd Battalion, 13th Infantry, caught the Germans piling out of their shelters, before they reached their positions. As the assault companies drove north, the reserve company, Company I, was left to clear a strip of west beach, heavily salted with pillboxes and coastal guns.
Platoon Commander 1st Lt. James M. Dunham, leading his men through the emplacements, spotted the white flags first. And so Lt. Gen. Ramcke might have been his baby. But a German medic insisted in precise English that the general was waiting below in a dugout for the American commanding officers. He wanted a first class surrender.
In a few minutes Brig. Gen. Charles D. W. Canham, assistant division commander; Col. R. A. Griffin, 13th Infantry commander; and Lt. Col. Earl L. Lerette, 3rd Battalion commander, had gone to inspect their catch, 75 feet underground.
"I am to surrender to you," Ramcke told Gen. Canham through his own interpreter. "I want to see your credentials."
Gen. Canham pointed to the eager dogfaces crowding the entrance with their M-1s. "These are my credentials."
This blunt phrase put the Nazi in his place, and paid dramatic tribute to the real power behind America's armies — the G.I.