Posted by Allan Wilford Howerton on February 22, 2005, 4:41 pm, in reply to "Grandfather LTC Robt Wallace" "I shouldn’t have gone after him (the German officer-sniper in the house across the street) with a pistol. Just as I reached the top of the landing, I looked out the window and saw him. He saw me at the same time. He fired first. There were three shots, apparently from an automatic weapon, and the third one hit me in the middle of my upper left arm. I tumbled downstairs. The last thing I remember was my S-3, Capt. Raymond Juricich, raising hell with me for going out looking for a sniper." The compassion went to his saving the lives of German prisoners. Johnston’s report notes: "The first thing I (Wallace) did when I got to the town was contact the First Battalion, then I found Captain Dorn (Commander, Company L). He was now commanding all my men in the town and had set up his CP in a basement. Captain Allen, the tank commander, was with him. Also in the basement were 13 German prisoners. One was about 40 years old, but the rest were young—from 14 to 18 years old. One spoke English and he was scared to death. He thought we were going to shoot all of them. I assured them they would not be hurt. . . . "The prisoners constituted a problem. We knew that if the Germans counterattacked and got into town, the prisoners would make a break. Some of the men wanted to kill them right away. I said no. Finally I said they could kill them if the Germans counterattacked and got into town, but not in a group . . . " Near the end of the interview Johnston asked Wallace about the German prisoners. "We kept them all night," he said, "and most of the next day, then two walking wounded marched them back to Gereonsweiler." The Germans did counterattack and got into part of Lindern. However, thanks to Lt. Col. Wallace, the prisoners were not harmed. Company K was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for Lindern. After researching the battle I have concluded that the award should have gone to the entire Third Battalion as well, or at the very least to the third platoon of Company I and to Company L. The third platoon of Company I was with us on the front lines across the railroad. Company L backed us up inside the town and beat off several counterattacks. It was the Battalion’s first offensive action against one of the strongest points of the Siegfried Line. Yet, Lindern was captured and held to enable the crossing of the Roer River in late February and the drive to the Rhine. Lt. Col. Wallace was the commander of it all. As he said in the interview, "It was a good Battalion, but it took a hell of a beating." Lt. Col. Wallace never received due credit. The New York Times in reporting the story got his name and hometown wrong and confused him with Company K’s Captain Carpenter who led the initial early entry into the town. Such is the fog of war.
Link: More on Company K
205.188.116.198
Regrettably, I did not know Lt. Col. Wallace. As a rifleman-messenger in the ranks of Company K, I knew little at Lindern beyond what I could see from the rim of a foxhole across the railroad tracks. During the research for the chapter on the battle of Lindern for "Dear Captain, et al." I came across a report of an after-combat interview with Robert E. Wallace (then a Major) conducted by a soldier named Johnston at the 111th Evacuation Hospital at Heerlen, Holland on December 1, 1944. It added some gallows humor to rather grim memories and revealed something of Lt. Col. Wallace’s personality: a rather robust demeanor (Company K Commander Carpenter would later recall him as a "blow-hard") leavened by humor and compassion. Wallace’s description of his encounter with the German sniper illustrates his self-defacing humor:
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