Once you got into conflict you start to understand death and the smell of death. You see, when we first went in, we all knew each other, and that wasn’t so good in a way because it hurt very much when somebody you were close to got killed. I know I had one incident where it hit me so bad that I wasn’t crying but tears poured down my face. I was so furious that if somebody made a gesture in the wrong way I would have killed them, I didn’t care who they were, American or German, because it hurt that bad. That’s what it takes, I guess you have to get where you hurt, hate, in order to kill, because if you tell somebody to kill a fellow you just can’t do it unless you have a basis to do it. You build up hate and you look over and [the Germans] are doing it and they’re doing it because you’re doing it to them and they’re feeling the same way. They’re soldiers and they are ordered to do what they do and we’re ordered to do what we do.

It was supposed to be a three-day attack; three objectives, three days. I had one other sergeant with me, I didn’t know who he was; he was from another company. We got up to Jack’s Woods, and half of the soldiers were in groups of two and three and were back far enough so they could smoke.

This sergeant was lying on the ground; he pulled his billfold out and he was looking at pictures of his wife and kids. I told him, "I want you to bring up the rear -- do you know what I mean? If anyone tries to run off, shoot them. I mean shoot them!" He said, "Okay, don’t worry about it." It got time to go and I said, "Let’s go!" I took two or three steps and "BOOM!" the sergeant shot himself in the foot. I’d seen that several times before in France and Holland. Right hand, left foot; left hand, and right foot. They hold their head down; they won’t look at you. I said, "You son of a bitch!" I told the medic, "Don’t mess with him, he shot himself. Come on, we’re going to need you." [The Medic] said, "I need help." I said, "Bullshit, I told you to come on!" The medic said, "I got to help him." I said, "You help him and you catch up with us, understand?" He said, "Yes, sir." So I moved on. I had to keep the line moving -– we were late, we were going to be in trouble. We would give the Germans time to get up and shoot again.

As we advanced we got up near a field and we ran into a tank. It was a sort of small tank, not one of those mean-ass tanks. The Germans were firing a cannon and they were firing a machine gun, and this boy ran up there, without orders or nothing. He knelt down to fire the rocket launcher and the machine gun cut him down. Another boy without orders ran up there and picked up the rocket launcher and he knocked the track off the tank.

There was a guy in my outfit who had been a West Point officer and he got in some trouble and they knocked him out of being an officer and they let him come back in as an enlisted man. He was a private in my outfit. Well, he got it in his mind that he didn’t like me. We had some pretty bad times; I whupped his ass. He said, "Get back in line or I’ll kill you." I said, "Shit, everyone in this damn outfit is trying to kill me, you don’t worry me one bit." I put him right behind me with a BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] and said, "If you are going to kill me, kill me, I’m tired of this bullshit! I’m going to get killed eventually, so I might as well get it over with."

We started moving and saw three or four Germans coming out of a foxhole. One stood there and I wondered what he was going to do. Once this ex-West Point officer was satisfied they were all out, he just killed them all. I said to myself, "All right, this boy’s a killer." I looked down in a hedge, and there were another three of them. I killed them. That’s when I thought they’d surrender, but they never did. Then I was getting some machine gun fire, so I tried to determine where the bullets were coming from. We kept moving on and we took our objective. We then started getting airbursts [artillery], and they were hitting trees and causing splinters. I wanted to get out from under that, so I called back to see if I had permission to go forward and take my next objective. I was asked, "Can you do it?" I said, "Hell, yeah!" They said, "Move out."

We started moving forward, and I guess I got too far out. There was an old German sergeant running, and I jacked my gun up and pulled the trigger of my Thompson. It didn’t fire, so I pulled it back again and it still didn’t fire. I said, "Son of a bitch!" I didn’t have another gun or a hand grenade, but I had a knife on my leg. I could see that damn old German coming back, and he had a smirk on his face. It was about that time that the boy with the BAR came up on my left side and knocked that sergeant down. The rest of the troops began to catch up with me, and they put a shell right above our heads and it exploded. This kid next to me (he was a nice kid, first time out, came from a nice family, well educated, rich) must have gotten hit internally because he was laying down with blood coming out of his mouth. He had a Thompson submachine gun. I put my gun down and said "Buddy, I’m sorry you got killed, but if you had to get killed I’m damn glad you got killed here. Give me your damn gun." I picked up his gun and what clips he had because we were moving on forward.

We came to the edge of the woods and there was snow out there, and I don’t know why, but I just walked right on out there. Some soldiers said, "Come on back, Jack, come back!" I had my gun to my side and I stood in the middle of that damn field and I could see four Germans, they had white camouflage on, but standing up in the dark woods I could see them. They were at the edge of the woods and there was a German machine gun up on the hill on the right. These soldiers came up to me; I didn’t speak much German, but I was waving them to come on. They looked around to surrender, because if there is a sergeant or an officer they could kill you, it was legal. They looked around and I guess they were satisfied and they threw their guns down and put their hands up and yelled "Kamerad, Kamerad." I took them back to our woods. One of them put his hands over his head and said "Kamerad" and one of them pulled out his billfold and said "Mein file, mein kinder" [my wife, my children]. I said, "Dis gut, dis gut." Another one said (in German), "Are we going to New York?" I said "yeah." He said, "ja for sure?" I said "yeah." So they were pretty happy. I was thinking I wish one of these guys would take his uniform off and I’ll put it on and go back to the States! Then when I would get back to the States I would say, "What’s this? How’d I get this uniform? I can’t remember anything!"

So we got back to the woods and the sergeant there had a Thompson submachine gun and he said, "Let’s kill them." Boy, that got the Germans alerted; they must have known some English or sensed what he was going to do. I was standing right beside him and I jammed my gun in his ribs on his left side near his heart; I could have blown his heart right out of his body with the .45 round the Thompson fired. I said, "If you kill them, I’ll kill you." He asked, "Are you a kraut lover?" I replied, "If you want to kill Germans, there are all kinds of Germans out there. Go kill all you want. These boys are going back." He said, "Well I’m going to kill them." I said "You just go right ahead and I’ll kill your ass, too." I would have, I guarantee you.

I couldn’t send a good man back to our lines with the prisoners. I had one little kid from Louisiana who was about to shit in his pants, he was so afraid, and I knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. I decided to send him back to our lines with the Germans. I said to him, "If you have any hand grenades, leave them with us, and give me all your ammunition except for two clips." As they started to march back, the Germans turned around, snapped their heads and saluted. I still had the gun in the sergeant’s ribs and gave them a left-handed salute and smiled and said, "Take them on back." I was later told that two big German sergeants stepped out and intercepted the patrol going back and they were going to kill the boy from Louisiana and the two German sergeants got together and said, "These paratroopers don’t take prisoners." The original prisoners told the two German sergeants the whole story, and the sergeants also decided to take a chance and surrender, too. So there were six of them, and the boy from Louisiana took them back.

Something happened and I started to reflect that I wasn’t going to be an effective leader because I don’t have the meanness that you need. I guess I was beginning to change. I think the Lord was beginning to turn me the other way.

We pushed on and got into some woods, and there was this big German foxhole with logs on top of it. We stopped at the top of the woods and a bunch of Germans came across an open field. By this time I only had fifteen men at the most between the two companies, so we just attacked the Germans in the field and they turned and ran back to their woods. We went back to our woods. In tactics, when you attack and you can’t make the attack you go to the flank and you flank them. If that works you flank and re-flank. That is basic tactics. Well, they were going around and were going to hit me on my right flank. I had two wounded and I put them in a deep dugout. I told everybody we need to run up and meet the Germans at the woods. The Germans threw a shell over us and another one of my boys got a concussion. There were four Germans in the woods. I grabbed one old German and held him by the shirt and pulled him in (I had my gun by him) and said, "Don’t you make a move, you son of a bitch!" I guess I looked pretty mean. I had a German belt buckle on, a Russian hat emblem on my uniform, something I picked up off a dead German, and they looked at me and said "Rooskie? Rooskie?" They were scared shitless of the Russians. I took this boy’s rifle and buried it in the ground and put his helmet on it so the German soldiers would see it and maybe find the bodies quicker.

The next day things really got heavy. I had two of my men get hit. One had his hand down and there was blood coming from his sleeve. Then two of my men were running to the rear. I didn’t stop them, I couldn’t stop them. They got back before the Germans completely surrounded us.

So here we are surrounded. It was looking real bad, like we couldn’t hold out much longer. Somebody said something about surrender and I said I wasn’t going to surrender. I said, "If I go down, I’m going down fighting and I’ll take one or two with me. I’m damn sure I’m not going to surrender because they put a bullet in your head once they get you over. If some of you boys decide you want to surrender we are at the point where I’ll let you make your own decision, but I’m not going to surrender." So this one boy spoke up, he was all shot up so it was hard for him to talk, and he said, "What do you men mean talking of surrendering? Here we got the best damn sergeant in the U.S. Army and we are not going to surrender. We’ll just go down fighting." After hearing him talk I felt for damn sure we were going to fight.

Williamson explains how American soldiers broke though the German lines to his platoon.

There was another officer with a jump outfit with a combat group and they broke through to us and they brought us some rations and ammunition. I understood that they were supposed to relieve us. They didn’t; they kept us. The next day they decided they were going to attack and he called me down there and he said, "Sergeant, you line your men up at the front there of the woods, the skirmish line; you are going to lead the attack."

We formed the line. I said, "Well, men, let’s go. If we get killed, what the hell, they were going to kill us anyway, it’s just a matter of time. They ain’t going to be satisfied until we are all dead." We lined up skirmishes just inside the woods and we started hooting and hollering like Comanche Indians. They fired a few shots. Hands went up and some of them started running to the rear. We closed in to try and get as many as we could. I saw this one German sergeant running off and I ran after his ass but I didn’t capture him, he got away. We came back and we had a lot of prisoners. We moved up a little bit further and formed a line for defense for the night. There was a big old hole that had a bunch of straw over it, it was just under a foot deep. I couldn’t figure out what it was. But it was up off of the snow and ice so I laid down there and I went to sleep. I know my helmet fell off because when I woke up there was a big thud right by my head. I woke up, sort of jumped, and one of these big old horses was by me (the Germans had horses pull some of their artillery and I was in the horses’ place). The horse had come back by itself and I thought wouldn’t it have been hell to be killed in the war by one of these horses stomping my head.

It was almost daylight, and the officer called me back again and I thought he wanted me to lead another attack. My mind was thinking I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. I had my Thompson over my shoulder so it was pointing right at him, and I had my finger on the trigger. I had the gun pointing right at his gut. I don’t know what I was thinking; I guess I was thinking about shooting him. He said "Sergeant, get your men together and go to the rear, you are relieved." I said, "What?" He said, "You heard what I said, now damn it, move." I said, "Yes, sir!"