Felton - Operation Swallow American Soldiers Remarkable Escape from Berga Concentration Camp

T ake cover! was the first order of the day on the morning of December 16, 1944. Hans Kasten had been asleep in his bivouac not far from the hamlet of Nachtmanderscheid, on the road to the strategically vital town of Clervaux in the northern tip of Luxembourg. The veteran Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division was guarding the border between Luxembourg and Germany in a heavily forested, hilly part of Europe called the Ardennes. Since landing in Normandy in June 1944, the Allied armies had pushed the Germans back to the very borders of the Reich, and were preparing to break into Germany itself in the coming spring. Roads through the Ardennes were few and the terrain considered unsuitable for offensive actions, so the Americans were satisfied to hold the region with the minimum of troops while concentrating their forces on more vulnerable sectors in France. Indeed, the area was considered so quiet that green units were sent there to acclimatize to conditions at the front, and battle-weary divisions rested.

Kastens unit, the 110th Infantry Regiment, was a part of the Twenty-Eight, one of these American divisions that had seen extensive action and had been sent to the Ardennes to rest and refit. Originally hailing from Pennsylvania, the men wore a red keystone patch on their shoulders to commemorate the Keystone State. The Germans had christened this symbol the Bloody Bucket for the punishment the Germans had dealt out to the American division in the Hrtgen Forest, and the death and mayhem that they had dealt out in kind. The Battle of the Hrtgen Forest had been an American attempt to break into Germany in late 1944 that had turned into a slaughter against a well-prepared enemy and ended in stalemate. After the breakout from Normandy in August 1944, it had looked as though the Germans were beaten, but now, in December, they had managed to stabilize their front line and could still give the Allies a bloody nose. What no one in the Allied high command expected was a full-scale offensive from the Germans so late in the war, and certainly not in the depths of winter in the unsuitable Ardennes.

To the north of the Twenty-Eighth Divisions position was the Belgian part of the Ardennes, garrisoned by more American divisions. With more than twenty inches of snow on the ground, Kasten, exhausted after coming off watch, had been huddled beneath sparse army blankets trying to catch some shut-eye when all hell had broken loose.

Kasten involuntarily reached up and touched a livid-looking scar that ran in a jagged line like a lightning bolt across his forehead. He had seen the sharp end of war long before the Ardennes, on the other side of the world. The scar was a memento of a white-hot shard of shrapnel that had struck him while he was aboard a troop transport in December 1941. Only instead of being German, this particular fragment of bomb casing had come courtesy of the Japanese. Kastens background and life journey had been complex and surprising.

He was born in Honolulu in August 1916 to well-to-do German parents who immigrated from Bremen. He had been raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, graduating with a degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin. Hed joined the Merchant Marine and shipped out to the Philippines in the pay of a dredging company.

The best thing I did was that I retired after college, Kasten said. Everybody talks about what theyre going to do after they retire but when they finally do retire, theyre too old to do anything and theyve lost all their dreams.

At sea when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, his ship put in to Fiji and then headed to Brisbane, Australia, arriving on Christmas Eve.

America needed young men, and after listening to a rousing speech from the US ambassador, Kasten volunteered to return to the States to help the war effort. He and many other young Americans boarded a returning troop transport bound for San Diego. Shorthanded, the captain asked for volunteers to man the vessels antiaircraft guns. Kasten found himself operating the port aft gun.

It wasnt long before Kasten, still a civilian, was in the thick of the action. A lone Japanese aircraft bombed his ship while they were steaming through the Tasman Sea. One minute Kasten was hammering away at the enemy aircraft, the next he was waking up in the ships sick bay with one hell of a headache and sixteen stitches holding together a nasty gash across his forehead.

After arriving at Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, Kasten had been assigned to the Transportation Corps. But due to his high intelligence and varied life experience, his superiors attempted to have him reassigned as a teacher at an Officer Candidate School. Kasten refused the transfer, stating clearly that he had joined the US Army to fight, not teach.

* * *

Now England was but a distant memory as Kastens company sector was subjected to an intense German mortar barrage in the Ardennes Forest. The GIs tumbled into dugouts and foxholes, trying to make themselves as small as possible as the bombs detonated all across the position, blowing down trees and throwing up clumps of frozen dirt and ice high into the overcast sky. White-hot shards of shrapnel scythed down on those too slow to reach cover. Kasten, a veteran of D-Day and the terrible Battle of the Hrtgen Forestwhere tens of thousands of Americans and Germans had fought themselves to a stalemate through fifty square miles of dense, soggy woodland near the German city of Aachenknew what was coming next. All the veterans in the unit knew. When the artillery fire slackened, an infantry attack would usually follow. The veterans in the Twenty-Eighth had witnessed this happen so many times, their reactions were almost automatic.

Kasten was his rifle squads Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) gunner. John Kopczinski, his best friend since basic training in Tidworth, volunteered to be Kastens assistant gunnerhis job was to carry the weapons stack of magazines and help Kasten keep the gun in action.