FEATURE Through the Gates of Hell Lincoln survived some of the worst fighting of the Second World War and tells some of the stories that he never mentioned during almost 40 years of silence. July 2007

Lincoln Leung

For more than 50 years I never told anyone the story about how a bullet from a German sniper ended the life of my buddy, Sergeant Philip Rocker. He had been standing at a schoolroom window only eight feet from me when struck down by a bullet through his head.

Seeing Sergeant Rocker lying on the floor with blood gushing like a faucet out of his forehead was the most shocking experience that occurred to me during the two difficult years that I spent in General Patton’s Third Army as we fought our way through Europe.

Like many of my fellow-combatants, I brought back from the war memories that for a long time were too awful to put into words.

Perhaps we were anxious to return to the normalcy of civilian life and believed that our silence could prevent the horrors of the war from infecting the peacetime existence that, after all, was what we had fought for.

Don’t imagine that silence removed the strength from those memories. A lifetime has been too short to dim in my mind those scenes that long haunted my dreams and to erase from my waking thoughts the continual replaying of the carnage that I witnessed.

The memories seemed too difficult to trust to words so I could never bring myself to tell any of my stories about the war until just three years ago. However, we World War II vets now need to tell the truth about those terrible days.

Those experiences are in danger of soon being lost forever because only five million American veterans now remain of the more than 16 million who fought in the Second World War. The ravages of age, disease, and illness are now accomplishing in a thousand of us every day what the tanks, guns, and bombs of Adolph Hitler and Emperor Hirohito gathered forces couldn’t succeed in doing.

My Origins

I was born on Clay Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown on March 2, 1926. My father had emigrated from China and had succeeded in becoming an Asia-born graduate of UC Berkeley. When dad arrived in California there was a lot of discrimination against our cultural heritage.

I heard my dad say many times, “We Chinese cannot walk down Market Street.” As a result we had to secure our livelihood and conduct our social lives within the confines of Chinatown’s 10 square blocks.

My first contacts with normal American culture occurred when I attended school at Francisco Junior High, which was a half-mile from our home. I subsequently attended Poly Tech High School, which was right across the street from Kezar Stadium.

My early school experiences were like being in a foreign country because there were very few of us Chinese students. My father had to get a special permit before I was allowed to attend. The war was heating up in 1944 when I was in the eleventh grade. I was 17 and would become eligible for the draft on my eighteenth birthday so I attended Curtis Wright Technical School in Glendale, California, and completed a course in Aircraft Mechanics hoping to get a deferment long enough for the war to end.

But my efforts were to no avail because when I turned 18 I was drafted into the US Army.

I entered the military September 6, 1944 and spent three months training as a rifleman at Camp Roberts near Paso Robles, which was one of the world’s largest training facilities.

The camp still holds the world’s record for having the longest parade ground — an immense open space that stretched the length of 14 football fields.

We were supposed to train for six months but losses occurring in the Battle of the Bulge were so great that only half way through our training we were all suddenly shipped directly to Europe. I made the trip aboard the Queen Mary, which was serving as a troop carrier. The ship had been designed with accommodations for 4,000 passengers, but was crowded floor to ceiling with 15,000 of us troops. That was no vacation; we were on no holiday cruise.

We disembarked at Liverpool, and were immediately shipped by troop transport to Normandy. Green and under-trained as I was, I found myself as a replacement in Patton’s Third Army, 90th Division, 358 Regiment, Third Battalion, K Company.

On January 10, 1945, I reported to my unit and without fanfare or ceremony was thrown into the midst of the Battle of the Bulge’s closing firefights. I arrived at night and asked the sergeant, “Where is the front line?”

“You will know when you get to it,” he said.

And he was right. There was no mistaking it when I arrived.

Days of War and Battle

We replacements played a small role in the almost unimaginably large conflict that was the Battle of the Bulge. Combat raged from December 16, 1944 to January 28, 1945. It was the largest land battle of World War II that American’s fought in, ultimately involving a total of more than a million combatants with nearly 200,000 casualties on both sides.

One of the bunkmates that I had trained with, named Robert Green, was killed almost immediately “On the first day of his first battle in a front-line trench he fell,” to echo the words from an epitaph by Kipling. We fought from ditch to ditch — advancing or retreating on our bellies.

Robert was the first of us to fall in battle, but certainly not the last. I was assigned to a Platoon that had 40 riflemen. After 110 days of battle only eight of us remained alive and still able to fight.

My life as a rifleman was a terrible ordeal! Following the Battle of the Bulge we spent a year chasing the Germans back into Germany. During that time I was to cross the Rhine River three times, twice while under German fire.

The sun was setting on the Third Reich. Hitler’s armies had lost too many soldiers and resources in the Battle of the Bulge to be able to continue the war.

Added to the problem was the fact that the Germans were forced to fight on two fronts. Patton’s three armies were advancing inexorably from the west even as the Russian armies were attacking the east. However, tattered remnants of the German military units continued to fight with the ferocity of cornered rats.

We eventually penetrated into the heart of Germany. I was lucky to survive the days of fierce battle that my platoon went through. In the month of April in 1945, for example, we were advancing on a town where superior German forces had prepared for our coming with machine guns, which they fired from hardened positions trying to kill us. They kept us pinned down with their effective fields of fire.

We were taking refuge from the deadly storm of bullets when my platoon leader said to me, “Lincoln. We need a tank. Go find one.”

Finding the tanks wasn’t the problem, because they were located about four blocks to our rear, their locations made obvious by the roar of their huge engines.

The problem was getting to the tanks; I felt like a duck in an arcade shooting gallery because I was dodging German bullets while retreating towards the tanks’ positions.

I ran from one cover to the next trying not to give the snipers a clear shot at me. I kept passing the sad sights of soldiers lying wounded and whimpering while waiting for help. I also had to walk over and around the silent forms of dead bodies, both Allied and Axis.

When I at last got to a tank I knocked on the side. The tank operator opened the hatch and said, “What do you want?”

After explaining to him our desperate situation, I imagined that he would offer me a ride back to our position, but he just slammed the hatch and drove away leaving me to leap away and then make my way back to my unit with sniper fire still falling around me like some grim rain. I was lucky to have survived both going and returning.

Not only was front-line conflict dangerous, it was plain miserable.

The kitchen, for example, could never catch up with us so we spent months without warm food, just eating congealed stuff out of our K-rations. The food became sticky in the rain.

One day we ccught a really wonderful break, because for some reason the kitchen caught up with us for a meal. After weeks of eating cold food I consumed 13 pork chops before I was finally satisfied.

Back to School

We were almost done with the war when the confrontation at the schoolhouse, during which my sergeant was killed, took place.

After the sergeant was slain a bullet struck the wall just above my head. I was the shortest man in my unit and if I had been of normal height that bullet would have killed me on the spot.

One of my comrades suddenly bolted out the door making a mad dash back to our lines. I saw an arm enclosed in the sleeve of a German uniform grab the man and pull him out of sight. Another of our men was in an adjoining room in the schoolhouse. A German hand grenade was lobbed into that room ending his life.

I could see the faces of German troopers popping up at the windows and realized that I would be killed if I remained where I was, so I ran out the same entrance where my companion had recently been captured and dashed down the hill towards our own lines.

A German machine gun began shooting at me, and I could see bullets kicking up dirt on both sides, but I remained untouched. Then I tripped, fell headlong with my helmet flying in one direction and my rifle in the other. It just so happened that my fall carried me tumbling into a ditch. The watching Americans and Germans both thought that I had been killed by the machine gun.

I lay unconscious in that ditch for three hours. When I awoke the fighting was raging as fierce as ever. Still minus both rifle and helmet, I dashed down the slope and dove headfirst right through the window of a building where GIs were firing at the enemy behind me. I landed hard on the floor and passed out for another hour. When I regained consciousness that time the soldiers promptly issued me replacements for rifle and helmet and sent me right back into the midst of the fighting.

The battle continued for the next eight days and on May 8 we entered Czechoslovakia and linked forces with the Russian armies who had been coming from the east. We had conquered Germany and the European part of the war was over.

Only two of us survived of the six that had gone into that schoolhouse. When the war ended, I had marched 500 miles in 110 days. Almost every step was taken while under fire or under the threat of fire.

After the war in Europe ended we were all gathered together as a unit and told that we had to go back to training and then would be shipped out to the Pacific Theater. I felt dismayed by a strong feeling that I had been living on luck for too long. If you’ve flipped a coin and gotten “heads” five times in a row when “tails” would have meant death, you want to lay that coin down. Then came a wonderful announcement: “We need people who know how to type.” Typewriters weren’t as common in 1946 as they later became and I was one of only three in my unit to raise my hand. I was sent to Waldmunchen, Germany where I was assigned to the transitional military government that was ruling Germany following the fall of the Third Reich.

I was given the task of typing the reports for a military tribunal that was interviewing and questioning Nazi leaders. I felt particularly blessed to be working at a typewriter in a nice office in Europe rather than shooting a rifle on some steaming island in the South Pacific.

Nuremburg and Beyond

After six months in Waldmunchen I was transferred to Nuremburg for the famous War Trials. The first Nuremburg trial lasted for eight months. We wore headphones in the courtroom, each with a dial that would supply a translation of the proceedings in English, French, Russian, or German.

Twenty Nazis faced justice in those trials, twelve of them were condemned to be hung, six sentenced to life imprisonment, and two were acquitted.

The condemned included Rudolph Hess and the notorious and unrepentant Hermann Gohring, who was second in command to Hitler. He requested execution by a firing squad, but the court handed down a sentence of death by hanging.

Gohring made a public announcement, “You’ll never hang me; I’m going to end my life on my own terms.” He was as good as his word and successfully cheated the hangman. Two hours before his death he extracted a cyanide pill that had been sewn beneath his skin and poisoned himself.

Twelve more trials followed that famous first one, but I had collected enough “points” to come home. On August 2, 1946, I was discharged from the army.

In May I received a strange call from Texas. An old newsreel had shown us marching in Rieff, Germany just after the Battle of the Bulge. We were marching shoulder-to-shoulder past the movie camera and 60 years later some alert researcher identified me as one of the marchers because at that time I had been the only person of Asian descent in the unit.

Not much is left of those days when I was fighting in Europe. I have an iron cross that I took from a German soldier who was lying in the road and obviously past the ability to appreciate decorations. Other than that, I’m mostly just left with my memories.

On the other hand, I might add that those grim days of bloodshed and death has also left me with a profound and unceasing gratitude for the life that was given back to me so many times.

I thank God every day when I awaken. I believe each day to be a gift to be valued and enjoyed. I’ve tried to make the most of the life that was given to me and to experience it to the full on behalf of so many of my comrades from whom it was so tragically taken when their life had just barely begun.

There were too many American dead to ship back to America. Six years ago I visited the grave of sergeant Philip Rocker, born in Maryland and buried in a cemetery in the Lorraine country of Germany beside 100,000 other American soldiers.

Now I’m telling my story so that people will remember what we did. We should never forget all the Sergeant Rockers and the sacrifices that they made for their country. “Every day of freedom is a good day to thank a veteran,” somebody said. And he was right.

I’m lucky to be alive. During the schoolhouse incident I described, Sergeant Rocker was at a window on one side of a small room; I was at the window on the other. I’m sure the sniper could have killed either of us.

That bullet caught him only eight days before the war in Europe ended. The irony of the thing has weighed on my heart for these five decades.