At 1:00 in the morning on August 7th, 1944, a young American lieutenant named Robert Weiss was lying on the wet grass of a French hilltop when he heard the sound that would define the rest of his life. It was the sound of tank engines, hundreds of them, coming through the fog from every direction at once.
Robert Weiss was an artillery forward observer with the 230th Field Artillery Battalion of the 30th Infantry Division. He had landed in Normandy a few weeks earlier. He had a radio strapped to his back, a map of the area folded in his pocket, and exactly one job. His job was to call down American shells on German positions.
What he did not yet know was that for the next 6 days on a rocky outcrop in Normandy called Hill 314, he and roughly 700 other American soldiers would stand in the path of the largest German Panza counterattack of the entire Normandy campaign. They would be cut off from their own army. They would run out of water, food, bandages, and very nearly batteries.
Half of them would not come down the hill alive. The only thing that would keep them alive, the only thing that would turn that hilltop into a graveyard for the German offensive was a small FM radio set, no bigger than a shoe box, that somehow refused to die. This is the story of the siege of Hill 314.
The story of how a few hundred American infantrymen with empty stomachs and dying batteries stopped Adolf Hitler’s last great counterattack in Normandy. This is the story of Morta. To understand why Hill 314 mattered, you have to understand what was happening in Normandy in the first week of August 1944. For nearly 2 months after D-Day, the Allied armies had been stuck.
They had landed on the beaches on June 6th. They had taken Sherburgg. They had bled through the hedge of the Bokeage country where every field was a fortress and every sunken lane was an ambush. They had not broken out. Then on July 25th, everything changed. It was called Operation Cobra. General Omar Bradley’s first United States Army carpet bombed a narrow corridor west of Slo and then American armor poured through the gap.
Within days, the German front in western Normandy had simply come apart. By August 1st, General George Patton’s newly activated third army was racing south and west into Britany. By August 4th, American spearheads were charging toward Avanches, the gateway between Normandy and France. The Germans were in full retreat.
In Berlin, Hitler looked at the situation map and refused to accept it. The German 7th Army was in danger of being cut off entirely. Field marshal Ga von Klug who commanded Army Group B wanted permission to pull back to the sane. Hitler refused. Instead, on August 2nd, he ordered something that horrified almost every senior German commander in the West.
He ordered a counterattack. Not just any counterattack. Hitler ordered four Panza divisions, every armored division Kuga could scrape together to drive west from a small town called Mortain, punch through the thin American flank, race to the sea at Avanches, and cut Patton’s third army off from its supply lines. If it worked, the entire American breakout would collapse.
If it failed, Hitler said in his directive, every Panza division he had left in France would be trapped behind enemy lines. Field Marshall Vonluga transmitted the order with a comment that has survived in the German war diaries. He said, “I foresee that the failure of this attack can lead to collapse of the entire Normandy front, but the order is so unequivocal that it must be obeyed.
” The operation was given a code name operation lutic after the Belgian city of lies where the Germans had won a great victory in 1914. The Germans assembled their attacking force in secrecy, moving by night, hiding in the orchards. They concentrated under the command of General Hans vonfunk and his 47th Panza Corps.
The force was built around four Panza divisions. Now you will sometimes hear this attack described as four SS Panza divisions and that is not quite right. Two of the divisions were waffan SS. Two were regular German army vermarked here but the lead division and the one that would chew into hill 314 was one of the most feared formations in the entire German war machine.
It was the second SS Panza division. Its name was Dar Reich. Two months earlier, units of Das Reich had massacred more than 600 men, women, and children in the French village of Oridor Serglane. The civilians of Normandy knew exactly who was now rolling toward them in the dark. The Germans hoped to attack at midnight on August 6th in a heavy ground fog that would hide their tanks from the dreaded Allied fighter bombers.
They had between 120 and 190 tanks, including Panthers, MarkV, medium tanks, and assault guns. They had veteran crews. They had momentum, fear, and the personal attention of the Furer himself. And almost everything they had to drive through in the first critical hours of the attack would be sitting on top of one rocky hill.
The Americans who were about to take the hit had a nickname. They called themselves Old Hickory. They were the 30th Infantry Division, a National Guard outfit drawn originally from the men of Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Their nickname came from Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, who was nicknamed Old Hickory because his men said he was as tough as Hickory Wood.
The division had been federalized in 1940 and had been fighting in Europe since June of 1944. By early August, they were already a veteran outfit. They had taken Slow. They had held the line during Operation Cobra. Their commanding general, Major General Leland Hobbes, knew his men and his officers and trusted them.
But he was about to ask them to do something that almost no Allied Infantry Division had been asked to do in the entire Normandy campaign. On August 6th, the 30th division was ordered to relieve the first infantry division around the town of Morta. The big red one, the first division, had taken the town and the hill on August 3rd without much trouble.
The German line in this sector was thought to be in tatters. The 30th was supposed to be there for a rest period. They were going to lick their wounds, take in replacements, and prepare for the next push east. Morta itself was a quiet little Norman town built around an old church and a few cobbled streets perched on the western slope of a steep stone ridge.
Above the town on the east side rose the ridge itself, 314 m tall, just over 1,000 ft. American maps gave it a number. Hill 314. The men who would fight on it would simply call it the hill. From the summit of Hill 314, on a clear day, you could see for many miles in every direction. You could see the road network running west toward avanches.
You could see every approach a German tank column might take. It was, in the language of artillery officers, dominant terrain. Whoever held hill 314 could see the enemy coming for miles and could drop artillery fire on any vehicle that moved. It was the single most important piece of ground in the entire German plan of attack.
The man tasked with holding it was Colonel Hammond Burks, commanding the 120th Infantry Regiment. Burks had three battalions. His first battalion went to Hill 285 northwest of the town. His third battalion was diverted south toward the village of Barington, leaving him only one rifle company from it. His second battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Eids Hardway would have to cover the town itself, the western approaches, and the great hill above.
Hardway had four rifle companies, more or less. Company E, commanded by First Lieutenant Ralph Curley, a Texan. Company Fant Reynold Ericson of Miles, Iowa. Company G under first lift tenant Ronal Woody Jr. The heavy weapons company H under Captain Delmmont Burn of Redfield, South Dakota, and attached from third battalion company K under first lieutenant Joseph Rezer of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Altogether on the hill and on the slopes around it between 600 and 700 American infantrymen. With them on the late afternoon of August 6th climbed up two small forward observer teams from the 230th field artillery battalion. The first team was led by second lieutenant Robert Weiss. With him were Sergeant Arman Sasser on the radio, Staff Sergeant John Korn as his senior NCO and observation instrument operator, and a small section of communications men.
The second team was led by First Lieutenant Charles Barts of Lincoln, Nebraska. With him was Corporal Frank Denius, an instrument operator from Texas, who would later be one of the most decorated combat soldiers in the entire division. Their radio sergeant was Sherman Goldstein, called Sid. Each team had one main piece of equipment that would matter more than anything else they carried.
Each team had an FM artillery radio. The standard set was the SCR 610, about 35, two crystal controlled channels, range of about 5 mi on a clear day. 5 mi, just barely enough to reach back across the valley to the fire direction center of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, where the gun crews of the 105 mm howitzers were waiting for someone to tell them where to shoot.
Lieutenant Weiss spent the afternoon of August 6th doing what every good forward observer did. He climbed every observation point. He registered targets. He plotted on the grided map every road, every crossroads, every dip in the ground where a German column might come at him. He gave each one a number.
He sent those numbers back to fire direction. He called them emergency barrage numbers. If anything happened, he would not have to dictate coordinates. He would just call a number and the shells would already be on the way. At about 5:30 in the afternoon, Weiss looked through his binoculars and saw something moving on a road to the east. It was a German column.
He called the first fire mission of his career on Hill 314. It was the first of 193. The Germans came at 1:00 in the morning on August 7th, 1944. They came in fog, a heavy low summer ground mist that hugged the river valley and the hedge. The German plan called for darkness and fog precisely to neutralize the great Allied advantage.
The fighter bombers, the typhoons of the Royal Air Force, the thunderbolts of the 9inth United States Army Air Force. Those aircraft owned the daylight skies over France. In the fog and dark, the panzas thought they could move with impunity. What they did not know and would not know for many years after the war was that British codereakers at Bletchley Park had decrypted German radio traffic.
The intelligence community called it ultra. By late on August 6th, the Americans had a fairly clear picture of what was coming. The warning reached General Hobbes at his command post at 38 minutes after midnight on August 7th. Far too late to bring up reinforcements. The 30th Division would have to fight with what was already on the ground.
The first to hit them was the second SS Panza division, Das Reich, under SS Brigade Furer Ottob. Two regimental battle groups, what the Germans called Camp Groupen, came at Morten from north and south. They were reinforced by another regimental-sized camp grouper from the 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division.
North of them, the second Panza division, a vermarked army formation under General Hinrich von Llutwitz, made the main effort toward the villages of St. Bartelli and Juveni. The 116th Panza Division, also Vermacht, was supposed to attack on the far north flank, but its commander, Count Ghard Vonerin, had quietly decided he did not want to throw away his men on what he believed was a doomed mission.
His division failed to attack on time on August 7th. He was relieved of command at 4 in the afternoon. Only one Panther battalion of the first SS Panza division, the Libstande SS Adolf Hitler made it into the fight on the first day, reinforcing the second Panza near dawn. So the popular story of four SS Panza divisions is not quite right.
The truer story is this. two SS Panza divisions and two Vermarked Panza divisions, plus an attached SS Panza Grenadier Camp Grouper, all under General Hans vonFunk’s 47th Panza Corps. Together, the largest concentration of German armor the Americans had faced since the campaign began. And the spearhead, the unit that would actually grind into the slopes of Hill 314, was Dar Reich.
For the men on the hill, none of this mattered. What mattered was the sound. Lieutenant Weiss was awakened in the dark by a sound that began as a deep, distant rumble. The rumble resolved into engines, tracked engines. Small arms fire began crackling along the slopes. The first artillery shells began to land. Weiss reached for his radio.
He did not know where the Germans were. He could not see them through the fog, but he had his pre-registered barrage numbers plotted the day before. He called fire mission. He called number after number. The howitzers of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion opened up across the valley. Within minutes, the hill was ringing with the sound of American shells exploding on roads the Germans were trying to use.
Down in the town of Morta, things were going badly. The German infantry of Dasich infiltrated through the cobbled streets. They reached the hotel deost where Lieutenant Colonel Eids Hardaway had his battalion command post. Hardway tried to slip out with his staff. He did not make it. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.
With Hardway gone, the battalion needed a new commander. Colonel Burks, listening on the regimental radio net, made an instant decision. The senior officer, still in position on hill 314, was Captain Reynold Ericson of Company F. Ericson would take command of everything on the hill. Lieutenants Curley, Woody, Rezer, and Burn would command their companies under him.
Robert Weiss would be the eyes of the artillery. And so before sunrise on August 7th, the perimeter on hill 314 was set. A loose oval on a bare granite hill above the town. Company E on the southeast. Company G on the southwest. Company K to the north near a stone farmhouse called Bonvoisa. Company F survivors in the center with the wounded.
heavy machine guns and mortars of Company H around the rim. Two artillery forward observer teams with two FM radios, just under 700 men surrounded on every side at every compass point by some of the most feared Panza divisions in Hitler’s army. By 8:00 in the morning of August 7th, the situation looked very nearly hopeless. The town of Mort had fallen.
The first battalion of the 117th Infantry holding the village of St. Bartellamy to the north was being overrun by second Panza division Panthers fighting almost tankto-tank in the streets. American soldiers were being captured, killed, scattered. German tanks were already on the western roads, driving toward the next high ground.
On Hill 314, Captain Ericson’s perimeter had taken its first casualties. Lieutenant Bart’s forward observer team had been hit hard in the opening hours. Barts himself was wounded and combat ineffective. Robert Weiss later described him in his memoir with a phrase that has stayed with anyone who has read it.
Weiss wrote that Bart seemed to be looking over his shoulder and that he could already see the pale stamp of death on his face. Charles Barts would die of his wounds on October 31st, 1944. With Barts down, the artillery fire direction for the southwest sector of the hill fell on Corporal Frank Denius, the instrument operator.
He picked up where Barts left off. He kept calling fire missions. The men called it laying steel. Around 11:00 in the morning, the wind shifted. The summer sun, climbing toward noon, began to burn off the fog. The pilots of the Royal Air Force Second Tactical Air Force, sitting on air strips back in Lower Normandy with their engines running and their cockpits open, had been waiting all morning for that moment.
By noon on August 7th, the sky above Morta belonged to the Allies. Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers came in low. Each one carried eight rocket projectiles under its wings, 60 lb warheads with a flight characteristic that sounded to the men on the ground like a freight train coming down from the clouds. Corporal Frank Denius later wrote a sentence that captures it perfectly.
He wrote, “I’ll never forget the sound of those rockets fired from the British typhoons. We had never heard anything like that before. The typhoons came in waves. The Royal Air Force flew about 294 sorties over the Morton battlefield on August 7th alone. American Republic P47 Thunderbolts of the 9th Air Force flew several hundred more.
They strafed and rocketed and bombed German tank columns, supply trucks, fuel bowsers, motorcycle messengers. The Germans had no air cover. The Luftwaffer had been swept from the skies of Normandy weeks before. Now here we have to tell the truth. For years after the war, the story was told that Allied fighter bombers had destroyed hundreds of German tanks at Morta.
Royal Air Force pilots claimed 140 German tanks killed. American pilots claimed another 112, that is more tanks destroyed than the Germans had committed to the entire operation. After the battle, the British army sent a team called the number two operational research section to count the wrecks. Every burned out Hulk in the Mortain salient was inspected.
The verdict, when it came in, was sobering. About 46 German tanks and assault guns had been lost in the entire operation. Of those, only about nine could be attributed with confidence to Typhoon rockets. The pilot claims were inflated by roughly a factor of 20. What the typhoons actually did was destroy German supply.
They shot up the fuel trucks. They wrecked the ammunition carriers. They forced the tank crews to button up and stop. They terrorized the support troops in the soft skinned vehicles. and they gave the German commanders in their headquarters miles away the unmistakable feeling that they had lost the battle for the sky and could no longer move by daylight.
At 1:00 in the afternoon on August 7th, a signal went out from German Army Group B’s headquarters. It is preserved in the records of the Royal Air Force. The signal said that the German attack had been brought to a halt and it gave two reasons. The reasons were, in the German wording, the employment of fighter bombers by the enemy and the absence of our own air support.
The hardest fighting was not yet over. The German tanks could still move by night. The infantry could still attack. The hill 314 perimeter was still surrounded, still desperate, still cut off. But on the afternoon of August 7th, on the great hill above Morta, Lieutenant Robert Weiss made a radio log entry that survived the war.
He wrote, “Enemy north, south, east, and west.” And the American shells called by his radio were already coming down on every one of those compass points. To understand what Robert Weiss and Frank Deius were doing on Hill 314, you have to understand the American way of war in 1944. The German army was the world’s master of mobile armored warfare.
The British were the world’s master of carefully prepared setpiece battles. But the American army by August of 1944 had become the world’s master of one specific thing, artillery. The Americans had more artillery, fired faster, with better coordination and better fire direction techniques than any army in the world. The American Fire direction center, where men with map boards and slide rules and field telephones translated a forward observer’s voice into a kill zone, was a quiet revolution in how war was fought.
and the man with the radio, the forward observer on the hill, was the trigger for that revolution. Lieutenant Weiss had spent the day before the attack plotting numbered concentrations. Every crossroad, every defile, every patch of forest where a tank could hide had a number. When the Germans came at 1:00 in the morning, Weiss did not need to read off coordinates.
He did not need to dictate corrections in the fog. He just had to say a number, and the shells were on the way. But Hill 314 was not relying on the 230th Field Artillery Battalion alone. Behind the Morta front, the Americans had assembled what some historians estimate at 12 and a half artillery battalions in supporting range, 105 mm howitzers, 155 mm howitzers, and three battalions of 155 mm long toms, the big rifled guns that could throw a 95lb shell more than 10 mi.
When a German column was cited, Weiss or Denius would call a fire mission. The fire direction center would calculate and then the order would go out not to one battalion but to many. The shells were timed to arrive together. The Americans called it time on target. 12 battalions could put a small storm of shells onto a single piece of ground.
All of them arriving within seconds of each other. To a German infantryman on the ground, it was the end of the world. Sometime on August 9th, Frank Denius spotted a column of German trucks unloading near the base of the hill. He called the mission. A multi-battalion time on target landed on the convoy.
Denius later wrote in his memoir, “Their casualties and vehicle damage were incredible. The few undamaged German vehicles withdrew to the east, loaded with men fleeing from a killing ground. That was one fire mission.” Robert Weiss called 193 of them in 6 days. The Germans understood almost immediately that the artillery was the worst thing they faced.
They tried to silence it. They could not. The radio that connected Hill 314 to the fire direction center was too small, too well hidden, too well operated. A German 88 mm shell clipped the antenna of Weiss’s radio. On August 7th, the set kept working. A Panza Grenadier rifleman put a bullet through the canvas of Sergeant Sassa’s pack near the radio handset. The set kept working.
The batteries began to fail on August 8th. That was a different problem. The SCR 610 FM artillery radio ran on dry cell batteries. In an FM radio of that period, the batteries did not just fail gradually. They held a near full charge until they were nearly depleted and then they died very fast. Once they were dead, that was it.
You could not recharge them. You needed new ones. Lieutenant Weiss had brought a small supply of spare batteries up the hill. On August 6th, By the morning of August 8th, that supply was running low. By August 9th, it was almost gone. The men did three things to extend the life of the batteries. First, they shut the radio off between fire missions.
Every minute of receiver hiss was a minute of battery life. Weiss and Sassa learned to switch the set off, then switch it back on a moment before they pressed the handset to their lips. Second, they laid the dying batteries in the August sun. A warmed, dry cell can sometimes give up another few minutes of usable charge.
The men set the spent batteries on flat rocks at the top of the hill and rotated them in and out of service. Third, they scavenged. There was a jeep concealed below the crest of the hill that had belonged to one of the observation teams. It had a vehicle-mounted radio set. The men cannibalized it. They pulled batteries from any piece of equipment that could spare them.
Down in the valley at the headquarters of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Vman was listening to the situation on the hill and trying to think of how to keep his observers alive. Robert Weiss had been radioing in steadily darker reports. Water gone, food gone, wounded piling up, morphine almost out, plasma gone, and increasingly batteries almost gone.
If the batteries failed, the radio was dead. If the radio was dead, the hill could not call artillery. If the hill could not call artillery, the Germans would simply walk up the slopes and take the position. The whole defense, Vimman understood, was hanging by the thinnest possible thread, by the electrical charge stored in a few square ines of zinc and carbon.
The men on the hill were running out of everything. They had climbed up on August 6th, carrying the ordinary load of an American infantrymen, a canteen of water, a few krations, one unit of fire of ammunition. By August 8th, the cantens were dry. By August 9th, the Krations were gone. What saved them in the most literal sense was the kindness of strangers.
Around the foot of hill 314 lived a few French farming families, the Lene family, the widow Boda and her young son, Madame Lec and her daughters. These were people who had welcomed the American liberators a few days earlier with bottles of cider and food set out on tables. Now they were caught between the German SS who had massacred the village of Oridor two months earlier and the American defenders on the hill above them.
Some of those families pumped water from the well at a farm called Lerage. They refilled American cantens. They risked their lives doing it. To be caught carrying water to surrounded American troops by men of Das Reich was a death sentence. The men on the hill also ate. They ate green apples from a small orchard on the slope. Private First Class Alan New House later remembered with the gallows humor of a soldier that it was the first time he had ever eaten green apples without getting a stomach ache.
Private Thomas Street wrote that the first bite of a raw cabbage dug from a French garden was about the most delicious taste he had ever experienced. Some of the men going out at night to scavenge potatoes and rooterbaggers from the gardens at the foot of the hill came face tof face with German soldiers doing exactly the same thing in the dark.
By unspoken agreement, both sides pretended not to see each other. They were all hungry. They all went back to their lines with their pockets full of root vegetables. There was no aid station on Hill 314. The battalion aid station had been overrun in the town of Morta on the first morning. The Germans had captured the battalion surgeon, the chaplain, and the medical orderlys along with the wounded who had been there.
By most accounts, the SS troops treated those captured medical personnel correctly on that occasion. But the wounded on the hill itself had only the men of the line companies to care for them. Stone outcrops near the summit. Natural overhangs of granite sheltered the worst cases. Some had been hit on the first morning.
Some had been waiting 4 days without plasma, without morphine after the first night, without sulfur powder for the infected wounds. The August sun was hot. The flies came. Men with stomach wounds, who would have lived with proper care, died slowly. The healthy soldiers carried water to the wounded when they could. They gave away their own rations.
They held the hands of dying men who, in many cases, were not even in their own company. The chaplain was gone, so the men prayed for each other. In their letters home in interviews many years later, the survivors of Hill 314 said the same thing again and again. The worst part of the battle was not the German tanks. The worst part was the sound of the wounded.
Tony Jabber, a mortman in company E, later said something that historians have quoted many times. He said, “I would take six months in the Bulge over 6 days in Morta. Those were the hardest days of the war for me.” On the evening of August 9th, in the long European summer twilight, the men on the southeast perimeter of Hill 314 saw a small group of Germans walking toward them across the open slope.
The lead man was carrying a white flag. He was an SS officer. He spoke English. He walked up to the American outpost and he asked to speak to the commanding officer. The man they brought him to was First Lieutenant Ralph Curley of Company E. Curley was a Texan. He had been on the hill for almost three days.
His company had taken heavy casualties. His radio operators were calling for ammunition that was not coming. His wounded were not eating. The SS officer made his pitch. He told Curley that the position was hopeless. He told him that the Germans had captured the rest of the battalion in the town below. He invited Curley on behalf of his men to surrender.
Now, the popular version of this story, the one you will read on websites and hear in some documentaries, says that Ralph Curley gave a long, eloquent, defiant reply about the last bullet and the last bayonet and bastard bellies, that is a post-war embellishment. The actual reply, according to the men who were there, was short. It was profane.
It was very Texan, and it was very clear. Curley refused. The SS officer walked back down the slope. A short time later, the German artillery began again. Then the infantry came again. The Americans on the perimeter with their last full magazines held them off. Down in the valley, the artillery fire direction center was tracking a German truck convoy unloading near the eastern slope of the hill.
Frank Denius called a time on target. Roughly 12 battalions of American guns answered. The shells came down on the convoy as one continuous wall of explosions. The Germans did not come back up the southeast slope that night. By the morning of August 10th, the situation on Hill 314 had become a logistics emergency.
The men had not had water in 2 days, except what they could scrge from French farmers and from a few stagnant pools in the rocks. The wounded were dying. The radio batteries were almost spent. Ammunition was short. The Germans were still all around them. The 9inth Air Force agreed to attempt an airdrop.
At about 4:25 in the afternoon on August 10th, 12 C47 Skyrain transport aircraft escorted by P47 Thunderbolts came in low over hill 314 and dropped approximately 71 parachute supply containers from an altitude of 300 ft. It should have worked. It mostly did not. The wind was wrong. About half of the parapacts drifted into German lines. The Germans recovered them and used the captured American supplies to feed their own troops.
The other half landed inside the American perimeter, but the cargo was a story unto itself. Most of it was 30 caliber rifle ammunition. The ammunition arrived loaded into obsolete stripper clips. The men’s M1 Garand rifles required onblock clips, eight rounds at a time. So under fire with German artillery still falling, the men of hill 314 sat behind their rocks and handloaded 30 caliber rounds from stripper clips into garand on blocks one round at a time. Some food made it.
Some replacement batteries for the radios made it. Just enough to keep Weiss and Deius on the air, but almost no medical supplies came down in the airrop. No plasma, almost no morphine. The wounded got a few bandages and not much else. Down at the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Vehman was about to try something nobody in the United States Army had ever tried before.
The idea was simple in the way that desperate ideas are simple. The 230th had a supply of M84 base ejection 105 mm smoke shells. A base ejection smoke shell when it reaches its target opens at the rear and releases a canister of smoke compound. The shell body itself is essentially a hollow steel tube. What if you emptied the smoke canister out of a base ejection shell? What if you packed the empty space inside with bandages, sulfur powder, and morphine cigarettes? What if you sealed it back up? What if you fired it like a regular round with the base
ejection charge timed to pop the cargo out a few feet above the ground? What if you used American artillery to deliver American medicine to American soldiers, fired through enemy lines, lobbed over the heads of the SS onto the top of a hill. On the night of August 10th, the 230th Field Artillery Battalion fired the first such rounds.
The artillery fire direction center on the hill confirmed the firing. The shells arrived where they were supposed to, but it was the middle of the night. The men on the hill could not safely cross open ground in the dark to recover them, and the Germans almost certainly got most of the loads.
On the morning of August 11th, after the morning mist lifted, the battalion fired more medical rounds. Four were used as range markers, weighted with sand. Six were the real thing. All six landed inside the perimeter. All six were recovered. When the men opened them, they found two things. They found bandages. They found sulfur powder.
Those things had survived the launch and the impact. But the plasma vials had shattered every one of them. The shock of the launch from a 105 mm howitzer is enormous. Glass vials cannot survive it. And most of the morphine cigarettes had been destroyed by the same shock. A few survived. They were precious. They were used immediately on the worst cases.
The medical artillery shell at Morta was not a triumph. It was a partial success born of desperation. Almost certainly the first time in modern warfare that artillery had been used to deliver medicine across enemy lines. Some men got bandaged who would have bled to death. Some got sulfur on infected wounds. A few got morphine.
Some did not. The plasma never came but the radio was still on the air. And outside the perimeter, the German pressure was beginning to slacken. By the night of August 11th, the second SS Panza Division Dar Reich was no longer the spearhead of an offensive. It was the rear guard of a retreat. Far to the east, General Patton’s third army was racing through Leong deep into the German rear.
The German 7th Army was about to be encircled in what historians would call the Fallet’s pocket. The Germans on the Mortain front had to pull back or they would be cut off entirely. That night, the German tanks around Hill 314 began to disengage. The men on the hill did not know this. They knew only that the morning of August 12th came up again with the smell of burning rubber from wrecked tanks at the foot of the slopes and the moaning of their own wounded.
At about 5 in the morning on August 12th, a single artillery round, possibly American, possibly German, exploded near the spot where Staff Sergeant John Korn was standing watch with Robert Weiss. K was mortally wounded. He lay on the granite. He knew. He gave away his nickelplated pistol. He gave away his watch. He said goodbye. He died on the hill.
Robert Weiss went back to his radio. Around 11 in the morning, the first American scouts came up the slope from the west. They were soldiers of the 320th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division. They had been fighting toward the hill for 2 days, attacking through the boage on top of Sherman tanks of the 737th Tank Battalion.
They had reached the southwestern outposts of Company G. The men on the hill did not cheer. Most of them were too tired to stand up. They watched the scouts move past their positions and into the perimeter. They drank from the cantens the relief column brought them. Some of them began to cry and did not know why.
Just before noon on August 12th, 1944, Lieutenant Robert Weiss of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, lying on a rock on Hill 314 with an SCR 610 radio set whose batteries had refused to die, called his final fire mission of the siege. It was the 193rd. By 1:00 in the afternoon, the first battalion of the 119th Infantry had marched up through the town of Mortaine, taken control of the western slopes and linked up fully with the perimeter on the summit.
Captain Reynold Ericson, the senior officer on the hill, walked his lines for the last time. Of the roughly 700 Americans who had climbed up hill 314 on August 6th, about half came down dead, wounded, or missing. The battle of Mortaine was over. Operation Lutic, Hitler’s last great gamble in Normandy had failed completely.
The German Panza divisions that had punched west toward Avanches were now exposed at the bottom of a deep salient with American and British armies converging from north and south. Field Marshall von Kluger had warned that the failure of this attack could lead to collapse of the entire Normandy front. He had been right.
Over the next 10 days, with the Filet’s pocket closing, the Germans began their full retreat. By August 21st, the pocket was sealed. Inside it, the German 7th Army lost about 10,000 killed and 40 to 50,000 captured. The wreckage was so total that American officers who walked the battlefield in the days that followed described stretches where it was almost impossible to step around the dead horses, the dead men, and the burntout vehicles.
Field Marshal von Kluga was relieved of command on August 17th. Two days later on the road back to Germany with the certainty that he was about to be arrested by the Gestapo for his suspected role in the July plot against Hitler. Vonluga stopped his car at a meadow near Mets. He swallowed cyanide. Hitler when he heard about the failure at Morta said the attack failed because Field Marshall Vonlug wanted it to fail.
He was wrong. The attack failed because of a French hilltop, 700 American infantrymen, 12 and a half battalions of artillery, the Royal Air Force, the 9inth Air Force, two FM radio sets, and the inexhaustible patience of one young lieutenant who kept calling fire mission after fire mission for six straight days.
The men of the second battalion, 120th infantry, were rotated back into reserve. They had taken roughly 50% casualties. They were given a few days to rest, to write letters home, to mourn the men who would not be coming back. Then they went forward again. The 30th division would fight through France, through Belgium, through the breakthrough into Germany, through the Battle of the Bulge, and across the Rine.
After the war, many military historians called the 30th Division the finest American infantry division in the European theater of operations. The four company commanders of the second battalion who had held Hill 314, Reynold Erikson, Delmont Burn, Ralph Curley, and Joseph Rezer each received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest American decoration for valor in combat.
Lieutenant Ron Woody received the same. Lieutenant Robert Weiss received the Silver Star. Lieutenant Charles Barts, who died of his wounds in October, received the Silver Star postuously. Corporal Frank Dinius would receive multiple silver stars across the campaigns of 1944 and 1945. The second battalion 120th infantry and company K of the third battalion received the distinguished unit citation.
The battalion was also awarded the French cuadare with palm. But the most extraordinary recognition came many years later. For most of the rest of the 20th century, the veterans of the 30th division campaigned for full divisional honors. It took a generation. On March 17th of the year 2020, the president of the United States awarded the entire 30th Infantry Division, the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest unit honor in the American military.
It is the same award as the wartime Distinguished Unit Citation, renamed in 1957. The formal ceremony was held on July 25th of the year, 2020 at the Joint Forces headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. By then, only a handful of the men of Morton were still alive to receive it. They were in their 90s. They came in wheelchairs.
They watched as the streamer was attached to the regimental colors of their old division. Robert Weiss came home from the war, went to law school, and built a long post-war life as an attorney in Portland, Oregon. In the late 1990s, he sat down and wrote a memoir of his six days on Hill 314. He called the book Fire Mission.
It was published in 1998. It remains one of the great American combat memoirs of the Second World War. Frank Deius came home, finished his law degree at the University of Texas, and built a long post-war life in Austin. He used his time and his wealth for the next several decades to fund veterans causes and university programs.
He wrote his own memoir called On the Way near the end of his life. Ralph Curley returned to Texas. Reynold Ericson went home to Iowa. Joseph Rezer returned to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Delmont Burn went home to South Dakota and eventually became a professor of education at the University of Michigan. Ronal Woody returned home.
Eids Hardaway, the battalion commander captured in the town of Morton on the first morning, was repatriated at the end of the war. He came home. He talked very little about Morta to anyone who had not been there. Charles Barts did not come home. He had died of his wounds in October of 1944. Staff Sergeant John Korn does not appear in the standard award roles, but his name is preserved in Robert Weiss’s memoir.
He died on the hill on the last morning of the siege with his pistol and his watch passed to the hands of the men who would carry them down. The French families around the hill, the Lace family and the widow Bodin and Madame Lec and the others who carried water at the risk of their lives were honored after the war by the people of Mortine.
Their names are preserved at the small chapel of Lemitage on the slope of the hill itself. The hill is still there today. There is a stone monument near the summit dedicated by the survivors of the 30th division many years after the war. It stands on the rocky shoulder where the radio once was.
If you stand at the monument on a clear summer afternoon, you can see what Robert Weiss saw on the evening of August 6th, 1944. You can see for miles in every direction. You can see the roads, the river valleys, the orchards, the little stone villages with their slate roofs. You can see in your mind’s eye the German tank columns coming through the fog.
And you can almost hear, if you listen carefully, a young American voice on a small FM radio calling a number that has been pre-registered on the map. A few weeks after the battle, American intelligence officers interrogated some of the captured German Panza crewmen who had attacked Mortar. The Germans wanted to know one thing above all others.
They wanted to know how the Americans had brought down so much artillery so accurately, so fast from so many directions at once. They had assumed there were artillery observers everywhere. They thought every farmhouse, every hedge row, every hilltop must have a hidden American spotter team.
They sent patrols to find them. They sent infantry to clear them. They could not find them all. What they never understood was that on the hill above Morton, there were not many observer teams. There were two, just two, Robert Weiss with one radio, Frank Denius and the wounded Charles Barts with the other. Between them, with the men who carried their batteries and protected their position, they had a panoramic view of the German offensive and the trust of 12 and a half battalions of American guns.
The Germans had better tanks than the Americans in 1944. They had better small arms in many cases. They had veteran infantry. They had men who had fought in Russia and in Italy and in North Africa, but they did not have the system. They did not have the radio that called the howitzers. They did not have the howitzers that answered every radio call.
They did not have the fire direction centers that turned a voice on a shoebox-sized FM set into a wall of steel coming down on a road junction. And on the slopes of Hill 314, that gap decided the campaign for Normandy. The battle of Morton is sometimes called the forgotten battle. It is overshadowed by D-Day. It is overshadowed by the filet’s pocket.
The men who fought there came home and mostly did not speak of it. The 30th division had to wait 76 years for the presidential unit citation. But every student of the Second World War who has spent time with the records knows what Morta was. It was the moment when Hitler’s plan in Normandy died. It was the moment when 700 American infantrymen with two radios and a hill stopped four Panza divisions in their tracks.
700 men, 6 days, one radio that refused to die. The men of Morton are gone now. The hill remains. The records remain. And if we tell the story right, the memory remains, too. Thank you for watching. Until next time.
