Vet recalls war’s ‘high adventure’
The first time Germans shot at Ken Pine during World War II, he couldn’t shoot back. His rifle was clogged.
Pine, a young infantryman from Lawrence, was in a three-truck convoy to Forbach, France, in February 1945 that came under artillery fire.
“Just before that, we’d been beside the road and I decided to clean the rifle,” Pine, now 79, said recently.
“We had a cleaning kit in the butt of the rife … a tough string. And I was pulling a patch through there and it broke, midstride. Nobody had a ramrod that could reach it. … So as we loaded back on the trucks, the order went: ‘Lock and load.’ I couldn’t do that because my rifle barrel was blocked.”
The situation became desperate when shells started exploding near the convoy.
“The driver stopped and everybody got out, got underneath something,” Pine said. “Except me.
“I’m knocking on a Frenchman’s door, couldn’t speak French, but I made the Frenchman know what I needed to get that out,” he said. “He got me a stiff piece of wire, and pfft, out it went. I could load my rifle and I was ready for combat.”
The next few months, Pine said, were the stuff of “high adventure.”
Lost promotion
Ken Pine, Lawrence, sits with the patches and medals he earned during his tour of duty in World War II. He landed in France and spent most of his time fighting there.
Pine hadn’t expected to be toting a rifle in the war. Drafted in 1943, he was sent to the University of Nebraska to train for the engineers corps. He was sent back to the infantry, though, as the invasion of Europe created a need for more foot soldiers. Training was at Camp Rucker, Ala.
“That was a real kick in the head,” Pine said. “We thought we were elite, going to college. The old sergeants, they were out for us. Well we were not pantywaists — we took all sorts of gymnastics and so forth, kept real fit while we were going to school. They found out, we were still tough.”
For the next few months, Pine trained with rifles, pistols, submachine guns and machine guns. Late in August 1944, his platoon sergeant asked if Pine wanted to become a squad sergeant and train new machine gunners.
“Well I thought that would be pretty good, get a promotion,” Pine said.
“But that time, most of my buddies I’d trained with were packing up to ship out as replacements. I was on that list. And names were being read off, somebody didn’t answer the roll. And lieutenant says, ‘Pine pack your bags and get on the truck!’
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Kenneth Pine, part 1
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Tactics
His first day in combat, Pine was ordered to carry ammunition for a gunner carrying a Browning Automatic Rifle. The two took cover in a ditch to fire at a house occupied by German soldiers.
“He shot about two clips of 20 rounds each, and I shot about two clips of eight rounds each,” Pine said. “I said, ‘Hey, before you shoot anymore, roll over a little bit, move.'”
The other soldier asked why.
“I says, ‘Don’t ask questions!’ I kicked him on the shins — ‘Move!'” Pine said. “He rolled over, I rolled over like that.”
The two men had just rolled out of the way when a burst of German fire hit the ground where the submachine gunner had been.
“He looked at me, and his mouth was moving and he wasn’t saying anything,” Pine said. “He was white.”
There was, Pine said, a reason for his order.
“Machine gun tactics. Shoot and move. You draw fire, and automatic rifles draw fire,” Pine said. “The German found us, see, and it didn’t take long.
“BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) men were constantly getting wounded and killed. I think he was one of the few who never did. I taught him machine gun tactics.”
‘Really nervous’
The calls would get closer for Pine. A few days later, a German sniper’s shot passed through the sleeve of his uniform and killed the soldier next to him. And artillery shells were dropping everywhere.
“We were going to take up some (defensive) positions” in the woods near Forbach, Pine said. “But getting there, the Germans were plastering us with 88 artillery. This was in tree bursts. That is absolutely deadly. … Getting down on the ground is not enough. You’ve got to get under something. … It was just raining fire all over.”
Pine found a safe spot.
“I found a tree uprooted and I got underneath the roots and dirt, nothing left of me showing,” he said. “The rest of the platoon, they were back to a concrete ditch, the lieutenant standing there swearing and turning the air blue, because they’d retreated.”
Pine started advancing slowly, digging foxholes along the way. But the constant explosions were getting to a nearby soldier.
“He was nervous, really nervous,” Pine said. “While I was in the hole digging, another guy was sitting on the edge. All of the sudden I hear him yell, ‘Here they come! The Germans are coming!'”
With that, the soldier shot himself in the foot with the submachine gun.
“He got a bum discharge out of the service because of that. … It’s unfortunate, but nerves go,” Pine said. “You do some strange things.”
‘High adventure’
As the war wound down, Pine’s squad was ordered across the “Siegfried Line” to attack pillboxes along the German border. The expected firefight never came — the old men and young boys who had been conscripted into service by the Germans had abandoned the fortifications.
“They went home,” Pine said.
After a brief time serving as a military policeman, Pine also went home. He was discharged from the service in March 1946, then used the G.I. Bill to get his business degree from Kansas University.
He spent the next decades working as an insurance agent, then at several Lawrence hardware stores. His patches and combat ribbons are framed, kept on the wall of an office in his home south of KU.
“It was a high adventure,” Pine said of the war. “After that, I really didn’t want any more high adventure.”
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