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Doctor’s letter tells of battle for French town against Nazis

Outside Dornot, Capt. Howard Ingling and his comrades endured ferocious artillery attacks by the German army

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 8:10 PM Sunday, June 28, 2009

The first three pages of Howard Ingling’s letter about the battle for Dornot, France, are missing in action.

The effect is to eliminate any buildup to the battle and for readers to enter while the fight for the village beside the Moselle River is at full pitch.

There we find Capt. Ingling, an army surgeon, in a cellar full of wounded men trying to survive in the crosshairs of German artillery.

Another letter in the collection Pat and Bruce Everhart have from her late father indicates Ingling wrote two letters about the battle Sept. 9 and Sept. 10, 1945, a full year after the event.

Both were written to the wife he always greeted with the words “My Dearest Mickey Pal.”

Here are excerpts.

Changing cellars

“I was on my knees holding up a plasma bottle (when) one small piece of shell (very tiny) hit me on the left cheek and knocked the plasma bottle out of my hand,” Ingling writes.

“Right away,” he continues, “we realized what a dangerous place the patients were in.”

To protect them, “we carried them then immediately up to the top of the hill in jeeps and decided we must use another cellar up the street just a little farther (to gather the wounded).”

Beside a half-track

Just how dangerous it was to move anything through the streets becomes clear.

“A man standing and talking just four feet from Lt. Beyer was killed instantly without ever getting a wound. He died from the explosive force (the shock wave) of the shell,” Ingling writes. (Beyer was not hurt.)

“Shells then came fast and thick. A man just across the little street from us (the street was only as wide as a room) also fell and died immediately beside a half-track.

“Capt. Pyle in an alley just near there was hit in the leg. I ran over and put a dressing on it and brought him to the shelter of the cellar and later sent him up the hill.”

A wooden foot

Then comes a lesson in the odd expectations of combat.

“A piece of shrapnel sometime within the hour practically cut off Snacke’s right foot (he later lost it and now has an artificial one). I sent Beyer on up the hill with Snacke to give him plasma up there for I didn’t want him to get killed, too.

“Snacke said goodbye to me, and although we felt bad for him, he seemed glad and so did we in awhile, for he said: ‘I know that I’m going home now and I’ll get there alive. I can get along well with a wooden foot if I need to.’ From then on neither the patients nor we felt sorry for the wounded as long as they had a chance to live.”

Staggered and stunned

After a brief interlude of quiet, “the shells started coming in again. One man again was killed right there on the street.’’

And when “another man was hurt badly and couldn’t tell where he was going ... I just couldn’t (watch) him stagger,” Ingling writes.

What followed was one of the actions that likely led to Ingling being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

“I just stepped out and carried him into the cellar.”

But there wasn’t true safety there, either.

“A shell hit right in our cellar door (near where the stumbling man had been). Fragments flew this way and that. I was the one next to the shell yet all I felt of it was the blast that stunned me just a moment and I felt a sting in my right shoulder.”

He came out of his stupor to a stunning scene.

“The shell had actually blown our aid men and the walking wounded into a pile, and those we drug-in had to lay on top of one another. It looked like the picture of people drowning in the great flood at Noah’s ark. At least it seemed that way to me.”

With a captain from the 5th Infantry — the only other able-bodied soldier — Ingling began working the pile from the top.

“(We) got men from the next cellar to carry them away and we just kept at it till we finished.”

Death’s echo

“Toward evening, C. (company) under Capt. Cole set out on foot on the opposite side of the river to go up and take the high ground on the opposite side of the river in order to make it safer for the engineers to build a pontoon bridge. They apparently got along well until almost at the top. Then the Germans counterattacked with all they had.

“It was said that Capt. Cole was leading his men when suddenly he was hit in the chest with German machine gun fire and he died immediately.”

That was not the only loss.

“Donnelly, our good (very good) aid man was caring for a wounded sergeant when the Germans demanded that he give up. He was seen to go over to the Germans unwounded and with his arms in the air and was all right. But this spring his grave was found near Capt. Cole’s there on the east bank of the Moselle south of Metz.”

Trafficking in courage

As night fell, misery followed terror.

“It rained again. We had ... patients lying on the wet ground under what canvas we could find and under what blankets we could scrape up. Our artillery was a mile or two back of us firing as best they could to support our troops .... We could hear the German tanks screeching along the other bank. . . .

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