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Mantachie World War II veteran remembers march through Europe

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal - 2/10/2023

Feb. 9—MANTACHIE — Sometimes the pages and documentaries of history make World War II's generals and government leaders appear to be larger than life.

That wasn't how George Patton wanted to appear to his troops.

After the Allied invasion, Patton's Third US Army marched through France, across the Rhine River and into Germany. Henry Clifton Cockrell was a corporal in the infantry, one of approximately 220,000 enlisted men — in addition to 9,600 officers — under Patton's command.

A lifelong resident of Mantachie, Cockrell, 98, remembers Patton as a hands-on general known to pay surprise visits to his troops.

"He would visit your division maybe every three or four days," Cockrell said. "He would just drive up. It wasn't a nice car. Sometimes it would be a jeep or maybe a halftrack. He'd say, 'How you like my vehicle?' He would act like regular people. 'How you boys getting treated?' Well, best we can."

As the number of living World War II veterans continues to fall, Cockrell's family has sought to preserve his stories.

If he has stories of individual heroics, he hasn't shared them. Instead, he presents a mix of mundane among the danger.

"Sometimes we'd go a week or two weeks and not shoot a gun," he said.

But war is never only mundane.

Cockrell's division was trained as replacement soldiers who would be called to the front lines after losses piled up.

After training at Southampton, England, Cockrell was part of an afternoon invasion force on D-Day that landed on Utah Beach.

Gunfire peppered the hull of the Higgins boat, causing Cockrell's group to delay its exit. Finally, troops were let out in high tide. Cockrell said he lost his rifle, but plenty were available on the beach.

The most intense resistance had moved on, but Cockrell and his mates were subject to occasional sniper fire, some of it from a German soldier dressed as a nun and standing in front of a church.

Churches were abundant, but did not mean refuge for American troops.

"The Germans knew about them too and had taken them," Cockrell said. "Somebody said, 'Let's go by and see that church yonder.' Well, that's what the Germans wanted you to do. Our officers were smarter than we were. They said, 'No we're not going to go and see.'"

One biscuit from home

Cockrell was 5-foot-6, 105 pounds when his draft notice reached the family farm in 1943.

Eventually, he'd face lighthearted taunts from captured German soldiers who awaited processing when his physical frame, and the fullness of his beard seemed to them a contradiction.

In truth, Cockrell was perhaps one biscuit too many from staying stateside. He passed his physical at the induction center, but when the clerk stamped "approved" on his papers, he told Cockrell, "Soldier, do you realize that if you had weighed 1 pound less, you would not have been eligible to serve? Welcome to the Army."

He had completed 10 of 15 weeks of basic training at Mineral Wells, Texas, when news came from home that a brother had died in a farm accident. The Army offered to pay for Cockrell to attend the funeral, albeit with a catch. He would have to start over with basic training when he got back.

He did not attend his brother's funeral.

Trainees went from Mineral Wells to New York City, where he sailed with 200,000 men aboard HMS Queen Mary to Northern England. Cockrell and his new friends made the trip to Southern England aboard converted freight trains.

In Southampton, troops learned they would be replacements for soldiers killed or wounded in the first wave of the invasion.

But while generals decided where and when to deploy infantry and how many, infantry often made their own decisions about the best ways to stay alive. One tactical maneuver for Cockrell was to volunteer for scout duty. He had noticed that Germans would often let scouts pass by in order to attack the main unit.

There were downsides to this. Scouts were also prone to become separated from their units. Scouts often hid for days while their units fought their way forward.

Once, the men were given an incentive: Take out a German tank with a bazooka and be sent home.

The bazooka was a heavy weapon. Cockrell and a friend carried one for days and never saw a German tank. They gave up and left the bazooka on the side of the road, where it was quickly picked up by two other infantrymen. The new hopefuls asked if Cockrell and his friend were finished with the bazooka.

He said they were.

The next day the company encountered a tank. The bazooka's new owners knocked it out of commission and were sent home.

Cockrell's group worked its way through France, into Belgium as relief help for the Battle of the Bulge, around German defenses at the Siegfried line and finally into Germany after the invasion.

They found crossing the Rhine — with German soldiers entrenched to protect their homeland — to be more dangerous for them than their afternoon D-Day invasion.

Cockrell compared the Rhine to the Mississippi River in size.

"It gave us more trouble than the beaches did," he said. "They had their army set up over there, camouflaged, and you couldn't see nothing."

It was on the landing day that Cockrell first encountered a German soldier face-to-face. Clifton's group had been ordered to clear an entrenchment when he found one man still there.

"He was the first one I ever saw," Cockrell said. "He didn't favor the Germans they'd been showing us. He looked like he was 12 to 15 years old, but he had a big rifle. He looked at me for two or three minutes then threw his weapon down.

"Man, you talk about a relief," Cockrell said.

American troops were charged with holding German soldiers until they could hand them off to others for processing and ultimately incarceration. But the sight of the diminutive Cockrell guarding anyone entertained others in his company.

"They got a laugh out of that," he said.

Cockrell encountered other German soldiers and found most of them to be well-educated with strong English language skills. Most didn't like their chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

"They would tell you how smart he was, but they thought he was going too far," Cockrell said.

As Cockrell's company pressed across the Rhine, they saw more and more German civilians.

Once the crossing was complete, the group entered a time of more marching than fighting.

Cockrell, when asked, prefers to share mostly the light-hearted stories of his service. He has other stories too, ones that are best summed up by the fact that he was one of only seven surviving members of his original unit.

What he saw

Cockrell and his surviving mates had marched into Czechoslovakia when Allied planes dropped leaflets to let them know that for them hostilities had ended. The war, at least officially, was over.

Cockrell's march through Germany and familiarity with the landscape made him a valuable commodity for continued service after only six months back in the states.

Among his last posts was Nuremberg to guard prisoners during the trials following the war. One assignment had his group picking up prisoners in a small town and bringing them back to Nuremberg.

As they neared Nuremberg, they noticed heavily armed soldiers waiting on them.

"We must be transporting someone important," Clifton thought. "I wonder who it is."

Turns out the famous prisoner was Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second in command.

Although in hindsight, Cockrell realizes the events that unfolded before his eyes from 1943 until 1947 were a small part of a greater effort to rid Europe of Nazi occupation, it took years for him to process.

To a skinny kid from a tiny Mississippi town, it was a terrifying and often traumatic introduction to the broad, dangerous world.

"Most of us green hands had never seen the ocean," he recalled.

They saw that and a lot more.

PARRISH ALFORD is the college sports editor and columnist for the Daily Journal. Contact him at parrish.alford@journalinc.com.

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