They Were All Young Kids

“I like to dramatize this moment,” Jim Flowers liked to say, “by saying that I’m now standing in the middle of Hell, with all these flames shooting up around me.” The moment he was describing was the moment a shell from a flat-trajectory 75-millimeter anti-tank gun penetrated his tank as he stood in the turret scouring the brush for the location of the gun that had bounced a shell off his tank only a moment before. Flowers would wind up leaving both of his legs on what he described as a “piece of bloody French real estate.” Nine of the 20 men in his platoon would be killed in what was a defining event for the 712th Tank Battalion. Only a week since they entered combat on July 3, 1944, it was the first time an entire platoon was wiped out. It would not be the last, but the 712th Tank Battalion would go on, in 11 months of almost daily combat, to acquire one of the best records for any independent tank battalion in the European Theater of World War 2. As Jim Flowers was often called on to tell his story at battalion reunions, it was also one of the first war stories Aaron Elson heard when he attended his first reunion of the battalion, with which his father served. Flowers and his gunner, Jim Rothschadl, lay in no man’s land for two nights before being rescued. One day Flowers suggested to Elson that he interview Rothschadl, who he said was an American Indian. It seemed odd, Elson thought, that a native American should be named Rothschadl, but he looked up Rothschadl’s address and it was right smack in the middle of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. So Elson went to Minnesota. Turns out Rothschadl’s father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant in Fargo, North Dakota who bought farmland that was swindled from the Native Americans with the help of an act of Congress, and the swindlers in turn financed Rothschadl’s father’s purchase at 15 percent. But I digress. Elson went on to interview several other surviving members of the platoon, as well as the brother of one member who was killed in the battle, and an infantryman who followed the tanks down the hill and was wounded, captured and had a leg amputated by a German doctor. Their stories are told in “They Were All Young Kids,” which is expanded from the Hill 122 chapter in “Tanks for the Memories,” Elson’s first book.