The day-to-day experience of leading an American infantry company into the heart of German and beyond is given real feeling as well as facts in this first-person World War II memoir. What it lacks in taut adventure it makes up for in authenticity.
Charles B. MacDonald testifies to the grim nature of war in many forms, including a night retreat under bombardment and advancing into enemy flak positions. Boredom and terror were frequent companions; so too was death.
The time we spend with MacDonald and his company are in places that don’t get much attention in histories of the war. But calling it rear-echelon duty isn’t right, either. They had more than enough to do.
It was a day of K-rations, of glorious sunshine, of adjusting artillery fire, of testing telephone lines after enemy shelling, of signing one’s name to the envelopes of countless letters, of requesting supplies from battalion, of one and a hundred little things that were becoming more and more routine. But always there was the deep, fearful dread of the enemy mortar shell that dropped unheralded from the sky, of the artillery round that screeched a fiendish warning as it approached – and the deep dread too of the darkness that would come tonight just as it had come last night and just as it would come the next night and the next.
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| U.S. troops at rest in Germany, 1945. MacDonald's focus throughout the book is on the men he commanded. "When you call a company a rifle company, you are speaking of the men who actually fight wars," he writes in the book's Preface. Image from https://www.ww2online.org/image/american-soldiers-resting-outside-germany-1945 |
MacDonald served in the 23rd Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division, a storied unit still in service today. When he picked up his first command, his company had finished clearing the French port city of Brest. Before his war was over, MacDonald’s troops would see action in four countries: France, Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia.
It was hazardous duty, though not always exciting. As in the above passage, MacDonald often draws on the numbing routine of day-to-day life, like his first days on the front line, hearing reports of an enemy flame-shooting armored car while keeping a quiet watch in a damaged German pillbox whose gun apertures pointed the other way. In front of him, his soldiers were hunched in foxholes and slit trenches, trying to catch sleep while registering explosions off in the distance.
Tanks were called “cans” on open radio calls; a strange affectation as MacDonald recalls it since the Germans knew that code word well by then. Helmets doubled as sinks for washing and, in a pinch, as trench latrines. When sleep did come, MacDonald recalls it was often interrupted, not just by the sounds of war, but nerves, too:
Sometimes a sleeper would snore so loudly that I thought surely the enemy would hear, and I would awaken him and tell him to turn over. I didn’t know what I expected the Germans to do if they heard it.
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| Built to protect German troops along the Belgian front, pillboxes like these, damaged by battle, became shelters for MacDonald and his men. He recalls their musty odor and faint candle light - as well as the fact they were facing the wrong way - with no nostalgia. Image from https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/siegfried-line-bunkers.html |
For a long time, MacDonald and his men deal with regular bombardments from a distant hill, but no fatalities. He wonders how long his luck will hold out. Then the company gets moved into what is called a “quiet area” near the Belgian town of Krinkelt, five days before it is enveloped by a surprise German counteroffensive. This was part of what became the famous Battle of the Bulge.
Throughout his book, MacDonald maintains a humble tone. The title of one of the Bulge chapters is “We Run Like Hell.” He details his terror during the German attack and his shame of losing control of his men after holding out for a day. Later, he is informed the company’s brief pocket defence was long enough to scramble German plans to bring armor across the roads. He remains abashed:
I was almost happy that the German offensive was on a large scale. My men had done an excellent job against heavy odds, and those who had died were not dead because of some personal failing of mine. The realization made me want to cry again.
Throughout the book candid stock is taken by the author regarding his inexperience and youth, and his doubts about measuring up when the battle comes. One of the pleasures of the memoir is sharing his discovery he does have what it takes to lead and look after his troops.
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| Where MacDonald found himself during the Bulge defensive would later be known as the Battle of Elsenborn Ridge. Above, U. S. troops on the move near Krinkelt during the battle. MacDonald was missing and thought dead for a time before he found his way back to his reformed line. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge |
“It seemed incredible that this group of hardened combat veterans could accept an inexperienced youth of twenty-one to lead them into battle simply because he happened to come to them wearing a set of flashy bars on his shoulders,” he writes.
This book was first published in 1947 when the war was fresh in mind; MacDonald writes to the conventions of the time. He blurs episodes of profanity, drinking, and womanizing and doesn’t give real names for some of the deaths he witnessed, apparently out of sensitivity.
There are still episodes of startling candor. In a couple of places, he records what sound like sexual assaults against German women. He calls one a case of “violently propositioning.” Prisoners of war are shot dead. MacDonald is later told one guy made a run for it, unconvincingly.
MacDonald is unsettlingly matter-of-fact about such things: Company G today committed a war crime. They are going to win the war, however, so I don’t suppose it really matters.
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| One of the soldiers under MacDonald's command at Elsenborn Ridge was Richard Cowan, a heavy machine gun operator. MacDonald witnesses him still firing at oncoming Germans as the rest of his troops ran. Cowan was killed in action the following day. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cowan_(soldier) |
Part of this cruelty was occasioned by deep resentment MacDonald and his comrades felt for the Germans and the war. Having said farewell to families and watched friends die was a lot to get past. So when he could drive German families from their homes, he wasn’t bothered.
Once he recalls being asked for protection from Eastern European prisoners his unit had just finished liberating. His dry reply: “Tell them it wasn’t us who brought these people here.”
I got Company Commander as a Bantam War Book, a series I got immersed in as a boy. I knew the title but never read it then; if I had, I wonder if I would have been able to digest its tough message, raised as I was on John Wayne and “Sgt. Rock” comic books.
Today’s reader may be more familiar with the “Band Of Brothers” miniseries, which also details company-level wartime experiences. The thing about MacDonald’s account is it feels like there’s less winning. His guys are running away in the Battle of the Bulge, not holding out like Captain Winters and his men in the HBO series.
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| MacDonald tells of one item he took from a German prisoner, a Walther pistol. Above is the pistol, which has stayed with the MacDonald family. The current owner still fires it but adds he must be careful of "slide bite" when doing so. Image from https://www.gunboards.com/threads/charles-b-macdonald-pistol-from-his-book-company-commander.1231027/ |
Regardless of any expectations, will general readers like Company Commander? When not grim it is often static, and rather thickly detailed on intricacies of infantry company operations. But MacDonald walks you through such things as the experience of leading people into battle, walking through silent woods: “Your nerves were keyed to such a pitch until it was a relief sometimes you run into trouble.”
His takes on his commanding officers are often subtle snarks. Just two years after the war, he wasn’t looking to burn bridges with any former work colleagues. But he lets some irritation show.
One colonel calls out from an upper-story window to order MacDonald to lead his platoons forward, no doubt not wishing to leave a fine meal. MacDonald at this point hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and was told he would be able to rest after taking the next objective, which became the next objective, then the one after that.
“The farther we go tonight, the less we’ll have to do tomorrow,” was the colonel’s justification for stretching MacDonald’s company onward; a lie, since the plan was to press on even further tomorrow regardless.
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| By March, 1945, MacDonald and his company were moving toward Leipzig. Enemy opposition was often in the form of repurposed flak batteries, deadly from a distance, but easier to manage than regular German troops from close range. Progress was much faster as both sides realized the end was near. Image from https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/flak-gunner-for-the-luftwaffe/ |
MacDonald relates the harrowing experience of riding outside a tank as it barreled its way to Leipzig, one of Germany’s largest cities:
An antitank gun or a tank was firing at us, I decided. I could not tell in the excitement from what direction the enemy was firing, but I thought it was from the north, and a sudden wave of selfishness made me thankful that I was riding on the opposite side of the tank. A sudden fury at my own selfish fear made me think of the other men on the tanks, and I prayed through set lips. The men around me seemed to hold on to the tank for dear life, as if tighter grips lessened their vulnerability to the enemy fire, their faces frozen in combined expressions of fear and amazement.
By this point in the war, avoiding death seemed more possible, which made their lives more dear. The fatalistic resignation they had lived with since the Bulge, of instant death at every turn, was beginning to wane.
The final push into Leipzig and beyond is more exciting in an old war movie sort of way. It’s the one part of the book my ten-year-old self would have enjoyed. At the same time, after the more soul-searing descriptions of life in a quiet, frost-covered front and the sudden apocalypse of the Bulge, those last 100 or so pages are anticlimactic. You know he survived and the Allies won, so you aren’t so invested in the progress of the 2nd Division as concerned if anyone else will get it.
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| Charles B. MacDonald, as he was in 1945. He was an author of several more war-themed books after Company Commander, including A Time For Trumpets, which details the Battle of the Bulge. A military historian, he died in 1990. Image from https://medium.com/the-spyglass/leadership-does-it-change-over-time-a-review-of-company-commander-d5eaa9b4bce8 |
Most of the dead we encounter in the book are already found on the ground. It took several days for Graves Registration to remove the first set of corpses MacDonald saw, lying under pillbox ruins. Later, much later, he would see German dead, lying en masse where they fell to bombing runs: I wondered why the Germans turned green so quickly after death, and then I remembered that someone had once said that it was due to a diet deficiency.
The book is very observational like that, quietly pulling back layers of sanitized spin to put forward hard thoughts in a firm, non-sensationalized form. Strategy and tactics are discussed, too; but in the main, MacDonald’s focus is on the human side of war and its immediate aftermath. There is a draining slackness to the narrative throughout. Yet when McDonald ends on a note of weathered grace for how it turned out, it feels satisfyingly earned given what we saw him go through.
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