Max Hummel: Sights set on carnage

By Chris Rosenblum

The remains of D-Day floated past Max Hummel.

Clothing, gas cans and life preservers dotted the choppy sea off Omaha Beach. Waves lapped at wrecked landing craft. A transport ship burned.

Bodies bobbed everywhere.

More carnage awaited once Cpl. Hummel waded ashore from LST 355 on June 8, 1944, two days after the Normandy invasion.

"It was horrible," said Hummel, 85, of Pine Grove Mills. "That's when it stopped being a great adventure, and I started filling up with hate. All those dead Americans. It made me grow up right there."

Before long, Hummel and the rest of the 200th Field Artillery Battalion gathered at nearby St. Laurent with their 155 mm "Long Tom" cannons.

Their war had begun.

From Normandy's dense hedgerows to a shattered bridge in Remagen, Germany, Hummel served as an observer. Ahead of Battery A's positions, he oriented the guns toward enemy lines and directed fire to targets as far as 15 miles away.

He spent many an hour in observation posts on promontories, peering through a mounted telescope or field glasses as his batterymates' eyes.

"As long as they needed us," Hummel said. "It could go all day long, or they could pull us in a half-day."

Back in Clearfield, though, he started out guiding horses instead of shells. Hummel joined the National Guard calvary unit in late 1940 for a one-year hitch.

"I thought I could save some money and go to college," he said. "Four years and eight months later, I got out of the service."

Once the Army absorbed the unit, artillery replaced the horses. The new battalion went to Camp Shelby in Mississippi and to North Carolina for months of training. Gun crews learned to fire the massive, wheeled Long Toms and drag them with tractors.

Hummel studied how to survey terrain.

"I liked it at the time," he said. "Because I was in recon and I didn't have to pick up a 95-pound projectile."

A trip on the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner brought him to England for more training exercises. Then came the real thing.

Pegged for the Normandy invasion's third wave and attached to the 29th Division, Hummel stood on a transport 1,500 yards offshore and watched the assault unfold. Planes streaked through the overcast sky. Battleships in the huge armada roared their 16-inch guns.

"We had a grandstand seat," Hummel said.

Later, in the Norman and Belgian countryside, he occupied many spectator perches.

Sometimes, they would be a mile or two from his battery, when it had moved and needed fresh surveying information. Whenever possible, Hummel chose crossroads because he could pinpoint their locations on maps, making distance calculations easier.

Other posts were closer to the front. Hummel tracked shots and called in adjustments -- left 200 yards, forward 300. When gun crews heard "Fire for effect," they were in business.

More often than not, Hummel settled in abandoned enemy observation posts.

"Because they were the best posts around," he said. "Europe is one of the most surveyed continents in the world, and the Germans knew precisely where the best lookouts were."

The problem was, they didn't forget. Hummel found that out near St. Lo while crawling into a well-dug enemy post. He stood up for a peek down into the town, but haze obscured his view. Back into the trench he went.

Bullets ripping the grass told Hummel the Germans below could see him just fine.

"They fired a machine gun where I was a scant instant before," he said.

Battery A marched through Paris as liberators, but its finest hour came during the frigid Battle of the Bulge, the desperate German bid to break through Allied lines in December 1944.

In the face of the surprise offensive, the 200th retreated to the Belgian town of Eupen and set up. All hands were needed to stop the onslaught, and Hummel found himself carrying shells.

"Someone said we established an artillery record," he said. "We fired four guns from 12 o'clock (midnight) to 7 in the morning."

That black Dec. 19 night, the battery shot off 536 rounds. During the next few days, it stopped four tank attacks, wearing out its tubes in the process.

Unlike many soldiers, Hummel dodged frostbite by wearing hunting socks and leather moccasins from home.

But his brain froze on one reconnaissance trip.

He and his survey crew were halfway down a hill, returning to base, when the gun crews yelled up, "Fire mission!" Facing the muzzles but knowing the shells would pass overhead, Hummel shouted back, "Go ahead!"

The blast left him totally deaf for a day.

"I had to learn to read lips," he said.

In April, he set up his last post near the Remagen Bridge on the Rhine River, then went home on a long furlough. He was still in Clearfield when the Germans surrendered.

"Everybody was going bumper to bumper through the town, horns blaring, people shouting," Hummel said.

Discharged that summer, he went on to delivery and brickyard jobs before going to Penn State for an American history degree. There, he also met his eventual second wife, Martha.

Though he built rather than destroyed during a long career in construction, his Army days proved useful in one sense.

"I did my own survey work, naturally," he said.

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.