Bill Biehler
Age: 87
Born: Jan. 22, 1923
Hometown: Summit, N.J.
Residence: Palm Desert
Military branch: U.S. Army; 3rd Army; 90th Infantry Division; 357th Infantry Regiment; Rifle Company; Company K
Years served: July 15, 1943- Dec. 30, 1945
Rank: Private first class
Family: Wife Janet; four children, Ted Dodd of Los Angeles, Margaret Motta of Incline Village, Nev., Randy Biehler of Tomales and Paul Biehler of Kelseyville; four grandchildren
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
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Private First Class Bill Biehler, a rifleman with the 90th Infantry Division, was hit twice by enemy fire while fighting through Europe with Patton's Third Army during World War II.
The first time wasn't too bad, Biehler said.
He was hit above his left knee by a piece of hot shrapnel that “didn't go very deep,” he said.
“It really wasn't bleeding. The heat had cauterized it.”
There was plenty of blood the second time around.
The men were fighting in the Battle of Metz in France when Biehler, carrying a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), was caught in the sights of a German sniper. The enemy fired an 8 mm bullet that found its mark, ripping through Biehler's upper left arm.
“I saw the flash and started to turn — that's what saved me,” he said. “He had me nailed.”
The sniper was perched in the window of a building about 100 yards away.
“It felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat,” he said.
The bullet hit Biehler's wallet, which he carried in his front pocket, before the projectile continued on its path.
Biehler had surgery and was hospitalized for about three months. His last stop was a rehabilitation hospital in England, where, “they just tried to put us back in shape,” he said. “We hiked, played volleyball — they had no physical therapy in those days.
“When the Battle of the Bulge started, officers would go through the hospitals and anyone who had a combat infantry badge was put back into combat,” he said. “They desperately needed experienced combat infantrymen anyone who was pretty much healed up was sent back.”
So Biehler was sent back to join the 90th Infantry Division that had, by that time, made its way into Frankfurt, Germany.
Biehler, who spoke German, was assigned to a three-man military police team that operated German cities overtaken by Allied troops until the military government arrived.
Biehler was drafted in the U.S. Army during his sophomore year at Rutgers. Although he already had more than a year of college experience under his belt, he wanted no part of being an officer.
“In the infantry, you don't want to be a lieutenant,” he said. “In Normandy alone, my platoon had 17 lieutenants” killed or wounded during four months of battle.
After 17 weeks of infantry replacement training at Camp Fannin in Texas, the men were shipped overseas to England in May 1944.
The men were being trained to replace the thousands and thousands of men expected to be killed or wounded on D-Day (June 6) and beyond. Traveling in a huge convoy of about 120 ships, zigzagging across the Atlantic to avoid enemy submarine attacks, it took two weeks to arrive in Liverpool.
“We could only go as fast as the slowest ship in the convoy,” he said. “Liberty ships only go 8 mph.”
Arriving in Liverpool on May 16, 1944, the men were sent by night train to Barnstaple, in the south of England.
“That's where they gave us the weapons,” he said. “That's the first time they gave us live ammunition. I was in the first group of replacements the 90th division received.”
The replacements sailed from Weymouth, England, landing on Utah Beach about two weeks after the D-Day landings.
The men came under occasional artillery fire after making the landing. Soon after, Biehler and seven other men were moved forward to catch up with the division.
Biehler joined his platoon at the front lines, about 10 miles from the Normandy coast.
“When I joined my platoon, there were only 25 people instead of 50,” he said. “Fifty is full strength.”
While he was just getting acclimated, “I said ‘Who are those people 100 yards over the hedge rows?' They said, ‘They're German paratroopers.'”
The paratroopers of the 6th Regiment were battle-hardened veterans who had fought in North Africa and Italy.
“Here, we'd never fired a shot in combat,” Biehler said.
Biehler and four other men were sent through the 6-foot-high, 3-foot-thick hedgerows — a nearly impenetrable mass of bushes, shrubs and rocks — to get information about the enemy's position.
“The first two guys were killed by a German 88 (mm) artillery shell,” he said. “The rest of us ran on to the field,” and the enemy cut loose with machine gun fire.
“We hit the ground and started to shoot back,” he said.
He soon noticed he was all alone on the field — the other men had hurried back behind the line — and he quickly joined them.
“The told me they saw bullets hitting all around me,” he said.
“The Germans attacked us 14 times in two days — and they had tanks,” he said. “We didn't have tanks, yet. This was before they got the tanks ashore. Artillery, mortars and P-47s (U.S. fighter planes) — they were really what saved us.”
The P-47s, armed with eight .50-caliber machine guns, a 500-pound bomb and some smaller bombs, “they knocked out the tanks,” he said. “They were the infantryman's best friend.”
