In 1943, Merrill Rice was a teenager living on the S Road in South Bristol and working across the Damariscotta River in East Boothbay – until he was drafted.
In 1944, Rice was wounded twice – at Utah Beach on D-Day and again during a harrowing crossing of the Rhine River. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and saw the horrors of a German concentration camp.
In a late summer interview with The Lincoln County News, Rice recounted his time in uniform. After he was drafted, he went to boot camp at Camp Carson in Colorado. “We didn’t even finish our basic training,” Rice said. “They needed troops, I suppose.”
“I went from [Camp Carson] to Tennessee on maneuvers,” Rice said. “We didn’t even finish maneuvers, because the war was getting closer and closer.”
Rice trained as infantry but ultimately served in the 168th Engineer Combat Battalion. “We did everything,” he said.
From an easy chair in the living room of his Bristol home, Rice recalled his first, short-lived foray into combat. In the assault on Utah Beach, shrapnel from a Bouncing Betty – a German S-Mine – hit him in the right arm. “They come up about four, five feet high and they explode,” he said. “That shrapnel’s what got me in the elbow.”
“If you see [a Bouncing Betty] coming up over the ground, you get right down and a lot of it would miss you – go over you,” Rice said.
In addition to Bouncing Bettys, American soldiers had to dodge fire from “pill boxes” or bunkers. Impervious to air strikes, the enemy shelters had small vents for enemy fighters to fire on the invading troops. “They just pick them off like shooting ducks,” he said.
Eventually, the American forces “put flamethrowers on the tanks and brought them up to the little peephole – you either came out or you’re going to be cooked,” Rice said.
Rice spent the next month in a field hospital in England with his arm in a cast.
“It healed up fine,” Rice said. “If I’d wanted to complain about it, I probably could have gone home, but I went right back to the front.”
Shortly thereafter, Rice, with three fellow engineers, found himself with the unenviable assignment of transporting infantry across the Rhine River in small, plywood boats. “Take the infantry across, then you come back,” Rice said. “Well, if you got back, you was lucky.”
“The Germans knew what we were going to do,” Rice said. The crossing began at midnight. German soldiers at the top of a cliff on the other side of the river “dropped a hand grenade right in the boat,” he said, wounding Rice for the second time, this time in the leg.
Rice, however, fared much better than some of the boat’s passengers. “I just took one look at one guy… I knew I couldn’t help him,” he said. Two other soldiers “was hurt, bad, but I managed to help them out, get them up on the shore.”
“I don’t know whether they ever lived or not. I couldn’t stay to help them,” Rice said.
“I wasn’t wounded bad in my leg – just a flesh wound,” Rice said. Nevertheless, the young soldier found himself in a deadly struggle – not only against the Germans, high on the cliff, but also against the powerful current of the Rhine.
“I could hear the Germans right up over my head, talking,” Rice said. “We started back across after the grenade hit the boat… We was supposed to get right back where we started from, to pick up more troops and bring them back.”
Heavy fire from the Germans brought the mission to an abrupt end. “I jumped overboard. I didn’t want to get shot to death,” Rice said. Unfortunately, the water offered little comfort. “I couldn’t swim,” he said. “I could just dogpaddle and stay up for awhile.”
Rice credits Edgar Kelsey, from Bath, for saving his life. “He see I was floundering around in the water, so he got us back to the side of the boat,” Rice said. “I had one arm on the side of the boat and [Kelsey] did, too, and we paddled all the way back across the river, hanging on the side of the boat.”
Rice quickly discarded his heavy gear – “my rifle, my helmet, everything” – leaving himself defenseless, except for a few hand grenades.
“I could hear the Germans right up over my head [but] I didn’t dare to throw them,” he said. “I didn’t know the height of where the Germans were up over my head. If I didn’t make it, [the grenades would] come back down, and it’d be just like taking your own life.”
“I don’t know how long we drifted down the river, because there’s quite a current there,” Rice said. Eventually, the two soldiers arrived at the other side. “There was some troops waiting for us. We didn’t know who they were or what they were or nothing at the time.”
Rice and Kelsey showed the soldiers their dog tags. “They was American soldiers, so they took us in and kept us there that night. They got us back to our outfit the next day.”
Now, Rice questions the judgment of the men who ordered that boat across the Rhine. “It was stupid, because the Germans were just waiting over there. After a while, they got hold of a tank and the Air Force and in no time at all – half an hour, an hour’s time – it was all over. That part.
“They should have done it in the first place, but, of course, your life wasn’t nothing because there was always someone to take your place.”
At some point – after 65 years, the details are fuzzy – Rice spent a month in the town of Gera in East Germany, where he witnessed the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. Behind the German barracks, there was “a great big barbecue pit,” Rice said. “They got rid of the bodies, just like that.”
“There was French slaves and Jews – they had no use for them, but too bad they had to do that to them,” Rice said.
Rice remained in Europe until the end of the war and saw action in the famous Battle of the Bulge. “I don’t know just where I was. I must have been back behind the lines,” he said. “A lot of our outfit was right up to the front and they got captured.”
The German prisoner of war camps left their mark on the men. “As soon as the war was over, they come back to our outfit again and you would hardly know them,” Rice said. “They’d lost a lot of weight.”
The emaciated prisoners, at least, were alive and free. Other men – Lincoln County men – didn’t return. Horace Sanford lived on Elm Street in Damariscotta. “I knew him several years ago. He used to caddy at the golf course when I did,” Rice said.
Sanford, like Rice, served in the 168th Engineer Combat Battalion. “He was in headquarters company. I was in A company,” Rice explained.
Rice doesn’t know how Sanford died. Neither, apparently, does the Army. Dean Jewett, a Saco man and another member of the 168th, wrote a history of the battalion, Hinder Forward, and self-published the volume in 2001.
The title of the book is a play on words based on the code name of the battalion, Hinder (“to create difficulties… resulting in delay or obstruction”), coupled with the word “forward” – at once a contradiction to hinder and a reference to the forward group of a unit – the men nearest the action.
According to Jewett, on Dec. 16, 1944, “A weapons carrier, driven by Horace Sanford, of Damariscotta, Maine, with three men from Co[mpany] B… was sent on a mission to retrieve some material previously located by our recon. The truck ran into an ambush…”
One of Sanford’s passengers died in the ambush. German soldiers captured Sanford and the other two passengers and transported the men deep into Germany. Eventually, the Russian army set the men free. The passengers returned safely, nearly five months after the ambush.
According to Jewett, “Sanford never made it. His body was found in Germany and he was buried in the American cemetery in Luxembourg.”
A man from Rice’s hometown of South Bristol – Stanley Alley – also died in the war. “He went in about the same time I did. He was in the infantry but he never came back,” Rice said.
Rice and two brothers, Walter Rice, 89, of Bristol and William Rice, 87, of Damariscotta, were more fortunate. William enlisted in the Navy shortly before Merrill was drafted. Walter, like Merrill, was in the Army, but Walter was in the infantry. Merrill said he didn’t know Walter was in the Army until the war was over. “It could have been him in that boat that I helped up on the shore but it wasn’t.”
As the war in Europe came to a close, Walter boarded a vessel for Japan. Before he saw action in the Pacific, “The war was over there, so he was lucky,” Merrill said.
Merrill Rice made his way west, to the city of Le Havre in northern France and later to the United States, where he left the service at the end of the war in 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart and an Oak Leaf Cluster for his injuries. “I gave them to my grandson,” he said.
Rice didn’t meet Jewett, the Saco man and author of Hinder Forward, until after the book’s publication. “If I’d have known at the time he was writing a book, I could give him a lot of information,” Rice said. “It’s not in that book, what I had done, but he didn’t know me.”
“I don’t know how come I looked him up,” Rice said, but after the publication of the book, Rice paid Jewett a visit. “It was on a Sunday morning,” he said. “He was getting ready to go to church. I only talked with him about 10 minutes. I wished I’d have talked longer but he had to go to church.”
Before Rice left, he bought a copy of Hinder Forward for $50. “I needed it,” he said.
Rice has read the book twice and referred to it often during the interview, citing it as an authority – “all the information anybody would ever want” – on the 168th. Jewett gave Rice the addresses of several fellow World War II veterans and the inspiration to contact the men.
Finding veterans able and willing to discuss the war has been difficult. A man Rice knows only as “Simmons” served in the 168th. Simmons lived on a small island off the coast of Friendship. Rice found someone on the mainland who knew Simmons and was willing to take him to the island.
“He says, ‘You’re two years too late.’ [Simmons] had passed away. But he says, ‘I’ll take you out on the island to see his friends if you want to.’ I said ‘No.’ I said, ‘If he was out there, I would go,'” Rice said.
Rice tracked another man, Kimball, to a nursing home in Brewer. “He didn’t want to talk. I don’t know why. He was waiting for his wife to come home.”
Rice met another fellow veteran, although he can’t remember the man’s name, in Harpswell. “He was in the bedroom. He was a long time coming out. He had one leg taken off.”
“I took one look at him. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it’s not what you think happened.'” The man lost his leg to disease, not the war. “He says, ‘I’ve probably got to have the other one taken off.’ A little while afterwards, I see he had passed away,” Rice said.
Another vet, in Hallowell, “was busy” when Rice came to visit. “He had a friend coming to work on his truck. He didn’t want to talk,” Rice said. “He was a man, 80 or 85. He had a motorcycle. He was enjoying life.”
Tucked in an envelope with slips of papers containing names and addresses, Rice keeps an obituary he read in the Portland Press Herald. “I recognized his face,” he said, gesturing to the man’s headshot. “I never knew that guy. I knew him in a way, because…” he trailed off.
“I’m just lucky to be here – what I went through,” he said.
