Main Street Electrical Parade

When Masters took off his helmet to wipe his brow, he found a bullet hole through the top. Masters ran to the first building on the outskirts of town. "I had this dead-end kid from Chicago I'd made my bodyguard. He came in close behind me, and then a number of men pulled up and we went from building to building cleaning out the place and captured a sizable batch of German paratroopers." Lieutenant Paul Leimkuehler gave a more vivid description of Masters's action: "He was leading, running down the main street like a madman, shooting up everything in his way." The company advanced and by March 7 was in Krefeld, on the banks of the Rhine. By some miracle the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked-electricity, hot water, flush toilets, telephones. They had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles of cognac. Private Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin ...»