"Ole Man Sides"

Years ago when my children were little and I was a bit younger myself I knew an old man that lived in Pleasanton, Texas named Ed Sides.  I first met Mr. Sides in Mason, Texas where I lived with my folks.  My Dad was the preacher of the Church of Christ there and he had met Mr. Sides, taught him the gospel and baptized him into Christ.  I remember him as a jolly old fellow and always full of humor and mischief. Mr. Sides was a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman and went door to door all over the county selling those cleaners.  He tried hard to sell one to my Mom but they were pretty pricey in those days and vacuum cleaners were not high on the list of priorities for a family with 6 kids on a preacher’s salary.  As a boy in Mason I didn’t really get to know Mr. Sides much until years later when we moved to Pleasanton, Texas.  Mr. Sides by coincidence had also migrated there and settled down there in the sunset of his years.  I was grown and married by that time and began to get to know “Ole man Sides” as my father used to refer to him.  One of my duties as a deacon of the church in those days was to go to the old folks homes and elderly shut-ins and serve communion and visit them at home.   I found that service to be sometimes difficult but often rewarding as I spent time with those old folks in the last years of their lives.  Sometimes I would take my kids with me and the old folks always enjoyed that.  Mr. Side’s wife had passed on and at this time he was living in a government low-income housing apartment.  Mr. Sides had diabetes and he was always having problems in circulation to his feet and lower extremities. He told me he had stepped on sticker burs one day and having little feeling in his feet he didn’t realize that his feet were becoming badly infected. Long story short, sadly the doctors had to remove his legs just under the knees because they could not control the infection and felt it was the best way to preserve his life.  After the surgery he spent the rest of his life in the local Retama nursing home in Pleasanton.  One Sunday while I was visiting him there he told me a most amazing story.  Mr. Sides had fought in World War 2 as a crewmember of a Sherman tank.  I can’t remember what unit he told me he was a member of but I remember he told me that he was fighting during the battle of the bulge.  He may have been part of Patton’s 3^rd army but at this point I can’t verify it.  As a side note here, the Sherman’s were a much inferior tank to its German counterpart.  In fact they were so badly outmatched that the Sherman tanks were considered death traps when engaging the German tanks.  Our Sherman’s had much lighter armor and smaller guns, compared to the German tanks with much thicker armor and the big 88 inch gun that could easily make scrap metal out of our tanks with one shot.  The Sherman’s best advantage while engaging the German tank was to maneuver to get an up close shot and if possible shoot the softer rear armor or catch the tank while passing perpendicular and hit the thinner side armor near the turret. In a straight up shoot out with the German tanks the Sherman’s didn’t stand a chance.  The German “Tiger” tank could knock out a Sherman from much longer distances.

Mr. Sides told me that during the bulge he had won a silver star.  Time now fades my memory but he may have meant he had gotten a unit citation and not a personal silver star.  The Silver Star is for bravery in action above and beyond the call of duty.  If indeed it was not a personal medal awarded to him then it should have been.  This is the story of how he won that medal as he related it to me. “ We were traveling down a little dirt road, he said.  The weather was snowy and cold and we were going slow not knowing what was up ahead.  The grousers on our tracks (the metal cleats that grab the ground on a track vehicle) were worn out cause we couldn’t hardly get resupplied.  The German’s had cut us off and we had to make do with what we had.  As we went down a little hill and were turning a little to the right the ice on the road made our tank begin to slide and after a bit we slid right off the road and landed in a ditch.  We tried to move back and forth and try to rock the tank out of the hole but it was no good , we were stuck.  As luck would have it though the tank had landed in the muck in such a way as to be kinda hidden from view from further down the road.  There was a kind of embankment that the tank was wedged against and we were able to elevate the barrel of our gun and turn the turrent over the ledge a bit and had some movement of the turret.  Wouldn’t you know that after a while a German tank come clamoring up the same road headed up our way and we knew we were in trouble.  We sat there quiet a while and then got to figuring what we were gonna do.  We thought about just leaving the tank sit and head back up the road and hope we could flag down somebody to come pull us out, but when that German tank appeared we didn’t have much choice anymore.  We knew that as soon as we fired the jig was gonna be up cause we probably wouldn’t get a second chance.  Maybe we could just fire and then abandon ship and make a run for it.  We decided in the end to just take the shot and hope for the best.  So we waited until the tank got close enough that we could get a pretty clear shot at the turret.  We hoped maybe we could at least disable the turret or something. We fired our gun and I’m not just pullin your leg I saw that shell arc and hit that turret square on and bounce up straight off the top. We figured we were gonna see that turret turn straight back at us and that would probably be it, but would you believe that tank just sat there idling on the road and did nothin. We waited a minute and expected it to do something but to our surprise, nuthin.  After a while we couldn’t believe our luck and decided it was time to get out of our tank.  We strapped on some hand grenades and took our 45’s and started skulking down the hill toward the tank.  It never moved or showed any inclination to fight.  We couldn’t believe our eyes but decided we had better try to finish it off if we could. Finally we snuck up to the tank and not seeing any movement, we jumped up on top of that tank and opened the hatch ready to shove some grenades down the hatch when to our surprise we peered into the tank and low and behold every crewman in that tank was dead.  We could only figure that somehow that shell we lobed at it had created such a concussion inside that tank that it killed those men. The good Lord was with us that day I’ll tell ya.’

Many years have gone by since Mr. Sides told me that story.  I have since learned much more about the battle of the bulge and what it meant for Ed and his crewman to have made the choice to stand and fight with that German Tiger rather than to just abandon ship and retreat.  Those men knew that if they let that German tank keep going up the road unchallenged than there were many fellow soldiers behind them that would have to face that tank with much less than a Sherman to meet the challenge.  Behind them were men huddled in cold snow filled foxholes with little food and little ammo and surrounded by the German Army.  Ed’s crew made a difficult choice that day, an unselfish choice.  I think a courageous choice to say the least.  Thankfully the good lord allowed Ed to survive that battle.

Today as I watched my grandson hunt Easter eggs for the first time and watched children breaking a rabbit shaped piñata I thought about “ole man sides”.  I hope he enjoyed the dividends of peace in his remaining years as much as I have enjoyed them. He earned them.  The dividends of peace have been to me a precious gift given by men like “ole man sides.”