Within minutes Boche Buster and the other vehicles rolled up to the front gate to be met by the castle’s jubilant defenders—white, black, American, French, and German. As journalist Meyer Levin set about interviewing everyone in sight, Lee and Basse walked over to Elliot and Sherman. Feigning irritation, Lee looked Elliot in the eye and said, simply, “What kept you?” The four Americans all dissolved in laughter, fueled by equal parts exhaustion and relief.

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Later, as members of the rescue force began removing the dead and caring for the wounded, the French notables were driven off in hastily requisitioned automobiles. They were on their way to Innsbruck to be suitably feted by a succession of senior Allied officers, after which Reynaud, Daladier, and the rest would return to France to resume their careers—and, undoubtedly, their acrimonious political disagreements.

For Lee and his men, the battle’s aftermath was more anticlimactic. The seven Americans and the surviving Wehrmacht soldiers all piled unceremoniously into the back of a two-and-a-half-ton truck for the ride back to Kufstein. Once there, the Germans were marched off to a POW cage; the African American soldiers rejoined their unit; and Lee, Basse, and the other tankers settled in for well-deserved chow and sleep. Jack Lee and Harry Basse were later recognized for their leadership during the battle for Castle Itter—the former with the Distinguished Service Cross and the latter with the Silver Star. At the end of May, Lee finally received his long-awaited promotion to captain.

While the unusual circumstances of the action at Castle Itter made it the subject of a few newspaper and magazine articles, including a July 1945 piece in the Saturday Evening Post by Levin, Lee himself summed it up best. A few months before his death in January 1973, he was asked by a reporter in Norwich how he felt about the long-ago incident. Lee thought for a minute, then replied, “Well, it was just the damnedest thing.”

This story appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of World War II magazine.

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