by Mark Helprin
34. Glorious Summer
OTHER THAN IN replaying over and over the several minutes before the cab drew up on Exhibition Road, he never did get back to London or to Claire. Shortly after his return, leave was canceled, the camp was sealed in, and in May the division moved to the airfields from which it would rise sometime in June on its way to France. As they drove through the countryside to the departure point, Harry knew with each change of heading in which direction London lay, and as if the canvas cover of the truck were one of the many outdoor movie screens he had seen in desert camps and in Sicily, he envisioned upon it scenes of life as they played out oblivious of him: tugs puffing down the Thames; traffic crossing bridges; trucks rolling; horses trotting, clopping; women in scarves, wending their way to work; and Claire, who did not know that he was watching. In his imagination, as if in a film, she was in a great hall where here and there and never ceasing, showers of bluish-white sparks arose from welders’ arcs and then died into cool smoke fleeing sadly on the air, and because of the way things were and had to be, her back was turned to him as he receded dimly on the road, goodbye, Claire.
The charm of northern European summers is that because they are so cool you do not need to yearn for fall. The summer light, the scents, and the sounds of warblers and owls at night and doves of any type in morning, and crows that caw for corn months before it ripens, come in England and in Normandy on currents of cold glassy air. Summer colors in high sun, vivid and clear, pierce the density of the atmosphere, which otherwise might be misty or vacuous, blurring sight and sound. The sun shone warmly upon rows of tents at the side of the airstrip, and refreshing air wound like a brook through their rolled-up sides. In the fields and woods, except when airplanes racing down the runway stunned them into silence, doves cooed with the precision of clocks.
At the beginning of June, when they were ready on the airfield, had packed and checked their equipment many times, and were as determined to live as they were at peace with dying, Harry and his men were visited by a colonel from the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The seven paratroopers were summoned to the officers’ mess, where in a room with diaphanous curtains that rose and fell with the breeze they stood at attention and saluted the colonel, who was on the phone, and who, with the rocking of his left hand, had them stand at ease. Then, furthering his order, he pointed to the benches and chairs scattered against the walls.
“I have no idea, and they don’t either,” he said into the phone, “but it has to be done.” The unintelligible response sounded like Louis Armstrong playing with the mute against the bell of his trumpet, and the impression given was that a creature like Rumpelstiltskin was on the other end of the line, a munchkin with three stars and a big office filled with maps, map cases, and telephones. “Two thousand here and another two thousand with the Hundred and First,” the colonel said to the munchkin. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I’m talking to the blocking forces. Oh. Okay. Yes, sir.” He hung up.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Good news and bad news for you, depending upon how you look at it, and depending on how it works out.”
They were silent.
“We go on the fifth. You’re first. You won’t jump first, however. We’re detaching you, and you’re going farther south. Your plane has to swing way out into the ocean to get you where we want you and not conflict with the traffic, of which there will be so much that we fear that no matter what we do we’re going to have collisions.” The colonel stood and walked over to a map of northern France, which because it had neither indications of enemy dispositions nor invasion routes marked upon it could have been lifted from a high school French class. “Here,” he said, pointing to a small town about twenty miles south of St. Lô, “rather alarmingly in the interior, is Tessy sur Vire, and somewhere around here is the Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier Division. Very bad.”
“Why, sir?” someone asked.
“Because they like to kill civilians—lock the doors of a church, set it on fire, machine-gun people who jump from the windows. When they take prisoners they have them dig long trenches and stand at the edge, so people can fall in conveniently a hundred at a time after they’re shot.
“They’ve got a lot of Romanians with them. We’ve found that, for whatever reason, the Axis troops that fight alongside Germans are nastier than the Germans themselves. Either they want to prove something, they’re more naturally barbaric, or they’re homesick, but whatever they are, this is what they do and they’ll give you no quarter.
“On the plus side, the Seventeenth SS is under-strength, like the Dutch a great many of them have no transport except bicycles, and they’ve been scrounging around for armor. They’re a Panzer division, but they’ve got mostly French tanks and StuG IVs. You know what they are?”
“Yeah, we know what they are, sir,” said a trooper who had destroyed one.
“Tell me, because I need to know if you’re really aware of what you’re facing.”
“It’s an assault gun,” Harry said. “It’s got a machine gun up top, but it’s exposed, which means you can kill the gunner with a well placed shot, and the main thing is that the big gun doesn’t swivel like a tank gun. That makes it a lot more approachable. Knock out a tread and the machine gunner, and you can kill it.”
“Right,” the colonel said. “But if they’re concentrated and protected, their guns can do an immense amount of damage, and the Seventeenth has a bunch of them.”
“Why the Seventeenth?” Harry asked. “They’re pretty far away.”
“There’s nothing between them and the invasion area. We’ve got to concentrate on the center, but there’s been a great deal of worry about the periphery. We can’t spare much from the heart of the matter, but we’re going to run a bunch of diversions. That’s where you come in. Of course, they’ll have had the hell bombed out of them, but, as you know, it’s hard to bomb a dispersed armored force and it may not mean a thing.
“I had to present on the Seventeenth SS to the Combined Chiefs: Eisenhower, Tedder, and Bedell Smith. I did my homework. I knew about as much as it was possible to know about a newly formed—or re-formed—division.
“Because they’ve spent their lives in the military, the chiefs are very interested in detail. They can read it as well or better than any intelligence officer, which is what I’m supposed to be. Actually,” he said wistfully, “in real life I was a chemist.
“The chiefs perked up about this division. There’s not too much we can do—and you’re part of it—because we’re so stretched. As I was briefing them . . . I gotta tell you this. The divisional emblem of the Seventeenth is a clenched iron fist. That’s because it’s the Götz von Berlichingen Division, named after a German knight who had an iron hand after his real hand was cut off.
“The chiefs wanted to know more about this, and I told them what I knew, including that the division’s motto is Leck mich am Arsch, which means ‘Lick my ass.’ How did that come about? they wanted to know. All I know is that it’s short for something the knight is supposed to have said: Er kann mich im Arsche lecken, or, ‘He can lick my ass.’ Arse, actually.
“So Ike, without looking up from his papers, quietly says, ‘At least they’ve got that right.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ asks Tedder, who, along with the other Englishmen—lots of staff—doesn’t get the American meaning. Ike looks up over his reading glasses and says, ‘You’re goddamned right we’re going to lick his ass, aren’t we, Beetle?’
“At this, Bedell Smith says, ‘All the way to Berlin, Ike.’
“And Ike says, ‘And when we get to Berlin, we’re going to lick Hitler’s ass, and I’ll be first in line.’
“It was as if someone had gone through the room and hit every Englishman a hard blow on the head with a blackjack. They looked like fish that are slapped against the deck. And then Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay says, ‘I take it, Ike, that we are not speaking literally.’ Ike, who thinks Ramsay is referring to the individual combat implication about what Ike has said
about Hitler, says, ‘Maybe not, but if I had the chance, I’d take it, and I don’t think I’d be disappointed at the outcome.’”
“That must have been some meeting,” Harry said.
“It was,” the colonel continued. “It was. And what it comes down to is that you are going to be facing the Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, ‘Lick my ass.’”
“All seven of us?” asked Rice, a trooper from Ohio, a lawyer. “Is that fair to them?”
“We want to slow them down on their way north to meet us, and there’s little we can do to accomplish that, given that the focus is on the beachhead. We’re hoping to confuse and delay, sever communications, give the impression that we have an airborne force in their vicinity. At the very least, we make them unsure, cut the telephone lines, blow some bridges, and derail a few trains.”
“Don’t the Maquis and the OSS do that?” Harry asked.
“We’ve been unable to coordinate sufficiently with the Maquis. Stupid, I know. Coalition politics. Anyway, that’s not the point. We want the Germans to see our airborne there, to report the uniform, to see the patch.”
“If they can see the patch, sir,” another pathfinder said, “shortly they’ll be dead, or we will.”
The colonel made no response, until finally he had to. “People will see, civilians. The Germans have binoculars. Maybe you’ll release a prisoner or two, so they can report. And I’ll tell you the truth and level with you. If you should get killed, you’ll be of use even then.”
“Please forgive us if we’re not enthusiastic about that,” Rice said.
“I would hope you’re not.”
“Sir,” Harry put in, “they’ll come after the seven of us with God knows what as soon as they get a fix, and that’ll be that.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Why?”
“This is not an infantry operation, it’s a diversion and a feint. You’ll be dropped five miles apart. Each of you will work independently. They’ll be looking for a formation, but you’ll be one apiece. After you strike, run. Go into a forest if you can find one. Hide under a log. The breaks between the fields are impenetrable thickets. Burrow in there and you’ll be invisible for as long as you want.”
“What’s the good news, sir?” another trooper wanted to know.
“You don’t have to take your Eurekas or anything like that. You don’t have to pinpoint any particular spot. You don’t have to hang around and get killed once you hit the ground. You can move. What you’ll take in place of guidance and marking equipment will be extra ammunition, provisions, and explosives. If you get the opportunity, do something spectacular.”
“Something spectacular.”
“It’s up to you. Although I spend most of my time in meetings and writing orders, I myself have always wanted to blow up an ammunition train, or at least a truck. You’ll find something. We chose you because you can work alone and you like to work alone. That’s unusual. And you’re not the only ones.”
“Who else?”
“Not for you to know.”
“It’s not like there’s a whole regiment that’s. . . .”
“I can’t say,” the colonel said, cutting off the discussion. “Tomorrow you’ll be briefed; you’ll get maps and passwords. You can draw or exchange whatever weapons and equipment you want. When you’ve finished your assignments, or as you work them, make your ways north. Eventually, we’ll meet you.”
“Colonel,” Harry said. “As pathfinders, we do work independently. Once our regiment is down, though, we form up together to fight. The seven of us are mutually supportive and we’ve been together since the beginning. We’re very effective if we can work that way.”
“Not this time, Captain. I wish you luck.”
Harry had anticipated the day when, as in North Africa, the division would assemble in its thousands, each man determined and trained, and with little talk line up to board planes waiting in the fading light. To soar over deserts and seas and then, the quality of landing undetermined, to fall, at first with great speed and then slowly and in silence into the flares of war—such things were without parallel in electrifying the senses.
One remembered everything in impressed detail: the smell of webbing and gun oil, the rattling of airframes, the burning line of orange as the sun set, and the sharp awakening, though not from sleep, when it was time to jump. Late in the evening of the fourth of June, Harry’s stick boarded the first of the C-47s at the front of the queue, the propellers whirring and impatient to get the planes back to the night air over France, where in the attention paid to them by anti-aircraft guns they would almost come alive.
The seven paratroopers boarded quietly. Rice, the lawyer from Ohio, had a big face, a mustache, unbreakable strength, and an illuminating smile. Bayer, a who-knows-what from the Lower East Side, was six-four, fearless, and so quick of wit that tritely but truly he often had discovered a solution before anyone knew of a problem. Johnson, a stocky and sardonic English teacher who took all in stride, was totally reliable, and had read and seemingly committed to memory every book in Wisconsin. Hemphill, a Virginian who looked just like General Gavin and because of Gavin’s unassuming dress and manner was often mistaken for him, had a certain sharpness and readiness of feature that said, accurately, that he was an uncanny shot. Reeves, a farmer from Colorado, was a big blond boy, forever good and forever young. And Sussingham, a steelworker from Gary, Indiana, was one of those people who seems to have taken on some of the attributes of his profession: he was unflappable, cool, terribly strong, and senselessly brave. They all were ever enduring and resourceful. Each one accepted his lot, not one assuming that he would come out alive.
The door of the plane was closed with a bang and sealed shut. All the delicate threads that tied them to home had now to be severed, as were their ties to the division and everything that had come before. Alone in the dark, with only a dim red light showing the outline of the others, they had to say goodbye to all they had known.
With a thousand planes behind it, the C-47 faced an empty runway and the wind. It was an honor to be first. The engines were brought up and the plane began to roll. In France it was early summer, and if they were to die that day it would not have to be in the cold. Rising to full rpm, the propellers were deafening and reassuring. For anyone in the belly of the plane, the faster it went the better it was. Finally, hurtling forward was insufficient for it, and as it reached its full potential on the ground it lifted, dipping one wing and then another because it was not yet steady in the stream of air. Faster and faster it went, until it rose vigorously enough to press them down in their seats. They were the only ones it carried, and the lightness of the load had freed it for an unusually powerful rise.
As they came to the coast, the jumpmaster opened the door both to make sure that it hadn’t jammed during takeoff and to let in some summer air. Harry leaned over and looked out. The open channels of a marsh gleamed in gold and red intarsia, and the sea beyond was a gem-like blue fading to black. As an A-20 returning from France passed below them, its huge engines easily pulling it home, the last rays of sun glinted off its upper surfaces but left the rest in shadow. Its twinned machine guns atop the center of the fuselage were relaxed to the left as the flight made it safely to base. What this plane had been doing in France Harry did not know, but it had been there, it had come back with the sunset, and in an instant it had passed. Then the jumpmaster shut the door upon the world below.
It was a long ride south-southwest until they dropped due west of the Channel Islands and made a ninety-degree turn east to enter France, so low above the breaking waves that German pickets watching by the sea would have been hit by the wash of the propellers. Then they rose in a steep climb, adjusting course toward the drop zones. Once over Coutances, they began to trace a gentle arc that would curve slightly north to St. Lô and end just beyond the river Vire. The distance was only about thirty miles.
They had hooked up as soon as they gained altitude
. They knew what to do, although not how they would do it, and, paradoxically, they knew how to do what they had to do, but not exactly what it was. They would be forty miles south of the invasion beaches and perhaps weeks away from a linkup with their own forces, but they were free, and each man was now his own general.
Soon after the door was opened, the light flashed. First out was Rice, without a word, gone and on his own. Next, Bayer, with a joke that no one heard. Then Johnson, who calmly looked back as if for the last time and disappeared, his static line flapping against the plane. Harry, who would take the middle position, closest to the most direct route north, stepped to the door, outside of which was a black whirlwind. Ex nihilo, he thought, which comforted him. Even though he was heavily weighted with weapons and equipment, the rush of air made him feel light. The light flashed, the jumpmaster signaled, and Harry left not only the plane but, for a moment, everything he had been heretofore. He fell very fast, not just as one falls after stepping wrongly on the stairs, or off a roof, but hundreds of feet into an abyss. All was darkness, speed, and wind as he was washed clean, emptied out, and reset. Then his chute opened, unfurling slowly at first but finally holding him, swinging him to left and right—just as the plane’s wings had rocked at takeoff before it found the fullness of the air—and opening into a cloud, a petticoat ballooning above him, visible in the dark as a faint, slightly bluish glow.
The plane gone, he drifted down in silence without sight of the ground. He released his leg bags. Now hanging below him, they made the descent more difficult as they became a pendulum to Harry, who was already a pendulum to the chute. At least the sudden absence of their pull would tell him when to brace. He hoped that upon landing he would clear walls, trees, and other obstacles, and break neither his legs nor his back.