Frings could only do so much from his wheelhouse. Captain Hanssen up on the open bridge above called all the shots, aided by the watch officer, lookout and signal man. Hanssen ordered Frings when to steer and how. Hanssen ordered engine telegraph man Kammel to relay speeds to the engine operator below deck. But even Hanssen himself could only do so much. He could only follow whatever the ranking Schirakow commanded from the lead S-boat, which captain Baum conned though he was only an Obersteuermann, a Master Chief Petty Officer. Yet Baum had more sea hours than Hanssen, was a rare 1937 vintage trained on the first S-boats, and had the flotilla chief on his open bridge.
Frings manned the wheel, but he had no real control. As helmsman he had to stay on the wheel, always in the wheelhouse, in all combat situations and dangerous sorties. He was an implement; he was implemented by orders. He was just one gear in the engine. He was only another link in the chain. The order of this machinelike system used to give him comfort, a feeling of freedom even. Now he only saw it as a curse that kept a man helpless. One break anywhere in the chain, and the whole machine broke.
The formula had become the problem. The powerlessness had been eating away at his thoughts, keeping him awake. How could he survive to care for his family if his wheel gave him no control? How could he keep them safe so far away in Cologne? They were so exposed, all the cities were. There he had his parents, his kid sister, his wife Christiane and two daughters, Elisa and Kristina, four and five. When he thought of his little girls, he still saw them as the toddlers they were when he’d seen them last. They expected him to survive. He had promised them.
He had to stay above water; he had to keep them from going under.
He grasped at the wheel, wrenching at the handles. His chest burned raw as if his skin had been ripped right off, exposing his organs and heart to the salt air. The night’s sortie had only showed him how easily the chain could break, and what men did to each other when pushed to the limit. It made Cologne and his family seem so much farther away. It made him fear the breakable chain even more. What part of it would finally snap, and when?
He leaned into the wheel and wheezed, swallowing back down the burn of vomit rising in his throat. He shivered again. He found his feet and lit his pipe, breaking his own no-flame rule.
The eastern sky thinned to purple on the horizon. A fog obscured the coastline where their base at Boulogne opened up to them. Once moored back inside their S-boat pen, Frings finally was able to leave his wheelhouse. It was six a.m., but the thick concrete bunker blocked most all of the morning breaking outside. As he always did, he touched their boat’s talisman mounted on the wheelhouse, a small double-sided axe atop a log slice—one stroke for each dull blade. Two bullet holes had come within centimeters of it this time, but none had ever hit it.
He made his way around the boat, taking stock, sizing up damage, asking questions, calming men down. The sentry came up to him, shoulders sagging, his MP 40 slung.
“Why aren’t you watching the Amis?” Frings said.
“They’re all dead, Schmadding. First the two, then the one. They just . . . gave it up.”
Frings shook his head, fighting another burn in his chest. He climbed below. The motors were giving off a nasty diesel smell, on the verge of burning, enough to make the seamen below sick. He heard patters and snorts coming down the narrow passageway as their compact little black and brown hunting terrier strode up, sniffing at him with care as if checking for wounds. Frings gave their sea dog Vigo a rub on his head, which earned Frings a few licks. Vigo was no fool. In the old days, Vigo had often found his way up on deck during a run and snuggled the main compass midships, the calmest spot on the boat. Vigo hadn’t ridden up there for far too long, choosing to hide out below deck, and who could blame him?
Up in the forecastle, Frings passed the tiny captain’s quarters that was the Hotel Adlon compared to the sailors’ shared bunks in the stern. As Kommandant, Hanssen had a bed that folded up into a table and leather bench, complete with a little bar built into the wood-paneled wall. Hanssen had plopped down on the bench, the leather squeaking like a fart. The captain looked smaller when he wasn’t up on the open bridge leaning over the range finder and gritting his teeth in frustration like he did, his peaked captain’s cap far back atop his pale, narrow face with droopy eyes and long forehead, all combined in a surprisingly handsome way. The man was all of twenty-six. He had come a long way since stepping aboard in late 1942. He was Frings’ third CO. The man had stayed alive longer than any of them. He was a naval legacy, his father a battleship officer in the Great War, and as such had gone to Mürwik Naval Academy of course. He spoke High German while Frings did his best not to confuse others with his Cologne dialect. While Hanssen looked the newsreel and magazine version of a boat captain, Frings was the boulevard tabloid version of a carnival strongman with his block of a head and thick reddish-brown hair. He had let his outdated large mustache grow into a beard, and on board he often wore a brown civilian sweater and blue-white checkered kerchief under his oilskins or denim. Yet every sailor saw he was a Number One and in case anyone doubted his know-how, Frings’ uniform bore the rare S-boat War Badge—an oval of gold wreaths topped with that all-pervasive Nazi war eagle and a silver S-boat speeding out from the center, its bow up high.
“Number One,” Hanssen said. “Do you want to know something? There were no Germans on those rafts. None at all. How do you like that?”
What could Frings say? He could not protest that their flotilla chief Schirakow and lead boat captain Baum were reckless if not contradicting general orders, and Hanssen wouldn’t hear of it. It suggested someone’s court martial, if not his own. Old hands like Schirakow and Baum certainly knew how to whitewash action reports. Yet Hanssen wanted to know what Frings was thinking. Since their recent slaughters battling the invasion fleet, Schirakow and Baum had been acting more rash in the lead.
“That is unfortunate, Herr Oberleutnant,” Frings said.
Hanssen grinned and wagged a finger. “Remember this: Reckless is good. I applaud it. But it has to work to our advantage, instead of us wasting our lives to save those dead already. You know this war is a new sort of war. It is not my father’s, or your dad’s. So when our boat gets its good chance, we won’t go and waste it.”
0700 hours: The flotilla had its billet in a brightly painted country house a few kilometers up the coast in Wimereux. They had a couple tables set out on the front lawn, and after a return march crews would gather there and wind down despite the morning coolness. Frings rode back in an open truck with a group from the other boats, Number Ones and NCOs mostly, swapping stories, ruing mistakes and working out in their heads just what the devil would want in their reports this time. Their uniforms hung off them, suddenly heavy, as if sizes bigger.
At the billet a young Matrose stood on the front steps, facing Frings. He held a telegram. The others slapped Frings on the back and wandered out to the tables. Frings took the envelope, and something in the seaman’s eyes told Frings to look at the telegram somewhere alone. He stomped through the front grass, around to the side of the house. He ripped open the envelope:
From Cologne:
From Your Christiane:
Horrible air raids. Your father, mother and sister lost. Heavy damage.
Your daughters and I are safe. Stay safe. Here we feel much sorrow.
Lost? Lost meant dead. Frings’ chest seemed to have filled with concrete. His boots sinking into the sodden earth. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, but at some point his mates had huddled around him, and he had curled up with his back to the stone wall.
He couldn’t speak, but he heard their talk. They had gotten orders from the FdS—they were heading back out that night. A large convoy was reported. Someone said: “The Schmadding here can’t go out, not with death in his family. It’s standard procedure—”
“No!” Frings shot up, pushing off the stone wall, staggering to his feet. “I’m going out,” he growled. “I’m going out tonight an
d every goddamned night we can.”
***
Wendell Lett was changing. He knew he was. His senses had intensified from all the caution. Every sparkle, color, edge and curve took on a gleam that imprinted in his memory, except the awe was reserved only for things he had to fear. He saw no pretty green fields or picturesque medieval towns—he saw sniper hidey-holes, machine gun nests, 88 haunts. Caution became his particular talisman, and learning from mistakes in the field his obsession. It helped him get a grip on the constant, grinding terror that he and all of them felt to the marrow, in their every waking and sleeping moment. Before an assault they had to pee from it, or shit, which many did in their trousers or foxholes and often. They had little appetite and used to blame it on their rations, right down to the powdered lemonade. Meanwhile, real sleep had become a distant dream. If Lett ever slept lying down for more than a couple hours it was like coming out of a coma, like smoke had filled his head and he had a horrible taste in the mouth, a tongue like dirt. They learned they could find some sleep while footslogging in file, and Lett probably got more shut-eye on the march than in his hole. Their nickname for this was easy: “marching dead.”
In July, Lett’s battalion finally broke out of Normandy. He was pulling his weight. He had an archaic sort of German, from growing up among the Mennonites. He had mentioned this at his reception center and again in training and an instructor had written it down, but no one brought it up again. Now it was finally proving useful. He offered it up whenever the platoon or company needed a question answered from a POW. It helped them dodge ambushes and shit creek. He knew his name went into after-action reports, but the S-2 intelligence officers at battalion or higher had never come asking for him. They had their own translators. Why would they need a dogface? Dogfaces dug in. Dogfaces killed.
He had his first up-close kill. He had killed before but it had always been from cover, from a hole or behind a stone wall firing away at a position with the rest of the squad. He had seen the enemy drop. He had seen their ripped-apart, leaking, oozing bodies contorted when his squad marched on by. Face to face was another matter. It happened in a town. In a foyer of a house. A German had tripped on steps trying to flee upstairs. The man fumbled for his rifle but it clattered down the steps, right down to Lett. Lett had him covered. The German had a simple, broad face, with longer hair showing from under his helmet like they had. “Hände hoch!” Lett shouted. The German raised his hands. Lett heard footsteps upstairs shuffling his way. So he fired. It laid the man out on his back, filling the stairway, the blood trickling down the edges of the steps. A team had rushed in other doors. They captured two snipers upstairs. They shot them on the spot, and all was clear. Lett had wandered back out the building. His squad was taking a break, not saying much and slumped on a stoop, leaning into one another. Lett sat next to a couple would-be old timers like him, Mancuso from a California farm and Bartley a Detroit suburb. They didn’t console Lett. In the last week they had lost five, two of them from snipers. Lett wanted to feel something, even a brief warmth of vengeance done, but in the moment he didn’t feel a damn thing. He wanted to throw up and ball and seize up like guys did. But he felt nothing. He wanted it now. If it came and found him later, who knew when it would end?
Mancuso died the next week. Mortar burst. Bartley was Lett’s foxhole buddy. He went the same week, but he didn’t die. He had bolted from Lett’s foxhole during a shelling. They found him a day later, wandering the rear line, naked and covered in mud, muttering in Latin. No one had even known he spoke the language.
At this point, Lett felt a secret relief when others bought it and not he. He imagined others felt that way, but who would ever say it? They had been knitted too close now. It was like saying you wish you’d never had your child. The company was losing guys faster than there were days. Every original sergeant Lett had known was dead. Most of the officers in Lett’s company were gone within a month—many dead, some injured horribly, a good few cracked up, a couple simply went missing; and others were taken off the line for incompetence that got so many men maimed and killed it couldn’t be ignored. Lett’s platoon went through two lieutenants after Reardon. A certain Lieutenant Hannity passed all orders through the platoon sergeant and never made the rounds. Hannity preferred to spend his time kissing up to the company CP. A sniper got him doing that. The next one, Lett didn’t even remember his name. He fancied himself some kind of two-bit Patton, complete with the chickenshit insistence on rear-line formality, wanting them to wear ties—as if they had any. He stepped on a mine looking for a place to have them dig a shitting hole. Good riddance.
Then came Tom Godfrey. The Second Lieutenant looked like another 90-day wonder straight out of OCS. He wore one of those windcheater tankers jackets the officers liked, a mustache fit for a publicity officer, face handsome in a common way. He smiled too much for the front. This one wouldn’t last long, they figured.
Sergeant Krebs had been leading things meanwhile. Godfrey listened to Krebs, and to all of them. He asked for opinions. He made the rounds at night when they were dug in. He remembered to whisper up on the line. He let Krebs talk him out of another dodgy night patrol ordered down from the deaf men at battalion, telling company they had done the job and all was well. He did send out a patrol when it was light, but he led it himself. When one Joe cracked up, he sent the man to a rear-line depot to pick up goods, all so the man could have a little time to put himself back together. He even shared his officers’ liquor ration with them.
The first direct thing Godfrey said to Lett was after dark. The looie had crawled out to their observation post, and crouched with Lett in the vulnerable forward foxhole. It had been a fubar day, fucked up beyond all recognition. They had lost two old hands on a patrol that division itself had demanded. “I tell you,” Godfrey whispered, “if any beings from space ever bother to visit this old planet, I doubt they’ll look at us humans as the best thing that’s ever happened to it.”
“We’re more like its plague,” Lett whispered back, and Godfrey patted him on the shoulder before moving on.
In August they pressed on toward Paris but never got to see the joyous old capitol. They slogged through small towns and down country lanes in the heat, heading east. Lett’s feet were so calloused he could light a match off them. One evening they finally got a brief rest, in a little wood outside a village. Word had come down that they wouldn’t have to dig in that night. They wouldn’t move either. Division needed more of the rear line to catch up. This was like announcing a guy had won the lottery. To celebrate, Godfrey took a team into the village to scare up booze and food. They came back with burning strong brandy and hard cheese but no bread. Somehow a mailbag had gotten through, and guys sat around reading, sharing stories from home. Almost every GI had loads of mail and wrote almost just as much. Lett got fewer mail than anyone. Distant relatives wrote to him, most out of a sense of obligation, he reckoned, and he had little desire to write them back. He had gotten one letter from an aunt, and another from a fellow orphan now on a ship in the Pacific. They might as well have been someone else’s letters by mistake. He was used to this. As an orphan most of his life, he didn’t think about it much. A man almost grew accustomed to the rootlessness. He knew it gave others an uncomfortable feeling. Krebs wanted to get him into a card game, but Lett was fine just leaning against a tree, smelling the breeze that came through the leaves with a sweeter scent, looking out at the blue sky going dim for the night and void of tracers for once. He didn’t even need any of that cheese, especially not without bread. This might have been the first time he couldn’t hear battle for well over two months, including nighttime. He got to thinking about how he would meet a girl if he ever made it through this, if it could ever end. It didn’t matter where, or how—it would be the start of something stable. Then he extinguished the thought by summoning that raspy coughing fit he couldn’t shake. Such thoughts had faded in the last month and probably should, he thought. The odds were just too poor.
Godfre
y made the rounds and poured brandy into canteen cups, an unlit Lucky Strike flapping on his lips. Most Joes only got Pall Malls and Raleighs. So Godfrey passed out his Luckies, and when they ran out, he somehow came up with Camels. He ended up kneeling beside Lett. Lett wasn’t smoking. He had quit cold turkey during a night of horrid shelling, another superstition. Where absurd horrors loomed, ad hoc superstition reigned.
Godfrey’s teeth shined in the dusk light, and he lit up. He shared the view with Lett a while. “All these guys reading mail, playing cards, who needs it, am I right?” he said finally.
“Keeps em going, though,” Lett said.
“Sure. Listen. I got word from a local, there’s a nice woman in town looking to entertain a real American hero.”
Lett threw an eye on the platoon lounging around them. He shook his head. “Better check with quartermaster, see if they got any left,” he said, showing Godfrey a smile. Some guys had made it in this or that town. It wasn’t that the thought didn’t interest Lett. But the combat, the drudgery, the marching and constant shelling squealing inside his head all sucked away such urges. It sapped a man. Besides, his field jacket was torn, his trousers stained from the urine and shit not to mention the blood; and only the dirt helped to hide some of it. His constant stubble had become a beard, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to see it gray. He must have smelled like the inside of a cattle car. “Thanks. Really. But I’m not interested in sharing,” he added.
“That’s just the thing. No one knows about her.” Godfrey smiled and placed a hand on his heart, but then his smile dropped away, leaving glossy, longing eyes.
“Ah, why not,” Lett said.
Godfrey perked up. “There you go.”
Lett pulled himself to his feet, brushed off a top layer of dirt, slung his rifle and hung his helmet on his belt. He didn’t bother cleaning up any more than that. What could it help? He didn’t even have his toothbrush any more. “Should I bring something, a bottle?”
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