by David Healey
“Tell me what you see, City Boy.”
“You got it, Hillbilly. But I’ve got to say, I don’t see much. Just a bunch of houses and shops. Brooklyn, it ain’t.”
“We ain’t here to write a travel guide. Just tell me if you see any Germans.”
“Oh, I see them, all right.”
Now, they could both see activity in the village streets as German troops moved forward to meet the attack. The Germans also seemed to have a couple of mortars lined up on the American position.
“Mulholland said he was told that there was only supposed to be a squad of Krauts in the village. That’s a whole hell of a lot more than a squad. Look at ‘em all.”
Cole managed to get his rifle to his shoulder. He could see lots of Germans, though most were behind cover. “I think we just kicked the hornet’s nest,” he said. “Where the hell is Mulholland, anyhow?”
“He’s pinned down in that ditch over there.”
“All right, let’s whittle these Krauts down to size.”
Cole tried to aim, but he had to admit, his eyes felt like someone had taken sandpaper to them. He felt too weak to hold the rifle steady. He fired and missed. Missed again.
Vaccaro gave him a target. “Hey, there’s a sniper in that church steeple!”
Just as Vaccaro spoke, a bullet that seemed more precise than all the others pecked at the stone near his head. They both ducked.
Cole searched the church steeple, but couldn’t detect any sign of the enemy sniper. Although Cole couldn’t see him, there was no doubt that he was there, all right. Another bullet came in and hit the new greenbean soldier firing from the tunnel entrance. Private Tawes fell dead, hit square in the head, a neat round bullet hole in the front of his helmet.
Vaccaro swore. “Dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have bothered to learn his name. These new guys never last a week.”
His comments sounded unfeeling, but hardening your heart was sometimes the only way to get through this madness.
The sniper was taking a terrible toll, but Cole was too feverish to be able to focus enough to take him out. He could barely hold the rifle steady. He lowered the Springfield rifle and slumped against the tunnel wall.
Vaccaro looked at him with concern. “You hit?”
“I feel like a truck hit me, if that counts.”
“That dead greenbean looks livelier than you do, Hillbilly. Don’t make me carry you back.”
The squad would have withdrawn, but they couldn’t—not with Lieutenant Mulholland and Private Bigelow still pinned down in the ditch. Between the machine gun and the sniper, trying to make a break for it would have meant certain death.
“We can’t leave Mulholland out there,” Cole said.
“There might not be much choice,” Vaccaro said. “Whoever thought there was just a handful of Germans in the village was wrong—dead wrong.”
“There are a few of them,” Cole agreed.
“We had better pull back. If they put a round from one of those mortars into this tunnel, we’re all goners.”
Behind them, they heard the clank and rumble of approaching tanks. From the engine noise, they knew that these were Shermans. That much was good news.
“Those look like ours!” Vaccaro said. “I never thought that I’d be so glad to see tanks.”
So far, they hadn’t seen any sign of German armor, which would have spelled trouble for any Sherman tank, which was equipped with a gun that was no match for the more heavily armed Panzers prowling these mountains.
The tunnel under the train tracks was just wide enough for the Shermans to pass through, once the dead greenbean’s body was dragged out of the way.
“Poor bastard,” Vaccaro muttered, helping to lift the body onto the back of a tank. “He’d barely been in the field long enough for his socks to get wet. Speaking of socks, that reminds me.”
Vaccaro went through the dead soldier’s pockets and liberated a chocolate bar and a pair of dry socks. The way that Vaccaro saw it, he could put those to good use, but the socks and chocolate wouldn’t do the soldier much good considering where he was headed—the local graves registration unit.
Quickly, the tankers hatched a plan to free Lieutenant Mulholland from the ditch. The lead Sherman would pull out of the tunnel entrance and head down the road just past where the lieutenant lay. The armored behemoth would create cover for Mulholland and Bigelow, giving them a screen. After all, the Germans could fire all the machine guns they wanted at the Sherman, but the bullets wouldn’t so much as dent the metal.
Once Mulholland was out of the ditch, the tank would reverse back toward the tunnel entrance, giving the infantrymen cover all the way. The second tank would hang back in reserve and provide any covering fire.
“You ought to let those Krauts have it,” Vaccaro said. “Jam a couple of shells down their throat.”
“I’d like nothing better,” the tank commander said. “But there might be people in the village. I don’t want to kill any civilians. We’ll have to rely on our thirty for suppressing fire.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Vaccaro said. He shouted down the road, hoping that Mullholland could hear him. “Lieutenant, we’re coming for you!”
It soon became apparent that the plan was going to be complicated by the fact that the Germans had started to advance toward the tunnel, clearly intending to push the Americans back.
“If we’re gonna do this, we need to do it soon,” Vaccaro pointed out. “Those Jerries mean business.”
“No time like the present,” the tank commander said. He pulled the tank hatch shut, sealing the crew within.
The tank started down the road toward the village. At the last second, Vaccaro fell in behind it.
Cole couldn’t believe it. Vaccaro wasn’t one to stick his neck out. Like Cole, he had seen all too often how that usually turned out.
“Where are you going, City Boy?”
“You sit tight, Hillbilly. We’ll be back with the lieutenant in a jiffy.”
From the village, the Germans redoubled their rate of fire. Machine-gun bursts and bullets hammered against the armored skin of the tank. Although the bullets couldn’t pierce the armor, it must have been more than a little nerve-wracking to hear them pelting the metal. Cole had grown up in a shack with a tin roof, so he could well imagine that the inside of the tank must have sounded like the sleeping loft in the shack during a summer hailstorm.
If the tank commander had dared to leave the hatch open, the German sniper in the church steeple might have tried to pick him off. However, the tank was buttoned up tight.
But the tank wasn’t just a punching bag. The Sherman could punch back. Its machine gun blazed, making the Germans who had been advancing toward the tunnel scramble for cover.
Still, the Sherman was fighting with one hand behind its back, considering that it couldn’t use its main gun for fear of civilian casualties. The lack of fire also emboldened some of the Germans, who crept closer, using outbuildings and ditches for cover.
With the tank hatched closed and the limited field of vision that the machine gunner had to work with, it was hard to see the Germans approaching or the fact that two of them carried Panzerfaust, their antitank weapon. Unseen by the Americans, one of the Germans set up behind a shed with the weapon, planning an ambush, waiting for the tank to come into range.
As the tank rolled closer, the German settled the sights of the weapon on the American tank. He was aiming for the sides of the Sherman, where the armor plating wasn’t as thick.
The tank passed the spot where Mulholland and Bigelow lay in the ditch, then stopped. From the shelter provided by the back of the tank, Vaccaro waved at the two men. “Come on, sir! It’s time to go!”
“Vaccaro, I never thought I’d say this, but you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Mulholland didn’t need to be invited twice. He didn’t attempt to get to his feet, but rolled out of the ditch and behind the tank. The soldier followed his lead. In the lee of the tank, the lieute
nant stood.
“We ought to try to advance into the village,” he said to Vaccaro.
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s a hell of a lot of Germans. The plan is to back this puppy back to the mouth of the tunnel and regroup.”
“All right. Let’s do it.”
The tank crept forward, still firing, and the soldiers behind it didn’t have much choice except to follow it or be exposed to enemy fire.
“Where’s he going?”
“They’re blind inside,” Mulholland said. “They can’t see that we’re out of the ditch.”
The lieutenant used the butt of his rifle to give the tank two quick whacks. The forward motion of the tank stopped. They heard gears shifting, and then the tank began to reverse. The reverse speed was faster than expected and the three men had to trot to keep from being run over.
Down the road, the German with the Panzerfaust saw the tank starting to retreat, and figured it was now or never. He lined up the sights and fired.
There was a tell-tale whoosh of smoke and flame, so fast that there was no time to dodge the deadly Panzerfaust round. The subsequent explosion made the tank shudder.
Whether it was a lucky shot or skill, the German’s Panzerfaust round had scored a crippling hit.
Mulholland and the others just had time to throw themselves flat in the snow. Lucky for them, it was the right front quarter of the tank that took the brunt of the explosion. Nonetheless, Bigelow cried out as a splinter of shrapnel caught him in the leg.
To their horror, the wounded tank came to a halt, engine clanking and shuddering. Thick, black smoke began to pour out of the Sherman.
Unfortunately, the security offered by the tight steel confines of the tank also turned it into a death trap. Exiting a tank filled with roiling, choking smoke was no easy task—if any of the crew had even survived the initial blast.
“Those poor bastards!” Mulholland shouted. “We’ve got to help them!”
Without thinking, the lieutenant scrambled onto the back of the tank, headed for the hatch.
On top of the tank, the hatch started to open, then fell shut again. Whoever was in there seemed to lack the strength to lift it from within.
When the hatch started to open again, Mulholland was there, getting his fingers under the lip and yanking it open. A soot-stained face appeared, coughing and choking on the thick smoke that boiled out.
Mulholland started to help the tanker, who suddenly slumped lifelessly in the lieutenant’s arms. From the village, they heard the solitary crack of a rifle. A shot from the sniper in the church steeple had finished the work that the Panzerfaust had started. Mulholland had no choice but to let go of the dead weight, and the body slid back into the smoking maw of the tank.
“Anybody else in there?” he shouted.
He waited a moment, bullets slicing the air around him, but no one else emerged. Flames began to lick upward from the interior of the tank.
Vaccaro had climbed up on the tank and grabbed Mulholland by the back of the belt, trying to haul him down from the top of the Sherman, where he was a target.
“Sir, it’s no use! They’re gone!”
It took another forceful tug from Vaccaro, but Mulholland finally got the message and slithered down off the tank, keeping low. Heavier smoke now poured from the crippled Sherman, helping to screen the soldiers from the gunfire in the village. It was as if in death, the crew of the defeated Sherman tank was making one final act of defiance against the Germans.
Benefitting from the bulk of the wrecked tank and the smokescreen, the three soldiers were able to run back to the cover offered by the tunnel.
Finally safe for the moment, Mulholland punched the air in an angry gesture. “Son of a bitch! They were just trying to save my ass and I got them killed.”
“Wasn’t your fault, sir. You didn’t kill those boys. The Jerries did.”
Mulholland knew it was true, but it wasn’t much consolation. He shook his head. He seemed to notice Cole slouched against the tunnel wall. “Hillbilly, are you hit?”
Cole raised his head, but didn’t seem to have the strength to respond. Whatever energy that he had managed to summon earlier was gone. His eyes looked glassy and bright with fever.
“He’s just sick, sir.”
“I’ll be damned. All right, let’s get out of here. Somebody grab Cole. It’s going to take more than our squad to capture this town.”
They pulled back, leaving the dead to be collected later. Bigelow was wounded, and they carried him out. Vaccaro draped Cole’s arm over his shoulder and dragged him out of the tunnel as the sound of German firing increased. Cole felt like dead weight.
So far, it had been one hell of a fight and it hadn’t gone well. They had lost two men, along with a tank and its crew. As for Cole, it looked as if he was out of commission for the time being.
On the other side of the tunnel, the rest of the company had set up a defensive line, reinforced by the second Sherman tank. Now, the tables had turned. As the Jerries advanced through the tunnel, the Americans opened up with a withering fire. The tank fired directly into the mouth of the tunnel with a white phosphorous round, resulting in a blinding explosion. A single German soldier emerged, hands in the air, screaming as burning phosphorus consumed him.
Vaccaro fired, and the screaming ended.
It wasn’t the first time that he had shot someone, but even if he was just putting that poor German bastard out of his misery, it wasn’t something that he’d ever get used to.
He turned to look at Cole, who sat in the bottom of a foxhole with his eyes closed.
“Hillbilly, I hope you get better soon,” Vaccaro said. “You’re a whole lot better at this than I am.”
Chapter Twelve
Night returned, along with the bitter cold. The fresh snow that had fallen previously turned crunchy underfoot. Troops did what they could in their foxholes to stay warm, liberating tarps from the trucks and huddling together, but it wasn’t enough. Everybody was shivering and miserable.
Adding to his misery was the fact that Cole was still fighting the flu, the night passing for him in fitful dozing. His head ached. His bones hurt. Vaccaro gave have him some lukewarm instant soup that he had begged and borrowed, which was about the best that could be hoped for in these conditions. Vaccaro also brought him some hard candy to help with his sore throat.
“I swear I could have heated up that soup on your forehead, Hillbilly. You want me to get the medic? Maybe he can give you some more pills.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Cole said. “I’ll be all right in the morning.”
“If you say so.”
Cole finished the soup, sucked on a piece of candy, and slept.
Vaccaro had given Cole his own blanket, so he tugged his coat as tight around him as he could, shivering. They had been in a lot of tough spots, but even he had to admit that this night was a new low point. It was freezing cold. Cole was sick. The Germans had halted the attack on the village, killing the greenbean and one of the squad veterans, wounding Bigelow, and destroying a tank in the process. All that they could do now was sit in the snow and lick their wounds.
From the village, he and the other soldiers heard the sound of singing. The Germans occupying the houses were sheltered from at least some of the cold. They started fires in the fireplaces, breaking up furniture to burn because most of the firewood was gone. Still, with the windows open to shoot out of, awaiting another American attack, the conditions were hardly cozy. But from the perspective of the shivering American troops dug into the frozen ground, the enemy was enjoying the lap of luxury.
“I hate those Kraut bastards,” Vaccaro said. “They’re all nice and warm in those houses, drinking schnapps and eating sausages, while we freeze our asses off out here.”
“Why don’t you stroll on in there and see how you like it,” the sergeant suggested. “Maybe the Jerries will welcome you with open arms.”
“Yeah, right. What are they singing, anyhow?”
“Sounds like more Christmas music. Has a nice ring to it.”
The Germans must have gotten carried away with their attempts to keep warm, because one of the houses had caught fire and was burning merrily, casting a glow across the snowy village. They could see the shadows of enemy soldiers moving in the light cast by the flames, but nobody made any effort to put out the fire.
Dug into the cold ground, surrounded by snow and trees, all that the American troops could do was watch from a distance, wishing they could have some of the warmth from the fire.
For the next twenty-four hours, the American troops sat in their foxholes and shivered.
“What are we waiting for, sir?” Vaccaro asked Lieutenant Mulholland.
“Word has it that we’re supposed to get more tanks. They’re on the way.”
“It’s fine by me if they take their time getting here.”
Everybody understood what he meant. Once those tanks showed up, they would have to attack the village again. Nobody looked forward to going up against fortified enemy positions.
It soon became clear that the American prisoners in the village were going to complicate the attack. Refugees from the village began to enter the American lines, carrying news of the POWs.
“The Germans are holding more than two hundred men inside the Catholic church,” explained a villager named Madame Lavigne, who had fled the village with her elderly mother and a young niece. They were pushing their meager belongings in a wheelbarrow. Madame Lavigne owned a shop in town and looked formidable as a Panzer with her hefty build and winter coat, but the slim young niece attracted the attention of the soldiers. When they decided to camp with the Americans rather than take their chances on the road, several soldiers volunteered to help the niece set up a tent.
“How are the prisoners being treated?” Mulholland wanted to know.