Once he’d counted to three one thousands on the dead run, he dove to the trench’s floor, lying prone, his head away from the imminent explosion. It seemed he’d barely gotten his head down when the always-disappointing pop of grenades detonating echoed down the trench, blowing a storm cloud of dust and debris with it.
But was that four? Or only three?
When he opened his eyes, there was a grenade lying inches from his face. Its handle was gone. A thin wisp of whitish smoke spewed from its burning fuse.
And in that last split second of his life, the sergeant knew only three handles had flown off when he’d pulled that piece of wood away.
When the fourth grenade detonated, it not only killed the sergeant, it wounded two GIs who were rushing to his aid, showering them with fragments channeled down the trench. When the company commander arrived, he couldn’t make sense of the scene—three of his soldiers were down, two alive but with multiple wounds oozing blood through shredded uniforms, and one dead, missing most of his head.
“What the hell happened here?” the commander asked. “A Kraut mortar?”
“Negative, sir,” the corporal replied. “We were trying to blow off that door over there.” He pointed to the dead man. “It was Sarge’s idea. You know, use grenades. Looks like one got launched down the trench…or…I don’t know…maybe it was just a slow burner. That’s what got the sarge. Got Smitty and Allen, too.”
But the door hadn’t budged. It stood there as if nothing had happened. Perfectly intact. Still locked. Still impassable.
The few moments of indecisive silence that followed were shattered by more explosions along the trench line, each far more powerful than the cluster of grenades had been.
The commander shrieked, “Mortars!” And he was right this time.
“I’ve got to get my men out of this trench, sir,” the platoon leader begged. “The Krauts got it zeroed in. We’re getting slaughtered here.”
The survivors of his platoon weren’t waiting to be told to clear the trench. Their survival instinct had sent them scrambling over its escarp and deeper into the landscape of the fort. They sought cover in shell craters half-filled with rain that provided poor shelter from mortar rounds falling almost straight down.
But burrowed against the sides of the craters, at least they were still safe from the bullets fired by well-concealed Germans raking the air above their heads, if just for the moment.
And through it all, the gunners in the turrets of Fort Driant continued to throw their shells toward the Americans trying to cross the Moselle as if nothing of any great consequence was going on outside their steel and concrete cocoons.
Suddenly, it all stopped, like the abrupt onset of quiet after a storm. The howitzers fell silent in their turrets; the torrent of mortar shells on the GIs ceased; the bullets slicing the air like scythes brought their harvest of death to an end.
The company was far too disorganized to take advantage of the lull and continue their assault, and the commander knew it all too well. Any further thoughts of attacking the bunkers between his scattered unit and the nearest turrets were a fool’s game. His choice became very simple: We can die here or we can withdraw and maybe survive this god-awful fuckup.
Withdrawal: the only tactically sound thing to do now. Men under his command had died before—plenty of them. But not another GI needed to die here today.
To hell with the mission. It’s already a lost cause.
He called for his platoon leaders to pull back the same way they came in—the only escape route available—and rally their men beyond the wire, outside the boundary of the fort. His radio operator had barely spoken the first few words of the withdrawal order into his microphone when a bullet pierced his chest and flung him to the ground like a discarded rag doll.
Then there were German soldiers everywhere. They’d risen from the ground like spirits from the grave—maybe fifty, maybe five hundred of them—exiting their subterranean shelters through armored doors like the one the GIs had just failed to open. Their mission was simple: repel the Americans from the roof of Fort Driant by any means possible.
Driven by the bloodlust born of primal fear, the opposing forces quickly mingled, like exhausted boxers drawn together in a clinch. Often at less than arm’s length, they were so close that rifles couldn’t be brought to bear as firearms. The fight atop this archaic fort had devolved to the old-fashioned methods of hand-to-hand combat, just as the GIs had feared at the start of this assault. Rifles with bayonets affixed to their muzzles became broadswords and lances; the stocks of those weapons were now bludgeons.
And when even those ancient weapons couldn’t be brought to bear, there were still blows from fists, desperate wrestling, and the chokeholds of men for whom the slogan kill or be killed was no longer just words.
But this was merely death in slow motion. There had to be a better way to win this.
There was. The same imperative seized both sides: Take back the trench!
The brawl dissolved to a frantic fifty-yard dash as Germans and GIs raced for the trench. The side that got there first with the most would win this skirmish. Men in the trench could bring their rifles and machine guns to bear on those still exposed in the open. It would be point-blank slaughter: if enough Germans got there first, they’d vanquish the Americans. If the GIs won the race, they’d be right back where they started. But they’d have fewer Germans blocking their escape from the fort.
The race ended in a tie. Even in the trench, there would be no respite from the hand-to-hand fighting. It would just continue in these narrow confines.
It was a battle of attrition now. Mortally wounded soldiers fell on each side until there were more Americans still standing than Germans. The battle had reached critical mass—that point when both sides knew for certain who was winning and who was losing.
No one needed to give an order; the Germans still on their feet fled, hoping to vanish back into the secret passageways from which they’d come before a GI’s bullet struck them down. The Americans, exhausted from this brief but intense fight, hurled poorly aimed shots after them.
This was not a victory to be savored. It was not a victory at all. The GIs grabbed their wounded and filed quickly from the trench and withdrew through the damaged barbed wire field from which they’d come. The dead from both sides, some still locked with a foe in lethal embrace, were left behind, nothing more now than numbers on some adjutant’s casualty report.
At the battalion CP, the company commander couldn’t understand why his colonel was so upbeat about the attack. The post-action report was dismal: One hundred twelve men had started up the hill to the fort little more than an hour ago.
Sixty-eight had returned. Nearly half of that number were wounded.
A seventy percent casualty rate. Astronomical by any standard.
I get kicked off that hill and had to leave forty-four of my men behind. So where the hell is the silver lining in this disaster that the colonel’s so high on?
His voice little more than an exhausted whisper, the company commander said, “Sir, we can’t take that fort. Not this way. It’s a maze—we don’t know where the hell the Krauts are going to pop up.”
“But you got inside, son,” the colonel replied. “I’m proud of you and your men, Captain. You got inside. No other unit’s done that. The rest of Fifth Division—hell, the rest of the whole damn Third Army—can learn from you. As soon as you get cleaned up, you’ll be briefing the general on how you did it.”
Fighting back his tears, the company commander said, “Begging your pardon, sir—and with all due respect—but we didn’t get inside of anything. Not a damn thing. Hell, we didn’t even scratch the surface. And these Krauts aren’t the same scared old men and little boys we were capturing back at the Falaise Pocket. These guys are tough. At least the ones that showed their faces were, anyway. I’m thinking we had them outnumbered three to one and they were still kicking our ass. I’m telling you, sir, if we can’t blow that whole dam
n hill to kingdom come, we’ll never force those Krauts out of there.”
Chapter Fourteen
Zebra Ramp had a sprawling operations tent all its own. At the moment, twenty-seven men were huddled inside it, seeking shelter from the cold, driving rain. In addition to Major Staunton and Sergeant Dandridge, there was the nine-man crew of the CQ-17 mothership, the two pilots who’d fly the BQ-7 baby, one pilot for each of the two PQ-14 drones, three electronics techs, eight aircraft mechanics, and Tommy Moon.
A telephone line had been strung to the main switchboard at A-90. Tommy was on that line, getting an update on the weather situation. Plotting furiously on a chart, he grabbed for a straightedge. The best thing within reach was a slide rule. He put it to use.
Staunton bellowed, “THAT’S NOT A GODDAMN RULER, LIEUTENANT.”
He snatched the slide rule away. “This is a precision instrument. We don’t use it around here for doodling.” As he stalked off, he told Dandridge, “Get that officer a proper straightedge, Sergeant.”
He lowered his voice, mumbling one more thing that was still heard by everyone in the tent: “Fucking pilots.”
Tommy checked the faces of the other flyers in the tent. They didn’t seem surprised, upset, or annoyed by Staunton’s slur.
I guess they’ve heard it all before. Must be like water off a duck’s back.
Tommy hung up the phone and moved to the briefing board. “It’s about time,” Staunton said. “So what’s the weather going to be, Lieutenant?”
“The rain’s going to continue both here at A-90 and over the target area through around 1200 hours tomorrow,” Tommy said. “We won’t see a break during daylight until then. After that, we’re supposed to get about a week of clear days.”
The mothership command pilot, a lieutenant named Paul Wheatley, asked, “Are your Ninth Air Force metro guys usually on the money, Moon?”
“They’re not too bad. I’d take that time of 1200 as an approximation, though.”
“That’s all?” Wheatley replied, winking at the other bomber pilots. “We can usually consider the whole damn forecast from Eighth Air Force as an approximation.”
Everybody seemed to be laughing except Major Staunton. He waved his arms impatiently to silence the tent and then said, “Let’s get this briefing started.” Pointing to the maps and aerial photographs hung on the tent sidewall, he added, “Lieutenant Moon, tell us everything you know about this Fort Driant.”
For the next twenty minutes, Tommy explained the topography, defenses, and vulnerabilities—or lack thereof—of the fort. Using an aerial photograph giving a view of Driant from directly above, he said, “The best chance to destroy the whole fort in one shot from the air is to blow up one of these four gun batteries in the main fort. Everything of any importance is underground—ammunition, generators, fuel, living quarters, the whole bit. The only thing that sticks up above ground are these armored gun turrets, and even they retract so they’re flush when not firing. There’s got to be an enormous tunnel system connecting it all together. If we can blow up just one of these batteries, the blast force and hot gasses funneled down those tunnels should kill or incapacitate just about every Kraut in the place. We’ve never been able to put enough concentrated explosive force against one of these batteries to do it any damage at all, though.”
Lieutenant Wheatley asked, “You said there’s very little flak?”
“Yeah, that’s true. We’ve never seen a flak position in the fort itself. There have been a few mobile ones in the vicinity, though.”
“You’d bet your life on that, Moon?”
“I do every day, Wheatley.” The air of certainty in his voice put an end to the skeptical line of questioning.
Major Staunton was at the map, jotting notes, making computations with the slide rule. He wasn’t happy with what the numbers were telling him.
“Lieutenant Moon,” he said, “how high does the concrete structure of a gun battery protrude above ground level?”
“I can’t give you an exact figure, sir.”
“Then give me your best guess, Lieutenant.” The irritation in his voice was as cringeworthy as nails on a blackboard.
“Well, sir, as you can see in these oblique photographs, it’s not very much. A couple of feet, tops.”
Staunton went back to working the slide rule. In a few moments, he had his answer. “We’re eight degrees beyond limit, dammit,” he said. It didn’t sound like an admission of defeat by some insurmountable obstacle. Just another equation—a very complex one—that needed to be solved.
Dandridge knew exactly what limit the major was talking about. He was the only man in the tent who did. He told Staunton, “Maybe we’d better explain, sir.”
The major nodded, adding an accommodating arm sweep that meant be my guest.
“What Major Staunton’s getting at,” Dandridge began, “is there’s almost no vertical aspect to our target. It’s flat on the ground, for all practical purposes. To have a decent chance of hitting one of those batteries, our dive angle is going to have to be steeper than we’d hoped for, so the baby impacts it from above rather than laterally. But we’re limited by the maximum elevator authority of the autopilot. It wasn’t designed for dive bombing, more for simply holding altitude or pitch attitude.”
Tommy asked, “But we can still do it, right?”
“Theoretically, yes,” Dandridge replied. “But unlike the gradual descent we’ve usually employed, our trajectory down to the target is going to be a tight arc, much tighter than we’ve ever tried before. And more difficult. Our numbers are going to have to be dead on the money or our chances of a bull’s-eye are pretty small.”
“Very small, indeed,” Major Staunton added.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the tent, broken only when Tommy asked, “Sergeant, you actually fly the baby into the target, right?”
“Of course, sir. We already—”
“I know we’ve already talked about it,” Tommy interrupted, “but I need to ask this: why aren’t actual pilots flying the baby?”
The other aviators in the room clenched their teeth. They’d been there before and had learned not to go there again. They felt sure they knew what was about to happen.
And they weren’t disappointed. Major Staunton bolted from his chair, snarling like a feral mother protecting her young. Spittle flying from his lips, he hurled his answer at Tommy.
“Let me enlighten you on what the rest of the Air Force knows all too well, Lieutenant. We studied this at great length back in the States and the entire air staff came to the same conclusion: a pilot is no more capable of flying a remote-controlled drone than a technician who understands the equipment so much better. In fact, pilots have a far longer learning curve, because they have to unlearn so much to become drone controllers. And since they think they all know so damn much, that unlearning is a monumental task. We crashed countless test drones with pilots at the controls due to operator error—wasting a tremendous amount of time and resources—until we learned this lesson. We’re eternally grateful for a pilot’s ability when it comes to taking off, finding his destination, and landing. But for remote control in the air and crashing into a target, our enlisted technicians have consistently given us better results. And they’re far cheaper to train. Faster, too.”
Paul Wheatley, the mothership pilot, shot Tommy a look which featured arched eyebrows. He knew what it meant: You see the bullshit we have to put up with?
Nobody expected Tommy to challenge Staunton’s pronouncement. But there he was, standing toe to toe with the major. Two diminutive men about to lock horns in a cerebral turf fight.
“Be that as it may, sir,” Tommy said, “but let’s get back to the original problem. Are you actually telling me you don’t think you can get an airplane to go down?”
The question left Staunton confused and silent. He’d expected a challenge from the fighter jock, just not this one. The air in the tent was suddenly infused with excitement, like the moments before
a street confrontation suddenly escalates to the first punch.
Tommy continued, “Well then, sir, I’m here to tell you that getting an airplane to go down is the easy part. Getting it to go up—now that’s a little harder.”
It took a few seconds, but the other men in the tent—especially the pilots—began to laugh. Softly at first, but it grew to a joyous chorus of agreement with the practical wisdom in Tommy’s words.
An added bonus: seeing how much it pissed off Major Staunton.
“Let’s talk specifics,” Tommy said. “Why do you think it’s going to be hard to fly a steep descent to the target?”
“We’re not flying a nimble dive bomber here, Lieutenant,” Staunton replied. “These ships handle like trucks.”
“Yeah, but like I just said, sir, getting an airplane—any airplane—to go down is a cinch. Especially one making a terminal dive.”
Staunton frowned and shook his head as if he was tired of suffering fools. To a lesser degree, Dandridge was doing the same.
“I know what you’re going to say, Lieutenant—just chop the throttles and she’ll fall like a brick,” Staunton said. “But I’m afraid you just don’t understand the equipment we have to work with. The autopilot elevator servo has—by design—very little authority, just enough to keep the ship straight and level. To expect it to be able to guide the ship through a steep descent that’s somehow controllable is—well—simply wishful thinking. We still need the ability to aim the baby so it actually strikes the target. And those servos give us only a very limited ability to do that.”
Now it was Tommy’s turn to suffer fools. “Major,” he said, “I’ve been on more dive-bombing runs than I care to remember, and not once did I need a lot of elevator input to keep the dive on target. The only time I needed a lot of elevator was for pulling out, and that’s a problem we’re not going to have here.”
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 11