by Leo Kessler
The American artillery reacted at once. With a roar like that of an infuriated beast cheated of its prey, the guns of the Second Corps opened up.
The veterans of the Wotan Battle Group knew that strange sound well enough. Paralysis descended upon their positions at once. The rattle of their spandaus died immediately. The crews huddled together expectantly, their heads buried in the stinking uniformed body of the man next to them. In the rifle pits, the troopers cowered in the mud, bodies rolled into tense balls, trying to present the smallest possible target. In that same instant, the first hundred or so heavy shells straddled the perimeter, bursting in a deafening thunder. Immediately all hell was let loose. Purple searing flame, the choking smell of cordite, pieces of shrapnel and copper shellbands hissing through the air, as big as a man's fist, slashing showers of earth and mud. Mangled, screaming men were flung high into the air.
A platoon of rear echelon stallions approaching the Twin Tits' HQ, carrying the breakfast rations for the Vulture's staff, were caught by a direct hit. Black army ration loaves and the kettles of hot giddi-up soup flying crazily through the vicious storm. A runner was caught out in the open, his head severed neatly by a piece of glowing metal. A group of reinforcements, boots polished, rifles neatly oiled, running panic-stricken through the hellish barrage and taking casualties all the way, dropped gasping into the perimeter trenches, dirty, bloodied and already completely demoralized.
In the Twin Tits' CP the assembled officers looked at each other, faces pale with shock, eyes wide and staring, as the big dugout shook and swayed with each explosion like a ship at sea hitting wave after wave. In the corner, the Creeper crouched in the foetal position, knees tucked up tightly under his chin, eyes closed, and hands pressed tightly to his lips. Next to him, Metzger, his normally ruddy face now drawn and ashen-grey, took surreptitious gulps from his bottle of grappa, his one consolation in this crazy murderous front-line world.
But despite the tremendous barrage, the Vulture was his usual self. Calmly he polished his monocle, and seizing a brief pause in the shelling, rasped:
`You have done well gentlemen. I am pleased with you. Our defences have held well.'
`But they were only niggers - little better than Jews and animals,' Schwarz said contemptuously. 'There is no victory in defeating such creatures.'
The Vulture looked across at the one-armed captain almost sadly. Everyone in the Battle Group knew now that Schwarz was mad; he had to be treated gently.
`No you are wrong, Captain,' he said. 'The black men were very brave, but poorly led and inexperienced. After all they did penetrate our positions.'
He turned to the others.
`One thing we have learned this night, however, is that we need more strength. If we had had the new paratroop recoilless rifle, we could have broken up the Ami attack much more easily. We need more beef. But that problem will be taken care of later. As soon as this barrage lifts, I want you to get back to your men immediately.'
`You mean they'll come back, sir?' von Dodenburg asked.
`Of course,' the Vulture said easily and slapped his cane against the side of his riding boot. 'Believe you me, gentlemen, we haven't seen the last of our black friends from the land of the boundless possibilities this night ...’
`Hello, Sunray ... This is Moonbeam ... Hello, Sunray, this is Moonbeam, are you receiving me?'
The radio operator, crouched in the cover of the snowbank at the bottom of the mountain called over and over again, while the officers of the 93rd came and went, reporting the terrible losses the Regiment had suffered.
`First company, Second Battalion - twenty killed, fifty wounded, thirty missing ... First Battalion, sir, three officers and six non-coms unwounded ...’
Black Jack Jones slumped behind the operator, the blood pouring down from the gash on his forehead, received the news of the terrible casualties blankly, as if they had happened to someone else's regiment and not to his own beloved 93rd. In the shelter of a poncho, the regimental surgeon was sawing off the leg of an eighteen-year-old runner. He could hear the harsh grate of the bone-saw on the boy's leg bone and his rapid, shallow breathing.
`Hello Moonbeam,' a voice broke through the static suddenly. 'Hello Moonbeam ... Here Sunray.'
Black Jack Jones shook himself out of his lethargy. He grabbed the mike from the operator's frozen hand.
`Hello Sunray, here Moonbeam. Are you receiving me?'
`Sure, I'm receiving you,' a well-remembered, satisfied Southern voice answered. 'Your boys sure did get their black asses whupped, colonel, didn't they!' The staff colonel's voice, distorted as it was by the static, was unmistakably gleeful. 'I told you they would. Yer can't make fighting men out of that kind of material.'
Black Jack Jones exploded with rage.
`Get off the radio, damn you!' he cried, forgetting radio procedure completely. 'I want to speak to the Corps Commander!'
`Who the hell do you think you're talking to, Colonel!' the fat staff officer cried.
`I know who I'm talking to - a mean bastard of a bigot whom I'm personally gonna pistol-whip when I come to Corps HQ. Now get your ass off this radio - quick!'
The staff colonel blustered but he fetched Keyes to the radio. Underneath the poncho the surgeon had finished with the boy. A blood-stained orderly deposited the severed limb in the snow, and as the boy was carried out, another soldier with most of his lower jaw shot away, was led in.
`Listen, General,' Black Jack snapped, 'I need all the artillery support you can give in thirty minutes. I want that goddam peak slapped with everything you've got.'
`You're going in again, Moonbeam?'
`Yes,' Black Jack said.
`What are your casualties like?'
`Bad, hellishly bad, sir. My First Battalion has had it. The Second is still capable of combat. The Third is in good shape. I'm jumping off with the Third.'
Black Jack could almost hear Keyes thinking.
`You were at the Point, weren't you, Jones? You're a regular?’
‘Yessir.'
`Don't you know that you're in a bad enough hole now as it is. The 93rd is a publicity exercise in the final analysis. If you can get them out without any more casualties, you'll save your career. But if you go in again and get plastered again, you've had it.'
Keyes' harsh, monotonous voice became gentler. The old cavalryman had a soft spot in his heart for determined young officers, especially if they were from West Point as he was and three generations of Keyes before him.
`It'd be kinda foolish to ruin your career, Jack, for a bunch of – well, you know what I mean?'
`I appreciate your concern, sir. But my 93rd is going to take that damned peak or - ' Jones hesitated a moment – 'or I shan't be coming back, sir.'
`All right, Colonel, be it on your own head. I'll give you all the support I can. I'll call TAC Air Force, but I don't think we'll get much change there for aerial support. This weather's too lousy. But you can rely on the corps artillery. When are you going in, Colonel?'
`Dawn, sir.'
`Dawn, eh? OK. It's on your head – and the best of luck, Jack ...’
‘Ah don't see why the folks back in the States always rave about this country,' the skinny PFC from Georgia snorted. 'Jesus Christ on the mountain, there ain't nothing here we don't have better back home!'
`Yeah, in a pig's eye!' his buddy, a smart high yellow from Chicago snapped from the side of his mouth. 'Go and tell that one to the marines, Washington, they might believe ya.' He lapsed into silence to keep pace with the long line of khaki-clad men climbing up the snow-covered mountain.
Black Jack Jones, his head bandaged now looked over his shoulder. Is this all that's left of the Regiment, he asked himself in dull surprise, seeing the extent of his losses for the first time. He glanced to his right. The Second was keeping up despite the rough going and the artillery which was coming in low over their heads. They surmounted an embankment and the last shells from the Corps' barrage started to hide the smoke-obscured
peak. A machine-gun up ahead chattered suddenly. Here and there soldiers began to flop down behind the cover.
`Off your duffs!' the big Staff Sergeant, who had insisted he should carry the regimental flag into action, snarled. 'The mother-fugging war ain't over yet. Move it!'
Some of the young soldiers bent their heads to the glittering snow and pretended that he wasn't there. The Staff Sergeant smashed his boot into the high yellow PFC's side. 'On your-doggon feet, soldier!' he snapped, 'you goddam nigger, you!'
The line moved forward again, more hurriedly now. The chatter of the machine-guns increased in intensity. The icy clear morning air was full of lead. Men began to fall everywhere.
The Third hesitated for a moment, the men staring in apparent bewilderment at the men lying on the snow, their blood staining it red, as if they could not understand how this terrible thing could happen to them.
`Come on, follow me,' Black Jack Jones yelled. 'Keep moving, men!'
But half the Battalion was down in the snow now, firing at the smoke-shrouded peak. The ones who had kept advancing, faltered and they too were running back to their comrades, sobbing for breath, crashing into the snow beside the others and firing their weapons furiously as if this were sufficient excuse for their withdrawal.
`Oh, you yella-bellied bunch of niggers!' the Staff Sergeant with the regimental flag cursed. 'Why, yer nothing more than a - ' He never finished the sentence. He swayed crazily suddenly, as a bullet struck him in the back. Blood spurted out of his mouth and he fell forward onto the snow. 'You niggers,' he said faintly, then died.
The high yellow from Chicago grabbed the flag, now stained with the dead man's blood. He scrambled warily to his feet and looked numbly at Black Jack.
The Colonel did not seem to see the bullets striking the snow in spurts all around him as he walked along the long line of men lying down, as if he were back on parade in Fort Jay.
`Come on men,' he kept saying, raising his calm voice only when the chatter of the machine-guns threatened to drown it. `Only another hundred yards and we've got them. For the sake of the old ninety-third.'
A bullet struck his wrist and he dropped his carbine in the snow. He did not seem to notice, but kept on walking.
`All you've got to do is to get to your feet and start walking - walking after me. I'll lead you.'
`For the sake of the old Ninety-Third,' the high yellow soldier yelled and swung the flag.
`For the Ninety-Third!' they bellowed as one, scrambling to their feet.
`Follow me!' Black Jack Jones cried joyfully, waving his good arm towards the enemy.
The survivors of the 93rd swept forward and, as the smoke cleared in front of them, they caught sight of their enemy for the first time, white camouflaged helmets and thin dark perforated Machine-gun barrels which quivered with heat and scorched the snow. Then they charged into the pitiless fire.
But they were no match for the veterans of the Wotan, whose vicious hail of fire poured into their ever thinning ranks, cutting them down into small scattered groups, then into individuals, each man suddenly alone in the confused noise and smoke, doubling blindly forward to his death.
The boy from Georgia was stopped at a low stone wall. His friend, the high yellow with the flag, was mown down a second later. Someone else grabbed it. He stumbled forward with the few who were left, his face upturned to the peak in agony, hands clawing at the wall. He was shot just as he had managed to swing his leg over it. As he fell, a helmetless Black Jack seized it, without even a glance at him or the rest of the dead littering the wall all around him:
`Forward the old Ninety-Third,' he croaked crazily. 'Forward!'
A bullet struck him in the shoulder. He staggered but kept on advancing. The ones who were still on their feet now followed. They scaled the wall and plunged through the snow after him, stumbling towards the machine-guns, as if they were eager to die. Only a half a dozen of them reached the perimeter; and within a matter of minutes they were all dead, their Colonel in their midst, his bloody hands still gripping the flag. Behind, the regiment he had trained so lovingly lay sprawled dead or dying on the snow-covered slope of Peak 555 stark against its white surface, while the handful of wounded survivors hobbled painfully and silently like sleep walkers down the way they had come. The 93rd Infantry Regiment (Coloured) existed no more.
Four hours later, von Dodenburg, accompanied by Schulze as a bodyguard against the Italian partisans who were beginning to make a nuisance of themselves on Route Nine, was heading north in the Battle Group's Volkswagen jeep. His orders from the Vulture were simple - in part. He was to take the captured banner and present it to the Reichsführer SS personally.
`Herr Himmler likes such trappings of military grandeur,' the Vulture had remarked cynically. 'Perhaps he will hang it with the rest of the mumbo-jumbo in that crypt he has built himself in the Wewelsburg, (2) what?'
In return he was to ask the Reichsführer SS for an immediate delivery of the recoilless rifles which were still on the secret list, but which, Geier knew, were being delivered to all airborne units, including the SS Parachute Battalion.
But that had not been the Vulture's only order. As they had walked across the plateau towards the mules, which were to take him and Schulze down to the valley and the Battle Group's rear echelon, he had gripped von Dodenburg's arm just short of the place where the sweating SS troopers were throwing the Americans' stiffening bodies into a communal grave.
`Von Dodenburg, a word in your ear.'
He had indicated with a nod that the Creeper should move away and had waited till he was out of earshot. Then he had whispered:
`Von Dodenburg, I know that you believe in the National Socialist cause implicitly, but you are also a simple soldier like myself, one who believes in Germany's destiny. Am I right, my friend?'
The young Major had mumbled something and waited, bewildered by the sudden mystery, for what was to come.
`When you have seen that fool of a Reichsführer, I want you to see Group Leader Schellenberg.'
`The head of the SD?'
`Yes.'
`And what shall I say, sir?'
`Nothing. Just tell him you come from the - er - Vulture,' he grinned faintly. 'He, knowing Schellenberg, will do the talking, believe me.'
Thus mystified, von Dodenburg swept north towards Rome's airport where they would catch the military courier plane for Berlin and Himmler's HQ. But if von Dodenburg was glum and silent, Schulze, Schmeisser cradled ready for the Italian partisans should they have the audacity to attack an SS vehicle, was jubilant. More than once he exploded joyfully:
`Great crap on the Christmas tree, sir, we're going home - home to mother!'
Part Two: The Traitors
`Of course, it's treason, Kuno ... But it must be done for the sake of our country.’ General von Dodenburg to his son Major von Dodenburg.
Seven
Berlin was dying. As the ancient wood-burning cab, with its steaming boiler trundling after it on a trailer, left Tempelhof Air Field, von Dodenburg and Schulze could see that the nation's capital lay in ruins.
`Oh my aching arse,' Schulze breathed. 'It's worse than Hamburg! Those RAF Tommies have really knocked the shit out of the place.'
Von Dodenburg nodded grimly and stared out at the sallow-faced undernourished men and women, their heads ducked in the collars of their shabby coats, who were hurrying through the ruins which still smouldered here and there from the last air raid.
They did not look like the well-fed, exuberant Berliners, who had welcomed them back from France in 194o, screaming their hoarse, frantic Sieg Heils, as the survivors of the Wotan had goose-stepped down the Unter den Linden.
`They don't look so good, sir,' Schulze said dolefully. 'None too good at all.'
`No, they don't,' he agreed, watching an old woman in a rusty-black coat, wearily shovelling up the 'apple' left by a tired, lean-ribbed nag pulling a Wehrmacht transport. 'They're bearing a heavy burden. God knows how they do it, Schulze.' Happ
y at the thought he would be soon home in Hamburg on a surprise forty-eight hour leave, Schulze chortled:
‘Well, they always say that the bombs are worse, sir. Why, at the front, everything's in butter - a rest cure.'
`Get on with you,' von Dodenburg said with a tired smile, as the ancient wood-burning taxi started to draw up in front of the shattered Lehrter Bahnhof, where Schulze would catch his train for Hamburg.
They shook hands under the suspicious eyes of the two chain-dogs, guarding the entrance on the look-out for the deserters swarming through the capital. It wasn't every day that they saw an SS Major shake hands with a private soldier, but then it wasn't every day that they saw a private with the precious black and white Knight's Cross hanging round his neck.
`All right, Schulze, don't forget that you've only got forty-eight hours. I expect you back here - on this spot - at sixteen hundred hours exactly, two days from now. And don't bring back any souvenirs from those - er - ladies of yours in St Pauli. (1) Clear?'
`Clear as thick ink, sir,' Schulze said cheekily, slinging his rucksack, laden with Italian black market goods, over his big shoulder. 'I'll probably spend my leave in the station mission, caring for fallen angels.' He winked. 'My regards to the Reichsführer.'
Major von Dodenburg got back into the cab and snapped at the elderly driver:
`All right, Number Ten Prinz Albercht Strasse.'
The driver gave him a quick look, a sudden light of fear in his tired eyes. He knew the address well enough. It was the home of the Third Reich's police apparatus, the headquarters of the Gestapo itself.
Well, man, what are you waiting for?' von Dodenburg snapped, angry at the naked look of fear on the man's worn face. What had he to be afraid of? The Gestapo was there only to protect the law-abiding folk comrades, not to hound them, as many stupid people thought.