"We did not start it, Tan Hwan," Schulze interposed. "And if you are an engineer, you should be intelligent enough to know that if the French really wanted to fight, no Viet Minh could ever defeat them. What do you want to tell us about the road?"
"Will you set me free?"
"Do you want to change sides?" I asked him somewhat skeptically.
"I don't want to change sides. I want to save those women and children, and your lives as well. Then I want to get away from it all."
"Turn around!" I commanded briskly.
He obeyed, turning slowly—a puzzled look, mixed with anxiety, on his face. Taking my knife I cut away the ropes around his wrists.
"Now, suppose you tell us about the road."
"Bamboo bombs!" he exclaimed. "Hundreds of them ... only ten miles from here. Do you have a map?"
Schulze opened his map case for the former guerrilla leader.
"Here!" Tan Hwan pointed out a section of woods. "Right here, near the streams. You can never pass."
"By now the guerrilla commander knows that we took hostages."
"Kly wouldn't care. He was educated in China and for him only the Party matters. If you blow up on the bombs, he will display the corpses of the women and children as though they were massacred deliberately by you."
"I see___"
So it was to be bamboo bombs, I thought. I had seen a few of those devilish native inventions: a ball of bamboo leaves packed solid under a netting of wire, filled with high explosive or grenades and hundreds of short, sharpened bamboo fragments, stakes with their points frequently poisoned. Fitted with a primer to act on pressure, or by trip wire, the football-size bombs could easily mow down a platoon. Also, since they were green, it was almost impossible to spot them against the foliage.
"Many of the bombs are suspended from the trees," Tan Hwan explained. "If they fall on the trucks, they will kill everyone."
"How do you know so much about them?"
He paused, wiped his perspiring face, then said, "I designed them, Lieutenant The whole trap, and many others before."
"You must have killed quite a few Frenchmen, Tan Hwan."
"I know," he admitted. "I saw them dying. They died horribly."
He asked for another cigarette. Schulze gave him a whole pack. The man broke four matches trying to light his cigarette.
"Is there an ambush in the making as well?" Erich asked.
"No, not immediately. The men are farther up in the hills. But they could not remove the bombs anyway. The Viet Minh will attack only after the bombs have exploded. I know a bypass," Tan Hwan added after a pause. "Will you still set me free?"
"You are free! I am going to give you a pass to Hanoi."
"I don't want to go to Hanoi. I am going to Saigon. No one knows me there."
"Where is your family?"
"I have no family. The Japanese killed them."
"We will get you to Saigon, Tan Hwan."
We had to cover up his sudden defection, and I knew the best way of doing it. I told Schulze to escort Tan Hwan farther down the road where he could board the tank without being seen by his companions or the civilians. I drew my revolver. "Now yell!" I told him. "Yell as loud as you can . . . Long live Ho Chi Minh . . . Down with the French colonialists." As he yelled, I fired five bullets into the woods. "Now you won't have to be afraid of any Viet Minh revenge, Tan Hwan," I told him as I reloaded my gun. "Cheer up! You have just been executed. Old Ho might even give you a posthumous medal."
"Come!" Erich urged him and the two walked down the road. I returned to the convoy. The two other guerrillas had already been returned to the tank turret. I ordered them removed to truck eleven.
They had seen us marching off with Tan Hwan, had heard the yells and the five shots. Now they saw me returning without their companion. "You shot him!" one of the captives yelled at me. "You killed him in cold blood. . . . Remember this day, officer. . . . Remember this day." The man cursed all the way back along the convoy, lamenting the fate of the "martyred" Tan Hwan.
Mounting the tank, I called Pfirstenhammer in the troop carrier. "Karl, you stay put with the convoy for about five minutes, then follow us."
"O.K., Hans!"
Driving on with the tank we picked up Schulze and Tan Hwan. Similar tricks had worked well in occupied Russia where we used to "execute" a large number of turncoats every day, especially for the benefit of their families still living in the shadow of Stalin and the secret police.
Forward!
Tan Hwan was as good as his word. He showed us the bypass, a cleverly arranged diversion through a dry, shallow ravine. But we could not leave that deadly booby-trapped section of road behind for other troops to fall into. Tan Hwan had already mentioned that the guerrilla camp was farther up in the hills and that the enemy was waiting for the explosions before attacking the convoy.
It did not take long for us to prepare a counter-trap. Leaving the convoy in the sheltered ravine we hauled ten large gasoline drums and a few ammo cases onto the road. At a safe distance, Riedl parked two trucks at awkward angles, one of them with its front wheels in a ditch, with its doors and windows wide open. The vehicles appeared to be broken down and abandoned. The tank was driven partly off the road, its turret turned around with the gun pointing against a tree barely five feet from the muzzle. Around the tank and the vehicles we planted a few oily rags and dumped some diesel oil on the ground.
Not far from the trap a narrow footpath ran up towards the hills, the path of the terrorists. "They should be coming down on that path," Tan Hwan explained. "When they hear the explosions, they won't be long. There is no other way for them to come."
Taking a hundred men from the convoy we proceeded to establish a ring of steel about the place. Schulze and thirty headhunters took care of the path. Pfirstenhammer, with two platoons carrying light machine guns and flamethrowers, went down the road to seal the escape route toward Yen Bay. Eisner and forty men deployed on the far side of the "abandoned" vehicles, between the road and the ravine. Riedl remained in charge of the convoy and I stayed in the tank with Tan Hwan, the driver, and the two gunners.
I called to my companions in German. We never spoke French on the wireless. Everyone was ready.
Eisner fired a short burst into the gasoline drums. They burst into flame and began to explode, setting off the ammo crates; in a matter of seconds the place looked like hell, with thick black smoke rising above the woods. Ten minutes later Schulze radioed: "They are coming, Hans!" "Let them pass!"
I signaled to Eisner, who thereupon sent a couple of men to set fire to the rags which had been scattered near the vehicles. The scene was indeed very realistic. Everything on the road seemed to be afire. "They are passing now," Schulze reported again. "About two hundred of them."
"Hold your fire, Erich," I warned him. "It is damned difficult," he replied in a subdued voice. "We could kick them in the ass."
I closed the turret hatch down to a few inches to permit observation and soon saw the first batch of guerrillas spilling from the bushes, swarming onto the road. "Xung! Phong!" they screamed. "Forward! Kill!" The "dead" tank suddenly came to life. Backing onto the road, we began to fire point-blank into the terrified mob. Eisner and his machine gunners began to play their own music and from the trail Schulze closed in with guns blazing. We had the enemy in the bag.
On the road a few dozen terrorists had already fallen, others had dropped beside the road, wounded or dying. Realizing that they had run into a trap, the guerrilla commander wanted to withdraw but bumped into Schulze's outfit. Turning toward the ravine, they were beaten back by Eisner's machine gunners. On the road, Pfirstenhammer's platoon was pushing them back with MG's and flamethrowers spitting fifty-foot flames. It was massacre.
The enemy had only one way to flee—through the booby-trapped patch of forest, a bit of real estate which I cheerfully permitted them to have. About seventy of the survivors now began to throw away their weapons. We stopped firing at them but kept the flamethrowers
working, pushing the demoralized mob farther back on the road, step by step into their own trap with the bamboo bombs and God knows what else. They would either run or get roasted.
The trap did the rest. A quarter of an hour later we could still hear explosions and death cries coming from the woods.
Climbing from the turret, I heard a sudden blast inside the tank. Dropping back inside I saw Tan Hwan falling from his seat, blood oozing from his head. Somehow he had gotten hold of our driver's gun and had shot himself in a moment of anguish. He was our only casualty.
The convoy arrived at its destination. Not only a few trucks but the whole convoy. The Viet Minh had begun to know us in the way we wanted them to know our battalion.
Bomb for bomb! Bullet for bullet! Murder for murder!
They had enjoyed many years of unpunished rampaging. We were resolved to put an end to it. We were determined to make their lives a prolonged cry of agony.
We succeeded.
5. OPERATION "TRIANGLE"
Colonel Simon Houssong was a calm and considerate officer who seldom lost his temper. But the extermination of a battalion under the command of Captain Arnold Lorilleaux must have hurt him deeply. Apart from having been a much-decorated officer of the Second World War, the unfortunate captain had also been a brother-in-law of the colonel.
It was well after midnight when he sent a corporal to request my immediate attendance. "The colonel is in his office," the corporal informed me. "He hasn't left his desk tonight, except to get another bottle. He's been drinking all evening."
I was already in bed but dressed quickly and hurried over to our headquarters. In the corridor I ran into Lieutenant Derosier, Colonel Houssong's ADC. Derosier was carrying a small tray of coijee. "Here!" he said, handing me the tray. "Take it to him. Maybe he will listen to you."
"What's wrong with the colonel?"
Derosier shrugged. "Lorilleaux!" he said. "The old man just can't digest the news yet."
I entered the office and closed the door behind me. Stripped to his undershirt, Colonel Houssong was standing at the open window with his forehead resting against the mosquito netting. He was holding an almost empty bottle of Calvados and the room was strewn with papers and broken glass. Slipping the tray onto the desk, I reported. "First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller, at your request, mon colonel." He turned slowly and came toward me, wiping his face with a towel. Taking another gulp from the bottle, he tossed it into the waste basket.
"First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller," he repeated with a hint of mockery in his voice. "Sit down, Wagemueller . , . Sturmfuhrer Wagemueller, the Lord High Executioner of the Waffen SS . . . or the French Foreign Legion . . . It does not matter which, does it?"
"Would you like some coffee, mon colonel?"
"To hell with your coffee," he roared, pushing the tray aside and spilling coffee over his desk. "Leave it!" he stopped me when I jumped to rescue some of his papers. "We have a far greater mess to worry about." He paused for a moment, then dropped behind his desk, turned on the fan and looked at me with his eyes drawn. "Do you know why I called you?"
"Out, mon colonel."
"You go and put those bloody bastards to rot, Wagemueller," he breathed with hatred in every word. "The whole village . . . they were all feasting over the corpses of Lorilleaux and his men." His fist came down heavily on the table. "Seven hundred and twelve men, Wagemueller. All dead! You go and get those bastards who killed Arnold. . . . "Give them a first-class SS treatment. Spare nothing and no one except babes in their cribs. If this is the kind of enemy you were fighting in Russia, then many of your SS buddies were hanged quite innocently. I fought you in the Ardennes, at the Meuse, in North Africa, but now I am beginning to think that I may have fought the wrong enemy all the time."
"Mon colonel —"
"Shut up, Wagemueller! Those poor devils must be buried and the murderers put to rot. I know what you wanted to say. I will leave it to you how to go about it. You will manage it somehow. You always do."
"Do you want prisoners, mon colonel?"
"To hell with them!"
"Oui, mon colonel!"
It was an order I could appreciate: "I will leave it to you how to go about it." In my opinion it was the only sort of order a field commander in Indochina could act upon with responsibility and return with results. After studying the maps and aerial photos it took us less than three hours to prepare "Operation Triangle," one of our most successful raids on a Viet Minh stronghold. Every local landmark on our operational maps was given a German code name. The target village, a heavily fortified terrorist stronghold deep in the mountains (now in Laos), was renamed "Altdorf." Similarly we referred to Hanoi only as "Hansastadt" and to Saigon as "Schwaben." The river which we were to cross, the Nam Ou, we called "Schelde." The expedition was to be an extended one, over two hundred miles, with the last stage of it to be covered on foot.
The enemy was aware of our coming. For three days we had been advancing on the open road, following the tracks of the unfortunate French battalion. Air reconnaissance reported that the plank bridge across the river was still intact, as I suspected it would be. Why should the terrorists demolish a bridge across which Captain Lorilleaux and his seven hundred men had so conveniently marched into oblivion? The Viet Minh invitation had been left open for us too. Intelligence estimated the number of guerrillas in and around the village at more than a thousand men.
Had there not been seven hundred bodies beyond that plank bridge, I could have laughed at the guerrilla's naivete. The Viet Minh, in fact, always planned with a certain amount of naivete, seldom conceiving a plan of great complexity. Even today, the Vietcong guerrillas are only repeating the well-worn ruses of the Viet Minh, their forerunners. It was never guerrilla ingenuity but only French ignorance that fostered spectacular terrorist coups. Superior weapons mean little in the jungle and superiority in numbers could also be an unimportant factor. A thousand tough experts may cause more damage to the enemy, spread more terror, destroy more of their ranks than a division of green recruits can. My head-hunters had often destroyed Viet Minh detachments three times their number, accomplishing more with their bayonets than other units of the Legion ever accomplished with artillery.
The bridge was intact, open and inviting. The only thing missing was a placard saying "Please cross." On the way toward the river we collected ample evidence of the persistent terrorist surveillance we had been subjected to from sunrise to dusk. As a rule, we trusted no one and considered every native Indochinese a potential enemy, unless half of his or her family had been executed by the Viet Minh. From their ranks we selected our few but trusted guides. They had been truly loyal to us and we respected them highly. We had some routine precautionary measures that we always took, "the rules of survival." If we passed by some rice paddies, for instance, where a few dozen peasants were at work, Eisner would give the word: "Abwehrmannschaft abtreten!" and six of our sharpshooters would quietly drop into the roadside underbrush, carrying telescopic rifles with silencers attached— a formidable weapon against guerrillas. The column would march on as though nothing had happened. Sometimes, and as soon as the army was out of sight, some peasants would turn into armed terrorists, taking off after the column head over heels. Our sharpshooters would drop them before they reached the jungle.
It was also one of our tricks to pass a Viet Minh-controlled village without bothering a soul. The column would vanish into the hills, except for the sharpshooters, who would drop back to cover every exit. In ninety percent of all cases, Viet Minh messengers or even groups of guerrillas would emerge from the village and depart in a hurry. The silencer-equipped guns were excellent for dropping them quickly and quietly. Indeed, our marksmen were capable of hitting a dozen terrorists within a few seconds, starting invariably with the last man in a line or group. Erich Schulze had once eliminated five running guerrillas, repeating aloud, "Mitte-mitte-mitte-mitte-mitte"—"Center-center . . . ," pulling the trigger at each word which corresponded with one shot per second. W
e had used the same ruse in occupied Russia and invariably it worked.
Nevertheless we could not have possibly eliminated all the Viet Minh observers. Some vital information, however, we would never let them learn: our exact strength, equipment, and combat order. Where the enemy observed only three hundred men carrying light weapons, in reality there were seven hundred troops equipped with mortars, machine guns, flamethrowers, and two 4 CM rifles.
For three days we had been advancing in a fashion which we called the Frachtzug—Goods Train—for it was a slow but very effective process. Group One, code named ATA, with myself in command, was the only force the Communists had been allowed to see. We moved openly during the day but never covered more than ten to fifteen miles and always camped down for the night. We set up what was in reality only a decoy camp, for as soon as darkness fell most of our force would quietly evacuate the camp to deploy on the flanks.
Group Two, ROTKAPCHEN, and Group Three, PER-SIL, each consisted of two hundred and fifty men. They were strictly stationary during the hours of daylight and remained camouflaged in the jungle. While ATA was advancing, the two other groups rested. ROTKAPCHEN and PERSIL moved only at night, sometimes toward a predetermined assembly point, sometimes by simply "riding the beam," the radio beeps transmitted regularly by Group One. For a short time we had tried using dogs to guide troops at night but the Viet Minh soon killed them off by leaving poisoned bits of meat along the trails. We never succeeded in training the dogs not to snatch food from the ground.
By dawn, Group Two and Group Three would arrive at the place where Group One had spent the night. Dispersing and taking cover before sunrise, the troops would settle down for another day while ATA penetrated deeper and deeper into the hills in plain sight of the enemy, Group One—the decoy.
Helmut Riedl, a one-time Brandenburger, was in charge of ROTKAPCHEN. Riedl was a tall blond Prussian, a tough and resourceful fighter who spoke little but did lots of shooting. During the war he had fought in Yugoslavia and in Greece, then spent two more years in Italy. Riedl had lost his wife and children during an air raid on Erfurt in 1943. After his tragic loss he did not care about being killed, which is probably why he had survived without receiving more than a few superficial wounds.
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