Cities, highways, bars, cinemas—people changing their shirts twice daily, people at beach parties . . . Europe. ... I read the letters as if they brought news from another planet.
"I hope you are not living too dangerously," Lin wrote. "The news about Indochina is quite fearful. Please don't risk your own we!! being for a transient advantage that is going to be lost anyway. The newspapers here are writing that whatever you may do (or for that matter, whatever the British Tommies may achieve in the British dependencies) the future of the colonies will be decided here in Europe, or maybe in America. Don't risk your life in chasinq the shadow of a victory that cannot be yours, Hans."
How right she was. . . .
"Life is improving here," my father wrote. "There is much talk about a peace treaty which would restore Germany to her own people. Personally I believe it is only twaddle. I doubt if Stalin will ever conclude a peace treaty with us. Eighty percent of whatever Russia now has, from photo cameras to printing machines, is coming from the zone that the Russians are busy milking round the clock. Stalin will never give up his German 'cow.' Here in the west we now have enough provisions. Most of the industries have been rebuilt, also the cities and villages. Everything was financed by the Americans! Naturally not because they began to 'like' us, but for the simple reason that they need a strong buffer state between the Reds and the rest of Europe. The prosecution of the so-called 'Nazi criminals' continues. It will probably go on forever. The only change is that it is no longer the Allied Military Tribunal but German courts who prosecute and condemn. Alas, son—Germans versus Germans. Those who were slimy enough to escape prosecution themselves now prosecute the less fortunate ones. There are so many 'anti-Nazis' and 'resistance fighters' here that one should indeed wonder how Hitler ever managed to gain control of the Reich."
The letter bore a Swiss postal stamp. There was still strict censorship in Germany Most of the letters I received from home had been mailed in Switzerland. The return address was also a Swiss post office box.
But our own world now centered on an area two miles downhill—in a Viet Minh camp. We gathered to discuss our coming operation against the guerrilla establishment, and, in general, our possible undertakings along the jungle road. Much depended on the girls. Although their loyalty could not be questioned, I ordered the customary precautions immediately after their departure. The defense perimeter of our camp was drastically altered. Sentries changed positions, machine guns and flamethrowers were removed and placed elsewhere. Our supplies were moved farther uphill. I also dispatched two hundred and fifty troops to deploy higher up in the woods. Our original establishment became a ghost camp. Whatever Noy and Thi may have seen was of no consequence now. A surprise Viet Minh attack would hit only the vacant woods.
Riedl at first took my arrangement as a "personal insult," and seemed annoyed as he commented, "Noy will never betray us, Hans." I explained to him that the girls could be captured and tortured into making admissions. They could be placed under surveillance, permitted to move about the camp, only to be shadowed on the way back to us. In our position we could not take chances. Not even if those chances were one in a million.
Although we did not dare approach too close to the jungle road, my prolonged efforts to gather intelligence had not been without results. We had spent considerable time in surveying the surrounding country, and Schulze had drawn a map of the area about five miles on either side of the Red Highway. Curiously enough it was the only accurate map ever made of the district. It was truly amazing to see how the uniform landscape, indicated on the regular maps only as forested hill-tracts, resolved itself into individual hills, valleys, ravines, and streams, revealing the vital details without which it would have been very difficult to plan an attack.
Even without Noy's report we soon agreed that a direct assault on the base should not be attempted. There were too many hidden machine guns along the road and at the foot of the hills. The eight emplacements which had been spotted by Xuey and Krebitz were likely to be only a fraction of the total number of guns deployed near the Viet Minh lifeline.
The base, however, did have its Achilles' heel. Like most of the other terrorist bases in the jungle, this one, designed to accommodate several hundred people, had been constructed at a permanent water source. A small river, about twelve feet wide, ran through the compound and this became the focal point of our attention.
Erich, who had surveyed the hills farther westward, boldly suggested that we should cut the flow of the river by blasting a dam across a deep ravine further up, about a mile and a half from our jungle hideout.
From his map case, Schulze extracted a diagram and unfolded it on the ground between us. "You know that I would never insist on doing something based only on guesswork," he said. "I surveyed the ravine with Krebitz, calculating as accurately as possible without the proper instruments. We agreed that the blast should bring down enough rubble to form a block in the ravine from fourteen to sixteen meters high." He glanced up. "That is the size of a five-story building, Hans."
"Carry on."
"I believe a temporary reservoir is going to form right here." He ran his pencil across a section of his diagram. "It will be six hundred meters long and twelve meters wide. When full, the ravine could hold one hundred and twenty thousand tons of water."
"Do you think your barrage can stand the pressure?"
"I can't say that," Erich admitted, "but that's unimportant. When the pressure reaches the critical level the rubble is going to burst." He looked at me triumphantly. "Now what do you think will happen when all that water rushes downhill? It will swamp the entire rathole."
"And a long section of the road as well," Krebitz added.
"The water in the ravine flows at a rate of approximately seven tons per minute, Hans," Schulze continued. "Our reservoir should fill up within thirty-six hours. Since we intend to blast during a thunderstorm, the downpour will probably cut that time by half."
"How did you calculate that rate of seven tons per minute, Erich?" I asked, casually examining his diagram.
"It was very simple," he replied with a grin. "We built a one-meter by one-meter crate with a sliding door opening upward, sank it in the river, opened the door, and measured the seconds it took to fill."
"You did that, eh?"
"Sure, Hans. A one-by-one crate holds exactly one ton of water," he went on explanatorily. "The crate filled to capacity in six seconds. The width of the ravine could accommodate twelve similar crates—which would come to one hundred and twenty tons per minute or seven thousand and two hundred tons of water per hour and so on."
"And so on," I nodded, quite overwhelmed by Erich's rapid display of mathematics.
"What do you think of it?" he asked me.
I was actually thinking that one could not lose a war with companions like Erich Schulze. But I reserved final judgment until after I had seen the site myself.
Leaving the camp to Riedl and taking only twenty men along with Schulze and Krebitz, I set out for the hills. Schulze and his party had already cut a path to the ravine, so we traveled light. Even so it took us almost four hours to cover the five miles between the camp and the ravine.
The jungle appeared so peaceful it was hard to believe that it belonged to a ravaged country, where men had endeavored to exterminate their fellowmen for over a decade, with still no peace in sight. Now with the terrain wide open before us, Erich explained his plan again in detail. I found it plausible. Although Sergeant Krebitz hastened to emphasize that it might be some time before Schulze's plan could be realized, we remained enthusiastic about the idea. Riedl's expedition, Sergeant Krebitz reminded us, might take a week or ten days. The mining of the ravine would also require three days of hard work and when all was ready we would have to wait until a thunderstorm came.
How long that waiting would be, no one could foretell. Our dependence on the caprice of Mother Nature was the only kink in Erich's ingenious scheme. But then, we had been searching for the Red Highway for many
months. And as long as our supplies lasted, we never lacked patience. I would prefer to strike a month later and preserve the lives of my men than embark on a premature attack only to suffer casualties.
Every day small three-man patrols kept the jungle road under observation. Their reports invariably said that Viet Minh units were on the move—armed guerrillas and Dang Cong coolies. Then to our immense relief the girls returned and from their excited account I deduced that the base was indeed a major one. Apart from tons of ammunition and weapons, foodstuffs enough to sustain several regiments and five hundred bicycles had also been stored there. Bicycles were the principal transport vehicles of the Viet Minh. The quantity of material which the terrorists could load onto bicycles and transport for hundreds of miles bordered on the incredible. A three-hundred-pound load on a flimsy bike was quite common for the coolies to manage. Of course they had to walk, guiding the bike by an extra long handlebar.
There were consistently five to six hundred people in the base, Noy said. Around the compound were trenches with machine guns. "You cannot get close," the little nurse insisted. "Every path is covered and the forest is mined."
For two days the girls had worked with a group of women carrying ammunition boxes into underground shelters. "We go down seventeen wooden steps into a cellar," Thi explained. "Twelve cellars full to ceiling."
I asked them about the crates and bales which we had previously observed in stored open sheds. "Many sheds have rice, salted fish in them. Others store bullets and bicycle tires," Noy stated.
The next morning Riedl and his men departed. Noy went along with Helmut. Sergeant Krebitz and fifty troops moved to the ravine and began to prepare the blasting site. Schulze, Suoi, Corporal Altreiter, and a platoon went to prepare the site where we intended to ambush the terrorist working party. Erich selected over fifty concealed positions where machine guns and flamethrowers could be deployed to our advantage, covering not only the ravine but also the escape routes.
"We are not going to wait for the pressure to burst the barrage. It would be too chancy," Sergeant Krebitz informed me two days later. Using watertight containers, Gruppe Drei planted fifty pounds of high explosive in the ravine. "The charges will be buried under the rubble," Krebitz said, "ready to blast the barrage at the right moment."
Our sojourn in the woods soon became a trial. To be on the move is relaxing but to hide in the woods so close to the enemy, keeping quiet, doing nothing but watching and waiting is exasperating. The men were terribly bored. Their activities were severely restricted. There was no loud talking, no laughing, no unnecessary walking about, for even the crackling of the dry branches could have alerted a terrorist outpost, the closest of which had been detected by Krebitz barely a mile from where we camped. Fires were naturally out and our spirit cubes were insufficient for cooking a decent meal of sweet potatoes, rice, and meat. Small hunting and fishing parties, however, were constantly making forays farther west, where the silencer-equipped rifles could be used. Game was plentiful in the area. In eight days our hunting parties bagged five boars, two deer, and over a hundred jungle fowl. We weren't choosy about our meals and consumed practically everything that moved and had flesh. Hedgehogs, monkeys, snakes, and monitor lizards also belonged to our regular diet. Reptiles, as a matter of fact, taste very good and their flesh is quite tender.
Since we could light no fires in our camp, the meals had to be prepared by the hunting parties and brought back neatly portioned and roasted. One day Sergeant Krebitz suggested that we could solve our rice and potato problems, too, by carrying the stuff two miles into the woods for cooking. Thi and Chi decided that they could be of better use if they joined the hunting parties, especially when it came to the question of preparing the meals. Thereafter we enjoyed a marked improvement in the quality of our meals—the female magic touch. The girls collected sacks of wild vegetables, which proved delicious either cooked or prepared as salad with salt and spices.
Ten days went by before Riedl and his party returned upset and decidedly empty-handed. Helmut had not only failed to get explosives from the enemy but had not been able to approach the jungle road at any favorable point without severe risk. The Red Highway was expertly protected from interference on the ground.
"By God, Hans," Helmut swore, "there are at least two thousand armed Viets with nothing else to do but sit along a twenty-mile stretch on guard duty. Whenever we found a suitable place for setting an ambush we bumped into bunkers and foxholes that covered the entire area with MG's."
It was a bitter blow but I couldn't blame Riedl for the failure. The enemy was becoming wiser. Our activities behind their lines had had their effect. Unable to track us down and eliminate us for good, the Viet Minh decided to play it safe along their vital lifeline from China. We learned a few months later that Giap had deployed over sixty thousand guerrillas along the six-hundred-mile-long Red Highway with nothing else to do but protect it.
Riedl had acted wisely when he decided not to rush an attack that could alert the enemy and fail in the process. We all looked to Sergeant Krebitz for a solution.
"Well, Rudolf, it is all up to you now," Schulze said hopefully. "We have come a long way to do a great job. It would be a pity to turn back now."
"I cannot shit gelignite, Erich," he replied crudely.
"Can't we do something with what we have?" I asked.
Krebitz screwed up his lips and gave a low chuckle. "With what we have? We have already buried most of it in the ravine."
"Any other solution?"
"Request an air drop."
"We can't have planes coming here, and to embark on another thirty-mile expedition. . . ."
"Then I can see no other way but to strip the battalion, Hans."
"Strip it of what? Revolver bullets?"
"Hand grenades."
"Why, hell!" Erich exclaimed. "That is the solution. Everybody still carries grenades."
"Sure, but it's me who will have to rig them up piece by piece," Krebitz grunted.
"Do you think it will work, Rudolf?"
"One can always try!"
Soon Krebitz had a neat pile of over seventeen hundred grenades. "Here you are, Rudolf," Riedl exclaimed with great enthusiasm. "You have all the explosives on earth. If you need any help just say so."
"You're most welcome," said Krebitz, slapping Helmut on the shoulder. "Now all you have to do is to get your can opener, cut the shells, and scrape the candy into a rucksack. But don't blow yourself up in the process."
Three days later the ravine was set for blasting. All we needed was a thunderstorm. One finally came eleven days later and marked our thirty-third day in the woods, "sitting it out" only two miles from the Red Highway. The moment the first thunder cracked the troops began to move out to take their positions along the ravine. It did not start to rain until well in the afternoon, when lightning bolt after lightning bolt illuminated the rolling clouds. Soon it sounded as though the skies were about to split apart. Synchronized with a savage thunderbolt, Krebitz plunged the detonator lever. The roaring thunder obliterated the explosions and had we not seen the flames we would have thought the charges had misfired. The rocky precipices tumbled down, triggering a land slide which filled the river up to fifty feet high. On the far side of the barricade the water began to rise rapidly.
The following noon a scouting party of twelve guerrillas was spotted wading upstream in the now barely trickling river. It was still raining but our dam held firm. We permitted the Viet Minh party to proceed right up to the dam and then to return to base without being molested. Just as Schulze had predicted, a large working party of about four hundred men arrived the day after, carrying demolition tools and satchels of explosive. Luckily it was still raining. The downpour deadened the sound of the machine guns. Confined in the ravine the enemy had no chance of fighting back. Most of them carried no weapons, only picks and spades. When they turned to flee, Riedl and his gunners were ready for them a mile downstream.
In twenty minutes the ba
ttle was over. The afternoon went by with no signs of another Viet Minh sortie from the base. At nine P.M. our dam sprang more leaks and looked ready to collapse. To prevent an ineffective partial burst, Sergeant Krebitz decided to blast the reservoir free. Carrying tons of rocks and broken timber, the torrent rushed downhill. Still swollen fifteen feet high when it reached the jungle road, the flood hit the guerrilla base with the force of a tidal wave. It was already dark so our observers witnessed little of the actual impact of the flood, but when we focused our binoculars the next morning on the enclosure I saw nothing but piles of debris amidst a shimmering swamp.
18. THE LAST BATTLE (OPERATION "FIREFLY")
We left the area immediately, refraining from harassing the enemy along the road. We ignored half a dozen smaller transit camps, guerrilla checkpoints, and convoys in order to deny the Viet Minh a chance to determine our direction and our next target. A week's trekking over very difficult terrain put a good forty miles between the swamped enemy base and ourselves. Our route took us up and down across a chain of steep ridges, some of which we had to climb to the summit, past the three-thousand-foot mark. We blazed our own trails most of the time, since that was the only way to avoid a few primitive tribal settlements whose inhabitants were alien even to our girls, and whose language none of us could understand. No one knew where the loyalty of the tribesmen might lie. I thought it prudent to avoid them altogether. Had we used their comfortable hunting trails, we could have made a faster journey but we would also have met with tribal hunters whom we would have had to kill in order to remain undetected in the area. News in the jungle can travel almost as fast as a teletype message.
The battalion stuck to the unbroken woods. Hampered by thorny thickets of wiry bracken and stingy shrubs which flourished with incredible vitality, we made our way. That ten days of trekking was probably more trying than a two-hundred-mile march on an open road. Yet even in the unbroken woods we came upon a small clearing with a primitive hovel, where a young tribal woman was looking after five naked children, all ridden with festering sores. Our sudden appearance terrified her, and she burst out in a torrent of high-pitched words which not even Noy could understand. Gathering her children, she was ready to flee into the woods when the sight of our girl companions quieted her fears. With some effort and by using at least as many signs as words, Noy succeeded in making contact with a female human being from the Stone Age. Her husband had been away hunting in the woods for five days. The family lived entirely on what the forest provided. They grew nothing themselves and had not seen money for years. The woman had no idea of a war going on in the country. Occasionally she saw armed people moving along the path down in the valley, sometimes as many as ten times ten armed bandits (she explained by showing ten times her open palms). They were neither white-faced nor as tall as we were. To her all armed men were bandits (including ourselves) and the words Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, French, Foreign Legion, army, terrorists, etc., had no meaning at all.
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