David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

Everywhere Joe Amos looked, people bobbed and shouted. Young girls wore print dresses, pastels and florals. Some swirled their skirts like gypsy dancers, showing good legs. The older women wore dark colors, even in the heat. Their hair was done up and they wore makeup and heels. Every lady waved or flung kisses. The girls bounced on toes. They beat on the truck panels with flat palms to make noise beyond their calls of ‘Amour,’ ‘Bienvenue,’ ‘Merci!’ While the women held up bottles of wine for the black drivers, old pensioners, dressed for church, drank to each other, often hoisting a glass in the direction of the American column.

  A young boy climbed on Lucky’s hood. He raised his arms to the crowd to cheers. He brought his face close to the windshield and clapped his lips to the glass, blowing and puffing his cheeks. Joe Amos smiled at the catfish face the boy made, but he pointed off the truck. The boy stood again and fell into the arms of his mates and more girls. Laughing, Joe Amos held out a cigarette. The lad leaped out of the crowd and grabbed it, shouting, ‘Okay!’ Other hands went up. Joe Amos tossed the rest of the pack to the people, flinging each fag to the folks far back in the mob.

  Every truck in the column was swarmed like this with revelers hanging off the fenders, running boards, and hoods. Every balcony and doorway along the main street of Fougères was crowded. McGee reached down out his window, accepting daisies, which he threw back to other girls. Joe Amos heard him laughing.

  McGee pried himself back into the cab. His black face gleamed with sweat and red glossy lip prints.

  ‘Sarge, can I get out?’

  ‘Go ahead. But when I honk the horn you get your ass back in here pretty quick. We’re gonna be movin’ any minute. Soon as the MPs clear the road.’

  McGee opened his door with care to avoid banging the pressing crowd. He stepped into a foam of white uplifted arms. He said, ‘Alright now,’ then his voice was drowned.

  Joe Amos watched the girls clot on the boy. They squealed to each other. Joe Amos supposed they were saying in French what McGee would never hear from white women in America, how much they liked him. Joe Amos stayed at the wheel, shooing people off the truck, keeping his senses aware should anyone try to climb on the back and lift any of the rations and uniforms he carried behind the 79th Division.

  Two weeks ago, Joe Amos had ridden through the breakout blast zone. He’d never forget what the carpet bombing had done there. Who could have known that dirt could burn, that metal would melt like wax, that human bodies smelled sweet when fried? The tanks of 2nd Armored had smashed German resistance for ten miles without slowing down. Suddenly, in one day, the round-trip to supply these forces became twenty miles longer. Every sunrise since had added more road and field between the beaches and the surging edge of the American assault. Since August first, when Patton took over the newly formed Third Army, the Krauts had backpedaled south out of Normandy like they’d been socked in the jaw. Twenty-one divisions under Patton and Courtney Hodges had spread out, heading west into the Breton peninsula, south to the Loire and east toward the Seine. The GIs were gobbling up France. Joe Amos never imagined he’d see so much of the country so fast. If the 90th took Mayenne today, thirty miles east of Fougères, the supply trip would get sixty miles longer, just like that. Already Lucky was rumbling and spitting, complaining about the abuse and lack of rest or maintenance.

  Joe Amos looked over at McGee. This crowd patting and hugging him was the first reward the boy had got since Joe Amos met him. McGee had seen little but long hours and a devastated countryside. For his hard work, he’d been called names by the same men he drove day and night to support. Like all the coloreds in France, he bit back an anger, but something else was building in McGee. Seeing the boy holding flowers, filled glasses, and girls, Joe Amos hoped this might relax him a little, bleed off some of his percolating unease.

  Joe Amos wondered, too, about Boogie John. Boog would have gotten out almost a week ago. The big man would love this elated crowd, he deserved it. Joe Amos would have to find his old partner, even though after the breakout that wasn’t going to be easy. Since the breakout, every driver was either behind the wheel all day or sitting next to the man who was.

  One of the bullet holes in the dash snared Joe Amos’s attention. He snugged a finger into it. Joe Amos had his rewards. The memory of the Messerschmitt trailing flames. The three stripes on his arm. And Geneviève.

  He hadn’t seen her in two weeks. Only once had he been through Couvains, but he could not split from his column. He leaned on his horn all the way past the road leading to the big house and drove on.

  Joe Amos sat high in the Jimmy, rubbing his chin, thinking about his girl. The Army can’t keep pushing like this, he figured. There’ll be a pause soon, and he’ll go visit her. The Marquis will squeeze him and welcome him. Geneviève will cook. They’ll all drink, and the Marquis and McGee will leave the two of them in private.

  The truck rocked and Joe Amos shouted, ‘Hey, come on now, get down!’

  ~ * ~

  The Mayenne River flowed north, splitting the town of Mayenne east and west. Three stone bridges had been built across the river; two of them were blown. The third had eight 500-pound aerial bombs wired to it.

  Ben perched on the second floor of an emptied warehouse. He stared east, across the river, into the German-held half of Mayenne. An artillery spotter in the window reside him had just called in a cannon and mortar preparation on the Kraut positions, to begin at 1750 hours. Ben looked down into an alley, where two hundred men of B Company, 357th Infantry, checked weapons, readying to charge over the bridge.

  The first big rounds whistled in. Across the water, the town rocked. In the opening minutes of the barrage, a shell struck the ammunition caisson of a Kraut 88 that had been guarding the lone standing bridge. The massive explosion set off a cloud of smoke that blew over the river, obscuring the bridge. The spotter’s radio screeched an order to call off the mortars and artillery. B Company was ready to cross under the pall now. The spotter forwarded the cancellation to fire control.

  From the alley below Ben’s window, the lead platoon lit out for the bridge. They ran straight up the street, into the gray coils of gunpowder stench. Before the first foot was set above the river, machine guns opened up from buildings on the east bank. The Kraut guns fired wildly at the fifty doughs scrambling and ducking behind the lean rails of the bridgework. A lieutenant at the head of the unit did not let his men falter. Ben heard him shouting orders, curses, encouragement, and every GI made it over the bridge behind him. Along the way, under pinging fire, they clipped all the bomb wires. The Germans, waiting to the last moment to blow the bridge, had lost their chance to the lightning charge of the platoon. Other soldiers on the west bank laid machine-gun fire into windows and doors across the river to keep the Krauts’ heads down.

  Onto the bridge, at the platoon’s heels, two Sherman tanks clanked, blasting rounds above the boys’ heads into any crevice that might hold defenders. In front of the Shermans crept a pair of engineers, clearing the bridge path of mines. Ben borrowed the artillery man’s binoculars and scanned the action.

  Halfway across the span, a fireball erupted with a boom that shook Ben’s building. When the haze cleared, both engineers were down, one missing a leg. On the bridge a soldier dragged the engineers out of the way and the tanks continued, shooting up the town.

  The first unit reached the far end of the bridge, and disappeared into the buildings to secure a bridgehead. Behind them, no more troops set out over the bridge. Ben swung the binoculars to find the problem. The next platoon in line had balked. They were cramming themselves into doorjambs and crannies in the alley. No one was leading them across.

  Then something happened that Ben had not seen in the 90th. A Major stepped out from his own cover to march up and down the alleyway, excoriating the soldiers for abandoning their buddies on the other side of the river to fight by themselves. The lieutenant who’d led his platoon across the smoky bridge ran back, picking up a rifle from one of the fallen engineers. In the
alley he lent his voice to the Major’s berating. Prodded by the two officers, the platoon fell in. Behind the lieutenant, under covering fire from both sides of the river, they scampered across the bridge. Every soldier made it.

  In two and a half hours, the second half of Mayenne fell to the Tough Ombres. A/T guns and tanks were positioned north and south to guard the flank approaches. The leading edge of 1st Battalion had already chased the Krauts a half mile east out of town. Ben walked over the river with Sam at his shoulder. Snipped detonation cords lay useless in their path. A blood smear rouged the road.

  Ben gazed into the green ripples of the river, and into the punched holes in buildings lining the bank where the Krauts had been routed. He marveled. What he had seen was perfect coordination between armor, infantry, and artillery. When a unit of riflemen hesitated, their officers had stepped in and shown leadership. Once they got their heads up, the boys beat the Krauts out of town like dust out of a rug.

  Ben asked Sam, ‘Was that the same 90th?’

  Sam picked up a bit of tar gouged by the tanks’ treads. He tossed it over the rail into the water. He hesitated before he replied.

  ‘I guess everybody just needs someone good to follow.’

  Ben nodded. The 90th had a fresh CO now, and was assigned to Patton’s Third Army. Under these new Generals, the doughs were streaking over France, racking up victories; that meant fewer casualties, and fewer replacements of men and officers. The bocage and Sèves Island were fading behind them. After two months, the T-Os, the problem division, were becoming a fighting unit.

  ‘I was talking about you, Chaplain. You and me?’

  Ben had missed the compliment. Sam rattled his head and spit over the rails.

  ‘Well,’ Ben said, ‘I suppose that’s true. After all, I’ve been following you since we met. Schenley.’

  Sam lowered his head to hide his smile. ‘Allderdice.’

  Dusk settled. More than a hundred German prisoners were marched back over the bridge, to be loaded into trucks and taken north to Normandy for processing. Ben sent Sam to scout out a place where he could hold a service that evening. Behind him, in the river, stripped GIs bathed beneath the bridge, jeering at the POWs crossing above them, and ogling the eight massive bombs still strapped to the stone pillars.

  Ben strode through the town. He watched the battalion gird itself into Mayenne, hardening its hold with foxholes, sandbags, tanks, mortars, and tramping, confident boys. Many of them greeted Ben with calls of ‘Hey, Chap!’ It seemed to Ben a way of chest thumping, of saying ‘Hey, look at me, I crossed a bridge and took a town and didn’t get shot!’ Confidence was taking hold in the T-Os.

  Ben reached the eastern outskirts, only a few blocks from the town center and the blackened wreck of a Kraut 88. He looked east, where the rest of the war was to be fought. Phineas was already out there, way ahead of him. So was Thomas, maybe.

  Ben’s thoughts of his son were interrupted by the winding roars of car engines. Standing in the road, he turned to look back into town. Two vehicles he did not recognize barreled straight at him, headlights off. Belatedly, he realized they were German staff cars, making a break.

  Ben held his place in the road. He slid his hand under his jacket and gripped Phineas’s .45. He pulled back the slide and lifted the gun two-handed to aim at one speeding windshield.

  ‘Chaplain,’ someone shouted, ‘get out of the way!’ Tightening on the trigger, Ben considered how the way had grown too large for there to be anyplace left to get out of it.

  The gun sight followed the lead car, now tearing right at him. Ben leaned into the pistol, to take the kick.

  Before he could squeeze a long shot, an Army jeep screeched around the bend. The jeep slammed its brakes between Ben and the onrushing cars. In the rear of the jeep, a soldier manned a mounted .50 caliber machine gun. Two captains leaped out of the seats, Tommy guns spitting fire. The .50 cal joined them. The lead Kraut car wobbled, the escaping driver dodged too hastily. Two wheels came off the road and the vehicle rolled over, just twenty yards in front of Ben. Slugs ate into the roof of the car, even before it stopped skidding on its side.

  The second car charged through the gunsmoke and steam. Ben lowered the pistol and stepped back, knowing this car was dead, too. When it passed him he saw the hundred splinters in the windshield and doors from the weapons that continued to blaze at it. There men slumped inside. He heard the bullets bite metal and glass, could not hear them hitting bone. The car slowed after it raced by. The two GI officers and the soldier on the .50 cal tracked it, never taking their fingers off their triggers, until the car faded off the road and stopped against a pole just outside town, fifty yards away. Amazingly, one Kraut staggered from the car. The dough on the .50 cal plastered him with a long burst, plowing so many rounds into and through the German that the car from which he’d emerged caught fire.

  Soldiers milled out of doorways, to look down the street at the burning vehicle and the body. A sergeant shouted to get back to work, it was just a stiff. The GI behind the .50 caliber and the two captains lowered their not guns and walked side by side like Western sheriffs to :he edge of town. Ben fell in beside them. The gas tank of the staff car detonated. Greasy smoke pulsed over the flames. The sound of the car burning was like a heartbeat.

  In the thickening night, the four men stood ten yards from the fire. The body was an officer, that much Ben could tell from the collars and sleeves of the uniform. The rest of the man was so bullet-riddled he was mash.

  ‘Padre.’ One of the captains spoke.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I didn’t know you fellas carried guns.’

  Ben realized the .45 still hung in his hand. He kept his eyes on the pulverized corpse laying close to the fire. The skin on the Kraut’s spoiled face began to bubble. His blood on the cobbled street shone. The other two bodies were out of sight, fallen over inside the car. Ben tried to smell them through the oil and burning rubber.

  ‘Some do,’ he answered.

  Ben and this captain stayed behind when the GI and the other officer walked off. For a time, neither spoke into the throbbing heat.

  Then the captain asked, ‘Would you have shot him?’

  Ben thought back to the frenzied moments when the cars were charging at him. He recalled feeling nothing, not reluctance or anger. Just the heft of the Colt, the balance of the thing. He had a bead on the windshield.

  ‘No.’

  The captain shouldered his Tommy gun. ‘Maybe you should holster that, Padre.’

  The officer turned from the greedy flames, walking back into Mayenne. Ben lingered, letting the heat sting his cheeks. The weight of the gun still tugged in his hand.

  The fire had baked the scarlet of the blood into black crust. The body had been busted by slugs in so many places, the Kraut looked almost turned inside-out, more gut than flesh. Ben could tell little about what this man had looked like, his hair had already burned off, his face was boiling and flat.

  Ben lifted the pistol, already cocked. He fired once into the middle of the corpse. Nothing in the body moved. Ben was not satisfied. The report fled upward and out, echoing over the gobbling fire. Ben stuck the gun in his waistband. He stayed another minute, glaring into the heat, smelling at last the cooking men.

  An hour later he conducted a service for fifty doughs in a parking lot. The soldiers knelt while Ben spoke.

  He told the boys of his pride in their actions that day. He described what he’d seen of them, and of the enemy fleeing Mayenne. He foretold swift and great things for the coming battles, and for the 90th Division.

  Ben said the Shema. After that, he led the Lord’s Prayer. Not once did he close his eyes.

  ~ * ~

  D+62

  August 7

  Joe Amos chucked the last jerrican into the sand with a gallon left in it. Lucky’s tank was full. He lit a cigarette, too tired to worry about the spilled gas on his hands.

  OMAHA at dawn was like a starter’s pistol going off. The moment
the light rose on ebb tide, landing craft started hitting the sand out of the pea-soup fog. Out in the mist, Joe Amos heard them churn their engines, starting a hundred yards out. He listened to the boats bull trough the surf to ram the beach, jumping out of the mist onto the sand where they dropped their gates and spit trucks, tractors, tanks, tank destroyers, ambulances, artillery pieces, jeeps—everything and anything that was green and came on wheels or tracks barged onto the packed sand. Without pause, without orientation or ceremony, every vehicle either headed up the draws to find the fighting or got in line to get a load. Big cargo ships offshore that couldn’t hit the beach were off-loaded by cranes onto barges and DUKWs. These came in from the fog, too. While the water was low, supplies were stacked everywhere on the beach, like sandcastles to be washed away by waves of Jimmies rolling past. At high water, everything was taken to chaotic depots in the nearby hedges. Joe Amos turned to look up at the gray shapes of the bluffs. When he faced the water again, another ship lad beached, grinding and ungainly, one more pile of supplies took shape, and another pile was whittled and sent to war.