The American supply effort was immense and astonishing, Joe Amos thought, and still it strained the strength of every man involved to keep up with the advances, still it was not enough. None of the French ports had come online in a major way. Cherbourg realized only a trickle through its tangles. On the Breton peninsula, Patton had chased the Germans out of the middle and into the harbors. The Krauts responded by demolishing St. Malo and Nantes, while Brest, St. Nazaire, and Lorient stayed in the hands of defenders holed up in rock-hard citadels. Two months after the invasion, the beaches and Joe Amos’s trucks remained the Allies’ only lifeline.
He clamped the cigarette in his teeth. He rubbed sand in his mitts to scour away the smell and itch of gas on his skin. Lieutenant Garner walked down the line of Joe Amos’s truck platoon holding a clipboard. Joe Amos was always amazed that in the middle of all this anthill action, Garner could find him to give him orders.
Joe Amos reached into the passenger side and took out a pack of Chesterfields. These were bought from Speedy Clapp before sunup, in bulk for the better price of a dollar a pack. Joe Amos was no longer buying cartons but crates from Speedy, sometimes from Thalhimer in Cherbourg. Every day he sold no fewer than twenty packs for two bucks each. His roll of dollars and francs had grown as thick as his wrist. He spun the Chesterfields to the lieutenant.
‘You look like shit,’ Garner said.
McGee rolled from beneath Lucky, where he’d tried to sleep for the two hours they’d not been driving.
The lieutenant tore into the cigarettes. ‘And he looks worse,’ he added.
‘When do we get a day off?’
Garner puckered behind his Zippo. ‘I don’t know what chicken farm you’re from back home, son, but this is a real war. We get a day off when we win. Maybe.’
Garner pocketed his lighter. McGee didn’t bother speaking to the officer but climbed into the passenger seat and put his head on the dash.
Garner gave Joe Amos his instructions: forty trucks, hauling half rations, half small-arms ammo, south to the 30th. Joe Amos didn’t expect a piece of paper from the clipboard. Ten thousand tons of supplies were stacked on the sand; most of it moved a hundred miles inland with a word.
Garner ran a hand over the truck’s fender. ‘Lucky holding up okay?’
‘She gets by. Might need some looking after.’
Joe Amos took from his pocket his mostly full pack of Lucky Strikes. He clapped them into Garner’s hand. ‘Soon.’
Garner stuffed the cigarettes away. ‘Sure. Assuming you get back.’
Up in the cab, McGee’s head popped out the window. ‘Assuming?’ he echoed.
‘Why?’ Joe Amos asked the white officer. ‘What happened?’
‘Early this morning, the Kraut Seventh Army counterattacked. They’re heading west for Avranches, trying to close our corridor. If they get to the ocean, they’ll lock us up again in Normandy. All the troops south of there’ll be cut off from the supply lines. You move fast, and the 30th holds its positions, you shouldn’t get stuck down there.’
In the cab, McGee moaned into the dash.
Joe Amos asked, ‘Down where?’
‘Last I heard, the 30th was still in Mortain. You’ll have to go find out.’
‘Where’s everybody else going?’
Garner patted the blue sheets on his clipboard. ‘Says here I got forty more going to the 4th near Vire, and the 35th around Landivy. The rest are loading up for Third Army down in Le Mans.’
Forty trucks each to Mortain, Landivy, and Vire, to contain a Kraut counterattack? And another three hundred trucks sent to Le Mans? Why shift so much supply so far south of the attack? It didn’t make...
Joe Amos asked, ‘Where’s Third Army headed?’
‘North.’
In a snap, Joe Amos figured it out. He had a road map in his head. He drew the lines of assault and saw the gambit.
The Generals were betting the 30th would hold at Mortain. The other divisions would pound at the Kraut’s exposed flanks, like hitting a boxer in the ribs to slow him down. In the meantime, Patton was going to rage north out of Le Mans with everything he’s got. Patton was going to spank the Krauts on the behind. An end run.
And the Brits were positioned due north of Patton, coming out of Caen.
Holy smokes. They’re going to try and surround the whole German Seventh Army!
Garner nodded at Joe Amos.
‘Yep. You got it, sport. This is big. The Krauts might pull this off. Or they might have fucked up. We’ll see.’
The lieutenant spat and pivoted on the sand. Walking past the passenger door, he smacked a palm against the thin metal.
‘Cheer up, boy,’ he called to McGee. ‘You’re getting to serve your country.’
~ * ~
By 0600, Joe Amos’s column was loaded and on the way to Mortain. The fog kept the road clotted with traffic, headlamps on. Joe Amos drove second in line behind the lead jeep. He fought the urge to lean on the horn, pull the whole convoy into the passing lane, and haul ass the fifty miles to Mortain. The Krauts were coming down there, and from the sound of things, coming hard. This morning, all his tiredness was gone. Yet there was little Joe Amos could do but tap on the wheel while he and his ammo crates crept through the mist, bumper to bumper, double-clutching in and out of third gear all the way to St. Lô.
McGee said nothing. The boy crossed his arms and gazed into the fog. Since the street celebration in Fougères, McGee, quiet by nature, had spoken even less. He drove his shifts alright. But something about the flowers and the elated girls had sparked some lament inside McGee, or snuffed some spark, Joe Amos couldn’t tell. Either way, even though he took the money Joe Amos gave him from the cigarettes, and never turned down a free smoke for himself, lately the boy wasn’t good company.
Ten miles south of St. Lô, the column left the main road, headed down a narrow backwoods lane southeast to Mortain. The trucks gained speed. Tree branches whizzed close to Joe Amos’s elbow. The convoy leaned around curves in the fog. Joe Amos liked this kind of driving, it was dangerous, and war was supposed to be that.
At 0730, the column passed a roadblock at Les Rocheaux, four miles west of Mortain. On all sides of the MPs’ sandbag positions, artillery pieces under camo netting stood by stacks of shells. Every cannon tilted east. Joe Amos could only see a few of the big guns through the haze, but he was sure there were plenty more in the fields around the village. The big tubes waited, ready for the cover to lift, for someone to tell them where the enemy was. Joe Amos rolled into the mist under their aim.
The column crept forward. Whatever the MPs told the boys in the lead jeep, it slowed them down. Trees closed m again on the road. All forty trucks moved like blind men, almost tapping the pavement before moving over it.
‘Take the wheel,’ Joe Amos told McGee.
‘Where you goin’?’
‘Take it.’
McGee slid over. Joe Amos opened his door and stepped on the running board. With a swing over the panels, he landed on the ammo crates. He dropped behind the .50 cal and charged the bolt. Up here, out of the cab, the fog was thick as lace against his cheeks. In the truck close behind, Philly boy Baskerville gave him the okay sign.
A slow gray mile slipped past. The road emerged from the trees into fields. The mist had begun to thin, but still the vista was kept short and cottony. Overhead, airplane engines muttered. These weren’t fighters but slower planes, spotters looking down through cloud breaks for the German assault. Or maybe they were Kraut planes looking for the Americans.
The column inched ahead. Joe Amos keyed his senses into the emptiness. Nothing but uncut grasses and low stone walls edged the road. Barns, some of them wrecked, studded the pastures. His fingers rubbed the machine-gun grips. Today was a Monday. His mother and sisters would be off to the mill, his brothers-in-law would be up with this early fog driving tractors and mules. Geneviève was a country girl, she’d be up, too, tending to her kitchen and chickens.
The planes faded.
The morning hushed except for the gears of forty laboring Jimmies and a jeep. Where was the giant Kraut attack? Where was the 30th Division? A sign read Mortain was three kilometers ahead.
In the mist, what Joe Amos thought was a fence post raised an arm. A young boy stood beside the road. When the convoy rolled past, the boy, in a cap and dark vest over a white-sleeved shirt, dressed like a little man, pointed east. Joe Amos watched the boy disappear behind him. Drivers tossed him chocolate bars, but the boy did not bend to gather them: he kept his hand up, showing the way to the battle.
Joe Amos saw the first tanks before he heard them. They came through the hazy fields, as big as trucks themselves, headed away from Mortain. The lead jeep stopped. A Sherman halted in the road across the convoy’s path, others pulled alongside the column. Riflemen rode on the tanks’ decks, high enough to look right into the truck drivers’ windows.
McGee braked, the whole convoy halted. Joe Amos swung the .50 caliber into the fog. He took his finger off the trigger when he recognized GIs filtering out of the fields.
Tanks rolled alongside the stalled column, inspecting, heading for the rear. Men tramped out of the mist, stepping over low fences and hopping ditches. The morning angled with the noises of soldiers streaming west away from Mortain and the grumbles of tanks sizing up Joe Amos’s column. Had the 30th broken ranks? Were they retreating?
Soldiers began to stop on the road beside the trucks. One called up to Joe Amos behind his machine gun. ‘Hey, pal, what you got for us?’
Joe Amos called down, ‘You the 30th?’
‘You got it.’
‘Where’s y’all’s depot? We got a load of gas and ammo for you guys.’
The soldier was joined by several of his mates. All Laughed, shaking dirty faces.
One pointed east into the mist. ‘She’s ‘bout two miles thataway.’
Another said, ‘I reckon you’re the depot, pal.’
Joe Amos climbed out of the gun ring, onto the boxes.
‘Catch,’ he said. He hoisted one crate over the rails and dropped it into a dough’s arms. The soldier hefted the box away. Hands went up and Joe Amos filled them, unloading the Jimmy as fast as he could until McGee and a white soldier climbed up to help dump the crates over the side. Joe Amos looked down the length of the convoy. A thousand soldiers had come out of the fog. Every truck in line was tossing its cargo to them a box at a time. A dozen Shermans idled in the lifting mist, waiting for their foot soldiers to load up and resume the retreat.
Working, Joe Amos asked one of the doughs, ‘What’s goin’ on in Mortain?’
The boy strapped his rifle to catch a crate. ‘Krauts got it. Came outa nowhere last night. Don’t worry, buddy, we ain’t runnin’. Old Hickory’s just fallin’ back a little. We’ll get it back. We still got a battalion up on a hill back there lookin’ right down their throats, and they ain’t goin’ nowhere. Gimme a box.’
By 0800, Lucky’s load was gone. The convoy’s two hundred tons were stripped and shouldered. The soldiers of the 30th marched off like ants from a picnic. Joe Amos’s back ached. McGee got behind the wheel.
A captain approached. Joe Amos had nothing to give him.
‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ the officer said.
‘No problem, sir.’
‘You’ll probably want to be gettin’ your trucks out of here pretty quick.’
He turned, lifting a finger to the east.
Joe Amos had kept his head down for a busy half hour. Looking out now, he noted the mist was burning off. Visibility to the east had picked up.
‘Hear that?’ the captain asked.
A distant squeak disguised the power of the sound. These were tracks, not like the Shermans but something bigger, slower. A howl like a huge farm tractor grumbled under the peal of rolling metal. Joe Amos narrowed his eyes to see into the fields beyond the fences and barns. The fields showed the trails of a thousand men’s boots stepping through the dew. The brown outline of a village rose at the crossroads of two hedges. This was Mortain, at of the clouds at last. In front of the town, at the edge of the meadow, just over a mile off, Tiger tanks were headed this way.
Behind the Tigers, a column of smaller German armor rolled west in wedge formations. Joe Amos spotted no fewer than thirty panzers. He’d never seen a real Tiger before, but he guessed he was well within the behemoth’s gun range.
‘We’ll be goin’ now, Captain. McGee!’
Joe Amos shot the officer a sloppy salute. The man hurried off with the stragglers in his troop. Before jumping off Lucky’s bed, Joe Amos took one more look at the advancing Kraut tanks. He saw the long barrel of one tank puff.
Five trucks behind him, a blast rocked Morales’s truck, hitting so hard, the Jimmy exploded as it tumbled over. Morales and his assistant were in the truck bed finishing handing out supplies when the shell struck. Joe Amos saw the miracle of them thrown clear. The two sailed out of the fireball, then hit the road, rolled to their feet, and scampered out of the way. Joe Amos was in mid-air off the bed of his own truck when the second explosion hit. The shell missed the convoy, blowing a pillar of dirt and slack smoke fifty yards beside the road. Joe Amos leaped into the passenger door just as McGee flung the gears into reverse.
The jeep in front of the line, with its shorter turning radius, was already burning rubber the other direction. The convoy was bunched too tightly, no one could turn in the road, no one could back up.
‘Go forward!’ Joe Amos screamed at McGee. ‘Turn around!’
The boy shifted gears in a blur and stomped too hard on the gas. The Jimmy shot forward, McGee hauling hard on the wheel. The truck’s front wheel dropped into the ditch.
‘Goddammit!’ Joe Amos had to pull back his own hands, instinctively reaching for the wheel and the gearshift. McGee snapped into reverse again, nailing the gas, trying to heave the front axle out of the ditch. The rear tires spun and smoked, raising a stink and a whine. Lucky didn’t budge.
McGee hit neutral.
‘Stuck.’
‘I know!’ Joe Amos hollered in the boy’s face. ‘I fucking know!’
The middle of the convoy was a confusion, two dozen trucks at all angles struggling to find room to turn in the narrow lane. The Jimmies at the far end were in reverse, winding fast and already gaining distance. Fire and smoke from the gutted truck lent the road a battle chaos.
‘Come on!’
Joe Amos leaped out of Lucky. McGee followed. The boy ran ahead to Baskerville’s truck and flew onto the bed. Baskerville was leaning on his horn for the truck blocking him to get straight. No more rounds came in from the enemy tanks. Joe Amos glanced back. The Krauts were midway through the field, clanking louder by the second. He figured there must be at least fifty panzers, packed tight and coming right at him.
Joe Amos patted Lucky’s fender. ‘I’m sorry, gal. Really.’
He grabbed the two M-1s from beneath the seat. He flagged down a soldier jogging out of the field, one of the last doughs to flee Mortain. Joe Amos asked him for a grenade.
He lifted Lucky’s hood, pulled the pin, and left the grenade on the engine block. He sprinted away from his truck, heading for Baskerville, who idled, waiting and honking for him. The explosion made Lucky jump, surprised. The two tires in the ditch went flat and Lucky kneeled down. She was left there, smoking and useless.
The convoy straightened itself. Joe Amos jumped up and held tight beside McGee while Baskerville sped away. They passed Morales’s burning Jimmy, and the smoldering crater from the wayward tank round. The road ran without curves and the fog was gone. Joe Amos watched behind him for a long mile, until Lucky and Morales’s truck were smoke markers behind a bend. The convoy rolled by some of the soldiers from the 30th, still carrying their crates. The GIs waved and hooted, in good spirits.
‘I’m sorry,’ McGee said. The boy’s face sagged with failure. Joe Amos nodded to him, not sure what to say. He was worried about Morales, and damned sorry to leave his bullet-scarred truck. But of all the things he mig
ht yet lose, his own life or a limb, or McGee, another driver in his unit, his stripes, Geneviève, the one thing he lost—his vehicle—was something he could stand. Boogie was right. Joe Amos was not going to be a hero in this war. He stood in the back of a truck zooming away from the fight, leaving it to the white boys, as always. Lucky was a symbol of what he would not achieve, so in a way it was right that he should lose her. The roll of dollars in his pocket, the beautiful French girl he would see in the next few days even if he had to buy the time off from Garner, his sergeant stripes—these were Joe Amos’s real victories.
McGee had panicked, sure. But nothing would be gained from throwing it up to him. Joe Amos would get them another Jimmy with a machine-gun cherry on top.
‘No sweat,’ he told McGee. He held out a hand. McGee smiled and gave him some skin.
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 38