Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  But first what must be done was what he did best—if this plane would ever stop weaving. At last it did and Joe grew tense, professionally tense. The pilot gestured for him to hook his static line onto a thick cable running across the top of the jumpers' compartment. They roused and patted him on the butt. Through the open hatch by his feet was France, under no moon, perfect for the pilot to see a lamp pattern below. Joe looked up at him for the jump signal. It was a downward-thrust index finger and the inaudible cry “Go!” A step through the hatch and Joe was blown into the dark. And into history as the first American paratrooper to descend on France—and high among the ones most welcomed by the French.

  Joe yelled, “Currahee!” Pop. Opening shock wasn't bad leaving him just bouncing a little in the night. The only sound was from the Lysander veering away. Jump altitude was a thousand feet. The drop-zone lamps, which he'd never seen, were already extinguished. All there was to steer toward was one of the pale patches on the ground. The darker stuff was trees. Joe tried to sense wind direction and slip against it, but there wasn't much wind, so he prepared for a neutral landing and just went limp. The best way to land on unfamiliar terrain was like a rag doll.

  At the last moment Joe worried about injury, imagining himself spending the rest of the war hidden by the FFI while his broken leg mended.

  The ground came up like an elevator. Thud, a heavy landing—all that gold—on a hard meadow with knee-deep grass. The canopy descended on him while Joe broke out of the parachute harness. He was down, safely down, the first step—the longest one—taken. The next was upon him as he unholstered his .45 because figures hurried across the meadow Despite feeling foolish, he hollered, “A breezy night!”

  A voice in Oxford English answered, “Yes, let's go sailing.”

  Someone gathered up his chute as Joe was silently led away through trees. Beyond the grove they arrived at a large hay shelter where kerosene lamps were lit, the same that had marked his drop zone. In the unsteady light Joe looked around at his reception committee. They were five men and a woman who, with her lover, was there to do a distracting scene if a German patrol happened by.

  Naturally the French were glad to see him, especially his bandolier, which had been promised by the British but delayed. The FFI leader had lost three fingers to Rommel's panzers in 1940 but was still able to do a quick count of the gold. Satisfied, he pulled bottles of red wine out of the hay. Only he spoke English. Recognizing Joe's accent he was pleased to tell the others that their paymaster was an American, the first they'd ever met.

  So too for Joe; except for the British, they were the first foreigners he'd ever met, and it occurred to him why he had been picked as a paymaster—to show the flag to the French resistance, let them know that America was in the war with them too. Representing America was headier than his second jelly jar of red wine, raised by his hosts in toast to Allied victory. Here he was, treated like a hero, and all he'd done was jump. It reminded him of his little speech last year at Saint Joseph's.

  The FFI reassured him that now he was in their hands and they'd handle things from here; so feeling pretty safe and secure, Joe slept like any tired GI. The next morning (awaking in a bird-shooting blind) he began to reflect on how unexpectedly he had been brought into this war that meant everything to his families. All three of them: his parents, his army, and his nation. Clearly his army parents considered him expendable, a youthfully ignorant courier, chosen from on high by those who would trade his life for the likelihood of an important delivery. Yet no one had forced him. Far from it. Bring on more. Bring on more adventure because this sure beat humping the English countryside carrying a ton of radios.

  Joe was now in the FFI network. Western cloak-and-dagger doctrine prescribes that an infiltrator-agent should stay in one location for minimum hazard of discovery. But the French constantly moved him, on roads, all back roads, in vehicles subject to search at German checkpoints. Frequent movement was a way the FFI distributed risk by requiring that a host harbor an agent only one night. The next morning he'd be gone and so too his host's exposure to the Gestapo.

  That's the way it worked with Gallic guile. At daybreak Joe was alone and edgy till a retarded farmhand arrived in a one-horse cart, dressed him in peasant clothes, and handed him a brief note instructing him to also act mute and retarded. The farmhand then burned the note. He spoke no English, so the two sat silently for a clopping ride of several hours to a house far out in the countryside where the proprietress prepared a ravishing brunch of ham and eggs, croissants, cafe au lait, and red wine.

  After a nap he was handed a one-sentence note and put on a horse, which carried him for hours on game trails to a small hunting lodge deep in a forest. The horse knew the way from repetition, a perfect agent for the FFI. If Joe were nabbed, he wouldn't know his destination and the horse wouldn't say. The note, nevertheless, said to shoot the horse if Germans were closing in. There was only a caretaker at the hunting lodge. With nothing to do, they listened to the BBC describe the Allies' slow advance on Rome. Joe helped him with the English and in return was taught a few French phrases that might come in handy if he met Germans.

  The next morning Joe was transported somewhere else, the beginning of more moves than he can remember. Several times he was buried in hay with a clothespin on his nose to stifle sneezing. He still had his .45 but felt unready to use it; the foreign strangers who were his only protection were unarmed; it was their game Joe was playing, and they'd said nothing about shooting his way out of a tight spot. It seemed in some ways there was almost an arrangement being observed with the enemy, that the French and Germans were occupied in matters that didn't much involve each other. At one halt he heard German spoken. It startled him to hear his family language in such a different context. He could make out some bilingual banter, and that his cart driver didn't sound tense or the German soldier threatening.

  It was difficult to keep track of time, but it was probably about a week till one night Joe's cart halted in the woods next to a long narrow field of mown hay. His escorts fanned out, apparently to secure the field, but it had so many dips and rolls that he didn't expect this to be the exfiltration site. However, after midnight, under a quarter moon, a dark Ly-sander glided in as if the hay field were Heathrow Airport. Joe guessed, correctly, that this was the paymaster system: jump in new ones, then pick up returnees before flying back to England.

  There were no ground lights, so the pilot had obviously landed here before. Out of the woods came a big wagon drawn by two horses. Off came the hay, revealing a huge vat, maybe a wine vat. Four Frenchmen took hoses from the pilot and began refueling the plane. No doubt some of Joe's gold had gone to buy gas on the black market. That made him uneasy about the quality of the gas. But if the pilot would fly with it, why worry?

  He had expected to be snatched off the ground in seconds, but there were long minutes before the engine coughed and turned over, during which the pilot had an amiable chat with his fuelers and exchanged something for wine. He finally climbed into the cockpit, gave a V for Victory and thumbs-up. From the woods a Norman cheer erupted that made Joe jump as he crouched in the brush. But if this was the way the French did things, why worry?

  They had gotten him this far. He hugged the men who'd delivered him, received kisses in return. A bottle of cognac was shoved into his hands, then he raced for the Lysander. From woods on the opposite side of the field another American, also with a bottle, sprinted for the plane.

  The exfiltrators sipped cognac during the flight home, which was direct, as if the Lysander were just a lagging aircraft from one of the increasingly frequent bombing raids on northern France. Guardedly the Americans probed each other about their time with the FFI. The other man talked like a demolitions specialist, joking about how his leg bag had been so full of explosives that he felt like a parachute bomb. Though the cabin was dark, Joe noticed how the man, presumably from the OSS, kept glancing his way as if trying to place him, at least by his voice. But then clandestine protocol
was respected, and for the last hour of the flight the topic was girls of the FFI. Was there a love scene set up at your DZ? Joe asked. Oh, yeah, his companion said, nodding. That's standard FFI procedure.

  Like a homing pigeon, the Lysander landed at the same RAF base from which Joe had departed. He was immediately separated and debriefed by a British lieutenant, who concluded by sternly warning Joe not to indicate to anyone in any way where he had been or whom he had seen. This routine admonition affected Joe unusually, forcing him to reconsider himself no longer as Jumpin' Joe but as someone holding secrets that could change, even end, other people's lives. This induced in him a subconscious defensiveness about the possibility that unknown enemies might try to search through his mind; it was an inchoate fear, different from that of impending combat for which months of intensive honing had prepared him.

  IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS the whole paymaster experience, carrying with it his secret fear, became a dormant memory like last night's dream—a short, strobelike interlude between the hectic time before and after—so Joe found the debriefer's orders easy to follow. Gone was the urge to share his foreign adventure with Bray and Vanderpool; he would keep it to himself like some attraction for a girl he didn't want them to know about. Wistfully he looked back on France as an experiential vacation, a romantic getaway from hard-time soldiering.

  Surely if another classified jump came up again, he'd volunteer with gusto. That seemed improbable, and after his solo Joe stepped back into a half-million-man chorus preparing for the premier performance of World War II.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON BOTH SIDES OF THE WALL

  EXCEPT FOR JACK AND ORV, THERE WAS LITTLE CURIOSITY about Joe's absence. It was nothing unusual for a radioman to be pulled out for days of specialized training, like how to guide fighter-bombers onto targets because the 101st would have little of its own artillery available when they first met the enemy. Such training would have been excuse enough for Joe, but division G-2 went further. Realizing that Joe's absence might be open-ended, they provided a cover story that Bill Beyrle, stationed with the air corps in Kent, had taken seriously ill, so Joe had been granted emergency leave to see his brother. Upon his return from France, Joe deflected questions by asking them.

  “Yeah, Bill's okay now. What's been going on in I Company?”

  From everyone the answer was exercises like tactical drills, maneuvers, and night movements after company-size jumps, followed by critiques, cleaning equipment, and preparation for the next drill, maneuver, et cetera, to the point where a graffito went up in Ramsbury latrines: “One more exercise and we'll be too tired to make it over the Wall!”

  That's what all the Screaming Eagles' preparations were for—to vault what Hitler called the Atlantic Wall of Fortress Europe. No one expected an easy landing. Indeed, German radio made specific reference to the 101st, how a warm welcome awaited them if they survived parachuting into minefields, plus acres of sharpened stakes known as “Rommel's asparagus” to impale gliders. Never had an invasion been so taunted by those defending against it.

  But the taunters had immense problems themselves, starting with where was Rommel to plant his asparagus and sow his mines? Between Spain and the tip of Denmark were sixteen hundred miles of potential invasion sites. To defend that span Rommel and his boss, Gerd von Rundstedt, had thirty-five divisions of widely varying strength. Rommel wanted them all, especially panzers, close to the coast, where they could go into action with much less interference from the Allied fighter-bombers that now ruled the sky.

  Rommel knew the fighter-bombers could paralyze movement on the ground, for he had suffered their devastation in North Africa. Rundstedt had had no similar experience and wished to concentrate most panzers well back from the coast to counterattack when the invasion site was confirmed (a preliminary Allied feint was anticipated). Moreover, Hitler reserved unto himself the decision of where and when four of the ten panzer divisions in France would be committed. Consequently, German deployments on and behind the Atlantic Wall were a compromise between contrary defensive strategies.

  Even if Rommel had commanded all thirty-five divisions, the Atlantic Wall, like the Great Wall of China, was too long to be impregnable for its entire length. Hitler, Rundstedt, and Rommel knew the Mongols were coming, but where? A wily deception plan, featuring a phantom army, commanded by Patton and apparently poised to strike across the Strait of Dover, kept the German high command befuddled.

  Currahees were also guessing, but because of huge bets placed on where they would drop. Otherwise location didn't matter much. They were the Mongols, ready to breach the wall anywhere. All they had been told was that the 101st would go in ahead of amphibious forces and hold off counterattacks against the beachheads. Yeah, we can do that. Let's get on with it. What are we waiting for?

  Of more immediate concern in I Company was repercus-sions from the brandy heist. During Joe's absence, the heat was on. An eminent earl had raised it to the point that General Taylor was obliged to admonish Sink to recover the brandy or hang the thieves. Briefly the 101st's intelligence resources turned from the Atlantic Wall to domestic sleuthing.

  A noose tightened on Duber but, aware of Sink's fondness for fine spirits, he found a loophole by approaching a trustworthy officer with this proposition: if the heat was turned off, two cases of brandy would be found under the canvas of Sink's jeep trailer. Through intermediaries the deal was cut. Duber sensed that no enlisted man in I Company seemed to be in better favor with Wolverton than Beyrle, no one less likely to be punished if something went awry in transferring the brandy; furthermore, Beyrle would be the last man to squeal on his buddies if the deal turned out to be a trap.

  But Joe, remembering his trepidation when summoned for his unexpected interview at Littlecote, was not an easy sell this time. If another paymaster opportunity came along, he was not about to jeopardize his favor with Wolverton. So Du-ber's offer of prime venison cutlets was declined (Joe had had better in France). Okay, what about four bottles of the brandy? No thanks, Sarge. Joe still had the two that had been his reward for standing guard during the heist. They might be worth hundreds of dollars—as Duber averred—but a price could not be established while no one dared put Napoleonic brandy on the market. When Sink gets his cut that's going to change, said Duber. Maybe, said Joe, and he took the offer back for consultation with Jack and Orv. They both advised him to pass. Duber had too many irons in too many fires, and it was always someone else who got burned.

  So Joe declined again, but Duber took that as an objection, not final rejection. He claimed to be a trustee—at what level, no one knew—of the invasion-site gambling pool. For transferring the brandy, he would let Joe in on how the betting was going, very confidential, very valuable insider information. This appealed to Joe's bent to be Best Informed, and he proposed that if Duber put in five hundred of his own money—but as Joe's bet—then he would participate in the transfer.

  This counteroffer revealed his Class Shark trait, but compared with Joe, Duber was a great white and glided to another inducement: he would give Joe a secret weapon—a crossbow— easily fitted into a leg bag. That was enticing. Already the Screaming Eagles were arming themselves for the invasion with personal weapons like shotguns, six-shooters, and German machine pistols.* Joe asked for time to think about the crossbow.

  A significant part of the 101st's training in England had been devoted to operating French civilian vehicles and German weapons, even tanks. Paratroopers were expected to capture such munitions in the enemy rear, then use them till resupplies arrived amphibiously some thirty-six hours after jumping. Till then, the Screaming Eagles' logistics were in their leg bags and whatever they could seize (“liberate” was the term, as “requisition” was in England), most important, German weapons and ammo.

  This expedient was debated at division headquarters. Do we really want our men firing German weapons in the dark? How will anyone know friend from foe? The problem was a factor in a command decision that in the dark no one sh
ould fire at all unless fired upon by an identifiable foe. The preeminent factor was to conceal planned drop locations. Widely dispersed beyond the DZs, hundreds of mechanical puppets were to be parachuted into Normandy. Hitting the ground they set off loud bursts from firecrackers, hopefully drawing Germans into a wild-goose chase, while Screaming Eagles assembled and organized on relatively silent DZs * So Sink's policy was to stay silent, stay concealed for as long as you can. Till situations sorted out in the morning, the approved weapon was your hand grenade.

  Currahees were skeptical and felt unreasonably constrained if they had to wait hours before pulling a trigger. They had a particular fondness for the enemy's Schmeisser submachine gun; its rate of fire was so fast that it went burrrrp while a hundred rounds filled the air in a few seconds, hence the Americans called it the burp gun. A model of German engineering excellence, it was a Mercedes compared with crude Model T's like the Sten and the tommy gun. No one could wait to capture a burp gun. Somehow Duber already had one, dismantled and concealed in his footlocker. It could be Joe's for transferring the brandy, but again he passed.

  The “don't shoot unless fired upon” policy was not pronounced till the eve of D Night, but much earlier most Screaming Eagles comprehended the value of a well-aimed silent weapon, no matter what its rate of fire. Consensus had developed that initially they would be fighting singly and in the dark, when a firearm gave away its origin much more than by day when a thousand weapons were crossfiring. The troopers deduced their jump would be at night because the amphibious invasion would have to be at dawn so that legs like the Keystone Kops could locate their objectives.

  So, while declining the burp gun, Joe remained curious about a crossbow. Did Duber have one? Yes. Did he know how to use it? Not yet, but he was practicing. Joe said let him know when a crossbow was as good as the silencer on his deer slayer.