Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Duber was persistent, but he was down to his last fillip. How was Joe dealing with censorship? Were the folks back home reading what he wanted to tell them? Were there some confidentialities he'd rather keep from Blue officers?

  All mail—V-mail it was called, letters on special folios that could be photocopied for minimum bulk—was censored by officers whose unwanted duty was to expunge references to unit locations. A trooper's letter that mentioned pubs meant head scratching for his platoon leader because it was supposed to be a secret, despite the taunting of German radio, that his unit was even in Great Britain. Hundreds of V-mails like that kept censors reading late by lamplight, often with embarrassment. If the officers didn't know their men already, they surely learned more than they wanted to after reading love letters. When they sent men into combat, it affected them, sometimes acutely, knowing the names and feelings of loved ones they had never met but would never forget.

  To have an officer figuratively reading over his shoulder was not disturbing for Joe, so Duber's last enticement of bypassing censorship fizzled. Unlike most of his buddies, Joe didn't have a girl waiting for him back home, so he never gave a censor cause to blush. Dating had been too expensive while the Beyrle family was down and almost out before the war. In England, camaraderie was stronger for him than companionship, though after his paymaster adventure there had been a lass named Greta of the Auxiliary Territorial Service who took a fancy to him. He never mentioned her in any letters to his parents. Joe only suggested that he was chased and no longer chaste.

  Letters from home (also by V-mail) were not censored, and for Joe they were an increasingly remote connection with the past. Whatever was back there had already exerted its influence, a vital impulsion but expended, a booster rocket that had done its job. Now, to finish the job, whatever it entailed, was the be-all and end-all for Joe and those around him, no matter how much they joked or pretended otherwise.

  The paymaster experience had sparked his sense of being special, as part of what mattered most. It had developed an expanded and novel perspective of the war, a vague but keen appreciation of components previously beyond his ken. Joe declined Duber's blandishments because he wanted to remain eligible for more uniqueness—someone else would have to carry out Sink's conditional return of the brandy.

  Duber recruited Jack Bray, leaving Joe nonplussed. He had acquiesced to Jack and Orv in turning down anything Duber offered. Now here was Jack picking it up like a girl Joe was no longer interested in. Okay, buddy, what's going on? Well, Jack said, this was an investment. Four bottles, sure to appreciate, were worth the risk. Yeah, he had counseled Joe otherwise, but… hell, this is going to be fun! Joe, you got in on the fun (and the reward) when you stood guard for the heist. On a maneuver while Joe was away, Duber had poached game in Sherwood Forest, gotten caught, and told the sheriff of Nottingham that he was America's Robin Hood—and he got away with it. Duber was a proven winner. His plan for the brandy transfer was simple, the odds very good.

  Then why, Joe demanded, didn't Duber transfer the stuff himself? Well, the heat was on; Duber was under suspicion and maybe under surveillance. You've been the risk taker, Jack said, referring to Joe's proxy jumps; now we want some fun-risk-reward. We joined the Airborne for that. And Duber is a sergeant. We do what he tells us in the field and will in war, so you can't separate that from off-duty.

  Jack and Orv were basically mild young men, resembling each other in their countenance and slim physiques. Neither of them took to Airborne bravado. Each felt, as General Taylor was to say, that he didn't much like jumping out of airplanes but loved being around men who did. As only soldiers do, they loved Joe, he loved them, and they proved to be right when the transfer went down as smooth as the brandy— brandy with which Sink and his staff toasted the crumbling of the Atlantic Wall hours before they took off to vault it.

  With the transfer accomplished and the heat off, the Blues' attention spun down to a shrinking vortex of concentration on what they were to do and how to do it. It didn't help when Captain Shettle moved up to be Wolverton's operations officer, replaced as CO of I Company by Captain McKnight, a taciturn, Lincolnesque man.

  As McKnight's radio operator, Joe was his shadow in the field and had to understand his unrevealing personality, anticipate his orders, actions, and inactions. This resembled a new libidinous relationship: a complicated ebb and flow of affection, admiration, incomprehension, and fury. Nothing had gone outstandingly well under Shettle; there were no particular plaudits from Wolverton or Sink but no pratfalls either. McKnight was comfortable with that, satisfied with continuing Shettle's high standards and not pressing for major changes. As the man closest to McKnight's shoulder, it was for Joe to reassure his fellow enlisted men that though I Company was changing quarterbacks before the big game, it was still a winning team. The game plan was so immense and comprehensive, I Company's component so subordinate, that staying the course was tantamount to success.

  McKnight's attitude was the prevalent one in I Company: let's just get to the kickoff fairly rested. Those above him, however, Wolverton and especially Sink, felt their team could not be overtrained—latrine graffiti notwithstanding. Lives lost from inadequate training would be the colonel's responsibility, as would the onus of writing letters to widows. Better to be safe than sorry, even if Blues felt overworked. Like Antaeus they were expected to regain strength as soon as then-feet struck the earth.

  During this exhausting run-up to a marathon, flashbacks came to Joe: how the FFI were over there, not that far away, waiting to detonate in the German rear somewhat as the 101st would, albeit the latter explosion would be infinitely stronger. He wished he could have told the FFI how strong. His mind encompassing both sides of the Atlantic Wall, Joe longed for the day that would link them. He felt it would be during the invasion.

  Not quite.

  NO CIVILIAN WAS PRESENT this time, and Wolverton had even less to say, yet when they saluted, something passed between them, an acknowledgment from the officer that the enlisted man had been there, done that—a tip of the hat. With nothing prefatory, Wolverton smiled and said that brother Bill had taken a turn for the worse. Did Joe wish to visit him again?

  Yes, sir! A week of escape and evasion in France would be like rest and recuperation. Once again Joe was jeeped to the Hungerford train station and again joined there by two men. This time, to his surprise, they claimed to be Screaming Eagles. Their cover story was special training at Bournemouth Airport. Joe didn't tell them he'd been through this before, and it was their turn to be surprised when the three went out to a hangar and drew golden bandoliers.

  More excited than apprehensive, the paymasters joshed with their pilot that they would skyjack the plane and spend the rest of the war in Swiss luxury. He was a Battle of Britain pilot whose wounds had disabled him from ever flying Spitfires again. Without irony he announced that these days the RAF never put enough fuel in paymaster planes to reach Switzerland.

  The young Americans looked at one another, unsure if he was kidding. They had little comprehension of British weariness, how years of mortal struggle against Hitler's tyran-nosaur had either killed, drained, or enervated the few to whom so much was owed by so many. In 1944, from sheer fatigue, Great Britain was not reluctant to hand off the heavy lifting to America, rightfully considered to be both the United States and Canada. Like a tag team the three nations were hell-bent on taking down Hitler from the west, but with the freshest members wondering why their veteran partner seemed most patient for victory.

  IN FLIGHT JOE'S PARTNERS nattered so much about going over the wall, going to France, that he worried whether they could stop talking about it when back with their units. We're going to be the first! they exulted. No, you're going to be the second and third, Joe reflected, wondering if there was something he should say about their upcoming FFI experience that would help them get through the adventure. He held his peace. Though his tips would be useful, what if either of these guys was captured?

  Joe wou
ldn't be—he refused to believe he could be—but what about the others? If his description as a second-time paymaster circulated in German security channels, it might make it more difficult for the FFI to move him to exfiltration. That was his apprehension now, as fear of a broken leg and convalescing with the FFI had been on his first paymaster jump. This time he wanted in and out of France quickly, like a senior-class outing before high school graduation.

  It was another two-hour night flight, bobbing and weaving. In the blacked-out cabin the jumpers were shadows swaying against one another. Being the veteran among them was a peculiar feeling for Joe. They asked him nothing, said nothing. It occurred to Joe that maybe they weren't Screaming Eagles at all. Maybe they all had clandestine covers like his. Maybe they were supposed to test Joe's ability to keep his mouth shut. Things didn't add up, but he felt higher-ups were doing calculations that would work. Wolverton backed what he was doing, and that was good enough for Joe.

  The engine shook the fuselage, rattling the deck on which they sat with increasing pain. This time Joe was scheduled to jump last. At some signal Joe couldn't hear, the man nearest the cockpit pushed open the hatch. Joe slid closer for his second look at France. “Currahee!” Joe yelled to the first jumper; he received a nod in return, then the man was gone. Joe was more excited watching him than he had been when he first jumped a month before. He grew increasingly excited as his remaining comrade crouched in the door and disappeared into the rushing night. They leaped out about ten minutes apart. No aborts. That was encouraging—the RAF-FFI system was working smoothly.

  Then he was sitting alone as the slipstream screamed by that black hatch that seemed to suck at him like a whirlpool. It was the aloneness that troubled him. Yes, there were allies down there, but he wouldn't know any of them from before. Almost sentimentally Joe wished to be back with Jack and Orv as he fidgeted, waiting for the command to go.

  The pilot was an RAF sergeant with a regimental mustache curling at the ends. He flicked his hand up, and Joe wasn't sure if that meant to hook on to the anchor line. The pilot nodded but was more concerned with finding the pattern of lamps a thousand feet below. Quickly he reached back and gave Joe a rap on the shoulder.

  “Currahee!” he yelled into the wind that in seconds was hurling him a hundred miles per hour horizontally.

  The shout spit out any misgivings. Life at twenty could be no better than this. No matter that the night was even blacker than the first, without any horizon between an earth and sky that were equally dark. His chute blasted open for that moment of suspended animation when he was neither falling nor parachuting. It should take about three minutes to descend. Joe lost count on the way down, too eager to pick up a light source somewhere.

  There were a few, scattered and distant, probably isolated farmhouses. Normandy wasn't completely blacked out despite the German curfew. In England even little lights like those would have brought the police in minutes.

  Some murky colors emerged below him, the kind a scuba diver sees when approaching the bottom of an opaque sea. Joe steered for the palest patch within a spiky collage.

  At the last second he prepared for a tree landing by crossing his legs. Joe's children are glad he did. His feet crashed through twigs; the trunk swayed as he knocked off branches and hit it bruisingly hard. With all of that tree holding him back, touching the ground was soft. His jumpsuit was ripped as was his skin beneath it.

  In a spider's web of parachute cords, branches, and twigs, Joe noisily freed himself as leaves floated down like a light snow. He scrambled away more afraid than ever in his life. Another ten yards of slip would have missed the clutching tree and set him on a meadow. Silently, from the perimeter of the meadow, a dozen figures stepped out in silhouette like the chorus in an opera.

  “I'm off to see the wizard!” Joe yelled. The answer should have been, “The wonderful wizard of Oz.” But there was a quizzical silence.

  The British briefer had advised, “Now, dear fellow, if they're Germans, it will sound like ‘vonderfiil vizard.’ You should then take appropriate action.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe had replied. “What would that be?”

  Some of the silhouettes appeared to be in uniform, and all prickled with weapons. Appropriate action for the moment was not to go for his holster. A figure stepped forward, a woman, to say, “Do you have something for me?”

  That was good enough for Joe. He unsaddled the bandolier and gave it to her like the offering at mass. With that, as suddenly as they had appeared, ten Frenchmen disappeared into the woods, leaving him with two English-speaking guides. No wine this time. Grimly Joe was offered a burp gun, as if the three might soon be in action.

  A burp gun was better than wine, and he longed to take the weapon but couldn't figure out how he could explain his possession of it to Jack and Orv, and especially to Duber. So Joe declined the gun, indicating that his hosts' valor was all the protection he needed. Such sangfroid ingratiated him with the FFI. Once more he was taken to safe houses, fed, and bedded. He ate very well and slept very soundly.

  One morning from the foot of his bed he was awakened by a dog barking, one who didn't like strangers and hadn't been briefed that Joe was an ally. Bijou was the dog's name, like Joe a fugitive because she had bitten a German of the SS who had intruded on her mistress. Consequently Bijou had been marked for execution. She was hostile to Joe because of his black jumpsuit, a uniform the same color as that worn by the SS. For reasons he never asked, during this sojourn with the FFI Joe was never disguised as a peasant.

  One morning he woke to a serene view of rolling farmlands with squares of tidy trees. It was hard to comprehend that there was a world war going on, that he was behind German lines, especially when he was served breakfast in bed as if he were lord of the manor. If this was war, Joe wanted more of it. But he noticed something different in the eyes and attitude of the FFI. They were noticeably tense, more impatient. They had expected the liberating invasion by now. From large-scale maneuvers in England, Joe had sensed the Anglo-Americans were headed toward the Atlantic Wall like a locomotive; but to the French who had waited four years it was different, the occupation apparently a permanent humiliation, and they let him know.

  “We are called the resistance,” one of them said, “but our countrymen's resistance is weakening. There has been too much time for them to adjust to life under the Germans. Too many of us are adjusting to it. When are you coming?”

  “Wish I knew.”

  Between sleeping and eating there was a languid time for such talk in safe houses. When a guide's English was good he'd draw Joe out about Franco-American relations. Joe knew only about Lafayette and the First World War. The FFI tried to indoctrinate him, and he didn't mind at all even though European politics were way beyond his pay grade.

  But when the invasion? The recurring question was put subtly, put bluntly, put in every way. Joe wasn't about to tell them his guess, which was that they could expect to see him again in the next month or two; but he did divulge the latrine graffiti that said much more training would exhaust the Americans to the point where the Atlantic Wall would be too high. This went over well with the FFI, most of whom had been soldiers in the French army when it was blitzed in 1940. Okay, they liked to say, the invasion must be coming. Joe's question to them was where.

  Just prior to exfiltration, the local leader, Camille, made a pitch to him: Joe could play a much more important role in the war if he stayed in France rather than returning to England and the fate of infantrymen, most of whom, said Camille assuredly, would be killed during the invasion. It would be like attacking the German trench lines in World War I, when Camille's father and all his uncles were mulched by machine guns.

  No, it would be German infantry slaughtered this time, Joe corrected him. Camille toasted to that but went on; French and Americans were the most freedom-loving people in the world and should be the closest allies, work hand in glove, forget the British. Joe liked to blow up things, didn't he? During his stay in safe h
ouses he had provided the FFI some valuable instructions on how to mold charges (delivered by the OSS) for maximum damage with minimum explosives. He'd shown them that by packing a little nitro starch on the outside of a railroad track the blast effect would also clear the opposite track like a bulldozer blade.

  Camille rubbed his hands. There was a railroad junction about twenty-five miles away that Joe should see and advise on how best to destroy it.* Stay with us a while longer, dear ally. You will never forget our hospitality, nor the hostesses of Argentan.

  Argentan? Joe perked up. Camille seemed to know some practical information. Might it include the location of the invasion? His answer came with a sigh as if it embarrassed him how ignorant Joe was of grand strategy. “But of course, my friend, the landings will come between the Seine and the Somme. Why else did the Canadians rehearse at Dieppe?” Then Camille commented on how Churchill sacrificed the French-speaking Canadians in a cold-blooded experiment.* So the location of the upcoming invasion could not be more obvious: “Normandie, n'est-cepas? “ So apparent that Joe should support it from behind German lines.

  So it would be Normandy; he had it straight from the horse's mouth. Joe was wondering how to change his bet from Picardy and double it without arousing the curiosity of

  Duber, when someone interrupted Camille, causing him to bilingually curse.

  Word was that a German patrol had come across Joe's drop site and noticed the tree he'd torn up when landing. It had torn him up too, leaving multicolored bruises. The Germans had also discovered scraps of his jumpsuit, deducing that there had been an aerial infiltration. Joe was impressed by their sleuthing while Camille railed against the crew who were supposed to sanitize the site. They had reached it too late the morning after Joe's jump.

  The heat was on, in a way as it had been in Ramsbury, Joe thought at first. Things get screwed up and involved, but the Dubers of the world (Camille, evidently, was one of them) dodge or deflect bullets, and things turn out right. But now Joe heard a different chord being struck. Camille reported random arrests and interrogations, safe-house keepers declining his requests. French eyes and attitude now expressed hatred of the occupiers, whereas previously there had been nonchalant distaste. Before, the FFI had referred contemptuously to the Germans by their World War I sobriquet, boche, which Joe took as the GI equivalent of “clerks and jerks”— drones of the occupation administration.