Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Like a demolition derby, firefights for squares progressed east. Following them, Joe came upon bodies, German and American. The first sight of dead men did not much affect him because his mind was filled with determination not to join them. More than anything else he wanted to find some living buddies.

  More hedgerows thwarted, kept turning him back. Now heavier-caliber fire was moving farther east and he was farther behind. He turned on the SCR 300. If Third Battalion was in hot action, he'd surely hear about it. But there was only static on the company frequencies, and he had memorized them all. He tuned all through the band every half hour for a couple of hours.

  By then the hedgerows had curved him around, back toward St. Come-du-Mont. In the distance he could see flames still leaping from the house that was the Germans' torch. Antiaircraft fire had ceased because the aerial armada was gone. For the last time Joe turned on the radio. Hearing nothing, he switched the frequency, smashed the set, and buried it in the corner of a hedgerow.

  That represented failure, the first of any significance since Joe had joined the army nearly two years before. How significant he didn't know, but he felt that was the right thing to do. Despite all his efforts, he was alone, quite killable, his radio a prize for the Germans to take from his body. That's how Joe was coming to view himself, somewhat as he had as living cargo with the FFI: a potential find for the enemy who outgunned him. He also reasoned that there were plenty of other radios in I Company—if I Company still existed. What if every one of its C-47s, except Joe's, had been fireballs? There was little reason to feel otherwise, at that age, at that time, at that place in the darkness of D Night.

  Joe's primary job was radioman; his secondary, demolitions. The blocks of nitro starch were for blowing the Douve bridges in case of German counterattack. It didn't look like he'd get to those bridges soon, not the way D Night was going for him. He needed a change of luck and, crouching in the corner of a hedgerow, decided to make it happen.

  St. Come-du-Mont, now a lurking silhouette in front of him, was just a minor village, but according to briefings, the Germans had installed a small power-relay station there. Joe crawled up to the outskirts and cased the village. The relay station, he remembered, was a fenced enclosure between buildings on Highway 13. Joe crawled closer. Sure enough, there was a square of high fence. It had a gate and something that looked like a small bunker inside with cables and wires running out.

  The briefers' description of the relay station was exactly right, information that must have come from the FFI. Joe's memories are like glimpses of a mountain range through turbulent clouds. What he remembers about the relay station was, “I'd paid the FFI, and now they were paying me back.”

  While Joe watched, he listened to a lull. As if in some spectral intermezzo, smoke from the burning house drifted toward him over the roofs of St. Come-du-Mont. The moon had set; the village was nearly silent, seeming abandoned, as if the war had departed. The French were hunkered in root cellars, keeping their heads down till one side or the other exerted firm control. What control Joe could detect was German.

  For what seemed an hour he staked out the relay station. Not a light, no movement around it, though out on the edge of his vision he detected a soldier or two moving between cottages. He was determined to get ahead of them before they reached the objective he had set for himself.

  But Joe became distracted. Studying silhouettes, he could see some Wehrmacht vehicles parked helter-skelter as if they had been abandoned in a snowstorm. They were unguarded. Whether or not there were Germans inside that relay station, he wasn't sure, but he was the Class Shark, an opportunist who saw an opportunity, with no sergeant or officer there to gainsay him. With the knife he'd used to extricate himself from his harness, Joe crawled around slashing tires with glee and a rationale: “General Taylor said that our hell-raising was his biggest problem in England. Just before we took off for Normandy he told us, ‘Okay, now go out and raise all the hell you can!’”

  So Joe just followed orders, slashing and crawling while there was still enough darkness to shadow him. If this was combat, he thought as he heard tires deflate, the more the merrier. Then there was no more rubber to slash. It was time to face up to the relay station he had avoided, indeed past time to just move out, be a Currahee, straight to the gate.

  As Joe came closer he could see that the gate was open about an inch. “Okay,” he said to himself, “you can do it, now do it.” The last twenty yards remain engraved in his memory. He wanted to kick open the gate and throw in the nitro starch like grenades. He'd already fused the blocks and primed the caps. Then he lectured himself as if Sergeant Lincewitz, his demo instructor at Fort Benning, were lecturing him: go up and open the gate, soldier. If no one's home, place the nitro on the target. Throwing close is only good for hand grenades and horseshoes.

  Okay, Lincewitz, he thought. Approaching closer, Joe could see a generator or dynamo larger than an office desk. Whatever it was, it was silent, apparently not operating. Too bad, but he put one nitro starch block on each side of what looked like the most important machinery, then popped the fuses and walked away (Lincewitz had said a good demo man never runs).

  The fuses were set for forty-five seconds. Joe was looking for cover when they went off together, a muffled explosion that puffed some white smoke from the bunker; but much to his disappointment, nothing changed in the darkly silent village. He broke into a run, rationalizing that even if lights didn't go out—there weren't any on before—some German radios went off the air.

  THE WEHRMACHT HIGH COMMAND was slow to Size Up the scale and objectives of the vertical invasion, how it was designed to seal off Utah Beach, where seaborne forces started to come ashore with the dawn of D Day. In a disorganized night fight, with communications often cut, Rommel's forces were largely immobilized, hard-pressed to defend where they stood while awaiting orders for the next day. It was this quies-cence Joe had noticed, but hiding by a brush fence he sensed that his opportunity to raise hell was ebbing with the night.

  Toward the relay station Germans began moving around. Had they really heard Joe's charge go off there, or was it another random explosion in the night? He heard them coming down Highway 13 as if there were no danger. He was one happy hell-raiser when a group of them stopped twenty yards away and started talking. He could have sprayed them with his tommy gun but adhered to his D Night orders not to shoot unless fired upon, which made sense in his situation.

  Joe carefully pulled the pins from two grenades, one to roll down the road, the other to lob over the group for an airburst.

  Like parachutes, grenades are timed for four seconds. For the air burst Joe released the handle (muffling its ping), counted “Hup thousand, two…,” and threw a grenade high. In the next second he bowled the other grenade down the road; he heard it bounce before his air grenade went off, followed by the second small boom.

  He expected to hear screaming and yelling, but there was hardly any. Shit! This war wasn't like any war movie he'd seen. Knocking out a power station didn't bother the Germans; now he'd peppered them with grenade fragments and they'd hardly reacted. He'd have to get another shot at them, if only to reestablish his self-respect. There seemed to be plenty of opportunities ahead. Joe took off in a crouching run, putting hedgerows between himself and the road. Hide-and-seek had been no fun, but this was almost like playing kick-the-can on a summer evening in Muskegon.

  The Douve bridges were east, but hedgerows deflected Joe south, while overhead the main lift of gliders arrived at dawn. He could see them angling down, often under fire. Many were to land or crash nearby but always inaccessibly behind hedgerows. Thousands of Screaming Eagles were all around him, but still Joe could not link up with any. Better to wait for the glider men chancing upon him rather than search for them. That's what he decided, his cricket in hand.

  Before the jump Joe had been a one-man arsenal. Now, with his land mine, machine-gun ammo, nitro starch, and grenades all gone, he felt lightly armed with only a carb
ine, tommy gun, and pistol—maybe enough for self-defense but no more. Joe was less frightened by his predicament than frustrated at not doing everything possible for his buddies. Unified with them but in a way AWOL, he felt he had contributed little. While he was within earshot, so much was being done by others.

  He hid out on D Day, the day Rommel called the longest. It was long for Joe but also the shortest in his memory because it contained no events, no change in his predicament. He'd move a little this way, that way, look at the compass a lot, more a fugitive than a soldier while historic fighting raged within a few miles' radius. On D Day he was just one tiny eye watching inside a hurricane, hearing more than seeing it.

  Fatigue was taking over. All of Colonel Sink's training had been about functioning while more tired than ever before. That made Currahees “body-conscious” decades before the rest of the country. Joe began to look at himself as if he were his own doctor, an ability he would cultivate.

  He'd notice himself staring at a barn a hundred yards away but unable to put it in perspective. A place to hide? A good machine-gun nest for the Germans? He was a decisive youngster, in tactical drills quick to see what was key terrain. Now he was failing, and it enraged him. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; he felt his judgment was poor. That's what alerted him. “Hey, Joe, what's going on?” he asked himself. The answer was exhaustion after being awake for dozens of hours, most of them in an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline is a supercharger for emergencies, it allows you to floorboard the gas pedal to avoid a crash but empties the gas tank very fast. As the driver of his body, he was nearly out of control.

  INCREASINGLY INTENSE COMBAT focused on St. Come-du-Mont, now behind him, and he heard the heavier calibers, mortars, and howitzers joining the battle. To the village was where Rommel, at the end of D Day, moved the first of his reserves, the 6th Parachute Regiment, to throw back what he was now convinced was the main invasion. Hitler, however, still vacillated.

  Once more darkness set in. Joe took off his helmet so that it wouldn't affect the magnetism of his compass, but then he couldn't find the helmet. His nose was the last of senses to lose keenness, for he noticed his caustic miasma as he slumped on the ground for longer and longer periods.

  The freight-train rumble of glider-towing C-47s had ended replaced by a stupendous naval bombardment of the beachheads. In that direction Joe persevered—east—a solitary soldier, scared by exhaustion but still daring. He kept putting it to the touch, through another hedgerow maze, instinct his only guide. He poked his head into a field, sniffed around, felt he was still alone.

  Crawling along the hedgerow he heard a rustle. Joe cricketed. There was a shout, “Hande hoch!” before many hands grabbed him as if he were a girl.

  * The pills were so strong that a medical investigation revealed some troopers were half asleep when shot by the Germans.

  * Without a reserve parachute there was life or death in a hundred feet of altitude. Some sticks didn't have enough. They went out without enough altitude for even the main chutes to open, and troopers who had already landed heard a sound like pumpkins smashing on the ground.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN THE ORCHARD

  WHAT JOE HAD STUMBLED INTO WAS A PERFECTLY CAMOUFLAGED machine-gun nest of nine German paratroopers—Fallschirmjägers. Evidently he wasn't their first capture; they went through his equipment and uniform like experienced garage-sale shoppers. The jump jacket and cricket were prizes, while the folding-stock carbine and .45 made Joe's captors think that he was an officer, granting him a bit of respect as they throttled him.* It was a paralyzing, out-of-body feeling to watch himself being frisked.

  Captures, recaptures, cross-captures, and uncaptures were occurring all over the Cotentin Peninsula, the thumb of Normandy that was invaded. War stories would emerge from the Airborne, typically of a trooper getting the drop on a German, taking him prisoner, only in the next minutes to be ambushed by the German's comrades, who reversed the roles but were subsequently captured themselves by a larger group of Americans, †

  From such stories emerged a grim variation of the Golden Rule.*

  Such was the chaos because, even after the advent of helicopters, never have major forces mixed so suddenly and violently as when three Allied Airborne divisions landed in the dark upon the Wehrmacht. General Marshall would withdraw his faith in division-size night jumps, and none was ever again attempted by any army. Third Battalion's chain of command was riddled because of errant drops, losing almost all the senior officers.

  Benumbed, Joe didn't realize at first that for the third time he was headed toward St. Come-du-Mont. Two Fallschirm-jagers took him there, an encouraging thought: if the Germans could afford a double guard, they must not have many prisoners. For Joe this was a stimulus for stubbornness: he would be a model of noncooperation for his captors. Yet to show them he was a hard-core soldier he followed their orders strictly, keeping his hands folded behind his head, saying nothing, and staring straight ahead.

  The three paratroopers heard, somewhere in twilight, the chunkofa small-caliber mortar. “Vorsicht!” a guard whispered and simultaneously they went to ground. It was an American 60-millimeter, its rounds landing elsewhere. The three rose, and for the first time the guards addressed Joe in German. He shook his head. As they wended toward St. Come-du-Mont, Joe realized that he shouldn't have reacted to Vorsicht (heads up), a word not in international parlance like Achtung (attention).

  Off and on, his guards probed further as the grim march continued along lanes between hedgerows, many with gaps blasted out of the foliage where he could see crashed gliders and wrecked jeeps. His captors didn't gloat. They were Hitler's Airborne, accustomed to victory starting in Crete. Joe heard that word as he listened with a new ear, his ear for German. But it was difficult to conceal it. Wie heist du? (What's your name?) a guard asked casually. It took a suspicious moment for Joe to nonreact.

  hardly have been instructed to learn the equivalent English command— hands up!—when all their training had been to fight to the death.

  HE WAS DELIVERED TO an apple orchard of some twenty trees. Beside it was a small stone farmhouse with a chicken coop and pigsty enclosed in a crude courtyard. With permission from the sergeant in charge, Joe's two guards took a bottle of calvados from the wine cellar. Apparently that was their reward for each prisoner brought in, and they departed with a swagger and a promise that they'd be back with more.

  “Ja, hoffentlich.” Yeah, I hope so, the sergeant replied, but with little conviction. It was late evening yet still semilight. Background war noise flooded and ebbed with little indication of which way the tide was running; consequently the sergeant and his comrades were antsy.

  The orchard was their POW-collection point, while the farmhouse served as a medical-aid station for a dozen American and German casualties, wounded or otherwise disabled. Most of the Americans had suffered bad jump injuries. What Joe immediately noticed was that the POWs were guarded closely, the casualties much less so, so the Class Shark convincingly faked a fractured back.

  Sometime during that surreal night, Major Kent, the 506th regimental surgeon, was brought in to examine the most serious cases. Joe was glad for the wounded but also worried because if Kent had been captured, that meant the whole vertical invasion had not gone well. Joe could only get in a few words with Kent, who said he'd allowed himself to be captured with the American wounded in his care. The Geneva Conventions required that in those circumstances he be given unique status, a doctor for both sides. The Germans very much respected Kent in this capacity, addressed him as Hen-Major Doktor, and deferred to his every medical judgment.

  From his paymaster jumps Joe knew a little more about the Geneva Conventions than other men of his rank.* In all the Currahees' preparation and planning for the vertical invasion, the only order was that if captured they were to give the enemy no more than name, rank, and serial number— not a word about how difficult that might be. Maybe no one knew because in Europe few Americans had been captured
since the First World War, when prisoners were routinely treated well.

  Determined not to be a prisoner much longer, Joe took a place in the farmhouse with the real wounded and wondered what to do. To lie there among them was a trauma of tense guilt. They were in extreme pain, not faking it. For lacerating wounds there was only a sprinkle of sulfa powder and maybe a self-applied pressure pad to slow the bleeding. No painkillers, though every trooper had jumped with a morphine surette in his first-aid pack. That was the first thing Germans took away to use themselves.

  In the farmhouse, Jack Harrison from Third Battalion was the worst off. He'd been gut shot by a burp gun. Joe could feel, because he heard, every outcry as Harrison struggled with his agony. That got on the Germans' nerves too. Joe understood that they were debating whether Harrison should be delivered from his misery. The guards were for it and put the question to their chain of command.

  The answer never came—too minor for consideration while the war hung in balance. The battle din grew louder. From one hour to the next, the Germans didn't know if they might be overrun by paratroopers, maybe by Harrison's battalion. So the guards punted to Major Kent. Exhausted from lifesaving emergencies outside the orchard, he nevertheless came around whenever possible. Kent, of course, was not advised by the Germans that Harrison had been nominated for execution but told them that his life was savable.

  Late that night or very early the next morning, Harrison's travail became too much for Joe. The hour fit his plan: when the guards were sleepiest, he'd fake the need to flex his back and hobble over to the stairs. If no one stopped him, he'd go up to the loft.

  No guard was present when he rose achingly to his feet. The wounded were moaning, some calling for their mothers. Joe had to get away from that. Their crying was undoing his training. It was too much to be around them any longer.

  The stairs were like a steep ladder. At the top was a farmer's attic, just junk piled up, but in the dark Joe saw a sliver of faint light. He tiptoed to it, but the attic floor creaked a lot, and the window tapered into just a slot, not big enough to get through. This wasn't going to be his chance, so he backed away. The floor creaked again. Then he heard the stride of jackboots.