Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  The roadside was now unnaturally marshy after Rommel had flooded the lowland to slow down the invasion. Harwick scooped up a chunk of broken asphalt, as did Tucker and Joe, to be flung far out into the marsh for a splashing distraction when they darted in the other direction. The signal to do so would be Harwick's throw. He studied the terrain ahead while Joe and Tucker trudged along whispering as they watched his arm.

  “Who do you know about?” Joe asked.

  This was hard for Tucker to tell him. “Lieutenant Johnston's ship… they got it… all of 'em.”

  “Jack Bray? Orv?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “They're gone, Joe.”

  THAT KIND OF DISMAL information was going up and down the column—who'd been killed and how, who'd made it out with wounds, who'd been captured. Everything later was words, words, words—in telegrams, on citations, in tributes, on tombstones. Everyone who'd put on a parachute or strapped into a glider had anted up. For the first time Joe learned who had lost their bets.

  The image of Jack and Orv consumed by a fireball was a blow to Joe's stomach, not his head. They'd never reached the ground. Joe had. That was something more he owed them. They'd been incinerated, mangled in jagged metal, maybe charred pulp in some of the smoldering wreckage Joe had passed on D Night. The impact on him was not immediate, rather a feeling that those killed were not dead, only gone— like jumpers ahead of him snatched by the prop blast, standing one moment, invisible the next, a flashing pair of dice in the great crap game. Irretrievably, numbers came up, winning or losing, ever-changing yet constant, to appear in every combination of life, death, and in between. Jack and Orv seemed out there waiting for Joe on a drop zone toward which he was descending.

  Tucker whispered more, glad to change the subject to other results. Currahees smoked the krauts at exits from Utah Beach (the 4th Infantry Division consequently came ashore largely unopposed). Blues seized and held the two Douve bridges, under command of Captain Shettle, the highest-ranking officer left in Third Battalion.

  That's what Jack and Orv had set out to do. It had been done, and that seemed like a temporary memorial to them.* Now the impact of their deaths came over Joe like the onset of flu. It drained his heart to think about the trio's last pass together in the States: the visit to Forty-second and Broadway, their glitzy introduction to a world-famous place, to be part of it for some hours, the experience and youthful accomplishment. Joe moved away from Tucker, who understood why

  There was slight time to grieve before the night was ripped by a huge missile. In the same seconds it was heard, the naval shell erupted in the middle of Joe's column. The 101st had probably slipped an artillery observer up to watch the Carentan road. In the gloaming and at a distance he saw a column of troops, not knowing they were prisoners. On his command a cruiser in the English Channel delivered sudden devastation on friend and foe.

  The earth jerked sideways. Joe felt a sting burn in the butt, smelled the scorched rent in his pants, with dreamlike detachment saw how the fringe of wool still smoldered. He'd been blown into a ditch and penetrated by a shell fragment at sonic speed, but that didn't register at first because all along the dusky road hands clawed the air as bilingual screams merged like their blood. Two guards closest to him looked like shark food, not quite digested, not quite quiet.

  Despite the carnage, somehow Tucker found Joe, pressed a handkerchief to the wound, and led him off to Harwick, who, not aware that Joe had been hit, appeared pleased. He whispered that sooner or later they'd have to move east of Highway 13, so better do it now in the confusion—odds in the crap game had changed in their favor, and they had the dice.

  They stumbled over two mangled bodies in marsh water. Tucker looked them over and recognized one was a Currahee named Richie Johns. Most of one leg had been blown away. He was so covered with blood they assumed him dead. Then he groaned. So did the other man. Harwick took off his belt and twisted it into a tourniquet. The other “body” had lost both legs. Belt tourniquets were tried for him too but could not stop spurts from femoral arteries.

  With a faint hope that the Germans would sweep up survivors, the amputees were pulled onto the cratered road. That's what Harwick told them, though they were too much in shock to understand.*

  In hiding, Joe watched the remaining guards reassemble prisoners and continue toward Carentan leaving blood trails on the road. Tucker tapped him, asked if he could follow; if so, it was time to go. Into the marsh and deeper darkness Joe limped behind Harwick, the trio's guide, east toward sporadic flashing of naval gunfire. They paused at a stream close to Highway 13 and drank noisily. A German patrol squirted automatic fire in their direction. Harwick and Tucker dodged one way; Joe heaved himself in the other, t

  He listened for their splashing but heard none and made no sound himself. On elbows he pulled along like a turtle with a bad rear leg. In the excitement of escape he'd ignored his butt wound, but now it throbbed with a piercing ache. He felt very much alone again. The second time was like the first, but he resolved to do better from his experience. From what could be seen at dawn the Germans were thick east of Highway 13, so he pulled back to the west side where there was a little more concealment. With Carentan as their final objective, a lot of Screaming Eagles must be headed that way. Joe decided to lie low and let their attack sweep him up.

  But German skirmishers were deploying to meet and feel out the weight of the attack. Joe could see Fallschirmjagers in camouflage smocks darting north—riflemen, machine-gun crews—all hardened troops, fingers on triggers. Even at a distance they scared Joe out of hiding like a flushed quail; he could stay beyond their range only by heading north, back toward St. Come-du-Mont. From what he could hear, it sounded like the Germans were in trouble there, even that the village might already be in American hands.

  P-47s regularly machine-gunned Highway 13, preventing any movement of vehicles, but when not being strafed German troops dodged forward from ditches. They were gaining on Joe, yet he felt almost privileged to watch what was coming up, a helluva clash when German paratroopers ran into American. West of Highway 13 was a solitary hill that despite its middling size dominated the flatlands and the impending battle. Joe knew it would be a strong German position that he'd have to avoid like a dinghy rowing away from an iceberg. But constantly he was tunneled toward the hill by American artillery and strafing; yet if he stayed put, the krauts he'd watch deploy would be upon him, seeking the same concealment from the air that he was seeking from them.

  That dilemma, whether to move or not, ended the thrill of regained freedom, leaving Joe with a hangover of hunger and weakness. He wouldn't admit what was wrong with him, rationalizing that it was from loss of blood. He couldn't see his butt wound, but it felt swollen to the size of a grapefruit, and how it throbbed. What could not be rationalized was that someone would find him, friend or foe, and he didn't have much control over who it would be. Joe felt like a slow-moving rat in a maze, going in one futile direction followed by another, stopping only to wheeze. He began to notice a buzzing in his ears.

  Bleary thoughts resolved into a dubious decision: he had to get around that hill, no matter what his chances. Midmorning offered some hope when a new sound growled from the battlefields, far off to the east but unmistakably headed his way. A tank sounds like a Greyhound bus going through its gears. What he heard meant that the seaborne forces were ashore and the 101st would be supported by tanks—just the encouragement Joe needed. He left his hideout, a spray of reeds, and sneaked along parallel to the road toward the sound of distant approaching armor.

  Starting up once more, Joe collapsed from lack of energy. Instead of watching for Germans he kept looking for apple trees. All the fruit had been blown down by concussions, and what lay on the ground was putrid. He devoured what he could find, cores and all. Several times during the day Joe fell asleep wherever he happened to be lying. That may have helped him. There were bodies strewn across the countryside, so he looked like many others, one with blood caked on his butt.


  Highway 13 became an iron curtain: he couldn't get across or around it, and that was his situation for the next eighteen hours or so. Finally, when dusk settled in again, chances looked the best since he'd separated from Harwick and Tucker. German positions could be identified when they fired at fighter-bombers, which kept strafing all through the night. Apparently the Germans had lost St. Come-du-Mont. If he could reach the oncoming Screaming Eagles, he'd have some very timely information for their attack on Carentan.

  Be cunning in doing the Lord's work, a nun at his high school had once told him. He felt now that cunning, more than courage, was what would get him through. From the Germans' antiaircraft fire Joe had a mental picture of their strongest positions. There was a stretch of Highway 13 that looked blank, the gap covered, it seemed, by interlocking fire from two small elevations about a half mile apart. When there was complete darkness Joe limped for the middle of that gap, where a low hedge had been mulched by strafing and artillery.

  Joe's try-or-die lunge for friendly lines was like his D Night jump. He thought about parents, country, Saint Joseph's, buddies living and dead, how they were all behind him in spirit and prayer. But it also occurred to him that many men like him had probably died in that state of mind.

  There was the cricketing sort of silence when he crawled up to Highway 13, now more narrow than its two lanes after P-47s had furrowed it like a farm field. This was the place to do it, put it to the touch. As fast as he could hobble, Joe crossed the road and crawled into reeds and water. His face was down and wet when he heard, “Hande hoch!”

  JOE'S SECOND CAPTURE was like his first, except for his captors. Instead of helmets they wore forage caps, the mark of static troops.* They pinned him down in the mud. With neither a weapon nor a helmet, Joe was evidently an escapee, which angered them to sadism. Pungent with the smell of sweaty wool and leather, they tried to pull off his jump boots but received a suicidal snarl: “You'll have to kill me first!”

  So they started to. One of them found his butt wound and began jabbing it with his bayonet. Joe fought with unimaginable strength and fury, got in some hard blows but received overwhelmingly more. He was about to lose both boots and life, but there was a shout—“Sei ruhig!” (“Be quiet!”)— with some German curses Joe hadn't yet learned.

  The Germans beating him froze like statues. A silhouette appeared, two others beside it. There were some quiet commands, the forage caps stepped aside, and a panzer grenadier sergeant wrenched Joe to his feet. The other two looked him over, patted him down, and with a nod from the sergeant he was hauled away.

  The following day a fellow POW confirmed that Joe was once again near St. Come-du-Mont. The name caused him more pain than his festering wound, heightened a sense of failure—he had not worked hard enough or well enough to make good an escape. He was shattered, stunned: to be captured was a challenge; to be recaptured was a compounded defeat he could not comprehend. Joe had been a star athlete in high school, Third Battalion's premier jumper, but now, in the ultimate contest, he was a two-time loser. This was no longer a crap game if he couldn't make a single point. Shorty had a technique; Joe didn't, couldn't follow one.

  Glum in a self-critical haze, Joe was with thirty new POWs. Confession seemed good for the soul, so he felt impelled to tell them that this was his second time through the wringer. No one cared. Their only concern was what would happen next.

  The Germans were less organized, more flustered during this go-around. They seemed ready to retreat, so Joe's second interrogation (in a barn) was shorter than the first. The interrogator had a note telling him that Joe was an escapee but seemed otherwise uninterested in him. Except that he confiscated Joe's dog tags—strictly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions—and Joe's alone.

  Dog tags didn't concern Joe while rain started coming down hard sometime during his second capture. There was no shelter; the prisoners were shivering, coughing, and falling sick. They were finally loaded onto trucks with POW lettered on the top to protect against strafing. Of course the Germans moved their own troops and heavy equipment in the same convoy, thereby presenting Allied fighter-bomber pilots with a wrenching dilemma.

  Joe felt doomed as he remembered what strafing had done to Highway 13, the blasted road on which he was now headed south in a slow, exposed truck. Then, like the sound of hope, pelting rain turned up in volume to hailstorm intensity. It swept the convoy with a sopping chill, but the clouds kept P-47s away. The Germans weren't taking any chances, though. The convoy wended south like a cautious inchworm, so that the fifteen miles to St.-Lo took over twelve hours to traverse.

  At one of many stops Joe's truck holed up in a farmyard with one exhausted guard. It was an opportune setting for escape, but still numbed by his failures and depressed by his luck, Joe just crawled into some wet straw and tried to sleep. He must have groaned because an American medic came over, examined his wound, and asked the guard for sulfa powder, a request that almost got the medic a bayonet in the stomach. He told Joe to watch out for infection, but otherwise the wound wasn't too serious, though the fragment was still in there. Yeah, until removed it would be painful, but pain was a good thing, a warning but also a sign that the senses were still functioning. If they stopped, he said, Joe was a medical crisis. Before they got back on the truck, a German officer in a rain poncho came by and asked which prisoner was Beyrle. Joe was identified and stood up for inspection. The officer looked him over, noticed his butt wound, but didn't say anything and moved on. Shaking in fear that he'd get a special interrogation, Joe was very relieved when the guard told him to get in the truck.

  * Like the American Airborne, the German Fallschirmjagers were not above braggadocio. After the war, 6th Regiment veterans convinced British author Robert Kershaw that twenty men of their bicycle company had in one swoop captured a complete American battalion of thirteen officers and six hundred GIs.

  * Postwar, it was for the next of kin to decide where their dead would be interred. Many, including General Patton, were buried near where they'd fought, in awe-inspiring cemeteries like those in Normandy and Maastricht. Most American families, however, wanted their children home: Jack Bray to Louisiana, Orv Vanderpool to California.

  * A German patrol did come by and found Johns, the only one alive. Twenty-seven years later, at the dedication of the 101st Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, Joe and Johns stared at each other's name tags. Johns had lost a leg, but eventually the Wehrmacht turned him over to the Red Cross in Switzerland, where he was exchanged for a German prisoner with an identical amputation. f He learned what happened to them when Tucker showed up on “Starvation Hill” near St.-Lo. Sometime in the early morning of their getaway, Tucker and Harwick were taken under fire, split, and couldn't get back together, just as had happened with Joe. German outposts were radiating from Carentan; one of them recaptured Tucker. Harwick made it back to American lines, was later promoted to major, and became a battalion executive officer in the 506th.

  * Static troops, as the Allies called them—the Wehrmacht's term was “fortress troops”—had not initially been stationed on Highway 13 but rather in bunkers to defend the beaches, such as they did at Pointe-du-Hoc, where Rangers scaled the cliffs to eradicate them as depicted in the movie Saving Private Ryan. The static troops Joe encountered had probably left their bunkers, against Hitler's orders to fight to the death, then been rounded up by Rommel's reinforcements and used wherever needed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GOOD COPS, BAD COPS

  AS HIS TRUCK, PACKED TWO DEEP WITH POWS, CONVOYED south, Joe had little idea if the semidarkness was twilight or dawn. Far-off U.S. artillery howled out projectiles from three sides like wolves converging on St.-Lo. Everyone could hear that the biggest inland battle so far was under way. The POWs prayed for their buddies' victory but prayed harder not to be caught where Americans would be killed by Americans. Indeed, just outside St.-Lo the guards yelled, “Jabo!” then-word for fighter-bomber. They had well learned Allied strafing procedure: first
the flight makes a pass to judge the target, then it either turns off or starts a hot run. This flight of three P-47s returned.

  To hear their first burst was almost too late. Moments before, guards and the guarded dove for cover as Jabos rolled back to strafe from the other direction. Joe scrambled out, but there was no one to help the immovable wounded. Fifty-calibers blasted away canvas, hugely gouging truck beds and the stretcher cases on them. Joe trembled and crossed himself as a jaw, shin, ribs, and guts fountained onto the road. To see dead men had been melancholy, but to watch them killed like that was another shock like his chute opening on D Night. He tried to collect himself, tried to imagine that each soul was now with God, so it didn't matter what was left of his body.

  The Germans were also hyperventilating. They collected themselves by ordering POWs to pile up remains in a ditch for the French to view. The convoy was now smoking and disabled. Ambulatory prisoners were marched through St.-Lo toward a town called Tessy-sur-Vire. Joe noticed the sign. North in the combat zone the Wehrmacht had removed all road signs. Seeing one alerted him that he was farther back in the German rear and closer to the FFI. He began thinking about escape again when his group was quartered in a stable with just a couple of tired guards.

  But that night he doubted there would be a next morning. The whole town of St.-Lo surged with explosions. Under pass after pass of medium bombers, buildings fell as in movies of an earthquake. Rolled by each tembler and showered with falling plaster, even exhausted POWs couldn't sleep, so Joe watched the guards. One was a teenager, scared to death and just as pale, perhaps not even German because he kept doing laps on a rosary, which Joe had never seen Germans do before nor would again. Both sides used “walking wounded” as temporary guards. The other wore a Fallschirm-jager helmet, and there was blood on his camouflage smock. He looked prematurely old, maybe twenty-five: months, perhaps years, of combat had accelerated his age.