A favorite was the Goebbels editorial saying democracy may be okay for some people but Europe has always preferred dictatorships like the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and—no surprise—Hitler. The only disturbing feature of OK Kid! was Keatingesque essays by krieges about life in American slums. Readers were divided by these accounts. “Why not?” one of Joe's muckers shrugged, “if it gets you a parcel. We all know it's bullshit.” McKenzie felt otherwise, and anyone in IV-B who contributed material felt his wrath. Gintjee recounted:
The British love plays, especially comedies and musicals. No tragedies, thanks, there's enough of that here. The “theater” charged a two-cigarette admission till the Americans arrived. Most of us had never seen a play except maybe In a high school auditorium, so it took the boredom of a stalag to raise a little interest. To get us more involved the Man of Confidence ordered that the first play be free.
I'll never forget it. The cast was in civilian clothes though they were streng verboten in camp as a possible aid to escape. It was a variety show with an MC who came out, casually lit a cigarette then dropped it to go into his spiel. “My God,” he cried, “this is only a play!” and scrambled to retrieve the butt. But the audience was ahead of him and grabbed it. That was the biggest laugh I had in prison.
The Americans' greatest influence in IV-B was gambling, which for krieges of other nationalities there had been scant interest previously. With energetic ingenuity and imagination, crap tables and roulette wheels were improvised. Gint-jee felt gambling was an appeal to the spirit that tomorrow we may die or next month be liberated, so what the hell, it's only cigarettes—let's get some excitement in our lives, win or lose in an egalitarian contest. That became a campwide attitude expressed in raffles, numbers rackets, and gruesome betting on how many American bombers would be shot down the next day.
Gintjee also made observations as an economist. When there was a bonus issue of cigarettes from the IRC it did not make everyone happy. Creditors with tobacco fortunes saw their net worth reduced when debtors paid off in devalued smokes. The British especially grumbled about such volatility and how widespread gambling upset the equilibrium that had sustained them before the Americans arrived. What if McKenzie became a debtor to Keating? It was a question hard to answer.
Marshall invited a French Legionnaire to our hut to hustle him for a button. This Algerian was a recruiter for the Legion, so before he donated his button we had to hear his pitch. Travel, freedom, adventure and amour would all be ours. He almost had me convinced to join up after the war (they didn't have any Japanese!), but then I asked him about the pay. Two cents per day. I said I hoped he enjoyed riding camels but I'll just smoke 'em, thanks just the same….
Looks like the Allies are on the Siegfried Line. The Brits are giving odds that Montgomery will be here in a month. They're so confident that they'll accept IOU's. I bet twelve cigarettes at three to one, and will happily lose….
Now and then the Brits pull practical jokes on the krauts and get away with it. There's this half-wit guard walking the perimeter and he's really bucking for corporal. After a rain he spots a bit of commo wire sticking out of the ground. He pulls on it and up comes some more wire. He yells to the sergeant of the guard—he found it!—the top priority contraband in Stalag IV-B—the Brits' secret radio antenna. Guards gather around and pull up wire that leads all over the camp, and sure enough it ends at the British compound. They yank up the last stretch of wire. It's threaded through a pile of rusty cans at the bottom of a latrine! …
Much colder weather at roll call this morning. Men in the hut next door did not fall out. It has been quarantined for diphtheria. No other cases yet….
Klug is the top poker player in camp. He's so good Marshall and I asked him to invest for us. Sure, he said, for a percentage of the winnings but we take the losses. We won a thousand postwar dollars but then Klug hit a bad streak and we're down $1,500. Creditors are concerned about our health and want us to move away from the diphtheria hut. It's nice to know that people care….
A new sergeant of the guard, an asshole wounded in France. Big shakedown and inspection of the hut found some cartoons I'd been drawing of the krauts. That got me dragged into the commandant's office, an oberst. He only “reprimanded” me, and my sentence was three days in solitary with bread and water. Not much change in my diet, colonel!
Gintjee and his mucker of button fame were probably known to Joe but lost in his slow-healing head, as are most memories from XII-A and IV-B except for his twenty-first birthday, celebrated with a sugared lump of dough baked on the hut stove, a cigarette for a candle. The Germans had a present for him too, a few weeks later, when “Beyrle” was read out at roll call for transport to another stalag. Hundreds of Americans were joining him (but neither Rosie nor Gintjee), many unhappy to leave the tolerable routine of IV-B, but not Joe, who felt bridled by a chain of command that seemed reluctant to bring a rash Yank into their escape plans, if there were any.* They reminded him of the pilot of his Lysander, war-weary, war-wise, and willing to wait for war's end. Joe had been a .400 hitter in high school, but oh for two against the Germans. He wanted another at bat, and not with a cricket paddle.
Joe hadn't found a really kindred kriege (his IV-B muckers had been shuffled several times), and it was accepted practice not to ask personal questions because they could ignite short tempers and end in fights, which burned up scarce energy and satisfied only the authorities, who never ceased trying to turn krieges against one another. Nonetheless IV-B had been an education for Joe, thanks mostly to what he'd learned from two Rangers who'd been captured at Dieppe in the summer of 1942. They were the senior American krieges but didn't transfer with the others because the Germans had permanently classified them as Canadian. Joe can't remember then-names. Names didn't matter much; men went by monikers like King Corporal and Hockey Shorts. Joe's was Spud because he was always scrounging potato peels.
The two crease-faced, stubbly Rangers did a lot to clear his head and bring it to the most practical level, the only one that could sustain any other level. Their patient instruction reminded him of Saint Joseph's basketball coach, who first showed him which foot to pivot on, what pass to look for, which teammate was in the best position. Fundamentals, essentials:
Save some food from every meal, no matter how much is available from the IRC or won by gambling. Tomorrow there could be none.
Don't expect to learn about a successful escape. The krauts won't want to admit it and the escape committee doesn't want to be flooded with proposals.
No matter how tired you are, exercise. The energy you put out actually adds to overall strength even when it tires you out. Like stashed food, you'll need that deep strength when you get sick, as everyone does sooner or later. Exercise makes it later.
If your legs swell, it means you may be getting beriberi, so trade for anything that has protein.
The MOC has a net of informers, so be careful about what you say and to whom. It could be worse to be on the wrong side of the MOC than to piss off the krauts, sort of like the choice between being fingered by the police or the Mafia. The enforcers can get at you in ways the cops can't.
At XII-A and IV-B Joe was never made by the MOC mafia but now, from what the two Rangers had taught him, he felt ready to step up in an American camp. Early in the afternoon his name was called again and he was sent to a table where kriege dog tags were checked against POW records that had begun at XII-A. For the first time Joe saw his mug shot, now on the cover of this book.
Ditty bags were inspected for contraband, then there was a personal patdown, which did not uncover Joe's shiv (won in craps), a sharpened fragment from a truck shock, an all-purpose tool used mostly for opening Red Cross cans. He had tucked the shiv into a jump boot that stunk so much the Germans wouldn't examine it. The transfer began with a two-mile march to boxcars at a siding. The krieges groaned to see them, forty-or-eights again, likely to invite air attack.
But Allied fighters had not been seen much lately because t
hey were concentrating above the Netherlands, as Joe would soon learn. A guard noticed his jump boots and asked which Airborne division he'd been in. When he answered the 101st, the guard said they had jumped again. Joe's buddies were back in the war for the first time since Normandy, on a date famous in Screaming Eagle history—September 17,1944— the same day as his funeral mass in Muskegon and also the day in 1943 when he landed in England. September 17 is the only day of the year when Joe reads his horoscope.
* Waffen (armed) SS were all-Nazi units, usually division-size, tactically integrated with the Wehrmacht, which was otherwise made up of conscripts rather than party members. These units were Hitler's elite, getting the best equipment and replacements but also the least rest and suffering the most casualties. They were under the general command of Himmler, who parceled them out to Wehrmacht field armies according to Hitler's wishes. Stalin developed an equivalent of the Waffen SS, his Guards divisions, comprising chiefly fervent Communists. When the two elites clashed there was always a battle royal, as if a personal match between Hitler and Stalin.
* Originally Axis partners, the Italians surrendered in September 1943. Except for reliable Fascist units in Liguria, their army was rounded up by the Germans and made nominal POWs.
* Einsatzgruppen (special action groups) were mass killing teams who began the Holocaust by shooting Eastern European civilians in droves—but not nearly fast enough for Himmler. Besides inefficiency there was a morale problem reported by Einsatzgruppen commanders: some of their men were not sleeping well after machine-gunning civilians all day. Thus the search for alternatives began, leading to poison gas in centralized facilities rather than bullets in the field as the final solution.
* As best as research can determine, in 1944 there were three one-man escapes from IV-B. At least two were successful, a tribute to British patience and their meticulous planning.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MARKET-GARDEN
BY SEPTEMBER 17, 1944, ED ALBERS FELT FULLY INTEGRATED into Joe's old company, what was left of I Company after Normandy. Duber was still around, and though his crossbow was never fired in France, he continued to practice. One day he took aim at a royal oak that shaded the bus stop in Rams-bury. The bolt shattered bark, shaking the tree as well as the folks waiting for a bus. This time Duber was identified, for there were no other crossbowmen of any nationality in the county. His weapon was confiscated, the only instance Albers can remember of Duber being punished for anything. A prewar army man, thirty-eight years old when he became Airborne, Duber had the guile to disappear for a whole day undetected. Albers wondered how he had done in Normandy. The originals said fine: Duber dodged and defied the Germans as easily as he had his officers.
Third Battalion officers now included the recently promoted CO, Major Shettle, who had saved the day on D+1 by seizing and holding the Douve bridges with fewer than a hundred men. Commanding I Company was Captain Fred Anderson, a platoon leader in Normandy. His family, like Wolverton's, resided in Charlotte, North Carolina. That state was overrepresented in the Airborne, probably because it had been born there and the first wave of volunteeers were local. The Anderson and Wolverton families didn't know each other, but at war's end Anderson paid a call of respect to Wolverton's widow, a visit that led to their marriage.
Albers's platoon sergeant was the redoubtable Alex Engel-brecht from Syracuse, New York. Like the Beyrle family, his had spoken German at home, and he reveled in pouring profanities on SS POWs in their vernacular. Albers's squad leader was Ted Dziepak, a Polish-American from Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Not that there was ever much question, but Dziepak didn't have to be told what he was fighting for.
Fighting spirit was quiescent among the Screaming Eagles during the latter days of summer. The pre-D Day “can't wait to drop on the Wehrmacht” attitude had been replaced by memories from the invasion. New men like Albers soon comprehended from the veterans that Airborne recruiting posters delivered one message, combat quite another. Consequently, the troopers would get ready but were not raring to jump back into the fight. This was a temperament that somewhat discomfited hard-charging commanders like Sink, but they understood and in various degrees felt it themselves.
So the 101st cheered on Patton's Third Army as it drove across France, overrunning one planned Airborne objective after another. Sixteen division-size drops were planned, several to reach the stage where jumpers went into their marshaling area only hours from enplaning, but each time Patton beat them to the drop zones. The Screaming Eagles were like pinch hitters watching the regular lineup run up the score: Go, team! We're ready if needed but won't be disappointed if you keep circling the bases.
While the troopers waited to return to action, decorations for feats in Normandy came down. Three Blues received the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism: Captain Shettle, Donald Zahn and George Montilio. The latter two crossed the Douve under fire and held off a company-size counterattack. There was a glitch in Zahn's paperwork: his medal had not yet been fully processed before the ceremony at which General Omar Bradley presented the decorations. As soon as Montilio received his DSC he took it off, refusing to wear it till Zahn got one, which he consequently did, along with a battlefield commission. Montilio was promoted to sergeant, but in late April 1945 he became one of the last Screaming Eagles to be killed in action.
The third Currahee to win the DSC was Private Lee Rogers, a tree-topper from Aberdeen, Washington, who would become famous as “Ike's corporal.” With the 506th formed up on Wiltshire County's most impressive parade ground, Rogers's feat was read out by Sink's adjutant. Even in reserved official language the citation was awesome: how the private, after his leaders were killed, had rallied a few men, leading them to destroy a machine-gun nest and a score of Falls chirmjagers.
Eisenhower listened with eyes that began to glisten, attached the medal on Rogers's jacket, then shook his hand more slowly than he had those of the other heroes. As Rogers returned to ranks, Ike turned to General Taylor and asked softly why such an intrepid leader was no more than a buck private. Would Taylor permit the supreme Allied commander to promote Rogers and do it on the spot? Taylor's answer was of course affirmative, so Rogers marched away from the parade ground with the DSC and two more stripes than he had worn.
Sink, never one to shun publicity for his Currahees, pinned new chevrons on Rogers in front of the press. Soon pictures appeared in Yank and Stars & Stripes as well as stateside newspapers, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Rogers's fame, alas, then plummeted to infamy. A superb performer in combat, he was equally inept in garrison and soon took leave of it without authorization to celebrate his uniquely bestowed rank. He did so in London pubs, where praise and pints went to his head. Leg MPs returned him to regimental control— disheveled, disreputable, and reeking of Guinness.
Sink was away when Rogers was hauled in. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Chase, the deputy commander, took one sniff and look at yesterday's hero, then demoted Rogers to buck private as summarily as Ike had promoted him. When Chase briefed the CO on this outcome, Sink pushed back his hat, lit a cigarette, and exhaled with exasperation.
“Charley, you can't bust Ike's own corporal!” To which Chase replied with dignity, “Sir, I wasn't aware that General Eisenhower intended for the rank to be hereditary.”
Taylor related Rogers's volatile rise and fall to Ike, who reddened with laughter, promising to never again intervene in promotions. Rogers, perhaps sobered by his vicissitudes, jumped back into the fight to rise from buck private to buck sergeant, a rank he earned and kept in what Screaming Eagles remembered as Holland.
THE NAME GIVEN TO the second of the 101st's three great rendezvous with destiny was a misnomer. Holland is not the province of the Netherlands the Screaming Eagles dropped on as part of history's biggest airborne operation—that province is actually North Brabant. Holland is up around Amsterdam and Rotterdam, north of the Rhine and near its mouth.* The objective of benignly named Operatio
n Market-Garden was to establish a bridgehead on the north bank, not at its estuary but at the industrial city of Arnhem, where there was a bridge, one that would become known as “too far.”
Blue chips were again on the table, almost as much so as on D Day. A mighty Airborne formation had been assembled the largest of all time, named the First Allied Airborne Army and consisting of the U.S. 101st, 82nd, and 17th Airborne Divisions, the British 1st (“Red Devils”) and 6th Airborne Divisions, plus an air-transported infantry division, along with the Polish Parachute Brigade. Despite a huge airlift capability, not all those units could be dropped on the enemy at one time; there simply were not enough transports in the world.
Ironically and increasingly, Eisenhower was fast running out of manpower on the ground while at the same time holding this vastly potent force of elite warriors ready to alight into the fight. There had been nowhere for them to attack while Patton galloped across France, but then his and all five Allied armies dashed like impotent waves against the breakwater of the Siegfried Line, the most formidable fortification in the world. It was a stalemate, and perhaps even trench warfare loomed unless Eisenhower came up with a good idea for how to commit the First Allied Airborne Army, ideally to vertically envelop the Siegfried Line.
The man whose idea prevailed was Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of Alamein. He did so over the customary fury of his inveterate rival, General George Patton, for if Monty got the First Allied Airborne Army, with it would go resources craved elsewhere, everywhere along the Western Front. Nevertheless, Ike turned to Montgomery, asking for a plan that featured imagination and daring, even though they were not characteristic of the field marshal's generalship.
An imaginatively daring plan was indeed produced. An “airborne carpet” was the Market half of it, landings to secure vital portions of the highway running from Monty's front lines on the Belgian border to Arnhem. The Garden half called for a powerful British armor corps to thrust up the corridor created by the Airborne and pile into the Arnhem bridgehead over the Rhine, flank the Siegfried Line, and open Germany's guts. The air-land jab was to strike with such surprise that Rundstedt would not have time to shift reinforcements into the Netherlands, apparently the least threatened sector of the Western Front.
Behind Hitler's Lines Page 19