Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Brewer and Joe didn't feel that way. They couldn't live on grain that made them itch and sneeze so much someone walking by could hear them. By a 2-1 vote it was decided that they would prowl around the forlorn rail yard, “check out the area.” Quinn vehemently disapproved: Okay, he said, if this were Poland where everyone hates the Germans, but this is the capital of Germany, where everyone hates us. As if to emphasize his point, a flurry of bombs dropped on the city.

  If bombers were going over, they might be targeting boxcars, Joe argued. Some bombs fell closer, and Quinn agreed to get out till the air raid was over. They slipped into a culvert and scanned the rail yard. It was huge, about five miles wide and three miles long. They roamed back and forth for two or three days, their bag of rations depleting. At some point they got into the sewer system, a miasmic maze promising to lead somewhere better but mocking them to try to find a way.

  The vast yard showed few signs of life, no trains moving in or out, till late one afternoon they saw an old man shuffling between train cars, checking grease fittings of the journals. He proceeded slowly and after an hour sat down to gnaw on black bread and baloney. Joe urged that the yard man be approached directly, no matter what the hazard. The three were in American uniforms, very motley ones. Should they pretend to be refugees? No, said Quinn, that story wouldn't last. Go right up to him, Brewer whispered, and tell him who you are. They studied the yard man for another half hour. He was hunched in the cold, a gloomy figure slowly munching as if his mouth had insufficient saliva.

  Joe came up behind, called him Kamerad, and asked for help. The man's jaw dropped and so did his sandwich when Joe told him he was an escaped POW. Go away—Kamerad didn't want to hear anything like that. Joe gave him three cigarettes, which he grabbed but repeated that he wouldn't continue talking for fear of being shot. By the Gestapo? Joe asked sympathetically. The man nodded.

  Joe left it at that and silently watched Kamerad trudge away. The next morning they saw him in another part of the yard, again checking journals. Joe emerged and asked for food and water. Kamerad wore a dingy overcoat and wool cap with a visor shadowing his eyes. This time he was willing to talk a little. He was forty years old and not well, he said— dysentery, the cause of his medical discharge from the Wehr-macht. Water? He pointed to a leaky cistern. Food—nein, it is very scarce. Ami bombers … Joe gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes. Well, Kamerad would check with a friend who might be able to help. He left before dark, and Joe's unease increased because he'd not been able to see Kamerad's eyes as they'd talked.

  The fugitives had another debate about what to do. They didn't think Kamerad would be much help, but he was all the hope there was for now. If he betrayed them, it would probably be soon, so they entered a switch shack to watch for police. What's our plan, Quinn asked, if the krauts close in? Joe said he'd make a break for it. That might attract the cops because Kamerad would have told them of only one Ami on the loose. Brewer disagreed—word would be out by now from III-C that there were three escapees. No, Joe informed him, the commandant wouldn't want that kind of bad publicity. Quinn grew angry; they had agreed not to bullshit one another, and now here was Joe trying to make them feel better, feel safer. But hell, if Joe was to be a decoy, he should rest up. He and Brewer took turns on watch that night. The morning brought another question, whether or not to consume the last rations. They did so with little debate, for from here on there was no doubt that they would have to barter cigarettes for food or die trying to steal some.

  Kamerad returned the next evening and wandered around with some apparent confusion till Joe whistled at him from a culvert. Kamerad seemed relieved and said he'd take Joe to a friend who had some food, then lit a candle to see that Joe had enough cigarettes to complete the deal. Suddenly he realized Joe wasn't alone; two other American faces had been illuminated by the candle. He stepped back and became very upset. Joe told him they'd be generous with cigarettes and leave as soon as they got a supply of food. Kamerad was still shaky, but he led them away from the yard, over twisted tracks and past bombed-out buildings. It was the kind of wet-cold night that makes a person shrink in the fog. In the distance there were lonely sirens and occasional probing searchlights.

  “If this was the way the master race was living, I felt there wasn't too much to worry about winning the war. That was my twenty-one-year-old attitude when I thought we'd found the anti-Nazi underground.

  “Blackout was seriously enforced. We had to feel our way into a four-room house with thick walls, then Kamerad lit a couple more candles. On a table was Brotchen, sausage gristle, and some weak beer. After months without alcohol, it put us on our heels.”

  Kamerad left, saying he'd be back to collect the promised cigarettes. Quinn went to a window where he could watch anyone approaching the house. In the middle of the night Kamerad returned driving a wagon pulled by a very skinny horse. Joe told him where their boxcar was if he needed horse feed. The three climbed in and Kamerad draped a tarp over them. They took turns peeking out. The ride was slow, jarring, and took over an hour. They were crossing Berlin but never heard a voice or vehicle.

  “FIFTY YEARS LATER I tried to locate the route, but nothing was familiar,” Joe relates. “What I wanted to find was where the wagon had taken us. It was a solidly built three-story house in a residential area. I suppose bombs got it after our visit. Good riddance.”

  Kamerad left them in the basement. After a while an old woman came down the stairs with some black bread, cabbage, and a dark liquid she called coffee. She demanded that Joe confirm what she'd provided, then promised to be back for the cigarettes. They checked out the basement, looking for a way out if needed, but there was only one stairway and no windows. That made them so nervous they couldn't nap. In the evening three men came down the stairs, introduced themselves by their first names, and asked Joe to repeat the story he had told Kamerad. Upon examining the kriege dog tags, the Germans were convinced and said relax, they would help the escapees move west. Had anyone helped them so far? Only Kamerad, Joe replied. The three Germans looked at one another and nodded.

  “In the next minute flashlights blinded us. Eight goons rushed down the stairs with guns we couldn't see. They didn't use them except as clubs because they wanted us alive. We struck back, slashed at them with shivs, and got in some good licks before we were knocked down and held down. The one I was fighting stank like nothing I'd ever smelled before. There were some awful odors in the stalags but nothing like his.

  “If God created humans, he didn't have anything to do with the Gestapo,” Joe says. “Or the Japs, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama— creatures from hell. They're here on earth, but the world wants to deny it or forget it. After tying us up they beat us till they were tired and we were nearly senseless. For young guys like us that took a while. All the time, the goon who spoke English was shouting, ‘Spies!’ Brewer had stuck one in the gut with a shiv. He kept bellowing Schlagen, schlagen!—beat us some more—then he'd moan and cry like he was the only one hurt. They helped him up the stairs like some wounded hero.

  “By then we could only grunt when we felt the blows. The leader must have realized we were being beaten to death. He stopped it. The next thing I remember is being hauled up the stairs in my underwear.”

  Joe's memory fades in and out here as it did after he'd been clubbed into his six-day coma, but reconstruction establishes that the escapees were loaded into two cars and driven deeper into Berlin, evidently to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Al-brecht Strasse.* He went to that address in 1992. It had been totally annihilated by bombs, but there's a gruesome sort of museum underground.

  “The roof of the Gestapo building had bomb holes that went down three stories. We were pushed up a long flight of stairs. Looking back I can see how we were a pretty big deal for the goons, probably the only American infantry to be captured in Berlin. The goons were met by some officers in black uniforms who slapped them on the back. Did we go up or down from there? I can't remember, just cells with big locks that looked like to
mbs. Along the way the three of us were separated, each to a cell.”

  IN DESCRIBING HIS PREVIOUS experiences, Joe's narration had been measured and deliberative, even when uneven. The Gestapo hours came out shatteringly different, like the exci-sion of a vital but cancerous organ. He was in inaccessible mental territory, dredging up a pain too deep to scar, a place he'd recoiled from revisiting, where his thoughts crossed a galactic space, expressed with a lag and voice change like that from a space capsule.

  “I'm still lost in this part. I don't want to describe it because I refeel things. That's one of the things they did, dislocate my shoulders so when they stopped I'd refeel the pain just as bad when the bones went back into their sockets as when they came out….”

  Fifty-five years later Joe finds detachment, merciful disconnection, in metaphor. One is a slow night shift on a production line. Gestapo headquarters was a factory in hard times but still turning out a necessary product. Once the production line had dominated and terrorized the world; now it was just a domestic industry. The old hands missed the glory days from not so long ago. They went at Joe with a vengeance, for he represented the vengeance of the world on Germany.

  His doctors say Joe has a high pain tolerance, but if he'd known what was coming, he would rather have rolled under the wheels of the grain car and never regretted not being able to relate what happened in Berlin. The worst of it, as he sees it now, was not the agony at the time but what has been taken away forever, an element basic to being a man, a human.

  “I'd resisted interrogation before, better than most. Under the Gestapo I was not being interrogated, just tortured, extremely tortured for the pleasure of the torturers. They kept accusing me of being a spy, parachuting from a B-17, but they knew that wasn't true because they had invented the story. They wanted a confession for their records but really couldn't have cared. After a while I didn't even shake my head.

  “They used their boots, truncheons, whips, and things I won't remember. The physical senses are an electrical system. The goons knew from lots of practice how to extremely stress but not short it out. Pain built up, beyond where pain had ever gone.”

  Analogies are vastly inadequate, missing the indescribable, indispensable elements. They resemble a theme taken by jazz performers for branches, variations, and sequels, forcing departure from physical sensations to mental constructs. Yet it was all sensations, thoroughly, previously tested in satanic evaluations. What they did sensitized and amplified every nerve in the full spectrum of agonies, repeating like an endless kaleidoscope, professionally modulated by expert torturers with unreachable mentalities. Joe was a subject for them, a laboratory animal. What he felt, he screamed.

  “Sometimes I heard myself scream, other times I was sort of watching myself scream. Many times I was that scream.

  “My mug shot from XII-A shows me glowering. They knew I was tough and stubborn. They were looking for a weakness, something like my shoulder wound. I was stripped so they could see how it was healing. They reopened the wound and probed around. And they had a favorite shoulder torture. They hung me up backwards, hoisted and dropped me till the shoulders dislocated. Releasing the ropes brought equal pain in reverse. The combination blacked me out for the first time.

  “When that happened I heard other voices screaming like mine. Most were in German but also other languages. Whether it was my imagination or other cells I heard, it was a chorus begging, calling out to God. The walls absorbed it.

  “From then on I must have been screaming in and out of consciousness. They were good at noticing that, bringing you up to passing out, then backing off a little to bring you up again. When I thought they could do no more they always found other ways. I saw them like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—they were shrunken heads from South America. They were in no hurry because what were hours for me were just minutes for them.

  “I felt exactly what they were doing, felt it but at the same time watched. It was a terrible zone. That's the end point of terror. You don't get through it; you survive it or you don't, and if you do, you wish you hadn't. I was witnessing while having my body twisted and destroyed. It was burning and freezing at the same time. I was broken down into coals. I survived but was never made whole. And I was one of their luckiest prisoners.”

  * Under the Geneva Conventions POWs were to remain in military uniforms throughout captivity (a provision violated most noticeably by North Vietnam). It was for their nation to supply new uniforms, through the IRC, when the original ones wore out. The United States did so readily, but impoverished nations like Albania had none to provide, so their prisoners got nothing.

  * A source for this was a Nazi newspaper that trumpeted the capture of three “parachutist spies,” alleging that they had jumped like pathfinders to guide bombers onto targets in Berlin. The Gestapo's vigilance, of course, was praised.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BASTOGNE

  CRAMMED ONTO OPEN FLATBED TRUCKS THE 101ST MOVED OUT on the morning of December 18, though a third of its strength was not present for duty, most on leave in France.

  “Where are we goin'?” asked Albers, slinging his hastily assembled gear aboard.

  “Someplace called Bass-tog-nee,” Dziepak yelled back over the roar of the idling convoy. It was dark but all headlights were on. Security was to be sacrificed for speed, an ominous omen for I Company. This wasn't going to be a gold-brick, backup reserve job. Something real bad was happening, as was evident when the convoy began bucking a tide of vehicles going the other way, their drivers' faces blanched with fright. Yes, they were just legs, but the Screaming Eagles had never before seen American troops racing headlong for the rear. At least it wasn't too cold, Albers reflected, and there was no snow.

  As they trudged over the cobblestones of Bastogne (population 5,000), few civilian faces peeped from windows as dark and hollow as the absent eyes in a skull. The Belgians, like the Dutch, had rejoiced in September when American forces liberated them. The approaching barrages of Wehr-macht artillery now suggested what could be expected if Bastogne were reoccupied by the Nazis, a fear subsequently confirmed by SS Einsatzgruppen who brought pictures and addresses of suspected Allied collaborators identified during the four-year German occupation. The reprisal teams were never able to enter Bastogne but held public executions in outlying villages. This was terror's high-water mark on the Western Front for the rest of the war. The tide had turned, as expressed by Geronimo lieutenant Bill Russo:

  “I think the Germans had gotten so confident in their terror—you know, scare the shit out of everybody in Poland the Low Countries, Russia. They got onto terrorizing this and terrorizing that…. Well, when they met us we didn't terrorize. That's when it all started going the other way, really.”

  SENT BY MCAULIFFE to the village of Noville, five miles northeast of Bastogne, Currahees bucked a reeling counterflow Like panhandlers, they stuck out their hands for clips of ammo from panicked legs. “You'll never stop 'em, boys,” an outbound officer said, shaking his head in despair. “But you want ammo? You really do? Sure, take it all—and good luck.”

  Troopers were glad to see the likes of him gone. Others in the retreat, often Keystone Kops, were willing to turn around and face the enemy. McAuliffe had them formed into a tough rabble he named Task Force SNAFU, a last-ditch reserve, and they fought well. His other supporting forces were Combat Command B from the 10th Armored Division, elements of the 9th Armored, and the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion. Eventually there would be about ten thousand Screaming Eagles defending encircled Bastogne and nearly the same number of armor troops, the latter ensuring a reverse outcome from that of the British 1st Airborne Division encircled and destroyed at Arnhem.

  “Encircled?” Albers recalls. “Well, that's what we were trained for. When we land behind enemy lines—that's what we always do—we're encircled. When we heard on the radio that the 101st was encircled at Bastogne, we said, So what? What's new? Someone in the 502nd said something that became famous: ‘They g
ot us surrounded, the poor bastards.’”

  Lugging a machine gun, Albers followed Dziepak on the road to Noville, an ordinary country road in the Ardennes but one remembered by Currahees as overhung by a presence of gloom and high danger. Outside Bastogne they'd awoken under a light snow, the first of the winter. The squad had increased in strength since the Island—replacements had doubled its number to six. Dziepak had trouble remembering their names, so recently had they been assigned.

  From the side of his mouth, as I Company huffed along, he gave them a fast course on how to kill and not be killed by the krauts. Those evergreens over there—it's like the biggest Christmas-tree farm you ever seen, right?—well, panzers won't want to go in there. We will. Hope we set up on that wood line. We can stop 'em if you know where the nearest bazooka man is. You might see a panzer before he does. You got to cover it with fire. Keep the crew buttoned up. You know how to shoot a bazooka? The three rookies nod but without confidence. Good. Where's the best place to hit a tank? In the engine, Sarge. That's right. So don't try to shoot 'em head-on. Wait and get 'em when they go by. Don't we need some ammo, Sarge? Dziepak nodded. Ammo was what worried him most.

  Ahead boomed a crossfire of artillery, each side feeling out the other. Artillery, Albers remembered, did not often duel (because of range) but usually fired on enemy infantry. On the Bastogne-Houffalize road there was this exchange of locating fire, more unnerving for the Currahees because the krauts had many more and much heavier howitzers. Listen to the artillery, Dziepak instructed the cherries. It'll tell you what's comin' up.

  Up ahead at Noville a brave band of tankers (Team Deso-bry) was holding off a regiment of the 2nd Panzer Division whose colonel had almost as difficult a decision attacking as Sink did defending: how many chips to play, how long to hold a hand? The German's question was whether to crash through, with significant losses, to Bastogne or obey orders and stop for nothing in the charge for the Meuse River. The panzer colonel opted to go for the critical hub of Bastogne (where seven roads and two rail lines converged) but faced a changed equation when First Battalion of the 506th reached Noville. Here their excellent commander, Lieutenant Colonel Laprade, was killed in action. Stepping up was Major Harwick, who had escaped with Joe into the Normandy marshes.