Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  His most noticeable feature was a large dimple in his chin. It would have almost been cute had not his chiseled face commanded instant and sober respect. He was accompanied by an English-speaking officer, who came to Joe's bed and identified him as the American casualty. Zhukov reached out with a crushing handshake. It was painful to bend forward, but Joe was proud to do so.

  Russia's premier marshal looked him over as if “Yo” were a kid who'd done all right in school, nothing great but adequate. The interpreter whispered that Joe was a paratrooper. Zhukov brightened, flashing a smile of bemusement and amusement. He'd heard that D Day drops were widely dispersed but

  “Did Yo drift all the way to Poland?”

  Everyone within earshot broke into laughter, a venting laughter when there had been little humorous in their lives. In quick, clipped tones Zhukov expressed the wish that he could have more time to hear about the American Airborne. He ordered his chief of staff that when Joe recovered he was to report to Zhukov's headquarters for a debriefing.

  “He asked how was my family? I couldn't say because I hadn't received any mail in the stalags.”

  Zhukov winced, for he had a most personal connection to stalags. His son had been captured in 1941 and resisted Gestapo coercion for two years before his fear of succumbing caused him to charge the barbed wire, where he was shot to death in an act of suicide.

  “How was I being treated now? Very kindly, I answered. He gave a little speech to everyone in the room, which was so cold you could see his breath. The interpreter told me the gist of it later, that Zhukov said the Allies would finish the war shoulder to shoulder, and if Hitler thought otherwise, he should see this young American comrade who bravely chose to fight with us.”

  Zhukov then raised his fist like a toast and said in English, “Sherman tanks!” Joe chuckle-chortled, in his characteristic way, and said the same thing back. Zhukov shook his hand again, as only soldiers who understand each other can do, and moved on to other beds, as only commanders of soldiers must do.

  When the VIPs left the ward the interpreter came back to Joe and asked if there was anything Zhukov could do for him. A light went on in his head. Yes, if the marshal would be so kind as to put something in writing that stated Joe was an escaped American POW, that would be a big help to get through the Soviet system and assure return to America. The interpreter said something like “No problem.”

  The next day he came back and handed over an envelope of heavy paper with a red hammer and sickle surrounded by a wreath embossed on it and a lot of stars underneath. It was the most beautiful stationery Joe has ever seen. He asked permission to open the envelope. Inside was the same elegantly raised letterhead and a few sentences written in Russian. He asked for a translation, and the interpreter said proudly that it was written by Zhukov himself and was a sort of passport, directing anyone to provide Joe with every assistance when moving through Soviet-controlled territory.

  “I thanked the interpreter profoundly and shook his hand with both of mine. He then said about the same thing that Schultz and Major had: the war will soon be over, and I could go home to my family.

  “You know how much I followed Schultz's advice. Now, with Zhukov's letter, I started planning my last escape. Actually there would be one more after that—from the U.S. Marines!”

  Casualties were pouring in now from the Oder, terrible cases whose screams and moans never abated. There were even worse sounds during operations without anesthetic. Bodies were being carried out as fast as wounded were carried in. Joe couldn't take it any longer. He really didn't escape from that field hospital, merely went AWOL. His bed was probably occupied within the hour. He left by putting on his brogans and uniform, complete with overcoat and pile cap, as if to go to the frigid latrine outside.

  “Without all your clothes there was a good chance for frostbite if you stayed on a crapper very long,” Joe remembers. “The first phase of my plan had been to complain to a nurse that I felt diarrhea coming on, though my real problem was exactly the opposite. So when I dressed and went out no one noticed. The staff was much too busy with incoming casualties, and the patients around me were deep in personal pain.”

  Joe started walking in the direction where there was the most military traffic. About a half mile from the hospital he came to a headquarters, greeted the guards with “Tovarish,” and handed them his passport from Zhukov. If this didn't work, he planned to ride the rails toward Warsaw, where he assumed there was an American embassy.

  The sergeant of the guard came back with the passport and indicated that there was no one in his headquarters who spoke English but he would drive Joe over to a bigger headquarters. The way he eyed Joe and tried to make conversation demonstrated that the passport had made an impression. At the second HQ an English-speaking captain took charge of him, saying there was a convoy leaving for Warsaw that afternoon. Let's go over there now, he suggested, and you can get out of the cold in the cab of a truck. It was a Studebaker. Joe sprawled out on the seat till the driver showed up and the convoy got under way.

  They drove for hours and hours. The groin wound was draining and bothered Joe badly. He figured Warsaw was about three hundred miles east, but first the convoy made a big swing south to Cracow. There it broke up, apparently unplanned, but the driver indicated that if Joe wanted to go to Warsaw, that wasn't this truck's destination. He pointed toward the rail yard. They both took a slug of his vodka.

  “He asked to see my passport again. I handed it to him. I don't think he could read, but he shook his head with awe as he fingered the embossed letterhead. He did recognize the name Zhukov and said it out loud like it was the name of a saint. We shook hands warmly, said, Proshchai, and he pointed once more to the rail yard, where there were only two trains, both very long, and both steaming up.”

  The way the engines pointed it seemed both trains would head east. Joe hurried to the nearest one and clambered on the closest car. His bad luck with trains continued. As the locomotive slowly chugged off, he realized it wasn't a passenger or freight car but a gondola for hauling coal. Joe wasn't agile enough to move up along the cars, so he painfully climbed the metal ladder welded to the sloping side of the gondola. It was empty. To get out of the cold wind he slid down the inside slope. The metal was rough cast iron. Immediately Joe realized that it was carrying away his body heat.

  “I prayed as hard as I ever have for a way to get out of that gondola. At some point I stupidly took off a glove, maybe to sit on my hand to warm it. My skin stuck to the cast iron. The pain to pull it up was terrible, and if I did, I'd leave most of my palm. For the next hour I blew breath hard on my hand. Little by little, with awful pain, the skin released.”

  After a couple of hours the train came to a halt. Joe started yelling. There was no way to climb the side of the gondola, so if someone didn't help, he'd end up another frozen corpse in Poland. His only hope was that someone would come along and pull him up. A Polish yard worker did happen by—God had decided to save Joe once more.

  “I sure put God to a lot of work,” Joe says, “with all He had to do during World War II!”

  Someone yelled back, and a stocking cap peeked over the ladder. A chain rattled down the gondola, and Joe was hauled to the top. Helped down the ladder, he stood shaking with cold and pointed to his groin wound. The yard worker nodded and walked him up the train. After a quarter mile he gestured to get on a car. It was a hospital train. When Joe realized that he looked back for the yard worker.

  “He'd saved my life,” Joe says. “I had a wad of rubles from the III-C safe and wanted to give them all to him, but he was gone. I still commend him to Mary in my prayers.

  “My passport put me in first class on the hospital train. The staff couldn't do much for my wounds but were experts in cold injuries and took care of my scorched hand with some wonderful salve that deadened the pain while increasing circulation. I wish I knew what that stuff was; I could sure use it in Michigan winters.”

  Next stop was Lodz, where patients
bound for Warsaw were to get off and then board a medical convoy. The train was continuing to Lublin for everyone else. Joe's train luck again. If he'd stayed on to Lublin, he'd have probably reached American control. But he thought the Americans were in Warsaw, so he got off the train and onto the convoy.

  His journey to the east so far had been mostly during darkness and he'd hardly noticed the flat, featureless countryside. Now he traveled in daylight to Warsaw. Even with all he'd seen of the war and its effects, the route from Lodz to Warsaw showed that he'd seen little. The landscape was from World War I no-man's-land: craters, dead trees, destroyed cottages, farms, whole villages with little left except toppled chimneys and blackened foundations. This is what Hitler and Stalin meant by scorched earth. They invented it, tried it out on poor Poland. There were many more wandering people than livestock.

  What Joe finds closest to describing those people is a movie about the aftermath of nuclear war. Bands, small groups, and scattered individuals drifting back and forth like trash blown by winds. They had a name in those days, DPs, displaced persons. Some were concentration-camp survivors—Auschwitz was only about thirty miles from Cracow. More were Polish peasants uprooted when the Soviets overran their half of Poland. Others were city dwellers whose cities had been reduced to cold rubble. Joe had no idea of the composition of the DPs till he studied the history of the war's end. What he saw of them was a staggering scattered rabble— begging, falling, dying during Europe's coldest winter of the century.

  The Russians he was among did not impress him as callous, but instead unreachably resigned to the stupefying consequences of their war, as if such suffering was little different from killing cold and blizzards. War against the Hitlerites meant stark facts to reckon with, realities to protect against, or else enter the ghastly whirlpool of the dying. A concatenation to end only when Hitler's Germany was destroyed. Joe was with them on that, his main regret that he could not be part of the final destruction—and a reunion with the Gestapo goons on Prinz Albrecht Strasse.

  Hate can be a tremendous stimulus, but by the time Joe reached Warsaw he couldn't draw on that kind of energy. He 'd seen too much killing and even enough Hitlerite bodies. They were as plentiful as road signs in the countryside, identified by what was left of their uniforms. The Poles had stacked them like cords of logs in a frozen woodpile, ten feet high and a hundred feet long, speckled by frosted eyes, pop-eyed as if shocked that death had reached them. There was such a stack at each crossroad; they became fertilizer after the spring thaw.

  This was the Wehrmacht, its collective corpse, the echoing remains of its curse. Except within Germany, all that Hitler did had been enabled by the Wehrmacht. They were the school of sharks upon whose jaws the Gestapo and Einsatz-gruppen attached like pilot fish. Extraordinary soldiers the Wehrmacht, but animated only by a hateful superiority, finally disproven, finally cold and stiff in discreditation of values their enemies fought and died for. The Wehrmacht was good, usually very good, as the word relates to competence, efficiency, and proficiency* However, what they fought and died for was not their country but to subjugate. And that applied not only to the SS.

  AT LAST JOE ARRIVED in Warsaw. Though a stretcher case, he left the hospital train with the ambulatory patients so it would be easier to get away. That wasn't hard, but there was no city to walk into, only rubble and rubbish, craters and devastation. He could make out where the streets were, but to walk down one meant weaving between buildings collapsed into the street. The only human activity was a few old people pulling scraps of wood from the rubble. Joe had learned the Polish words for American embassy, and he asked these people. They just shook their heads and didn't look up from then-scavenging. Off in the distance was what was left of a big church or cathedral. It looked like the center of town, so he headed that way.

  The Warsaw Concerto affects Joe deeply. Warsaw was one of the most fought-over cities in World War II. First came the Hitlerites' invasion in 1939, followed by their obliteration of the Jewish ghetto, then the Polish uprising in 1944, then the Russian conquest in 1945. The only place Joe had seen so leveled and totally destroyed was St.-Lo, and that was a town, not the capital of a great and ancient nation. As he trudged toward the cathedral it began to dawn on him that if there weren't any whole buildings, how could there be an American embassy in Warsaw?

  He kept looking for buildings in use. The only ones standing were gutted and roofless. What had been windows were jagged holes where daylight came in one side of a skeleton building and out the other. His boots kept crunching on broken glass. He had seen not one vehicle and only a single horse cart. He approached the ruins of the cathedral in despair, very much regretting going AWOL from that hospital train. The Russians would have sent him somewhere, not into the deadly cold of a lifeless city.

  He was right, though, that the cathedral was at the center of what life existed. In what had been, he guessed, the cathedral square there was a small group of men trying to keep warm around a small fire of rubbish and scrap wood. The wood scavengers he'd spoken to before had dressed in scarves and piles of wraps like peasants. Maybe they were peasants from the country, scrounging stuff from the remains of the city.

  The group of men by the fire weren't dressed like peasants; they wore heavy overcoats. Joe approached them. When he tried German, his best foreign language, they stiffened. A little Russian, and they relaxed some. When he said American-ski, they lightened up a lot and beckoned him over to the fire. One of them went to get an English-speaking Pole.

  “He was the very old uncle of a boy in Milwaukee who was probably an American soldier like me. I said there was a daily ferry from near Muskegon to Milwaukee. Some of the others in that group had relatives in the U.S. They all wanted to know what they could do for me.

  “In the cold I showed them my wounds. They knew just what I needed and led me there. The uncle said it was a convent, but I didn't see anything but rubble and a low bunker. That's right, he said, the convent was largely destroyed during the uprising, but the sisters were in the basement. If there was anything that could help me, they'd have it. Before we reached the entrance to the basement I saw a bullet-scarred statue of Saint Joseph outside. This seemed like a good sign. It sure was—the sisters were from the Order of Saint Joseph, a healing order.”

  * A few months later the 506th liberated a concentration camp, previously a prewar prison, near Landsberg in Bavaria, where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

  * But not, in the last three years of the war, the military beau ideal as represented by its stunning successes in the first three years. In postwar interrogations, the principal Wehrmacht generals admitted to serious blunders at Bastogne for which American counterparts would have been relieved of command. After blitzkrieg failed to win the war early, the Wehrmacht's opponents learned how to both foil and imitate German tactics. Strategically the Wehrmacht was hamstrung by Hitler's micromanagement.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  TO MOSCOW

  THE SAME STATUE OF SAINT JOSEPH, OVER A HUNDRED YEARS old, is still where Joe found it on his first revisit to Poland in 1988. Only one of the twelve sisters from 1945 was still alive, but his story remained part of the convent's history, and he was welcomed like a living legend.

  “I've given the convent some money because I owe them so much. The mother superior, who was also a nurse, spoke some English, heard my story, looked at my wounds, and assured me I'd receive care—and added that it was a small miracle I'd found the convent because it had the only medical skill in Warsaw that could help me. The miracle wasn't small at all. When I look back it was as large as any of the miracles that preserved me in World War II.”

  The sisters praised God that Joe belonged to Saint Joseph parish in Muskegon, for it could have been only the hand of God that guided him to the convent of his patron saint and namesake. As a healing order they were swamped with people to care for in wasted Warsaw. Though the sisters were openly religious, the Soviet occupation hadn't bothered them at all, probably because the ex
periences of these women had been so horrific even in comparison with that of the Russians. The sisters didn't want to talk about it; they were still grieving, but perhaps an American could help tell the world about the wartime of Warsaw.

  Most of all they wanted Joe to know how beautiful the city had been before the Germans. The worst of the destruction occurred during the August-September 1944 uprising when guerrillas, called the Polish Home Army, seized strong points, holding them for two months against Wehrmacht forces stunned by their strength and determination. Many streets were still cut by antitank ditches they had dug. The sisters said the entire city had been aflame, with smoke hanging over it like a giant parachute canopy. Rains finally put out the fires.

  The convent of course had been mobbed with casualties. The Germans might have spared it because their wounded even SS, were treated by the sisters—who were then raped by some of the patients when they recovered.

  Warsaw was once home for a half million Poles. During the uprising Hitler sent in two panzer divisions and one SS division under General Bach, plus swarms of bombers. Most of the Polish dead were crushed by bombs in their cellars. Those who escaped did so through sewers. General Bach stopped this by throwing in poison-gas grenades. He was hanged as a war criminal. The sisters thought there were fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants left in Warsaw. There appeared to be many fewer.

  The Polish Home Army had been betrayed by Stalin, who stopped his advance on the east bank of the Vistula, as close as Arlington is to Washington, D.C. The uprising received no support except from British bombers who flew all the way from Italy to drop in supplies. The Americans offered a hundred B-17s, but Stalin refused to allow them to land on Soviet airstrips. That's what Roosevelt got in return for Sherman tanks delivered at great peril and price in lives by American merchant mariners. What Stalin wanted was for the Polish non-Communist resistance to be exterminated by the Hitlerites; he got what he wanted. When he decided it was time to take Warsaw (about six weeks before Joe arrived) it cost him fifty thousand casualties, but what did he care?