Stupid, but it did make me feel a little better.
The Germans didn’t send across their afternoon wake-up call, and I fell asleep for nearly an hour. That was when Mink shook me and told me we were moving out again.
No trucks, no jeeps, no heavy equipment. Just a bunch of dog-tired soldiers in two columns snaking our way through the Normandy forest. Captain Milton put Gomez on point and gave us the order to move out. I could see the look on his face that said the idea sucked.
“We’ve spread out three battalions, all moving toward the ridges that overlook St. Lo,” Milton said. “Our orders are to take the ridges, and then take the town. Our company … or our guys … are going to take the east ridge overlooking St. Lo. We’ll be about a thousand, five hundred meters away.”
“Yo, and let me ask you this, Captain.” Petrocelli held one finger up as if he were going to say something profound. “Have we called ahead to let the Germans know we’re on our way? I hate just to drop in on them with no warning.”
Captain Milton started to say something, but then he just cracked up. It was one of those things that was funny and not funny at the same time. It was funny because it was so formal, as if we were going over to the Krauts’ house for dinner, and not funny because they knew we were coming and would be waiting to kill as many of us as they could.
We sloshed through the rain and the mud and the cold like silent gray ghosts, lost souls shuffling in a hellish purgatory. I thought of Mom. She would have told me to change my socks because the ones I was wearing were soaked.
We were told not to talk because we didn’t want the Germans to hear us, in the likely case they had outposts in the woods, and attack. Petrocelli asked how damned close the Germans were, and Milton shrugged. I wondered if we were going to make it back from this march. The Germans didn’t like to fight at night, and it was growing dark. That was good. But the only time they could move their tanks and antitank guns was at night because of our planes, so we didn’t know what we were going to run into.
We had walked for nearly two hours before Gomez slipped back and gave us the signal.
“Get down! Get down!” A frantic whisper from Milton.
We were bunched, and I saw Burns signaling for us to spread out. There were a little over forty men left in our company, and we were divided up into six squads of seven men each. We got down into the grass and waited for the signal to move again. I put my head to the ground, knowing that if any tanks were moving nearby I would hear their rumble. If the Kraut that Burns was talking about, the one just as cold and wet as me, was anywhere near, I hoped he was as miserable, too.
The rain against my helmet sounded loud enough for every German in Normandy to hear, but I knew it was just because I was wearing the damned thing. The thing about hiding in the forest and waiting is that you always wonder if you’ve missed something, if the Germans have spotted you and are sneaking up on you, or if your guys have left and you’re all alone. We listened, and I prayed.
God, please get me out of this shit!
The rain let up slowly. I was sweating and stinking so bad, I thought the Germans could smell me. Then we began to hear noises, and worse. What we heard were German voices. They sounded like casual conversations, and I realized that we had wandered into a Kraut camp. Suddenly, being scared had a place and a time. There was movement around me, and I stuck my head up and watched as Stagg, Gomez, and Captain Milton huddled together. Then Gomez, somehow making his small body even smaller, came over to me.
“Woody, we got to head back and see if we can find a way out of this!” Gomez said.
This is it! the little voice in my head kept saying. You’re going to be killed today. This is it!
I was following Gomez as we crouched as low as we could, heading along the same road we had come along. I couldn’t see a damned thing and more sensed where Gomez was than anything.
Somewhere to my left I heard an engine start up. Maybe it was off to my right. We edged closer to where the sound was coming from and saw two German soldiers in short sleeves. They were drinking from what had to be their mess gear.
The machine the Krauts had started looked like a generator of some kind. What I knew was that they didn’t know a bunch of Americans had drifted into their lines. Gomez and I crawled back toward our guys. We found Milton and he looked the way I felt, scared out of his mind and ready to give up.
“We can’t stay here until they find us,” he said. “I don’t think they have the manpower to hold prisoners. We’re cut off from the back and one side for sure, maybe both sides. We don’t have a choice. We move forward and hope God don’t sprechen die Deutsch.”
I had never tasted fear before, but now it was in my mouth and filling my nose with its stench. The sounds of Germans talking were all around us.
A dog barked.
Someone was pounding metal against metal.
The heavy scratching sound of someone digging came in a slow, steady rhythm.
Minutes passed. Minutes of crawling through the darkness until the sounds of the Kraut camp were behind us. I was sweating. I had to pee.
When we got to a spot we thought was clear, Captain Milton told us to take five. He found a map from somewhere and called in our position. Command Post didn’t believe us.
“We’re lost in the woods and they don’t believe us,” I said to Mink.
“Lost?” The right side of Mink’s face was lit up in the sun while the rest of it was in shadow. A ghostly abstraction. “Physically or metaphysically?”
“Mink, stop thinking,” I said. “You’re losing me.”
“Yeah, okay.”
We kept moving up, inching our way through the woods, until we reached a small clearing. On the far side of the clearing, no more than a hundred yards away, there was a half-track with a gun mounted. It could have been an 88, but more likely a field artillery piece. It was partially covered by netting and tree branches to keep it from being spotted by our planes.
“We can work around the edge of the clearing, along the tree line, and take that damned thing out,” Stagg said.
“Too risky,” Milton said. “We’d get blown away before we got close.”
“How many men will that thing take out?” Stagg asked.
“Who knows?” Milton answered. “Look, there’s a time to be a hero and …”
Stagg had already moved off into the darkness. It was a time to be a hero. A drop of ice-cold sweat ran down the inside of my leg.
“If there’s an exchange of fire, we’ll have to shoot in the direction of the gun and assume they got Stagg,” Captain Milton said.
“You think he’s got a chance?” I asked.
“No, but that’s why I’m a teacher,” Milton answered. “Not a soldier.”
We waited. Seconds passed, or maybe minutes, or maybe forever. There were crickets in the area, and their calls brought a sense of normalcy to the night.
More time passed. Where the hell was Stagg? Gomez came up and said that the battalion was retreating.
“To where?” Milton asked.
“We pull back to this morning’s line,” Gomez said. “They called off the attack for tonight.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Milton asked.
“It means, sir, that we, Baker Company of the 116th, are attacking the whole German army by ourselves,” Gomez said. “Should we ask if they want to surrender?”
Captain Milton laughed. We all laughed. It was friggin’ funny! What was left of our regiment, our battalion, our company, was a handful of men trying to stay alive, and we were all by ourselves leading the way against the German army. Sweet.
Gomez moved off to his position just as the big gun we had spotted fired a round. From where we were, we could smell the powder burning, could see the Krauts servicing the gun turn away from the muzzle blast, their white bodies orange and yellow reflecting the fire from the blast.
I could see the rear of the gun. It buckled and lurched after the shot, and I knew it had sent a shel
l toward our lines.
“We need to open up on the gun,” I said.
“Wait a second,” Captain Milton said.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Shut up!”
The gun fired again, and then there was a volley of small weapon fire, followed by silence.
We moved quickly along the edge of the tree line, angling upward on the terraced ridge, toward the German gun. It took a minute or so before we came across the bodies. One of the German soldiers was still alive. There were three already dead, two on one side of the big gun and one on the other. It was Milton who found Stagg. His body draped over a low branch, he looked as if he was searching for something on the ground, one arm extended forward and the other still clutching his M1.
Gomez collected the weapons of the Germans and we took cover. Milton said something about getting Stagg’s body back, but we knew it was nonsense. The best we could manage was to drag him off the branch and cover him. I couldn’t look at him, although I wanted to see his face one last time. Whatever his face looked like, it would be what mine would look like one day.
Petrocelli took something from the gun to make it inoperative, and we took positions in the dugouts the Germans had dug. The wounded Kraut signaled that he wanted some water, and Gomez gave him a drink from his canteen.
Milton was on the radio, giving our position, telling the CP that we were cut off.
“I think I’m overlooking St. Lo now,” he said. “Yeah, I see a cathedral.”
We spent the night on the ridge. Below us we could see the lights of vehicles gliding through the darkness. We were ten to fifteen feet apart, and Milton was trying to organize some sleeping time. He told me and Gomez to sleep first.
“How the hell we going to sleep?” Gomez asked. “You going to tuck us in?”
No answer from Milton.
The German started moaning, and Petrocelli asked him if he wanted us to kill him. I don’t think he understood anything except Petrocelli’s attitude, and I didn’t think he cared anymore.
I don’t know if I slept or not. I had kind of a dream, but it was an in-between fantasy, and I could have been awake. It was about me being surrounded by German soldiers who couldn’t see me. I couldn’t tell why they couldn’t; they just seemed to ignore me. Then they stood up and started to leave, but before they did they came over to where I was and each shot me once. I didn’t feel any pain, but I was terrified into wakefulness.
The wind picked up and it started raining again around the time I saw the first break in the distant sky.
“Something’s coming!” Petrocelli whispered.
The sound of the engine whining as it switched gears climbing up the hill toward us was unnerving. They had probably tried to reach the gun crew by radio without luck and were now coming up to check on them.
The vehicle was small, about the size of a three-quarter-ton truck. There were two guys in the cab, and one got out the back. They seemed to disappear into the darkness.
“Gunther?” A low voice. “Baber?”
I thought of the wounded German soldier. Was he still alive? It had been a mistake not to kill him. Letting him live might be the death of us all.
A flashlight. It swept up the hill and stopped on the gun.
More conversation in German, and the Kraut soldiers started up toward the gun. They were still talking, not at all cautious.
When Petrocelli’s grenade went off, I could see the first two German soldiers react. Their hands flew up and their bodies twisted from the impact. I opened fire at the last place I saw the third soldier, shooting almost blindly into the semigloom.
All three of the enemy were down. Milton went to them and disarmed them. I thought I heard a struggle. Was he killing them? I turned my attention away.
The first daylight and the Germans had been put in a pile in the shade of the gun. We had taken their water, and one of them had a hunk of cheese wrapped in cloth, which we split. There was some blood on the cloth and cheese, but Petrocelli cut it off with his bayonet before passing it out.
“We need to get away from the gun,” Milton said. “They know where it is, or where it’s supposed to be, and the next time they come looking for it they won’t send careless people.”
We looked for a sheltered way down the ridge and found one that looked promising. We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard activity above us. Milton had been right. The Germans had sent a patrol out looking for the gun.
There was incoming artillery fire, and I imagined it was from our side. The Germans fooled around with the gun, I guessed trying to get it to fire, then moved down the ridge toward the town.
The rain started again. It was the seventeenth of July, and at noon, or at least close to it, a flight of light bombers came over and began bombing the town.
The bombing went on for thirty minutes and then left. Seconds later we heard the roar of heavy guns as our artillery began to pound St. Lo. You could actually see the shells flying overhead and into the town below. By three in the afternoon, the first American soldiers showed up from our rear. It was guys from First Army, and we were damned glad to see them.
I saw Mink talking to a sergeant and pointing toward the town. Captain Milton was talking to their officers, and I saw him go over to where we had left Stagg.
For a wild moment I thought I might have been wrong, that Stagg wasn’t dead. When I saw them bring the wrapped body and put it on a truck, I knew it was for real.
The First Army guys set up a CP on the side of the hill away from the town, knowing that Kraut artillery would eventually answer our own. At 1600 hours, a food truck showed up.
I was so hungry and thirsty, my hands were shaking when I took the food from the cooks.
“You don’t get this kind of chow in the 29th,” a short, round-faced soldier said. “This is special First Army cuisine!”
By 1700 hours the Germans were shelling the hill with everything they had, and the First Army guys had moved back. Major Johns showed up from somewhere and told us to dig in.
“You guys did a great job! A great job! Charlie Company is going to attack in an hour from the west!” he said. The fool seemed almost cheerful about it.
Charlie Company, handfuls of half-starved soldiers the same as we were, didn’t attack in an hour. The next two hours were an exchange of artillery and mortars. The rain had picked up, and it was too dark and wet for air coverage.
Captain Milton came over and told us that they had taken Stagg’s body back for Graves Registration.
“I just wanted to let you guys know that,” he said. “And we got another sergeant to take his place. They say he’s having a little trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Petrocelli asked.
“Just been in this war too long,” Captain Milton said. “Just been in this war too long.”
The new sergeant was weird. He was all, “29, let’s go!” and talking about killing Nazis and strangling Hitler with his bare hands. “If I could get my hands around that little bastard’s neck, I’d squeeze him until his eyeballs popped out!” Reese was a master sergeant who had some years on him. I thought he had to be at least pushing thirty-five, maybe forty even.
It was the first time I had heard anybody talking about Hitler since we had left England. The English used to make fun of him in the bars, calling him the Little Corporal. I never got the point of that, but the Brits seemed to like it.
It was 2000 hours, and the Germans had figured out that we’d taken the ridge overlooking St. Lo. They started shelling us with everything they had: artillery, mortars, 88s. Guys were digging in and holding on. For the first time, I didn’t want to dig in. The ground began to shake all around me, but I didn’t want to move.
“Woody, find some damned cover!” Captain Milton called to me as I sat on the ground, leaning against the wheel of a quarter ton.
He called to me again, and it was as if I couldn’t hear him. I saw his mouth opening, and the agitation in his face, but I didn’t hear a
nything he was saying. It was as if I was fogged over.
Then Mink was at my side with his arm around my shoulders. “Come on, Woody, we need to find some cover!” he said. “Let’s find a ditch or something.”
Yes. Suddenly I was clear again, and the sounds of the shells hitting the ground, the black smoke pouring up from the holes they had created, the shards of metal whistling past me and into the quarter ton, came back into focus.
Mink found an undercut ditch, and we huddled in it. I felt so tired, I just wanted to sleep.
“Don’t sleep,” Mink said. “In case they want to storm the ridge. They’ll come in right after the barrage.”
We waited. The shelling went on for another five minutes. The stink from the exploding shells was everywhere. Small patches of mist were forming at the top of the ridge, and I knew that if the Germans were coming, they would come through the same fog at the bottom of the ridge.
The artillery stopped. We grabbed our rifles and waited. Then it started again. They were playing with us. Get ready to die, Americans. The next shelling was different. The shells hit harder, and I imagined them to be from panzers. We didn’t have anything to stop their tanks. Where the hell was our artillery? Why weren’t we answering their attack?
The shelling stopped. We grabbed our rifles. I saw the medics on the move. More men had been wounded, more had died.
“Panzers!”
Reese was up and running toward the top of the ridge with a bazooka. If it was a self-propelled gun being driven up the mountain, he stood a chance. If it was a panzer, they would kill him instantly.
“You!” Reese pointed at me. “Grab these rockets!”
He had a bag of rockets for the bazooka. I got up and grabbed them. Six rockets, six shots. Nobody got off six shots against the Krauts. They were too good for that. You got off two if you were good, three if you were lucky.
I grabbed the bag of rockets and ran after Reese. We got to the top of the ridge, and he started aiming the bazooka.
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