“Looks like they’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,” Sean said as he manned the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret roof. “They must be pretty pissed off that we crossed the Rhine. Where are those damn flyboys of ours when we need them?”
Fabiano had stuck his head through the turret hatch to be the lookout for marauding aircraft. He asked, “Where the hell’s the anti-aircraft section, Sarge?”
“Couple of hundred yards behind us. That’s usually where the Krauts like to hit, in the middle of the column. Better odds of killing something. But they’ll walk into a wall of lead from those quad-fifties when they do.”
“Don’t look like all them Krauts got the word about that,” Fabiano replied. “Eleven o’clock—we got two F-Ws headed straight at us.”
Sean swung the fifty cal toward the approaching fighter-bombers. “Get on the radio, Fab. Tell the platoon hard left and engage them birds, dammit.”
The platoon did exactly as ordered, the roar of their .50 calibers rising above the howl of the Shermans’ engines.
Fabiano yelled, “GOT SIX ON THE LINE. HE WANTS US TO STAY ON THE ROAD.”
Six: the company commander, Lieutenant Fagan.
Sean had no intention of doing what the lieutenant wanted. Fabiano repeated the order.
“I CAN’T HEAR HIM,” Sean replied. “I’M MAKING TOO MUCH FUCKING NOISE.”
The two FW-190s flashed past, each dropping a bomb that landed well off its mark. The explosions were unnerving just the same.
The tankers chased the fleeing aircraft with more .50-caliber fire for a few seconds. But if the gunners caused any damage, they couldn’t tell. The planes had made what appeared to be a clean getaway.
In the lull of the temporary cease fire, Fabiano said, “Six still wants us back on the road, Sarge. Continue the advance, he says.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what he wants…but this is one hell of a time for him to start giving orders, considering we ain’t heard shit out of him for days.”
Fabiano added, “I know, Sarge…it’s just stupid. Why the fuck would we want to stay on the road, all nice and lined up for them planes?”
“Exactly,” Sean replied. “I’ll make a TC out of you yet, Fab.”
TC: tank commander.
“Don’t do me no fucking favors, Sarge.”
The aerial threat was gone, at least for the moment. It was time to get moving again. Sean told his gunner to relay Fagan’s order to the rest of the platoon, however belatedly.
Fabiano was about to do just that. But before he could speak a word into the microphone, his jaw dropped. He pointed over the tank’s right side and screeched, “THREE O’CLOCK. WE GOT ROCKET SHIPS ON OUR ASSES AGAIN. NO FUCKING PROPELLERS…AND THEY GOT FUNNY-LOOKING WINGS, TOO.”
The strange planes were moving fast at low altitude, looking more like mottled fish slipping through a crystal clear sea than any aircraft Sean had ever seen before. They were turning right toward his tanks; they’d be on them in a few rapid heartbeats.
Fabiano screamed, “SIX SAYS GET BACK ON THE ROAD AND KEEP MOVING.”
Sean never heard him. He was lost in concentration, trying to get one of those jets in his gunsight. It would be an impossible shot at nothing but a minuscule, head-on cross-section of a plane approaching at blinding speed.
They passed overhead in less than an instant. Sean had given up trying to track them with the fifty. He wouldn’t be able to traverse it fast enough to fire at them as they sped away. They’d be long gone before he could get off wild, wasted shots in their general direction.
But in Sean’s mind—and Fabiano’s, too—their distinctive shape as they flashed past registered as clearly as a still photograph, the wings especially—swept back, with underslung pods that must have been the jet engines. And that sound: a shriek loud enough to drown out even the clattering mayhem of their Sherman’s motor. They were so mesmerized by it all they hadn’t seen the bombs the jets released just before they streaked across the road.
This time, one of the bombs found its mark. It hit the only vehicle still on the road; Lieutenant Fagan’s Sherman vanished for a moment in a ball of fire.
Once that moment passed, the tank was nothing more than a coffin of twisted steel on shattered tracks, spewing licks of flame and thick black smoke.
Yeah, right, Sean thought. Stay on the road. Great fucking idea, Lieutenant.
“I don’t think they’re coming back,” Sean said as he watched the specks the jets had become disappear from the sky as if erased by an invisible hand.
Fabiano said nothing. He glanced back and forth between the empty sky and the burning tank, his face blank, as if witnessing horrific death at the hands of advanced weaponry no longer triggered his own sense of mortality. Or maybe, like so many others who managed to survive nearly a year of combat, he’d come to accept his eventual death as inevitable.
Sean wanted—no, needed—to understand exactly what was going on in Fabiano’s head. His life, and the lives of the rest of his crew, would depend on it.
“We ain’t about to hear no bullshit about Kraut super weapons again, are we, Fab?”
The gunner shrugged and said, “I didn’t see ’em do nothing regular airplanes don’t do. They just do it faster…and a lot fucking louder.”
Fabiano took one more look at what was left of Fagan’s tank. Then he said, “He shoulda known better. Who’s next in line to be the old man now?”
Returning from the battalion briefing, Sean told the tankers of his platoon, “Lieutenant Pollack’s our new company commander.” When they seemed ambivalent to the announcement, he added, “Hey, it could be worse. They could’ve stuck us with Lieutenant Bridger.”
Sergeant Smith—Smitty—seemed surprised at the mention of the name. “Bridger?” he said. “I thought Ol’ Abe palmed him off on some other outfit after his fubar mess back at Trier.”
“Nah,” Sean replied, “he’s still around. They had him playing errand boy between Battalion and Division. Liaison officer, Colonel Abe called it. But guess what? He’s gonna replace Lieutenant Pollack as our XO.”
That announcement was met with loud groans.
“At ease, guys,” Sean said. “He won’t be able to cause no serious damage as XO. And Pollack did a halfway decent job when he had First Platoon. No serious fuckups.”
The nods of agreement were slow in coming. But they came nonetheless.
“It’ll be a real good thing if Lieutenant Pollack stays alive, though,” Sean said. “That way, we don’t run the risk of Bridger being in command just because there ain’t no one else. The way I see it, he’s got even worse tactical smarts than Lieutenant Fagan, may the poor bastard rest in peace.”
This time, the nods of agreement came quickly.
One of the drivers mumbled, “Tactical smarts didn’t do Captain Newcomb a whole lotta good. He bought it anyway.”
Anxious to change the subject, Sean said, “We got something else to talk about, too. Them planes we got attacked by today—them jets. They’re called ME-262s. Further identified by the swept-back wings, with an engine hanging off each one. The intel boys say we won’t see a lot of ’em, because there ain’t that many to go around. They can carry a couple of bombs but got no special bombsight or nothing. That hit on Lieutenant Fagan’s tank was pure fucking luck, just like all the other times a plane put a bomb dead on a Zippo. Ain’t that right, Fab?”
At first, Fabiano seemed stunned by the question. But then he replied with gusto: “Damn right, Sarge.”
“And me and Fab know a thing or two about a bomb hitting a Zippo dead on, don’t we?”
Fabiano again: “Fucking A, Sarge.”
It was late last summer, in the final days of the campaign to close the Falaise Pocket, that Sean and his gunner had survived a direct hit by a bomb on their tank, a hit that killed two of their fellow crewmen and demolished the tank. Their eyes locked for a moment, both men bound together by the surreal but vivid memory of their closest brush with death, knowing
they’d never be able to put it behind them. Ever.
“Now here’s the thing,” Sean continued. “They’re armed different from those Arado jets that attacked us back at the Moselle. The Arados are straight bombers, so they don’t have no guns. The M-Es are fighter-bombers, so yeah—they got guns.”
“Ah, shit,” a voice moaned. “So they can strafe our asses?”
“Yeah, technically they can,” Sean replied, “but as fast as they fly, the odds of them hitting what they’re aiming at on the ground is just about zero. My brother flies jugs, remember? And he says it’s hard enough hitting something when you’re flying at two-fifty—not that he’s looking at the airspeed or nothing when he’s strafing, mind you, because you only got a split second to get your sight picture and even less to correct it if you’re off target. Try doing it a hundred miles per faster and you’d be lucky to put a round into anything smaller than Yankee Stadium. So, no, you guys…I ain’t real worried about getting strafed by them.”
The platoon looked as if they were trying as hard as they could to buy into Sean’s logic, but he wasn’t kidding himself: they weren’t quite there yet.
“Any more questions?” he asked.
When no one spoke up, Sean said, “Okay, I got one. Everybody check their tranny fluid today?”
All four tank drivers and their TCs nodded affirmatively, with a slight air of offense that their platoon sergeant would question their performance of such a basic duty.
“Good,” Sean said, “and if you’re wondering why I’m asking, here it is: we’re gonna be doing a lot of twisting, turning road driving as close to top speed as we can. I don’t need another swinging dick missing a turn and tumbling down a hillside—or into a fucking river—because his Zippo couldn’t steer right all of a sudden. You remember what happened to Sergeant Wakefield and his crew, right?”
They nodded. But this time, any air of offense they might have had was gone. It was impossible to forget Wakefield’s tank driving off the side of a bridge and tumbling into the river below.
The entire crew drowned.
“Okay, everyone back to work,” Sean said. “I want nothing but vehicles in prime condition on the road at first light.”
Sergeant Vaccaro lingered behind. Once no one was in earshot, he said, “Hey, Sean…you really think having Pollack as C.O. is a good thing?”
“Yeah, Vinny. It could be worse, right?”
“But he’s a Jew, Sean.”
“And you’re a wop and I’m a mick, Vinny. So what?”
“It ain’t the same fucking thing, and you know it, Sean.”
“I’m telling you, Vinny, all I know is Pollack’s got a silver bar on his collar, not no Star of David. The rest of his uniform looks just like yours and mine…and he ain’t no fucking greenhorn, neither. So yeah…I’m real fine with him being C.O. You read me?”
It didn’t matter that Vinny Vaccaro replied, “Yeah, Sarge, I read you. Loud and clear.” Saying it was one thing, meaning it was another thing entirely.
And I don’t have to be no fucking genius to know that Vaccaro don’t agree with me. Not one damn bit.
APRIL 1945
Chapter Sixteen
The days of steamrolling, ten-mile advances for 3rd Army were interrupted at the city of Kassel. It lay on the Fulda River, and the German defenders there had managed to blow the bridges and organize their defenses well, with infantry and tanks dug in deep and supported by zeroed-in artillery. American forces that tried to skirt the city to the south found the twenty miles of flatlands between the Fulda and the Werra River equally well-defended by a mobile panzer force larger and more potent than they’d seen in weeks. To make matters worse, as March yielded to April, the weather had turned sour once again; the spring storms kept the planes of XIX TAC on the ground and out of the fight.
But for at least one day in that first week of April, the skies cleared enough for air operations to resume. Tommy Moon led Blue Flight in an attack on the German transportation and communications hub located at Eisenach, forty-five miles southeast of Kassel. Flak was light; Luftwaffe aircraft were nowhere to be seen. The airfield just outside Eisenach looked deserted from 5,000 feet up.
“Damn, I’ve lost track of how many trucks I shot up so far this morning,” Tommy’s wingman Joe Wilkinson said over the radio.
“Me, too,” Charlie Fusco, flying Blue Three, added. “This is a damn turkey shoot.”
“All right, enough with the chatter,” Tommy said. “We’ll congratulate ourselves later. Who’s got bombs left besides me?”
The only pilot who reported affirmative was Eddie Dugan in Blue Four, and he had only one.
“Okay, Four, come with me,” Tommy said. “We’ll hit the rail yard. Two and Three, you guys scout the highway east to Gotha.”
As their sequential replies of roger spilled across the airwaves, Blue Flight broke from their racetrack holding pattern. Tommy and Dugan began the climb to 8,000 feet to begin the dive-bombing run. Wilkinson and Fusco dove down to strafe targets of opportunity on the road.
“Put the bombs on the locomotives,” Tommy told Dugan. “If we get a chance after that, we’ll shoot up the rolling stock.”
“Roger, boss,” Dugan replied. “Hey, can I go down first?”
“Be my guest, Eddie. Just remember to escape south.”
As they climbed, they passed through a thin layer of wispy clouds that might obscure parts of the rail yard when viewed from 8,000 feet. Once in position to start the dive, however, Tommy was fairly sure the clouds wouldn’t pose much of a problem. They’d be diving out of the east—out of the morning sun’s glare—so anti-aircraft gunners would have a difficult time seeing them as they plummeted. At the IP of the dive from that direction, those clouds shouldn’t obscure their line of sight to the rail yard at all.
He was right. As they leveled off and turned the final half-circle to bring them to the IP, Dugan said, “Target identified. I’m going for the locomotive at the west end.”
“Good luck,” Tommy replied. “Right behind you.”
Dugan was halfway down when Tommy began his dive, picking a locomotive on the far side of the yard from his wingman’s target: If we hit them both, that should snarl up those tracks in both directions for a good while.
Nudging his control stick gently, Tommy slid the pipper in his gunsight onto his chosen target.
Oh crap, that locomotive’s starting to move. Ah, what the hell…I love a challenge.
He was too focused to notice the impact of Dugan’s bomb. He would’ve seen that it hadn’t hit the locomotive, but it was close—close enough to crater the railbed, collapse the track, and cause the engine to topple onto its side. But a moment later, something he couldn’t help but see drifted into view: the smoke and dust of the bomb blast, now augmented by the swirling cloud of steam escaping from the locomotive’s ruptured boiler. The prevailing southwesterly wind was pushing that murky veil into Tommy’s line of sight, promising to obscure his target completely.
Tommy cursed his shortsightedness: Dammit, the wind! The fucking wind. I should’ve had Dugan switch targets with me. Nobody would’ve gotten smoke in their eyes then.
But he realized he was winning the race against the wind. In the split seconds to bomb release at 3,000 feet, he still had just enough visibility to keep the creeping locomotive in the gunsight’s reticle.
He pickled away the bomb and pulled out of the dive, wondering if he’d ever know whether he scored a hit or not: Dugan’s smoke plus mine just might blanket everything.
Like in every other pullout, he blacked out for a second as the g-forces pulled blood from his head. But just like all those other times, he came to without confusion and went right back to flying the airplane, as if he’d just experienced no more than a momentary glitch in the viewing of a fast-paced movie.
Even though they were expected, he always found the blackouts a little unsettling. He told himself, One of these days, I’m going to wake up and be surprised to find myself flying an
airplane.
Or maybe I won’t wake up at all.
Then he scolded himself for being such a worrywart:
Knock it off, Moon, and just do your damn job.
Turning south, Eclipse of the Sun III had barely begun to climb when Dugan’s voice, tense and high-pitched with stress, filled Tommy’s headphones.
“Something just went by me like a shot, two of them,” Dugan said. “I think we got jets down low and heading east. Maybe that airfield isn’t as empty as we thought.”
Tommy’s head swiveled, but he couldn’t see any jets where Dugan had reported.
I’ll have to get higher and maybe make out some wing shapes. Right now, I’ll bet they’re just showing me tail cross-sections, and they’re blending into those hills to the south.
“Can you i.d. the jets?” Tommy asked.
“I think they were Two-Six-Twos…but that’s just a guess. Didn’t get a real good look. Then they were gone. Never saw one before, you know?”
Two-Six-Twos: Dugan was referring to the ME-262, the twin-engined, turbine-powered Messerschmitt fighter-bomber. Just like the ones the men of Sean Moon’s tank platoon had seen just over a week ago.
“Climb to angels four,” Tommy told Dugan, “and head toward that airfield outside of town. If they’re this low, that may be where they’re going. We’ll try and cut them off.”
“Shouldn’t we go higher than that, boss?”
“Negative. Slow as these jugs climb, by the time we get there, they might already be on the ground and in hard shelter.”
Speaking of hard shelter, I hadn’t given it much thought, but those hangars on that airfield still look pretty intact for stuff that’s supposedly had the crap bombed out of them.
That’s the second thing today I didn’t give much thought to…but should have. Let’s hope it’s the last.
Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3) Page 13