Moon Above, Moon Below

by William Peter Grasso

  “You’re kidding, right, sir?”

  “Nope. Dead serious.”

  Sean threw up his hands in frustration and replied, “Well, then…I guess it’s good night, nurse for this little campaign.” He grimaced as he took a bite of the bitter chocolate bar—the D bar—that came with the K ration. “And you say those frogs were dining like kings on C rations, while we get this subsistence shit?”

  Tommy’s voice came out of the darkness, asking, “Something wrong? Let me guess…they just called the whole thing off and we can all go home, right?”

  “Not quite, Lieutenant,” Newcomb said. “Your brother was just expressing his lack of confidence in our French allies.”

  “Don’t forget I ain’t too crazy about the Limeys, either, sir,” Sean added.

  Newcomb asked Tommy, “Find out anything interesting from the air liaison?”

  “Yeah. It sounds like the Ninth Air Force is pasting the shit out of the Germans pulling back from Mortain. They made it sound like a regular turkey shoot.”

  “Great,” Sean said. “Then they won’t be needing us ground pounders none.”

  “Not so fast,” Tommy replied. “There are still plenty of Krauts to go around for everyone, apparently.” He turned to Newcomb and added, “I need to run something by you, sir. I was thinking about how we could’ve used the air support in that fight back up the road, and it occurred to me that no matter how I directed them, they had just as good a chance of dumping their stuff on us as the Krauts, close as we all were.”

  “We’d just do what we always do,” Newcomb replied. “We’d have our artillery or mortars mark the targets with smoke and hope for the best.”

  “That’s just it, Captain…once a fight gets going real good, all we see from the cockpit is smoke and dust. It all mixes together and we pilots can’t tell one color smoke from another. That stuff obscures the ground, and if there’s not some easily recognizable reference point, it’s a crap shoot where the ordnance is going to land.”

  “Hmm…so what do we do about that, Lieutenant?”

  “I’d like to try this, if it’s okay with you, sir. Let’s put the artillery FO right with us in the M10 so he and I can coordinate white phosphorous airbursts—up real high, above all the battlefield smoke—to mark an approach path to the target. They’d have to be tightly time controlled so the smoke from the bursts doesn’t drift away in the wind before the pilots can get a good bead on it. Then they’d have a better of chance of being lined up on—and actually seeing—the target when they broke through all that smoke, because at the speed they’re going, they’d only get a second or two for target acquisition. If the FO was right there with me it would be so much easier to set up. He can call the fire missions directly, rather than me having to pass all the coordinates for the WP bursts over the radio first.”

  As Newcomb mulled it over in silence, Tommy added, “I know the turret’s going to get a little crowded with an extra guy and all, but we’ve already got enough radios to handle it. Plus, the FO can bring his battery-operated set as extra insurance.”

  “Sounds like you’ve already worked this out with the artillery, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  “Outstanding,” Newcomb said as he got up to leave. “Let’s give it a try. I’ll catch up with you guys later. I’ve got to see how the fueling’s coming along.”

  As Tommy ripped open his K ration box, his brother asked, “I’ll bet hearing about your flyboy buddies ripping the shit out of the Krauts is making you wanna be back in the cockpit, don’t it?”

  Tommy needed no words to answer. A wistful glance skyward was all it took.

  Chapter Twelve

  ALLIED GROUND FORCES COMMUNIQUE

  FROM:

  MONTGOMERY--COMMANDER, ALLIED GROUND FORCES

  DATE--TIME OF ORIGIN:

  11 AUG 44/1100 HRS

  TO:

  BRADLEY--COMMANDER, 12TH ARMY GROUP

  COPY (FOR INFO):

  SHAEF (EISENHOWER)

  IN RECEIPT OF YOUR ELOQUENT REQUEST DATED 10 AUG. HOWEVER, BE ADVISED THE ORIGINAL DIRECTIVE FROM THIS COMMAND STANDS: ELEMENTS OF 12TH ARMY GROUP WILL ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN—REPEAT, MAINTAIN—AN EAST-WEST LINE THROUGH FLERS AND ARGENTAN NLT 0600, 14 AUG. NO UNIT OF 12TH ARMY GROUP IS TO ADVANCE NORTH OF THAT LINE, AS IT WOULD BE UNWISE TO ATTEMPT TO BLOCK SEASONED PANZER FORMATIONS WITH UNTESTED AMERICAN UNITS. I PREFER TO RISK A BLOODY NOSE AT ARGENTAN RATHER THAN A BROKEN NECK AT FALAISE.

  SIGNED,

  MONTGOMERY

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was midmorning when a radio transmission from an aerial observer in a spotter plane sounded the warning. A German armored force from the west was speeding toward the same wooded road junction Newcomb’s tanks were approaching from the south. The Germans would get there first, posing a roadblock far more potent than yesterday’s mere inconvenience at the hands of the French 2nd Armored.

  “The AO says they’re Panthers, sir,” DeLuca, the radio operator, reported. “Six of them, with a couple of trucks tagging along.”

  Captain Newcomb, on another radio with Battalion, replied with an impatient nod. Tommy Moon was already calling for air support from the P-47s.

  “We’ve got to stop them before they block the junction,” Newcomb said. “That’s going to be some trick, considering we can’t even see them yet through all these trees.” Then he turned to the latest addition to the M10’s crew: Lieutenant Bill Baxter, the artillery forward observer. “Plaster the junction with HE and WP,” he told the FO. “Let’s make them stop short on the road so we can get a crack at them broadside through the woods, before they can turn toward us.”

  Baxter objected. “But, sir, I can put WP right on the tanks.”

  “How are you going to do that, Lieutenant?” Newcomb replied. “They’re not going to stand still for you to adjust the rounds on them…and you can’t see the fucking Krauts in the first place.”

  “Yeah…and save a couple of willy petes for me,” Tommy added. “This fight’s going to be close in and down in the trees again. The jugs will have a hell of a time figuring out who’s who.”

  Newcomb asked, “This is just what you were talking about last night, isn’t it, Moon? Marking an airborne approach path to the target with willy pete airbursts?”

  “Yes, sir, it sure is.”

  “Well, it better fucking work, or we’re in real deep shit.”

  Once again, Newcomb deployed his forces with a hand steadied by hard experience. As his tanks left the open killing field of the road and fanned out into the woods, Lieutenant Baxter had just finished calling in the artillery fire mission on the road junction. He and Tommy settled into plotting the white phosphorous airbursts to guide the flight of four P-47s.

  “Let’s use the road junction for the near burst,” Tommy said as he wrote down the coordinates. “Put it five hundred feet in the air. For the far one, put it off to the east”—he touched his pencil point to the map—“right here, about a mile out, burst height at one thousand feet. What’s the time of flight going to be?”

  Baxter did a quick calculation. “One gun can shoot both rounds while the rest of the battery hits the road junction. If we shoot the far airburst first, its time of flight will be about eleven seconds. Then, allowing a little time to reload and adjust firing data, the near one’s burst should be pretty much simultaneous.”

  “Simultaneous. Excellent,” Tommy said. “What about the time delay getting our fire command to the guns?”

  “Considering they’ll already have the initial firing data set, a few seconds, at most.”

  “Great,” Tommy replied, adding it all up. “With the usual winds from the southwest and the jugs coming out of the sun, this should work like a charm.” He radioed the orienting information to the fast-approaching fighters.

  For a moment, Tommy Moon almost forgot one of those men charging at the German tanks in those Zippo lighters would be his brother.

  The first artillery rounds struck t
he road junction. They had the desired effect; though a few hundred yards from the impacts, the Germans came to a dead stop on the road. But they weren’t Panthers.

  “They’re assault guns,” Newcomb said. “Sturmgeschutz, or some shit like that. For cryin’ out loud, you flyboys think anything with tracks is a fucking tank.”

  Tommy asked, “So assault guns should be pushovers?”

  “Not exactly. They’ve got the same main weapon but it can’t traverse very much. And there’s a lot less armor.”

  No one noticed the airburst of white phosphorous high above the road junction or the much higher one a mile to the east.

  “Okay,” Tommy said, “the jugs are turning to the markers. Shut off the artillery.”

  “Yeah, let the jugs in,” Newcomb concurred. “Do it now.”

  The German vehicles were still motionless, engines revving, as if unsure what to do next.

  “Come on, boys,” Newcomb beseeched his tanks, “they’re showing us their flanks! Don’t wait until they turn on you. Punch a round right through them! Take your damn shot!”

  But he understood why the Shermans hadn’t fired yet. They were bouncing and lurching through the woods; the only way to get an accurate shot was to stop, giving the gunner a stable sight picture before firing. But stopping meant death. You were too good a target when you weren’t moving, and the Germans’ powerful 75-millimeter gun could kill you before it was even in your gun’s range. The only chance of a first-round hit on the move was if you were close—200 yards or less—and they weren’t there yet.

  Hunkered down in the turret of the M10, Tommy told the jugs to attack with machine guns: Easier to aim, and even if they miss, they’ll scare the living shit out of the Krauts, with their heads sticking out like that. Rockets will probably miss.

  Tommy could only visualize the fight through the eyes of an airman. Turn, dammit, he urged the German guns. Sitting on the road as they were, their tougher front armor was facing the oncoming P-47s. But when he peered over the edge of the turret, a tanker’s perspective smacked him in the face. If they turn, they’re looking straight at my brother. Dammit…somebody make a move…do something!

  All at once, Tommy got his wish. A Sherman fired and shattered a track on the lead assault gun. She was crippled but by no means dead, pivoting with her good track to face the approaching Americans. The five vehicles behind her belched smoke from their racing engines and began to pivot, trying to turn their toughest armor—and their big main guns—to the Shermans.

  They never saw the P-47s streaking out of the sun. Four assault guns erupted in flames, struck by API rounds in their flanks. The crewmen who were still alive and able to move clambered off the hulls, frantically trying to shed burning uniforms as they ran to seek cover in the woods.

  That left two German vehicles still in the fight: the leader—frozen in place but her main gun very much alive—and the last one in the column, now rumbling toward the Shermans. Her main gun spit a wildly inaccurate round while on the move.

  For the moment, the lead gun’s immobility gave her an advantage as she took a well-aimed shot through a rock-steady gunsight. The round penetrated a Sherman’s front armor, spraying a torrent of hot gasses and razor-sharp metal fragments into the crew compartment. She came to an abrupt stop. The only thing escaping her hull were multiple jets of smoke colored the gray pallor of death.

  A Sherman maneuvered for a shot at the lead gun’s thin side armor. Firing on the move from 300 yards out, she missed, the round burrowing into the ground yards short. The German gun replied with a shot of her own, knocking the American’s turret askew, rendering it useless. The Sherman began to back away; at least her driver was still alive.

  “Shit,” Captain Newcomb mumbled. “Two Zippos down.”

  Baxter, the artillery FO, said, “If that Kraut isn’t going to move, I can burn her with WP.”

  Newcomb was about to agree when Tommy blurted, “No, wait. I’ve got the jugs coming back the other way. They can nail her.”

  “When?” Newcomb asked.

  “Thirty seconds. Shifting the arty will take twice that long.”

  Newcomb swallowed hard and replied, “Okay. We’ll hold for the jugs.”

  Thirty seconds in combat can be an eternity. In the narrow lanes of the woods a hundred yards off the road, the still-mobile assault gun was caught in a deadly game of ring around the rosie with two Shermans. Swirling as if caught in a whirlpool—or circling a drain—the three vehicles struggled to get a point-blank shot at their enemy’s rear, searching for a path through the dense trees that would yield an intercepting vector without smacking the main gun into a tree. Two more Shermans were trying to position themselves at tangents to that circle, hoping for a clear shot at the German vehicle without offering themselves up to her far more deadly gun.

  One of the Shermans seeking a tangent miscalculated; the assault gun blew her apart at 50 yards.

  But then she ran out of luck. Maneuvering for another kill, her main gun struck a tree, forcing her to stop and reverse. In that instant, she was turned into a funeral pyre as rounds struck her from three directions at once.

  On the road, the lead assault gun exploded as a P-47 shot up her hull with API. In turn, the other three aircraft riddled the burning lead gun and then set ablaze the two German support trucks trying to slip away from the battle.

  And then it was over—the pants-wetting terror of combat replaced with that eerie stillness that provided anything but closure to the mortal chaos just lived through.

  “I guess that idea of yours sort of worked, Moon,” Newcomb said. “Nice job.”

  But I still lost three more tanks. That’s seven gone in two days. I’ve got eight left—at this rate, this company will be wiped out long before the division reaches Argentan. Shit, if we hit heavier contact than this—and can’t get air support when we need it—we may cease to exist before nightfall.

  Regrouping his scattered tank company, Newcomb shifted his platoons’ order of march. Tommy overheard the terse commands over the radio that would put Sean’s tank at the head of the column. He saw the Sherman named Eclipse of the Hun moving back toward the road to take its place on point, his brother sitting on the ring of the turret hatch, casually smoking a cigarette. Sean waved with little enthusiasm as his tank drove past the M10. Tommy wished he’d been close enough to see the look in his eyes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The highway to Alençon coursed through the woods for another 10 miles. Newcomb’s column encountered Germans only twice in that distance, both times meeting details of infantry armed with light weapons and panzerfaust—small but powerful anti-armor rockets carried and fired by one man. Similar in concept to the American bazooka, but packing a far stronger punch, its only drawback was its short range: about 110 yards, which left its operator terribly vulnerable to the infantry accompanying and protecting the American tanks from just such a threat. If he could manage to get close enough, though, he could kill a Sherman with one shot. But that had rarely happened since the GIs came ashore at Normandy. It wouldn’t happen this afternoon, either; Newcomb lost no more tanks in the woods.

  “It’s going to get worse,” he warned. “We’ll be back in the open real soon, and I’m betting we’ll be up to our asses in panzers again. And the closer we get to this Falaise pocket they keep talking about…well, shit—this could turn into another Kursk.”

  He scanned the low-hanging gray clouds gathering in the sky ahead, lit from within by lightning, flickering like Chinese lanterns. “A fucking storm coming, too,” Newcomb said, shooting a disparaging look at Tommy. “That’ll do it for our air cover. Your Air Force can’t hit shit on the ground if they can’t see it.”

  There was nothing Tommy could say to contradict the captain’s assessment. Newcomb was right; losing visual contact with the ground not only prevented a pilot from finding a target, it might even prevent him from finding his way home. Thunderstorms presented an even more dangerous problem. More than one aviator
had blundered into their towering columns of cloud to watch his aircraft disintegrate around him, torn apart by the sledgehammer blows of the fiercely turbulent air within. If he was lucky, he’d survive the bailout through nature’s fury. Usually, it didn’t work out that way.

  Once Newcomb’s column was clear of the woods, a spotter plane they’d heard transmitting over the radio but seen little of touched down in a grassy clearing beside the road. It had barely rolled to a stop when a bulldog of a man wearing two silver stars on his helmet jumped out and walked with great purpose toward the M10.

  “Who the hell is that?” Tommy asked.

  “It’s General Wood,” Newcomb replied.

  “The division commander?”

  “None other, Lieutenant. That’s ‘P.’ Wood himself.”

  “What’s the P stand for, sir?”

  “I heard it’s for professor. Used to teach college, supposedly.”

  As the spotter plane’s pilot busied himself tying down the light aircraft against the punishing winds the storm was sure to bring, General Wood clambered onto the M10. In a booming voice dripping with the flavor of the American South, he said to Newcomb, “Mind if I ride with you, Alvin? That storm’s no place for a li’l ol’ airplane.”

  “Sure, sir. Welcome aboard,” Newcomb replied as he motioned for the two enlisted men to make room in the turret.

  But the general stopped them from climbing out and riding on the hull deck. “That’s okay, boys. You stay right where you are and do your jobs. I’ll ride the deck.”

  Newcomb asked, “What does the situation up the highway look like, sir?”

  “No Kraut tanks, surprisingly,” the general replied. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t some well-concealed eighty-eights waiting for us, though. But as long as we can flank them like you’ve been doing all day, my boy, they shouldn’t stop us from liberating Alenҫon by nightfall.”