Kinda like a whore, Sean Moon thought as she brushed by him.
The young woman walked right up to Newcomb. In thickly accented but precise English, she said, “My name is Sylvie Bergerac. You are the commander here?”
“Yeah, I’m Captain Al Newcomb, ma’am.”
She seemed decidedly unimpressed. “You are only a captain. We know there are many Americans just outside Alençon. Surely someone of higher rank is in the area, too. A colonel or general, perhaps?”
Newcomb replied, “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s on your mind first, lady, before I waste the time of anyone with higher rank, okay?”
“As you wish, Captain,” she replied.
She launched into her story. By the time she’d finished her third sentence, Newcomb was sending a runner to get the battalion commander on the double.
As they waited for Colonel Abrams to arrive, Sylvie and the older man with her exchanged comments in French. “Can you understand what they’re saying, Half?” Sean asked. “You knew all that frog shit real good back with the nuns.”
“Yeah, of course I understand. You sure you want to know?”
Captain Newcomb pulled Tommy aside and said, “Hell, yeah, we want to know. What’re they saying?”
“Well, sir, in a nutshell, they’re saying we’re all dumber than sheep.”
The captain smirked as he asked, “She mean just present company? Or all Americans in general?”
“For the moment, I think it’s just us.”
Sylvie had overheard. She shot an annoyed look Tommy’s way and said, “Merci pour les petite faveurs.”
That needed no translation. Even Newcomb and Sean figured out it meant thanks for the small favors. She and her companion wouldn’t exchange another word.
“Looks like you got yourself a friend, Tommy,” Sean said, patting his little brother on the back. “And a real looker, too.”
The runner returned with Colonel Abrams and his radio operator in tow. Sylvie began her story all over again.
“The Boche will leave Alençon before dawn, mon colonel, along this highway before us. They are a weak force, battered from combat with the Americans at Rennes and Laval—”
The colonel interrupted her: “Just how weak are we talking here, Mademoiselle Bergerac?”
“It’s madame, mon colonel…and just how weak are they? No more than two hundred men.”
“Okay…maybe two companies, tops. What about vehicles?”
“About a dozen camions,” she replied.
“You mean trucks with motors? Not horse-drawn wagons?”
“Ahh, oui…trucks.”
“And tanks?” Abrams asked. “Are there any tanks?”
“Oui. Five. The Boche call them tigre.”
All the tankers in earshot let out a collective, “Ahh, shit.”
“But there are only five,” Sylvie protested.
“Ma’am,” Abrams said, “we might kill five Tigers…but in the dark, with no air support, we’ll probably lose just about every Sherman in this battalion doing it.”
“Then perhaps we can come to an arrangement,” Sylvie replied. “Allow the Boche to escape. You live to fight them on better terms…and Alençon is spared the inevitable destruction.”
For a few moments, the tankers found her suggestion quite enticing. But it was Colonel Abrams who finally shattered their wishful thinking. “Unacceptable,” he said. “If they come tonight, we’re going to take them on, one way or another.”
“I was afraid that would be your answer,” she replied.
“Let me ask you something, Madame Bergerac,” the colonel said. “How do you know all this? And why should I believe you?”
“Because the Oberst told it to me.”
Abrams was more skeptical now than a moment ago. “Why would a Kraut officer be telling you anything?”
“Mon colonel, the Boche, like all men, tell a woman many things to remain important once they are finished inside her.”
Sean whispered in his brother’s ear, “See? I told you that jane’s a fucking whore.”
Whispered or not, Sylvie understood every word.
Abrams’ skepticism was faltering fast. “And when did this Oberst tell you they were pulling out of Alençon?”
“A few hours ago, mon colonel.” Grinning broadly, she added, “And the imbécile had no idea he was telling it to the maquis.”
A startled Abrams asked, “You’re maquis? The Underground? ”
“Oui, mon colonel.” She opened the musette bag slung over her shoulder and showed him the Welrod pistol within—an assassin’s weapon supplied by British SOE. “Perhaps now you believe me?”
They began to hear the low murmur of truck engines just past 0300. A few minutes later, an infantry listening post close to the highway reported a column of German vehicles on the outskirts of Alençon, heading north. A few minutes more, and the tankers could see the dark silhouettes of slow-moving trucks without lights passing in single file before them.
Colonel Abrams’ voice growled from the battalion’s radios: “Do not—repeat—do not engage the wheeled vehicles. Wait for my command.”
Huddled behind the M10 with her male companion and Tommy Moon, Sylvie Bergerac felt a flicker of hope blossom within her. “Maybe your colonel will let the Germans escape after all.”
“No,” Tommy replied, “I don’t think that’s going to happen. He’s just trying to set a trap for the Tigers.”
“I do not follow, Lieutenant Moon.”
“The Tigers are hanging back. If we start shooting up the trucks now, the German tankers will know exactly where we are and cut us to ribbons before we’ve had a chance to take them out.”
“So you are waiting for the Tigers to show themselves on the road?”
“Yeah. That way, the first hint they’ll get that we’re here is when they start getting broadsided from our guns. If we can get in the first shot, we’ve got a chance.”
She turned to her companion and explained the American tactics in French.
“We can speak en français if that would make it easier,” Tommy said.
Sylvie smiled, touching his cheek tenderly as she would a child. “Merci, Lieutenant, but I have heard a little of your français americain. It is better I translate for mon papa than you. But should you not be off to fight with your comrades now?”
He explained what his job was and how he had nothing to do at the moment but keep the maquis visitors safe and out of the way.
“But if you are a flyer, Lieutenant, what are you doing here without an airplane?”
“I guess you can chalk that up to luck, Madame Bergerac.”
“I would say it is quite the opposite, Lieutenant.”
The sound of the trucks faded quickly as they made their way north. After a few moments of anxious silence, a fearsome rumble of heavy machinery began to emanate from the town. “The sound of the tigres,” Sylvie said.
Captain Newcomb called down from the M10’s turret: “Lieutenant Moon, take our guests and go find a hidey-hole somewhere, on the double. This is about to get very messy.”
“Come,” Sylvie said, “we go to the orchard.”
Surprised, Tommy asked, “There’s an orchard around here?”
“Yes, behind us, a few hundred meters that way,” she replied, pointing into the darkness.
As they moved quickly away from the line of armored vehicles, they could hear the mechanical whir as gunners cranked the turrets manually, scanning for targets. The sound of the Tigers’ engines grew louder as they left Alençon and followed the trucks north up the highway.
Though the edge of the orchard was well behind the tanks, it was farther up the slope and afforded Tommy, Sylvie, and her papa a good view of the road. They counted the Tigers’ silhouettes until all five were about to pass right in front of 37th Tank’s guns. Tommy saw the brief, repeated glimmer on the southern horizon of artillery firing a few seconds before he heard their muted poom.
Our guns, he told himself,
putting up illum rounds.
Then the night was turned to ghostly day as the illumination rounds popped their flares high in the air over the Tigers, bathing them, the American tanks, and the open fields all around in harsh glare and shadows that danced back and forth across the ground as the brilliant balls of light swung in their parachutes.
The 35 guns of 37th Tank fired as one, their 75-millimeter rounds streaking arrow-straight toward the targets, trailing fiery red tails like comets.
The engines of the American tanks roared to life. Once a tank fires a round, its position isn’t a secret anymore. And a tank that can’t move is a metal shell asking to be turned into a furnace. The running engines—despite the industrial racket they brought to the battlefield—could now spell the difference between life and death.
Some rounds bounced off the turrets of the Tigers in splashes of orange, probably causing their crews screaming ears and splitting headaches but delivering no knockout blow.
A few rounds hit tracks and road wheels. Crippling wounds but not mortal.
A dozen rounds missed completely, plowing the ground short or disappearing long.
The rest struck the weaker side and rear armor. The trailing Tiger was surrounded by a shimmering red glow for a few moments, until flames belched from her engine compartment. Burning crewmen struggled from her hatches, only to die quickly in a hail of American machine gun bullets.
The second Tiger in the column began to turn toward the Americans, trying to show them nothing but her impenetrable front armor. But she stopped halfway. Her hatches flew open, spewing the same red glow as her sister. If any of her crew managed to escape the inferno she had become, the GIs never saw them.
The third Tiger suffered a shattered left track. But that didn’t prevent her from slewing her hull about on the good right track toward the Americans so they had nothing to target but that thick front armor. There was nothing wrong with her main gun, either. The Tiger fired, shooting a Charlie Company Sherman right through the lower portion of her front armor, instantly turning her into a crematory for her five crewmen.
The first and fourth Tiger were very much alive and fully mobile. They, too, had turned toward the Americans and were rumbling up the slope. The Shermans directly in their path backed frantically away, firing shots that, even if they’d hit the Tigers, would’ve probably just bounced off their glacis plates.
The illumination rounds were dropping low, their light fading fast. Approaching point-blank range now, the German tanks killed three more Shermans before they realized their mistake: there were far more American tanks than they realized. Four Shermans from Baker Company had circled behind them, pumping round after round of 75 millimeter through the Tigers’ soft rear ends until all three were quickly ablaze.
Then it was over, only a minute after it started. The illumination rounds had burned out, leaving the battlefield lit only by gutted tanks burning like torches in the night. The sweet fragrance of a late summer’s night was replaced by the stench of burning gasoline, expended ordnance, and roasted flesh.
Now came the difficult task of reorganizing in the dark a battalion of armored behemoths scattered over hundreds of acres. Wounded would have to be cared for; the dead would have to be collected. Vigilance against a counterattack by the German infantry—whether in the trucks they’d let pass or still in the town—had to be maintained.
Sean’s Sherman—Eclipse of the Hun—was stopped 20 yards behind one of the burning Tigers. She’d fired three rounds into the German monster: Maybe we killed her all by ourselves.
But Eclipse had taken some hits, too; nothing that took her out of action or turned a crewman into a casualty, but the odor of gasoline inside her hull had become overpowering. “Everybody out,” Sean ordered when Captain Newcomb radioed the cease fire and regroup command. “Shut her down all the way, so maybe she don’t blow.”
Climbing down from the turret, Sean saw his driver start to slide off the front of the tank to the ground. No sooner had his feet touched down than he recoiled back onto the deck. Sean could hear him murmuring, “Oh, fuck…oh, fuck.” He was hunched over like a man about to be sick.
Sean peered over the tank’s nose—and then it was his turn to recoil.
The head and shoulders of a German tanker protruded from beneath the left track. The rest of him was crushed beneath the treads. His eyes—bulging, wide with terror, reflecting the glow of his burning Tiger—still blazed with the last flickers of life’s fire.
But not for long. When they glanced over the nose again, his eyes were looking to another dimension, one only the dead could see.
“I never saw nothing,” the driver said. “Where the fuck did that Kraut came from, anyway?”
“He must’ve fell down or something when he was running away, that’s all,” Fabiano, the gunner, offered. “Too fucking bad for the poor bastard.”
As the crew put a safe distance between them and their tank, they heard Sean mumbling, “Not again. Oh, God…not again, dammit.”
Chapter Seventeen
Alençon was secured by 0930. The troopers of 4th Armored found only citizens eager to welcome them. The Boche were gone. Sylvie Bergerac was ecstatic.
“Thank you, mon colonel,” she said as she kissed Colonel Abrams on both cheeks in the center of town. “Thank you for sparing us the agony of liberation.”
Abrams’ only response was a smile more solemn than celebratory. Six hours earlier, when the Germans began their exodus, he really hadn’t been thinking of sparing the good people of Alençon the death and destruction a house-to-house fight would have entailed. He’d just wanted as much of the element of surprise he could garner against the superior firepower of the Tigers.
For a tank they’re not supposed to have a lot of, we sure seem to come up against them often enough, he told himself. But this time, we only lost four of ours to take out five Tigers. That’s the best scorecard we’ve had yet.
The colonel wasn’t deluding himself that kill ratio would last: Our only hope is they run out of tanks before we do.
Tommy finally found his brother in the hastily set up maintenance depot on the outskirts of Alençon. Sean was up to his waist in the engine compartment of Eclipse, supervising two mechanics who were fixing her ruptured fuel line. “We would’ve been zippoed for sure if this leak lit off,” he told his brother. “We’re goddamn lucky all we took was a couple of glancing shots.”
Tommy walked around the far side of the tank to see what the results of glancing shots from a Tiger looked like. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw them; it looked like some giant can opener had punched through the side armor. The thick steel had been peeled away as easily as bullets and flak tore through the fragile aluminum skin of his P-47. Another mechanic was preparing heavy steel patches to be welded to Eclipse as soon as the fuel line repair was complete. Billowing smoke and showers of sparks around several other tanks in the depot signaled their patches were already being welded into place.
Captain Newcomb walked through the depot, checking on the progress of his tanks’ repairs. “Take the time to do it right, boys,” he grumbled to the mechanics, “because we ain’t going anywhere until the fuel trucks show up.”
Sean asked, “Any word when the hell that’ll be, sir?”
“A couple of hours, maybe.”
“They can take their damn sweet time, as far as I’m concerned,” Sean said under his breath. He didn’t care if his company commander heard it.
In no mood for smart-mouthing, Captain Newcomb asked, “You got something on your mind, Sergeant?”
“No, sir. Not a damn thing.”
Newcomb let it drop; there were bigger problems to tackle than a surly attitude from one of his best fighters. He looked to Tommy and said, “Lieutenant. We’ve got a meeting with General Wood in fifteen minutes at the town hall. Meet you there. Bring all your maps.”
Satisfied the engine repair was in good hands, Sean climbed from the tank to join his brother. “You better hurry, Half
. Don’t keep his fucking highness the general waiting.”
“What’s with you, Sean? You’ve got a bug up your ass. You had one last night, too, before the shit started to fly.”
“Fuck off, Tommy. You flyboys wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m your fucking brother, Sean, and flying is fighting, too. Try me.”
Sean wandered away from the maintenance in progress to light a cigarette. Tommy was right behind him.
“You going to talk or what, Sean?”
He took a long drag on his cigarette before answering. “Look, Lieutenant…Tommy…I don’t know…it’s just that I keep seeing their faces, that’s all.”
“Whose faces, Sean? What are you talking about?”
He looked at his little brother like he’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. “That nickname of mine, Tommy…those Krauts I ran over. I saw their faces…and I just keep seeing them, day after day. And fuck me if it didn’t happen all over again this morning. Crushed another son of a bitch. Saw his face, too.”
“Sean, it’s kill or be killed, right? Shitty as it is, that’s our job. Does it really matter how you kill them?”
The logic had no impact on Sean Moon. “They’re gonna be waiting for me in hell,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time. Just a matter of fucking time.”
Tommy started to put a comforting arm around his brother just like he had that first night he spent with 37th Tank. But Sean pushed him away.
“Knock it the fuck off, little brother. You ain’t the fucking padre…and there’s a bunch of wise-ass douchebags watching. I don’t need no more fucking nicknames.”
Maybe this isn’t the time to ask him about killing those prisoners, Tommy thought.
Tommy walked the cobblestones of Alençon’s grand-rue on his way to General Wood’s meeting. All around him, joyous townspeople were singing and dancing with GIs keen on enjoying whatever pleasures they could find. In all the reverie, he noticed something odd, though: it looked like a parade of civilian couples—10, he counted—were avoiding the celebration and converging from several directions on a quaint row house tucked away in an alley. As they reached the house, a couple would exchange a tender kiss. Then the woman entered the house as her man offered a wave of goodbye that seemed heavy with resignation before walking away. Every man and woman was wearing a wedding band.
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