A few yards to my rear the bazooka man crouched behind a shed. In a loud whisper I told him to hold his fire until the tank was directly in front of us, and then I turned my eyes again to the road, watching tensely as the tank approached the designated spot. Almost there... now! Fire now! But nothing happened; the tank tolled along and nothing happened; it drew ever nearer the safety of the next group of houses and nothing happened. Forgetting caution, I called back to the bazooka man and ordered him to fire, and again nothing happened, the tank passing beyond the shoulder of the next house and then gone. It had hardly disappeared when the nose of another tank appeared, following the first. Again I commanded and begged and pleaded; my voice broke and I think I was crying, and still he didn’t fire. And the second tank passed, unhurt.
When it was gone, I ran back to find out what had gone wrong with the bazooka, what had happened to the man carrying it The poor bastard told me that he hadn’t been able to fire because his assistant wasn’t there to pull the safety pin from the rocket! That’s what he’d learned in basic training— that the assistant pulls the safety pin—and so (his tone said) if his assistant didn’t happen to be around, how could he be expected to fire the weapon? I told him to pull the goddamn pin himself (I could hear another tank approaching), and at that moment the lost assistant, Frank H., appeared. I asked where he’d been, and he said he was looking for his bag of bazooka ammunition. What the hell did he mean, “looking for it”? I roared. Well, he’d put it down for a minute outside some house and then he’d gone on and forgotten it. When he remembered and went back for it, he couldn’t find the house. His carelessness meant that we now had but one rocket.
There wasn’t time to properly ream him out. I gave hasty orders and prepared to return to my forward vantage point Before leaving, I told a grenadier to move to a position where he, too, could get a shot at the approaching tank. And that poor bastard had tears in his eyes as he showed me his grenade launcher, packed solid with mud. He’d dropped his rifle in a ditch during the bombing attack.
This whole episode makes us look pretty slipshod and blundering, but it demonstrates that the war wasn’t always heroics and cool efficiency in our army. True, not all bazooka teams were compounded of slow wits and carelessness. But when you were short of men (and you were always short of men), you used what you had, even when you knew beforehand that they’d probably bungle their particular job. There wasn’t any choice.
The third tank appeared, and just as in the first one, the tank commander stood in the open turret, carelessly exposed. And at last our bazooka team went into action. The result was what you might expect: it was the only rocket we had and it was too low, damaging the tank only slightly and failing to halt it. Bob Berthot saved the day: hunched behind a steaming mound of manure, he picked off the tank commander with a rifle bullet
Leaving the squad, I began to work toward the end of the village, following the direction taken by the tanks. I kept to the rear of the burning houses, out of sight of the road. There was a sweating, retching moment in a turnip patch when I stumbled over something pink and naked and newly dead. For a few palsied seconds I thought it was the body of a newborn baby, and then 1 realized it was a baby pig, so young that the skin was still moist and raw.
Darting through ruined gardens and dancing like a cat over the hot and tumbled bricks of houses still smoldering, I reached the crossroads at the end of the village. The tanks were there, catty-corner from the house where I crouched. They had drawn under the sheet-iron roof of a vast hay shed, a skeleton structure of heavy poles and open sides. There they rested, the muzzles of their guns facing us. The tank crews were covering them with hay, and I could catch stray fragments of their conversation, hear the sound of their feet as they climbed around. I slipped to the courtyard at the rear of the house, preparing to go back and collect some men with antitank weapons. A second house stood on the far side of the courtyard, fronting upon the side road that led to the intersection. As I darted across the open yard I saw something moving in the field and altered my course slightly, heading for the house. It was very quiet now; there was no sound but the crackling of flames and the low moaning of cattle.
Fragments of food and scattered articles of German equipment in the kitchen of the little house indicated the recent presence of the enemy. In the bedroom on the second floor I found a window that offered observation of the field, and screening myself cautiously behind the cheap lace curtains, I peered out. Stretched across the field in a long defense line were several dozen German soldiers, hurriedly digging foxholes. A hundred yards beyond them stood an ornate house, and in the shadow of the porte cochere was the darker shape of a German tank, large size. In the neighboring field two self-propelled guns had drawn into position, facing the village. It was an impressive setup, and I recalled with pain our own lack of armored protection.
I raced downstairs and out the back door, heading for home. As I stepped from the house I heard the rumble of a tank and froze against the back wall. I caught sight of Bob Berthot then. He was on the opposite side of the courtyard, crouched beside a crumbled wall, and from his strained position I knew that he, too, had heard the tank. I considered the width of the yard between us and wondered if I could get across before the tank pulled up. The twenty-five yards between me and safety stretched wider and wider, and I teetered in an agony of indecision while the noise of the tank grew steadily louder. Then it was too late, the tank was in sight, moving up the road toward me, less than twenty feet from where I stood, rigid and unbreathing. I shook under the slow grinding of its advance and prayed that it would keep going, not stop. Please don’t let it stop here! It stopped as it reached the courtyard, stopped and swiveled to face the village. I could hear the talk and laughter of the tank crew; I could see the black hulk of the tank when I inched to the corner of the house and strained my vision around it. I could have reached out and touched the blunt nose of the 88.
I couldn’t see Berthot now, but I whispered his name. He didn’t hear, and I tried again. Then again and again. On the sixth try he appeared, directly across from me but concealed from the tank by the wall at his side. The tank having shut off its motors, he assumed it had gone and started to his feet. Frantically I waved him down again, and then, across the courtyard that separated us like a wall, I loud-whispered my instructions and sent him back to report. In a few seconds his twisting, dodging figure was out of sight—and it was a lonely day then. If I were going to be killed or captured, I wished I wasn’t alone, I wished that someone was there with me.
With the shoulder of the house screening me from the tank, I crept to a chicken house and crawled in. Watched by gravely curious hens, I searched for an exit to the field beyond. There was a window, but it was blocked by a bicycle and a clutter of discarded furniture. With trembling, feather-tipped hands I cleared the window and crawled through. My rifle clattered against the window frame and sweat sprang out on my palms, but I was out in the field, I was moving. I might yet die, but not like an animal, not trapped and cowering.
I crept along the base of a low wall, the prickling skin of my body reminding me that a sharp-eyed sniper in the German C.P. could easily pick me off. Then the wall came to an end and an eight-foot gap stretched between me and the buildings toward which I yearned. Only eight feet to safety, but under the nose of the German tank.
They saw me when I streaked across, and the 88 let go with an angry whoosh! The shell exploded a short distance away and I was pelted with twigs and bits of brick.
Home again, I reported to Sergeant Torrey, who had become our platoon leader when Sergeant Misa went home on furlough. Somebody, whether Torrey or one of the officers, flubbed his dub in the hours that followed, because nothing was done about knocking out those damned tanks, not a blasted thing. After a tormenting period of indecision, Shorty and his squad were ordered to the house from which I’d seen the tanks, their mission “to keep watch on the hay shed.” When Shorty reached the house, he found that the tank that had scared the
pants off me was gone, and only the two in the hay shed remained.
Sometime during the period in which we were stalemated by indecision, I went back to a building I’d passed en route to the crossroads. It was a fine brick stable and there were animals inside, suffering. The stable itself was undamaged, but the bricks were hot to the touch, and smoldering wood and hay from the burning buildings on either side had made a choking torment of the air. Entering the stable, I discovered that the beasts were chained to their stalls, safeguarded by their cautious owner before he himself took off for safety. I winced from the sight of the swollen tongues, the bloodshot eyes, the poor heads that strained at the stanchions. The lock of one stanchion was broken, and I freed the animal that had been imprisoned by it. She looked at me with dumb eyes, and I could not force or persuade her from the stable and into the open air. Unable to break the mesh of chains and locks securing the other animals, I carried water in my helmet from the nearest well and poured it into the feeding troughs. I’d thought they would lap it greedily, but they sniffed at it and would not touch it, looking back at me with frightened eyes. Whatever it was they asked of me, I could not understand and could not grant, and I left quickly.
I collected my squad and we scooted across the road, dodging the bursts of machine-gun fire from the tanks at the crossroads. Our assigned position was another “courtyard village,” a house and attached outbuildings enclosing a great square courtyard. The house proper was gutted by fire, but tottering walls and smoking rafters testified to the original size of the building. It was still burning.
There were civilians in the cellar, living there while the house burned down over their heads. They came out when they heard us and ran to us, weeping and hysterical. One man was crying bitterly, brokenly, and he wanted to embrace us. I dodged him—I was suddenly unbearably tired and oppressed by all that remained to be done, by all that had been done. He disappeared in the cellar, returning a moment later with a bottle of schnapps, but I told him we had work to do and could not drink until later. I watched him to make sure that he took it back to the house. Then we started to dig in. It was dark now, but the burning village crimsoned the sky, threw our shadows in giant, flickering relief against red clouds. Smoke from burning hay writhed heavily over the ground.
On a bed in the cellar lay the patriarch of the house, wounded in the afternoon’s bombing. Our medic dressed his wounds, but we could not satisfy his pleading daughter, who begged us to get an ambulance and take him to a hospital
Bales of hay smoldered on the lawn before the house. Originally they had guarded the cellar windows against shrapnel, but catching fire from the burning house, they had pouted smoke into the cellar until pulled away from the windows. They burned a long time.
Directly across the road was a fine modern house of stucco. With the houses on both sides burning fiercely, it was only a matter of time until it, too, started to burn. We watched the progress of the fire as it swept from room to room, licking the creamy walls, laughing triumphantly from conquered windows. The old fascination of fire was irresistible, and in our transfixed pleasure there was little trace of the horror that would temper our relish of a fire in our own hometowns. This was spectacle; this was circus; this was Rome blazing, and Tyre and Nineveh, and no personal stake of kinship involved us.
The house belonged to one of the women in the cellar. There was no surprise on her face when she saw her home burning—only a numbed acceptance, an emotionless misery more painful to observe than hysterics. She could not stay away from the sight. She would go to the cellar, but within half an hour she would be at my side once more, looking steadily at the blazing ruin across the road. She said nothing to me, and I heard only a few low moans, but she stared until her eyes filled and the tears rolled soundlessly down her face. She covered her head with her apron for a moment, and her body rocked in the silent impotence of grief, the ancient rocking grief of women.
Most of the civilians were in a large cellar room bulging with beds, chairs, dishes, and luggage. Torrey set up his C.P. in a storeroom, sharing the space with a vast bin of potatoes. The room smelled beautifully of apples. In an adjoining storeroom there was a luxurious bed of inlaid wood and a refugee from Bonn, a wearily attractive woman of thirty. She was dressed in a dark blue shirt and slacks. Haggard with fear and exhaustion, she looked curiously like the “gray girl of Bonn.” Her husband was a Luftwaffe officer, and there had been no word from him for many months. She smoked an incredible number of my cigarettes and talked nervously in a dull monotone. At the faintest whisper of sound from a distant plane, she would run to me and wrap her arms tightly about my waist, burying her head on my chest I could feel the violent quivering of her body, and I would pat her shoulder gently and murmur meaningless comfort. When the planes were gone, she’d straighten up, toss her hair back, and ask for another cigarette.
The house burning over our heads kept the cellar pleasantly warm. Only two outside walls remained now, and the flames were playing with them, teasing them with light flirting tongues. From the road it appeared that the adjoining buildings were also burned to the ground, but the courtyard behind them was sunken, and a layer of rooms below the road level stood unharmed. The irony of their survival was that they were workrooms: a laundry, several grain bins, a pump room, a root cellar. No living quarters remained. The same irony of destruction had fingered the buildings across the courtyard where the farm laborers had lived: the living quarters were gone, and only the living quarters. The front wall of one building had been sheared away, exposing the devastated interior—blackened streamers of wallpaper, a porcelain stove toppled on its side, an iron bed, fire-twisted and obscene. But the next building, a wooden shed noisy with barnyard fowl, was untouched.
Access to the fields and pastures beyond was possible through an outside door in one of the barns, offering us a quick and almost safe route to positions from which we could observe the German tanks in the hay shed, two hundred yards away. I concentrated the squad at that vital corner and we dug in as quietly as possible.
About nine p.m. Torrey called the squad leaders together at the C.P. He gave us the bad news tersely: the C.O. had ordered him to send out a combat patrol to knock out those two tanks. A sweet little sonofabitch of an assignment, and our respective hearts hit bottom. We drew cards for it, high man to go. (That was a favorite custom in our outfit: I don’t know whether other outfits used it. Our ranking noncoms hated to select men for an unpleasant job, so we always drew for the chance to be a hero. I wasn’t very fond of the system: I am phenomenally unlucky at cards, and ill luck had tapped me for most of the night patrols we’d done during the winter.)
We drew: Shorty, Greg Luecke, and I—high man to take the mission. I drew first and my card was a jack. My heart flapped miserably against my boot soles, but I struggled for a poker face and tried to look unconcerned. I fooled nobody. Greg drew next and pulled a queen. I tried a new expression this time: gentle sympathy. Again I fooled nobody. Then it was Shorty’s turn. An ace! Greg and I didn’t dare look at Shorty.
No definite hour had been assigned for the job: Shorty could go when he chose. We talked it over and decided that Shorty’s team should be composed of men drawn from all three squads. We settled on two a.m. as the best hour because the moon would have set by then. The patrol would set out from my positions at the corner of the barn.
Returning to my squad, I inquired about any recent activity of the tanks and received contradictory answers. All of the men had heard ominous rumbles from the hay shed, but none could agree on their meaning. Some said the tanks had just been warming up; others asserted they’d pulled out A few swore that more tanks had arrived to join the two at the crossroads. There was no way to check these conflicting reports: the moon had set, and a heavy ground mist cut visibility to less than fifty feet. The men were jittery, suspecting thousands of Germans creeping up under cover of the mist.
Shorty and I discussed the problem once more and decided it would be best to go far out on the fla
nk and approach the tanks circuitously in order to hit their rear ends. However, when we laid our plan before the men who were to make up the patrol, they rejected it emphatically and said in effect, “If you please, sir—no!" And they meant it (Who said the army wasn’t democratic?) We held a kind of loose-jointed town meeting and finally agreed on a revised plan: they would crawl into the field at such an angle that their fire could be directed against the sides of the tanks.
One at a time they crept over the lip of our defenses and slipped silently into the mist—Shorty, three bazooka teams, one rifle team. Our intent had been to stagger the teams across the field, the first team to fire first, then the second, finally the third—all in rapid succession and each team streaking for home immediately upon discharging its rocket.
The last man had hardly crawled out of sight when some nervous character loused up the operation by firing his rocket. The other teams were not yet in position, of course, but the ill- timed shot forced them to fire also, and in a few seconds the entire patrol was back in the hole, the men tumbling over themselves in their anxiety to reach safety.
Of the three rockets fired, two exploded harmlessly in the field beyond the hay shed. The third hit something that rang metallically—we decided later it must have been one of the steel posts of the shed—but failed to explode. The mission had been a flop, and it was even more aggravating to learn the following morning that the tanks had gone from the hay shed several hours before our patrol set out. A neighboring unit saw them leave. The long torment of the night had been needless: the tension of waiting to see who would be chosen for the patrol, the worse tension of waiting for zero hour.
Shorty was too downhearted to want to report to Torrey on the mission, so I walked to the C.P. and delivered a somewhat puffed-up account. It was deliciously warm in the cellar, and Torrey invited me to sleep there, but I felt restless away from the squad and refused. I went back to the barn, made a pallet of hay, and covered myself with a German overcoat I’d found. Half an hour later I was awakened by someone who told me to rash to the C.P.: Toney wanted me. When I reached there, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, the cellar was full of smoke and hysteria, and Torrey was no longer there. And I was the platoon leader.
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