by Leo Kessler
‘Now, this is what I want to know,’ Donner continued. ‘Firstly when and where is your First Division going to attack. Secondly, who was your informant about Colonel von Dodenburg within the city?’ He thrust his face close to Wertheim’s, puffed up now to the size of a balloon. ‘Now then, Jew, what do you say?’
With the last of his strength, knowing already what the results of his action would be, Wertheim hawked and spat directly into that terrible face.
Donner sprang back, pale with shock. With the spittle dripping down his cheek, he cried: ‘Schwarz – Schwarz, hit the filthy bastard!’
A flood of icy water hit him in the face. Wertheim came to, spluttering with shock. He blinked rapidly several times. But the mist would not clear and for some reason that he could not establish, his eyes would not open properly. His vision was limited to a blurred slit. Then a pair of highly polished boots stepped into his line of vision. They halted. One of them thudded into his side as he lay in the puddle of water. He gasped with pain.
‘You’re awake, Jew, are you?’ the metallic voice said. ‘Good, well you’ve had your little sleep. Now we’re going to get the answer to our questions without wasting any more time. Schulze, fill it up.’
‘Must we?’ a worried voice asked a long way away.
‘There is no time to be squeamish, von Dodenburg,’ the metallic voice answered. ‘The fate of Aachen depends upon this. If you don’t like it, you can go away till it’s all over.’
‘No, I’ll stay.’
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of rushing water. Wertheim tried to raise his head to ascertain what it was. But he simply did not have the strength.
Finally the rushing sound stopped. ‘It’s full now, sir,’ snapped the Hamburg voice of one of his torturers.
‘Thank you, Schulze. All right, you can begin.’
The man with the Hamburg voice must have hesitated, for the command was repeated: ‘All right, Schulze, I said you can begin, man! Don’t you understand German?’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry sir.’
The next instant, a big hand seized Wertheim by the scruff of the neck. His head was forced down. Through the puffed slits that were his eyes, he stared down at a sheet of water. With sudden terror, he realised what they were going to do to him and he kicked out desperately. The man holding him had been expecting the move. He dodged the blow easily. The next moment his head was forced into the bath. His mouth opened. Water poured in. Frantically he tried to breathe. The water filled his lungs. He squirmed and struggled like a madman. But he could not escape that vice-like grip. A roaring blackness swamped him. Just when he felt he must drown, the pressure decreased and he was allowed to flop face-downwards on the tiled floor retching agonisingly and vomiting blood and water, his heart beating like a trip-hammer.
‘Do you want to answer my questions now, Jew?’ The boot thudded into his broken ribs once again. But now he no longer felt the pain, just an overwhelming sense of relief at being able to breathe again.
‘It’s no use, General,’ the Prussian voice said, its horror apparent even to the man lying in the pool of bloody vomit on the floor. ‘He won’t crack and time’s running out. Leave him.’
‘He’ll crack, von Dodenburg, don’t worry. They always crack in the end. Schulze, once more please – this time a little longer.’
This time someone grabbed his feet and he was flung bodily into the bath. The side of his head struck the bottom. Blood-red stars exploded before his eyes. The bubbles of air shot from his mouth and his lungs started to fill with water. He writhed crazily and fought to escape that terrible hold. He evacuated his bowels with fear. He knew he was drowning. It was a matter of seconds now. A red roar filled his ears. In a second he would be dead.
They pulled him out just in time, vomiting pink-tinged water and screaming between his frantic hungry gasps for air, ‘I’ll talk … I’ll talk … please let me talk …’
And leaning cynically against the wall of the bathroom, staring down at the helpless pathetic wretch of a prisoner, Donner laughed.
‘The First kicks off its attack at zero five hours tomorrow morning,’ Wertheim whispered in a husky voice, his eyes fixed on the floor.
‘Where?’ Donner rasped.
Wertheim did not answer immediately. Von Dodenburg leaned forward anxiously.
‘Where?’ the SS General persisted.
Wertheim swallowed hard. ‘Verlautenheide,’ he whispered, so low that his silent listeners had to strain to understand. ‘It’s near—’
‘Yes, we know,’ Donner snapped irritably, ‘we know. But what is the First’s objective?’
The Jewish officer, his sorely beaten face already beginning to turn a hideous green and black, licked his bloody lips as if he were reluctant to answer. Donner thrust forward his hideous mutilated face aggressively, an unspoken threat in his one eye.
Wertheim whispered. ‘Crucifixion Hill.’
‘Where?’ von Dodenburg broke in.
‘Height 239 – where you took me prisoner.’
Von Dodenburg looked at Donner triumphantly. ‘Of course,’ he cried, ‘the height. It dominates the whole area. If they link up there, with the other Ami division coming up from Rim-burg, they’ve got us cut off from our supplies. Then they can reduce the city at their leisure.’ He turned to Schwarz, who seemed unable to take his eyes off the broken prisoner’s face, ‘Major Schwarz, alert the panzer grenadiers. They can beef up the men on the height. We’ll keep the tank companies in reserve lest the Amis throw a feint at the city itself.’
Schwarz shook himself out of his reverie. ‘Yessir,’ he snapped, clicking his heels together like the excellent soldier he was.
‘Schulze, can Matz drive?’ he swung round on the big NCO. ‘Or is that shoulder of his too bad?’
‘The only thing that’ll stop Matz, sir,’ Schulze said, relieved now that the nasty business of torture was over, ‘is a big burst of HE in his eggs!’
Von Dodenburg had no time for humour. ‘Good. Bring up the command tank. We’re going out to the height with the panzer grenadiers. And check that the smoke launcher is armed. I don’t want to be caught up there by Ami infantry with no smoke grenades, in case we’ve got to take off smartly. You saw what that Ami bazooka did to the jeep.’
‘You don’t need to draw me a picture, sir,’ Schulze said, taking a last look at the man whose face he had helped to beat to a pulp. ‘Mrs Schulze’s boy is awfully anxious to come out of this war with his skin intact.’ He saluted and disappeared through the open door followed by Schwarz a moment later.
Von Dodenburg bit his lip thoughtfully, while from below the first sounds of the emergency move – whistles, commands, angry shouts – start to float up. ‘General, I’ll need more muscle in case that feint develops into something serious. Can you release one of your stomach battalions for transfer to the Big Red One front?’
Donner shook his head. ‘No, von Dodenburg. You’ll have to make do with what you’ve got.’
‘Can I go and clean myself up?’ Wertheim interrupted.
The two SS officers turned. They’d forgotten about their prisoner. His head was hanging low so that they could not see the sudden determination in his pain-filled, bloodshot eyes. Wertheim weakly indicated his soiled pants.
Donner shook his head. ‘We have no time for that now, Jew,’ he said firmly. ‘Besides, what the devil does it matter what you look like? You will die within the hour as soon as we have finished our work here.’
Von Dodenburg looked at the pathetic wreck of a man, swaying slightly as he stood there before them, the water dripping from his torn uniform. ‘There is a latrine at the end of the corridor.’ He slapped a hand against his revolver holster. ‘You can go in there and clean up, but don’t try anything foolish.’
‘Thank you,’ Wertheim croaked, still not raising his face, afraid that the look in his eyes would give him away.
He started to stagger down the corridor, trailing water after him. The two SS officers
watched him, amazed that he could still walk after his terrible punishment. Von Dodenburg was the first to realise what the Jew was going to do.
‘HALT!’ he roared.
Wertheim broke into a shambling run. The window he had spotted from the room where the black bastards had tortured him was only ten yards away now.
‘HALT – OR I FIRE!’ von Dodenburg yelled, fumbling with the flap of his holster.
Wertheim drew on his last reserves of energy. Sucking in a deep breath and feeling the pain sear through his broken ribs into his torn lung, he flung himself towards the window just as von Dodenburg fired.
The slug slammed into the wall of the corridor a yard from his head. Plaster and brick showered his face. He shook his head angrily and, a split second later, dived forward. He hit the window headfirst, shattering the glass. The high-pitched scream of agony was ripped from his mouth by the wind as he hurtled to the ground. He struck the cobble yard four storeys below at nearly 60 mph. The fall broke every bone in his body, which bounced high into the air like a rubber ball, before flopping down once more. He twitched convulsively in his death throes then lay still, arms flung out dramatically, staring unseeingly at the dark German sky, dead at last.
High above, the two black-clad officers stared in reluctant respect at the body illuminated in the thin icy-blue beam of the command Tiger’s headlights. Blood seeped everywhere, outlining Wertheim in a star of red. Then, mercifully, Schulze turned off the headlights and all was silent save for the steady purr of the Royal Tiger’s diesels.
Note
1. National Socialist name for Austria after its incorporation in the Reich after 1938.
THREE: THE BIG PUSH
‘We’re the SS, Schulze, hated and feared wherever we go and one day those people who hate and fear us will attempt to take their revenge for these last five years. What else can we do but to fight on?’ Colonel von Dodenburg to Sergeant-Major Schulze, October 1944.
ONE
The great 155-mm shell tore the dawn stillness apart.
‘Arseholes up – three cheers, America!’ Schulze yelled next to Colonel von Dodenburg and ducked.
The shell exploded with a hellish crash two hundred metres beyond Crucifixion Hill. Flame spurted high into the air, and the men crouched on top of the Royal Tiger were showered with dirt and pebbles.
‘The symphony concert has begun,’ von Dodenburg cried sardonically.
The Ami ‘Long Tom’1 spoke again. Automatically the observers underneath the towering cross sucked in their heads. Another shell threw up a great plume of smoke and dirt a hundred metres ahead of them.
‘They’re ranging in, sir,’ Matz, his shoulder heavily bandaged, yelled, as the full weight of the Ami barrage descended upon the panzer grenadiers dug in at the crest of the hill. ‘Here comes number three.’ Von Dodenburg’s answer was drowned in the roar of fire. Their Royal Tiger shuddered violently, as if it were a child’s tin toy and not sixty tons of Krupp steel.
Now the whole front beyond the Ami start-line near Verlautenheide was deluged in a wave of fire from Huebner’s eleven artillery battalions, supported by 4.2-inch chemical mortar batteries, borrowed from ‘Lightning Joe’s’ corps artillery. The world became a screaming, red-roaring hell, as the earth beneath the panzer grenadiers rocked violently.
Above them the little L-5 spotter plane buzzed round in slow mocking circles, directing the softening-up barrage on to the German positions. Once a shell-crazed soldier sprang up on to the top of his foxhole and, legs braced apart, wild meaningless phrases tumbling from his slack, foam-tinged lips, fired an enraged burst at the Ami plane. It missed by a good hundred metres and a red-hot piece of shrapnel tore his arm off.
The trenches of the inexperienced stomach battalion, dug in a thousand metres below in the direction of Verlautenheide, were full of soaked, scared men, or silent, bloodied messes of pulped flesh and crushed bone. And then everything was uncannily silent. It seemed even more sinister than the terrible barrage which had gone before. As the Ami infantry started to come out of their trenches to the attack, it began to rain.
‘By the great whore of Buxtehude, ‘Schulze cursed, ‘and now even the angels are pissing on us!’
The GIs of the Big Red One’s 18th Regiment slithered up the muddy, sodden bank behind which they had been crouching and lurched forward, helmeted heads bent against the bitter rain. Before them the Shermans had formed up into a ragged line. They doubled forward with mud-heavy boots to take cover behind their earth-churning wake. For they knew what to expect.
As the daylight crept across the desolate countryside from the east, the Kraut mortars opened up. The pillars of smoke rose swiftly towards the black-bellied low rainclouds. A crippled Sherman heeled to a stop and started to burn fiercely. Its infantry tail doubled heavily to the cover of the next one. Another tank stopped a mortar bomb and exploded almost immediately. White and red tracer ammunition zig-zagged wildly into the dripping sky.
Still the GIs plodded on, apparently ignoring the din of war around them. It seemed to them as if it was nature they were fighting, not human beings: the cold rain that dripped from their helmets into their collars, the mud that clung in heavy, clotted masses to their rubber boots, the slippery ground over which they stumbled. Soaked, sick, stunned by the roar of the Shermans and the din of the mortars, they trudged on across the bitter fields.
Colonel Smith, the regimental commander, looked back at his men. They were plodding in slow thoughtful groups, rifles and grease-guns at their hips. The attack was going okay. Then without warning he heard the familiar high-pitched burr of a Spandau. The morning air was suddenly filled with the hiss of lead. Men were crashing heavily to the mud almost before Smith heard the rattle of the German machine-guns. Here and there the replacements dropped hesitantly to one knee. In a second and they would be lying there full length, their attack paralysed.
Smith jumped on to a slight rise in full view of his men and the enemy. He waved his swagger stick with the silver head, his only weapon. ‘All right, boys,’ he cried above the rattle of small arms. ‘We can’t stay here all day. Only the stiffs’ll be doing that.’ He smiled. ‘All I’m asking you to do is move up to that next hedgerow over there. That ain’t much to ask, is it?’ He looked down at an eighteen-year-old replacement with glasses whose ashen-lips were trembling violently.
‘That ain’t much to ask, is it son?’ his face sad and unsoldierly.
‘No, sir,’ the boy gulped and got to his feet.
‘That’s the ticket!’ Smith said enthusiastically. He turned, waved his silver-headed stick, and started to plod forward again.
The machine-guns chattered violently. Still they advanced, filled with the infantryman’s unreasoning hope that it would be easy this one time, drawing steadily closer to the hedgerow in which the stomach battalion had dug themselves. Thin violet lights crackled along it. The bullets cut swathes in their ranks. The fire intensified until a concentrated hail of lead hit them from the right flank too. Each man suddenly found himself alone, engulfed in smoke and death, a lone gambler with fate.
Smith blew his whistle. ‘At the double,’ he yelled. ‘Keep moving, boys!’ Clumsy in his mud-heavy boots, he began to double towards the right flank.
His men followed, wild obscene curses flung from their wet lips, their eyes wild, white and staring. The mg nests on the flank opened up with all they had, but they stumbled on in the face of the fire. Man after man toppled over, faces upturned and contorted, hands clawing the air in agony. Within seconds the first line had vanished, and the ground in front of the mg nests was piled high with American dead.
Smith dropped into a shell-hole, gasping violently. All around him the survivors of the second line did the same, their hands trembling like leaves, their chests heaving, eyes blurred so that they could not even aim their weapons. He grabbed the walkie-talkie and called for mortar cover.
For what seemed an age, the survivors of the 18th Regiment clung to the hollow while wave after wav
e of machine-gun fire swept their ranks, washing them away like shipwrecked sailors clinging to the debris of a sinking ship. Then the fire of the massive 4.2-inch mortars descended on the German positions and the hail of lead ceased.
Smith did not waste his opportunity. He sprang to his feet, his once immaculate uniform smeared with mud from top to bottom. He wiped his mouth free and blew his whistle. ‘All right, let’s move it!’ he yelled above the roar of the barrage.
The men crouching among the dead of the shell-holes hesitated.
‘I said – move it,’ he snarled.
Still they did not move.
A buck sergeant poked his head up hesitantly. ‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’ Smith yelled.
‘Kowalski, sir.’
‘All right, Kowalski, you’re acting top kick of this outfit. Now get your guys moving – fast!’
Polack Kowalski, whose ambition had never extended beyond the rank of sergeant, jumped out of his hole. ‘All right, youse guys,’ he yelled in his heavily accented English, ‘get ya asses out of dem holes! Come on!’ He lent urgency to his command by grabbing the nearest soldier and dragging him physically out of his hole.
Led by Colonel Smith and the new Master Sergeant Polack Kowalski, the GIs stumbled forward. Now at last they saw the camouflaged German helmets crouched over the thin quivering barrels of their Spandaus. All their pent-up fury and bitterness at the war, the CO, Kowalski, the rain, transferred itself to the Krauts. Yelling wildly, all fear gone, they launched themselves forward at the enemy. Kowalski was shot through the head in the first minute and the soldier he had kicked out of his hole heedlessly stamped over his dead body, forcing it deeper into the gory mud. Then they were in and among the Krauts.
The enemy tried to surrender. They dropped their smoking weapons. Raising their hands high, they cried, ‘no shoot … no shoot … comrade … comrade!’