by Bill Mesce
Harry let up on the trigger. Makris and Wright followed suit.
But not Horse.
And not the tank.
It would only be later it would occur to Harry this was not some sadistic excess. Bonilla – ever the magnificent, masterful warrior – had the tank rake the tree line, pushing the Germans still further back. Now, none of them would even dare creep back to the edge of the forest to so much as snipe at the men in the creek bed.
Finally – thankfully, Harry thought – the shooting in the firebreak died down, ended. The tank returned to its nest. A moment later, Bonilla was at the wheel of a jeep, across the creek then off the road, skidding and sliding across the open ground to pull up at the base of the slope below where Sisto and his men were still engaged with the enemy on the high ground on the far side of the road.
Harry rolled over on his back, let himself slide down the bank from the rim. He’d done nothing more than hold down the slender, steel crescent of the trigger but he felt utterly drained, gasping for air. The cold wind made him aware of the sheen of sweat coating his face. His hands were squishy with damp inside his wool gloves. Yet his mouth, lips, throat…desert dry. He fumbled his canteen from its holster. He’d not been outside long enough for the water to gel as it had in the Huertgen, but it was still bitterly cold, so much so he could only take it in small sips that drew aches from his teeth. But his thirst seemed unquenchable.
“Can I borrow those, Suh?” It was Wright, asking for the field glasses. Harry handed them over.
Wright crawled up to the bow in the trunk. Harry presumed he was looking out at the body of Spider Valence.
“I’m scared,” Chicken Ellis quaked. “Horse, I don’t wanna die!”
“You ain’t dyin’, Chicken,” Horse said. “Hey, Colonel, ain’t it time we thought ‘bout gettin’ the fuck outta here? I should get this kid back to the hotel!”
“Why?” Makris asked dryly, “You think ‘Young Dr. Kildare’ is waitin’ there for you?”
Harry rolled over on his side. “How’re you doing, Corporal?” he asked Lyle Bott.
“It hurts like a sonofabitch, Colonel,” Bott winced, clutching at his side, “but aside from that – ” he managed a grin at the paradox “ – I don’t feel too bad.”
“Where you hit?”
Bott pointed to a ragged bullet hole in his great coat in the area of his ribs.
“Bad?”
“Tell you the truth, I haven’t had the nerve to look.”
“I told him, I said, ‘Spider, you take him,’” Wright said, still looking out at the firebreak, “but he said, ‘No way I can carry him; you take him, Big Man.’”
Harry crawled up alongside Wright and took back the field glasses.
What he would remember with painful clarity later was the red: the spreading red stains on the white camouflage cloaks; the red sprays in the white snow.
Those are men – boys – that I killed. I killed. He felt his stomach twist, the taste of bile in the back of his mouth. He dropped the glasses to the huddled form that was Spider Valence. That is also a boy that I killed.
He had learned that horrible lesson of the front line. There are no mishaps or mistakes, no accidents. There are no “if only”‘s, “you have to understand”‘s, or “it’s not my fault” and “I did my best”‘s. There is a quite simple formula: you fail, and someone dies. And then you carry that death with you. Always.
Harry let his feverish face drop into the welcome coolness of the snow.
“Fuck all a you!” declared an exasperated Horse. “I’m takin’ this kid back ‘n’ if anybody has a fuckin’ problem with that – ”
“Shuddup!” Bott commanded.
“C’mon, Corporal, I’m talkin’ about you, too! We gotta get – ”
“Shuddup! Can’t you hear it you stupid arse?”
Harry picked up his head; he heard it as well. The mix of clanks and squeaks, familiar but different. Heavier. The engine noise underpinning them more of a growl than the half–track’s motor had been.
“That’s a diesel,” Wright noted.
“Another half–track?” asked Harry.
“That sounds like a hell of a big fuckin’ half–track,” Makris said.
“That’s no half–track,” Wright said.
Harry brought the field glasses back to his eyes, went up on his knees for better vantage.
On the far side of the draw he could see Dominick Sisto, Peter Ricks, and Juan Bonilla at the rim of the trees, their attention focused down the draw toward the source of the noise. Behind them, several of their men were helping two wounded comrades down the slope toward the jeep.
Harry swung his view toward the Stuart concealed behind the gasthaus. Farron was looking his way, hands out, palms up, shoulders in a shrug. Harry responded with a like pose: What is it? Damned if I know.
He turned the glasses back down the draw. He did not have a clear view. He could see over the wrecked Volkswagen, but his sight line was interrupted by the rising and falling flames, the eddies of smoke from the burning vehicle.
“Oh–oh…”
First into view from round the bend at the far end of the draw was the cudgel–like muzzle break floating along about two meters off the ground, then the long, tapered barrel of the high velocity 75 mm gun followed by the low, clean lines of a panzer: a Mark IV. The diesel engine revved as the driver fed it more fuel to coax it up the grade, and the noise sounded like a snarl in the echoing confines of the draw.
Harry turned back to Farron. He didn’t know the proper hand–signals, but pointed adamantly down the draw and made a “T” with his hands. It was enough for Farron; he nodded in understanding.
“What’re we stickin’ around for now?” pressed Horse. “For that thing to come out here and mush us into hamburg? You think me ‘n’ the kid are just gonna lay here – ”
“For Chrissakes, Horse, can’t you just shut the fuck up for a minute?” Bott snapped, his anger fed as much by the pain in his side as his own concern. He turned to Harry. “Do you have any ideas on what we should do next, Colonel?”
The same question was on the faces of Spiro Makris and Big Man Wright.
Harry turned the glasses back to Sisto’s position. He was looking for some cue, some hint in that regard, but the three men seemed as much at a loss as Harry.
“What’s he want?”
Makris drew Harry’s attention back to Farron who’d been waving trying to gain his attention. The tanker began making signals and gesturing toward the draw.
“I’m not sure but I think he wants us to draw their fire,” Makris said.
“That’s his plan? Fuck that plan!” judged Horse. “We let that fuckin’ monster chase us around so he can bug out? Fuck him! I got a better plan! He plays bait while we bug the fuck out!”
But, again, that same acute intelligence that had destroyed Leonard Courie in a courtroom went to work here. Harry immediately understood a “bug–out” was not Farron’s plan. If so, the tanker would have headed his Stuart down the west–bound road at full speed the second he’d understood there to be a German tank headed their way while the walls of the draw and the bend in the road still concealed his presence. And, too, Harry remembered the ploy worked out between Bonilla and Farron that had brought about the demise of the armored car and the half–track.
But what the Stuart’s 37 mm gun was capable of against the 8 mm of armor on a 5–ton armored car was a marked difference from what it might manage against the 40–60 mm frontal armor of a 26–ton panzer. Harry could only assume Farron had something in mind.
His intellect also told him there was no time for him to explain all this to the men huddled with him along the bank of the creek and hope they would digest it. There was only time to force their commitment with an action.
He grabbed the grip of the .30 and squeezed the trigger.
“Are you outta you’re fuckin’ mind?” screamed Horse.
Harry lofted his line of fire over the burning Volkswagen, dropping –
as near as he could calculate through the curtain of flame and smoke – in the vicinity of the Mark IV. Even if his fire was striking the tank, he wondered if the crew – buttoned up within all that steel – would even be aware of the pinprick .30 strikes.
Wright and Makris, with more faith in Harry’s judgement than Horse, added the fire of their carbines to the effort. Bott painfully crawled up to Harry’s side to feed the ammo belt cleanly into the .30.
The German tank was, indeed, aware of them. The panzer ground to a halt. The low, sleek turret began to traverse bringing the long–barreled gun pointing in their direction, sighting – as Harry was doing – through the gap between the burning half–track and the wall of the draw, over the Volkswagen. Harry was still firing even as the muzzle settled on him, as if hypnotized snake–like by that Cyclopean eye.
A flash of light, smoke geysering out of the muzzle break, a detonation like thunder, that Harry felt in his chest. The curtain of smoke and flames from the Volkswagen flapped apart. He felt a blast of hot air as the high velocity shell passed a few meters above his head before landing thirty meters behind him.
The explosion, the pelting by frozen blocks of ground thrown up by the shell seemed to shake him from his trance.
“If I were you, Suh, I’d get down here!” It was Big Man Wright.
Harry was surprised to find himself the only man still up on the rim, the others having wisely dived for the bottom of the creek bank when the panzer had fired.
Bott did not wait for Harry’s cognitive processes to thoroughly re–engage, but grabbed him by the leg and pulled him down as the tank fired a second time.
This time, the shell landed short, but only by twenty meters. The explosion left Harry’s ears ringing, was close enough to actually bounce him nearly clear of the ground. Like the others, Harry found himself instinctively withdrawing into a fetal curl, squirming as if to push himself into the frozen mud of the bank.
“Ah, shit,” Makris said with bleak resignation. “He’s got us bracketed.”
Through the ringing in his hears, Harry could hear Horse: “You fuckin’ killed us you stupid shithead! You fuckin’ killed us!”
Harry closed his eyes and waited for the coup de grace. God, Cynthia, I’m so so sorry…
“What the hell is he doin’?” It was Bott, uncomfortably propped on an elbow to see over the top of the bank behind them.
Harry and the others followed Bott’s gaze.
The Stuart had charged out from behind the inn, across the road, its turret already swiveling to the left. The tank came to a sudden halt. Looking from the American tank to the German panzer, Harry winced at how puny the Stuart looked in comparison, it’s 37 mm a mere broomstick next to the threatening maw of the Mark IV’s gun.
What the hell is he doing?
Harry crawled to the top of the bank, brought up the field glasses. The Stuart’s gun fired, the round threading the narrow space between the half–track and the left wall of the draw. Much of Harry’s view was obscured by the burning vehicles at the near end of the pass but the American shell seemed to barely catch the Mark IV, hitting the panzer low and to the left.
The Mark IV’s turret began to swivel away from the creek.
“Get outta there,” Harry heard Bott mutter.
The Stuart fired again, the shell landing in the same place. Considering how neatly the American gunner had dispatched the armored car and the half–track, Harry wondered if something had gone awry with the Stuart’s gun sight.
The American tank fired a third shot; same place.
“Get outta there!”
Big Man Wright, with a quiet urgency: “He should run.”
The Mark IV’s gun was now nearly lined up on the American.
The 37 mm elevated, fired a fourth time, this round landing square on the front of the panzer’s turret, an effort – Harry guessed – to momentarily blind the German gunner, then the Stuart was off at full speed, wheeling about sharply to the right, its treads kicking up a spray of snow as it headed back toward the road, angling toward the far side of the firebreak. They had done their bit and were now making a run for it.
No one begrudged them.
“Run, goddammit!” Makris yelled.
“Gogogo!” Bott cheered.
The panzer had an extremely narrow field of fire between the half–track and the side of the pass. As soon as the Stuart had tossed off its last round, a touch of the throttle by its driver had moved it safely out of the fire lane. But someone in the panzer knew that to return to the road, the Stuart would have to re–cross the same line of fire. Rather than try to pursue the American tank by swiveling its gun this way and that, hoping to get a proper lead on the target, the Mark IV left its gun where it was, and as soon as the Stuart hove back into view, the German tank bucked as it loosed its shot.
The high velocity armor piercing shell tore through the armor of the Stuart’s small, boxy turret as if it were wet cardboard, setting off the 37 mm ammo in its storage racks. With a deafening clap, the combined blast separated the turret from the hull on a blinding white ball of flame, propelled it several meters into the air before it crashed back lopsidedly onto the hull, then tumbled into the snow where the stored cannon shells continued to explode in a spasmodic series.
Though the entire crew must have died instantly, the tank’s engine, now sputtering, continued to move the hull forward in fits and starts. To the Germans, this refusal to completely die warranted another round.
The second German shell impacted toward the rear, blasting two of the bogie wheels loose, severing the tread, punching through the thin armor of the engine compartment, igniting the tank’s fuel supply, finally imbedding itself in the engine block so forcefully it pushed the rear of the tank about in a near quarter–turn.
The process of destroying the American tank had taken five, perhaps six seconds.
Harry and the others could hear the Mark IV’s engine rev, a triumphant roar, as the panzer again began crawling up the road.
“Now can we scram outta here?” Horse demanded.
Harry continued to study the action of the German tank through his glasses. The panzer drew to within twenty meters of the vehicles burning at the end of the draw. Any one of them – the armored car, the half–track, the Volkswagen – might not have provided much of an obstacle for the 26–ton tank, but grouped together, and completely afire to boot, the panzer – for a moment – seemed to be at a loss as to how to deal with them.
Makris, almost amazed: “What a fuckin’ idiot!”
The panzer commander had decided to try to skirt the roadblock by going to his right, trying to squeeze alongside the half–track by putting most of his tank on the lower part of the slope of the pass.
Had the angle of that slope been less dramatic, the tank might have had a chance, but, as it was, the panzer was almost immediately in trouble. The sharp angle of the slope threw the tank’s center of gravity wildly off kilter, and the vehicle’s 26–tons began pulling the panzer sideways rather than to hold it to the ground; the treads could not gain sufficient traction to hold the slick, frozen surface of the slope. The diesel engine revved louder as the driver tried to nose the tank uphill, and keep his left–hand tread from burrowing itself edge–on in the drainage cut at the base of the wall of the pass. The driver made one full–power effort, the engines spewing blue exhaust, the tank still unable to halt its sideways slide.
“Good God…” Harry now understood what Farron had valiantly – and quite cleverly –been trying to do. It all made sense to him now, the American shells landing low and to the side of the panzer: Farron had been targeting his gun at the Mark IV’s right–hand tread. He had not been able to break the links as he’d hoped, but he had – it was now clear – managed to weaken them. The strain the Mark IV was now putting on them finished what the tanker had started. Through his lenses Harry saw the right–hand tread part and spew into the snow like ribbon spilling off its spool. The tank, with nothing now to hold the slope bu
t its naked bogie wheels, slid down the slope to a crashing stop with its left tread in the drainage cut.
While an immobile tank is hardly defenseless, its crew is painfully aware of how vulnerable it becomes. It was time to abandon. The commander’s hatch flew open but before the man could get his head clear of the coaming, he was driven back down inside by a burst of Thompson fire from above.
The Mark IV’s turret swiveled, aiming uphill. The upper rim of the draw was too close a range; the turret’s co–axial machine gun could not sufficiently depress to target the rim, only rake the trees at a height a man could easily evade. Desperate to fend off whoever was lurking above, the 75 mm gun now flared and roared. The shell neatly shattered the trunk of one fir, passed on to exit through the evergreen canopy in an eruption of sheared boughs and snow.
The same Thompson – another Thompson? Bonilla and Ricks working in tandem? – opened up on the Mark IV from further back down the draw, this time followed with a grenade that exploded harmlessly against the metal hide of the tank. But it was enough to draw the attention of the panzer’s guns and the turret swiveled about toward the rear, as if looking over its shoulder.
That’s when Harry saw Dominick Sisto. He had scaled up the slope leading out of the firebreak, just round from the entrance to the draw. As soon as the panzer’s turret had turned to face the rear, Sisto scurried round into the draw, struggling to keep his feet on the steep, icy slope, moving far enough uphill to stay clear of the limited traverse of the tank’s bow gun.
“What’s he carryin?” asked Makris, squinting across the distance.
“I can’t tell,” Harry said. Through the lenses, it almost looked as if Dominick was carrying a heavy suitcase.
Harry’s angle of view was rather poor. The full story would come from one of the survivors of the fight on that side of the draw. What Harry thought was a suitcase was the five gallon jerrican of spare petrol carried in the bracket of the rear panel of the jeep Bonilla had brought up.
High enough up the slope to safely clear the panzer’s bow gun, once uphill from the tank, Sisto allowed himself to slide down the slope on his rump, coming to a stop against the uphill bogie wheels. He moved to the rear of the hull, passing beneath the turret’s guns. He uncapped the petrol container, stuffed an armed grenade in the opening, and hoisted the jerrican up onto the rear deck of the panzer. In the few seconds he had, he certainly could not run back the way he’d come. For cover, there was only the tank itself, so he scurried round to the front of the tank, ducking below the hull machinegun and tucking himself in below the panzer’s bow.