by Dean Hughes
“If the Allies get across the river and take the Ruhr, the war will end quickly, don’t you think?” Brother Stoltz asked.
“One would think so. If they push on to Berlin, and Russia does the same, maybe Hitler will finally see that he has no choice. But who knows how this man thinks, he and his henchmen? The SS troops are ready to fight to the bloody end, no matter what happens.”
“What about this talk that Hitler will create a redoubt in Austria and hold out in the mountains?”
“He might try it. It would be like him to fortify a stronghold of some kind—especially there, at his Eagle’s Nest. And some fanatic Nazis would flee to such a place with him. If he commanded it, they would go, and they would die for him.”
Brother Stoltz wondered. Maybe the war could drag on for months if Hitler tried a last stand of that kind. Still, it seemed likely that Brother Stoltz would get a chance before long to make contact with Allied troops and escape Germany. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure that’s what he wanted to do. Maybe Peter would have the sense to move toward the American lines himself. If he could be taken prisoner by the British or Americans, and not by Russia, Brother Stoltz might be able to find him and gain his release.
“Did you hear that?”
Brother Stoltz hadn’t heard anything, but he listened now, and he detected a sound, although he couldn’t identify it.
Albert remained silent for a time, and then he said, “It’s an inspection crew on one of those pump cars.”
“What should we do?”
“Let’s wait. It’s still too soon to blow up the tracks.”
“But what if this crew finds the explosives?”
“I can’t let them do that.”
Brother Stoltz knew what that meant. He and Albert were sitting by the plunger box. If the explosives or the wires were discovered, the two of them could be dead men. The sound of the pump car was getting louder, but the car was moving slowly. “Some are probably walking and checking the tracks,” Albert whispered. He said nothing more, but he placed his hand on the plunger.
In a few more minutes voices were in the air, still at a distance. The slow pace of it all was almost more than Brother Stoltz could stand. “Maybe we should get away now,” he said.
“No. We hid the wires well. I’ve seen men walk right by these charges and never spot them. We have to wait until they give us no choice. If we don’t delay the supply trains, we’ve accomplished nothing.”
Brother Stoltz nodded. He shifted his weight a little, got into a better position to get up quickly. The pressure on his bad knee was painful, but he knew he couldn’t shift around again.
As the voices, the sound of the car, came closer, finally Brother Stoltz saw movement through the trees, saw the glare of the lanterns the men were carrying. Shadows were working their way along the tracks. A man with a deep voice said, “Anyone else ready to stop for a smoke?” Another man made some sort of joke, and the others laughed, but they didn’t stop yet. Brother Stoltz thought he heard at least five men, maybe six, but it was hard to make out that many distinctive shadows.
The crew was coming even with the wire now, and Brother Stoltz felt himself breathing in little gasps. The men seemed to be passing by, however. Brother Stoltz let his breath seep out, ever so slowly. But then he heard a startled voice, heard someone say, “What’s this?”
At the same moment, Albert drove the plunger into the box, and everything erupted. Brother Stoltz saw the flash and, for a second, the silhouette of bodies lifting off the ground, turning over. The debris slashed through the trees, and a concussion struck Brother Stoltz in the chest.
“Run!” Albert was shouting. And the two were already up.
Albert couldn’t hold himself back. He was in better condition, didn’t have knee problems. They hadn’t run far before Brother Stoltz was alone in the woods. He tried to hear Albert ahead of him, confused the sound with his own thrashing in the underbrush, but he kept pushing forward, no matter how much pain he felt.
And then he heard Albert. “Come on! You have to run faster. This way.”
Brother Stoltz wasn’t certain what to fear. Were some of those men alive and well enough to chase them? Or was it the noise that worried Albert—the rush of troops to the area? All Brother Stoltz knew was that Albert was in a panic, and the terror was enough to send him bolting into brush he couldn’t see, to accept the scratches on his face and the rips in his clothing.
And then they broke out of the woods. Albert leaped a rock fence, which Brother Stoltz had to climb onto and jump off. Then they ran hard through a pasture and down a hill. At the bottom, in a little cove filled with trees, was the motorcycle they had hidden. Albert was on it and had it started before Brother Stoltz could reach him and climb on behind.
“Hang on tight,” Albert commanded, and then he gunned the accelerator. The motorcycle leaped ahead, spraying rocks and dirt. They charged down the road, without a headlight, swerving through ruts and banging into holes. Brother Stoltz could see no road, couldn’t imagine how Albert was choosing his path. He ducked his head against Albert’s back, partly to streamline the wind flow, and partly not to see. He expected at any moment to be hurtled across the ground.
But Albert never hesitated, kept the motorcycle going all out. And then, as he reached a paved road and turned onto it, he swore bitterly. “We may have failed,” he said. “They’ll have another crew in there before long. They’ll fix those rails. We just have to hope they can’t get it done before morning.”
That brought the horror to a focus. Brother Stoltz saw the picture in his mind again, the flying bodies. All those men had to be dead or badly hurt, and for what?
“Why did you push the plunger?” Brother Stoltz shouted into Albert’s ear.
“What do you mean? To save our lives, of course.”
But that was not what Brother Stoltz had intended. He had wanted to save the lives of the paratroopers who would be landing in the morning. And he wanted to save German lives. That’s what all this had been about. He was helping to end the war more quickly. That had meant delaying a train, nothing more. Now he and Albert had killed those men, and Albert was saying it could all be for nothing. Brother Stoltz kept his head down, felt the air rush over him, and he needed that; he was getting sick to his stomach.
***
The bombardment suddenly intensified in the middle of the night. Big artillery guns were zeroed in on the German defenses on the east side of the Rhine, and the noise the guns made was beyond anything Alex had ever heard before. The roar, even from a safe distance, was constant, as though thunderbolts were striking several times a second, with never a hesitation in the clamor. Closer to morning, flights of bombers, with fighter escorts, came in waves by the hundreds.
Alex and Otto had awakened in the forest to all this chaos. After that, Alex lay awake and watched the explosions light up the western sky. But the bombs began to drop closer. He and Otto were not far from Wesel, and the town was obviously taking a pounding.
“We’d better move out of here,” Otto told Alex. “If one of those bombers overshoots its target, we’re in a bad spot.”
“But where can we go?”
“Let’s head north, away from Wesel, and then we can loop back to the west and watch for the drop.”
So the two set out in the dark. They worked their way through the trees until they felt safe, and then they waited for the sun to come up. The airborne troops would be taking off now, flying from France and England. It would be midmorning, Alex supposed, before the drop began. Until then, he was certain this barrage of fire would continue.
For the moment there seemed little chance that anyone would be looking for Alex and Otto, but it seemed strange to be moving about in German uniforms at a time like this. Once the Allied troops landed, Alex wished he had some way to discard the clothes and put something else on. There was no way to do that, however, so Alex and Otto simply tried to move as close to the drop zone as they dared so that once the battle was
over they could try to make contact with American or British forces. They were able to climb to the top of a hill, well out of the action but close enough that as the sun began to come up, they could see the dust fly and the trees burst as the bombing and artillery fire continued. The fire was aimed into the areas all around the drop zones, but in all the smoke and dust, it was hard to say whether German AA guns were being knocked out.
“By now, the first wave of ground troops should be across the Rhine,” Otto told Alex. That was true, according to the plan. Alex just hoped that the men hadn’t been shot up and stopped.
It was breathtaking and dreadful to watch the formed-up flights of bombers come over, to see the devastation on the ground. And it was hard to imagine that anyone in the middle of it could survive. But Alex knew better. If troops were dug in and didn’t take direct hits, they would be waiting when the paratroopers began their drop. He knew how long a parachute drop could seem when a man was watching tracer bullets flashing toward him. He wished now that he could have done more to pinpoint the sites of the German strongholds. This would be the largest airborne drop in history, even larger than D-day, and that meant a lot of men had to make it to the ground. Alex just hoped they weren’t falling into a trap.
It was just after ten o’clock when Alex saw the great armada approach. First came fighters, not transports: P-47s diving toward the landing zone, racing across the open areas, and then strafing the surrounding woods. Finally a big, lumbering transport, one of the new C-46s, appeared. At the same moment, Alex saw black bursts begin to fill the air, and now he knew for sure that anti-aircraft guns had survived the Allied fire.
What he saw in the next few minutes, however, was beyond anything he could have imagined. Hundreds of fighters were in the air, and scores of big transports. The paratroopers, with their khaki-colored parachutes, would bloom into the blue sky, in chains, like strings of pearls—slipping from both sides of the C-46s. Before long the entire sky was filled with the little blossoms, all drifting gently toward the ground, but beneath them the very air seemed to be exploding. Bursts of black were smattering the blue with increasing regularity, and a layer of smoke was covering the ground. The parachutes would disappear into all that chaos and dark, and they seemed to be swallowed by it. The sense Alex had was that this was an utter disaster, that every one of those boys was dying.
The explosions in the sky were also sickening to watch. The flak was reaching the transports, which were coming in at only five or six hundred feet. The pilots were holding to their course as their airplanes were tossed about by the concussions. Many were taking hits, and several blew up in the air, suddenly turning into immense balls of fire as their fuel tanks ignited. Some of the airplanes blew up before they got their jumpers out. But once the jump had been completed, the pilots would try to climb above the flak. The big crafts labored, and a number of them took hits as they climbed, then nose-dived, and finally exploded into the earth.
On another field, parallel to the parachute drop zones, gliders were drifting toward their designated landing zones. Others were still coming, pulled in pairs, two behind each tow plane. As they released and then angled toward the ground, they took a tremendous barrage of flak and machine-gun fire. Alex saw one of the big wood and canvas birds lose a wing and then spin toward the ground. Another landed hard, bounced in a cloud of dust, and then flipped over onto its back. Before long there was too much dust and smoke to see what was happening on the ground, and Alex wondered if any of them were making it all the way down to a safe landing.
Time and again Alex would look away, unable to watch, but then would look again, in spite of himself. He didn’t say it to Otto, but what he felt was that he was watching a great tragedy, an enormous failure of the Allied effort. But after a time, he began to see men, looking like insects from this distance, emerging from the smoke. They were gathering into groups. They were moving out. Even out of the dust and smoke of the glider landing zones, an amazing number of troops were appearing. Some men certainly were dying, but most were getting down, and they were showing their toughness—not hunkering down somewhere but getting organized to fight.
Alex felt a tremendous surge of pride. These were his airborne brothers, and they had crossed the great natural boundary of the Rhine, which had been impossible in previous wars. These were not men who had planned on military careers. They weren’t even flag-wavers. They were merely doing a job that had to be done. Alex had seen so much, had felt so disillusioned all winter, but this was a sight he never wanted to forget. He had never seen courage manifested so tangibly on such a grand scale.
For two hours the landing continued. As the fighters zeroed in on the artillery sites and attacked them, the flak diminished, but the drop still had to be an ordeal for every jumper. By the second hour, however, Alex could see that the troops were moving, attacking the machine-gun emplacements, opening a broader salient. Eventually supplies were dropping, and there was less and less interference. Alex knew that Allied forces were moving not only south and east toward Wesel but also back toward the west and the Rhine. They were hooking up with the men who were crossing the river, and they were driving out the German defenses between them.
Alex and Otto finally ate what was left of the food the Richartzes had given them. And then, as the evening came on, they settled down to sleep one more night in the woods. What they now had to fear, with their German uniforms, was that they might be overrun and shot before they could identify themselves. But it was heartening to see American troops so close. Alex slept fairly well, and in the morning, as he looked down from his hilltop position, he could see an American outpost, a roadblock, with MPs in charge.
“Let’s go. I’m starving,” Otto told Alex.
“All right. We need something for a white flag.” Alex tried to think what he could use.
“I had nothing white when I surrendered last time,” Otto said. “We merely set down our rifles and raised our hands in the air. We can do that, and you can shout in English. They’ll recognize that you’re an American.”
“All right. Let’s walk off this hill and into the road. Then we can walk straight at the roadblock with our hands high in the air. They’ll see us from well off and know we’re giving ourselves up. Once we get close enough, we should both start saying, ‘Varsity Coach.’ Someone at the blockade should know the password.”
“Even if they don’t, it shouldn’t matter. They’ll process us through, take us to a camp of some type, and we’ll have a chance to explain who we are.”
Alex was less confident about that. He had no papers except for his German military ID. He hoped there would be no problem. But he started down the hill, and he told Otto, “Okay, this is it. Once we make this last step, we’re home free.”
“It was a good operation too. Things are going well for the Allies.”
Alex glanced up as he walked through the trees. The sky was a wonderful pale blue, the temperature already warming. It was a lovely day, the kind he remembered from the spring of 1939. He could hear birds in the trees, and the grass was beginning to turn green. Before long, Germany would be at the height of its beauty. It was strange to feel all that warmth and renewal and to know that this spring the war would rage across every part of the country. “Tell me the truth,” Alex said. “Doesn’t this feel a little strange for you?”
“What?”
“To be on the other side—after fighting for years for Germany?”
“Sometimes, for a moment, I get confused about what side I’m on. I see those American planes—the shape of them and the insignias on their wings—and my instinct is to fear them, to think of them as the enemy.”
“They’re killing Germans. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Otto had come to a thicket of undergrowth. He stopped and looked around to spot the best way down the hill. “We saw more Americans being killed than Germans,” he said.
“So where was your heart? Which side are you on, deep down?”
Otto laughed. “Y
ou still don’t understand me, Alex. I try to tell you, but you don’t believe me.”
“What? That you don’t care?”
“Alex, I’m on my side. I don’t think much beyond that.”
“So what do you believe in? Really?”
Otto broke through the thickest growth and stepped into a little clearing. The sun was shining down through the locust trees, the taller oaks; it was a beautiful, peaceful spot. Otto looked at Alex for a time, and then he said, “Early in the war, the British began to bomb Berlin. A bomb dropped into an apartment house in the Kreuzberg district. Only one person was killed—and that person happened to be my grandmother, the person in this world I loved the most. So I asked myself why. Why did this bomb happen to choose, from all the people in Berlin, this one good person, this one harmless woman? And the answer was obvious to me.”
He stood and waited until Alex finally said, “What answer?”
“There was no reason at all. It was random chance. Once I saw that, I told myself, nothing means anything at all. Meaning is something we try to give to life only because we can’t face the idea of no meaning. But I have accepted this meaninglessness. And so I say to myself, ‘Make sure you’re not the one the bomb drops on. That’s the only thing that matters. All the rest is just talk.’”
“Then you shouldn’t have come here. There’s more chance of getting killed.”
“Yes, but that’s the other sad truth. Once you see no meaning in life, it seems rather tedious. Sporting with fate is the only fun left.”
“I don’t think you really believe any of that. You want to end this war—and you want to stop all the bombs from falling on all the grandmothers.”
Otto looked away, up toward the filtering light in the tops of the trees. “Well . . . I will say this much. Most of the people dying are not the ones who deserve to die. It’s these Nazis—who like death so much—who should taste more of it.”