Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “I can see why they would want him dead,” said Avril.

  “Indeed, Lieutenant. Indeed. Now, I suggest you attend to your men. General de Lattre expects the offensive to begin at any time, and Giap has been building his reinforcements in the area for several days. I suspect we’ll be very busy.”

  “Yes, Sir.” They exchanged salutes, and Avril went off to organise his men.

  They needed fresh supplies, weapons, ammunition, food and a radio to replace the one smashed in the Viet Minh assault.

  Three hours later, and with only a small part of his resupply efforts completed, the Viet Minh struck with both artillery and infantry, flinging themselves against the French troops in massed human wave assaults. They were, indeed, going to be very busy.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  I watched the Lieutenant walk away, and he looked tired, dangerously tired. Worse still, he looked beaten. I wondered how he would have fared on the Eastern Front, fighting another communist enemy, the savage hordes of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

  That was a war beyond the worst nightmares of man. A war against an enemy, that no matter how many were killed seemed to have the limitless capacity to regenerate itself. Knock out a tank, and two or three more appeared. Mow down a company of advancing Soviet infantry, and a regiment appeared in its place. It seemed to be a communist philosophy that life was cheap, able to be sacrificed as recklessly as its commanders wished, in both wartime and peacetime alike.

  Our mission here was the same as in Russia. Kill the enemy, nothing more. Slaughter them so that they couldn’t be patched up and pitched back into the battle. Terrify them with a violent ferocity that was calculated to keep them awake long into the reaches of the night.

  The communists shared the same philosophy, it was true; a campaign of limitless violence calculated to murder and terrorise all who opposed them.

  But theirs was a war with a difference. We begrudged every man who fell in battle, every death and every casualty. Our tactics were based on preserving the lives of the men at any cost. The communists just spent the lives of their troops as if each man had the value of a piece of confetti, tossed at a village wedding, and no more value than a useless, discarded piece of coloured paper. Their civilians were fair game too; human slaves to be exploited, threatened, tortured and killed if they failed to obey their masters. Eventually, this war would be decided not by the side that killed the most enemy. There were just too many soldiers on each side to simply kill them all. It would be decided, by the army that convinced the civilians to resist the terror, or forced them to submit to it. That freedom was worth fighting for. Slavery was a living death in itself.

  “Jurgen, you’ve got problems of the world on your shoulders!” a cheery voice called over to me.

  It was my good friend in the Legion, Captain Jacques Legrand.

  “Jacques,” I replied, happy to see the young captain, and we shook hands. Although several years younger than me, Legrand was always happy to listen to the voices of more experienced men, officers or not. Unlike the regular French troops, the Legion in Vietnam had much of the easy formality I had been used to in the Waffen-SS. He handed me a cigarette, and took one himself as we chatted about our next mission. A tall, handsome and accomplished young man, he always seemed to have the most attractive girls in the bar competing to be on his arm, or in his bed. But when he was on duty, he was the complete professional. I focussed on what he was saying.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The brass expects Giap to launch an attack at any moment. Artillery are all standing by for fire orders. The air force are running back-to-back missions reconnoitring the enemy positions, and waiting for a chance to unload their bombs onto the heads of our local communists. Are your men ready to deploy? I don’t think we’ve got much time left to us. I gather you were involved in some kind of a skirmish outside the town, so do you need time to re-equip and regroup?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was nothing big, and Sergeant Petrov is drawing ammunition from the stores right now. No casualties. We just need time to catch our breath, and we’ll be ready to fight.”

  “Good, I’ve got some beer in the tent. Do you want one?”

  “Another time, Jacques,” I smiled. “What’s the intelligence on the enemy forces?”

  “Not good, three divisions, 308, 312 and the 316. In total, they’ve got at least ten thousand men, possibly even more.”

  “And us? What’s our strength?”

  “Apart from the Legion, we’ve got Colonial paratroops and infantry, a Senegalese unit, the 30th, several armoured cars, and some Tho partisan units.”

  “Partisans?” I spat out.

  I hated partisans. A large part of my time in Russia had been spent slaughtering the irregulars that infiltrated our lines and caused such havoc and fear to the regular troops. They were like lice, and when you felt the itch and discovered them amongst you, you killed them.

  “Yes, I know the record of the Waffen-SS in Russia,” he laughed, “but these people really hate the communists. They’re good fighters too. De Lattre also arranged for some gunboats on the river, the Da Bach. They’ll give us useful artillery support. We’re outnumbered, of course, even allowing for the Viet Minh we don’t yet know about, but we’re better equipped and better prepared. We’ll blow them back to the stone age,” he grinned.

  “It sounds good, in theory, Jacques. Let’s see how it goes in practice. I need to rejoin my men, and we’ll join you shortly.”

  We exchanged salutes, and I went off to find my company office, where I received orders to report to the captain on the defensive perimeter of Mao Khe. The whole town was a hubbub of military preparation. French Colonial infantry and paratroopers, Senegalese, their black faces striking and incongruous, Vietnamese and part-Vietnamese, a mix of languages and troops. Foreign Legion, speaking French, Viet, German, Russian and Ukrainian, and even some languages I’d never heard before in my life. Officers and sergeants shouted commands; corporals chivvied their men into assigned places.

  Hard-eyed madams watched them all bustling past their brothels, calculating how many would be alive by tomorrow, and how much could they charge. The girls watched from the balconies, trying to catch the eye of any soldier that took their fancy. A French soldier meant a passport out of this war-ravaged country to the real or imagined luxuries of Paris, if you could persuade them to marry you. Some did, and it meant clothes, good restaurants, theatre and social life. And, of course, security, the security that comes from knowing one’s country is not being torn apart by a vicious and bloody civil war. The security that comes from knowing the door will not be smashed down at midnight by a gang of drunken soldiers, or a band of fanatical Viet Minh seeking revenge on women who dared to sell their bodies to the hated French colonialists.

  I found my unit sitting in the sun outside a Vietnamese native bar. I didn’t have to worry about drunkenness, thankfully. These men were professionals and needed no lessons in the value of keeping a clear head to fight the enemy, and win. My NCOs were all ex-SS. Not a result of deliberate racial discrimination, but discrimination nonetheless. I had trained my unit, with the permission of my commander, to fight the SS way. Our tactics were simple; the brutally hard application of maximum force, designed to shock and intimidate the enemy, giving us time to kill as many of them as possible while they were still gathering their wits. It only worked when the whole unit moved and fought as one man. Endless training, drills, ruthless discipline, and a strong esprit-de-corps were the ingredients that mixed together made us what we were. An elite fighting unit, respected by our superiors, and hated and feared by the Viet Minh. I needed experienced men to make it work, men who had fought and bled across the battlefields of Europe, practising the ruthless SS way of fighting that particular war.

  They nodded a greeting as I walked up to them. My four NCOs sat relaxed, waiting to hear the unit orders.

  Corporal Karl-Heinz Vogelmann, a lean, hard veteran of SS D
as Reich. He had fought in Russia as well as many other European battlegrounds.

  Corporal Manfred von Kessler, the unit clown, invariably smiling and cracking jokes, his short, tubby appearance hid the reality of the man inside. Ex-SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler, von Kessler was a ruthless killer when needed.

  Sergeant Paul Schuster, ex-SS Totenkopf.

  Senior Sergeant Friedrich Bauer, lean, almost cadaverous, and another veteran of SS-Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler.

  They were all veterans of the battlefields of Kursk, the Demyansk Pocket and many other Russian theatres, Greece, the Balkans, France, and finally the bloody struggle for Germany, Berlin, and the heart of the Reich itself.

  Like me, they had acquired literally dozens of decorations, tank destroyer badges, wound badges, Iron Crosses and campaign cuff titles. Also like me they had opted to join the French Foreign Legion at a time when the future for Waffen-SS veterans looked bleak. Even before we left school, we were playing soldiers in the Hitler Youth. Then the war arrived and changed our lives forever. Adolf Hitler’s colossal, cruel miscalculation, surely the biggest lie any leader had ever inflicted on his people, with the exception of Joseph Stalin, of course. And our local warlord, Ho Chi Minh was doing his best to get to the top of the blood-soaked dictator ladder.

  So here we were, Hitler’s orphans, rootless, homeless, still fighting wars on foreign soil. At least we’d become good at what we did. Not all had learned quickly enough, but they were buried in the soil of Indochina, the forgotten men of ill-fated colonial conquests.

  The men sat there smoking and chatting, laughing at another of von Kessler’s jokes. Two girls were with hem, Mai St Martin, Vogelmann’s pretty Eurasian girlfriend, and Thien van Hoc, von Kessler’s equally beautiful Vietnamese native girl. The girls usually stayed near our base in Hanoi, but on this mission had accompanied the main force to this town of Mao Khe that was supposedly safe. Once again, our blundering intelligence officers had led us blindly into a dangerous battle zone that threatened to overwhelm us.

  “Have you come to tell us about a week’s leave we have been awarded, Jurgen?” my Senior Sergeant, Friedrich Bauer, asked me.

  They all laughed. Giap had begun to throw in huge numbers of troops in the surrounding areas, well-equipped divisions of hardened veterans. He was looking to build on his Cao Bang victory, so there would be no leave for us, not in the foreseeable future.

  “We’re here to man a defensive perimeter around the town. Reports show that the enemy are preparing to attack in strength.” I showed them the map.

  “Our company has been ordered here, and Captain Leforge is already there with the rest of our company. We are to report there to him directly, so get the men together. Latest intelligence places the Viets already massing just outside the town and an attack is certainly imminent.”

  “So the monkeys are swinging through the jungle towards us, are they?” Vogelmann grinned.

  The Corporal had a black eye patch and a ragged beard to hide the injuries he sustained when a tank shell came too close to his foxhole. His men called him Blackbeard. He was also a fan of the new ‘Tarzan’ films that he’d seen in the cinema in Germany before the collapse. He came to Indochina expecting to see men in leotards swinging through the jungle on vines, dragging their attractive female mates along with them. We were certain he was still looking. In the meantime, he regarded the Viet Minh as no higher up the scale than monkeys; a label many of us here gave to the ugly and brutal men that fought for the communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

  “Indeed they are, Karl-Heinz. If you don’t get out of that chair pretty damn quickly and pick up your weapons, they’ll catch you sleeping and singe your arse.”

  There was a roar of laughter at Vogelmann’s expense, but the nudge to get him into action was unnecessary. They were already getting up, checking their weapons and packs and preparing to rejoin the company. Suddenly, a mortar bomb whistled overhead and landed the other side of the town with a tremendous crash, spurring the bustle of troops preparing for the coming battle to move faster.

  Friedrich Bauer looked thoughtful for a moment.

  “I reckon about two kilometres away, Jurgen. That was a heavy mortar. About thirty minutes before they hit us?”

  “Agreed,” I replied. “Come on, let’s get a nice SS welcome ready for Vogelmann’s monkey friends. We need to move fast. Vogelmann, von Kessler, get the girls moving. There’s a supply convoy returning to Hanoi in the next hour, so make sure they’re on it.”

  They needed no more urging. We double-timed to our positions as more mortar shells began landing around us. It wasn’t a good sign; heavy mortars meant that for once our intelligence had got it right. These were well-equipped and trained Viet Minh forces. We would have a battle on our hands.

  We saluted Captain Jean Leforge, and he returned the salutes.

  “We have at least three divisions of Viet Minh expected to hit us shortly. As soon as their positions are confirmed, the artillery will start hitting them. We’ve also got the gunboats on the river waiting for fire orders. Our job is simple, we’re moving forward to meet them, and give them a bloody nose. They won’t be expecting opposition before they reach the town, so get your men ready. We move out in ten minutes.”

  A runner came up with messages for him, so we left the Captain and went to check in with our men.

  Sergeant Petrov greeted me, another veteran of the Eastern front, except that he fought for the Russians. Short, slight, with dark hair, a pointed beard and wire-framed glasses, he was the very image of the unfortunate Leon Trotsky, murdered by Joseph Stalin. Cut off from his unit, the Second Shock Army, he was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht and spent the rest of the war in a camp. Nikolai Petrov had survived the prison camp to be repatriated to Stalin’s Russia, only to be branded a traitor for having been captured by the Nazis. Facing a lengthy term in a Siberian Gulag, Nikolai Petrov had jumped a train heading west, eventually winding up in France where he was recruited by the Legion. Strangely, he too had fought at Kursk, where many of our Waffen-SS recruits had fought. Had they ever exchanged shots? I wondered. Perhaps a question best not asked. Petrov carried out the job of quartermaster, when he was not engaged in what he was best at, the job of killing. In the field, he hunted down the Vietnamese partisans with all the brutality and dedication of the most ruthless SS-Partisanjaeger, the German partisan hunters who operated behind the lines to hunt down and exterminate Russian guerrillas.

  “Jurgen, we’re ready to move. Everyone is carrying their maximum load of weapons and ammunition, and food and water for two days. If we haven’t done the job by then, we’ll not need any more than that.”

  I agreed. We should be out and back within twenty-four hours. We simply had to hit the enemy hard and fast, our speciality. Hit their forward reconnaissance units, try and disrupt their command and control, and generally inspire a healthy amount of fear in the Viet Minh. That would slow their advance, so that we would have time to bring the artillery into play and shred their slant-eyed fanatics into a million pieces. That, at least, was the theory.

  “Thanks, Nikolai.” I checked my watch. “Five minutes, then we move.”

  I joined Captain Leforge, the company commander. He was a graduate of the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French equivalent of the American West Point or British Sandhurst officer training schools.

  The French elite military academy was founded in Fontainebleau in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte near Paris in the buildings of the Maison Royale de St-Louis; a school founded in 1685 by Louis XIV for impoverished daughters of noblemen who had died for France. The cadets moved several times more, eventually settling in Saint-Cyr, located west of Paris, in 1808. They left the school with the rank of lieutenant and joined the specialist centre for their chosen branch for one additional year, before being assigned to a regiment to serve as a platoon leader. Like his illustrious French predecessor, Napoleon Bonaparte, Leforge had intended joining the Artillery, the pride of the French army.


  Unlike Napoleon, he didn’t make it that far. A bully went too far in the Military College, and Leforge’s good friend was left with a fractured skull after the bully, one of the instructors, went too far in meting out punishment. Leforge went straight for the man to eke out revenge, breaking two of the bully’s legs and one of his arms in the process. Rough justice had no place in the stiff, tradition-ruled French army, and it was made crystal clear that the regular army had no place for him. And so he entered the Foreign Legion, where he soon found a place for his brand of unconventional soldiering in the steaming jungles of South-East Asia; leading his elite company of hardened troops, all survivors of the most brutal battlefields the world had yet seen.

  “Move out,” Leforge shouted down the line.

  Instantly, our reconnaissance patrol went forward, a section of four men led by Corporal Manfred von Kessler. They travelled five hundred metres ahead of the main force and were lightly equipped and armed. Their packs and equipment were shared out amongst the men so that they only carried MP40 submachine guns with them; with the exception of Private Jean-Claude Armand, who carried a silenced Kar 98 sniper rifle.

  Their job was to be our eyes and ears. If they ran into a Viet Minh main force, their only defence would be to see them before they were seen themselves, and then rejoin the company as quickly as possible. They disappeared into the dark greenery of the jungle, and Leforge signalled us to follow.

  We travelled for only a kilometre before von Kessler brought his men back hurriedly.

  “We have company,” he told Leforge, who waited with me and the other sergeants.