Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “What about a ventilator?” Bauer asked.

  A good question, we had two Hiller UH-12A helicopters, nicknamed ventilators, here in Hanoi.

  United Helicopters began producing the Model 360 as the UH-12. In 1949 the UH-12 became the first helicopter to make a transcontinental flight from California to New York. When Hiller upgraded the engine and the rotor blades, the company designated the new model the UH-12A. It was the UH-12A that would be adopted by both the French and United States militaries, and the helicopter was used in the Indochina battlefield, as much as its limited numbers would allow.

  We could use one of the helicopters to take out Giap. After further discussion, we decided our best way out would be east to the sea, the Gulf of Tonkin, where a warship of the French Navy could extract us. All Viet Minh eyes would probably be looking south towards Hanoi, and the obvious place for us to retreat to. That should give us the time to make our escape.

  We drank heavily that evening, discussing the possibilities of taking the fight to the enemy for a change. I was still very uneasy. This whole area was a literal sieve when it came to security; the least leak, and we would be going to our deaths. Vogelmann and von Kessler, both roaring drunk, got into a huge argument that quickly developed into a fight as to which as the better outfit, SS-Das Reich or SS-Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler. Bauer and I let them swap a few blows, then separated them and dragged them off to their rooms in the barracks dormitory. Then we all shook hands and wished each other good night. I reeled as I climbed the stairs to my own room and fell into bed. It had been quite an evening, meeting the veteran of Skorzeny’s outfit that rescued Mussolini, capped by far more alcohol than was good for me. As I dropped off to sleep, the room seemed to be slowly spinning.

  I woke with a start, and the barracks shook to the sound of massive explosions. We were under attack, here in Hanoi. What the hell was going on? I threw on trousers, boots and shirt and dashed down the stairs, checking the magazine on my MP40 as I ran. I bumped into Bauer who had been coming to get me.

  “We’re taking mortar fire, Jurgen. The Viets have infiltrated the city and set up a ring of heavy mortars all around us. Captain Leforge is calling out the company to mount up, and go and hunt them down.”

  I acknowledged him and ran on to our vehicle park. It was a chaos of running men, shouts, and vehicle horns sounding as drivers fought to clear a way out of the tangle ready to hit the open road as soon as they were loaded with troops.

  I found my men directed by Paul Schuster. They were throwing boxes of ammunition and MG42s into the back of a lorry, the engine running.

  “We’re all ready, Jurgen. The Captain wants us to split up. We’re to turn right out of the barracks, and head south-east to try and find the mortar crew that’s operating in that area.”

  “Let’s go,” I shouted as I jumped into the front seat. “Hit it, Private, and let’s get out of here before one of those mortar rounds finds us.”

  Our driver was Armand, the sharpshooter. He nodded at me, threw it into gear, gunned the engine and dropped the clutch. We roared out of the barracks, and I could have sworn we hit the sharp right-hand turn on two wheels. I heard another series of explosions as more mortar rounds hit the area in and around the barracks, then we were on the road, and heading to the possible site of one of the crews.

  “Armand, take the next left turn, and we’ll skirt around the side of them.”

  “But, Sergeant Hoffman, that’ll take us at least three kilometres out of our way,” he protested.

  “And out of the way of any possible ambush they have prepared, Private Armand.”

  He looked thoughtful, “I see. You think they’ll be waiting for us, then?”

  “I only know we’ve done this before, many times. If you were the Viet Minh, wouldn’t you set an ambush for the enemy you knew were coming to destroy you?”

  “The next left turn it is, Sergeant.”

  The side road was upon us, and Armand swung the lorry into the sharp turn. We began skirting around to the east of our objective. The explosions were still hitting the barracks area, and we could hear them, though more faintly.

  Armand drove like a demon, heading for the source of the mortar fire in our sector. Suddenly, there was the soft ‘crump’ of a heavy mortar being fired, and literally within metres of our position.

  “Go, Private, straight for them if you can see them.”

  He stamped on the accelerator pedal and screeched around the next corner. Suddenly, we were confronted with the enemy, and caught like rabbits in the headlights of our vehicle. A group of ten Viet Minh were clustered around the mortar, a 120mm Soviet heavy mortar. They were startled, bringing their weapons to bear on us. I could see a DP light machine gun being hurriedly moved around to point in our direction. The mortar crew were unmoving. They’d been about to reload the mortar, but were frozen with indecision. Did they need to move their equipment or fire another round?

  “Ram them!” I shouted at Armand.

  “Hit the machine gun first, and then the mortar. Get as many of the Viets as you can. Men,” I called to the back of the lorry, “in the next few seconds, we’re about to pass a Viet Minh mortar crew, so send them a calling card as we go past.”

  Armand spun the wheel and headed straight at the Viet Minh. Two of them managed to get a shot off at us that went wide. Then the lorry hit, smashing into the machine gun, mangling the gun and the crew beneath the wheels. Expertly, he swerved the lorry at the last moment and managed to catch the mortar a glancing blow. It toppled sideways, and a scream announced that one of the crew had not managed to jump out of the way quickly enough.

  We were past, but the misery for the Viet Minh was not over. As we swept past them, twenty legionnaires in the back pointed their guns out of the vehicle and opened up with a roar of submachine gun fire. As the lorry continued, I heard the ripping sound of the MG42 they’d managed to get into action. One man was holding it on the side of the lorry while the gunner swept the Viets with bullets, and the crewman fed in the ammunition. Armand finally brought the vehicle to a stop, and we all jumped out and ran towards the Viets, weapons ready, but there was no need to continue firing.

  All of them had been hit in the mad rush, three mortar men and a machine gun crewman run down by the lorry, and the rest by gunfire. One of them was still alive. He was clutching a pistol, which marked him out as some sort of an officer. I lifted his head up, and he winced in pain. He’d taken at least one round to the stomach, an agonising wound.

  “How many mortars do you have deployed in Hanoi?” I asked him.

  Through his agony he managed to snarl at me.

  “Enough to kill all of you French dogs,” he hissed at me.

  “I am not French, my monkey friend, but still, I do need to know. How many, quickly, or I will make your agony beyond anything you could dream would be possible?”

  He looked at me curiously.

  “Not French? Where are you from? Why are you here, fighting the Frenchman’s war?”

  “Not the Frenchman’s war, it is a war against you communist filth. We started it in Russia, and this is just the second instalment.”

  He was obviously educated; he’d picked up the inference immediately.

  “So, you are German. You will die here, alongside your French masters.”

  He tried to summon enough phlegm to spit at me, but he was too weak and had lost too much blood.

  “Karl-Heinz, see what you can do with him.”

  Vogelmann stepped forward. “With pleasure, Jurgen.”

  Although we’d all served in anti-partisan operations, Vogelmann had made it a speciality on the Russian Front, especially when it came to interrogating prisoners. He put out his foot, casually rolled the Viet onto his back, and then put the foot on the wound.

  “Now, my friend, tell Karl-Heinz what he needs to know, and I will take my foot off, and maybe even get some medical attention for your wounds.”

  The only reply was an agonised scream, almost inhum
an to the ears. I walked away and left him to it. That was when I saw the bodies. The Viets had set up the mortar on what had almost certainly been the front yard of a brothel. They were noted for their puritanical attitude to loose sex, regarding prostitutes as little more than criminals; and prostitutes who plied their trade with the enemy, with the French, were traitors and collaborators in their eyes. Perhaps the brothel staff had refused to let the Viet Minh station their mortar on their premises, but whatever, they had been killed in the most horrific way.

  There was a line of wooden stakes in the ground, probably part of a fence line forming the boundary of the premises. The owner and staff, eight women and two men, had been impaled on the stakes. Their look of pain-wracked horror was a mute testament to what they must have been forced to suffer. We were not angels, neither in the SS, nor in the Legion, but this went beyond the very pits of inhumanity, opening the very doors of hell itself.

  I shouted to Vogelmann.

  “Karl-Heinz, look there. What the monkeys did to the people who lived here!” He glanced over, and even in the dim moonlight, I could see him blanche. Then he went to work with a vengeance, and the captive’s screams filled the night air. After a short time, I heard him gasping out to Vogelmann, giving him the details of the operation. Then Karl-Heinz pulled out his pistol, a Luger, which many French troops routinely carried in Indochina.

  The Luger was made popular by its use by Germany during World War I. The Pistole Parabellum 1908, known more popularly as the Luger, was a toggle-locked recoil-operated semi-automatic pistol. The design was patented by Georg J. Luger in 1898 and produced by German arms manufacturer Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) since 1900. Although since replaced by the Walther P38, our SS troops had used the shorter barrel Parabellum during the war, when it proved to be effective and reliable on the Easter Front. Many Germans recruited to the Legion carried the Parabellum, perhaps for sentimental reasons, but it was still a useful sidearm.

  He put the pistol against the prisoner’s head.

  “My friend, here is a painkiller to help ease your discomfort.”

  He smiled at the Viet and pulled the trigger. The man fell back dead, his brains spilling out onto the ground.

  “Eleven mortars in all, Jurgen,” he shouted.

  “I’ve made a note of their positions. We’re looking at about two companies of Viet Minh.”

  “Right, mount up, let’s go. We’ll get someone to come back in the day and bury these poor women.”

  We drove away at speed, heading for the next nearest mortar position. We’d been beaten to it by a squad of French paras who were mopping up the last of the Viet Minh. Without stopping, we carried on to the next one. We screeched to a halt alongside the long, high wall of a large villa. Bauer jumped up to look over the wall, and sure enough the Viet Minh were there in the open courtyard of the villa. They managed to get a shot off at him before he ducked down.

  “About twenty of so of them, Jurgen, and they’re packing up the mortar to leave by the look of it.”

  It was a difficult situation. We could take them, and go in with all guns blazing, but we would inevitably take casualties. I decided on an alternative strategy, and one that we had used successfully once in Russia.

  “Mount the MG42 on the cab, Paul,” I called to Schuster. “The rest of you, dismount.”

  They all piled out of the vehicle while Paul fixed the machine gun on the mounts that all our lorries had fitted.

  “Armand, back off for about fifty metres, then come back and go through the wall. Paul, hit them with the MG42, and the rest of us will be right behind. You’d better take a couple of men with you in the lorry to throw grenades once you’re inside the courtyard.”

  Two legionnaires jumped onto the lorry. Armand reversed back for fifty yards, and I gave him the signal.

  We stood to one side, guns ready as the vehicle surged forward, accelerating until it smashed through the wall. Immediately, the searing, ripping racket of the MG42 began as Paul Schuster opened fire. The noise was punctuated by the explosions of grenades thrown from the back of the lorry. We leapt through the gap in the wall torn by the charging lorry. The Viet Minh were milling around, caught totally unawares by this unexpected attack. At least half of them were down, and the rest were running aimlessly from place to place, unsure whether to shoot back, shelter from our guns or just run away. One by one, our shattering automatic fire picked them off and flung their bodies to the ground, torn apart by the incredible rate of fire we poured into them. Then suddenly I shouted for the ceasefire. The courtyard was a charnel house, a death pit filled with Viet Minh bodies, smashed equipment and the 120mm mortar, now lying destroyed on its side.

  “Check out the villa,” I called over to Senior Sergeant Bauer.

  “Take three men with you. Be careful, there could be more Viet Minh in there or even booby traps.”

  He nodded and raced away. The men were watchful, but the silence that had descended on the courtyard suggested we’d killed them all. Some of the men lit up cigarettes and stood quietly chatting. Bauer came out of the villa, shaking his head.

  “It’s awful. The owners of the place are in there, at least, what’s left of them. The Viets disembowelled them, literally, the parents, four children and the servants, all of them. They’re lying in pools of blood, with their guts strewn around like Christmas decorations. Not pretty, I’m afraid.”

  I nodded. I felt sickened. Once again, the French had been caught unawares by the Viets. The night had gone quiet, so clearly we had disposed of all the mortar crews.

  But they’d won a victory of sorts, although a pyrrhic victory. They were animals, prepared to sacrifice as many men as was needed in order to propagate the party line, which meant, of course, putting themselves in power.

  Communist equality was nothing of the sort, but my God, they were good with words. Very good, so much so, that the poor devils believed them. Did the peasants, who took up arms and fought for the Viet Minh, honestly think that when victory came, if it came, the political elite would ever share the spoils with the rest of the population? If so, they should look to the lessons of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s Great Purge and the Siberian Gulags.

  The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and Government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership and the persecution of unaffiliated persons. It was characterised by widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, imprisonment and executions. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups) and then executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labour camps. Many died at the penal camps due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork. Other methods of despatching victims were used on an experimental basis. One policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van.

  We arrived back at the barracks. Our own company offices and storerooms hadn’t been hit, neither had our living quarters. Company C hadn’t been so lucky, having sustained a direct hit to the men’s sleeping quarters, resulting in about a dozen casualties, some fatal. The medics were carrying the dead and wounded out on stretchers.

  I felt angry; a white, hot, blazing anger. Our soldiers should never have been hit in their own barracks. It was sloppy work on behalf of French Army intelligence, as well as the garrison who should have been guarding in and around the approaches to Hanoi. But the civilians, the poor devils murdered in the villa, small children butchered in the name of Father Ho Chi Minh and the prostitutes, suffering untold agony and torment through their impalement on fencing stakes; it was too much. It went too far. Yes, our SS units in Russia had behaved at times with appalling brutality. But not this, this was too much.

  I recalled one famous occasion when Himmler, head of the SS, had to
admonish Romanian troops for their brutality on the Eastern Front. Was it a perversion to have limits to cruelty and brutality? I hadn’t an answer for that question, but I did have an answer for the Viet Minh. I went to find Colonel Joffre.

  It was dawn by the time I found him leaning against a Willys jeep, smoking. He was alone.

  “Sergeant Hoffmann,” he greeted me.

  “Colonel Joffre.” I saluted him.

  “I heard about the brothel. It must have been a distressing sight. Terrible, the way those girls suffered. I imagine that’s why you’re here, the Giap mission?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “These animals need to be stopped. Giap is our best hope. Teach them a lesson. We’ll be ready as soon as you wish.”

  “Excellent, Jurgen. I’ve been going over the plans for the assault. Our troops will be mounting a prolonged assault on Viet Minh bases to the north west of Hanoi. Giap has his headquarters to the north east, near Cao Bang, so hopefully the assault will divert attention from your movements. The navy has been briefed. They’ll be landing your party in two inflatable boats, launched from a destroyer currently patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin. The air force has made two helicopters available to lift Giap back to Hanoi, and the navy will be waiting to bring you off of the beach when the job is done. If you run into trouble, the navy also has the carrier Arromanches waiting offshore, with two squadrons of F6F Hellcats permanently ready to offer assistance. That’s about it, a formidable force to support your group, Jurgen.”

  I whistled, “Indeed it is Colonel. You must want Giap very badly.”

  “We do, yes, the High Command has given your mission the highest possible priority.”

  “And if we cannot get him out alive?”

  Joffre hesitated. “That’s in your hands, Jurgen. Giap is the man behind the crucifixions, the impaling. Are you prepared to leave that monster loose in Vietnam?”