Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  The camp was surrounded by barbed wire strung on poles. The wire had even been woven over the roof of the camp, making it impossible to climb over and out of the camp without cutting through the wire. There were four guards lined up in a central square of hard packed earth, all armed with Soviet Mosin Nagant rifles. An officer was supervising them all; a short, fat Viet armed with a pistol that he used to emphasise his shouted commands. He seemed to have got out of bed the wrong side. Renaud confirmed it was his shouting that had alerted them first to the presence of the camp. The windows to the huts were enclosed with what looked like iron bars. There were no prisoners in evidence, but certainly they were not too far away. The barbed wire was there for a purpose. The officer stopped shouting, and the soldiers ran to a low-lying structure in the centre of the square. They slid back some huge bolts, and two of them lifted the heavy hatch that covered what appeared to be a hole in the ground. One of them, presumably an NCO, began screaming orders. Almost immediately, men began appearing; ragged, emaciated scarecrows, climbing out of the hatch and standing to some semblance of attention in the square. There were nine of them altogether, all white men, and obviously French prisoners. I got out my binoculars and looked more closely. It was possible to make out the badges on their uniforms. They were all officers.

  There was more shouting, and the poor devils were marched away to a store, where they picked up tools and went off into the jungle. It looked as if they were on a wood cutting detail. Three of the guards accompanied them, and one stayed to stand guard at the gate.

  The prisoners were in a terrible state, covered in sores, ragged and filthy dirty. All of them looked as if they were suffering from several of the common ailments the jungle inflicted on soldiers of all armies, and which untreated meant lingering painful misery, often resulting in death. The officer went into the guard hut, and we heard him shouting at someone, presumably a further soldier, probably his clerk. So there were six of the enemy in total, the officer, his clerk and four others. We went quietly back down the track, leaving Renaud to watch the camp, and I described the scene to the men.

  “Common sense dictates that we leave them there, but somehow it goes against the grain to do that. I’ve never left a man in the hands of the savages before, and I don’t intend to start now. The question is, how do we organise this without alerting the Viet Minh?”

  After a brief silence, Schuster spoke.

  “Suppose they were to desert, or at least simply disappear? If we can leave everything tidy, the Viets will just think their men disappeared, or maybe had orders to move the prisoners elsewhere.”

  I thought about it for a few moments.

  “Excellent, that’s probably our best shot. At the very least it will leave an element of doubt.”

  “What about the prisoners?” Bauer asked.

  “They’re in no shape to come with us, Friedrich. The best we can do is tend to their wounds. Helene, can you do anything with them?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “That’s it then. We’ll leave the prisoners with our spare radio and as much food and supplies as we can spare. We’ll ask them to give us a day’s start, and then they can radio for an evacuation. I suggest we attack the camp after dark. Remember, we need to be very careful not to leave any evidence of a firefight. Corporal Dubois, you can take out the gate guard first.”

  The Arab smiled. “With pleasure, Sergeant.”

  “Right, that’s it then. We’ll use the rest of the daylight to move into position. Friedrich.” I said to Bauer.

  “Take four men and one of the MG 42s. Make your way around to the north of the camp. Paul, bring three men and the other machine gun, and come with me. We’ll close in ready to take out the guards. Try to avoid using the machine guns unless it’s absolutely necessary. Private Fuchs, stay here with Mam’selle Baptiste, and make sure she’s safe.”

  We got up and left, and within an hour were safely under cover, watching the camp. Just before dark the prisoners were marched back and herded into one of the barred huts. A guard took one of the prisoners into another hut, presumably the kitchen, and he came out shortly afterwards carrying a full bucket. The evening meal, no doubt! He went to the prisoners’ hut, and when he came out the door was locked solidly behind him. The guards seemed to relax now that their charges were safely locked away for the night, and they stood around smoking and chatting. One of them brought out a bottle, and they cheerfully passed it around. The officer came out of his hut, together with a young soldier who was carrying his boots and sat down to begin polishing them. One of the soldiers ran to get a chair for the officer, who sat down and pulled a letter out of his pocket that he began to read carefully. I assumed it was a letter from home. It would be the last one he ever received.

  We waited quietly as dusk crept over the jungle. The camp wasn’t equipped with electricity. One of the guards went around lighting oil lamps and rejoined his comrades, drinking and smoking. The officer went inside with his clerk, and the men pulled out more bottles and began drinking heavily. Inside of an hour, they were all semi-comatose, and it was time. I signalled to Dubois who crept down to the gate. I could just make him out through the gloom. There was a ‘clink’ as he threw a stone that hit the ground just outside of the fence, near to the guard. His head whipped around, and he peered into the darkness. Seeing nothing, he opened the gate and walked to the source of the noise, his rifle at the ready. I saw a shadow move, and the guard struggled briefly and was lowered to the ground. Dubois reappeared shortly afterwards.

  “All clear, Sergeant. He’s dead.”

  “Ok. Men, let’s move in quietly and dispose of the rest of them.”

  We crept down to the camp through the open gate and moved from hut to hut until we were close to the three guards.

  “Dubois, you lead. The rest of you use your bayonets, and no shooting if you can avoid it.”

  Dubois looked around the end of the hut and turned to us.

  “They’re looking away, so we can take them now if we’re quick.”

  Without waiting for an acknowledgement, he sped around the corner. I followed and saw him run up to the first soldier and slice the man’s throat. I had my bayonet out, grabbed the next man around the mouth to stop him crying out, stabbing the point into the man’s heart. Almost immediately he slumped, dead. Two of my men had taken the third guard. One held him while the other, imitating Dubois, pulled a knife across his throat. There was a sigh of escaping air, and the last of the three dropped dead at our feet.

  Paul Schuster was watching the officer’s hut carefully, and his submachine gun, a MAT 49, cocked and ready to open fire if the man or his clerk appeared. All was quiet, however, and we were shortly joined by Friedrich Bauer and his men, as they crept noiselessly into the camp. I walked up to the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked. I gently opened it into an office in semi-darkness. There was a half-opened door on the opposite side of the room, through which a soft light was shining through sufficiently for us to see inside, presumably the sleeping quarters. We crept quietly across the office, and I looked cautiously into the next room. Sure enough, it was a bedroom. The tubby little Viet officer was naked on the bed, vigorously sodomising the naked man, his clerk, who lay on the bed below him.

  I walked boldly into the room. There was no real need for stealth as these two were totally preoccupied with what they were doing. I reversed my MP38 and hit the fat man on the head, knocking him out cold. Dubois came up next to me, took the clerk’s neck in his hands and began to squeeze, tighter and tighter. He struggled, and tried to call out, trying to prise the Arab’s hands away, but gradually he became weaker as his air supply was cut off. He finally fell dead.

  “Paul, tie up the fat one, and you can fasten him to the chair in the office. The prisoners may want a word with him. Bruno, a good job, and well done. Get some of the men, and release the prisoners.”

  Bauer came up to me.

  “I’ve sent a man to bring in Mam’selle Baptiste and Pr
ivate Fuchs. Armand and Renaud are guarding the gate.”

  “Thank you, Friedrich.”

  Karl-Heinz and Manfred had already broken off the padlocks from the huts, and the prisoners were coming out into the gloomy night. Even in the dark, they looked far, far worse than when I’d watched them earlier through the binoculars. Two of them had legs that were crooked, broken at some stage and never properly set. They stank of faeces, urine, vomit and filth. Nonetheless, we embraced them warmly, our fellow soldiers. It turned out they were officers of the Colonial Infantry, captured when the Viet Minh had overrun their posts. Their men had been killed horrifically, even after laying down their arms in surrender. The officers were kept for possible future use as hostages and spent their days, alternating between manual labour, and hours spent locked in the hole in the square as punishment for any infraction dreamed up by their Viet Minh captors. When they found out we had the officer captive, they were overjoyed. Two of them rushed away to find him and pay him back for some of the extreme cruelty they’d suffered. It was going to be an interesting session.

  We checked around the camp and managed to replenish some of our supplies of food and ammunition from the stores. The screams had already started, and they went on for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than fifteen minutes. Abruptly, they stopped. The prisoners came out of the hut and walked across to us.

  “My name is Michel Bellaire. I am the senior French officer in this camp, and my rank is Colonel. On behalf of my men, I want to extend my deepest thanks to you for rescuing us from this hell. Including myself, there are only nine of us left. Originally, I commanded three companies on a search and destroy mission, but the Viet Minh ambushed us. I was in charge of a March Battalion, and my men were mainly Algerian riflemen, all regulars. They took a hundred and ninety three of us into captivity, but we are all that’s left.”

  “What happened to the rest of you?” I asked the Colonel.

  “Executions, starvation, disease, and all of it avoidable. They treated us worse than animals. Even now, some of my survivors are in bad shape. Have you come from Hanoi to rescue us? How did you find out we were here?”

  I had to explain that we were on a mission and had only chanced on the camp by accident.

  “I'm sorry, Colonel, much as I am concerned to get you back to Hanoi as quickly and safely as possible, the mission we’re on is of immense importance to our war effort. I'm afraid we're going to have to find somewhere for you to wait for a rescue. Staying in the camp is obviously out of the question. We have no idea when the Viet Minh may arrive to check that everything is in order.”

  The Colonel was obviously taken aback, but still overwhelmed with joy at being rescued from the Viets.

  “No,” he said, “staying here is definitely not an option. They come through about twice a week with supplies and check the number of survivors. They were here yesterday, so we have a couple of days start on them before their next visit. But when they do come back, we need to be as far away as possible.”

  I called Friedrich Bauer, and we went over the maps. Eventually, we found a trail close by that would lead the Frenchmen in a westerly direction; away from the camp and the line of march that we were taking to Cao Bang. I pointed it out to Colonel Bellaire, and he examined the map carefully while he munched on some of the food Vogelmann and Kessler had given him and the rest of the prisoners. Helene was going round with our rapidly diminishing medical supplies. She tended to some of the wounds and running sores while giving all the prisoners antibiotic injections to ward off the worst of the infections they were all suffering from.

  “Yes, that definitely looks like a possibility,” the Colonel murmured.

  “Exactly how far do you want us to travel before we attempt to make contact with Hanoi? The Viets captured some of our field radios when they took us, and occasionally they get them out to listen for broadcasts from any units in the area. We can take one of those with us and call in an evacuation as soon as we’re sufficiently far away.”

  I would have liked them to travel at least fifty kilometres before they started to broadcast on the open airwaves. It was inevitable that as soon as they did broadcast, the Viet Minh would pick it up and would go and check the source of the radio message. At the same time, there was no way these men were going to walk that far and still be alive to make the call.

  “Do you think you can manage twenty kilometres, Colonel?”

  Bellaire thought for a moment.

  “I think so. It will take us a couple of days, but yes, we can manage it. I intend to travel as far as possible at first light and get away from here, just in case the Viets do return. We can rest and eat some of the food, then see how much progress we can make. Yes, we can do it.”

  I left the Colonel and went around the camp supervising the hiding of any evidence that we’d been there. The men carried each of the bodies into the jungle and buried them, where it was unlikely they would be discovered in the near future. In the morning, we double-checked to make certain there was no evidence of our being at the camp. We said our goodbyes to the Frenchmen left them with one of our maps and as many of our dwindling supplies that we could manage, and got back on the trail to Cao Bang.

  We fell into the usual order of march; two men on the point, a further two covering our rear, and Helene Baptiste in the middle of the column. There was little to say. The very idea of an entire March Battalion being reduced to the nine pitiful men we had released was hard to swallow, yet it was by no means unusual. Since the fall of China, when Mao Tse Tung had begun supplying arms and equipment to the communists in Indochina, the French had been suffering increasing losses. Colonel Bellaire’s Battalion was by no means unique in being virtually wiped out by a clever and well-equipped enemy.

  It was certainly something to ponder, and seeing more evidence of Viet Minh savagery, combined with their increasing military successes, amounted to a solid argument for an early end to the war in Indochina. I discussed it with Paul Schuster, who walked alongside me.

  “We've been here before, Jurgen. It's not so long ago that the Fuhrer totally underestimated the communists in Russia and sent hundreds of thousands of our soldiers to their deaths. It was reckless stupidity. I thought I would never live to see it again, yet I wonder is this not history repeating itself?”

  “We’re all beginning to think along the same lines, Paul. It makes this mission to assassinate Giap that much more important. If we can take the bastard out of the equation, it may make things a lot easier for us.”

  “Will it? Do you honestly think that, Jurgen?”

  “I have to,” I told him. “I have to take responsibility for the men and for the mission, and I need something to believe in. It may not win the war, but yes, it will give us much more of a chance of bringing them to the negotiating table. That in itself would at least shorten the war.”

  “I hope so, Jurgen,” he said. “I truly hope so.”

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We picked up the pace, trying to reach Cao Bang before the Viets started to investigate our activities. I firmly believed the rescue at the prison camp could be the final piece in the jigsaw that an intelligent Viet commander could put together, and work out that a French force was engaged on some kind of mission in the area. We soon left the Viet tribal area that constituted the largest ethnic group in Northern Indochina, entering the area of the Nung people.

  The group was the sixth largest of Vietnam’s fifty-three minority groups, and with a population of nearly nine hundred thousand. It had local groups, Nung Xuong, Nung Giang, Nung An, Nung Phan Sinh, Nung Loi, Nung Tung Slin, Nung Chao and many others. They were considered to have retained more of their traditional culture and were less open to outside influences. Large numbers of the Nung had, in fact, recently fled across the border from China when Mao Tse Tung overran the country with his communist revolution. Many had fled further south to the region around Saigon, but even more had settled in Northern Indochina, especia
lly around the area of Cao Bang.

  There was no question that we could trust the Nung any more than the Vietnamese. The whole area had been totally subjugated by the communists. However, the communists, like any other people, had strong tribal instincts. The largest ethnic group were the Vietnamese and who would, of course, favour their own people where the distribution of resources was concerned. This would mean that the Nung tribe may not be fully in the pay of the communists, and I hoped to be able to gain some kind of intelligence about the current situation at Giap's HQ.

  We were soon to find out, as our point men reported we were approaching the outskirts of Dong Khe, the largest town before we reached Cao Bang itself. We left the track and moved into the jungle. Within two hundred metres, we found ourselves on the edge of a lake. It was a natural point to make camp, well screened from passing traffic, and we could obviously replenish our water supplies. The men gratefully shrugged off their packs and sat down, dragging out rations and preparing a meal while they had the chance. Before I could decide on my next move, Helene Baptiste came up to me and offered to help.

  “Jurgen, I know this area. I was in Dong Khe on my previous assignment. I still have contacts there. If you wish, I can see what I can find out.”

  It was a tempting offer, but Dong Khe would inevitably have a strong Viet Minh presence, and the idea of Helene Baptiste walking in to have a friendly word with one of her contacts was not very attractive. I explained this to her, but she was insistent.

  “The thing is, I was very friendly with an old Buddhist priest who helped to run the hospital on the southern outskirts of the town. I got to know him well. I'm certain I could reach him, and he would be happy to help us. He was certainly no friend of the communists, that I can assure you.”

  I thought about this, and any local knowledge would be of tremendous value to us. One of our overriding concerns was the consistently out of date intelligence our own people supplied. It was no substitute for having a man with his ear to the ground. I eventually relented, provided that she was escorted. I assigned Corporal Vogelmann and Private Fuchs to accompany her.