by Chris Lynch
Our tanks are blowing up already. There is chaos. The air attacks are just as serious as any of the isolated attacks we’ve endured over the months, but in the face of this onslaught they hardly seem to amount to anything worth our time.
But everything here is worth our time, if we only had the time, and the firepower, to deal with it.
“Where am I shooting?” Pacifico screams, frozen.
“Straight ahead, just like I told you way back.”
He remains frozen. “Where am I shooting?” he screams again.
I lean over and slap him crisply with the back of my hand. He looks at me, shocked.
I point where I’m driving, though I don’t know where I’m driving. “Like I told you. I’ll aim the tank and you shoot straight ahead.”
He starts peppering away at whatever it is I’m driving us into.
“We’re going right flank, Bucyk, hard,” Cowens calls. “Stay in formation with our group, right on the shoulder of number one there. Good. There you go. Here we go. We can do this, boys. We fight smart, we fight right, we win.”
“Yes, sir!”
That may have been me shouting that but I honestly don’t know.
This is already the sum of all the fights we have fought so far. The panzers and Tigers I see, up close now, are brutes. We are dwarfed, in armor and firepower, as I pull up hard on the levers and we stand to fight.
“Yeeeahhhh!” Logan is screaming, with some kind of rhythm, as Wyatt feeds and he fires. He’s keeping us confident, and keeping Wyatt in sync by doing it, but it’s already failing.
There is carnage on this field. We are overmatched. The only thing keeping this contest a contest is the maneuverability of the Sherman. It’s pretty fleet for thirty-eight tons, but they have the size and the numbers and the position. So we dodge, and we fire, and we dodge, and we fire. We draw fire, make them miss, make them waste, and as of now that feels like we’re doing something.
We all cheer when Logan scores a direct hit that seems to at least have stunned one Tiger into a silence that I hope is permanent.
My hope is dashed as that Tiger singles us out and I sense it just before he unloads, bu-hoom, and I am already reversing before he can change his sight. The shell misses us but scores, brutally, deafeningly, on one of our guys that was already put out of its misery earlier.
Eventually it is only the size of the force we have sent that gives the impression of an ongoing, viable fight. I’ve seen vehicles and mobile artillery of all description rolling in to support us as the battle has ground on, and most of them are now just so much more meat for the German grinder.
We are still slugging, firing everything we’ve got as fast as we can. We’re absorbing more small arms hits, avoiding the larger ones by smaller and smaller margins, when the referee finally calls it.
“Pulling out!” Cowens hollers while still on the phone. “I said we’re retreating, Bucyk. Move this machine, now, back toward Djebel Hamra. We’re regrouping. Stay in formation with our group.”
Regrouping.
I swing behind Number One tank. Number Five pulls behind me. That’s our group now.
There is silence inside the Sherman as we flee, at maximum speed, leaving defeat and a whole lot of United States Army on the field behind us.
There have been retreats before. But now it’s us.
And that was just the beginning of running the wrong way for us.
Having lost another forty-six tanks that day on top of the previous losses, we are definitely licking our wounds when we are ordered to withdraw all the way back to Kasserine Pass. This represents about two months’ worth of backtracking over a matter of days. The First Armored Division is today ninety-eight tanks, fifty-seven half-track armored vehicles, twenty-nine artillery pieces, and five hundred fine fighting men poorer than it was at the beginning of yesterday.
Good thing there are no yesterdays in this game.
The pass is a major strategic location, a two-mile-wide cut in the Atlases that represents one of the primary throughways between the major contested sectors of the Tunisia campaign. It feels like an important assignment. And for once they appear willing to pull a lot of forces together for a single goal.
It looks something like a dry-gulch Old West frontier town as we roll through the dusty core of the pass. British and American infantry, artillery, and mechanized units are all set up in every conceivable spot, from the flats to the ridge tops, to little bluffs of rock jutting out halfway between the two. This landscape is harsh, stark, wicked. It looks less like any natural piece of planet Earth I ever imagined, and more like a place that has been pulverized, smashed, and crushed over and over and then the rubble pushed around into mounds and gullies with giant bulldozers for some big toddler god’s amusement. It looks like silence to me, this terrain.
It’s been a very quiet trip this time. Quietest extended stretch since we all met, I’d say.
“This appears promising,” I say, regarding the variety of company we are now keeping.
“Hnnn,” Cowens grunts.
“You disagree, I take it?”
“Look at them,” he says. “Really look at them. Their faces, their movements.”
I am driving standing up. I have my head popped out of the hole, as do Cowens and Pacifico. We must look like a traveling prairie-dog hutch.
“You can smell it. This is still a hundred little armies, rather than one big one. The only difference here is that we’re placed a little closer together.”
I couldn’t see all that, really, much less smell it. Until Commander Cowens pointed it out.
This would probably be a good time to be able to doubt his senses, but I still haven’t developed that skill. And if we are being honest, we’d consider ourselves partly responsible. As we have moved, through our training, our sailing, our deployments, and battles, we have become a little army ourselves, the five of us. Our tank, our world.
I just figured that was a good thing, and the way it was supposed to go. It sure has made our crew a fighting unit in the best sense.
“Sometimes you can be awfully negative, commander,” Pacifico says, pointing his hearing ear menacingly at the boss.
Cowens manages a bit of a chuckle.
“You might be right, kid. I’ll have to keep an eye on that.”
It’s cold and windy up here in Kasserine country at night. It is black, as we sleep in the tank. We’ve seen tent camps set up all over the area, but we don’t bother with that. This is what we do, our crew. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to sleep lying down when I get out of tank service.
“How come we don’t get nicknames?” comes Logan’s voice out of deep, deep left field, on the warning track.
“Which one of you nuts said that?” the boss groans.
“Me, sir, Logan.”
“Fine. Your nickname is Nuts. Now, go to sleep.”
“Okay, but doesn’t everybody in the whole armed forces get a nickname at some point? Part of the experience, isn’t it?”
Cowens sighs. “I thought Wyatt was in charge of nicknames.”
Go on, kid, bite.
“Why’s that, captain?”
The laughter is instant and spontaneously perfect, like a mean choir.
“Why’s Dat?” Pacifico calls out, speaking for everybody.
“Very funny, Nonna,” Wyatt calls back.
“Hey!” Pacifico says. “But, my nonna —”
“That leaves you, Bucyk,” Cowens says, getting very much into the swing of it. “Since you all may very well have nicknames for me, but I very well better not hear them. You’re up.”
I almost forgot myself. I feel my smile unfurl.
“I already have a nickname, captain.”
“Do share.”
“The Captain. Since I was a kid. I’ve always been known as The Captain.”
“Allll right,” Logan says, clapping his hands and rubbing them together.
The other captain waits for the fuss to die down.
&n
bsp; “Um, no,” he says, mysteriously without explanation.
“He was a pro ballplayer,” Pacifico says. “In the Red Sox system. Let’s call him Teddy Ballgame.”
There is another pause.
“Bucyk, are you telling us you were in pro ball?”
“I wasn’t telling you that, but I guess I am now. Yeah, I was in the Red Sox system.”
There is another pause. Cowens is a very skilled pauseman.
“It’s settled, then. Bucyk’s nickname will be Liar. Unless you prefer Pinocchio, because we’re pretty flexible.”
There is a lot of low-level, high-satisfaction laughter before it settles.
“Can I sleep on that, sir, and let you know my decision in the morning?”
“Sounds reasonable. Unless you wake up in the morning and tell us you’re Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
“I’ll try not to, sir.”
“Good night, men,” Cowens says, pulling the curtain down on our little show.
I am certain it is the first time he has called us that.
“Chief.” Cowens’s voice comes low from the silent night later.
“What’s that?”
“Chief. I’d say that’s the Sioux Indian version of Captain. I can’t live with another Captain in the tank. But I can live with a Chief, I think.”
It feels like getting DiMaggio’s autograph. And his bat.
“Saves me a decision in the morning,” I say. “Thanks. Good night, captain.”
“Good night, Chief.”
If I get no closer than this to the Medal of Honor, I’ll have no complaints.
It feels almost familiar, the way the next week goes. Familiar because it’s a lot like how Oran was, toward the latter part, when there was clearly some fierce fighting going on right around the corner, but it remained there, somebody else’s business. We just figured all along everything would work out correctly for our side.
I still believe that.
But after a week the morning breaks, as it seems mornings tend to break in war, with an urgent call to get to a position about a mile from where we are, because Rommel’s tanks are in our yard.
Like the vicious guard dogs we are, the bulk of the tank command flies in that direction. We have no idea what else is being sent in terms of manpower and machine-power, but there is enough of it around that we can be confident it will show, if it’s not already there.
The old howl and snarl is back in the team as we race out to defend what we have, incredibly and in short order, come to feel is our place, our pass, our country, even.
This is right. This one feels right.
We are storming into the depths of the ravine, rounding the small foothill that was our cover, rushing to help out at the critical east entrance to the pass.
We come close to colliding with a company of light M-3 tanks from the battalion sent ahead of us, who are in full flight from a company of German Tigers.
As the M-3s rush past us, we open fire on their pursuers.
“How did they get here?” Cowens screams. “How did we not know?”
We cause the Tigers very little trouble as they are at high speed already, and before we know it we are running west instead of east, chasing the German tanks back into what we thought of as our base. It’s occurring to me much too late that we are passing by machinery and bodies, freshly dead and dropped right here in our stronghold.
We are gaining ground on the Germans, feeling good about our chances as we pound rounds and shells into the tails of the running Tigers for a change.
“This is more like it, men!” calls the commander, reborn. “Run them down, Chief. Blow them into oblivion, Nuts!”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!”
It is our finest moment. We are fighting against the best now, and we are winning.
Bu-hoom bu-hoom bu-hoom bu-hoom.
Suddenly the all-too-familiar sound and feel of the 88-mm cannon is all over us, all around, and coming from all around.
“Holy … holy …” is the sum of the commands we get now from the commander.
“They’re up top!” Logan howls as he swings his 75-mm gun up as straight as if he were going into antiaircraft mode.
There is panic now in our tank.
“Wyatt, for cryin’ out loud, load!” Logan screams. Then I hear thrashing around and finally Logan loads his own gun.
We have stopped short, to assess, and to dig in against …
“They’ve taken it,” Cowens says evenly, surveying all sides through his scope. “They’ve done it. Look. During the night, they came in, and took the heights right away from us, both sides of the pass.”
I use my own scope to check it, desperate to find him wrong for once. Just this once, please.
“It was a trap,” Commander Cowens says. “A wonderful, brilliant, rotten trap.”
“And here we are,” I say, still looking past all the mounting, mounted evidence for a better outcome.
If it’s up to Nuts Logan, anyway, we have nothing to worry about. He’s loading and firing and loading and bellowing like there’s no tomorrow.
“Bucyk,” Pacifico says. “Bucyk,” he says again, tugging on my arm when I fail to look down from looking up. The world is walls of deafening explosion, sound and shake, and it doesn’t even matter anymore what direction it’s coming from.
“What?” I say, like my pal is a nuisance keeping me from my stargazing.
He points straight ahead.
One solitary Tiger, all fifty-seven tons of tank, one of the beasts we were chasing and tail-whipping, has turned. It is slowly — much more slowly than necessary — advancing on us, daring us, mousing us as it comes. When we were chasing the Tiger we were exploiting its only real flaw, a lack of straight-ahead speed. It’s laughing now as it comes, showing us its 88-mm cannon looking as long as a football field, its front armor that is four inches thick.
I learned every detail from the great Tankist himself.
“Logan,” Cowens says as coolly as any natural-born commander who ever lived. “You might want to forget about the hills, and fire on this guy.” He points.
Logan swings down, he pounds a shell straight into the Tiger’s face.
Wyatt jumps in, jams in the next round, and we fire.
So do they.
Pu-hoooom! Puuuu-hoooooom!
My eyes are smoke and fire. My head is howling, crackling, the bone a thousand small fissures like a fat green log just when the ax splits it.
Their shell tears the entire turret right off of our tank. Sends it to the four corners, sends it up and down and nowhere. And I am lucky enough — just so, so lucky enough — to have the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second when I involuntarily whip my face away from the flash of the oncoming 88-mm shell. As a guy does in the face of an oncoming 88-mm shell, even if he is not a coward. And in doing this I am lucky enough to see the shell atomize the finest, truest, and rightest man I have ever met.
While he looks right at me.
Pacifico and I looked up to the sky that day, like we were just two stupid rabbits coming up out of a hole. We just stared straight up into the sky from our turretless tank, our leaderless tank, our Loganless, Wyattless husk of a machine, and Pacifico would have gone right on staring if I hadn’t grabbed him pretty much in a headlock and wrestled him up and out of there. We scrambled across the ground, on our bellies like they taught us in basic, and found ourselves a gigantic delicious boulder that was probably wedged against that Kasserine wall twenty-five wars ago.
We survived.
There was nothing wrong with either of us, by the standards of Army life in wartime, anyway. Certainly by the standards of that crew of five, in that tank on that day, we were shiny, new, fine.
Still, they thought it a good idea to get us out of harm’s way for a little while, to get our gears some oil and reload for the fights to come.
They sent us on a holiday for three weeks while the fighting continued in Tunisia.
Our vacation destinat
ion was dear old home-sweet-Oran, Algeria.
MY DEAR CORPORAL,
YOU SHOULD SEE ME NOW. I’M QUITE A GOLDBRICK, LYING AROUND DOING NOT MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE PEACEFUL COAST OF ALGERIA.
THEN AGAIN, I’M THE GUY WHO MADE IT PEACEFUL, SO I SHOULD BE ABLE TO ENJOY IT SOME.
THAT WAS A JOKE, RATHER THAN A BRAG. I WILL NEVER BE BOASTFUL AND OVERCONFIDENT AGAIN. NEVER, EVER.
I’M HERE WITH MY CREW, ON A MANDATED R&R, AND R (THAT’S REST, REHABILITATION, AND, IN OUR CASE, SOME RETRAINING) BEFORE REDEPLOYMENT. PACIFICO, THAT’S MY CREW.
THE OTHER GUYS WON’T BE MAKING IT TO DINNER, I’M AFRAID. PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME. NOT A SCRATCH, AS THE SAYING GOES. AS IT WILL ALWAYS GO FOR ME. I’M VERY CAREFUL NOW, YOU KNOW, FAMILY MAN AND ALL.
PART OF MY EVER-EXPANDING EDUCATION HERE HAS INCLUDED A REAL UNDERSTANDING OF IRONY (FOR THE FIRST TIME, I SHOULD CONFESS). COMMANDER COWENS ALWAYS LONGED TO SERVE UNDER GENERAL PATTON. NOW, BECAUSE OF CERTAIN COMMAND FAILURES THAT CONTRIBUTED TO COMMANDER COWENS NOW SERVING UNDER SAINT PETER, OUR CORPS HAS BEEN PUT UNDER THE COMMAND OF GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON. THAT IS IRONY, YES? HAVE I GOT THAT CORRECT?
OH, FORGOT TO MENTION, WHAT’S LEFT OF MY CREW IS DEAF. OR, EXTREMELY HARD OF HEARING WITH A LITTLE MORE OF IT EBBING EVERY DAY. HE’LL BE GOOD AS LONG AS WE’RE TOGETHER, BUT THE FEASIBILITY OF THAT MAY BE SLIPPING AWAY. HE’S VERY CONCERNED ABOUT THE FATE OF ITALY, SO MAYBE IF HE GETS IN POSITION TO PERSONALLY WRESTLE MUSSOLINI TO THE GROUND SOMETIME SOON, HE’LL BE ABLE TO RETIRE WITH HONOR HIMSELF.
YOU ARE AN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER NOW (I WON’T MENTION THE STRIPES). OH, HOW MUCH WE COULD USE YOU HERE, BECAUSE THESE SKIES ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL.
I WILL WRITE AGAIN SOON, TEAMMATE. OR, WITH A LITTLE LUCK, WE’LL WRAP THIS UP AND I’LL SEE YOU EVEN SOONER.
LOVE,
ROMAN
P.S. IT’S MUCH MORE LIKE CASABLANCA THAN ROAD TO MOROCCO — THEY WERE KIND ENOUGH TO SCREEN BOTH FOR US SINCE I’VE BEEN BACK IN ORAN.