Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  And still the Germans fire, and reload, and fire again, pouring lead into women and children choking on smoke.

  It is a long time before the firing stops and the last screams are silenced. A long time until the German soldiers, some looking down and rushing as though in a hurry to put the day’s massacre behind them, others sauntering, laughing, carrying stolen goods, set about the job of annihilating the village itself, tossing incendiary grenades through windows and doors. And as the last of them pile aboard their trucks, the village is engulfed in smoke and flame.

  From their treetop perch Rainy and Philippe watch, hoping somehow to see life, to see a man or a woman or a child emerge.

  Roofs collapse in showers of sparks.

  “I must see,” Philippe says.

  Rainy knows it’s a bad idea. She also knows there is nothing she can say to stop him. They climb down together, and Philippe leads the way to a small footbridge. They dip scarves in the water and tie them over their mouths and noses against the smoke, like bandits. They cross the river into a scene of man-made hell. The village is aflame. Smoke is thick, penetrating their damp scarves and making them choke and cough. The smell of burning wood, burning fabric, burning furniture, burning bodies is sickening. Fire and smoke are everywhere.

  “My father,” Philippe says as if explanation is needed, as he races up the slope to the barn. Here the roof has collapsed, spreading broken tile over a mass of perhaps two dozen bodies. The clothing of the dead singes and catches fire, and quickly burns out. It is the flesh, the human fat, that burns longer.

  Rainy puts a hand on Philippe’s shoulder. He shakes it off. He wishes no comfort. No comfort is possible.

  Half blind from smoke, eyes swimming with tears, they walk back with dread-slowed steps to the church. Here the roof still burns but has not yet fallen. They kick their way through machine gun brass that tinkles merrily on the cobblestones. They cannot enter without climbing over dead bodies, bodies not yet stiff, bodies that sag and slide and force Rainy to her knees, steadying herself with a hand pressed down on a bloody face.

  They see inside.

  “Oh God,” Rainy cries. “Oh God. Oh God.”

  Here there is no pile of two dozen. Here are hundreds. Hundreds of women and children. A baby, less than a year old, stares up at Rainy, its blue eyes open, its body pierced and torn apart by bullets, like a rag doll a mad dog has taken as a plaything. An old woman lies atop a child of six, her arms frozen in a futile attempt to protect him. A woman sits against one wall, her dress burned away to reveal flesh that is red and black.

  Somewhere in the gruesome tangle of bodies lies Bernard. Rainy searches for his face but soon gives up. What is she hoping for? Does she want to see the lively little boy dead? Does she want to see those mischievous eyes staring blankly up at her?

  Philippe calls out, “Is anyone alive? Does anyone still live?”

  His answer comes when the roof begins to collapse in sections. No. No one still lives in the church at Oradour-sur-Glane.

  Their faces black with smoke, they retreat to the river’s edge. Philippe collapses on the ground, head in his hands, weeping.

  “I have to leave,” Rainy says dully.

  “Why? For what? What is the point anymore?”

  “I have to track the division. I have to report back on their movements.”

  “I cannot.” He shrugs helplessly and looks with devastated eyes back toward his hometown.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I must . . . someone must . . .”

  “I know.”

  He nods acceptance. “You have your duty.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  My duty to track the Das Reich. My duty to report back. My duties as a soldier.

  And my duty to find Adolf Diekmann, the smiling SS monster in the command car, and kill him.

  Assassin?

  She will wear the word easily if she finds him.

  17

  RIO RICHLIN—NORMANDY, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  “It’s like we’re back in Italy, Cap’n,” Stick says to Captain Passey. He and the rest of the sergeants, along with the lieutenant platoon leaders of Passey’s company, have been called together for what Passey called a “skull session.”

  “How so, Stick?”

  “Well, there we’d take a German defensive line, and there was another right behind it. Here it’s the hedgerows. We take one and in the next field we’re starting all over from scratch.”

  Passey nods. It is clear to Rio that the captain puts more stock in Dain Sticklin than in most of his officers, which, in her opinion, speaks highly of Passey’s good sense. The lieutenants are mostly ninety-day wonders, young men and women of little to no experience and not all that much book-learning either.

  Rio’s division, the 119th, has been spared the protracted battles for the Cherbourg and the Cotentin peninsulas. And the British forces are taking on Caen. Which leaves the 119th slogging through the bocage, as the French call this countryside.

  After days of fighting in the bocage, Rio has learned some lessons, and she hasn’t lost any more soldiers. Cat has had two killed, one by friendly fire from a P-38 Lightning, and she’s in a very un-Cat-like funk, saying nothing, just scowling.

  “That may be,” Passey says. “But I want to know how we’re going to advance. We’re taking too many casualties and going way too slow.”

  Rio knows—as everyone now does—that while the landing is a success and the beachhead is secure for now, forward progress is slow, very slow, with her platoon often doing nothing in the course of a day but fighting its way across a single field to take a single hedgerow. At this rate they’ll be in Berlin about the time Rio is ready for a rocking chair.

  Stick says, “The people are behaving well, for the most part. But they still can’t get the idea of marching fire. And they still hit the ground every time they hear a loud noise.”

  “The Kraut is counting on it,” Lieutenant Horne says, perhaps feeling that his platoon sergeant is taking up too much of Passey’s attention. “They fire a shot, everyone yells ‘sniper,’ they all hit the dirt, and once they’re laid out flat, in come the mortars or the 88s.”

  “Yep.” A lieutenant from another platoon agrees, nodding vigorously. “They got MGs at the corners of every field, antitank guns, riflemen in the hedges, artillery support, and when all else fails they roll a Tiger up on us.”

  “We need—” Rio starts before quickly silencing herself, because none of the other three-stripers are speaking up.

  “Go ahead, Richlin,” Passey says. She’s acquired some standing with Passey since the breakout from the beach. Passey had shown skepticism about the women under his command, but he’s more interested in winning than in playing favorites.

  “Well, sir, the best thing I’ve seen so far is this Sherman with a bulldozer blade on the front,” Rio says, feeling like the only child in a room of adults. “It can push straight through a hedgerow, which means we don’t have to come in through gaps the Krauts have zeroed in. But that was just once, I haven’t seen any more since.”

  “What about antitank fire?” Passey asks. “What about mines?”

  Rio says, “The mines in those fields are Bouncing Bettys and the like, mostly antipersonnel, not antitank. The 88s, as you know, sir, are usually on high ground a distance away, so unless the air corps can take them out . . .”

  Passey says, “The fly-boys are scared because they say we’re shooting at them.”

  Cat looks like she’s building up a head of steam to say a few things about the air corps, so Rio jumps in. “Those 88s have the roads and the entrances to fields ranged, don’t have the center of a hedgerow zeroed in, and got MGs and mortars for that. The tank-dozer I saw in action broke through in about three minutes. I’m not saying the Krauts can’t aim and shoot in three minutes, but it wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be as accurate.”

  Passey nods. “The only tanks in this sector are a colored battalion of Shermans. I’ll ta
lk to their colonel and see whether we can get some help from them.”

  The meeting breaks up, and Stick, Cat, and Rio walk the few feet to the field kitchen. After days of C rations the stew and biscuits are a wonderful luxury.

  The camp is a chaos of vehicles and soldiers and sad-looking tents. They find an unoccupied spot upwind from the latrines and sit on crates and stuff their faces, feeling guilty about their people up at the front who are opening yet another can of cold hash.

  “It’s good you spoke up, Richlin,” Stick says.

  “Captain’s all right,” Rio says through a mouthful of burning-hot apple cobbler.

  What is unsaid is that Lieutenant Horne is not okay. His panic on the beach has left him tarnished in the eyes of the platoon. And since then he has been taking risks with himself and his soldiers, trying to prove himself.

  “I’m wondering about some NCO-to-NCO outreach,” Stick says.

  “What’s that mean?” Cat asks.

  “Look, we have a push on tomorrow. Captain’s got to talk to his colonel, who has to think it over and then maybe get hold of the colonel of that colored tank battalion, and in this army nothing gets done in twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re saying we go talk to some of the tank drivers?” Cat asks. “Captain will blow his top if it goes bad.”

  But in the end the three of them take a detour on their way back to the front line, a detour that takes them to the motor pool—two tents and a jumble of treads, bogie wheels, carburetors steeping in cans of gasoline—of the tank battalion. There they find a furiously angry master sergeant puffing intensely on a huge meerschaum pipe who begins by telling them that he (puff) does not take orders (puff) from some staff sergeant just because he’s white. (Puff, puff.)

  Stick, being an educated fellow, turns to logical argument. But Rio has had experience with men whose lives are spent with machines. She knows their language. She grabs a piece of wrapping paper and sketches the tank-dozer, and sure enough the pipe-puffer cannot resist looking.

  “It wasn’t like an actual bulldozer blade,” Rio explains. “It was more like this, see. Like teeth, kind of.”

  The master sergeant stares and puffs. He takes the pencil and begins drawing. Stick starts to speak but is stopped dead by a raised hand and an angry puff.

  “We could bring up some of the scrap metal off the beach . . . (puff), cut at a bias (puff), . . . weld it here . . . (puff, puff). Hmm.”

  (Puff.)

  “I might could get my captain to let me try it out. (Puff.)” Then a crafty look comes into his eye. “Of course that’s a lot of work. I don’t have men to spare bringing scrap up off the beach. And you know, all that welding (puff) would take a lot of my energies.” He sucks on nothing, takes out his pipe, and knocks the ashes against his boot. “A man can’t plan right without a little pipe tobacco. Sure can’t work without it. No, not even if he had a mind to.”

  A year earlier Rio and Stick and Cat might have missed the implications of that speech. But they are veterans now and understand that the army runs on favors.

  “How much pipe tobacco would it take to focus on a job like that?” Cat asks.

  “Oh, I’d say a full two pouches. And it’s thirsty work besides.”

  “I had a premonition it might be,” Cat says.

  In the end they agree on a single pouch of pipe tobacco and two bottles of liquor (or four of wine) for two modified tanks.

  “I can get my hands on the scrap metal,” Stick says. “The other stuff . . .”

  “I have a guy,” Rio says.

  Back with her squad, Rio calls Beebee over. “I need a pouch of pipe tobacco and some booze.”

  Beebee considers. “It’ll take me two hours . . . if I can get a jeep.”

  It takes him three hours, but in addition to the bribes he comes back with a complete ham, a part of which is sent along to encourage progress at the motor pool.

  The next morning two Shermans with dramatic dentures at the front come rattling up. One is assigned to Rio’s objective.

  “Okay, here’s how we do this,” Rio explains to her squad as the tank commander sits in his turret listening in. They are in a cleared field facing a secured hedgerow. “Tank goes through this hedgerow. We follow. Marching fire, people. Marching fire: walk and shoot, walk and shoot. Don’t make me have to yell at you when I should be shooting Krauts. We cross the field, with us behind it, figuring the tank will pop any mines. The tank goes right ahead, bang into the facing hedgerow. Right? And we go through the gap, split left, Preeling’s people go right, we roll the Krauts up and the tank skedaddles before the Kraut spotters can zero in. We dig in. And listen up: I mean dig in. Half the time we get somewhere they come right back at us while we’re draining our canteens and boiling coffee. Through the safe hedge, follow the tank, through the next hedge, left and right and shoot anyone you see. Right?”

  “Right, Sarge,” a few voices mutter.

  Well, Rio thinks, I’d be more worried if they were cocky. Better scared. “We jump off in ten minutes.”

  Heads nod. Geer says, “You sure these colored boys know how to drive a tank?”

  “You have a white tank unit you can call up?” Rio asks.

  The tank sits idling, exhaust fumes rising. The tank commander and the bow gunner are both poking up from their respective hatches. The Germans will hear them. They’ll know tanks are coming. Hopefully they won’t know from where and they’ll have all their Panzerfausts at the corners of the field.

  If this doesn’t work, I’ll be in the doghouse.

  Rio looks down the line at her squad. Her solid soldiers, Geer, Pang, Jenou, and Jack; the risen-from-the-dead Dick Ostrowiz, who reappeared three days after the landing, having been given up as drowned; the enthusiastic and overly eager Jenny Dial; the goldbrick Rudy J. Chester; Beebee, indispensable as a scrounger, but not the most eager beaver of fighting men; and Maria Milkmaid Molina, who was shaping up to be a decent soldier.

  Two short of a full complement, not that she wishes for more green replacements, God forbid. But someone who could handle a BAR or remember to throw a grenade after pulling the pin would be nice. Despite the tension, or perhaps because of it, her thoughts go to the soldiers who have not made it this far. Cassell. Suarez. Even Magraff. And the new ones, Hobart and Camacho.

  “Ready?”

  They nod or grunt.

  The signal comes. Rio yells up to the tank commander, who waves her off and says, “Don’t you worry, honey, we will tear up that little old hedge.”

  He guns the engine, and the Sherman gathers speed. It’s going maybe fifteen miles an hour when the welded teeth bite into the base of the hedgerow. The bushes tilt away and wave wildly, a clear-as-day signal to the Germans.

  The tank backs up, hits it again, and this time sits grinding its gears, treads kicking up clods of dirt and grass as the squad stands close by.

  It takes a third and then a fourth rush by the Sherman, and suddenly the front of the tank tilts up and it plows right over the hedgerow into the field beyond, tilting like a playground seesaw.

  Now the squad competes for space behind the tank, and no one but Jack, Jenou, Pang, and Geer is employing marching fire, firing from the hip even without specific targets to keep the Krauts pinned down.

  Machine guns open up from the far corners and Chester and Ostrowiz promptly fall on their faces as the tank pulls away.

  “Get up! Get up!” Rio yells. “How many times do I have to tell you? Move!”

  Now comes the whistle of artillery and a dirt flower erupts in the middle of the field, showering the GIs and the tank with dirt and debris. The tank buttons up, closing their hatches, relying now on inadequate periscopes for steering.

  “Move, move, move!” Rio shouts and reaches down to grab the collar of Chester’s uniform and haul him to his feet. The German gunners must be careful not to hit their own position, so the safest reaction to mortar fire is to advance. “Ostrowiz! Move!”

  The tank is ahead of the inf
antry, racing toward the far hedgerow in the knowledge that the German artillery will have to stop firing or risk hitting their own men. The tank hits the second hedgerow like it did the first, but the tank commander has learned, and this time it takes only three charges from the Sherman to knock a hole in the hedgerow.

  Rio is at the rear, pushing Chester and Ostrowiz. Geer leads the way through, with Dial and Pang beside him. They pivot left out of Rio’s sight, and she hears frantic rifle fire.

  The tank commander, no longer worried about the mortars that rain down on the now-empty field behind them, is up out of his hatch and swiveling the big machine gun toward the tree line. The tank is behind the German line now, behind gray-clad soldiers rushing up with their Panzerfausts at the ready.

  This Sherman has a .50 caliber for the tank commander and a .30 caliber bow gun. Both lacerate the hedgerow, cutting through the Germans like a scythe going through wheat.

  Rio pushes through the gap, pivots, sees Jack trip, and for a heart-stopping moment thinks he’s been shot. But he’s up, cursing, and firing at German troops who now retreat in both directions along the hedgerow.

  “Dig in, dig in!” Rio shouts. She grabs the entrenching tool from the back of Chester’s pack and shoves it in his hands. “Soon as those Krauts are clear the arty’s coming!”

  Shovels out, the dirt clods start flying as the tank continues spraying deadly fire, now into the next hedgerow. Then the tank fires its big cannon and the center of the next hedgerow explodes. The Germans over there are firing back, but only sporadically in the presence of the Sherman’s annihilating fire.

  A Panzerfaust, the German counterpart to the American bazooka, flies, trailing sparks. It misses the Sherman, and the Sherman chases the track of Panzerfaust smoke with lacerating machine gun fire.

  Then the tank turns and roars back through the hole it has made.

  Rio checks her watch. Eleven minutes start to finish, and another square of Normandy’s endless checkerboard belongs to the Americans.