by Alan Gratz
Stretching out to his left and his right were all the other soldiers who’d been lucky enough to make it this far up the beach, to the protection of the seawall. There were hundreds of fallen, lifeless American soldiers in the short distance between the wall and the water. There were only forty or so here with Dee.
BOOM. A mortar exploded a dozen yards down the line, just this side of the seawall, taking out four or five of the men who’d been hiding there. If the mortar had been aimed just an inch or so to the right, it would be bits of Dee that were scattered all over the sand.
Dee would have shrugged, but he was too tired. It might be him next time. It might not. Now or later didn’t really matter.
Sid was already dead. Sid, his best friend in the army—maybe the best friend he’d ever had in his entire life. All Sid had ever wanted was to fight the Germans. Back when they met in boot camp, Sid had told Dee about the day his synagogue in New York City had hosted a Jewish woman who’d managed to escape from Nazi Germany. She’d horrified the congregation with stories of how the Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and burned down their places of worship. How the Nazis segregated the Jewish people, deprived them—had even begun to murder them. Sid had wanted to go to war with Nazi Germany right then, but the United States wasn’t in the war yet. Sid had been just about to run away to Canada to join the Canadian army so he could do something, when the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and America had at last gone to war. Sid had enlisted right away and gotten himself shipped to Europe. But now he had died before he’d ever gotten his revenge on a single Nazi soldier. How was that fair?
A mortar exploded nearby, and Dee saw again in his mind’s eye the blast that had taken out Sid. One minute Sid had been there, and the next he was gone. That’s the fate of every last man on this beach, Dee thought. We’re all going to die here, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. We’re all going to die without getting our chance for revenge.
No one had made it up and off the beach yet. They were supposed to have taken the German bunkers on the cliffs and been miles inland by now, but they were still pinned down. Still dying from German machine guns and rifles and mortars and grenades. Dee wondered if the soldiers on Utah—the other American beach—or the men on any of the three British beaches—Sword, Juno, and Gold—had fared any better. Distantly, Dee hoped so. For their sake. There was no use hoping for anything here.
So stupid, Dee thought. I was so stupid to think I was going to come here and change anything. The time for changing anything in Germany was long gone. His family should never have left. They should have spoken up before things got this bad, even if it had meant disappearing into the Night and Fog. If everyone had spoken up at once, they couldn’t have made them all disappear, could they?
But his parents had been scared. Scared for him, and scared for themselves.
They don’t know what it really means to be scared, Dee thought now. Nobody but the people sitting against this seawall, nobody but the soldiers lying wounded and dead in the surf of Omaha Beach, had ever known true fear.
Another Higgins boat pulled up to the shore with another forty soldiers inside.
“No. Go back,” Dee said. “Don’t lower the ramp. Stay on the boat.”
They couldn’t hear him, even if he yelled. Not this far away. Not over the constant rat-tat-tat of the German machine guns. But Dee said it out loud as if the universe might hear him. As if by just speaking the words he could will it to happen.
“Don’t do it,” Dee said. “Don’t drop the ramp. Don’t drop the ramp.”
They dropped the ramp.
Dee looked away as bullets ripped into the boat and row after row of soldiers fell screaming into the water.
“Go! Go!” a soldier a few paces off to Dee’s left shouted, and Dee looked back up.
One of the soldiers from the boat, unbelievably, had run right down the ramp and into the knee-high surf without getting shot.
“The tank! Get to the tank, bud!” cried another soldier along the seawall.
Valiant, the tank that had given Dee the cover he needed to get this far, had long since become mired in the wet sand, its turret and machine guns aimed too low to do any good. But while it could no longer shuttle soldiers up and down the beach in its shadow, Valiant was now at least a valuable way station on the path to the seawall.
“The tank! Get to the tank!” Dee called.
There was still no way for the soldier down there on the beach to hear any of them, but somehow the solider spotted Valiant and ran for its shelter.
He made it! Dee sat up higher.
“The hedgehog,” one of the other soldiers at the seawall said, willing the soldier to see the big steel obstacle a few yards away.
“No, the shell line—straight for the shell line!” said another soldier.
“He’s moving!” Dee cried.
The soldier burst out from behind the tank, head down. He’d made his decision. He was running for the hedgehog.
“Go! Go! Run!” the soldiers at the seawall cried.
Dee ducked and cringed along with the running soldier, feeling his adrenaline, his fear. He was almost there—almost there! Then suddenly—POOM!—a mortar landed right on top of the hedgehog, blasting sand and shells and shrapnel all over the beach.
The soldier just missed getting hit by the exploding hedgehog. He stumbled and fell, and Dee held his breath. Laden with gear, the soldier struggled to his feet. His hedgehog hiding place destroyed, he staggered off toward the shell line instead. Go, go, go, Dee prayed silently. Bullets kicked up sand beside the soldier, behind him, but still nothing hit him.
“This guy’s the luckiest soldier on Omaha Beach,” Dee whispered.
The soldier dove for the protection of the shell line, and he fell so fast, flopped so clumsily, that Dee thought he might have been shot after all. There were gasps up and down the line of soldiers at the seawall. Calls for the soldier to be okay. To not be dead.
The soldier peeked up over the shell line, and the line of soldiers at the seawall cheered. Dee let out the breath he’d been holding and smiled for the first time since hitting the beach.
The soldier put his head back down and waited. Dee knew what he must be feeling. They all did. The soldier had found a place of safety in the middle of the storm, no matter how slight it was, no matter how tenuous. Dee didn’t yell for the soldier to get up, to leave the protection of the shell line. No one did. No one who had been through that hell—who had had to summon the courage to stand up again when he could just lie there forever and be safe, his face buried in the sand—could ask him to do that, because none of them had wanted to do it either. But they knew he would, in his own time. Because he had to.
Dee could feel the anticipation up and down the line as they waited for him to make his move. The suspense was electric. Other soldiers had crawled out of the surf, and some had even made it up to the shell line in other places, but it was this soldier—the Lucky Soldier—who had their attention. There was something special about him. Something untouchable.
Dee’s breath came hard and fast. Did a German sniper have his rifle trained on the Lucky Soldier right now, waiting for him to do something? Was a mortar going to find him before he worked up his courage? Would a machine gun tear him apart the moment he stood?
They waited long, anxious minutes, none of them calling out. None of them wanted to be the person who lured the Lucky Soldier to his death. But then, finally, the Lucky Soldier did what they all had done: He climbed to his feet and started his run across the ten yards that separated him from the seawall.
Dee and the others immediately roared their encouragement.
“Come on!”
“You can make it!”
“Just a few more steps now!”
“You’re almost here!”
“You’ve got it! You’ve got it! You’ve got it!”
Dee stood, waving his arms, ready to pull the man in.
And then a bullet struck the Lucky Soldier, r
ight down through his shoulder, straight down to his heart, and he tripped and fell face-first into the sand.
One of the other soldiers cursed. Another sobbed. Dee could only stare forlornly at the dead soldier a few feet away. He didn’t think he could feel any lower, didn’t think the black hole in his stomach could grow any larger, any deeper, but it did. It opened up and swallowed Dee whole, and he felt himself fading out of existence.
He had to do something. Do something right now or he would disappear forever.
What he did was run for the body of the Lucky Soldier.
The wet sand twisted under Dee’s boots as he ran. Bullets still flew, and mortars still exploded, but no German up on the cliffs had seen him yet, or else he’d be dead.
In two steps, Dee reached the Lucky Soldier. He snatched up the man’s hand—it was still warm—and pulled him hard. The wet clothes, the heavy gear, the man’s limp, lifeless body: It was like running against the tide. Dee screamed, a primal howl of anger and frustration and strength, and before his cry even ended, he had dragged the body of the Lucky Soldier up to the protection of the seawall. Bullets fwipped into the sand where he and the Lucky Soldier had been, but he was safe again now.
Dee squatted next to the body like a catcher, breathing hard.
“What the hell did you do that for?” one of the other soldiers asked. “He’s dead.”
“I—I don’t know,” Dee said. How could he explain that if he hadn’t done it, he’d be dead too? “It just felt like a shame for him to make it all this way and not get here in the end.”
The other soldiers nodded. It had been a dumb thing to do, to run out there and get shot at again, but they all understood.
Down the line, a medic had been treating a fallen soldier in the no-man’s-land between the shell line and the seawall. Now he was trying to stand with his shoulder under the arm of the injured man to help walk him to safety.
“Come on,” Dee told the others. He ran crouching along the protection of the seawall, past soldier after soldier, each with the same thousand-yard stare he’d just had, until he came perpendicular to the place where the medic struggled just a few feet away. Heedless again of the German guns up on the cliffs, Dee ran straight out and put his shoulder under the wounded man’s other arm. More soldiers ran to join him, and together they had the wounded man and the medic under the lee of the seawall before any of them had taken a bullet.
“Thanks, pal,” the medic said. He was black, Dee suddenly realized.
“Name’s Henry,” the medic said, and Dee introduced himself. “D?” Henry asked. “Just like the letter D? Hang on—you got some scrapes here I can wrap up for you.”
Dee sucked in a breath as Henry dabbed iodine on a cut on his arm.
“There’s a German film called M, just the letter M,” said Henry. “Came out in the States a few years back with English voices dubbed over the German. But the main character in that’s a bad dude. You don’t want to be anything like him.”
With a start, Dee realized he knew the film. He’d never seen it, but he’d seen the creepy movie posters when he was a boy.
In Berlin.
Dee tried to look away, irrationally worried that someone might somehow see the look of recognition in his face, but Henry held his chin and dabbed at it with a cotton swab.
“What are you doing?” Dee asked.
“You took a bullet to the left arm and had one graze your face too. Didn’t kill you, but it’s going to leave a scar.”
Dee frowned. When had he been shot? He tried to put a hand to his face, to feel the wound, but the medic slapped his hand away.
“Don’t touch it,” Henry told him.
“I can’t—I can’t feel them,” Dee said. “The places I got shot. Did you give me morphine?”
“No. That’s the adrenaline,” the medic said. “When it wears off, you’ll feel them. I’m not going to give you morphine because that would dull you and you’re not so badly injured you can’t fight.”
Fight? Dee thought. Fight what? There was nothing to fight. Just invisible bullets and mortars that dropped out of the sky. All the hopelessness that had held him rooted to the seawall just a few minutes ago came washing back over him now, and he sagged. What was even the point of Henry patching him up if he was just going to be killed a few minutes later?
“Hey, when you’re done being pampered you could maybe say hello,” said a familiar voice. Dee turned to see the soldier he’d helped Henry carry out of no-man’s-land.
It was Sid!
“Sid!” Dee cried.
Dee pulled Sid to his feet and wrapped him in a hug.
“Watch the leg! Watch the leg!” Sid said, laughing. “I missed you too, buddy. When that mortar went off, I thought I’d lost you for good.”
“I thought I lost you!” Dee said. “I thought you were dead!” Dee couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t stop smiling. But Sid’s leg— “Are you all right? Are you hurt bad?” he asked.
“Don’t count me out yet. I told you, I’m not leaving till I kill a Kraut.”
“Your buddy took some shrapnel from the blast,” said Henry. “He’ll be a little slower than everybody else. You might have to stay close, give him a hand every now and then.”
Sid put his arm around Dee’s shoulder and shook him like a little brother. “You kidding? We’re not getting separated again. Thirty years from now, me and Dee here are going to be taking the train back and forth from New York to Philly to watch the Dodgers and the Athletics in the World Series!”
“Medic! Medic!” another soldier cried out.
“Somebody’s playing my song,” said Henry, and with a tip of his helmet he ran back out onto the battlefield. Back out into the bullets and the mortars and the mines. Dee shook his head in wonder at the medic’s courage and skill.
Before Dee could ask Sid anything else, a tall, thin lieutenant Dee had never seen before came down the line of men at the seawall. He was crouching low so the Germans couldn’t see him. There was blood all over the breast of his uniform—his or somebody else’s, Dee couldn’t tell—and a white gauze bandage crossed his face diagonally, coming down out of his helmet to cover his left eye.
“We’ve got to get off this beach!” the lieutenant told them. “The only people here are the dead, and those who are going to die. If we’re going to die here, we might as well take some Germans with us.”
“I hear that,” said Sid.
“A mortar blew a hole in the seawall a few yards down,” the lieutenant said. “That’s our way up and out. Now, let’s get the hell off this beach!”
The lieutenant’s name was Mendoza. He wasn’t from Dee’s unit, but that didn’t matter anymore. There was no radio, no way of coming together but this, in small groups of survivors who had ended up hiding beside each other at the seawall. Dee was still scared, but he couldn’t sit here and wait for death any longer. He had to do something. And now that Sid was back, he had someone to do it with.
“You ready to do this?” Dee asked Sid.
“Yeah,” said Sid. “But I think you’re forgetting something.”
Dee didn’t understand.
“A rifle? A weapon of some kind?” Sid said. “You might need something like that at some point soon.”
Dee stared at his empty hands. Of course—what was he thinking? He’d dropped his rifle in the ocean right after he’d left the Higgins boat.
“Hang on,” Dee said. He jogged back to where the Lucky Soldier lay, the man’s rifle beside him on the sand. Dee took it for his own.
“Thanks, pal,” Dee whispered. “And I’m sorry.”
“Through the hole, everybody!” Mendoza cried. “Let’s go!”
Dee ran with Sid through the hole in the seawall. The air just beyond the wall was thick with smoke, and Dee threw his arm up to cover his mouth and nose.
It was the dry seagrass on the dunes; the bombardment from the Allied battleships must have set it on fire. It was a curse, and a blessing. Dee’s eyes watered so
badly from the smoke that he could barely see, but the German machine gunners apparently couldn’t see through the smoke either. They kept up a steady stream of machine gun fire, but they missed more GIs than they hit.
Dee reached the top of the bluff at last and crouched in the seagrass until Sid caught up. Only about twenty or thirty American soldiers had made it to the top of the bluff, but it was a start.
“All right,” said Lieutenant Mendoza. “Half of you go left, the other half of us will go right.”
Dee and Sid joined the group led by Mendoza toward a concrete-reinforced bunker with big guns aimed at the beach.
Almost immediately they came upon a small trench with a tripod-mounted machine gun and soldiers with rifles. The Germans never heard the GIs coming, and the American soldiers blasted them with rifles and machine guns of their own and jumped into the trench. Dee took aim at one of the Nazi soldiers and shot him dead with his rifle. It was a slaughter, but nothing compared to what the Germans had been doing to them on the beach below for the last five hours.
The Germans. Dee paused for a second. He was German. His family were Germans. He had relatives who were German. He’d just killed one of his own countrymen. A boy his age.
The boy’s helmet had fallen off as he died, and Dee could see the name written inside: D. Kaufmann.
D—was his name Dietrich too? Dee shivered. If Dee and his family hadn’t left Germany, that boy could be him.
But they had left Germany. And even before that, his parents had been against Hitler. They hadn’t joined the Nazi Party, even when their neighbors and coworkers and other family members pressured them to sign up. For whatever reason, this boy had taken a different path. He had agreed to serve in the Nazi army. He had accepted Adolf Hitler as his leader. D. Kaufmann wasn’t Dee’s countryman. Not then, when Dee himself had lived in Germany, and certainly not now that Dee lived in America. These were not his people. The American soldiers in the trench with Dee, those were his people. And when he got back home, he was going to make it official.
