Under False Flags

by Steve Anderson

  “I’m back, aren’t I?” Lett tried the radio. They heard voices in German:

  “This is group leader,” said one. “Cleared the first line. Resistance scattered, weak . . .”

  The artillery bursts grew louder. Auggie bounded into the room dragging his gear.

  They heard a voice in English, sounding frantic: “The huns closed our rear flank! We are cut off. All retreat. Everyone fall back!” But the voice had a slight accent, and no one said “huns” anymore. The Germans were pulling out all the tricks.

  Only now did Lett think of Stromville. Could this reach Heloise? “Let’s get going,” he shouted. “Weber, disable that wireless set. Listen . . .”

  The artillery had let up, to reveal the pops and burps of small arms fire. A faint clanking rumble grew louder.

  “Leave it. Follow me,” Lett said. Auggie fell in behind him, pulling on equipment, his rifle.

  “Where? There’s nowhere to run,” Weber shrieked.

  “We can hide.”

  “Cellar’s no good, too obvious. The attic?” Weber said.

  “Of sorts. Come on. And get your gloves on, both of you.”

  Lett had seen a rain barrel outside his window, near the lowest overhang of the roof. They used it to clamber up onto the roof, pushing each other up, almost slipping on the icy tiles and moss but hanging on, and finding their way to an attic dormer that they clawed at and hugged. In the fog they seemed to hang within the clouds, clinging to a mountain peak.

  Panzers and halftracks appeared, dark masses within the blur below, staining the fog blue and gray with exhaust, the engines’ growl drowning out the small arms fire. Dark figures passed by, some barking orders in German. Others stomped through the barn and house and attic right beneath them, raving and twitching as if being prodded along by hot irons. The bitter reek of the exhaust hovered over the roof, and the soldiers left a pungent aroma of hard schnapps—heavy drinking was always the last refuge of desperate, doomed infantry. The machines roared onward down the road, the soldiers trailing through gaps in the forest, heading west through the American lines.

  ***

  0515 Uhr, Dezember 16: Holger Frings woke to thumps of artillery. He dove under a cart and covered his head — he thought the shells were incoming. The others in the barn had done the same. Now they wandered outside into the freezing fog, listening. Frings went out. He could hear now that it was their own guns, the salvos landing off to the west. Shaking off sleep, he remembered: Half the jeep teams had been called up during the night. Most of the sailors had gone. They were heading out on sorties, somewhere over the American lines.

  Frings made his way over to his American jeep. He smoked his pipe and heard the rest of his team trek through the fog from what had to be their final hot meal. He shined his flashlight on their silhouettes—there was the stocky Florian, lean Kreisfeld, and young Gamm. Florian was a Luftwaffe sergeant, a rear-liner. Kreisfeld was Army, mechanized infantry. Gamm was also Army, in one of those new units formed since D-Day using boys, older men and head cases. Kreisfeld had seen ground combat, and too much shelling. He told Frings about it in a sputter, then clammed up again: He had been at the Falaise Gap when the Allies trapped German divisions with massive flanking movements, all so Allied bombers could bombard them to shreds with a line of bombers so long it reached back to the horizon. The miles of inferno had eclipsed the sun. Many survivors had gone mad or charged the enemy in suicide or lost their hearing. Carcasses of horses and cows outnumbered trees and the corpses swelled in the summer heat, swarming with maggots crawling out, in, out. The ensuing retreat, back to the border where they were now, had been a hopeless and starved-out tragedy. Soldiers shooting civilian families for their food. Soldiers shooting each other for a car, donkey, cart, any way back. It made Napoleon’s retreat look like a boy scouts’ excursion. Kreisfeld had learned his English from Spaniards, back in a lost golden age when he was a professor. Nowadays he only mumbled to himself. Frings suspected Kreisfeld was much like him—just wanting to expire when he expired. Florian was a special piece of work. He had once been a headwaiter in New Orleans, or so he said. His excellent and surely hard-won Ami English had come at a sorry price, though — he spewed claptrap about the threat of American jazz and what he called “niggers” and their general sloppiness and how the Amis could still be beaten easily. And then there was Gamm, just a boob of a kid. He just wanted at the enemy. He thought it his mission to save Germany. He had been enrolled in an Adolf Hitler School after his family died in an air raid. Talk about a boy scout. One of his parents had been English, supposedly, so his British-accented English could be a problem. Each had his cover. As Sergeant Clarence Arthur, Frings was supposed to memorize that he was from Chicago, Illinois, but he hardly bothered. Among his fake papers, they gave him a letter and photo from a girl back home. It had probably come from some poor POW or dead GI. He didn’t even read it. They had also been given “anti-sleep tablets,” or Pervitin, a form of methamphetamine regularly issued to German troops. Frings had avoided using them on the S-boats. They kept a man awake but made him jittery. Now he swallowed them like bon-bons, washing them down with potato vodka for breakfast.

  He flashed his light at his jeep crew with Navy signals, a reflex. They looked at him blankly, Florian leading the way.

  “Just make sure you’re ready to sail, sailor,” Florian said. He wore what Amis called a Mackinaw coat, with double rows of buttons, a built-in belt and darker wool collar that matched the liner. It made Frings recall the American and Canadian foreman who yelled at him and the stevedores in so many ports. The coat only made Florian stick out. It made him an asshole. Good riddance, and soon.

  “I been ready for four years,” Frings said to him.

  ***

  By 7:00 a.m., the storm of attack had passed and the din of battle had moved on, sounding like distant thunder claps. Wendell Lett, Weber and Auggie climbed down from the roof. Around the farmhouse the faint daylight revealed a vast mudscape formed from the friction of so many boots, only now covering with snow and icing over.

  The three headed west. They followed a creek through forest, trudging along the trickling water choked with ice, tree splinters and corpses.

  “What was that?” Weber said.

  “I’ll take a look,” Lett said. The creek ran along the base of a ridge. He clattered up to find a road. Vehicles sat vacant, at odd angles, shot up. German and American corpses lay about. Lett waved up Weber and Auggie. They approached a mess truck, on its side. They started — a GI cook sat with his back against field mess pots, the lids still on, the heat of their cargo keeping the man alive. His stomach looked gutted, shiny with dark blood, and he had been hugging himself to keep it all in. His face was ivory, like a ceramic. Death neared.

  “Go ahead, eat. Last chance,” he muttered to them.

  Lett and Weber opened a pot. A slop of pork chops and beans spilled out, its last warmth steaming the snow. It probably had come from division mess depot, just as Godfrey predicted. They ate what they could and carried the rest, wrapping the chops in newspaper.

  They moved on. They found a hayshed and huddled inside to keep warm. Auggie kept watch at the door, shivering.

  “Here we go again,” Weber said. “Shit. What more could you possibly want?”

  “Can we light a fire?” Auggie kept saying. After the fifth time they stopped answering.

  Lett could feel Weber’s eyes on him again. “So where we heading?” Weber said.

  “West. I told you. Find a way around their salient. It’s our only chance,” Lett said.

  Weber’s eyes stayed on him. “And then?”

  “As soon as we’re able? I say we split up. We find a busy junction, get rides, go back to our old units.”

  “But that S-2 captain said: We go out and come back together,” Auggie said.

  “We’re done with S-2,” Weber said. “Times have changed, thanks to Adolf. I don’t know. There used to be the buddy system keeping me on the line. No offense to yo
u twose, but I ain’t got no buddies left.” He set out a bundle of newspaper and ripped it open—the pork chops from the mess truck. “Now let’s eat some, before they freeze.”

  ***

  0900 Uhr, Dezember 16: Holger Frings adjusted this and that on their jeep like a Number One did. Florian and Gamm joked about it, how this bucket was his vessel now, and Frings didn’t bother to tell them just how sad that would be if true. Throughout the morning more jeep teams had left on sorties, ordered out by overwrought officers who rushed over from Skorzeny’s forester house. A few jeeps had already come back, one shot up by their own tanks, another chased back by counterattacking Americans or so they claimed, though none were wounded. By S-boat odds, Frings knew that many others out there were already dead.

  Then Frings and his three comrades sat ready in their jeep, Florian the pretend lieutenant in his asshole jacket, the other two slumped in back, leaning against one another for warmth. No one had slept. Frings had begun shaking, and his stomach was rolling. His head pounded. So he had popped another pill, and took another slug of cold chicory coffee Gamm had in a canteen. He pulled out his pipe, stuffed it with stale tobacco and sucked on it slowly, softly, like a baby suckling in reverse, nearing his end.

  He was their helmsman, as it should be. This would be just like going out on a run for a night of hunting. And yet he was beginning to think that taking the wheel of this skiff on tires would give him back some control over things. Somehow, it just might free him from the chain of the machinelike system. Maybe it was the Pervitin talking, or the vodka. So be it. He turned on the engine at intervals, to make sure the thing still fired up in this cold.

  In the fog he spotted a cigarette ember, a silhouette. An SS captain strode out to their jeep and briefed them. They would follow the main road west, on through the Losheim Gap. This road was the only route through the Siegfried Line, along a valley into Belgium. The Allies called this a Gap but in German it was a Graben, a trench, which better expressed how narrow it was. The captain handed them German paratrooper smocks, and told them to wear the smocks while going through so they wouldn’t be mistaken as enemy. They shouldn’t discard them or put on their American helmets until they were clearly into enemy territory. If they met with traffic, they should just go around it. The launch of the Führer’s grand and surprise Ardennes Offensive had depended on this shit weather, SS captain said. Crack German forecasters had predicted ideal conditions. The heavy clouds would keep Allied planes grounded. The morning delivered mist and this dense icy fog and midday more snow. With that, SS captain vanished back into the fog.

  Frings turned the ignition key and pressed his toe to the foot starter. The engine revved and whined as they found the Losheim road. The way was muddy from all the advancing columns yet crunchy, wanting to ice over, jostling them. A kilometer on, the road was covered with straw but it was matted down, ground into mud, oily. A massive traffic jam appeared ahead, a mess of fighting and support vehicles, trucks and more trucks, artillery, equipment. Throngs of German infantry stood waiting for orders while some vehicles had given up and parked to the side. Frings steered around it all, sliding them sideways a couple times. It was all a jumble in the fog. Frings knew what to look for from years on a fighting boat at night and acted as interpreter for the others who only saw flickers and shadows, heard shouts and clamor and felt myriad tremors. Even Kreisfeld, the Landser. The man seemed to have lost twenty pounds overnight. Frings knew that look, too. He’d seen it on survivors in life rafts, the ones certain to die. No one wanted to tell them the truth, or make them trade places with the stronger ones hanging off the side so the stronger ones might survive in the boat. No one had to. Eventually, they knew the truth.

  It went on like this for the next ten, fifteen kilometers. Lines of American POWs plodded by, so tired they could only gape at the sight of fake Americans heading up on the line.

  “It’s all quite a success, that’s what it is,” Gamm said. “So many of our forces are getting through that we’re clogging the road.” No one answered him. No one talked about the other explanation—that this hulking and desperate counterattack might already be stalling.

  The fog lightened, bringing clarity. Frings kept them moving, steering around more traffic. They saw a staff car parked along the road up ahead. Just beyond it a tall, broad-shouldered man waved his arms. He wore a US Army sweater and trousers and those lumberjack-style boots but also a leather SS officers’ overcoat. It was Skorzeny himself. He tried to direct vehicles like a forceful commander, but to Frings he just looked like a novice traffic cop. Why wasn’t Hitler’s great hero riding right here in this jeep with the rest of them? he thought. He steered around the big man, jerked the wheel in hopes of spraying a little mud, and didn’t bother looking back to see if he had.

  They had entered Belgium.

  11:00 a.m.: Frings took the first road skirting what had been the American forward lines. Once they had quit seeing German soldiers or tanks, they shed their paratrooper smocks and put on their American helmets. They reached the sector assigned to them. Frings tightened his knuckles around the wheel, wishing it had handles like a proper helm. Driving a jeep thrashed his senses in familiar yet new ways as they passed abandoned battlegrounds. A forest burned with orange and black billows. A putrid smoke of burning rubber combined with sour vapors of leaking gasoline. Neither the compost reek of cratered earth nor the pine aroma of busted trees could stifle the pungent wafts of charred and rotting flesh. The four rarely spoke now in the jeep. Every next turn could reveal an unmapped crossroads, counterattacking armor, an MP checkpoint. An American sentry would find more than enough to hang them. Their jeep-boat carried wads of counterfeit dollars, an M1 Garand rifle, an American Thompson submachine gun and two American Colt pistols, a German Walther pistol, a German two-way radio, explosives, grenades, and cigarette lighters. The lighters had cyanide capsules hidden inside. Their team leaders had passed them out in the barn at Schmidtheim with all the ceremony of handing out ration cards. Of course they would never be held as spies. But if so? Always best to be prepared. Frings had tossed his lighter out the side of the jeep. The other three had seen him do it. “Hate to get my lighters mixed up,” he had joked, and no one had laughed.

  They drove a narrow road. Men appeared in the fog, running, arms flailing. Frings slowed. Blackened and bloody men ran out of the wood and filled the road screaming, grabbing at the jeep like zombies. American GIs.

  Frings sped away. The wheels spun, lost any grip. They sideswiped a fence, scraping the posts. Signs read: “Danger! Mines!” Frings jerked the jeep portside but a culvert almost swallowed them so he yanked it starboard and back onto the road. He screamed, his asshole so tight it wanted to suck up the seat itself, fabric, springs, horsehair and all. He turned to the others, and saw three bleached masks with mouths hung open.

  12:30: Snow fell hard, sticking to the fenders and swirling inside the jeep around their GI boots. They could see a crossroads up ahead, the few buildings revealing themselves among the flakes. It was a junction, not even a village—an inn and a couple buildings, shops at street level. Three roads emptied into the junction.

  Frings let the jeep coast into the middle of the crossroads and steered portside three-fifty, wheeling around in a circle, staking things out. Outside the inn, an American motorcycle sat parked, empty. That was all, one motorcycle. It had two seats. It still carried a rifle in its holster on the front fender, butt upward as if the rider would be able to pull the gun and shoot while riding like some kind of iron-horse cowboy.

  A sign read: “Halt! Checkpoint!” But they saw no one. Had they retreated here too? It seemed the Americans had brought their ghost towns with them.

  A pole held US Army directions signs pointing to division HQs and command posts, depots and field hospitals and towns in the rear. Communications wires were attached, hanging loose as if strung up in a hurry, stretching off down the road along poles.

  “A juicy goose,” Frings said.

  He lo
oked to Kreisfeld, who nodded.

  “So we do it,” Frings said. At some point the Number One had become the Captain. No one had questioned it. The other two kept their masks on, terrified.

  Frings slowed the jeep before the inn, revved the motor a couple times. No one came out so he parked by the pole, fifty meters away. He had Florian stay by the jeep, to keep watch and make things look normal. He was the fake officer after all.

  Frings, Kreisfeld and Gamm strode over to the inn. They kept between the front door and a window. They heard Americans, arguing inside. Frings peeked in a corner of the window. Two Amis stood around a table pointing at a map and each other. One was a tall sergeant, the other a stout lieutenant. Why hadn’t they come out yet? They had to have heard them.

  Frings had Kreisfeld stay by the inn, to stall if possible. “Tell them we’re doing maintenance on the signs,” Frings said, and added in English: “Say it like this: ‘The krauts have been taking them down.’”

  Kreisfeld nodded, and did a little bow.

  Frings and Gamm headed back to Florian standing at the jeep.

  “You got to look more natural,” Frings said in English. “Here, take my pipe.”

  Florian slid it between his lips and leaned against the jeep fender, one leg up, casual like.

  Gamm already had the crowbar and rubber mallet out, the wire cutters. They got to it, working fast, their breath pumping steam. Frings peeled off his overcoat so he could move better, then his scarf because he was hot, leaving only the field jacket over his German tunic.

  They switched the signs. Higher up waited the wires. Frings grabbed the cutters. “Cup your hands,” he said to Gamm. “Hold me up.”

  “One moment, Clarence,” Gamm said in hopelessly British-sounding English. “What if they’re using these cables inside, for a field phone or what have you?”

  Smart kid, Frings thought. He might keep them living a whole extra half day.

  “Just stand there, hold me up,” Frings said.