Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  “Hey! Fritz Number One! How long you gonna keep us standing here?”

  This voice bellowed with unmistakable authority. The man behind it was a fighter pilot from New York, a captain. The outburst was directed at a solitary German, dressed in the gray coveralls, with a soft campaign hat pulled down on his forehead, that was the standard ferret uniform. There were three ferrets with the first name of Fritz and they were always addressed by their name and number, which irritated them immensely.

  The ferret turned, eyeing the captain. Then he stepped up to the man, who stood at parade rest in the front row. The Germans had each block of the formation gather in rows of five, easier for counting.

  “If you did not dig, captain, then there would be no need for standing here,” he said in excellent English.

  “Hell, Fritz Number One,” the captain replied. “We didn’t do no digging. This was probably some more of your lousy sewage system that went and fell in. You guys ought to get some of us to show you how it’s done.”

  The German shook his head.

  “No, Kapitän, this was a tunnel. To escape is foolhardy. Now it has cost two men their lives.”

  This news silenced the airmen.

  “Two men?” the captain asked. “But how?”

  The ferret shrugged. “They were digging. The earth falls in. They are trapped. Buried. A loss. Most foolish.”

  He raised his voice slightly, staring at the formation of his enemies.

  “It is stupid. Dummkopf.” He bent down, and scraped up a handful of muddy ground, which he squeezed between long, almost feminine fingers. “This earth. Good for planting. Growing food. This is good. Good for your games. These are good, too . . .” he gestured toward the compound athletic field. “But not strong enough for tunnels.”

  The ferret turned back to the captain.

  “You will not fly again, Kapitän, until after the war. If you live.”

  The captain from New York simply stared at the ferret hard, finally replying, “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  The ferret made a lazy salute, and started to move off, pausing only as he reached the end of the formation. There he had a quick exchange with another officer. Tommy Hart leaned forward and saw that Fritz Number One had reached out his hand, and that a quick pair of cigarettes had been slipped to him. The man who had passed the smokes was a wiry, short, smiling bomber captain from Greenville, Mississippi, named Vincent Bedford, but he was the formation’s expert negotiator and trader, and because of his skills had been nicknamed Trader Vic after the famous restaurateur.

  Bedford had a thick, southern drawl, with an excitable quality to it. He was an excellent poker player, a more than passable shortstop who’d done some time in the minor leagues. Before the war, he’d been a car salesman, which seemed appropriate. But what he truly excelled at was the commerce of Stalag Luft Thirteen, turning cigarettes and chocolates and tins of real coffee that arrived either in Red Cross parcels or packages from the States into clothing and other goods. Or he would take extra clothing and turn that into foodstuffs. No trade was beyond Vincent Bedford, and rarely did he come out on the wrong end of an exchange. And, in the unusual event that he had, then his gambler’s instincts repaired his losses. A poker game could replenish his stock as effectively as a parcel from home. He seemed to trade in other items as well; always knowing the latest rumor, always getting the latest war news just slightly ahead of everyone else. Tommy Hart assumed that in his trades he’d somehow acquired a radio, but didn’t know this for certain. What he did know was that Vincent Bedford was the man in Hut 101 to see. In a world where men had little, Vincent Bedford had amassed a prisoner-of-war-camp fortune, stockpiling coffee and foodstuffs and woolen socks and long underwear and anything else that might make life in the bag slightly more livable.

  The few times that Trader Vic wasn’t making some trade, Bedford would launch into grandiose and idyllic descriptions of the little town he hailed from, always delivered in the soft drawl of the Deep South, slowly, lovingly. More often than not, the other airmen would tell him they were all moving to Greenville after the war, simply to get him to shut up, because talk of home, no matter how elegiac, prompted a homesickness that was dangerous. All the men in the camp lived on the edge of one despair or another, and thinking of the States did no one any good, though it was almost the only thing they did think about.

  Bedford watched the ferret move away, then turned and whispered something to the next airman in formation. It only took a few seconds for the news to pass through the group, and on to the next formation.

  The trapped men were named Wilson and O’Hara. They were both prominent tunnel rats. Tommy Hart knew O’Hara slightly; the dead man had occupied a bunk in their hut, but in another room, so he was merely one of the two hundred faces crammed into the barracks. According to the information being whispered down the rows of kriegies, the two men had descended into the tunnel late that past night, and were busily trying to shore up the support beams when the soft ground had given way around them. They’d been buried alive.

  And, according to the information Bedford had acquired, the Germans had decided to leave the bodies of the two men where the ground had collapsed in on them.

  The whispered talk quickly gave way to voices starting to be raised in anger. The formations of men seemed to take on a sinuous sort of life, as lines straightened, shoulders were thrust back. Without command, men snapped to attention.

  Tommy Hart did the same, but not without a last glance down the lines of men to where Trader Vic was standing. He was struck by what he’d seen, and unsettled slightly by something elusive, that he could not put a word to.

  Then, before he had time to assess what it was that had disturbed him, the captain from New York shouted out: “Killers! Goddamn murderers! Savages!” Other voices from other formations picked up the same message, and the air of the compound filled rapidly with bellows of outrage.

  The SAO stepped to the front of the formations, and turned and stared at the men with a glare that seemed to demand discipline, although his own anger was evident in the cold gray look in his eyes and the rigid jut to his jaw. Lewis MacNamara was old-time army, a full bird colonel with over twenty years in uniform, who rarely needed to raise his voice and was accustomed to being obeyed. A stiff man, who seemingly saw his imprisonment as just another in a long line of military assignments. As MacNamara assumed a parade rest facing the kriegies, his legs slightly apart, his arms held tightly behind his waist, a pair of goons snapped back the bolts on their weapons, an act of mostly menace, but with just enough determination that the men in formation hesitated, and slowly quieted.

  No one truly thought the goons would open fire on the massed airmen. But no one was ever completely certain of this.

  The camp commandant, trailed by a pair of aides who walked gingerly through the mud in their polished riding boots, hove into view, which prompted some whistles and catcalls, studiously ignored by Von Reiter. Without a word to the SAO, the commandant addressed the formations loudly.

  “We will count now. Then you are dismissed.”

  He paused, then added.

  “The count, it will be two men short! Idiocy!”

  The airmen remained silent, standing at attention.

  “This is the third tunnel in the past year!” Von Reiter continued. “But it is the first tunnel to cost men their lives!” The commandant was shouting, his voice infected with frustration. “Further escape attempts will not be tolerated!”

  He paused, then stared across at the men. He lifted a bony finger and pointed like a wizened schoolteacher at an unruly class.

  “There has never been a successful escape from my camp! Never! And there will be none!”

  He paused, his eyes sweeping over the assembled kriegies.

  “You have been warned,” he concluded.

  In the momentary silence that swept across the formations of men, Colonel MacNamara stepped forward. His own voice carried the same weight of com
mand as Von Reiter’s. His spine was rigid, his posture a portrait of military perfection. That his uniform was frayed and ragged seemed oddly to underscore his taut bearing.

  “I would like to take this opportunity to remind the Oberst that it is the sworn duty of every officer to attempt to escape from the enemy.”

  Von Reiter held up his hand, cutting off the colonel.

  “Do not speak to me of duty,” he said. “Escape is verboten!”

  “This duty, this requirement, is no different for the Luftwaffe airmen being held by our side,” MacNamara loudly added. “And if a Luftwaffe flier died in his attempt, he would be buried by his own comrades, with full military honors!”

  Von Reiter frowned, started to reply, then stopped. He nodded his head, just slightly. The two men stared hard at each other, as if struggling over something between them. A tug-of-war of wills.

  Then the commandant gestured for the SAO to accompany him, and he turned his back on the gathered men. The two senior officers disappeared from the kriegies’ sight, marching stride for stride in the direction of the main gate, which led to the camp offices. Instantly, ferrets appeared at the head of each block formation, and the airmen began the familiar and laborious process of being counted. Midway through the roll call the kriegies heard the first deep, thudding explosion, as German sappers placed charges along the length of the collapsed tunnel, filling it with more of the sandy yellow dirt that had choked the life from the two tunnel men. Tommy Hart thought there was something wrong, or perhaps unfair, in enlisting to fly in the clean, clear air, no matter how deadly it could be, only to die alone and suffocating, trapped eight feet beneath the earth. He did not say this out loud.

  The tunnel coming out from 109 had been concealed underneath a washroom sink, and after going straight down, had taken a sharp right turn, heading for the wire. Of the forty huts in the compound, 109 was second closest to the perimeter. To reach the safety of the dark line of tall fir trees that signaled the edge of a deep Bavarian forest, the tunnel diggers were required to burrow more than a hundred yards through the dirt. The tunnel had made it less than a third of the way. Of the three tunnels dug during the past year, it had traveled the farthest, and had the highest of hopes attached to it.

  Like virtually every other kriegie in the camp, by midday Tommy Hart had walked over to the deadline and stared out at the remains of the tunnel, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the two men trapped beneath the surface. The sapper’s charges had left the earth churned up, grass streaked with muddy brown dirt, cratered with depressions where the explosions had caused the tunnel ceiling to collapse. A guard crew had poured wet concrete into the tunnel’s entranceway in Hut 109.

  He sighed loudly. There were two other pilots, B-17 men wearing heavy sheepskin coats despite the mild temperatures, standing nearby, taking in the same elusive vista.

  “It doesn’t seem all that far,” one man said, with a sigh.

  “Close,” his companion agreed, muttering.

  “Real close,” the first pilot said. “Into the forest, through the trees, find the road to town and you’re in business. Just gotta make it to the station and a rail line heading south. Jump some old freight train destination Switzerland and you’re on your way. Damn. Real close.”

  “Not close at all,” Tommy Hart disagreed. “And too damn obvious from the North tower.”

  Both men hesitated, then nodded, as if they, too, knew their eyes were betraying them. War has a way of shrinking and expanding distances, depending on the threat involved in traveling through the contested space. It’s always hard to see clearly, Tommy thought, especially when one’s life might be at stake.

  “I’d still like just one little old chance,” one of the men said. He was perhaps a little older than Tommy, and much stockier. He hadn’t shaved, and he wore his campaign hat pulled down hard to his eyebrows. “Just one chance. I think if I could just get to the other side where there ain’t no wire, well, hell, ain’t nothing on this earth gonna stop me then—”

  “Except maybe a couple of million Krauts,” his friend interrupted. “And you don’t speak any German and where you gonna go to, anyways?”

  “Switzerland. Beautiful country. All cows and mountains and those fancy little houses . . .”

  “Chalets,” the other man said. “They call ’em chalets.”

  “Right. I figure maybe a couple of weeks getting nice and fat eating chocolate. Nice big, fat milk chocolate bars served up by some pretty blond farm girl in pigtails whose mommy and daddy ain’t nowhere around. Then maybe right back home to the States, where I got a girl maybe give me some damn special hero’s-type welcome, you better believe.”

  The other pilot slapped him on the arm. The leather jacket muffled the sound.

  “Dreamer,” he said. He turned toward Tommy Hart. “Been in the bag long?” he asked.

  “Since November, forty-two,” Tommy replied.

  Both men whistled.

  “Whoa! Old-timer. Ever made it out?”

  “Not once,” Tommy replied. “Not for a minute. Not even for a second.”

  “Man,” the B-17 pilot continued, “I only been here five weeks and I’m already so crazy, don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do. Kinda like having an itch, you know, right in the middle of your back. Right where you can’t reach it.”

  “Better get used to it,” Tommy replied. “Guys try to blitz out. Get dead fast.”

  “Never get used to it,” the man said.

  Tommy nodded in agreement. Never get used to it, he thought. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lip, breathing in hard.

  “Sometimes,” Tommy said softly, “you’ve got to find your freedom up here. . . .” He tapped his forehead.

  One of the pilots nodded, but the other airman had turned back toward the main camp.

  “Hey,” he said, “look what’s coming.”

  Tommy pivoted quickly and saw a dozen men marching in tight formation across the wide expanse of the compound’s exercise ground. The men had obviously decked themselves out in Stalag Luft Thirteen finery; they wore ties, their shirts and jackets were pressed, there were sharp creases in their pants. Prisoner-of-war-camp dress uniforms.

  Each man in the group was carrying a musical instrument. The May sun suddenly reflected off the brass of a trombone, glinting sharply. A drummer had slung a single snare around his waist so that it hung in front of him, and as the men approached, he began to snap out a rolling, fast metallic beat.

  The squad leader was set slightly ahead. His eyes were locked forward, staring through the wire to the forest beyond. He had two instruments in his hands, a clarinet, held in his right, and a trumpet, which glistened, polished to a rich golden brown sheen. All the men maintained formation, quick-marching in unison, the leader calling out an occasional cadence above the steady rat-a-tat of the snare drum.

  It took no more than seconds for the odd constellation to attract the attention of the other kriegies. Men began to stream from the huts, jostling shoulder to shoulder to see what was going on. In front of some of the side barracks there were officers tending to small gardens, and they dropped their makeshift tools to the dirt and fell in behind the marching squad. A baseball game, just getting under way in the exercise yard, stopped. Gloves, bats, and balls were left behind as the players joined the throng that had collected behind the marching men.

  The squad leader was a short man, balding slightly, thin and muscular like a bantamweight wrestler. He seemed oblivious to the hundreds of airmen who had materialized behind him, continuing to march, eyes straight ahead. He repeatedly blared the cadence—“Right, your right, right . . .”—as the squad did a sharp left wheel that would have done justice to a West Point drill team, and approached the deadline. On the leader’s barked command—“Squad . . . Halt!”—they came to a rest a few feet from the wire, their feet stamping in unison against the muffled dust.

  The German machine gunners in the nearest tower swung their weapon in the direction o
f the men. They seemed both curious and intent. Their eyes were just visible beneath the dull gray steel helmets they wore, peering above the barrel of the gun.

  Tommy Hart watched, but then overheard one of the B-17 pilots still standing by his side whisper in a deep voice of quiet despair: “O’Hara. The little Irish mick who died in the tunnel last night. He was a New Orleans boy, just like the bandleader. They enlisted together. Flew together. Played music together. I think he was the clarinet. . . .”

  The bandleader turned to the men, and called out: “Stalag Luft Thirteen Prisoner’s Jazz Band . . . attention!”

  The squad clicked their heels together.

  “Take positions!” he ordered.

  The squad stepped smartly into a semicircle, facing the barbed wire and the scar on the earth that marked the tunnel’s final progress and where the two diggers lay buried. The men lifted their instruments to their lips, waiting for the signal from the bandleader. Saxophones, trombones, French horns, and cornets stood at attention. The drummer’s sticks paused over the skin of the snare. A guitarist fingered the fretboard, a pick in his right hand.

  The bandleader’s eyes swept over each of the men, assessing their readiness. Then he did an abrupt about-face, turning his back to the band. He strode three steps forward, right to the edge of the deadline, and in a swift motion, set the clarinet down against the wire. He raised up, snapped off a sharp salute to the instrument, and again performed an about-face. The bandleader seemed to quiver, for an instant, as he returned to his position in front of the assembled musicians. Tommy Hart saw a small tremble in the bandleader’s lips as the man slowly lifted his trumpet to his mouth. He could see that tears were streaking down the cheeks of both the tenor sax man and one of the trombone players. The men all seemed to hesitate, and silence filled the air. The bandleader nodded, licked his lips as if to steady them, raised his left hand, and began to mark time.