Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2)

by William Peter Grasso

  Chapter Eight

  HEADQUARTERS, USAAF STRATEGIC FORCES, EUROPE

  It was exactly the solution General Spaatz, C.O. of US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, had been looking for. He’d wanted no part of Bradley’s plan—No, make that Patton’s plan—to use an Operation Aphrodite remote-controlled bomb against some silly, obsolete fort in France. Since that phone call with them last night, he couldn’t stop asking himself, What the hell’s wrong with these ground-pounder generals of ours, anyway, who seem so eager to fight a slogging, medieval battle in the age of fast-moving mechanized combat? But Ike is all for it, too, so I’ve got to play along.

  But here was the US Navy, surprisingly eager to bounce back from its latest deadly fiasco—one that killed a scion of the prominent Kennedy family—and take on any mission he’d give them. To Tooey Spaatz, their act of volunteering was a gift from heaven. Although he’d never wanted the Navy attached to his strategic bombing domain, in this case he’d gladly pass them the responsibility for executing this foolish enterprise—even though there was nothing in the least bit nautical about this landlocked target some three hundred miles inside France—and save him and his Air Force the trouble.

  There was just one big problem: General Arnold, Commanding General, Army Air Forces, back in Washington had promptly caught wind of Spaatz’s decision; an ocean bridged by telegraph cables and radiotelephone systems was little impediment to intraservice gossip and backstabbing. He sent a cable ordering Spaatz to reverse that decision without delay. Only Army Air Force planes and pilots are to support Army troops in the field, Arnold decreed. Lack of procedural uniformity between the services would result in confusion and increased risk to our ground troops.

  Tooey Spaatz was beginning to wish he’d never heard of Operation Aphrodite, with its unreliable radio-control systems and its penchant for killing American airmen and missing its targets. It had seemed like such a great idea at first, a win-win: crash explosive-laden, unmanned bombers, which were going to be cut up for scrap anyway, into Nazi targets. In the process, the USAAF would be showing up the RAF by fielding a weapon with a bigger punch then their vaunted blockbuster bombs.

  If only the damn things would work like they were supposed to.

  FORWARD AIRFIELD A-90, TOUL, FRANCE

  The rain didn’t stop until 1300. It took another hour for the solid overcast to scatter. As soon as it did, the pilots of 301st Fighter Squadron were handed their mission for immediate execution: Support 4th Armored Division forces in vicinity of Arracourt.

  Lieutenant Jimmy Tuttle, pilot of Blue Two, took a long look at the situation map. Then he said to Tommy Moon, “Hmm. Arracourt…same place as two weeks ago. You think this is going to be a turkey shoot like it was the last time, Half?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Tommy replied. “Kind of strange they’re still in the same area, though. That’s not like Fourth Armored at all. You figure they’d have moved a lot farther east in two weeks.”

  “Well, at least today we won’t be throwing rocks at the fort that refuses to die,” Tuttle said.

  The pilots of Blue Flight were over their area of operations in less than ten minutes’ flying time. They hardly had time for one orbit when the first request for air support came in. Tommy Moon was fairly sure he recognized the voice of the ASO on the ground: a pilot from the 301st named Rich Menifee, a young lieutenant from Alabama. Even the nasal filtering of the aircraft radios couldn’t disguise a southern drawl as distinctive as his. It seemed ridiculous to go through the authentication process of challenge and response to confirm you were talking to an actual friend rather than a foe masquerading as one, but to not do so invited disaster, as Tommy knew all too well: Some of these Krauts speak damn good English, and it isn’t too hard to fake an accent. Fall for that crap and you get tricked into shooting up your own guys.

  Menifee reported German mechanized forces threatening an American infantry regiment in a thickly forested area. Tommy was pretty sure he and his three pilots were looking down at the right place. All they saw was the tops of trees and an occasional whiff of smoke. No troops, no trucks, no tanks. Just glimpses of vehicle tracks imprinted in the soft, wet ground.

  Menifee added, “We’re real close, too. Danger close.”

  Tommy radioed, “Quarterback, this is Gadget Blue. Request goal posts, over.”

  Goal posts: marking an approach line for aircraft to a ground target with white phosphorous airbursts high in the sky.

  “Negative, Gadget Blue, negative,” Menifee responded. “No goal posts. Artillery unable to comply.”

  Well, ain’t that some shit, Tommy thought. Usually when the artillery’s too busy, there are big fat columns of smoke rising somewhere in the battle area from the pasting they’re dealing out, and the ASO is screaming at you to stay clear—there are rounds in the air! But I don’t see any of that stuff going on here.

  “We need help, Quarterback. Target not identified. Repeat—target not identified.”

  “Best we can do is white smoke from the eighty-ones,” Menifee replied.

  Great…mortar smoke. About as visible from up here as a black cat in the dark. But if that’s all they have…

  “Give it a try, Quarterback. Standing by.”

  Blue Flight barely had time to reverse direction to keep the area in view when Menifee reported, “Splash, over.”

  Five seconds later, an indistinct plume of white smoke appeared, wafting lazily up through the thick trees. In a few seconds, another puff of smoke materialized, hundreds of yards away from the first and just as difficult to see.

  “Quarterback, this is Gadget Blue. Confirm number of smoke rounds fired.”

  “One round, over.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Then we’ve got ourselves a copycat, Quarterback.”

  Tommy was fairly certain one of those smoke rounds had been fired by the eavesdropping Germans, and it had probably landed somewhere in the American position. Menifee just hadn’t realized it yet. It could be a ruse, a deadly decoy. And if Tommy led his flight against that target marker—whichever one of the two it was—there was an excellent chance they’d kill GIs.

  And my brother could be one of those GIs down there.

  But not providing the air support they so desperately needed could get his brother killed, too.

  What the hell am I supposed to do? If we fly high, we won’t see a damn thing. If we fly too low, we’re moving too fast to see a damn thing.

  There was another option, however, and as if on cue, it appeared out of nowhere as a voice on the radio: “Gadget Blue, this is Rocket Man. Need some eyes low and slow?”

  Rocket Man: every GI in 4th Armored knew who he was, but the pilots of the 301st had only heard stories that seemed too fantastic to be true. He was an artilleryman—a major named Bob Kidd—who flew spotter missions in an L-4, the Army’s version of the Piper Cub. He’d been doing much more than merely spotting for the big guns, though. Flying low and slow, he’d come face to face with panzers, often close enough to spit on them. Not willing to stop there, he’d mounted bazookas—the standard, shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket the ground-pounders carried—on the wing struts of his little L-4 and wired them up to firing buttons in his cockpit. And by flying low and slow, he could actually get close enough to the panzers—one hundred yards or less—to knock them out of action with rockets, something the speedy fighter aircraft could rarely do with any regularity, despite countless claims to the contrary. It was simple ballistics: compact, moving targets such as panzers were difficult to hit with rockets fired from a fast-moving aircraft. It was like trying to throw a ball from a speeding car into a bucket on the road ahead.

  “Rocket Man, this is Gadget Blue Leader. Sure could use your help figuring out where to drop our stuff.”

  “Roger, Gadget Blue. Stand by.”

  Rocket Man’s procedure for target marking would be a bit different—and a bit safer for the GIs on the ground. He’d drop a colo
red smoke grenade on the target and then ask the attacking fighters to identify the smoke color they saw. If their report agreed with the color he dropped, they were clear to attack.

  Orbiting to the west to get out of Rocket Man’s way, they watched in amazement as the slow-flying L-4 got down to treetop level—probably even drawing fire—as he made several passes over the forest, turning on a dime after each run and going back for another look. From that height, he’d be able to spot the details that distinguished Germans from the GIs. He could even see startled faces beneath Wehrmacht coal scuttle helmets looking up at him, some in disbelief, others in anger, as they raised their weapons for a fleeting shot at the L-4.

  I don’t get it, Tommy told himself. These crazy guys in their fragile little airplanes putter around right over the Krauts’ heads all day and live to tell about it. I saw a couple come back from missions with huge chunks of the fabric skin shot away from their wings and fuselages, but they still flew and got their pilot home. Shoot up a jug like that and it’s probably going down…and taking you with her.

  On his fourth pass, Rocket Man dropped a smoke grenade. Tommy was too high to see such a small object fall into the trees, even with the wispy yellow trail it was leaving behind. But several seconds later, thick yellow smoke rose in a thin but distinct plume.

  “Gadget Blue’s got yellow smoke,” Tommy reported.

  “Affirmative, Gadget Blue. Now get in there and knock them silly, before some clever Kraut picks the damn thing up and throws it away.”

  Blue Flight wasted no time dropping their 500-pound bombs on the yellow smoke. As the last of the four jugs pulled up from her bomb run, Lieutenant Menifee—Quarterback—said, “Right on the money, Gadget Blue. Beautiful! Great job!” The radio failed to mask his excitement and relief just as it couldn’t mask his southern accent.

  “Good to hear, Quarterback,” Tommy replied. “Do you need a gun run in the same area?”

  “Standby, Gadget Blue. This may be under control.”

  “Roger,” Tommy replied. “Rocket Man, you still on frequency?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Hey, we owe you a beer. Stop by A-90 anytime.”

  “I’ll take you up on that, Gadget Blue. Great working with you.”

  Blue Flight drifted back toward the Moselle, loitering in wait of another call for ground support. Looks like this is shaping up to be a slow afternoon, Tommy thought. But I’m betting it wouldn’t be this way if Third Army was actually advancing somewhere. If you ask me, I think they’re digging in for the winter already. Doesn’t look like anyone’s going to be home by Christmas, that’s for sure.

  Chapter Nine

  It had been a full week since Sean had “swum” in the Seille, and he was still wearing those same filthy tanker’s coveralls. But it was the cleanest uniform he had; Maybe that damn swim had been good for something after all, he told himself. It was the only laundry service I’ve seen in months. Traded out a little dirt and grease for river silt. But still, if I ever take these duds off, they’ll stand up all by themselves. Maybe even walk away. At least we got ourselves a hot meal last night, though. Hot food beats clean clothes any day.

  The hot meal—fried Spam and eggs any way you liked them—had been ordered by 5th Infantry Division’s commanding general as a morale-booster. No GI would ever turn down food at any temperature, but the old hands of this man’s army—men like Sergeant Sean Moon—weren’t blind to the hot meal’s real purpose: Whenever the brass are about to get our asses killed in a big way, they try and pump us up with something first. Maybe it’s a hot meal, maybe the padre shows up to dish out more of the “God is on our side” bullshit. But it all means the same thing: we’re going into some serious action, and real soon.

  He asked Captain Newcomb, “So what’s the big plan this time, sir? We’ve been pussyfooting around this damn fort for days now, getting blown to shit in the wire. If it ain’t anti-tank ditches, it’s mines. When are we gonna bust it all down for good?”

  “Fifth Division G2 figures the fort’s weakest defenses are on the east side—the back side,” Newcomb said.

  “That’s also the steepest slope, too, sir. Real steep. Mountain goat steep.”

  “We know that, Sergeant. We also know there are no anti-tank ditches back there.”

  “That don’t mean there ain’t no mines, sir.”

  “We know that, too, Sergeant. But if we can breach the barbed wire network in at least three places on that back side, they figure we can push enough infantry through to actually get into the fort and hold it. Maybe two battalions’ worth.”

  “But I hear they’ve already been inside,” Sean replied, “and once you’re in there, it’s worse than house-to-house fighting with all them tunnels. They can get in, but they just get pushed right back out. At least the ones still alive, anyway.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, Sergeant. The casualties have been pretty heavy. But they’ve never gotten more than a company inside the fort. Still, there can’t be that many Krauts in there.”

  “I don’t know, sir. Every swinging dick’s beating his gums that the casualties are something like forty percent.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, Sergeant. Gather up your tank commanders and report to the CP at 0800 hours. The engineers are going to give us a class.”

  Sean checked his watch. “You gotta be kidding, sir. That’s less than an hour from now. The guys are still pulling maintenance.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding, Sergeant Moon?”

  “But a class, sir? On what?”

  “Bangalore torpedoes,” Newcomb replied.

  Sean knew exactly where this was going. His reply: “Oh, my aching ass.”

  The four P-47s of Blue Flight had taken off just after dawn, flying into the rising sun to look for German columns on the roadways east of Nancy. The blinding glare of sunrise was brutal even with tinted goggles, and it heightened the anxiety all Allied pilots lived with every time they left the ground: Beware of the Hun in the sun.

  That’s why I’ve got to keep us low and fast, Tommy told himself. We’re hard to see from above down here…and we’ll flash past any flak gunners so fast they’ll never have a chance to get a bead on us.

  Within a minute he was proved right. “Blue Two to Blue Leader,” Jimmy Tuttle broadcast, “we’ve got two FWs, straight up overhead, maybe three thousand feet, heading northwest.”

  Tommy craned his neck to look out the top of his razorback jug’s birdcage canopy. “Yeah,” he replied, “I’ve got them. Good eyes, Jimmy.” Within seconds, the German fighters had sped out of view.

  “Doesn’t look like they got us, though,” Tommy added. He couldn’t help but feel his tactics had just been validated.

  And my wingman’s definitely on the ball.

  Finding the French roads strangely deserted, they prowled farther east to the town of Dieuze, where a number of highways intersected.

  Maybe the pickings will be better there.

  They were.

  On a stretch of highway running through a thick woods—the Bois de Morsack—just west of Dieuze, they saw a column of trucks. Twenty, maybe more, Tommy counted, scattering among the trees at their approach. But even in concealment, their exhaust smoke and tire tracks in the soft earth had given the trucks’ positions away.

  They’d attack in two waves, Tommy and Tuttle making the first pass, strafing with their .50 calibers to keep the heads of any German gunners down. Right behind them would come Blue Three and Blue Four—Lieutenants Joey Nardini and Pete Iverson—to drop their 500-pounders in a glide bombing run.

  It all went so well at first. Tommy and Tuttle riddled the trees just one hundred feet below their wings. They couldn’t see much of the Germans below the treetops, but felt a vicious bump of turbulent air as something—maybe a fuel tanker, maybe an ammo truck—exploded beneath them. They wouldn’t know what it was for a few moments, not until they could turn their ships and see the target area again. The color of the smoke woul
d give it away: thick black for a fuel fire, grayish and wispy for ammunition.

  Nardini in Blue Three saw it first. “You want us to use that smoke for a target marker?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Joey, but drop your stuff a little beyond it, okay? I’m pretty sure that’s the tail end of the column.”

  “Roger. Here we come.”

  Circling wide of the target area, Tommy and Tuttle had a front row seat as Blue Three and Four put their bombs right where they were told. As he pulled out of his shallow dive, Blue Four—Iverson, flying tail-end Charlie—reported, “Looks like a lot of Krauts running to the south side of the road. I’m talking a lot of Krauts.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said, “let’s swap hats. Joey, you and Pete do the strafing run this time, then Jimmy and I will get rid of our bombs. Keep it wide, guys…if they’re running, they’ll cover a lot of ground in the minute it takes us to get back on them.”

  “Maybe they’re going to stop and dig in close on the south side, boss,” Jimmy Tuttle said.

  “Not likely,” Tommy replied. “Once you start running, it’s pretty hard to stop. And there’s not enough time for them to dig deep enough. Like I said, play it wide.”

  Blue Three and Four were rolling into their strafing run. “How wide is wide, boss?” Iverson asked.

  Tommy replied, “Come on, Pete, you’ve done this before. Put Joey’s plane so it just fills the two squares in your canopy frame.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ve got it.”

  Nardini and Iverson were firing now, streaking so low across the treetops that Tommy thought they might vanish into the greenery. But they stayed in plain sight. When they reached the edge of the woods, Nardini pulled up. Iverson didn’t.

  His voice rising an octave in panic, Iverson said, “I’m not getting any power. And the whole ship’s vibrating like hell. Can’t keep her up much longer.”