Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2)

by William Peter Grasso

  They crawled into the nose compartment. “Here’s the forward-looking camera,” Dandridge said. “As you can see, sir, it looks straight out through the plexiglass nose. Once we’re about ten miles from the target, I switch my video monitor to this camera for the final approach.”

  Tommy smiled: the term final approach took on a far more literal meaning when applied to flying the baby.

  Back in the main cabin, Dandridge pointed to a panel on which two switches were mounted. “Those are the arming switches for the Torpex explosive, which, of course, hasn’t been loaded yet.” Then he began pointing out electrical cables draped throughout the cabin and bomb bay, each cable ending in a plug connected to nothing at the moment. “These plugs will hook up to the squibs that fire the Torpex,” Dandridge said. “About ten tons’ worth.”

  Trying to imagine it all, Tommy said, “That’s a lot of bang all in one place.”

  “You’d better believe it, sir.”

  “So where’s all this Torpex now?” Tommy asked.

  Dandridge replied, “It’s being shipped across the Channel and then trucked across France. Supposed to be here 12 October—three days from now.”

  “Why so long?”

  “The way I understand it, sir, General Spaatz didn’t want to waste the stuff if the planes didn’t get here intact.”

  The rain hadn’t let up at all, forcing Tommy and Sergeant Dandridge to make a mad dash across the ramp to the mothership. Once inside the CQ-17, Tommy could see it looked much more like the bombers he’d toured back in England.

  “Unlike the baby,” Dandridge explained, “she’s still got all of her original equipment. Since she’s not carrying any bomb load on these missions, weight isn’t much of an issue, even with the addition of the Castor sets. We still have about four thousand pounds to play with before hitting her max gross weight.”

  They moved into the nose compartment, where the bulk of the equipment Dandridge used to control the baby was located. The sergeant gave the video monitor’s glare hood a loving pat and said, “This CRT—the cathode ray tube—is my eyes on the mission, sir. Whatever those cameras in the baby show, I see it right here on this screen.”

  “If everything works right,” Tommy added.

  “Yeah, of course, sir.” Dandridge seemed a little ruffled that Tommy was alluding to Aphrodite’s less-than-stellar success rate again. “But the goal is to succeed, right?”

  “That’s always the goal, Sergeant. Not always the outcome, though. Things tend to go to hell in a handbasket real fast when the shooting starts. But go on…show me the rest of your stuff.”

  “Sure, sir. Over here is the controller. This is where I input the commands to fly the baby.”

  It was a compact metal box that could be hand-held or shelf-mounted, with a cable connecting it to the aircraft’s electronics. A joystick, a few switches, and a row of indicator lights were clustered on its face.

  “So that’s it?” Tommy asked. “You make flight control inputs with the stick and control the throttles with this switch?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s exactly how it works.”

  “Okay,” Tommy continued. “So with you sitting up here in the nose, I’m guessing you keep the baby ahead of you to maintain visual contact with her?”

  “That’s right, sir. We stay behind and well above.”

  “Well above…how high is that, Sergeant?”

  “About twenty thousand feet, sir.”

  “And how high is the baby flying?”

  “About two thousand feet, sir.”

  Tommy let out a shrill, skeptical whistle. “That’s some altitude spread, Sergeant. Why is the mothership so high? Can you really keep track of the baby visually from so far above her?”

  “We manage, sir. The view from the nose, the fact that she’s painted bright yellow, plus the video image on the screen…”

  Tommy’s skepticism hadn’t faded. “It seems to me that you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of hitting anything smaller than Yankee Stadium. And even that might be a struggle. I don’t know what you’ve been flying against, but Fort Driant—big as it is—is going to look pretty damn small from twenty thousand feet.”

  “Well, sir,” Sergeant Dandridge replied, “if you’ve got some suggestions on how we can do it better, I’m sure Major Staunton would love to hear them.”

  “That’s why I’m here, supposedly.”

  Tommy had noticed right away that Dandridge wore no aircrew wings of any kind, just like Major Staunton. Before getting any deeper into the technical details of what they were doing, this seemed the time to ask the question:

  “Are you a pilot, Sergeant?”

  “No, sir. I’m not classified as a pilot. My MO is 993—drone radio mechanic.”

  “How’d you get this job, anyway?”

  “I was a technician at RCA Labs in New Jersey when the war broke out, sir, working on television development. I guess the Army figured I was a natural for this stuff.”

  “You sure don’t sound like you’re from Jersey.”

  “That’s because I’m not, sir. I’m from Indiana originally. I just moved there to find a job. Wasn’t a lot of ways to earn a living in Indiana. You sound like you’re a New Yorker, though.”

  “Yeah. Brooklyn.”

  “Thought so,” Dandridge said. “Funny thing—both the Army and Navy were looking for guys with my background. The recruiters were sort of fighting over me.”

  “Why’d you pick the Army?”

  “I pretty much knew what my job would be, and I didn’t want to do it in the Pacific. I heard about all the weird tropical diseases and such. Wasn’t much interested in living there, even temporarily.”

  “Can’t say I blame you, Sergeant. Let me ask you something, though…did they ever consider using an actual pilot to guide the drone?”

  Dandridge flinched at the question. “You’d have to discuss that with Major Staunton, sir. That’s a real sore point in some quarters, and it’s way over my rank to decide something like that. I just do what I’m told.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  On the west side of Fort Driant—the opposite side from the Bangalore torpedo fiasco—a company commander from 5th Infantry Division had made a startling discovery. “I’m not believing this,” the commander—a captain—told his platoon leaders. “It looks like we can walk right into the damn place.”

  The commander could tell by the looks on their faces that his platoon leaders weren’t buying it. They hadn’t been forward with his recon party, so they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes. He realized he was making this assault sound easy, and nothing so far had been easy about Fort Driant. For all the casualties they’d taken the past few weeks in their quest to conquer the Metz forts, they’d gained not one inch of terrain. But today just might be different.

  The captain continued, “All that artillery fire the other Kraut forts have been dumping on us around Driant must’ve chewed up the barbed wire at the southwest corner something awful. Doesn’t look like we’ll have to cut hardly any of it to get through.”

  But the platoon leaders were still not convinced. One said, “Maybe it’s a Kraut trap, sir. Lure us onto that slope between the wire and the parapet—get us canalized in there—and then slice us to shreds.”

  Another added, “That slope’s a natural killing field, sir. We know that from hard experience. There’s hardly any cover. Machine guns and rifles on the fort's walls can rake it just like it’s level ground.”

  “That may not be much of a problem right now,” the commander said. “According to Battalion, the Krauts seem to have shifted their infantry defenders to the east wall to counter another attack by the tanks and Bangalores.”

  “Are the tanks getting through, Captain?”

  “No word on that, I’m afraid.”

  The platoon leaders knew to a man what that really meant: the tanks had definitely not broken through to the fort.

  “But it doesn’t matter right now if the tanks got through or
not,” the captain said, hoping he sounded more convincing to his lieutenants than he did to himself. “Just so they keep the Krauts distracted, that may be all the break we need. Don’t forget that all this rain’s going to make us harder to see, too.”

  “It’s going to make everything muddy and slippery, too, sir.”

  “It’s been raining for weeks, for cryin’ out loud,” the captain replied. “You guys should be used to that by now. Okay, here’s how we’ll do it. We’ll advance in column, with Second Platoon in the lead, followed by First and then Third.” Turning to his Weapons Platoon leader, he asked, “Are all your machine gun teams in place with the rifle platoons?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “And your mortars are dialed in?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Excellent. We’ll have additional fire support from the tank destroyer platoon on the ridge to our right.”

  A rifle platoon leader asked, “What about the artillery, sir?”

  “Are you asking about ours or the Germans, Lieutenant?”

  “Both, actually, Captain.”

  “Well, according to Battalion, the Kraut artillery is concentrated on our guys trying to force a crossing of the Moselle. That’s why none of it has fallen around the fort all morning, even with the tanks trying to push in on the back side.”

  “But what if we actually get inside the fort, sir? Won’t they shift some of it—maybe all of it—on us?”

  “Once we’re inside the fort, Lieutenant, we’ll have all those great bunkers the Germans were nice enough to build for us to take shelter in.”

  The Weapons Platoon leader spoke up: “And what about our artillery, Captain? Will we get support from them?”

  No matter how the company commander responded, he knew it would sound like a betrayal. But the question had to be answered honestly.

  “We won’t be getting any artillery support today, gentlemen,” he replied. “Priority of fire goes to the river crossing.” He paused, taking in the disconsolate faces of his platoon leaders, and then added, “Are there any further questions?”

  Their silence was a ringing accusation, an inaudible but anguished cry of men who knew they were getting screwed again. Or perhaps sentenced to death.

  “All right, then,” the captain said. “We move out in ten minutes.”

  Maybe the company commander had been right after all. The advance through the shattered field of barbed wire was nearly effortless, with no serious opposition offered from the Germans on Fort Driant.

  Effortless…until a machine gun in a concrete emplacement at the fort’s southwest corner began to cut down GIs advancing up the slope.

  Within seconds of the German gun opening fire, several rounds from the tank destroyers providing fire support struck its emplacement. Like all those rounds fired at the fort before, it seemed to have no effect on the structure itself.

  But unlike all those times before, the machine gun fell silent. And it stayed silent long after the smoke and dust of the rounds fired against it had drifted away.

  “Now ain’t that some shit,” a veteran platoon sergeant said. “That son of a bitch is either dead, shit his pants and run, or he’s curled up in a ball mumbling for his mama. That’s a fucking first.”

  A terrified young GI asked, “But what if he starts shooting at us again, Sarge?”

  “We make sure we’re not still standing here with our dicks in our hands, son. Get your ass moving.”

  The Americans were only yards from the southwest corner of the fortified infantry trench encircling the fort. Every man now knew—with pants-wetting certainty—why they’d fixed bayonets before starting up the hill to Fort Driant:

  It’s going to be close-quarters fighting. Maybe hand to hand. It’s hard enough shooting them from a hundred yards away. Now we’ve got to look them in their fucking eyes, too.

  And those German eyes would be as wide and terrified as those of the GIs spilling into Fort Driant’s perimeter.

  But the trench was empty. As the GIs scaled its stout concrete face and dropped into the sunken passageway behind, they stopped to stare in wonder that this magnificent defensive position—with its enclaves of thick overhead cover and excellent fields of fire—had been abandoned. The Germans had been here just moments before—rifle cartridges littered the rain-puddled floor as the odor of expended ammunition hung in the air; a cigarette left on the ledge of a firing aperture still glowed, its paper nearly consumed, its finger-like column of ash perfectly intact.

  A few GI riflemen started to whoop and holler—the yells of men convinced they’d just routed their enemy.

  “Knock it off, you morons,” a sergeant yelled. “This ain’t near over yet. Stop dancing around like a bunch of little girls and cover your sector, dammit.”

  The company proceeded along the southern boundary of the fort, one platoon in the narrow confines of the trench to make sure it was clear of Germans, the other two outside the trench’s front wall. It seemed to make tactical sense: If we start to take fire from inside the fort’s perimeter—especially those two big bunkers between us and the gun batteries—everyone has cover this way, the commander told himself.

  The fort’s artillery batteries—standing amidst the craters of so many ineffectual bombs and shells in their impregnable turrets of domed steel—continued to fire toward the Moselle River, seemingly oblivious to the Americans in their midst. But the howitzers were no threat to the GIs; just as with the tanks attacking the opposite side of the fort, they were beneath the howitzers’ minimum elevation and too close to be effectively engaged, even if the turrets traversed to point directly at them. Still, it was unnerving to be so close—only a few hundred feet—to the turrets the American pilots called Easy Battery, with its three 150-mm howitzers belching fire and steel several times a minute.

  What was more unnerving was the realization that the Americans were not inside Fort Driant. They were merely on top of it, walking the cratered moonscape of its barren, napalm-scorched earthen roof. The heart and soul of this installation—and the bulk of the men who manned it—were deep beneath the surface of this hilltop, secure behind armored doors, shrouded in the thick concrete walls and ceilings of the corridors and compartments in which they lived and worked.

  “But they’ve got to breathe, Sarge,” a PFC who looked far younger than his eighteen years told his squad leader. “I see some pipes sticking out of the ground near those bunkers. They’ve got to be ventilators or chimneys. A couple of grenades down those pipes oughta shake up those Kraut bastards pretty good.”

  The squad leader wasn’t impressed with the idea. “You could be kicking a hornet’s nest, too, kid. Let the lieutenant come up with the bright ideas, okay? That’s what he gets paid for, not you.”

  But the lieutenant had overheard. “I think that’s a great idea, Sergeant,” he told the squad leader. “Do it.”

  The PFC and two of his buddies climbed from the trench and set out toward the pipes with all the grenades they could carry. They hadn’t covered fifty feet across the open terrain of the fort’s roof when three bullets cut them down, a split second apart, one for each man.

  “Fuck,” the lieutenant said, “we’ve got snipers out there somewhere. Anybody see where they are?”

  Not a man in his platoon could answer that question with any certainty.

  Farther down the trench, another squad came to a steel door recessed into the inner wall. They called for their bazooka man, but he took one look at the situation and shook his head. “I’ve got no place to fire it from. I’d have to get way outside the trench, and even then I’ve got a shitty angle. Besides, ain’t you guys heard? There’s snipers all over the place. I’d be a dead duck before I could get into position.”

  “Never mind,” the company commander said. “I’ll call for the engineers to blow the door.”

  But there were no engineers to be had. They were all still tied up on the other side of the fort with the Bangalore torpedoes.

  “May
be we can just knock and the Krauts will open it up for us,” a GI said, trying to make a joke. But no one laughed.

  “Let’s try to blow it with some grenades,” a sergeant said. “Put ’em against the door and pile whatever crap we can find on top. Maybe we can get enough of a bang to blow the door off its hinges.”

  “Aw, that ain’t gonna work, Sarge,” a corporal said. “You see how thick that steel is?”

  “How the hell can you tell how thick it is, being on just one side and all, numbnuts? Cough me up some of them fucking grenades. That’s an order.”

  The rest of the squad gathered a tattered mattress, a few concrete blocks, and some weighted sacks that resembled sandbags, rummaged from the trench’s shelters.

  The sergeant asked, “Any of you clowns got any cord?”

  A GI surrendered a bundle of twine.

  “Good enough, if I double it up,” the sergeant said. “Now give me that big hunk of wood over there.”

  The four grenades were lined up in a row against the base of the door, backed by the concrete blocks and the sacks. The spring-loaded arming levers of the grenades were facing away from the door. The sergeant tied the twine to the stump of a nail protruding from the wood, and pulled hard, testing its strength. Then he placed the heavy length of wood across the arming levers. Gingerly, he pulled the safety pins on the grenades one at a time. Restrained by the wood, the handles stayed in place.

  “Any one of y’all who ain’t got a set of balls better get the hell outta here,” the sergeant announced. “On my count of three…”

  He didn’t have to look around to know he was suddenly all by himself.

  “Oh, what the hell,” he said, and then counted, “One…two…three.”

  In one swift motion, he pulled the twine and pivoted to sprint away from the door, stealing one last peek over his shoulder as he did.

  Handles flew from the grenades. But did I see four handles come off, or only three?

  He knew all too well the timing of a grenade’s fuse was variable, somewhere between three and a half and five seconds from the instant the handle flew off until it exploded. But hey…if one blows up first, it’ll blow up the rest of ’em too, right?