Combat- Parallel Lines

by William Peter Grasso

  When they answered, “Ja,” she continued, “Good, because you’re going to jump out of a moving truck. Is that something you can handle?”

  The price was right. They could handle it.

  She needed eight men total: three in the lead jeep, three in the trail jeep, and the two in the deuce. They’d all be posing as American servicemen in vehicles borrowed from the US Army. They’d carry American small arms but have no ammunition, just empty pouches. Only she would have a loaded pistol, the same Beretta she always carried.

  “We’ll involve two GIs in this operation,” she told the eight Germans, “because, unfortunately, we need them. I’d prefer not to use Americans at all—most of them can never keep their mouths shut about anything—but none of you can expertly drive a Pershing tank, and we’re going to need experts.”

  The acknowledged leader of the Germans was an ex-hauptmann named Franz Ulrich. He’d been skeptical of Sylvie’s plan before he’d even heard it. Knowing a little about it now, he asked, “If you don’t trust the GIs, why are you using them at all? Is the tank so crucial?”

  “Absolutely crucial,” she replied. “And to ensure those GI tankers don’t spill the beans about what went on here, the Army’s shipping them back to the States the moment this operation is over. They don’t know about that, so let’s not tell them.”

  Then she explained the plan in detail, using a chalkboard in the meeting room of a church basement to depict it visually. She made a point of saying that the deuce-and-a-half they’d use was headed to the scrapyard, anyway. “It’s old, burns oil badly, and the transmission leaks. The Americans have declared it uneconomical to repair, so they couldn’t care less how we bang it up. The jeeps, on the other hand…let’s try to keep them undamaged, please.” She pointed to boxes full of US Army fatigues. “Now let’s get you ersatz soldaten outfitted. We only have a few hours.”

  *****

  To Sylvie’s surprise, the crowd watching the phony nuclear ammo truck parade through Baumholder was even bigger than the one that had viewed the arrival of Atomic Annie. Even when perched atop the same stone wall from which she’d witnessed the fake cannon’s arrival, the throngs made it more difficult to pick out the suspected Soviet agents. But she had little doubt they were there, somewhere:

  We scattered those pamphlets all over town. They were bound to see one…and once they did, they’d want a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings.

  Then, almost too quickly, the game was on. The lead jeep came into view a few streets away, with Franz Ulrich in the front passenger’s seat wearing the uniform of a US Army lieutenant, playing the officer-in-charge of this three-vehicle convoy. Sylvie mounted her bicycle and rode as fast as she could to the base gate, doffing her bright red flat cap as she passed the guard shack. That was the signal for the Pershing, which had been hidden behind a building near the boundary of the post, to start moving. Then she crossed the street, parked her bicycle, and stood in the doorway of a butcher’s shop. Her plan would play out directly in front of her.

  It was all going flawlessly. Ulrich’s jeep reached the gate, drove a hundred feet past, and stopped, blocking any traffic that might be coming from the opposite direction. The deuce with its nuclear markings and fake ammunition crates was thirty yards behind. As it drew near to the gate, the Pershing lurched onto the road, her turret facing backward so the overhanging gun tube would not strike anything in the imminent crash. The tank played its roll perfectly, turning onto the road but at too great a speed; the resulting attempt was much too wide, as planned. A head-on collision with the ammo deuce was just a split-second away. The two German fallschirmjäger leapt from the cab, their bodies rolling once across the cobblestones before they were on their feet and sprinting to safety.

  The tank driver, relishing the chance to play demolition derby in earnest, steered his massive vehicle so it met the front of the much lighter deuce at a slight angle, creating the collision that seemed a careless accident. It was anything but.

  The Pershing’s overwhelming inertia knocked the truck onto its side, a result Sylvie hadn’t planned on. The four heavy ammo crates in the truck bed—each containing nothing but multiple industrial-sized tin cans filled with cement—spilled onto the cobblestone street with startling violence. Sylvie breathed a sigh of relief they hadn’t broken open; she’d insisted they be banded with steel straps, and those straps had kept the crates intact. Lying in the street, the nuclear warnings and bogus technical data stenciled on the boxes were plain to see.

  This is a little more spectacular than I had in mind, she thought. I would’ve been happy just to have an upright truck stopped in the middle of the street until the wrecker could get here, with those nuclear symbols on its side making their ominous point…and maybe have some civilians try to get a look inside the truck.

  And among those civilians would be Soviet operatives, no doubt.

  But with the crates in the street, they’ll have an even better look…

  Just so those fucking things stay closed.

  A civilian mob was forming around the toppled deuce and spilled crates, preventing her Germans—her fake GIs—from forming a security cordon as was the plan. Now Sylvie was worried: I can’t let the Russian spies find out what’s really inside. This mission would go from success to farce in seconds. It would be an embarrassing failure…

  And I don’t fail.

  She started toward the mob but strong hands seized her from behind in an unbreakable grasp, covering her mouth and dragging her backward into the butcher’s shop. Trying to free just her hand so it could reach the pistol in her musette bag, she saw the mute, cowed faces of the old butcher and his wife standing behind the counter as her captor dragged her to the rear of the store. Her fingertips brushed the pistol’s grip but could do no more.

  Another man rushed in from the street, moved quickly toward her, and brandished a knife, which he waved in her face. Then he took that same knife and cut the strap on her bag, allowing him to seize it from her shoulder. Finding the semi-automatic pistol inside, he held it on her.

  Sylvie recognized the man holding her gun: Steigmeier…that MGB mole from East Berlin. We heard he’d been killed by some Russian officer over a woman. But I guess that was planted misinformation, because that scar running down his cheek is unmistakable.

  The man with the vise-like grip on her—whose face she still couldn’t see—asked Steigmeier, “You’ve got the photos?” Though he was speaking German, the accent was decidedly Russian.

  “Of course,” he replied, sounding insulted to have been asked.

  “Put the camera in my pocket.”

  Steigmeier did what he was told, slipping the miniature device into his comrade’s jacket. When he was done, he stepped back in front of her and began running the pistol’s barrel through her hair like some crazed hairdresser.

  He won’t shoot, not as long as his partner is still holding me.

  I’m far more worried about that knife.

  An exultant leer on his face, Steigmeier said, “So…Sylvie Bergerac. Or is it Isabelle Truffaut? Or Sylvie Kohler?” He rattled off the rest of her aliases before asking, “Which name will the Americans put on your grave? Oh, you can’t answer with that hand clamped over your mouth, can you?”

  She tried to kick him but he stomped on her foot.

  “Hold her still,” he told his partner as he stepped to her side, raising the knife to her throat.

  A shot rang out. Steigmeier’s head exploded in a cloud of pink mist.

  Franz Ulrich was crouched behind the counter, wielding a US Army .45 pistol he held with both hands. The man restraining her had pivoted so she shielded him. Tightening his grip on her, he began to back toward the shop’s rear exit, dragging her with him. Ulrich jumped over the counter and followed, the .45 at the ready.

  When he considered himself close enough to the door, the Russian shoved Sylvie toward the man in the GI uniform and sprinted outside. Ulrich dropped to one knee and took careful aim. Sylvie grabbed his ar
m, jerking the barrel upward.

  “Let him go,” she said. “We need him to report what he saw or this is all for nothing.”

  They ran to the front door of the shop, Sylvie offering hurried apologies for the mayhem to the butcher and his wife as she wiped Steigmeier’s blood and brains from her face. Back on the street, she was relieved to see the other Germans in GI uniforms had finally established the cordon around the phony ammo boxes. None of them had been opened.

  When she tried to thank Ulrich, he told her, “I couldn’t let them kill you. You haven’t paid us yet.”

  “But who gave you the bullets? That was strictly forbidden.”

  He looked at her like she was crazy and asked, “You’re not really complaining, are you, Frau Bergerac?”

  *****

  At the debrief, Joe Bachmann was a very satisfied boss. “It sounds like another jackpot, Sylvie,” he told her. “Very fine work. Washington thinks the phony intel you planted is already in Moscow’s hands. They’re now watching very carefully for signals that the Chinese and the North Koreans are showing some interest in coming to the conference table.”

  But she didn’t seem pleased. Bachmann asked, “Something wrong?”

  “The Russians know I’m here…it’s a certainty now. They know my face, they know my name…or should I say names, all of them. I’m compromised.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bachmann replied. “You’ll be on the next plane out of Frankfurt. You’re being reassigned to Washington.”

  That wasn’t what she wanted.

  Something Tommy once told her kept echoing in her head, something he’d referred to as Brooklyn wisdom:

  No good deed goes unpunished, Syl.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The imperatives of warfare have a way of mocking even the best laid plans. The new unit Brigadier General Jock Miles would form and command—the 247th Regimental Combat Team—was supposed to be assembled and intensively trained in-country over a period of two months. Only after that training period was complete would it be deployed to the 38th Parallel, ready for immediate commitment to battle as needed.

  A renewed Chinese offensive in mid-May 1951 changed all that. Northeast of Seoul, 8th Army units were withdrawing south of the Parallel as much as twenty miles, yielding ground to dissipate the blow. For the most part, it was never a rout but a series of skillful retrograde operations to deny the CCF the ability to employ its daunting numbers against obligingly stationary objectives. Once the Chinese assaults faltered, as they now did with regularity, 8th Army would be poised to regain the ground they’d ceded.

  MacArthur had criticized Ridgway for this strategy, but few could deny it was achieving the political goal that Washington—and the rest of the United Nations—had set as a means to end this war: bleed the Chinese dry so they’d be forced to negotiate an end to hostilities.

  When General Van Fleet, the new 8th Army commander, ordered Jock to immediately bring his nascent unit north to Hoengsong, the RCT had been in existence barely two weeks. The unit wasn’t fully formed yet, either, as it was still short two of the infantry battalions he’d been promised, leaving Jock with only four.

  Sean Moon took an optimistic view. “Might not be such a bad thing, sir,” he told Jock. “With what we got at the moment—the four infantry battalions plus the two artillery battalions and the two armor battalions—we’re more like one of them armored cavalry regiments we formed in Germany than an RCT. The only difference is our infantry will be riding in deuces instead of armored carriers. Still, we’re light enough to move pretty damn fast but still pack a hell of a lot of firepower.”

  Before he put Sergeant Moon’s contention to his five staff officers—three of whom hadn’t even arrived until that morning—Jock turned to Patchett and asked, “What are your thoughts, Top?”

  “I gotta agree with Bubba, sir,” Patchett replied. “If we’re gonna be this mobile fire brigade like General Ridgway figured, I think the way we’re set up right now—even though we’re a little low on dogfaces—might just be the way to go. Besides, we’re lucky that the units we got ain’t green. All we gotta do is lay down the law how they’re gonna work together. And the way I see it, rule number one gotta be this unit don’t never get split up and farmed-out piecemeal. Otherwise, we’re gonna end up just being road guards or a manpower pool for the rest of Eighth Army.”

  “Damn right, Top,” Sean added.

  “I’m glad you both agree,” Jock said with a smile, “because I’m with you one hundred percent on all counts.”

  “I got something else you’ll wanna hear, sir,” Patchett said. “Our boys have come up with a crackerjack nickname for this outfit, because the Two-Forty-Seventh RCT is kind of a mouthful. They’re taking to calling themselves Brigade Miles. They sound pretty proud of it, and I believe I like the name a whole lot myself. Beats being called Trench Rats any damn day.”

  Sean Moon said, “Sounds pretty good to me, too, sir.”

  “Outstanding,” Jock replied. “You’ve got to love a morale booster the men invented all by themselves. Makes our job so much easier.”

  Patchett replied, “Amen to that, sir.”

  *****

  Leaving their training camp at Wonju, Brigade Miles covered the ten miles to Hoengsong in a little over an hour. Sean Moon griped, “If it hadn’t been for all that fucking traffic moving away from the battle, we coulda been here in half the time.”

  But they’d only stay at Hoengsong long enough to get a new set of orders from 8th Army’s forward CP. General Van Fleet told Jock, “Elements of two CCF divisions are forcing a gap near the village of Soksa-ri, about thirty-five miles east of here. Air power’s been a huge help slowing them down, but airplanes can’t be everywhere at once and can’t hold terrain.” Pointing out the village on the map, he continued, “I imagine you’ll want to take Highway Twenty to get there. Can you make it within three hours?”

  Jock replied, “If there are no traffic jams, we could do it in three, sir. But the odds of no traffic are about zero. To make the move as fast as possible, can the MPs give my boys priority on the highway?”

  A pained look came over Van Fleet’s face. “Jock, right now I can’t guarantee the highway’s going to be open all the way to Soksa-ri. It sits right on the boundary between our Tenth Corps and the ROK Third Corps.”

  Jock clenched his teeth: Tenth Corps—that means General Almond. This isn’t the first time he’s had a problem keeping a boundary secure. This sounds like Twin Tunnels all over again.

  He asked Van Fleet, “So I’ll be reporting to General Almond, sir?”

  With what sounded like an air of apology, the 8th Army commander replied, “Yeah, I’m afraid that’s the way it works, General Miles.”

  *****

  The traffic had been heavy and chaotic, just as Jock surmised. It took three hours just to reach the village of Changp’yong-ni, which was five miles west of Soksa-ri along Highway 20. There, Jock conferred with the C.O. of 3rd Infantry Division, a two-star named Bob Soule.

  “Good to meet you, Jock,” Soule said. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. How’d your armor hold up on that motor march from Hoengsong?”

  “Lost two to breakdowns.”

  “Out of how many?”

  “Seventy-one.”

  “Man, that’s fantastic,” Soule replied, “because I’m down to about a company of tanks.”

  “You’ve got a better excuse than I do, sir—you’re in contact with the enemy. All I’ve been doing is driving. So what are we up against here?”

  “A couple of ROK divisions are caving again, Jock. I had to put most of my men into a blocking position at Habae-jae. Otherwise, I would’ve had the fleeing ROK Seventh Division and Lord knows how many CCF divisions streaming into my sector. We’ve stopped them there, but on our right flank, the 3rd Corps ROKs have been giving up whole stretches of Highway Twelve like it’s going out of style. Almond wants me to split my force and set up another blocking position at Soksa-ri, but I j
ust don’t have the people. You do, though.”

  “Yeah, I could do that,” Jock replied, “but listen to this…I got a message from Almond’s headquarters about thirty minutes ago. He wants me to push east through some damn mountain trails, passing well south of Soksa-ri, and buck up the ROKs at Hajinbu-ri, of all places. As far as Eighth Army is concerned, that’s the one area the ROKs aren’t under serious pressure and haven’t had to pull back much at all. I could do what Almond’s ordering, but by the time I get there, most of my armor will have broken down on those mountain grades. I won’t be much help to anybody then.”

  Soule added, “And if the chinks pull a breakthrough at Soksa-ri, you’ll be fighting them in those mountains with both hands tied behind your back. All those artillery pieces and tanks of yours will be next to useless.” He paused, knowing full well that both of them were considering ways to interpret Almond’s orders into actions that would make more sense…and maybe do some good.

  Jock studied the map for a few moments more. Then he said, “You know, I can go straight up Highway Twenty to Soksa-ri as if I’m actually headed to Hajinbu-ri, staying out of those damn mountains, and be in position to block the chinks at either village. Nobody can really say I’m not following Almond’s orders. I’m just choosing a faster route.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Jock…but speaking of fast, you’d better do it now.”

  *****

  Brigade Miles found Soksa-ri practically deserted. Sean Moon had led the lead element of tanks into the town, jokingly declaring it an open city over the radio.

  But everyone knew that was no joke: the ROKs’ desertion of the village and its crucial highway junction had nearly created a gap through which the CCF could’ve poured, allowing them to envelop the 8th Army line in any number of places.