David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘Boog, you hear the one about that old lady in Tewksbury?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah. She wrote a letter to a Colonel over in Cheltenham. Said she wanted him to send six soldiers from the base over to her house for tea. And she said No Jews.’

  Boogie shook his head at the British. ‘Everyone got to have somebody to whup.’

  Joe Amos finished the tale. He didn’t know if it was true or not, but it was funny.

  ‘So Sunday noon the old lady opened her door and standing there were six big colored boys. She says there must be some mistake. And the biggest brother says, ‘No, ma’am. Colonel Berkowitz didn’t make no mistake.’’

  Boogie chuckled, his big stomach rubbed the steering wheel. He laid out his hand. Joe Amos slapped it.

  ‘You take her for a while,’ Boogie said.

  Joe Amos slid over top of the burly driver, and the two exchanged places without getting out. They could do this at sixty miles an hour with no problem.

  The Quartermaster crew finished loading the truck. The last man jumped down and shut the gate. He pounded on it.

  Joe Amos charged the gears. The instant he pulled from the depot, another Jimmy took his place. An approaching truck honked. Joe Amos tapped the brake to let him go past. The entire beach was choked with traffic and materials. He dodged to get in line with his platoon waiting near the D-1 draw. Everywhere on OMAHA, mounds of ammo crates were built like bunkers in the sand. Dunes of ration cartons swept in and rolled away, to be rebuilt in another hour. A million five-gallon jerricans sucked the loads from tanker trucks dry, then the tankers tiptoed back into the water and up the ramp of one odd-looking ship or another to motor back across the Channel, returning tomorrow with more fuel for the war machines. Toting these crates and cans onto the beach was every shape of vehicle: amphibious DUKWs, giant bladed ‘dozers, landing craft great and small laying themselves open to spill in the shallows, rhino ferries, jeeps, Sherman tanks, and hundreds of Jimmies. Joe Amos recollected what a transport officer had told their battalion before the invasion: the plan called for three thousand vehicles a day to land in Normandy. ‘That’s how we’re going to beat them,’ the officer said. ‘Wheels.’

  Joe Amos took his place in line with his 1st platoon. He was the tenth truck back from the jeep that waited at the head of their column. With closed eyes, he waited in the warming cab for the rest of his unit to finish loading. Joe Amos Biggs and Boogie John Bailey drove in Dog Company, in the 688th QM Battalion, eleven hundred Negroes led by forty officers, most of them white. The battalion had five hundred trucks, divided into four companies, each broken into four platoons of about thirty vehicles each. When the 688th moved in echelon, the column snaked over eight miles long, and thirteen hundred tons of whatever Eisenhower’s U.S. Army ordered went for a ride.

  Dog Company had not been off the beach since their arrival yesterday, Sunday. Joe Amos cast his thoughts back to Danville, Virginia. An ocean and two calendars had spread themselves between him and home. His mother and four sisters and four brothers-in-law were all praying for him yesterday, sure enough, uncles, aunts and cousins, too. Every one of them were on their farms or at the textile mill today. Across the Atlantic, Joe Amos idled on an invasion beach in a truck piled high with gasoline cans. He sat in the front seat of a rolling firebomb he was about to drive straight to the front lines. Eyes closed, he said a quick prayer for himself and for his family, because a farm, the mill, Danville, France, these all had dangers.

  The truck behind nipped his bumper. Joe Amos opened his eyes. Beside him Boogie shivered awake. The line of Jimmies ahead had moved off. Joe Amos shifted into gear and began his first run of the war.

  ~ * ~

  It took forty minutes to get all the platoon’s trucks off the beach and up on the battered road. In single file, the convoy crept through the ravine, labeled D-1, the first of four breaks in the steep green bluffs that allowed vehicles to drive off the five-mile expanse of OMAHA. D-1 was the westernmost and the most prized draw on D-Day because it had been the right-hand, exposed flank of the American invasion sector. According to the maps Joe Amos had seen in England, D-1 was also the narrowest of the paths off the beach, and the best defended by the Germans.

  Joe Amos eased the Jimmy between the dunes. Scars hemmed the draw, a dozen blasted pillboxes lay in ruins. Bunkered German machine guns with interlocking fields of fire must have made this five-hundred-yard stretch a slaughterhouse for any soldier fighting his way through. Blackened concrete spoiled the slopes, kicked there by naval artillery and hand-delivered satchel charges. Acres of beach grass were cordoned with barbed wire and posted with skull-and-crossbones signs reading Achtung! Minen! Joe Amos gaped at the destruction, slowing so much he drew a honk from the deuce-and-a-half behind and a glare from Boogie John.

  Up on the road, the convoy straightened its ranks and picked up speed, headed west. The column hauled POL -petrol, oil, and lubricants. Over the last year, Joe Amos and every driver in the battalion had it drilled in their heads: An American army can fight in dirty uniforms; soldiers can be hungry and low on ammo. But if they don’t move fast, if the tanks, transports, tractors, and jeeps stall, then the greatest advantages America brought to the war—manufacturing and mobility—went right to hell. One in ten soldiers actually saw combat. The rest, the service divisions, bore the task of supplying the combat troops. The chain was a long one, stretching from American factories to ports, then onto ships, over the ocean, into English harbors, across the Channel, onto landing craft, then the beaches and into the truck beds. There the drivers took over. They would deliver the materiel when and where it was needed. Without their hands on the steering wheels, the hardware of war—America’s real Sunday punch—would stay stacked on the sand. And here in Europe, seven out of ten of those drivers’ hands were black.

  Joe Amos kept his Jimmy twenty feet behind the truck in front, right where he was supposed to be. The pace of the convoy hovered at twenty-five miles per hour, the speed designated in the transport manual. He didn’t know where they were going. That was the job of the jeep out front and the officer with the map. Joe Amos wiped his palms on his thighs. He sweated with excitement and pride. His convoy looked good, long and olive drab, strong and aimed straight at the Jerries. Joe Amos Biggs himself hauled five thousand pounds of fuel in his truck bed.

  ‘I wish they’d let me fight.’

  ‘Why you wanna say something stupid like that?’ Boogie John asked. ‘That’s the second dumbass thing you said this morning. Take a break.’

  Joe Amos shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just figure I could do as good a job as them. That’s all.’

  ‘Maybe you could, you being a dumbass.’

  Boogie seemed to laugh at himself, how mean he could be.

  The truck tilted and jounced in and out of a deep pothole. Joe Amos struggled to keep his grip on the wrenching steering wheel. The laden truck swayed.

  ‘Get your head on the road!’ Boogie barked. ‘Pay attention to the job, boy! Say you wanna fight? You can’t even drive a damn truck.’

  Joe Amos tightened his lips. Boogie would get under his skin if he didn’t, the man could rile an anvil. Joe Amos fixed his gaze on the narrow bit of road sluicing between his hood and the truck ahead.

  But the scorched litter of combat drew his gaze. Beyond the shoulder, tanks with broken tracks and burned-out turrets squatted in scorched fields. Deep craters from mortars and artillery scooped the land; two bullet-riddled Jimmies on flat tires had been bulldozed off the road, one of them had caught fire. There were no bodies anywhere, though Joe Amos looked hard to see one on the ground or in the wrecks. He barely kept his hands on the wheel. Every second he wanted to point something out to Boogie, but his big partner only scowled at the carnage. Joe Amos drove and gawked.

  His wheels struck another pothole. In the truck bed the jerricans squealed and bumped, the Jimmy shuddered. Joe Amos feared for the axles. Boogie John drew an impatient breath. Joe Amos braced for the rebuke. Boogie�
��s head did not turn his way, but leaned out his passenger window.

  A flight of Thunderbolts blared overhead, slicing across the road at four hundred miles an hour. Six Pratt & Whitney engines drowned every noise on the ground. The Jimmy and its load shuddered to the vibrations of the roaring fighters passing low and hot, seeking enemies to the south.

  Joe Amos whooped. He balled a fist out his window.

  ‘Damn, Boogie! Look at ‘em!’

  Boogie lowered his head and watched the six planes snap by. Somewhere over the green terrain to the south—miles off now in the seconds since they were overhead -the Thunderbolts broke formation. They dove, each zeroing in on some target. Joe Amos heard their cannons pound. Smoke plumes rose where they struck. The planes climbed and circled to hit again whatever prey they’d found.

  The convoy pressed westward. The power of the Thunderbolts’ assault faded, replaced by more war debris beside the road. Trucks and tanks were the largest dead denizens, but the earth was littered with smaller bits. Joe Amos noted everything along the ground: discarded field-pieces, artillery casings, windblown medical rubbish, lost helmets. He imagined the combat that boiled through here only days ago, the fight for this key road that connected OMAHA and UTAH beaches. He cast back a week earlier, before the invasion, and peopled this road with Germans, black-clad soldiers riding where he rode now, in their convertible staff cars, enjoying the mild Normandy sun. The Germans had been chased south off this highway, but not very far. The attacking P-47S overhead told him how close the Krauts were, and how hard they were going to be to push farther back.

  The road stretched long and straight. The convoy rolled through ruined villages, and some that had escaped damage. There seemed no formula for this other than where the Germans had made a stand and where they’d backed away without a fight. Wherever they’d put up their dukes, like in Longueville, La Cambe, d’Arthenay, and Isigny, the towns were eradicated. What looked like ancient buildings, not made of bricks so much as stones, had been gutted. Joe Amos looked into people’s sliced-open rooms, saw curtains and tidily made-up beds where walls lay in the street. He slowed in front of a church steeple with no church attached, just stones and charred beams. The towns stated their names on signs, sometimes shot-up placards, and again, at the city limits, announced you were leaving with a red line through the name. He tried to pronounce the towns in his head, but did not know which of the letters to leave out in the odd French pronunciations; instead, he enlisted Boogie to say the towns out loud and the two chuckled, easing their path through the battle zone.

  ‘Boog?’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Can we drive one of those?’

  Joe Amos pointed at the Jimmy in front. The truck was one of four in their platoon with a .50 caliber machine gun welded to a ring behind the cab.

  ‘You go ahead,’ Boogie said. ‘I’m fine where I am.’

  Joe Amos rattled his head in reply and drove. Boogie clucked his tongue.

  He said, ‘Where’d you get this notion about fightin’? The man told you we won’t gonna fight. We’re gonna drive trucks. That’s what the black folk came over here to do. And that’s what I’m gonna do.’

  Both men had stowed their M-1 Garand rifles under the seat. In training camp, Joe Amos had made himself a proficient shot. As a service unit, their battalion was not given regular rifle practice. Joe Amos hadn’t fired his weapon once in 1944, but he kept the rifle clean and close at hand. No matter the truth of what Boogie was saying, when Joe Amos carried the M-1 or oiled it, he felt like a soldier.

  ‘College, show me one boy in this whole Army doin’ one thing more than he’s supposed to, I’ll show you a moron. That’s FUBAR and you know it. And don’t think the Army’s gonna do anything extra for you, neither. We ain’t wanted here and that’s fine with me, I don’t wanna be here. They drafted me and I don’t like jail. That’s the deal.’

  Boogie folded his arms and clammed up. Joe Amos drove another ten minutes wrapped in motor growls, exhaust, and a bumpy silence. In England, Boogie had not been like this, so edgy. This negative, sad-sack stuff started yesterday. Joe Amos waited a while, then told his partner so.

  Boogie studied the grass fields dotted with abandoned vehicles. The wreck of a crashed bomber rose out of a marsh like a jumbled island, a bent propeller jutted up in the shape of a palm tree. Boogie said nothing. In a field, a cart was tipped over, a dead horse lay in the traces. Joe Amos watched Boogie’s eyes linger on the bloated animal until it was behind them. Placards beside the road read: Danger! Shoulder Not Clear of Mines!

  Joe Amos realized: Boogie’s scared. Damn a’mighty, he thought. So am I.

  He felt better and let the talk dry up. Being scared doesn’t make you a coward, he decided. It means you’ve got eyeballs in your head, and some sense. Boogie John ran away from his fear; he, Joe Amos, walked toward his. Both were valid and human. Joe Amos privately smiled, because Boogie’s reaction probably made more sense.

  On the other side of the road, a long convoy roared by, headed back to OMAHA. He couldn’t see the cargos under the canvas tops. A few soldiers stood in the truck beds looking over the gates. Other than them, the trucks seemed empty.

  The column entered the outskirts of a larger town. The sign read: Carentan. The truck in front slowed and the gap narrowed. There were no brake lights on any of the Jimmies, only cat’s eyes, two ruby slit lamps on the rear and one clear lamp in the front, lights that would not be visible from the air. Joe Amos tapped his brake. The convoy came to a halt. Joe Amos and Boogie leaned out their windows to find the reason.

  The leading jeep had reached a bridge over the Aure River, into Carentan, a dozen miles from OMAHA. The jeep pulled off the road at the foot of the bridge and waited until all thirty trucks were idling in line. Then the first Jimmy motored across. The second truck waited, then sprinted over the stone span.

  In a few minutes Joe Amos rolled to the head of the line. A sign next to the bridge said: Welcome to Carentan. Courtesy of the 101st Airborne. Below this placard was nailed a hand-painted poster, warning: One vehicle at a time. Bridge under fire.

  Lieutenant Garner stood beside the road, his hand up to Joe Amos. He watched the Jimmy on the bridge trundle across. Without looking into the cab, he asked, ‘How you boys doin’? Boog, you lettin’ the pup drive?’

  ‘Boy got to learn sometime, Lieutenant. Y’all sure as shit didn’t teach him nothin’.’

  The white officer chuckled. With the ninth truck safely across, he set his elbow in the driver-side window and looked past Joe Amos. The platoon CO was a tall Louisianan. The word was that the Army believed Southern officers knew best how to handle Negro troops. Garner spoke with a drawl, rubbed his bald head a lot. He was twenty-three, just two years older than Joe Amos.

  ‘Boogie, if I can put up with you, why can’t you put up with me?’

  Boogie’s chest jiggled with laughter. ‘I’m doin’ what I can, Lieutenant.’

  Garner nodded at the parity of their situations. The lieutenant didn’t want to command colored soldiers, they didn’t want to be under him. That was the U.S. Army, and all agreed war was not the time or place to change it. Garner waved them onto the bridge.

  ‘Don’t worry, boys,’ he called after them. ‘I hear the German artillery takes about nine trucks to get their timing down.’

  Across the span, Joe Amos laid on the gas. He charged the Jimmy over the narrow river, into the ruined town of Carentan, and put his truck back in line to wait for the rest of the platoon. He didn’t expect an enemy barrage on the bridge, but the 101st Airborne hadn’t put that sign there as a joke; the banks were gouged with craters. Joe Amos sensed he’d crossed something more than a river. These were his first moments within reach of the Germans.

  Carentan was a beat-up mess. The fighting here had raged house-to-house. Now that the town was taken, soldiers moved into every crevice. Gun barrels bristled in windows, fieldpieces behind sandbags pointed south. No soldier carried his weapon on his back, but
in his hands.

  ‘I reckon we don’t give much of a damn about homes and such,’ Joe Amos observed. ‘I mean, Jesus. Look at this.’

  Boogie snorted. ‘What you want ‘em to do? Be careful? I’d of knocked everything down, too.’

  ‘That’s if you were to fight.’

  ‘Which I ain’t.’

  The truck platoon re-assembled on the west side of the bridge and got under way. To the rear, another convoy halted at the bridge, read the Airborne’s signs, and began their crossing.

  Moving west of Carentan and the Aure River, the convoy was now a few miles from UTAH beach. The terrain around the road began a slow change, away from low hills and marsh. Bit by bit, the land closed around the road, a greener embrace of thickets along the shoulders, rimming the meadows and orchards rolling away south.