David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘Alright,’ Joe Amos began.

  The boys wriggled their fannies on the benches.

  ‘McGee and I were riding back from a run up north to the 79th.’ Joe Amos set his elbows on the table. ‘About a mile outside Valognes, we came up behind a convoy. McGee was driving. I was up in the bed with the fifty cal.’

  ‘I want to hear this, too. Keep your seats, gentlemen.’

  Major Clay and Lieutenant Garner stepped forward. The boys at the table shot upright and stiff at the officers’ arrival. The whole mess tent quieted. The tattoo of rain on the canvas echoed off metal trays and plates.

  ‘Relax, fellas,’ Major Clay said, ‘I haven’t had a chance to hear this adventure from Corporal Joe himself. Joe Amos, go on. Let’s hear what happened.’

  Major Clay set his rump on the edge of the table. Lieutenant Garner stuck his hands behind his waist, in parade rest. Joe Amos flicked a glance around the hushed tent, full of drivers and cooks, and now these two white officers. Major Clay announced, ‘Get back to your mess, everyone. Thank you.’

  The white officer opened his hand to Joe Amos. The gesture said: There, all taken care of. Now, proceed.

  Joe Amos nodded. Moments before, the clamor of colored soldiers eating and cajoling, passing the rainy, useless time, was familiar and homey, a little raucous. Now the mood was stilted. Major Clay waited.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Joe Amos faced the boys at the table. He reckoned there were over a hundred in the mess tent, all from his battalion. Maybe it would do them good, too, like Charlie, to hear a brave tale from one of their own. Anyway, Major Clay had said he was expecting big things from Corporal Joe. What the hell.

  ‘Okay,’ Joe Amos said, out loud but to himself, agreeing.

  He told the story.

  After pulling up behind the convoy outside Valognes, with McGee driving fast and Joe Amos at the machine gun, a huge convoy passed, heading west into the peninsula. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt knifed in tight over the bocage, barreling straight at the big convoy from behind.

  ‘He strafed the trucks good on his first pass.’ Joe Amos used a flattened hand to illustrate the German fighter’s initial swoop over the trucks, sweeping low over the salt and pepper shakers on the table.

  ‘A bunch of them caught fire. The whole convoy stopped dead in the road. I didn’t even have time to think about taking a shot, he was gone like that.’

  Joe Amos snapped his fingers. Major Clay folded his arms and nodded approval. So did the rest of the mess tent. Joe Amos had never been given this kind of attention. Not back in Danville, with four loud sisters, not ever in the Army beside blustery Boogie all the way from training camp. Joe Amos waited for something inside him to wilt, to stutter, dig a hole. Instead, he was jazzed.

  He lifted his hand from the table and curved it, mimicking the German fighter.

  ‘Then he came back.’

  He put both hands in front of him, making fists on the invisible machine-gun grips. He lowered his head, he saw the Kraut coming, hot and mean over the trees.

  ‘McGee jumped out and dove for the ditch.’

  McGee thrust an arm at Joe Amos. ‘He told me to!’

  Every driver at the table and many in the tent laughed. Joe Amos glanced up at Major Clay and Garner. Both officers grinned.

  Joe Amos hunkered again behind the pretend .50 cal. He took aim on the streaming Messerschmitt. The Kraut’s cannons and machine guns lit up. Bits of road and metal popped like corks going off.

  ‘Next thing I know we’re squaring off, me and this Kraut, both of us got our guns going. Pieces of everything were jumping around me, I could feel the truck getting hit and I just kept my finger on the trigger and him in front of me.’

  ‘You were shoutin’!’ McGee Mays piped up. Joe Amos’s partner cast a wild and happy gaze around the table. ‘He was shoutin’, I could hear him.’

  Joe Amos shook his head. ‘All I remember is watching him go by, wham! and he was gone. Right over my head.’ Joe Amos took one hand off the imaginary grips and skipped it away, flashing like the fighter plane. ‘I spun the fifty cal around to keep after him.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ McGee concluded, reverent, churchly, ‘shot him down.’

  Joe Amos lifted an eyebrow at his young partner. The boy was suddenly full of talk.

  ‘Yeah, well, he was trailing smoke. Some other drivers shot at him, too. I reckon we all took a piece out of him. Anyway, he was flying so low he hit the treetops.’

  With both hands Joe Amos made a rising fireball, then held them out, empty.

  ‘And that was it.’

  The boys at the table looked to each other. Charlie glared straight at Joe Amos, the boy’s narrowed gaze spoke of how much he coveted Joe Amos’s story, he wanted to do this. Joe Amos gave the thin boy his own private nod, telling him to go get him a Kraut plane, too.

  ‘I saw your truck.’ Major Clay spoke into the whispering approval in the mess tent. ‘It’s pretty chewed up.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’d like to keep it, if you don’t mind, Major. She still runs good. The Kraut didn’t hit anything important.’

  Major Clay rose from his perch on the edge of the table. He laid a hand on Joe Amos’s shoulder.

  ‘No, he didn’t. Lieutenant?’

  Garner strode forward. ‘Gentlemen, if you don’t mind, the Major and I would like the table alone with Corporal Joe.’

  McGee and the others rose and left. Major Clay moved to sit on the bench opposite Joe Amos, Garner sat beside the Major.

  ‘You shot down a Messerschmitt,’ Major Clay said.

  Joe Amos waited to respond, sniffing for the Major’s intent. ‘I might have, sir.’

  ‘Oh, you did. The report I got from the CO of the other convoy said you bagged the sumbitch. Stood right under his guns and let him have it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So, Joe Amos. I know I told you I expected big things from you, but you’ve kind of moved a little fast for me.’

  Joe Amos made no answer. He saw where this was going and tightened his lips.

  ‘Lieutenant, we’ve got ourselves a bona fide hero in the 668th,’ Major Clay said.

  Garner nodded agreement. ‘Yes, sir. Bona fide.’

  ‘Now what are we going to do with you?’ Major Clay never took his eyes away, as if Joe Amos were a new and thorny thing. ‘What am I going to do with a hero in a colored truck battalion?’

  Major Clay untwined his fingers. He lifted one and waggled it at Joe Amos. He issued a small and ironic laugh through his gappy teeth.

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth, son. I don’t have any real use for one, if you get my drift.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Alright. Just so’s you know. You did a hell of a thing out there. You know it and I know it. But for right now that’s got to be good enough. The Army don’t need more combat soldiers. What it needs is for you and the rest of these boys to drive them trucks and keep doing your jobs. And, well, it would be a help...’ Major Clay paused, selecting different words. ‘It would be better all around if you didn’t stir up any hornets’ nests.’

  The urge to tell the Major to kiss his ass was fleet and gone, faster than the Messerschmitt, and it crashed, too. Joe Amos was not raised in Danville to make trouble, he was not Boogie John Bailey. Joe Amos didn’t need a medal, and he didn’t need slaps on the back. He only wanted folks to know what he and the men of his color could do. That wouldn’t happen because of a few explosive seconds in the back of a truck bed, and it wouldn’t happen in a year or over the course of this war. Joe Amos knew what he’d done, so did the coloreds in this mess tent and the black hands in that convoy. And the Major said he knew, too.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Major Clay clapped his hands softly and rubbed them, satisfied.

  ‘Lieutenant?’

  From his pocket, Garner gave Major Clay a cloth patch, another stripe. Major Clay handed it across the table to Joe Amos.

  ‘Here you go, Sergeant. Congratulations.’

&
nbsp; Before Joe Amos could speak or react, Major Clay stood. He raised his voice to the whole tent.

  ‘Everyone finish your mess. Then come outside and saddle up. Follow me. I want to show you something.’

  ~ * ~

  Rain dripped in the shot-out rear window. Three holes in the cloth of the cab roof had been plugged with strips of towel. A puncture thick as a thumb gaped in the metal dash. In the empty truck bed, the track of the German machine gun could be followed like connect-the-dots, walking right up to and past where Joe Amos had stood at the .50 cal.

  Joe Amos drove in line with his whole company, one hundred and eighty trucks. McGee sat on the bench across from him, staring in awe at the third stripe he held in his hand. The convoy crept along, with none of the breakneck speed the colored drivers poured on when they were alone or in smaller units. This time Major Clay and Lieutenant Garner rode at the head of the column, heading back toward OMAHA. The ride was long and muggy. Joe Amos’s wipers worked hard to keep in sight the road and the taillights through the smearing day. ‘Cut it out,’ Joe Amos told McGee.

  ‘You movin’ up right fast, Sarge.’

  ‘Yeah. Well.’

  Joe Amos had nothing to say. Major Clay had told him pretty straight to cool it, make no big deal out of shooting down the Kraut. Joe Amos figured it was alright to be an inspiration, just not a distraction. Besides, Joe Amos knew he ought to be dead. The bullet holes in the truck were testimony to how much luck he’d used up facing the Jabo. Telling the story to admiring faces, even to Garner and Clay, he forgot the danger. He wasn’t reliving the moments, just playacting them. But every time he sat in the perforated truck and saw the punches in the metal, he felt a foreboding, like dew before a hot day.

  McGee pulled his eyes off Joe Amos and faced the windshield. Joe Amos pushed the Jimmy along in third gear. No other convoys rumbled at them from the direction of the beaches. The battalion had the road to themselves.

  ‘I’m from Chattahoochee,’ McGee volunteered. ‘Two A’s, two T’s, two O’s, two E’s, three H’s, two C’s.’

  Joe Amos had asked this question three days ago, the name of McGee’s little town in Florida. Now Joe Amos was a hero and a sergeant—one stripe more than Boogie ever had—and McGee was spelling the answer for him with a school rhyme.

  ‘Whereabouts is it?’

  ‘On the Georgia line. Near the Apalachicola River.’

  ‘Fishin’s good?’

  McGee’s smile bore recollection, of ease and heat, stringers and guts and panfrying, water snakes chased off by paddles and pebbles. Joe Amos had a river back home, too, the Dan River. There were bream and bass in the current, and copperheads in the weeds.

  McGee stared into the rain. ‘Yeah. I’m goin’ back there minute this war is over. Gonna drop a line and sleep. See my girl.’

  ‘You got a girl?’

  ‘Little girl. My daughter. She almost two.’

  Joe Amos smiled for McGee. Here was a young colored man drafted away from his child and river and plunked in a war. Here was a quiet fellow, an admiring sort, a nimble driver, a physically strong man, a follower, a hero in his own way. This is the man Major Clay wants a whole corps of.

  Joe Amos asked no more. He resorted to what Boogie always did when silence seemed the best tack. He punched McGee in the shoulder and looked him in the eye, then did what Major Clay required. He drove for the U.S. Army.

  The pastures and hedges thinned, and the beaches neared. A lone passel of trucks came down the road and spurred past, headed west into the bocage. Man, Joe Amos thought, there is nothing coming off OMAHA. No road crew repaired potholes and bomb damage, no MPs waved traffic along, checking speed, no recently landed soldiers tramped beside the highway, tossing off equipment. The rain and lowering sky had clamped everything shut.

  The long convoy wended the familiar route into D-1 draw. Joe Amos downshifted to drive over the sand in the gulley, packed hard and brown by tractors and constant wheels. Charred German pillboxes remained sentinels here. Joe Amos looked up the bluffs and imagined again the fury of D-Day. McGee stayed quiet.

  At the mouth of the draw, the column dispersed. Lieutenant Garner stood there directing traffic. Joe Amos crept up, riding close behind the canvas tarp of the Jimmy in front. That truck pulled right. Joe Amos reached Garner and the first sands of the beach. Garner motioned Joe Amos to follow to the right. He turned the wheel and emerged from behind the high slopes of the draw.

  His mouth went slack.

  As far as his eyes could pierce the rain, stretching miles east, OMAHA was a junk pile of wreckage. Joe Amos almost slammed on the brake by instinct to stop and gander at the incredibleness of the damage wreaked by the storm. The Jimmy behind him beeped; Joe Amos pushed over the rain-sopped sand to park in line with is company and battalion ogling the ruined, tangled remains of the artificial Mulberry harbor and hundreds of vessels.

  Whitecaps on the Channel slapped at the hulks of battered landing craft. Every kind of ship had been driven like spikes into the ribs and faces of every other craft strewn across OMAHA. LCTs tossed in the surf, snapped at the spars where the blunt prows of huge LSTs had crunched through. Rhino barges lay sunken, waves ransacked across their cargo flats. A coast guard cutter wedged itself into a nest of LCMs and wound up with its smaller sisters sideways on the beach, all of them alien and appalling out of the water.

  Mangled and mingled with the boats were giant bits of the ruined Mulberry harbor. Concrete pontoons larger than some vessels batted the gunwales of downed craft with every pulse of the waves. Steel piers twisted like ribbons. Massive floating pieces, recognizable or not, rammed and rolled until they found enough of a crevice through the jumbled vessels to stumble up on the beach. Only the sunken blockships offshore seemed to have kept their places, and half of them were broken-backed.

  Joe Amos jumped down into the rain, McGee with him. Three hundred and fifty drivers gaped at the carnage. A dozen bulldozers and tow trucks plied bravely at the bedlam, breaking embraces and pulling wrecks aside to keep paths to the beach exits clear. Soggy soldiers scrambled into the holds of rocking wrecks to salvage what cargo they held, loading crates into a trickle of trucks to speed them off the beach. Joe Amos almost tripped in the sand, aghast at the chaos on OMAHA.

  Major Clay stood in the rain, looking at the busted dream of the Army’s artificial harbor.

  ‘What’s this mean?’ McGee asked, moving closer to the Major in the ring of stunned drivers. ‘What’s gonna happen?’

  Joe Amos shushed the boy.

  Major Clay raised a hand for quiet. Behind the officer, the groans of pierced boats ground like broken bones. Bulldozers spit diesel smoke and struggled. The rain pounded.

  ‘As you can see, gentlemen, this is one great big goddam FUBAR!’

  The drivers nodded and dug boot heels into the sand.

  ‘Not even the Krauts could do what Mother Nature’s done here. She’s fucked up our harbor and fucked up our plans.’

  Major Clay turned away to take in the Channel for another moment, as if drawing power from the churning water to help him choose words that might equal it.

  He turned back to the semicircle of dripping, sober faces.

  ‘You men! This is what happened here. The U.S. Army’s Mulberry is gone. We no longer have a goddam pier to load our trucks directly from the ships! And from the looks of this mess we also have a hell of a lot fewer ships! So. That means we are going to continue, for the foreseeable future until Ike comes up with a better idea, to pick up every goddam thing the whole goddam army needs to fight this war right here off the sand like we’ve been doing!’

  Joe Amos rubbed a hand over his brow. This was rotten news. The Mulberry harbor was designed to allow trucks to drive right out to the ships tied up to the pierheads, take their loads from cranes straight from the holds, then drive across the piers to the beach and on to the troops. Easy peasy. Fast and efficient. Now, the slowest and most backbreaking way to move cargo, the way they’d been doing it�
�ferrying supplies from ship to beach, unloading it, then loading it again into the beds of trucks—was going to stay SOP. His heart sank into the moan of the wind and the bashing of ships.

  Major Clay lifted his hand again.

  ‘Here’s the good news. Mother Nature had you boys in mind when she pulled this stunt. You soldiers and your trucks just became a whole lot more important to the United States Army than they ever imagined you would be. We’re gonna be going twenty-four seven as soon as this damn storm stops. For how long, I can’t tell. You got any questions, don’t ask ‘em! At this point you know everything I know.’