David Robbins - [World War II 04]
Page 17
Previtera looked again to the orchard where the cough came from. He seemed to visualize dawn.
‘Gimme something, Chap.’
The German foxhole lay close enough to slither to and slit a throat. Ben had done this in his life, many times. Those deeds hung on the tree of his time. He wanted to tell Previtera how in his war the trenches were so close they could hear the Germans’ teakettles, or a sneeze, just like now.
‘In the Talmud, Jews are taught that all people are descended from a single person, Adam, so taking a single life is like destroying an entire world. Saving a single life is like saving an entire world.’
‘What is that supposed to mean? I shouldn’t take a life? Then why the hell are we out here? Why should I go and kill a German?’
‘Because they’re wrong, Private. You kill them because they’re wrong down to the bone. What they’ve done by starting this war, conquering and killing innocents, what they’ve done to their own people and the peoples of other nations, no God, not mine or yours, could approve of. That’s why you’ll do everything you can to stop them and, yes, punish them. I swear I do not know if God wants it that way. But I do know your family back home does, and so does your country. They want these Germans beat.’
His voice had risen above a whisper. He stopped himself. The private mulled Ben’s words.
‘What do you want?’ Previtera asked him, confused.
‘I want them beat, too, Private. That’s why I’m here.’
Previtera paused again, then answered with a voice also no longer a whisper.
‘Let me tell you something, Chaplain. I’m no big thinker. I ain’t fighting for no apple pie and no flag. No offense, but I ain’t fighting for you or your Jews neither. And I don’t give a hoot about the Bible. I’m here ‘cause my country sent me here. I’m just gonna shoot that Kraut son of a bitch tomorrow morning ‘cause if I don’t, he’ll get me or one of my buddies. And I ain’t gonna worry about killing a whole world when I kill him, that guy out there ain’t related to anybody I know. Oh, and no offense, but if you were so frickin’ sure they were wrong, you’d be carrying a rifle and not just me, know what I mean? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m the one with the gun here and I got duty.’
Previtera arranged himself and his rifle away from Ben, toward the dark orchard. Ben said no more. He crawled out of the foxhole for the rear. He had no reservations about Previtera’s morale now. The private would fight all the way to Berlin if he lived to do it. Of all the reasons Ben heard and spoke tonight for fighting in the morning—scripture and even the claptrap he’d laid on about right and wrong—no soldier in any foxhole in France had better cause for slaying another man.
~ * ~
The morning loomed. Clouds knelt low, and battle neared. Ben Kahn watched the soldiers steel themselves.
Some checked and rechecked gear. They tugged on grenades to be certain each was securely attached, patted pockets for extra ammo clips, many sharpened bayonets and knives on whetstones, making an eerie susurration that harked back to massed broadswords and spears. Others smoked and fixed a thousand-yard stare at the cobwebs of dawn. Lips moved in prayer and secret deals. Some sergeants jacked up their squads, pounding shoulders and helmets, reminding them of lessons and assignments. One lieutenant ordered his platoon to turn their fatigue jackets inside out, because the innards of the coats were duller than the shiny, sailcloth outer shell, and made better camouflage. A captain rubbed mud over the stripe on the back of his helmet, hiding from Kraut snipers that he was an officer. He tucked his binoculars and map case inside his jacket, and told his men not to call him ‘sir’ after the battle began.
The replacements in the battalion looked to the grizzled veterans and wondered if they themselves would be so transformed. The veterans watched the officers, many of whom were new, shavetail lieutenants. The officers stayed aloof, readying themselves for the burden of life-and-death calls. No one looked to Ben. This was right. He did not carry a weapon. In the ticking before the assault, only the fight and the fighters mattered.
Ben walked along a high wall of hedge, past all three rifle companies of the 359th’s 3rd Battalion. Soldiers in the ditch lifted their chins. A few greeted him with ‘Chap’ and ‘Padre.’ Into every eye that met his, he tried to drip some iron and faith for the day ahead.
Ben joined the one hundred and ninety men of L Company. Their orders were to seize the five hundred yards of hedgerows and orchards east of Prétot, then advance into the town and move southwest in echelon with the rest of the battalion to assault Ste. Suzanne. Their assignment was one platoon, one field.
At 0600, the first mortar shells lobbed overhead from the heavy-weapons company set up to the rear. Ben headed for the ditch, careful not to leap or cower. He was not only a chaplain but an officer. The men of 1st Platoon closed around him.
A hundred yards away, the opening bombardment plastered the enemy hedgerows. Ben snuck a peek over the scrub and roots to watch the far hedge erupt in flame. For five minutes the mortars battered the Germans along a thousand-yard front. Leaning against the hedge, Ben felt the thumps on his chest.
The mortars quit. The morning smoked to silence. No tanks clanked up the dirt road, no Thunderbolts dove in support of the GIs. The bocage accepted only men.
‘Move out!’ The call came down the line. Ben stood from the ditch with the doughs.
‘Go get ‘em, boys.’ His hands stayed at his side. He did not clamber over the hedge into the orchard.
Captain Whitcomb, Lima Company CO, stamped past, urging the men, ‘Stay spread out! Don’t clump up. Fire and move!’
Seeing Ben, Whitcomb paused. The captain was in his mid-twenties. Ben marveled that he had once served under officers so young and had thought them old and wise, instead of boys with lives in their hands.
‘Rabbi.’
‘Captain.’
‘I’ve heard tell it’s gonna do me no good to ask you to stay back.’
Ben smiled.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Four privates you crawled out to see last night. Previtera said he couldn’t get rid of you ‘til he talked mean.’
‘Previtera is a fine young man.’
‘Does the Division Chaplain know you’re up here?’
‘General Billups does.’
‘Alright. Stay low, Rabbi. I don’t want my men worrying about you. They got other things to think about.’
‘I understand.’
Whitcomb hurried along the hedge. Like his brother officers, his map and binoculars were stowed, and the stripe on the rear of his helmet hidden under smirch. Ben said his first morning prayer, then stuck his head over the scrub to observe the attack, the first actual combat he’d seen since returning to France.
He watched two squads of 1st Platoon clamber over the mound and into the orchard. He gripped the roots of the hedge, uneasy. In the Great War, the Allies and Germans rarely engaged in sunlit, front-on assaults like this; they preferred to wallop each other from vast, fixed positions, trading murderous artillery and night raids. When those armies did find themselves out of their holes and face-to-face, the numbers were great and the bloodletting horrific. This skirmish in the bocage was on a more intimate scale than Ben’s war. Three dozen men launched themselves at an equal number of enemy. Each soldier was so much more naked in this fight, one of a few instead of many ten thousands.
Most of two squads were now in the orchard. The third held back in reserve. Hedgerows enclosed the field, except for each corner where the hedges parted for a narrow gate. The trunks of the apple trees provided scant cover. The soldiers bent low and walked under the first tier of branches.
A single Browning air-cooled machine gun opened up over the backs of the advancing doughs, firing blind into the far hedge to keep the Germans’ heads down. In the field, two soldiers dropped and took positions with their BARs; the rest of the men hugged the sides of the field and eased forward. In the first minute of their advance, nothing came from the Germans.
The first GI fell. The men in the orchard dove and scattered for ground cover, skinny trees, rotting apple baskets; many leaped into the hedges. The far mound burst with noise, brrrrp, brrrrp! Someone in the orchard shouted, ‘MGs!’ The buzz saw of bullets spraying from the shrubs and roots exceeded the single machine gun and pair of BARs the GIs brought to bear in return. The dug-in Germans had fire superiority from the opening moment. Ben heard the reports of enemy guns and saw the scrambling results in the orchard but caught no blink, no smoke from any Kraut barrel. The enemy used smokeless, flashless gunpowder! They were invisible. Ben bared his teeth at the puffs above every dough’s gun with every bullet they fired. He bit back a curse and wondered how Allied generals could have ignored this detail for fighting in the bocage. The Germans certainly knew.
In moments, 1st Platoon’s assault bogged down. Three soldiers were hit before they advanced twenty yards. Two lay still. A medic ran to the third and dragged him into the side hedge. The soldier yelped. Ben stiffened to climb over the hedge but a trill of stray bullets whipped into the roots near his chest and he fell back. Until the firestorm slackened, Ben could do nothing.
He watched the two squads slog and suffer forward, pouring every round they could into the hedge. They crawled, some ran to gobble up a few fast yards before diving to the ground again. Many did not get up, afraid; others were hit. Yelling, bellowed orders, screams, men’s voices in two languages filled the bowl of the field along with the smoke and roar of weapons. Ben could not leave his place, the combat was too fierce.
The squads paid a hard wage for the orchard. The fighting was man-on-man, it had to be this way. Looking at the hedges, Ben saw the terrible limitations of this battlefield. Tanks couldn’t operate in such close quarters, there was no way for them to get into the fields past the mounds; the millennia-old roots of the bocage would repel any effort to break through them. The Shermans would just climb over the top, exposing their thin belly plates to Panzerfausts. And close air support from P-47S was a no-go; tree cover was too thick and the distances between foe and friend too narrow. The doughs of the 90th had to take these fields with only the guts and guns they carried with them.
Thirty minutes passed before the platoon held half the field, leaving eight men down. Ben saw heroism and hesitance in full measure, sometimes in the same men. One soldier lunged flat as soon as he cleared the hedge and landed in the field, refusing to advance. Minutes later, when a buddy ahead took a round to the leg, this reluctant private surged from the ground, grabbed his pal by the coat, and hauled him under fire into the hedge, then lay protecting him with his own body until the medic arrived. Another scooped up a BAR from a wounded corporal, ran to the front of his squad to set up a firing position. He squeezed off a few rounds, then changed his mind and ran to the rear, until a sergeant blistered him with a tongue Ben heard above the clamor; the soldier sprinted again to the front, laying down fire while the squad groped forward. Ben gazed in awe. He did not see cowardice or disobedience or rotten morale in the 90th, he saw only boys afraid to die and kill, and that was as it should be, the sixth commandment.
But something else should not have been: how untrained the GIs were for fighting in this kind of terrain. In 1918, Ben had been only an infantryman, but frontline troops were always the first to spot poor strategy. His foot-soldier’s eye told him how grimly misfit the fire and movement tactics were in the tight green bocage of this new war.
For four years, Germany had occupied France unhindered. They’d had more than enough time to design their defenses not just on the Channel beaches but across the whole countryside. They knew every hedge and crossroads in Normandy. The Krauts must have practiced war games in these fields, dug in their .88s, and picked apples in these very orchards. German commanders had put a spate of automatic weapons in their units just for this purpose. Lanes of fire were calculated. Ben guessed they had routes of retreat laid out and covered by pre-sighted artillery.
The American plan of attack relied on fire superiority to suppress the enemy while the riflemen advanced. That went out the window in the first minute of an assault because the Germans had more firepower. The GIs were scared to shoot from cover because their gunpowder instantly betrayed their positions, while the Krauts fired away like ghosts in the brush. Because no one had figured how to get tanks involved in the hedges, the GIs were sentenced to a murderous walk across the fields. The opening mortar barrage had clearly done little to sweep the Krauts out of the far hedge. They likely had excellent bunkers and warrens hewn into the network of roots. Watching the doughs struggle forward, Ben grew resentful. Every soldier knew the math of poor preparation. Always, it created a deadly cycle in the ranks. When one of them went down, a replacement arrived days later. This robbed the unit of an experienced hand and plugged in one more raw kid to nursemaid and prod until he became a fighter or another hole to fill. The casualty rate swelled, and the cemeteries ate well. Ben snapped branches in his fists while the dogfaces of 1st Platoon crept up, outgunned and wrongly trained. Surely the Generals had to be scratching for answers. They’ve got to know what they’d set out for these soldiers to do. How can they call the Tough Ombres a problem division? What else could the 90th be, with this task and these tools? Ben loved every one of the boys for this, and he rose over the hedge.
‘Chaplain!’ Captain Whitcomb’s yell split the spanking sounds of gunfire. ‘Chaplain, get down, dammit!’
Ben landed and stumbled. From his fanny he gazed across the smoky field, surprised to be where he was inside the hedges. He’d made no plan before jumping in. He hurried to his feet and bent behind an apple tree.
‘Third squad! Commit! Let’s go!’ Whitcomb belted this order behind the hedge. Another twenty doughs cascaded down the roots. The machine gun at the corner barked to cover them. Ben’s elbow was swept by a bear of a sergeant who hauled him to the left edge of the field and crammed down on his shoulders, telling him to stay the hell put! The sergeant kneeled beside Ben, scanned the field, then lit out.
In the melee Ben spotted the medic. He sensed he would be needed most wherever this man went. He crept along the edge of the orchard, moving on instinct. The sounds and smells were familiar, gunpowder and bangs, throats in roar, then silence and a strange, great emptiness while the battle caught its breath and lone voices cried for help. Ben’s hands hung bare, they curled for a weapon. His legs remembered, they powered him through brambles and kneeled behind sparse cover while German gunners picked at the assault. The Krauts could not hold the GIs back now. The first rung of dogfaces had crawled and shot their way within grenade range of the far hedge. They pulled pins and tossed explosives over the mound, then fired at point-blank range through the tangled roots. Ben pulled his eyes from the last bits of the assault and, bent at the waist, jogged to the center of the field where the medic squatted beside a wounded dough.
Twenty yards from the medic, a bayonet had been plunged into the ground, Ben did not know what this meant. He ran on.
‘Chaplain, no!’
In mid-stride Ben was tackled and knocked over. He landed on his backpack, badly winded. Gasping, he saw Private Previtera unwrap his arms from around him.
‘That’s a mine. Chaplain. Watch where you’re goin’.’
Ben sputtered thanks.
Previtera gathered to his knees. ‘Bouncing Betty. You hit that sucker, you’re singin’ soprano in the Jew choir. Know what I mean?’
Previtera patted Ben on the shoulder and took off to find another purpose in the fight. In his first minutes in the field Ben had distracted two men from their job and probably caused Whitcomb to send in his reserves before he was ready. Ben resolved to be less careless, less proud that he was an old soldier. If he didn’t, he or someone else would wind up hurt, or dead.
Reaching the medic, he found a young soldier shot through the thigh. The medic had tied a tourniquet tight around the groin and sprinkled sulfa powder over the wet hole. Ben’s first-aid training told him the bullet had struck the femoral artery. The boy may lose the leg, if he did not bleed to death in the orchard. The soldier looked past the medic and saw Ben. He grabbed Ben’s jacket.
‘I want a priest! Get me a priest!’
Ben covered the private’s grip with his own. The copper tang of blood curled in Ben’s nose. There was no priest in this field. The 90th had thirteen chaplains, each one of them ministering to over twelve hundred soldiers. They could not be in every field, or aid station, in the hands of every reaching soldier of every faith, they could not be everywhere.
‘Son, hold on. You’re doing fine.’
The medic’s fingers fluttered around the wound, probing the severity and the bleeding. ‘That’s right,’ he echoed, ‘doin’ fine.’
The soldier’s head fell back in the trampled grass.
‘I gotta confess,’ he panted.