David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  Joe Amos thought of the Marquis and his wine cellar. How large must the Krauts’ cellars have been to supply thirty thousand men?

  Garner lowered his voice. ‘Von Schlieben had no problem smashing the whole damn harbor so we couldn’t use it. But when it came to spilling good booze, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So.’ Garner rattled the smokes again for effect, coming to his point. ‘Major Clay would like you to do him a little favor while you’re up in Cherbourg. He wants you to trade these for as much of that booty as you can get your hands on. He says you can keep two packs of the Chesterfields for yourself. What do you say, Sergeant?’

  ‘Sounds fine.’

  ‘ ‘Course, if anyone asks, you’re just working for yourself. The Major don’t know nothin’ about this. You understand?’

  ‘Where’d I get those, just in case?’

  ‘Same place I got ‘em. From Mr. Nobody.’

  Joe Amos took the cartons. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Good. Go get another couple hours of shut-eye.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’

  The officer turned impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t mind doin’ this. But I got something I’d like to ask you back. Between you and me.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Every chance you get to send me down to St. Lô, I want it.’

  Garner seemed tempted to ask why. But this was a man who’d just handed Joe Amos three cartons of smokes, far more than any single soldier, even a Major, should legally possess. An agreement struck itself between the two with Garner’s quiet, simple nod.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Wind ‘em up!’

  Joe Amos, lead driver and sergeant on this morning’s route, hollered, walking down the line of Jimmies. He spun his arm in a big arc like a propeller. McGee Mays grinned proudly when Joe Amos climbed behind Lucky’s wheel.

  Joe Amos led the ten trucks out of the bivouac. Muddy ruts in the grassy field cut by a thousand tires had dried, and Lucky kicked dust. The muffler had sprouted a hole; the Jimmy sounded powerful in low gear. The day promised to be steamy and clear. McGee seemed raring to go. His breath smelled of coffee. At the main road, Joe Amos was waved onto the tarmac by an MP and quickly set the pace for his little convoy.

  ‘McGee, look in my pack.’

  The boy finished rolling up his sleeves over sleek black forearms. Joe Amos noted again the muscle and color of this Florida Negro. There was nothing ambiguous about McGee, not in his heart or his skin.

  ‘I be dogged.’ McGee whistled, gazing into the mouth of Joe Amos’s backpack. ‘Where you get these?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Open a carton.’

  McGee did not pursue the question. He tore the side out of one long box and handed Joe Amos a pack of Chesterfields. Joe Amos tucked the flimsy pack in his shirt.

  ‘Take one for yourself and stick the rest in the glove compartment.’

  McGee did what he was told and set away the backpack with the two remaining cartons. Joe Amos reached for the pack McGee held on to. He tore open the foil top with his teeth, spit a shred out the window, and stuck a fag on his lips. He flipped his lighter and dragged in the smoke. He returned the pack to McGee.

  ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’

  ‘Never had no money for it. I always liked liquor better.’

  Joe Amos tossed his lighter and Chesterfields into McGee’s lap.

  ‘Give it a try.’

  In a minute, McGee was doubled over hacking. Between puffs, he looked to Joe Amos, who smoked stylishly without touching the cigarette with his fingers, he just stuck it to his lips and worked the tobacco, with his hands busy on the wheel. McGee labored through the Chesterfield with eyes watering from the coughs. Joe Amos held out his hand.

  ‘Alright, alright, give ‘em back. You’re gonna kill yourself.’

  McGee held on to the cigarettes and lighter. ‘No, I’ll get it, Sarge. Leave me to it.’

  At UTAH, the company of Airborne waited. Two hundred scrubbed soldiers milled in the sand with their trouser legs tucked into jump boots, even though they’d come across the Channel on a cruiser. Joe Amos pulled up across the broad beach. Behind him, the other trucks formed a fine straight line. Joe Amos was glad to see the discipline in his convoy, a good first impression for these green white boys.

  UTAH was not strewn with wreckage the way OMAHA had been after the storm. And the invasion here had been less difficult, not defended as heavily by the Krauts. The dunes were flatter, access off the beach was not so limited as it was at OMAHA, with its four bunkered draws. Splashing through the skim of early-morning surf, a local in a beret trotted his sulky behind a beautiful chestnut horse. McGee grinned big at this sight. His fourth cigarette was snugged between fingers that pointed out his window at the clopping horse, the snap of a buggy whip, and the hiss of sliding waves.

  ‘Mornin’, y’all,’ he called out his good mood to the Airborne. ‘Ya’ll see that buggy? That’s somethin’.’

  Joe Amos did not hear the reply from the men climbing into his truck bed. McGee pulled back, his face stung and slack.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ McGee said. ‘Let’s just drive ‘em.’

  ‘What? Somebody say somethin’ to you?’

  ‘Leave it, Sarge.’

  Twenty soldiers clomped into Lucky’s bed, twenty into each Jimmy in line. Their jump boots made more clatter than regular Joes did. These Airborne troops were weighted with equipment and grenades, every one of them wore at least three knives and two cartridge belts, trenching tool, blanket roll, rifle, and pistol. They looked part soldier, part tractor. Every face bore a scowl, a tough-guy mien, though not a one of them had seen the first minute of combat. McGee had seen more, even from ditch. Joe Amos had shot down a Jabo; these Caspers were standing now on the bullet holes a black man had won. McGee had just been trying to welcome them to France. Joe Amos ground his teeth.

  ‘Gimme the cigarette.’

  McGee handed it over. An Airborne captain came to his driver’s side and spoke up.

  ‘Cherbourg, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Joe Amos did not say Sir and he did not pull the cigarette from his mouth.

  The captain glared up. Joe Amos bore down.

  The captain said, ‘That’s right, sir.’

  Joe Amos took his elbow from the sill. He tossed the cigarette into the sand.

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  The captain gave Joe Amos another moment to say more. Joe Amos did not. The officer seemed to consider this all the victory he had time for this morning over this uppity colored driver.

  ‘Alright, then. Move out.’

  The captain leaped last onto Lucky’s back. The canvas shells on all ten Jimmies were down. Joe Amos saw the company mounted in his rearview and gave the gas and clutch their nudges. The muffler grumbled and the Jimmy rolled easy. Men weighed nothing next to Lucky’s normal tonnage.

  Joe Amos led the convoy off the beach. He simmered alongside McGee, both sat quiet while the sand gave way to pavement.

  Out on the road, Joe Amos’s ten Jimmies got in line behind another column headed north from UTAH. Far back, more trucks closed the gap.

  ‘Road’s crowded this mornin’,’ McGee said.

  Joe Amos didn’t answer. The road to Cherbourg was always crowded, every road in the American lodgment was being choked and worn out. Since June 6, more than a million and a quarter Allied soldiers had been ferried from England, and more than 600,000 tons of supplies, enough to load up a freight train two hundred miles long. All this had been bottled for five weeks behind a front only forty miles long, chewing up men and materiel and the trucks to deliver them and the roads, too, just to gain a few hundred yards a day, especially down around St. Lô and south of Ste. Mère-Église.

  Distracted, Joe Amos came up too close behind the rear of the last Jimmy of the convoy ahead. The truck hauled ration crates. He didn’t see a pothole and clipped it.

  The truc
k clouted on its suspension and shimmied, a spring was probably shot. Someone in the Airborne smacked a fist on the canvas roof, the cloth plugs in the bullet holes bowed in.

  ‘Dammit, boy! Watch it!’

  Joe Amos looked in his side mirror. Arms and faces lined the slat sides of the bed. The soldiers arrayed their heads into the wind like riding dogs, mean, junkyard Danville dogs, Joe Amos thought. He’d been chased by a few of them before. He wasn’t a sergeant then. I ain’t being chased anymore, he thought. My men ain’t, either. Not McGee, not any of them in my convoy.

  Joe Amos laid back from the bumper in front and waited.

  The morning brightened. Without the military traffic roaring everywhere on conked-out mufflers, without the knocked-down fences and char places in the earth, the air felt clean, blue, and sandy. Joe Amos ignored it the way a man in a sour mood dispatches a playful child from his presence. He had something in mind. McGee sensed it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothin’. Just watch.’

  The column passed through Ste. Mère-Église and slowed, so much administration of the American force in Normandy flowed out of here. Northwest of town stood the village of Le Val. Some of the bombs that fell on Ste. Mère-Église the night before D-Day had landed wide and tore up the little burg and the road that ran through it. COM Z engineers were still working on repairs. Traffic had been routed through the fields over a bulldozed dirt track, rejoining the main road a mile later at Edmondeville.

  Joe Amos crossed his fingers that the trucks in front of him would not turn off at Ste. Mère-Église. They did not. He nodded and closed the gap again to the bumper.

  He told McGee, ‘Roll your window up.’

  The last Jimmy of the convoy in front was put there for a reason. Its muffler was shot. The thing spewed exhaust in smelly gouts. An oily cloud backfired on gear shifts. The engine block was surely on its last go-round, oil was mixing with the cooling water. Joe Amos held a fist out his window. He opened and closed it several times, until he saw the driver behind him, Baskerville from Philadelphia, do the same for the truck behind him. The gesture was repeated truck to truck through the ten Jimmies. Joe Amos had given the signal to close ranks tight. Now he rolled up his window. Baskerville did, too.

  Joe Amos moved ten feet behind the spitting exhaust pipe. Instantly the stink of oil smoke thickened the air in the cab. In a minute, his eyes began to sting. Over the muffler prattle, he heard coughs from the Airborne. Someone thumped the canvas roof.

  ‘Back off, goddammit! Hey, boy, back off that truck!’

  McGee, breathing through his shirtsleeve, showed Joe Amos a smile with his eyes.

  ‘Sarge, you bad.’

  A great painted arrow outside Le Val turned the convoy off the road into the fields. The ground here was clay, red banks of hard earth plowed level by Army ‘dozers. The Jimmies, each one twenty-six thousand pounds with load, rolling on ten tires slick or treaded, peeled over the dried rain ruts and powdered the ground like brown flour. Billows of dust boiled high and thick. Joe Amos stayed on the tail of the failing Jimmy, close inside its gray trail of exhaust. Behind him, vague in his rearview through the dust, Baskerville hugged Joe Amos’s bumper, and the whole convoy did likewise. Apparently, the Airborne fellows had made themselves unpopular in every one of Joe Amos’s trucks this morning.

  Joe Amos endured poundings and curses on his roof, knocks on his window, for five minutes until the clay road ran past Edmondeville and rejoined the tarmac. Then he backed off the exhaust pipe of the leading truck and rolled down his window. His windshield and hot hood wore a jacket of dusky red dust. Joe Amos held out a fist, the signal to the column to stay in echelon, with the standard sixty yards between bumpers. Baskerville laid off. Windows went down. The convoy shed dust in the wind like comet tails. From the truck bed, more coughs and curses burbled from the Airborne.

  ‘We gon’ get in trouble?’ McGee asked.

  ‘Naw.’

  Joe Amos did a mental run-through of the jawboning he was going to get from the Airborne captain once they stopped in Cherbourg. He’d take it with a stoic face, as hard a face as any of these white boys who’d just seen their first trouble in France, which was dust and black men who wouldn’t take shit off them. The captain would probably threaten to report Joe Amos to his battalion CO, Major Clay. Joe Amos had three cartons of black market cigarettes given him for trade by Major Clay.

  ‘Naw,’ Joe Amos said again. He punched McGee in the shoulder.

  The air in his window was fresh again, playful and blue clean. Joe Amos took it in and thought that a cigarette was no way to breathe this French air. He might quit, he decided, even as McGee shook out another spike for himself and asked for Joe Amos’s lighter.

  ~ * ~

  Cherbourg was as wrecked as anything seen in the war zone. For two weeks, VII Corps had sat outside the port city pummeling the holed-up Kraut garrison with artillery. Then the bombers hit, giving rise to a new phrase in warfare, ‘saturation bombing.’ The Germans sat under an incredible number of American bombs, each blast adding to the wreckage of the city. Driving through the streets, Joe Amos followed a winding path, pointed by MPs from detour to detour because of the destruction. Above the chuffing of Lucky’s muffler, the Airborne soldiers whistled at their initial look at ruined France.

  After a half hour straining in first and second gears, lurching through narrow ways between brick piles and dodging craters, Joe Amos spotted COM Z Headquarters. HQ was in a large brownstone facing a statue of Bonaparte on a horse. Beyond that sprawled the ruined harbor.

  He eased the truck to a stop. The bad spring made the Jimmy rock like a boat on choppy water. He waited with his elbow in the windowsill.

  The Airborne captain walked alongside. The man was red-clay grimy. A raccoon mask of white skin showed around mirthless eyes where he’d put on his jump goggles. Now he looked like a combat soldier.

  Joe Amos handed him two fresh packs of cigarettes.

  ‘Go get ‘em.’

  The captain did not react.

  ‘Sir.’

  The officer measured the smokes against giving this uppity colored a tongue-lashing. Then he took the Chesterfields and pocketed them, glaring at Joe Amos the whole time. Finally, he turned to yell for his troops to fall in. Joe Amos watched the Airborne soldiers jump down, filthy, patting dust off themselves like putting out fires in their clothes. McGee watched, too, then smiled admiringly at Joe Amos when the captain and his boys walked away without giving them trouble.

  Once the Jimmies were emptied, Joe Amos led the column past the verdigris Napoleon into the sparking harbor. Everywhere, in the air and on the quays, engineers touched welding rods to metal bars and beams, cranes hoisted new trusses in place, twisted wreckage was raised dripping from the water. Acetylene lights twinkled deep in the rust jungles and tangles, and the shouts of men, the clangs of hammers and riveters, made that special echo of metal, what every American knew was an American sound. Hot yellow stars tumbled from a hundred feet in the air, bounced, then disappeared. Every tool these men used, every sound they made except their voices, had come off the back of some truck. Lucky and the rest of the jimmies and tankers and flatbeds and the black drivers inside them were here in the flashes and hammer shots, just like they were in the sounds of battle out in the bocage and fields, Joe Amos drove slowly into the port, leading ten trucks, feeling a pride he could never describe to Boogie, feeling that he with his .50 caliber behind him, his bullet-holed Lucky around him, and his little convoy following him were a parade for the men pounding Cherbourg back into shape. You guys get this port up and running, he said silently to the men putting the harbor back together, and ‘til you do, we’ll keep the supplies flowing off the beaches. We got you covered.

  Deep in the harbor, Joe Amos stopped on a broad quay. Beneath the water, with hawsers still tied to gigantic steel cleats, lay a titanic cargo ship scuttled by the Krauts and resting on the mud bottom. The ship’s rails were level with the platform when they s
hould have been twenty feet in the air. Men crawled all over the boat like ants, chopping and slicing with flaring torches and metal saws howling. They whittled the great ship into shards that were lifted by a crane onto the back of a scow. The sight was tragic and remarkable. Joe Amos gazed up at a huge piece of deck floating almost gingerly at the end of the crane’s cable. He watched it swing out over the water, then crash onto the solid back of the scow, the rusty old grave digger attending the dead ship. All that metal would be floated back to England, then America. It would return to France as rifles, cannons, and Liberty ships. McGee thrust his head and arms out his window, astounded at the scale of the operation to clear just this one berth in Cherbourg when there seemed to be another hundred to clear, too.