David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘No they’re not! The Americans are too close.’ The red armband pointed at White Dog. ‘What do you think?’

  White Dog’s ears picked up. Did these boys suspect something about him?

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘No.’ The Communist waved off White Dog’s concern. ‘No one cares. What do you think?’

  The barricade had gone quiet watching this squabble. White Dog drew himself up. Hugo and his boys might still be keeping their eye on him.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know where the Yanks are. But you’d better hope they come quick. He’s right,’ White Dog aimed a finger at the FFI, ‘you Reds should have left the truce in place. Now you’ve forced von Choltitz’s hand. He has to fight back. If he doesn’t, Hitler might get impatient and send in the Luftwaffe. Then Paris is really fucked. And who knows if all the bridges are really mined? Or the Eiffel Tower? It could all happen. It might not. I do know one thing, though.’

  The two antagonists cocked their heads. The rest waited.

  ‘I’m hungry. And I’m buying dinner for everybody.’

  White Dog recruited the two bickerers to shake hands and come with him. Folks on the barricade patted him on the back while he walked away. Several blocks off was his Montparnasse warehouse. White Dog opened it, put carts in the hands of the amazed fifi and the Communist and loaded them with meats, cheeses, breads, Gauloise cigarettes, wine, liquor, and cider. He emptied half his stores into the carts and into a hand-pulled wagon for himself. He tossed on bars of soap, tins of butter, bolts of cloth, boxes of socks, stockings for the girls on the barricade and the old women in the windows, chocolates, anything he could spare to curry favor and celebrate the Liberation. Loading the carts, White Dog exulted. The two boys with him stood laughing at his wealth and generosity.

  ‘You’re Chien Blanc,’ the Communist declared.

  ‘Friend to man,’ White Dog sang, closing the warehouse door.

  At the barricade, he sprayed the goods around, feeling like a Vanderbilt or a summer Santa. His name spread with the socks and nylons, the words Chien Blanc left mouths just before the meat and cheeses went in. He took a place at a café table where the people of the barricade and the neighborhood came to shake his hand. White Dog was a curio, a celebrity of the night who’d strolled into full light, to mingle and lend himself to the struggle.

  Like fucking Flynn, thought White Dog.

  Just before eight o’clock, with the sun resting on the roofs of Avenue d’Orleans, a pair of bicyclists in FFI brassards streamed up to the barricade. Their tires skidded when they braked.

  ‘Leclerc has crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz!’

  The people on the barricade were stunned. No one knew first whether to shout with joy or wait for the detonations, for if von Choltitz was going to blow up Paris, he would do it now, with de Gaulle’s tanks on the Right Bank.

  From a doorway, the mobster Hugo started the celebration. He raised a bottle and bellowed, ‘Vive la France!’

  Other voices swelled. Embraces and kisses swept the barricade. White Dog was lifted from his seat. In moments, out of the high windows above the barricade, old women shouted for the revelers in the street to hush. The power had come back on. The FFI radio station was broadcasting.

  An excited, electric voice floated in the dusk. Windows, like a chorus of mouths, announced the arrival of the French 2nd Armored across the Seine.

  No skeptics remained on the street or in the buildings. Every voice and hand lifted, some skirts, too. The Germans weren’t going to destroy Paris! The French army itself was the first liberating force!

  The radio voice was not drowned out, the old ones in their windows turned up the volume. The Resistance called for every priest in Paris to ring his church bells. Within moments, the radios were drowned in the peals in the dusk, from Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur to the little jingles from the handlebars of the bicyclists pedaling off.

  After dark, when the festiveness was drained from the barricade, White Dog slunk away, a little drunk on his own cognac. Kraut artillery boomed from the north. The shells landed west in the 15th arrondissement, aimed at the advancing French armored columns.

  Tomorrow, he thought, when the fight for the city is over, the Germans will be done here. Paris will become America’s problem. The floodgates will open.

  White Dog tossed his linen coat over his shoulder and headed into Montparnasse.

  Near one of his flats, he passed a girl carrying a lantern with the wick low. She was alone in the alley, dressed fine and made up. In the little yellow light she seemed fantastic, sent to him. He kissed her and patted her rump. Handing her a cigarette, he boasted in English, ‘I was on the barricades today.’

  ~ * ~

  D+80

  August 25

  ‘Gentlemen, good morning. Take a seat.’

  Major Clay doffed his helmet and waited for the three hundred drivers and maintenance men under the mess tent to settle. From the middle of the crowd, Joe Amos saw the Major’s hair glisten, gooped in place. McGee dropped the last of his cigarette and ground it under his boot.

  The boy muttered, ‘What they want from us now?’

  The company took seats on the benches and tables. Major Clay pursed his lips watching his coloreds mill too slowly into place. Joe Amos chuckled at the drivers showing their disdain for taking an order, even one as simple as ‘Sit down.’ These boys had driven twenty hours a day, sometimes two and three days with no break at all. They’d been on their own except for the guy in the cab with them and the bumpers close in front and behind. They’d seen as many French sunups as sundowns. They’d taken their loads right up to the front lines and hauled back prisoners, wounded, and bodies. Their Jimmies sported bullet holes and spiderweb windshields. Major Clay was their CO, but the moment they shifted into gear, each one of them answered only to the convoy and the road.

  Major Clay stepped up on a table. He screwed his helmet back on his slick head.

  ‘Shut up, goddammit!’

  The room hushed.

  ‘Gentlemen, I have news. This morning, Paris was liberated.’

  No one in the tent knew whether or not they should cheer. Major Clay had said shut up. Men fidgeted, nodded, and whispered.

  The officer continued. ‘I heard an interesting report this morning, that General von Choltitz was holed up in the Hôtel Meurice and wouldn’t come out. A French soldier went inside and asked him why he was laying back. The good General said he could not surrender without some combat, so the Führer would get told at least that he’d been under attack. The Frogs obligingly tossed three purple smoke grenades through a window, and the Krauts came out pleased as punch. Boys, you gotta love this war.’

  The drivers and mechanics all laughed with Major Clay. The man had the Southerner’s front-porch storytelling gift.

  ‘Anyway,’ the Major said, hoisting a hand for quiet, ‘everything was fucked up before. Now it’s a whole new ball game of fucked up. Here’s the situation.’

  The war had gotten out of whack, the Major said, at least according to the way the battle planners had figured it would unfold. Allied forces were not supposed to cross the Seine and reach the German border until May of 1945. They were now just days away from this goal. Paris was not supposed to be liberated until mid-September; instead it fell this morning. The unexpected and massive victory in the Argentan-Falaise pocket had apparently convinced the Krauts to fold up their tents in France and head back home, to hightail it across the border and man their Siegfried Line defenses. The upshot of all this was that Ike had told Monty, Patton, and Bradley to chase the Krauts east across the Seine, to try and destroy the enemy’s armies in France before they could reach Germany and dig in to their prepared defenses there.

  ‘The Germans were not supposed to cut and run like they have,’ Major Clay told them. ‘No one saw this coming. So, right now, instead of supporting twelve divisions approaching the Seine a few months from now, like the pre-invasion plan called for, COM Z is su
pplying sixteen divisions that are crossing the Seine as we speak. One week from today, those divisions will be another two hundred miles even farther east. And you boys know, every mile them doughs go toward Germany is another two miles we have to drive, out and back. Our supply lines are being stretched pretty thin, and pretty damn far.’

  The men groaned. ‘Amen,’ someone said.

  Clay kept up the bad news.

  In addition, he explained, instead of supplying a Third Army that was supposed to be just a supporting force while Monty made the main thrust in the north, Patton’s recent successes to the south had convinced Ike to bulk up Third Army to almost twice its planned size. That meant twice its supply needs.

  Major Clay waved a hand east.

  ‘And you all know George is not gonna slow down. Every day he gets farther and farther away from the plan, which I think we know by now has been thrown pretty far out the damn window.’

  All told, there were twenty American divisions operating in the ETO. Each division required five hundred tons a day. Another ten divisions waited in England or back in the States to join the fight.

  Major Clay looked over the company. He shook his head.

  ‘If this was all we had to deal with, it’d be tough enough. But today, the deal got worse, because starting today we have got to add in ...’

  Most of the men in the tent said the name along with the Major.

  ‘... Paris!’

  The drivers’ mood changed instantly. A bunch whooped, shouting, ‘Yeah, baby!’

  Calling over them, Major Clay made it clear they were missing his point.

  ‘Perhaps, gentlemen. I’m eager to see the place myself. But now that we got Paris to take care of, you can throw in another four thousand tons a day. Every goddam day. And we got to take it to them, along with everything else we haul.’

  Major Clay let the men react. They whistled their amazement and chattered their excitement. Joe Amos looked across the colored faces in the tent. Every driver picked up his loads and drove his routes, steady as a drumbeat. Every mechanic kept his head under a hood or a chassis. Not one of them knew much more than the job at hand and how tired doing it made him. But ever since he first drove through the water and up onto OMAHA beach two and a half months ago, Joe Amos had tried hard to keep an eye on the big picture, assembling how the war was faring from bits and pieces, from where he went and who he delivered what to. He kept a French map in his head, and did his best to keep track of the infantry’s progress over it. But he had no idea things had gotten this big, this fast. Just one month ago was the big breakout from Normandy, that everybody now called Operation COBRA. Thirty days later and look at us, he thought. Already knocking, on Germany’s door. We’re feeding Paris. Hot damn.

  His thoughts flashed to Geneviève and the Marquis. He wanted to celebrate with them, take them all the news. Where would he get the time to see them? He’d have to be clever. So far, that hadn’t been a problem.

  Geneviève and Paris. Joe Amos’s heart thumped at the prospect. With Paris open, and another four thousand tons heading to the city, there were bound to be opportunities galore. He’d find one, the right one, then he’d make his move.

  ‘Alright,’ the Major called the men down, ‘I’m not done up here. Settle.’

  The drivers and grease monkeys latched their attention back on Major Clay.

  ‘Boys, in case you didn’t already suspect this, you and your trucks are pretty much the only game in town. The French railways west of the Seine have been bombed by us and blown by the Resistance to the point where they’re no damn good. Cherbourg is barely bringing in a trickle, and the rest of the major French ports in Brittany are either wrecked or still in the Krauts’ hands. Some numbskull in Washington figured he’d rather have more bombers than cargo planes, so air freight ain’t taking up much of the slack, either. As of today, eighty percent of the supplies for the entire American force is still arriving over the beaches. All that adds up to one thing: for now, it’s you and me and a shitload of Jimmies.’

  Joe Amos didn’t know why, he didn’t see it coming, but he let out a yell. No one else in the hundreds around him made a sound, his cheer died fast under the warm canvas. He found himself on his feet, McGee gazing confounded at him.

  Someone in the rear of the tent said, ‘Yeah.’

  Another picked this up. A murmur sputtered, then caught. Someone clapped. In moments, the entire company applauded Major Clay’s words, shouting for themselves and their mission, that they, tired and dirty and surely unappreciated, mattered so much.

  Major Clay held up his hands a long time before the thunderous clamor dispelled. The men punched shoulders and slapped palms, they rose from the tables and benches to be on their feet. Joe Amos even got dour McGee to root.

  ‘The job ahead,’ Major Clay called, almost preacher-like now, buoyed in their spirit, ‘looks impossible, don’t it?’

  The men laughed at this.

  ‘Back in the Civil War, General Forrest once said the way to win a battle was to get there the fastest with the mostest. Eighty years later that ain’t changed. So pay attention, boys. I’m about to tell you how we’re gonna do the impossible.’

  ~ * ~

  The Red Ball Express began with the call, ‘Wind ‘em up!’

  Joe Amos turned the key and gave the gas a rev. Beat-up mufflers beneath three thousand Jimmies growled north at OMAHA, down in St. Lô, and across the bivouac where Joe Amos let out the clutch. A dozen green columns moved together, roaring like a rapid river. Joe Amos shot McGee a grin and rolled out of the field, bumper to bumper.

  Twenty minutes later, on the beach, the company took on its first Red Ball load—sixty trucks of clothing, sixty-five for rations. While the Jimmies waited on the sand for the cranes and COM Z crews to shift the tonnage to their beds, each driver painted a red-ball emblem on his front bumper. This was to let the MPs know who was on the Red Ball and who was not.

  Joe Amos bought five more cartons of Lucky Strikes from Speedy Clapp, thinking this was small potatoes. So much materiel was arriving over OMAHA that Speedy had dispensed with even the pretense of a clipboard and paperwork. He just played traffic cop on the sand.

  When his company was loaded and in line, Joe Amos climbed behind the wheel. Jumping into the cab, McGee looked excited. Joe Amos was glad to see the boy animated, the first time in weeks. McGee had been a pain in the ass and had not bothered to explain why. Joe Amos was left to guess, and hadn’t put much effort into it except to figure McGee Mays was one of those boys who just did not like the Army.

  ‘Sarge,’ McGee said, ‘I can drive.’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘But I’m gon’ get to drive later.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Major Clay said the Red Ball was gonna be historic. I’d like to drive the first leg, you know, on the first day. You don’ mind.’

  Joe Amos took his hands from the wheel. Let the boy have his history, he thought. The Army’s not going to give him much else.

  McGee guided the loaded Jimmy off the beach. He drove in the middle of the convoy streaming through the draw. Once on the main road, the column built speed and stretched out. Joe Amos could not see Lieutenant Garner’s jeep at the head nor could he spot the tail of the convoy, it was so many miles long.

  The trucks headed south, to St. Lô, the start of the Red Ball route. The road from OMAHA passed through Couvains. Joe Amos put his elbow in the window and waited.

  The column was loud and seemed endless. Joe Amos cast his thoughts ahead: Hear us coming! Passing through Couvains, to his astonishment, she was there, beside the road. This was fantastic! He heard other trucks honking at her when they passed. Joe Amos stuck his head and shoulders out the window, spreading his arms into the wind. He tossed her a carton of Lucky Strikes, landing them in the ditch. Geneviève recognized him only after he was beyond her, shouting and waving like mad. She threw him a kiss, then scrambled in the ditch for the cigarettes. Trucks behind honked at her, too. He watch
ed until she was out of sight, only seconds. The convoy was moving fast.

  ‘Paris,’ Joe Amos said. ‘I’m gonna take her to Paris.’ McGee said nothing, which was right because no one else was involved. She was his alone.

  At St. Lô, the column slowed. The town was in such ruin that the trucks had to detour several times. The engineers had plowed only a narrow path through the rubble. Joe Amos stared at the hills of bricks and timbers shoved to the the side, all of it knocked down by American shells and bombs. McGee shook his head at the destruction, even no though this was the umpteenth time they’d driven through here. This time, tiptoeing through the St. Lô wreckage, Joe Amos felt different. Now they were part of something huge, the Red Ball, like red blood flowing through here, strength returning to all this.