David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  The column hit its stride outside town, stoking south to Tessy-sur-Vire, then to Mortain. The road ran wide, Joe Amos guessed maybe twenty-five feet, and solid. These were the French roads he’d read about in college, roads that dated back to Napoleon, built on granite. Three years of bombs and one month of fighting had barely scarred their surface.

  The Norman countryside, always green and rolling, scissored by hedges, glowed its brightest today. Joe Amos had never traveled so fast in so huge a convoy; the roads before had always been choked with traffic going both directions, from vehicles merging out of side roads, snarling at intersections. The Red Ball was designed for speed. It was a one-way loop, utterly dedicated to military transport. Every few miles, MPs in jeeps sat beside the road, watching the columns fly past. Their job was to make sure that nothing slowed the Jimmies. No civilian cars or farm tractors, no cattle, sheep, or geese, no horse-drawn carts, no tanks or TDs, nothing that couldn’t keep up was allowed on the Red Ball to hold the flow back. At every major crossing, a tall white sign was nailed to a post, painted with a big red ball and an arrow to show the way. McGee pounded the gas pedal, the pitted muffler snarled through the next town, Mayenne. Over this single-purpose highway on the backs of the great American fleet rode millions of gallons of POL, mounds of rations and ammo, whole divisions of troops, forests of phone poles, cable, boots, medicine, everything to fight a war, and nothing was going to slow it down.

  McGee did not give up the wheel, staying in the driver’s seat after the first way station at Marmers one hundred twenty miles southeast from St. Lô. The men jumped down for a piss and coffee, rations were handed out but the drivers were obliged to tuck into them back on the road. As soon as Joe Amos’s company left the bivouac, another column sped in.

  The Red Ball route rolled east another sixty miles, through Nogent-le-Rotrou, then to Chartres, the terminus. This was the first time Joe Amos had seen Chartres. The twin spires of the great medieval cathedral became visible from a long way off. It was nice to have those great arms hailing the convoy from a distance, waving them in.

  The ASP at Chartres swarmed with activity that rivaled OMAHA. Materiel arrived at a fevered pitch. The off-loading was furious and haphazard, supplies got dumped into piles to be sorted out later. The object was to get the Red Ball Jimmies cleared and moving again. A signpost showed the distance to Paris, just sixty miles; to Berlin, six hundred and sixty.

  For the return trip to St. Lô, Joe Amos took the wheel. After gassing up, the return leg of the loop ran through Alençon at the halfway mark, and another bivouac area. This time Lieutenant Garner didn’t let the company slow for coffee or a leak, they poured through and powered all the way to St. Lô and OMAHA.

  The entire three-hundred-and-ten-mile round-trip took just under nine hours. The summer sun rested on the black bunkers of the bluffs when Joe Amos lowered himself from the cab. He sat in the sand, resting his back against a hot tire. He lit a smoke and tossed the pack to McGee. Both were too tired to say anything. Joe Amos had not sold one cigarette all day, where was the time?

  Garner walked bandy-legged through the lines of steaming Jimmies. A dozen radiators had cooked off and their tired drivers tended to them. Garner toured the four platoons of the company, taking stock. He glanced down at Joe Amos and slowed to accept a smoke, then moved on. Joe Amos closed his eyes to the noises of trucks arriving and departing, and the grinding of landing craft ramming the sand, both never ceasing.

  Thirty minutes later, with the day pinching shut, Garner returned to the front of the company, carrying orders. He stopped for another cigarette.

  The lieutenant stepped back from Joe Amos’s lighter and blew a billow. He looked up from the walls of trucks on all sides, to the evening’s first stars. Joe Amos started to get up.

  Garner shouted into the dusk, ‘Wind ‘em up!’

  ~ * ~

  D+81

  August 26

  Ben got drunk.

  He did it quietly, over the course of the afternoon. The townsfolk of Donnemarie never left an empty bottle at his table or in his hand. At midday, the radio reported de Gaulle’s walk in Paris—forty miles to the northwest -from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame. A million Frenchmen hailed him along the way. De Gaulle walked in Donnemarie, too, across the radios playing everywhere in the town. The General’s stroll set off a celebration here, for the people’s freedom and for the Americans who’d delivered it to them.

  Ben took a seat at an outdoor bistro table in the warm blue day. He was alone. Sam had given him up, and Ben had given up the jeep. He walked again with the Tough Ombres, or rode with them in the backs of trucks. He hadn’t been in the bistro chair for more than a minute before a bottle was plopped on the table by a local, someone else gave him a glass, a girl kissed him on the cheek, and Ben began to drink.

  Townsfolk ran around the streets. Ben could figure no reason for this other than to exercise the simple liberty of running and shouting. Even the old hobblers with canes did their best to move somewhere fast. Ben’s own liberty was to sit still and pour himself pink bubbles or scarlet wine or the velvet of cognac, whatever he felt like next. An impromptu parade took place. People lined the avenue. Around a corner came the hubbub of an approach, a pack of screeches and jeers. Down the cobblestones of the main street shuffled three women in nightgowns. They had been shorn of their hair down to patchy stubble. The people of Donnemarie booed them and threw things or shook champagne bottles to spray them. Behind these three were a gaggle of older women, driving them on with sharp fingers and tongues. When the collaborators were past, laughter returned easily in their wake. Their misery was nothing but a bobbing cork on the gaiety.

  Through the late afternoon and four bottles, no one joined Ben at his table until a priest sat. The old man wore a long black frock and a collar.

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Please,’ Ben said.

  ‘Merci.’

  ‘I do not have a glass for you, Father.’

  The priest shrugged. He grabbed the champagne bottle by the neck and took a long plug from it. He set it on the metal table with a clank; again, Ben thought, such freedom.

  ‘You are a rabbi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have sat here for hours. Why you do not join?’

  ‘I’m fine, Father. Merci.’

  The priest raised a hand and shouted something to a running boy. The lad stopped in his tracks, then disappeared into a doorway. Moments later, he returned with a bottle of Camus VSOP and two glasses. The priest patted the boy’s head and sent him off.

  ‘A toast?’ The priest poured the glasses. Ben took one, the glass was stemmed and more fragile than the cup he’d been drinking out of. He lifted it to the priest.

  ‘La libération,’ the priest said.

  They clinked the lips of their glasses. Ben had to focus to make sure he met the priest’s glass with his own.

  They drank. Out of the village square came the first sounds of music, from a trumpet, a drum, and an accordion. The people of Donnemarie perked at the strains and headed that way. The priest kept his seat.

  ‘Rabbi.’

  ‘Yes, Father?’

  ‘May I tell you? We have lost Jews. They were taken.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We do not know what has happened to them. We fear. We hope.’

  Ben said nothing.

  The priest poured two more cognacs. They touched glasses in silence.

  Setting down his glass, the priest said, ‘I have tried to pray, oui? For them. But I am not certain I have God’s ear for this. You understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you come with me? To my church to pray?’

  Ben drained his cognac.

  He stood with the priest, the first time on his feet in hours. The alcohol hit him in his first strides. The priest took his arm and the two walked through the crowds like comrades. The old man talked of the town, how he was born here. Close into Ben’s ear he told a joke, about the man who ca
me to confession for having sex with two beautiful sisters. When the priest did not recognize the man’s voice, he asked if he was a member of the parish. The man said no, he was Jewish. The priest asked, ‘Why are you telling me?’ The man replied, ‘I’m telling everyone.’ Ben had a laugh, appreciating how the priest made the man in the joke Jewish, he could have been anything else. Ben asked the priest to let him take a pee, which he did against a wall with children running behind him.

  The church filled an entire block. The priest, linked again to Ben’s arm, walked them past a monument for the town’s dead from the first war. Ben patted the obelisk above the granite names, thinking he might have fought beside some of these boys.

  The arch above the doorway to the church was sooty, as though there had been a fire. Inside, the church was immaculate and coolly lit. None of the windows were stained glass, but regular panes painted over.

  ‘The windows, they are in a bank vault,’ the priest said, walking Ben to the altar. ‘Now we will return them. They are beautiful and very old.’

  Stone steps led to an altar draped in burgundy, topped with silver challises, candlesticks, and a tall cross. Above, a shining wooden Jesus looked to heaven through a crown of thorns. A polished mahogany rail enclosed the altar. Ben thought of a Greek word he’d learned in seminary, éntheos, the feeling of possession by the Divine. The hands that carved this Jesus, that hid the stained-glass windows from the war, they had éntheos. The priest kissed a white satin stole and laid it around his shoulders. This priest had éntheos, too.

  The priest kneeled on the steps before the altar. He did not invite Ben to join him, leaving the rabbi to say his prayers on the other side of the railing as he saw fit. Ben had never kneeled to God. That was not something asked of Jews. He wanted to sit, the alcohol in him made him unsteady. He looked back at the first row of pews but wanted to be close to the priest. Ben walked to the steps and bent to his knees beside the old man’s shoulder.

  The old priest moved his lips to a whispered prayer. Ben had not prayed in weeks, not since Sèves Island. Here, on his knees in an ancient church, he felt at last that he could pray. He was not burdened anymore, not with Sam, Phineas, or even Thomas, not with hope or the Divine. The words felt liberated in his throat. Kaddish was to be said only with a minyan of at least ten, but he figured six million souls made a minyan, too. The Hebrew words came with ease. He did not think to whisper them beside the priest but sang:

  ‘Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo, b’olmo dee’vro cbir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say, b’chayaychon uv’yomay’chon uv’chayay d’chol bais Yisroel, ba’agolo u’viz’man koriv; v’imru Omein...’

  When Ben finished, he discovered he’d closed his eyes anyway. He opened his lids and looked beside him to the priest. A tear wet the old man’s cheek.

  ‘Amen,’ the priest said.

  Ben stood from his knees. He staggered and caught the priest’s arm. The man brought him off the steps and sat him on a pew. The priest returned to the altar, kissed his stole again, then took it off. He muttered a few parting words, crossed himself, and came to gather Ben. The two walked from the church.

  In the street, the sounds of the celebration had not slackened. Music and clapping sounded from the cobblestone square. Ben could tell the voices of women and soldiers.

  The priest said, ‘That was beautiful. Magnifique. What was it, Rabbi?’

  ‘Kaddish. The prayer for the dead.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ the priest sighed, and shook his gray head. ‘You think this? They are dead?’

  Ben could tell this priest. The old man might believe, might let go of his hope for the missing Jews of his town. But what could the priest do? He was not a soldier he could do nothing to stop the war. He would only pray more. And he was right, he did not have God’s ear for this. No one did, no matter who Ben told. God had chosen. That was why for Ben the Kaddish was a breeze. When your God does not hear, you can pray without gravity. When your God is so distant, you can shout or whimper, you can hold your silence, or your heart in your hands. You are free because God does not care or interfere. You are free because nothing is wanted from you.

  Ben unhitched from the priest’s arm.

  ‘So long, Father. I’m not mourning anyone else today.’

  Ben headed toward the square, leaving the old man behind. He would get drunker, he might dance.

  ~ * ~

  D+84

  August 29

  Joe Amos sat up with a jolt.

  Horns blared in front and behind. Headlamps flashed in his mirrors. Beside him, McGee flailed his hands.

  Joe Amos’s eyes scrambled for clues, where was he? He stomped on the brake, shifting by reflex to neutral. The loaded Jimmy shuddered off the paved surface onto the soft shoulder. His rear tires locked and skidded. Other trucks in his company leaned on their horns as they passed. The ride got bumpy, Joe Amos gripped the yanking steering wheel as hard as he could. The Jimmy stopped alone in the loud, upturned darkness. He smelled brakes and rubber. He breathed madly, scared and checking his condition and his truck and cargo.

  ‘Fuck!’ He hit the steering wheel. McGee cleared his throat and arranged himself from his panicked curl on the passenger side.

  ‘I’m alright,’ Joe Amos said, regaining himself. He’d fallen asleep but nothing bad happened. Just a fright and a close call. The boys behind him had seen him weave and fade and they’d hit their horns and lights. Joe Amos had snapped awake in time to avoid the concrete pole that stood too close right now bathed in his headlights.

  ‘You okay?’ McGee asked anyway.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Joe Amos exhaled. That would be a rotten way to die in a war, he thought, smacking a pole. The

  Army didn’t hand out medals for that one.

  ‘Where we at?’

  ‘Last town was Marmers,’ Joe Amos recalled. They were halfway on the outbound leg to Chartres.

  He shifted and accelerated along the shoulder until someone let him merge onto the road. He climbed into fourth gear behind another set of cat’s eyes. No harm done. He wasn’t the first driver to drift off on the Red Ball.

  McGee checked his watch. ‘Three-ten. You wanna switch?’

  ‘At the depot. I’m alright.’

  Adrenaline needles held Joe Amos bolt upright behind the wheel. He took a swig of water. When he screwed the canteen top on again, he was sleepy. He set his open hand out the window to scoop cool air onto his face. The fading of summer so quickly in France surprised most of the colored drivers, accustomed to lingering Southern heat this time of year.

  McGee slumped on the bench. ‘Lemme see if I can get back to sleep with this shit in my britches.’

  Joe Amos rapped the boy on the hip. ‘Shut up.’ He thought to ask McGee to stay awake with him, but didn’t. He knew McGee would have nothing more to say, one jibe per hour was the boy’s limit.

  Joe Amos made himself ready to resist more slumber. He said, ‘Tout de suite.’ After four solid days of driving, this had become the unofficial motto on the Red Ball, the French for ‘right now.’

  Joe Amos wasn’t embarrassed at having fallen asleep at the wheel. All the drivers were getting fuzzy. They went round and round on the one-way loop, starting at OMAHA or St. Lô, often loaded way past their five-ton limit, then barreled flat out for Chartres, sometimes as much as fifty miles past the ASP. Once every eight hours or so, men and panting Jimmies got sixty minutes in the bivouac area to throw off flats, swill some coffee, maybe heat some hash or stew tins on the exhaust manifold for a warm ration, before they hit the road again. The men got dizzier, and the convoys grew more ragged. Some drivers lit out on their own or in small groups, running their loads as fast as they could without waiting for the rest of their column. It didn’t take long before confusion was embedded in every detail. The drivers just drove, hard. MPs waved the trucks on. Civilian traffic didn’t dare cut in. The drivers ignored anything that held them back, like speed limits, maintenance, waiting for slowpokes, and sleep.


  The number of trucks that drove the Red Ball was growing. On August 25, over three thousand vehicles started on the route. Today, that number was six thousand. Three-quarters of those drivers on the Red Ball were colored.

  Every non-essential vehicle in the ETO had been press-ganged into service, from COM Z and MTB motor pools, from anti-aircraft units, artillery battalions, engineer companies, even newly arrived infantry were put on foot and their transports taken from under them. Early this morning, with dawn on the beach. Lieutenant Garner spread the word that four days ago, 4,500 tons moved over the Red Ball to Chartres in supply of the combat units chasing the Krauts out of France. Yesterday, Garner said the route carried 12,000 tons. The target for today was 15,000. Then Garner issued the shout, the real motto of the Red Ball Express: ‘Wind ‘em up!’