Watching through binoculars, Colonel Parker and Lieutenant Felter saw short, squat, gray-clad troops rise from the ground and intercept the motorcycle. And then Lieutenant Fernwall and the MP T/4 were seen being marched down the road into Zwenkau.
When they did not reappear in thirty minutes, Colonel Parker summoned Major L. J. Conzalve, who was functioning as a replacement for his bitterly disappointed executive officer who had been left with the regiment outside Bad Nauheim. He informed the major that he was going into Zwenkau in his track and that if he did not reappear or otherwise communicate in sixty minutes, the major was to move into Zwenkau with the remaining tracks, returning fire if fired upon.
Colonel Parker then ordered the multiple .50 mounts on the half-tracks to be pointed to the rear, so as to visually demonstrate a nonbelligerent attitude. Next he ordered his driver to move out. As they approached the stone fence which was obviously the outer ring of the Russian line, he motioned Felter to stand beside him in the front seat.
At that moment, a half dozen Soviet soldiers, in battle-soiled quilted cotton jackets, rough wool pants, and canvas and rubber shoes, stepped out in front of them, their submachine guns held menacingly.
One soldier stood in the middle of the road, blocking their passage.
They were, Colonel Parker realized with surprise, Orientals of some sort. And then he identified them: Mongols. He had heard that the Russians were using Mongols as their assault troops.
“Do not the soldiers of the Soviet Union salute a colonel of the United States Army?” Felter snapped in Russian. There was no reply and no salute.
“Get that man out of the road, or we’ll drive over him,” Felter went on. Then he told the driver to drive on. As soon as the gears clashed, and the engine revved, the Mongolian soldier stepped out of the way.
They rolled, past stone farm buildings into Zwenkau and came to the center of town, a wide marketplace with a flowing water pipe. An ancient church stood on the far side of the square. Lieutenant Fernwall and the motorcycle driver were standing by the motorcycle. There were three Russians with them, troops that somehow both Felter and Parker recognized to be company-grade officers. One of them walked up to the track and saluted.
“This is Colonel Parker, of the United States Army 393rd Tank Destroyer Regiment,” Felter said. “Send for your commanding officer.”
“I am the commanding officer,” one of the Mongolian officers said.
“We do not deal with captains,” Felter said.
“He spoke a little German,” Lieutenant Fernwall said. “I think he sent for somebody.”
“Ask him where the Americans are,” Colonel Parker said to Felter.
“I don’t think we’d better ask,” Felter said. “I think we had better give them the idea we know where they are.”
“All right,” Parker said. “I’ve got to take a leak. Come with me.”
He opened the door of the track and climbed down.
“Inform your superiors that the colonel is here,” Felter said to the Russian officer. Then he followed Colonel Parker across the cobblestones to what had apparently been a tavern, a gasthaus. Parker, with intentional arrogance, pushed the door open. Half a dozen women, in torn clothing, cowered in a corner of what had been the dining room. There were two naked women lying on the floor, dead, one from a bullet wound in the face, the other slashed across the stomach.
“There is a ‘Herren’ sign,” Felter said, “if you want the men’s room.”
Parker followed the nod of Felter’s head. There was a urinal trough in the men’s room, but there were feces in it and in piles on the floor already attracting hordes of flies.
“Savages! Savages!” Parker said. He relieved himself in the urinal. He looked at Felter. “Are you all right? You’re not going to pass out?”
“No, sir.”
When Colonel Parker had zipped his trousers, he marched back out of the gasthaus, looking at neither the bodies nor the women cowering against the wall. A jeep was now drawn up with its bumper against the bumper of the track, and a Caucasian officer standing beside it. His uniform was of much finer material than the uniforms of the Mongolians. He was not, Parker sensed, a combat officer.
“What is he?” Parker asked. “Do you know the insignia?”
“Major of military government,” Felter said. “Either military government or service of supply.”
The major saluted, and walked toward Parker and Felter.
“Good morning, Colonel,” he said, in heavily accented English. “You seem to be lost.”
“Good morning, Major,” Felter replied, in Russian. “May I present Colonel Parker of the 393rd Tank Destroyer Regiment?”
“You speak Russian very well, Lieutenant,” the major said, in Russian, looking at him with interest. “Are you perhaps Russian?”
“I am an American,” Felter said. The major shook hands almost absent-mindedly with Colonel Parker.
“But then you must have Russian parents,” he said. He switched to English. “I was saying, Colonel, that you seem to have lost your way.”
“We are not lost,” Parker said. “Quite the contrary. We have come for the American prisoners.”
“What American prisoners?” the Russian major asked, innocently.
“The prisoners of Stalag XVII-B,” Parker said.
“I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the major said.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Parker said. “I had hoped you would be able to help us find our countrymen. Now we’ll just have to look for them.”
“This is the front line, Colonel,” the Russian major said, coldly. “It would be dangerous for you to move around very much here.”
“Yes, it probably will be,” Parker said. “But one has one’s orders, and one does what one can to carry them out.”
“As I say, I know of no prisoners—” the major said.
Parker interrupted him, calling up to the driver of the track. “Have Major Conzalve send a half dozen tracks down here, Sergeant.”
“Colonel,” the major said, in English, “I must insist that you withdraw.”
“What did he say, Lieutenant?” Parker asked politely.
“I said,” the Russian said, “I must insist that you not send—”
“Major,” Felter said, in Russian. “Why don’t you say what you want in Russian, and then I will translate for you.”
“I said,” the Russian said, now blustering, the Russian words coming out in a torrent, “that you must withdraw. This area is occupied by the Soviet Army.”
“I don’t quite understand what you mean,” Parker said. “Withdraw? Withdraw where?”
The sound of half-track engines could now be heard.
“Please tell your colonel that I insist he withdraw his forces to American lines,” the Russian said, furiously.
“Colonel,” Felter repeated. “The major insists that you withdraw to American lines.”
“Ask him what he means by that,” Parker replied.
Felter repeated the question in Russian.
The major glowered at both of them, but said nothing. The sounds of half-track engines and the clanking of their tracks were now loud in the early morning quiet. The Americans were coming. The only way they could be stopped was by firing at them. The Russian major was not prepared to do that.
“Ask him where the prisoners are, Felter,” Colonel Parker said, coldly, looking directly at the Russian major.
The first of the tracks became visible down the narrow street leading to the marketplace. There was a very large black officer standing up beside the driver, and its four .50 caliber Brownings were manned and pointing forward. Ten feet behind it came a second track, and ten feet behind that a third. When the tracks reached the marketplace, they formed a line, six abreast, and then sat with their engines idling.
“Ask the major, Felter,” Colonel Parker said, “if he will lead us to the prisoners, or if he wants us to go find them ourselves.”
“A protest will be made,” the Russian major said.
“Tell the major what he can do with his protest, Felter,” Colonel Parker said.
(Three)
Zwenkau, Russian-occupied Germany
8 April 1945
The two hundred and thirty-eight American officers, formerly interned in Stalag XVII-B, were in the huge and ancient timbered barn of a farm two miles east of Zwenkau. A detachment of soldiers assigned to the Military Government and Civil Affairs Division of the Red Army had laid a single roll of concertina barbed wire in a circle twenty yards from the barn. They had made clear the purpose of the barbed wire by firing a jeep-mounted machine gun into the ground ahead of a party of American officers who wished to pass the barbed wire while serving as burial detail.
The first German to die had been Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz von und zu Badner. One of the Russians who had overtaken the column of prisoners had knocked Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg to the ground with the butt of his machine pistol. When Badner had tried to protect the fallen colonel from being kicked in the mouth, he had been summarily executed.
Thirty minutes later, just after the Americans were shoved into the barn, the rest of the Germans had been lined up against the stone walls of the building and machine-gunned. The Russians then denied the Americans permission to bury the bodies anywhere but in the barnyard under the manure. Then, as if to show there were no personal hard feelings, the Russians had pushed through the open barn gates a dozen German women, making their intentions clear with wide grins and the international hand language for copulation.
The females, ranging in age from thirteen to sixty-four, had already been raped repeatedly before being turned over to the Americans for their pleasure.
Lt. Col. Robert F. Bellmon had had to tackle and wrestle to the ground a previously quiet and mild-mannered Signal Corps major who had quite seriously announced his intention to take the Barisnikov submachine gun away from the Russian commander and blow his fucking head off with it.
If they were to break out of here violently, Bellmon thought, that wasn’t the way to do it. The possibility that they should take some action was a very real one. He had Katyn in mind, and that, he believed, presented two duties to him. As the actual commander, he had a very deep responsibility to make sure that his officers did not wind up in a ditch with their hands bound and a .32 caliber bullet in the base of their skulls.
He also had the responsibility to get the documents of the Katyn massacre to the proper American authorities. That was a double responsibility; first, a general one as an officer, and second, a personal one to Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg, who had been murdered here in Saxony.
He forced himself to think calmly, to think the problem through. They had been captured by front-line assault troops. If they were going to be shot down, chances were the front-line troops would have done it, and done it already. Front-line troops of any army were more prone to commit summary executions than the service of supply troops who followed them into an area. When the supply troops moved up here, the chances of the American prisoners being massacred would diminish. It was, of course, possible that they would still be eliminated. The Poles at Katyn had been murdered by rear area troops, but it would take an order to get service troops to do something like that; and with the war about to end, Bellmon thought that an officer would be less likely to take that responsibility.
What was most likely to happen would be that vehicles would arrive and transport them to the Russian rear. If there was a movement order, Bellmon was determined to resist it, although at the moment he had no clear idea how he could.
He had Greiffenberg’s Colt .32 automatic. He had been stripped of the Schmeisser.
One little pistol against a hundred armed Russians was almost the same thing as being completely unarmed. A wild thought, holding the pistol to the head of the Russian commander, came to his mind. It was not a sound plan, but it was all that he had.
And his command was in bad shape, physically and mentally exhausted. More than a dozen of his officers were nearly catatonic. They were lice-infested, dirty, hungry, and weak. Many were bootless.
He had sent one of the lieutenants up the inside wall of the barn, to the peak of the roof, where an opening gave a partial view of the rest of the farm, but not of the road leading to it, nor of the barnyard itself.
“I hear tanks, Colonel!” the lieutenant called down softly.
Bellmon had a quick mental picture of a half-circle of T-34’s turning their machine guns on his officers. He dismissed it, thinking first that the tanks were on their way to the front, and if they weren’t, they were vehicles entirely suitable to accompany a force of two hundred and thirty-eight men being marched to the rear.
He heard the roar of engines now himself, and the clank of tracks. The vehicles were in the barnyard now, apparently forming up in front of the fifteen-foot-tall doors.
Then the engines were killed. There was the crack of backfires, the screech of steel treads on cobblestones. Then the sound of muffled voices. He had a moment’s wild suspicion, born of desperation, that he heard English. He forced that from his mind, desperately searching for a plan of action.
And then there was the sound of a trumpet, faint but unmistakable, through the heavy wooden doors. He didn’t believe what he heard, because he was afraid that he had finally gone off the deep end and was hallucinating.
But in the last seconds before the ass-end of a half-track came crashing through the heavy wooden doors, he couldn’t dismiss what he heard as impossible. Some sonofabitch out there really was playing, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The knocking down of the barn doors with the track had set up a huge cloud of dust, which billowed outward into the yard. A man staggered out through it, his arms at his sides, and looked at the tracks. His uniform was in tatters, and he was skeleton thin. But there was an overseas cap on his head, cocked to the left in the tradition of armor.
Colonel Philip S. Parker VI pressed the button on his microphone.
“Bring up the trucks,” he ordered. “We’ve found them.”
A half dozen others staggered out after him, blinking in the sunlight, shielding their eyes.
The trumpet player, a fat, very black staff sergeant with tears running down his cheeks, put his horn to his lips and played again, not quite able to do what he was trying to do, play what the army called a “spirited air.” It came out more like a dirge, but it was still “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The emaciated officer looked in the direction of that track, and half smiled, making a gesture with his hand. Then he saw the commanding officer of the detachment of soldiers from the Red Army, and advanced on him, his arms spread and bent, his fingers extended, violence obviously on his mind.
Two of the men who had followed him out of the barn started after him. One of them broke into a run.
One of the Russian soldiers fired a burst with his Barisnikov machine pistol onto the cobblestones before him. The officer stopped. A half-second later, the multiple .50 caliber machine guns on one of the tracks fired a second’s burst. Forty .50 caliber bullets, eight of them tracers, slammed into the cobblestones in front of the Russians. One of the Russians, not the commanding officer, slumped to the ground, the top of his head and the back of his helmet blown away by a ricocheting projectile.
By then, Lieutenant Felter was out of his half-track, across the cobblestones, and standing in front of the officer with violence on his mind.
“Colonel,” Felter said. “For God’s sake!”
Bellmon looked at him, as if surprised to see him.
There was the sound of starters grinding and the whine of electric motors as the multiple .50 mounts turned to bear on the Russians.
“Goddamn you, Jamison!” Colonel Parker shouted at the gunner who had let fly with the burst.
Another track, racing, came around the corner of the barn, followed by a six-by-six, a T/4 at the .50 caliber in the ring turret over t
he cab.
Colonel Parker jumped out of the track and signaled where he wanted the line of trucks to go, and then he went over to where Bellmon and Felter stood facing each other.
“If there are any radios in that Russian jeep,” he ordered Felter, “smash them.” Then he turned to Bellmon.
“Bobby,” he said, very gently. “We’ve got to load your people and haul ass,” he said.
Bellmon looked at him without recognition for a moment.
“It’s Colonel Parker, isn’t it?” he asked.
Parker, obviously having a hard time keeping his emotions under control, nodded. “Bobby,” he repeated, “we’ve got to load your people right now.”
“Yes,” Bellmon said, dreamily, then seemed to regain some control as he said: “Yes, of course, sir.” He turned and staggered back toward the door of the barn.
“Disarm them,” Parker said, indicating the Russians. “Throw their weapons down a well. Lock them up in the farmhouse. Tie them up with commo wire.” Parker ran back to his half-track, climbed in, and picked up the ground-to-air radio.
“We’ve had a little trouble down here,” he said, calmly. “We’re going to run back through Zwenkau. Check to see if they’ve tried to block the road.”
The L-4 which had been circling overhead banked steeply, and flew low over the farmyard, as if the pilot was curious and wanted to see what was going on, and then flew off toward Zwenkau.
(Four)
57th U.S. Army Field Hospital
Giessen, Germany
11 April 1945
Carrying a bottle of Pinch Bottle Haig under his arm, Major General Peterson K. Waterford walked into a private third floor room in the neat, modern, airy hospital, which had been built for the Wehrmacht for the care of gastrointestinal illness.
“Can you handle this?” he asked, extending the bottle to the pale man with shrunken eyes, who sat on the edge of a hospital bed wearing a purple U.S. Army Medical Corps bathrobe and white cotton pajamas.
The Lieutenants Page 12
