Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3)

by William Peter Grasso

  “It’s too tight,” the chief said. “We’ll never get her turned around while she’s still hooked up to the truck. And I take a real dim view of having to spin her trails around by hand…not when we’ve got plenty of room to set her up right there on the road.”

  “Bullshit, Sergeant,” Sean replied. “I walked it myself. And I towed these things with my Zippo a couple of times when it was too muddy for your prime movers. So yeah…I know all about their turning radius under tow. She’ll make it.”

  “I still think we’re better off on the road, Sergeant Moon.”

  “Again, Sergeant…bullshit. You’ll just be in our fucking way when it’s time to move out. And slow as that thing of yours fires, if you don’t hit them bunkers first shot, we don’t want to be too close to you when they start shooting back. Now let’s get our asses in gear and get this over with, okay?”

  Sean was right. The massive truck that towed the howitzer made the pivot in the clearing, missing the trees ringing it with less than an inch to spare. Once the weapon had been turned one hundred eighty degrees so the muzzle faced the target, all the driver had to do was back up a matter of yards to put her in the optimum firing position.

  The howitzer’s twenty-man crew sprang into action, most of them spreading her unwieldy trails and then digging them in. The rest readied the ammo, massive two hundred-pound projectiles that required a hoist to lower them from the truck.

  Once the howitzer was dug in, Sean oriented the section chief on the location of the two bunkers. “I’m gonna give you distant aiming points so you can zero in on the azimuth of fire,” he said. “You see that cut in the mountain way the hell out there?”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Okay, that’s the azimuth for the bunker to the right. Call it Target One. The wind’s blowing right to left, so once we stop the smoke, Target One will clear first...and we’ll take it out.”

  Sean held both hands out, fingers up, palms toward the targets. “Now, go seven fingers to the left of Target One. Yeah, that’s right—you gotta use both hands. That’ll put you on a knob that’s a good five miles away. That’s your reference for Target Two. If you hit Target One with your first shot, you should have time to reload and sight in on Target Two just as the smoke’s clearing it.”

  The section chief looked like he was trying to think of a reason—any reason—why this tanker’s plan for an artillery engagement was doomed to failure. But all he asked was, “And how far you say those bunkers are?”

  “Thirty-two hundred yards. Three-two-hundred. Set that on your gunner’s telescopic sight and do your worst.”

  The gun crew worked with startling efficiency. It took about ten minutes to get the trails dug in—and three more volleys of smoke rounds to keep their efforts obscured from the Germans across the valley. Sean asked, “You really gotta dig that deep with them spades?”

  The section chief replied, “You bet. She’s gonna rear up like a son of a bitch shooting direct fire.”

  “Still seems like a lot of work for nothing. You can’t just shoot the trails in like they do with the one-oh-fives?”

  “Hell, no, Sarge. That’s a guaran-damn-teed way to bust a spade…and get some of my guys’ legs busted, too, when she jumps backward.”

  “Good to know,” Sean replied.

  It took four ammo handlers to lift the tray holding the round to the mouth of the breech. Then, six more cannoneers grasped a long steel pole like a twelve-armed machine, placed the pole against the round’s baseplate, and rammed it into the chamber with one arduous, coordinated thrust. As soon as that was done, another man placed the powder bags into the chamber and inserted the primer cartridge into the breech. Then he jumped out of the way as the assistant gunner slammed the breech closed.

  Immediately, they began readying the next round for the loading process.

  “We’re ready,” the section chief said to Sean, who yelled to Newcomb, “Turn off the smoke, Captain.”

  Like a watched pot that never boils, it took longer than anyone expected for the smoke to clear from Target One. But as it finally began to thin, the assistant gunner began his chant: Set…set…set…set…

  He had his sight picture, his elevation set, his bubbles level, the firing lanyard firmly in hand. All he needed now was the gunner to say Ready…

  And then he said it. With one twist of his body, the assistant gunner pulled the firing lanyard. They could hear the faint clack of the firing mechanism, metal to metal as hammer struck primer cartridge. Then, in what seemed an incredible compression of time—certainly no more than a millisecond or two—the howitzer fired, not so much with a noise but a crushing increase in air pressure that was a savage punch to every organ in a man’s body.

  Before the tube had recovered from its recoil, the breech was snapped open and the chamber rinsed with a wet swab to extinguish any smoldering fragments of the powder bags. As soon as the tube was fully home, a new round was lifted to the breech, ready to be rammed into the chamber.

  In that heady moment just after the round struck, Sean was sure it had been a direct hit. But as the smoke and dust of impact cleared, the view through binoculars told him the round had been low, striking the slope just beneath the bunker. He imagined the Germans inside stunned, bleeding from their ears, temporarily incapacitated—but not dead. They’d recover quickly and resume the fight.

  “No cigar,” he told the gun crew, “but close enough to put them Krauts in a world of pain. Bring it up just a hair.”

  “Yeah, we got it, Sarge,” the gunner replied. “Give us a second here…”

  There was no point in adjusting their sight pictures until the round was rammed and the breech slammed closed. Those actions could knock the aim off an infinitesimal amount—just enough to cause another near miss.

  But it was only a matter of seconds before they were ready to fire again. This time, the assistant gunner only had to say Set once. With the gunner’s cry of Ready, the second round was on the way.

  “Target,” Sean said as the round scored a direct hit on what was obviously a bunker. Chunks of concrete—some quite large—were flying in all directions. The tube of a large-caliber gun hung from the rubble like a cigarette dangling from disheartened lips.

  The gun crew had already begun traversing the tube toward Target Two. But they needed to stop midway and elevate the tube to give the cannoneers on the ramming staff a good angle for their task. Sean knew why: Poorly rammed rounds either come out like a football kickoff, tumbling end over end and landing real short…or they never leave the tube at all.

  The smoke screen was already drifting clear of the second bunker.

  “Step on it, guys,” Sean said. “Ain’t no secret we’re here anymore. Once they can see us…”

  The ramming done, the breech snapped closed. With furious cranks on the deflection and elevation handwheels, the tube was laid on its quarry.

  But it seemed to take forever before the assistant gunner began his chant of Set…set….set…

  There was no call of Ready. The gunner was still fussing with his sight picture.

  “SOME FUCKING TIME TODAY WOULD BE SWELL,” Sean said.

  Kowalski was scanning the valley from the edge of the road. The next voice was his: “HIT THE DECK!”

  Nobody needed to be told twice. There wouldn’t have been time, anyway. The German round sliced through the trees on the far side of the clearing before detonating some fifty yards behind them. A few of the gun crew were lacerated by wood splinters from the shattered trees, no one seriously. They didn’t even realize they’d been wounded, not with that much adrenaline pumping through their bodies.

  No commands were necessary. The gunners jumped back to their tasks.

  Set and Ready were spoken nearly in unison.

  The firing of the howitzer only made the tension they all felt worse. Another miss might be the last thing they’d ever do.

  It was no secret most German artillery pieces could reload much faster than the American
203 millimeter.

  The Germans probably had reloaded, but they never got the chance to fire again. The shot from the 203 reduced that bunker to rubble, too.

  “TARGET,” Sean told the gun crew. “Excellent shot, you guys.”

  The cannon cockers didn’t hear him. They were busy ramming a fourth round into the chamber.

  Kowalski yelled, “Hey, Sarge, the captain says cease fire.”

  When Sean relayed the cease fire command to the section chief, he replied, “Ah, shit. We got a round in the tube now. We either fire it or we’ve got to pop it back out before we can drive…and that’s gonna be one huge pain in the ass.”

  “Hang on a sec,” Sean told him. “Maybe we can work something out. Let me go talk with the captain.”

  When he returned a few minutes later, he told the chief, “The captain says take out the dragon’s teeth just to the right of the barricade. That’ll give us an extra lane of traffic through the obstacles where we won’t have to check for mines. Just don’t tear up the road, okay?”

  “Piece of cake,” the chief replied. “What’s the range?”

  “I make it at seventeen hundred yards, give or take a couple of inches.”

  “Yeah, that looks about right. Just so we can depress the tube down far enough.”

  The gunners had no problem lowering the tube’s elevation to target the dragon’s teeth. In one mighty blast, the howitzer’s final shot reduced a dozen of them to dust and mangled metal, slicing a clear path through the obstacles.

  Sherman engines revved as the armored column prepared to penetrate the West Wall. “Gotta go make some history,” Sean told the section chief. “Tell your crew that was some real nice work.”

  “You did a pretty good job yourself, Sergeant Moon. You know your shit…even about gunnery.”

  “Hey, we tankers get a little practice playing at being artillery every now and then. We got all the equipment on board to do it, you know.”

  “Yeah, so I heard. Good luck to you.”

  When he got back to Eight Ball, Sean told Fabiano, “You see that two-oh-three millimeter, Fab? Now that’s what I call a real super weapon.”

  The crab tanks led the way—a few Shermans equipped with a rotating drum which protruded in front of their hulls. Chains hanging from the drums flailed the ground ahead of the tanks as the drums spun, detonating any mines in their path.

  “About time those crabs showed up,” Sean said. “I was getting tired of being our own mine clearing vehicle.”

  “You bet,” Fabiano replied. “I’d rather have those spare track links hanging on her side as extra armor than be using them up for spare parts every time we run over some fucking mine.”

  Surprisingly, the crabs found no mines as they passed through the gap in the dragon’s teeth.

  “I guess the Krauts never got around to laying any,” Sean said.

  “There gotta be more Krauts up on that ridge, though,” Fabiano said. “Too much small arms fire was coming down for them to all be in those bunkers.”

  “You’re probably right,” Sean replied. “They’ll either cut and run…or once we’re up on the ridge, the dogfaces will flush ’em out and end their war one way or the other.”

  The Germans still on the ridge hadn’t cut and run. But they fought poorly and were easily rounded up by the GI infantry.

  Eight Ball rumbled up to a prisoner holding area so her crew could take a long, hard look at the captives.

  “These ain’t exactly first-line Krauts,” Sean said. “Looks like it’s another one of them sick, lame, and lazy outfits, thrown out here like some kinda stopgap.”

  Bagdasarian, the assistant driver, noticed something else. “They all got ants in their pants, Sarge. Look at their faces…their eyes are like saucers. And it’s like they’re gonna break into a jitterbug or something any minute now.”

  A GI medic emerged from the crowd of prisoners, walking past Eight Ball. Sean called down to him from the turret. “Hey, Doc…what’s the deal with these Krauts? Looks like they all got the heebie jeebies or something.”

  The medic paused, smiled, and dug something out of his musette bag. It was a small metal cylinder, no bigger than a roll of quarters. He tossed it up to Sean.

  The label was in German, with the name of the cylinder’s contents in bold letters:

  PERVITIN.

  Sean opened the screw cap, letting a few of the white tablets fall into his hand. He asked the medic, “What the hell does this shit do?”

  “It’s a stimulant, Sarge. A methamphetamine.”

  “A what?”

  “Methamphetamine, Sarge. Gives you unnatural energy, keeps you awake for days. These Krauts are all high as kites on it.”

  “You mean they’re all drugged up on the stuff?”

  “That’s right, Sarge. They’re all dope addicts. With guns, to boot. They’re going to be climbing the walls in the POW cage before long.”

  Sean rolled the cylinder in his fingers, examining it closely. “Can I keep these?”

  “Sorry, Sarge, but I gotta turn them in. And don’t tell anybody you heard about the stuff from me. It’s supposed to be some kind of closely kept secret.”

  “Too bad,” Sean said as he tossed the cylinder back. “We could use a little kick in the ass every now and then.”

  “Yeah,” Fabiano chimed in. “All we ever get is saltpeter in the food to keep our dicks soft.”

  The crew were all chomping at the bit to deliver a punch line to Fabiano’s perfect setup, but they deferred to their sergeant for the first shot.

  “They ain’t putting no fucking saltpeter in the food, Fab. That’s some bullshit story all the limp-dicks tell. If you got a problem getting hard, go see the doc. Or maybe the padre.”

  Sean expected some furious rebuttal from his gunner, but to his surprise, Fabiano became pensive. Maybe even worried.

  Then he said, “Per-vert-in, huh?”

  Sean replied, “That’s Pervitin, Fab. P-E-R-V-I-T-I-N. It don’t make you no pervert. It just makes you fucking nuts, from the looks of it.”

  “I don’t know, Sarge. That medic said it gives you super energy and you never have to sleep. It sounds like it makes them into super soldiers.”

  Sean threw up his hands in frustration. “Ah, here we go. You gonna start with that super weapons shit again?”

  “It makes sense to me,” Fabiano replied. “If you’re gonna make super weapons, why not start with the common soldier?”

  “C’mon, Fab…look at those poor bastards. Do they look like super weapons to you? It’s more like they don’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  “Maybe not this time, Sarge. But if the circumstances were right—like during a night fight or a breakout, like back in the Ardennes—it could be a whole different ball game. We’d get exhausted and start fucking up. But they wouldn’t. Not with that shit in their bellies.”

  Fabiano did have a point, but there was no time to dwell on it.

  They needed to get back on the road and head east, deeper into Germany.

  Chapter Seven

  Tommy timed the thirty-minute motorcycle ride from Toul to Nancy to avoid the rain showers. “I’m very grateful for your aviator’s prowess in forecasting weather,” Sylvie told him as he chained the motorcycle to the sturdy pipes at the end of a bicycle rack. “I’d prefer not to look like a drowned rat while I’m visiting friends.”

  “I live to serve, Syl. Since this weather’s got me stuck on the ground, I might as well chauffeur you around.” He snapped the padlock closed, adding, “There. That ought to keep it from being appropriated. What do you think of the bike?”

  “I would have preferred a sedan…with a roof and a windscreen. You don’t appreciate how difficult it is for a woman to ride on one of these things without her skirt blowing up around her neck. Remind me to wear trousers next time.”

  “Well, I’m sure all the GIs we passed got a kick out of it.”

  With a sly smile, she replied, “Oh, I know they did. I
saw their faces. Come…we need to walk a few streets to get to where Paulette lives.”

  As they drew close to a corner, they could hear a commotion, its source still hidden from view by the buildings. Loud, angry voices were shouting vile names at something. Or someone.

  Turning the corner, they could see what was happening. A crowd of leering men, women, and children surrounded a crying woman on her knees in the middle of the street. She cradled a bawling infant in her arms. A fat, slovenly man wearing the black beret of the maquis stood over her, a pair of shears in one hand. With the other, he had a firm grip on her long hair, winding it around his fingers so her head was held fast. He began to lop off her hair, right down to the scalp.

  “My baby is French!” the woman sobbed. “Her father is a Frenchman.”

  “NON!” Sylvie screamed and raced into the fray before Tommy could stop her. She plowed into the fat man with enough force to knock him right on his backside. The shears went skittering along the cobblestone street.

  The crowd backed away. A few knew who this vigilante woman was and, like a game of telephone, her name spread through the crowd. A look of recognition lit the faces of those who, just a moment ago, hadn’t realized they were in the presence of a genuine heroine of the maquis.

  When the fat man saw the face of his assailant, his look of murderous rage quickly turned limp. He slammed his knees together as she approached again, no doubt intent on kicking him in the groin.

  Tommy was behind her now, trying to hold her back without much success. “Listen to your Ami friend, Mademoiselle Truffaut,” the fat man on the ground said, trying to negotiate from a position of pitiful weakness. “This is none of your affair.”

  “Let go of me, Tommy,” she said, shaking free of him. “I’m not finished with this bâtard des cochons yet.”

  It took him a second to translate the term into English: pig bastard. Then he puzzled for a second why the fat man had called her by the surname Truffaut, until he remembered that was her maiden name—she had become Bergerac through marriage—and when in Nancy as a member of the maquis some months back, she'd gone by the name Isabelle Truffaut.