Black Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  But the bombs were not hitting the yards, they were landing back near the Wall and the Barracks, the Tank Park, and the Motor Pool. The ground still pulsed hard enough to hurt, the blasts rang your ears a half mile away.

  Once the detonations ceased, I slapped some butts of the people nearest me, said, “Go get your rifles. Something bad is coming! Move!” Blank looks, but Lupo and Peaches and Frankie got it, started kicking asses. You play these games long enough; you can smell shit going bad. You learn, or you die. We ran. Back at the train, the ack-ack guns were fully manned, the railroad troops hunkered down, rifles to shoulders, the Cluster Drums open and ready. Good. We thundered up the steps, grabbed rifles, tin hats, and cartridge belts and ran full-speed back to our holes in the ground. Real foxholes would have been better, but fuck that shit.

  We got back under cover just as the Gothas plastered us with indiscriminate fifty-pounders, sticks walking all over the yards, looked like at random. The Gothas were too high to see well, the sky almost completely clear, perfect bombing weather. Such fun.

  We had an hour’s break, the big boys were gone, they might need ten or twenty hours to come back, unless the Germans had set up refueling basses out in the desert someplace. Maggie and Stan had not seen any, but it was a big chunk of nothing out there, whole armies could vanish in the emptiness. A few sand-colored tarpaulins, and a fuel dump would be invisible from a thousand feet up. Plus, there had been enough snow on the ground to wash out any details. I ran back to get Bob Weeks on the job, but he was well ahead of me, had canvas flats set up to break the straight outlines of the cars and platforms, even had a phony engine set up at the front of a line of empty boxcars a good distance away from our real train. Every trick in the book. Would it be enough?

  >>>>>>>

  The next wave hit just before noon, and it was nothing I had been expecting. I had almost forgotten about those gliders that hit Maeve and me at that airport west of Irkutsk, Angarsk. Again, they had waves of the Junkers Ju 52 Trimotors, Tante Ju, they called them, towing tubby gray gliders, each about the size of a school bus. Each glider had about thirty soldaten, a good squad, and they were ready to kill my personal ass. “Get the fuck up here, shoot these bastards!” I screamed, not in my officer voice, in my scared as shit voice. It got through to them. Again, the attack was west to east, aimed at the inside of the Great Wall. I wondered for a second, then the first wave of gliders cast loose, and smashed into the Wall. They were not full of troops; they were full of explosives. The detonations were far, far more violent than those huge one-tonners dropped by the zepps this morning. Six thousand pounds? Who the fuck knows?

  I was blasting away with my Springfield, trying to lead the Junkers, trying to hit the pilots, hit something. Everybody else was blazing away too, everybody out of the shelters, the trenches, blasting away, just trying to get as many rounds in the air as possible. I stole a look, and there were lines of dive-bombers behind the first wave of gliders, and more trimotors behind them. Somebody said, “We are all going to die.” It might have been me.

  The troop transports were strings of gliders behind one tow plane, so the sky was getting really crowded. Several kinds of all hell broke loose. Weeks and his guys triggered the Rocket Clusters, the ack-ack guys were right behind, and everybody with a gun was firing as fast as they could. I saw blocks of black troops cluster together and start firing by the numbers, not the best plan to group up into a target, but fuck it. I was busy.

  Some truck-mounts were in action by now, and shit was flying everywhere. The dive-bombers targeted the trains, the few pursuits on the runways, and the AA, scored some hits and zoomed off to reload. For a few seconds, it got quiet enough to hear sergeants of the 33rd screaming at their troops to take cover, people were running in every direction, then the troop-carrying gliders skidded down, and shit got interesting. Welcome to the poor bloody infantry. Asshole.

  Step one; find a place to hide. Step two; shoot at the enemy. Step three; try to live through steps one and two. Lucky for us, the focus of the attack seemed to be the Wall itself, and the garrison buildings in the town over near the Main Gate and the Railroad Gate, a good half mile away. The next wave of troop-carriers came right over the ack-ack in the Train Yards, and the Rocket Cluster emplacements, they were not expecting that, and all previous incarnations of Hell were immediately eclipsed by the crap that cut loose then.

  The Rocket Clusters had been designed to throw dive-bombers off their targets, but what they did to the bigger, slower, transports and gliders was just nobody’s business. Every glider had a pilot, but they were probably just infantry men with a few weeks training, all they were expected to do was to crash softly. They were not expecting to lose all visibility, to have flaming crap and minor explosions rattling off their windshields, which were only celluloid anyway. The gliders were wood and doped linen, they were highly flammable, overloaded with explosives and ammunition. Once you saw it happen, it was obvious and could have been predictable. Chaos. Glider pilots flinched wildly, some of them tried to veer off without triggering their tow releases, and the sky was suddenly full of crazy. We helped, of course, firing everything we had at the low-flying transports.

  Right overhead, a glider pilot jinked at exactly the wrong time, dragged the tail of his tow plane far enough off line to make it veer right into the path of the next plane to the left. Two tow planes and six gliders, and they all had nowhere to go but down. We helped, we shot the shit out of them as they slowed and stalled in mid-air. Then another tow plane caught fire in its right engine, and crashed close enough to us to wash the bunker with flaming gasoline. We ran like turpentined dogs. By instinct, all my guys headed back toward the Recon Train, I thudded my feet to get in front of the mob, bellowed and pointed to a line of military slit trenches a few dozen yards away. “No, you idiots! Go that way!”

  Some of them listened to me, Peaches and Frankie and the Mexicans, Oblenski, the veterans. That gave the rest of them people to follow, and most of us humped our asses over to the trenches and dove in, headfirst in some cases. Good thing, a vee of pursuits were right behind the transports, strafing anything that moved, and raking down the line of the Recon train. I guess all the rockets had all been fired, and the ack-ack was still traversed to the west, following the transports as they zoomed over the Wall after dropping their troops. The Motor Pool and the barracks erupted in rifle and machine gun fire, and we sorted ourselves out from being entangled with the Railroad troops, and got our rifles aimed back at the sky. We had jumped into a trench occupied by big Negro gandy dancers, a section gang. The sergeant winked at me from under his soup-plate helmet, said, “That white folks’ bunker ain’t good enough for y’all?”

  “Any port in a storm, Sarge, any port in a storm.” Then the next wave of transports roared down on us, and we got busy. This batch were more of those huge bombs, one of them released early, I thought I saw a motor smoking on the tow plane, and the glider smashed into the far end of the dummy Recon Train, the one Weeks had made. It was a good distance from us, but not far enough. My god, what a blast. I assumed the position, full cower, and shit just poured down out of the sky on us.

  It took long minutes before we could lift our heads, and an even longer time for the dust and smoke to drift away so we could see. Not much left of the whole back of the dummy train. Later for that crap.

  There didn’t seem to be many more planes in the air, but the firing behind us from the Wall intensified. A full battle. We all shuffled around, we were packed in there pretty tight, and tried to see what was going on. Not a chance. “Stand your ground. Reload. Be ready.” The sergeant said much the same to his troops, obviously, it was a time for caution. I tried to get an idea of what was happening, scattered fires here and there, the end of our train was burning, it must have picked up fragments from the dummy. I could see a couple of full-sized box cars that had been tossed like toys, a couple had landed on the Recon Train. I could see our soldiers fighting the fires, dragging the wounded to what littl
e shelter there was. Nothing in the sky, and I could hear the blat of tank engines firing up in the tank park area. Hard to see, but I figured the Germans were about to get run the fuck over. Too bad. Those masonry chimneys the garrison troops had been building fired up, pouring out black smoke, they must have been burning old tires in them, trying to make a smoke screen.

  I waited a good half hour, then the firing over near the Wall slowed down to scattered single shots. That usually means clean up time. And it was also time for me to earn my officer’s pay. I dragged my fat ass up out of the trench, told Peaches, Frankie, Lupe, and a couple other AEF guys to follow me. That Bobby-O followed without orders. Good enough. We were, they were, officially civilians. First priority seemed to be fire-fighting and tending the wounded, but a new outburst of firing from the Wall changed that plan toot sweet. I could see more smoke, hear small caliber artillery back there, then caught a glimpse of white-painted tanks smashing through a hole in the Wall, and headed straight for us.

  I was boggled for a long minute, then figured it out. All a setup. There had been a strong force out in the desert, somehow they had bypassed Urum-chi, hidden in the snow-covered wilds, and were here to smash the railroad. They had breached the Wall, punched a hole in it with those huge bombs and were coming right down our throats. Maybe their timing had been a little off, but fuck that. Here they were.

  I looked around for a defensive position; the flames that had washed our bunker had died out, and even though the opening was facing the wrong way, east, it was as good a spot as we could get. I ran back, slapped that black sergeant’s helmet, and just pointed. He jumped up, took one good look, and bellowed for his men to face the other way. I waved my people to the singed bumper, and set them to flinging sandbags around to make a breastwork facing west. Not going to leave shelter and attack, not my job. We were in the soup now.

  >>>>>>>

  The thing about battles, is that your perspective, your focus, is extremely limited; usually just what you can see through your rifle sights. We were up a little, a yard or so high, bad bunker design, but nobody had expected a ground attack here. They hadn’t expected a lot of shit that was coming right down our throats.

  I could hear our pursuits fire up across the airfield, no telling how many were left, but every little bit helped. We might have had a few tanks left. The truck-mounted AA I could see from where I was at were all unlimbering and heading toward the battle, and the ack-ack troops were frantically cranking their guns horizontal. The ones on top of our trains had a better view, but they were just that much more exposed. I was just as glad to be a mud-grubber. Gladder.

  There was not much between us and the place the Railroad Gates used to be, just tracks, a few odd cars, tool sheds and switch engines. Suddenly we were the front lines. A few of the switch engines were desperately getting up steam, trying to get away from the enemy tanks. One must have been hit, a huge cloud of white steam shot with black erupted at the far end of the yards, and people started running, abandoning their locomotives. I looked to the south, my left, and soldiers were frantically unloading howitzers from flat beds, digging them in, as best they could, hauling caissons by hand, and getting ready to fire. I wished we had a fucking flag to let them know who we were.

  The Training Camp was behind us and to the south, there were a lot of men there, but what good they would be was another matter. God knows how many different languages they spoke, who they owed allegiance to. But, fuck that. They had to fight or die. There sure was no place to run, nothing but desert and mountains for hundreds of miles in any direction.

  >>>>>>>

  We had a few minutes of quiet, a brave truck-driver from HQ ran by and threw out a few cases of 30.06, most welcome, for morale purposes, if nothing else. The firing at the breach in the Wall intensified, lots of rifle and machine gun fire, I thought I could see our troops running along the top of the Wall, south and north, to try and plug the hole. It’s only twenty, twenty-five feet high, bricks and stone, not a real fortification against what was coming at us

  Everything motorized that we had was heading the same direction, a dozen tanks roared by, wide open, I guessed they were from the training ground behind us. They were not painted for combat, had big white numbers all over, but they were here, and they were hot, and they were welcome. I hoped the Instructors were manning them, but fuck it. All good.

  They didn’t stop to chat, they ran right into the battle, which was hard to see from all the smoke and dust in the air. The few Pursuits we had left roared back in to add to the confusion, a couple of white-painted tanks, with a wedge of tarp-covered troop-lorries behind them burst out of the clouds of crap and headed right for us. The AA on the Recon Train behind us saw them and started firing, flat trajectories, right over our heads. It was insanely loud, painful, and barely worth noticing. The shit was on.

  “Ignore the tanks! Shoot the troops!” sometimes you just have to say the obvious. That’s the officer business. I followed my own orders, and laid into the leading lorry. Somebody got lucky, it swerved violently, dead driver, and the truck behind it smashed right into its side scattering troops in all directions. They did not seem to be wearing field grey, Brits maybe. Fuck them. The Railroad Troops in front of us were laying down some serious fire, but they, like us, had only rifles. Do what you can with what you have.

  Any soldier exposed on the hardpan didn’t get to take more than a few steps. A few of them got behind the oncoming tanks, hid behind rails or wreckage, but they had not expected entrenched professional troops. We stopped the trucks, mowed down the poor slobs once they were on foot, and the AA guys took out most of the tanks. A few turned and ran for it, that exposed their flanks, the armor is thinner there, they did not get far.

  One tank kept coming, shells zinging off the frontal glacis, anti-aircraft shrapnel shells are not the ticket. They have timed fuzes for explosion at altitude, so they just bounced. Somebody got lucky, a shell apparently zipped through an open vision slit. The tank stopped, the shell bouncing around inside hashed the crew, all was well until the fuze burned down, the shell exploded, the tank’s ammo cooked off and the fuel tanks ruptured. Too bad the tank was straddling the railroad guys’ trench when it went off.

  Fire everywhere, the blacks ran in all directions, we tried to put down covering fire, but there was entirely too much jagged shit flying through the air to carefully consider any actions. Keep firing, that’s all you can do. Some of them made it over to our bunker. The sergeant was one of them, he didn’t speak, just slid in another stripper clip, looked for targets. I was tempted to smart-ass him, but later for that shit.

  We kept firing well after we ran out of targets, then when I was sure nothing enemy was moving, I stood half up and bellowed “Cease Fire!” It took a few times and a few kicks in the ass to get through, but eventually I managed. “Peaches, Frankie, Lupe, go get us some water. The rest of you check the wounded, you all know the drill. Move!”

  Old lags, they did all know what to do. I surveyed the damage, all quiet. I stood up the rest of the way, could see our guys standing up, doughs scrambling down the rubble of the Wall, fanning out, doing cleanup. Nasty job. Let them handle it. They were getting paid; twenty-one dollars a day, once a month. I realized I was a little giddy. Sit down before you fall down, asshole.

  That big sergeant stiffly tried to stand up. He made it, but he was all kinds of battered. I never knew black people could turn all those colors. He pulled off his tin hat, wiped blood and sweat off his face and said, “I guess we integrated these here high-dollar premises, Colonel.” He might have tried to smile, but it wasn’t a success.

  “Any port in a storm, Sarge, any port in a storm.”

  >>>>>>>>>

  Hard to believe, but it was over. More of our planes were winging in, landing for fuel, and roaring off west. Good hunting, guys. I found one of our flivvers that was only mildly full of holes, sucked down a quart of water Peaches brought me, and putted over to HQ, to find out what the deal was. I passed a
couple kraut tanks on the way, they looked like the same Renault FTs, the old ones, not the new improved models coming from the states that we had. And the scattered bodies were in Brit field dress. They were not all white, the ones you could tell what color they had been, but they had been Brits. Looked a lot like this was another last gasp operation; I supposed the German troops were either up the Line, or waiting to smash through Urum-chi.

  We were odds and sods too, as well as being exiles, but we might just be better off than our attackers. Surely this was a desperation attack, if not as much of a long-shot gamble as the previous battle here. Lots to think about, and damn little time to do any of it. The planes kept cycling through, the tanks were lined up refueling, ready to move out into the snowy desert, and I could see engineers digging trenches and rebuilding redoubts at the breach in the Wall.

  HQ was calmer than you would have expected, only a normal level of chaos. I had suspected Stillwell was a cool character, and this just proved it. An aide took my verbal report, and told me to carry on, in a way that said I was in danger of wasting his time with my side show. Lines were being moved on maps, orders being cut, and wires being burned up as orders flew out to field units. SOP. Time for me to go home and listen to the fucking radio like a good boy.

  >>>>>>>

  Reaction did not hit me until I pulled the flivver next to the platform, and tried to step out. Tried. I had to sit and shake for a while. Peaches must have seen me through the window, she came out and helped me up. Once a nurse… “Your ass looks whipped, Miles. You need a stiff drink and a blow job.”

  “I know you aren’t offering.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” But she could not keep a straight face at that, she cracked up, smacked my ass, and led me to my compartment. “Take off a few clothes, I’ll be back with a cup of tea. High test.”

  “Love ya.” And I did. Tattoos and all. A monster.

  I knew I had to stay awake, eat something, get a situation report, sponge off, and change clothes at the very least. These clothes were stinking with cordite, gasoline fumes, smoke, flop sweat, pure panic, and a few other foul substances. The tea and brandy helped, a handful of aspirin helped a bit more, I was able to change shirts and socks, at least feel quasi-semi-human. An illusion, I knew, but I’ll take it.