MOON ABOVE,
MOON BELOW
A Moon Brothers WW2 Adventure
By
William Peter Grasso
Novels By William Peter Grasso
Moon Brothers WW2 Adventure
Moon Above, Moon Below
Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series
Operation Fishwrapper, Book 5
Operation Blind Spot, Book 4
Operation Easy Street, Book 3
Operation Long Jump, Book 2
Long Walk to the Sun, Book 1
Unpunished
East Wind Returns
Kindle Edition
Copyright 2016 William Peter Grasso
All rights reserved
Cover design by Alyson Aversa
Kindle Edition, License Notes
Moon Above, Moon Below is a work of historical fiction. Events that are common historical knowledge may not occur at their actual point in time or may not occur at all. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales or to living persons is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Novels by William Peter Grasso
Copyright
Author’s Note
Dedication
Falaise Gap Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
About the Author
More Novels by William Peter Grasso
Dedication
To all those GIs (like my father) who served in WW2 not because they wanted to but because they felt it was their duty to do so. They were truly “The Greatest Generation.”
Author’s Note
This is a work of alternative historical fiction. The story begins by mirroring actual events in France during August 1944 leading up to the imperfect encirclement of German forces in the Falaise Pocket. Taking cues from the personalities of the various Allied commanders, the storyline then diverges from actual history, evolving into a very different telling of that encirclement and its effects on bringing WW2 in Europe to an end.
The designation of military units may be actual or fictitious.
In no way are the fictional accounts intended to denigrate the hardships, suffering, and courage of those who served.
Contact the Author Online:
Email: [email protected]
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FALAISE POCKET, FRANCE, 1944:
An ALTERNATIVE PROPOSITION
“The remarkable resurgence of the German Army in autumn (1944) owes something forever unquantifiable to the imperfect victory of Falaise.”
Raymond Callahan
Historian
Chapter One
Some lucky Kraut might’ve just taken a piece out of her.
There’s a fine stream of oil coming out from under her cowling, painting thin black skeleton fingers up the windshield.
Oil pressure’s holding, though…oil temp is okay, too.
No excuse to abort. At least not yet.
Gotta keep my damn eyes outside her cockpit before I hit a tree like Mason did the other day. Wasn’t enough left of him after the fireball to put in a bucket, they said. Mostly ashes. Flying this low—and this fast—will get you dead, and real quick. Without any help from the Krauts, either. Just one little slip-up…
God, I don’t want to burn.
Shit! Did that oil pressure gauge just spike down? And is that temp starting to creep up?
No. I’m imagining it. They’re steady. It’s nothing. Probably nothing. Just a little leak. These engines always leak somewhere.
An excited voice in my headphones says, “Blue Leader to Blue Two, we got Krauts in the open on the yellow smoke. My right wing, on three, Tommy.” Then he counts one-two-three in less than a heartbeat.
I push her throttle forward and begin a slip to get next to Wilson, my flight leader. The ground—only two hundred feet below—is just a blurry treadmill of green and brown. Everything in France looks like patches of green and brown from up here, even when you’re flying much higher and it’s not racing past you so quickly.
But I don’t see any yellow smoke marker. Just the usual clouds of black and gray boiling up to the late summer sky from the madhouse below. Some of the smoke is tinged red. First time I saw that I thought it was from blood. Turns out it’s pulverized brick from buildings blown to smithereens.
No more than a second has ticked off the clock. Wilson’s voice screams in my ears, “I got it!” He opens up with his fifty cals, pumping out API rounds—armor piercing incendiaries. Their tracers bounce off the ground only a hundred yards ahead of us like fireworks gone berserk. I still don’t see the yellow smoke, so I kick my rudder to align my guns with his and squeeze the trigger.
I stop firing as soon as he does. I have no idea who or what we just shot at.
No time to dwell on it. The town of Mortain looms through the smoke ahead of us—higher than us, actually, perched on the side of that big hill like it is. A north-south line running through the hill marks the operational boundary between us and the RAF. Except for a coastline or river, that damn hill is the clearest boundary marker we’ve had since coming to France. Clear boundaries between armed forces are real important—matters of life and death, in fact. Especially to pilots. Without them, we might get confused and start bombing the crap out of friendlies all over again. The Brits shrug and call it “own goals.” I call it a shitty sports analogy for fratricide. I can only pray I’m not guilty of it. But mostly, it’s out of your control. Those imaginary lines the generals draw on maps? Nobody paints them on the ground for the pilots.
We swing our P-47s hard left to get back into the racetrack pattern we’ve been flying west of Mortain. A whole mess of panzers broke through yesterday north and south of the town—two divisions’ worth, the briefing officer said—and started driving west, trying to split the US forces breaking out of Normandy in half. I don’t think we’re slow
ing the Krauts down much. Not yet, anyway. But the weather’s been good for our flight ops, and whatever Luftwaffe is left in this area has been knocked out of action. In fact, in the month since the squadron moved to France from England, the few German planes I’ve seen were parked on the ground and centered in someone’s gunsight. I wouldn’t mind it staying that way for the rest of this damn war.
So around and around we go again in this two-mile-wide circle, praying that making two-fifty down on the deck keeps us untrackable for the Kraut gunners, until we’re low on fuel, ammo, or both. I tuck back behind Wilson, covering his tail from the Luftwaffe we’ve never met in the air…
And I watch my oil pressure gauge start its jittery dance toward zero as the oil temp needle starts its unmistakable climb. She’s gonna crap out any second…and I’ll be flying something that glides like a brick.
I tell Wilson, “Blue Two to Blue Leader, I’m heading back to A-6. Oil pressure’s gone.”
I hear the click of his microphone key in my headset, like he’s about to reply…and then his plane explodes in a brilliant orange flash, flinging aluminum and steel in every direction like a seven-ton grenade. He manages to get out only one syllable, spoken in the voice of a frightened child: “Ma!”
Chapter Two
As he pulled the rattled Tommy Moon from the cockpit of Blue Two, Sergeant Harry McNulty said, “Geez, Lieutenant, not to cast no dispersions on your fine piloting abilities or nothing, but couldn’t a good Brooklyn mick like you keep her in the air another hundred feet?”
Another hundred feet meant the wheels of the dead-stick P-47 would have touched down on the Marston Mat runway instead of the soft muck just short of it. She could’ve then rolled majestically to an unpowered stop before being quickly towed clear of the other planes stacked up to land.
Struggling to regain his composure, Moon replied, “Aspersions, Sergeant. The word you’re looking for is aspersions.”
“Hey, close enough, Lieutenant. I didn’t get to go to no Fordham or nothing like you officer types.”
Blue Two’s current position was anything but majestic. She was pranged, with the lower lip of her nose cowl buried two feet deep in the mud. That made her tail stick up in the air like a capital “T” canted backward, posing an obstacle to the other planes waiting their turn to land at forward airfield A-6. The runway was short to begin with; having to clear the vertical monument now decorating its threshold made its available length significantly shorter. Already, another aircraft had landed long after clearing Blue Two’s tail and rolled into the mud at the runway’s far end. At least this ship had been going slow enough not to prang when she ran off, but her wheels had promptly sunk to the axles. She’d have to be pulled out, too. “That’s all we fucking need,” McNulty muttered just loud enough to be sure Moon heard him. “Me and my boys’ll be digging these mud ducks out half the night.”
He wiped a thin streak of oil off the windshield with his fingertip and studied the dark drop of fluid for a moment. Then he wiped it away in disgust on his coveralls. “So why the hell did you shut her down and go for the dead stick, anyway, Lieutenant?”
“Losing oil pressure. Didn’t want to blow the engine.”
McNulty exhaled through his mouth, making that motorboat sound with his lips that meant bullshit. “We ain’t like the Limeys, Lieutenant. We got spare parts up the recticulum. Ain’t no sweat to swap an engine out.”
Tommy Moon was pretty sure the sergeant meant rectum, not recticulum.
“Looks like she’s gonna be out of action a while,” McNulty said as he scanned the damage. “What the hell chewed up all these leading edges, Lieutenant? Wings, stabilizers, prop…they’re all fucked up.”
“Captain Wilson’s ship blew up right in front of me. There was shrapnel flying everywhere.”
“You think he got out?”
“Not a chance,” Moon replied.
“Tough break. So what got him, Lieutenant?”
McNulty’s questions were getting painful to answer. Worse, Tommy Moon knew he’d have to answer them all over again at the debrief, and his reply wouldn’t be any better than the one he was about to give his crew chief: “Beats the shit out of me.”
The squadron had long since lost any inclination to grieve its losses. The only ceremony marking today’s death was performed by a sergeant as he erased Captain Wilson’s name from the squadron readiness board on the operations shack wall, just like he’d done when Mason and the two before him went down. It had been different when they were still flying out of England, with solid roofs over their quarters, real plumbing, a village pub in which to drown their sorrows, and the free time to do so. They’d lost three pilots from the squadron scattered across that year prior to Overlord, each dead man receiving one rousing, beer-soaked eulogy after another from his squadron mates as flirty English barmaids kept the pitchers of warm ale coming and the Yanks spending. Now, living in the desolate mud and olive drab tentage of liberated Normandy, with casualties a regular occurrence, the willingness to mourn had long passed.
“He was a good man,” Colonel Pruitt mumbled as Wilson vanished from the board as quickly as he’d vanished from their lives. “Damn shame.” Then he turned to Tommy Moon and said, “Half, I’m giving you Blue Flight.”
Half: Tommy’s squadron nickname. Everybody had one that suited him to a tee: Popeye, Lech, Smiley, Grump, and so on. So what was more fitting than sticking a very short pilot named Moon with the moniker Half? It didn’t come as any surprise to him; he’d been called Half Moon by friends and foes alike most of his 21 years:
I can thank my big brother Sean for that. It was better than Shrimp, Tiny, or PeeWee, at least.
“Me, sir? Flight leader?” Moon asked. “Aren’t Goins and Springer senior to me?”
“Oh, probably,” Colonel Pruitt replied, “but I don’t give a rat’s ass. Let’s just say I prefer your…well, let’s just say your objectivity, Tommy.” He lifted a stack of debrief forms from his desk. “According to these, I’ve got more than enough throttle jockeys who can embellish after-action reports as good as any general. Thirtieth Division is thrilled as hell with the support we’re giving them, but like me and you, they’re just a little skeptical the Three-Oh-First Fighter Squadron has wiped out a panzer division all by itself, like these bullshit debriefs from your buddies would have you believe.” He let the stack of papers drop back to the desk with a loud plop, and then added, “If you put any stock in those reports, this war’s going to be over in a month or two.”
The colonel had a point. Just about every swinging dick in the ETO—from Ike on down—seemed to be convinced they’d be home by Christmas.
“Yeah,” Moon replied. “Like they say: Home alive by Forty-Five.”
Pruitt swept his hand across the big briefing map decorating another wall. “Look at this...it’s Seven August and we’re nowhere near Paris yet, after two fucking months on the continent! Hell, Monty and his Brits are still nailing down the area around Caen, and that’s ground he said they’d capture by D plus Three! Home alive by Forty-Five, my sweet ass.”
“I’ll settle for the home alive part, sir.”
“Wouldn’t we all, Tommy. But can you believe we just made that strutting Limey fraud Allied Ground Commander? Is Ike fighting a war here, or running for Parliament?”
“You’ve heard the saying war is just politics by other means, sir?”
“Yeah. Didn’t some Kraut say that?”
The squadron maintenance officer, a major, entered the shack and went straight for the status board. Without saying a word, he took a red grease pencil and drew a long line through the data for Tommy Moon’s aircraft. At the end of the line, he wrote the letters UTR, which stood for uneconomical to repair. The colonel and Moon watched with the same dispassionate emptiness as when Wilson’s name had been erased.
“Shit,” the colonel whispered. “Scratch another jug.”
Jug: common nickname for the P-47 fighter. Officially known as the Thunderbolt, it was h
eavy, but powerful and fast, with a big ordnance-carrying capability. Rumor had it that its thick, oval fuselage cross-section once reminded someone of a jug, and the name stuck.
“What the hell happened, sir?” Moon asked the major. “We thought it was just some sheet metal damage and a new prop.”
“Negative, Lieutenant. McNulty found a cracked wing spar. It’s got what sure looks like a supercharger vane jammed into it. Nothing we can do. You’re lucky it didn’t fold up on you.”
A supercharger vane, Tommy thought. Got to be Wilson’s.
Then the major reassured Colonel Pruitt, “We’re getting some replacement jugs from the depot in a couple of days, sir, so we’ll be back to full strength before you know it.”
“Well, Flight Leader Moon,” Pruitt said, “looks like you’ve got a couple of days to relax and get yourself organized.”
Chapter Three
12th ARMY GROUP COMMUNIQUE
FROM:
BRADLEY--COMMANDER, 12TH ARMY GROUP
DATE--TIME OF ORIGIN:
8 AUG 44/1800 HRS
TO:
EISENHOWER--SUPREME COMMANDER, SHAEF
COPY (FOR INFO):
HODGES--1ST ARMY; PATTON--3RD ARMY; QUESADA--IX TACTICAL AIR COMMAND; WEYLAND--XIX TACTICAL AIR COMMAND
COUNTERATTACK AT MORTAIN BY ELEMENTS OF AT LEAST 3 PANZER DIVISIONS (2ND PANZER, 1ST SS PANZER, 2ND SS PANZER) HAS BEEN THROWN BACK AFTER PENETRATIONS OF NO MORE THAN TWO MILES. SURVIVING PANZER FORCES ARE IN HEADLONG RETREAT EAST OF MORTAIN AND BEING PURSUED BY 30TH DIVISION. TACTICAL AIR SUPPORT EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE.
POSSIBILITY EXISTS TO TRAP ALL RETREATING REMNANTS OF GERMAN 7TH ARMY, PROBABLY IN THE TRIANGLE FORMED BY FLERS TO WEST, FALAISE TO NORTH, AND ARGENTAN TO SOUTH, PROVIDED MONTY CAN GET OFF HIS “CAEN” AND CLOSE NORTHERN JAW OF THE TRAP.
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