The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  Moments later the last Ami resistance was over and the SS men had jumped out of their vehicles, eyes red with blood, faces black with smoke, to loot the enemy tanks for cigarettes and the highly prized Ami canned rations. But von Dodenburg knew that there were still Ami infantry in the wood and it would soon be dusk. Once it was dark, even the Amis might feel brave enough to tackle the Tigers with their excellent bazookas and Hawkins grenades.

  ‘Schulze,’ he bellowed above the crackle of the flames and the exuberant yells of the young SS troopers. ‘Get those shitty wet tails out of these tanks, will you?’

  ‘Yessir,’ Schulze neatly pocketed two packets of C-rations, far superior to their own issue cans of ‘Old Man’, which was reputedly made of old men salvaged from the workhouses. ‘I’ll get right on to it. All right,’ his voice rose above the noise. ‘Get those leaden tails back into your vehicles before I have the eggs off’n yer with a blunt razor blade! MOUNT UP!’

  It was a massacre. Swinging out to left and right of the wood, ignoring the wobbling clumsy bombs of the Ami bazookas with their trail of fiery sparks, and the patter of machine-gun fire against their thick armoured sides, the Tigers took up their positions and ground to a halt.

  Von Dodenburg stood upright in the turret. He could imagine what must be going through the terrified Amis’ heads now. They were trapped, and they knew it. From a small group of foxholes at the edge of the pines, a handful of desperate stubble-hoppers opened a wild fire at his tank.

  Unhurried, almost casually, he spoke into his throat mike. ‘Matz, clear up that mess at the edge of the wood, will you, before we start?’

  The one-legged NCO, who had lost his leg with Wotan at Cassino, after lying out in the open for three days with gangrene, needed no urging. ‘Yessir,’ he barked and ordered his tank forward.

  The Tiger rattled straight towards the dug-in Amis. Ignoring the terrified bursts of white tracer bouncing off its glacis like harmless golf balls, Matz ran over the first of the foxholes. Through his glasses, von Dodenburg could see the horrified GIs duck before their white blobs of faces were blocked out by the sixty-ton bulk of the Tiger. But Matz was too old a hand to allow the Amis to escape by cowering in the bottom of their little holes. Deliberately, he started to swing the Tiger back and forth, clouds of blue smoke pouring from its twin exhausts. The sides of the holes started to crumble. The Tiger sagged as one side of the pit gave way. If there were screams, von Dodenburg could not hear them, but he could imagine the crushed bloody pulp now filling the bottom of the foxhole.

  Its track churned up flesh and earth as Matz rumbled on to the next foxhole and repeated the performance. Once von Dodenburg caught a glimpse of what looked a human arm swinging back and forth with the tracks, but it vanished as soon as Matz’s Tiger rolled on to the next hole.

  ‘All right, Matz,’ he cried in the end, sickened in spite of himself. ‘You’ve had your litre of blood for today. Come on back into line.’

  ‘I’d sooner have a bit of the other any day, sir,’ Matz replied, his excitement noticeable even over the crackling tank radio. But he pulled away obediently, leaving the bloody remains of the GIs squashed to pulp at the bottom of the graves into which they had unwittingly dug themselves.

  Von Dodenburg did not waste any further time. The black clouds were coming in rapidly now from the east and he did not want to be caught out in the dark without the protection of his panzer grenadier infantry.

  ‘HE five rounds,’ he yelled over the mike,’ commence firing!’

  The twenty-nine cannon roared. The immense barrage crashed into the wood at two hundred metres range. Pines smashed like matchsticks. Within seconds the wood had ceased to exist. But von Dodenburg wanted to make sure that none of the Ami stubble-hoppers survived.

  ‘Cease fire,’ he cried into the throat mike. Then. ‘Two rounds of incendiary!’

  Rapidly the sweating gunners ejected the great heavy round of HE and replaced it by incendiary. Time was pressing. It was really getting dark now. They must get away. ‘FIRE,’ he bellowed.

  The incendiary shells hissed through the darkening sky and smashed into the shattered wood at point-blank range, transforming it into a white-hot inferno. As the shelling ceased, the men of Wotan could hear the shrieks and screams of the Americans through the high curtain of leaping flame. Here and there, a GI, his uniform alive with fire, tried to crawl out of the inferno or came bursting panic-stricken into the open, burning arms held aloft in a frantic token of surrender.

  But the SS troopers mowed the Amis down where they stood, until von Dodenburg yelled at last, ‘Cease firing, we’re pulling back. Follow me – convoy distance! And remember, you heroes, that there might be some Ami lurking out there with a bazooka. So keep a weather eye open.’

  But as they swung into line, leaving the burning scene of the massacre behind them, the Amis had vanished from the bitter, war-torn landscape. Two hours later they rumbled back into a pitch-black, deserted Aachen without having been fired upon once. The swift intervention of SS Battle Group Wotan had temporarily brought ‘Lightning Joe’s’ attempt to capture the Holy City to an abrupt and bloody halt.

  Notes

  1. High explosive. (Transl.).

  2. Standard two-and-half-ton US trucks.

  3. Nickname of the First US Infantry Division.

  4. The thickly armoured front plate of a tank.

  SIX

  ‘Gentlemen, our first attack on Aachen was a complete snafu.’ General Collins, at forty-eight, the youngest corps commander in the US First Army, stared aggressively at his two infantry generals and let the words sink in.

  Outside, the mud-stained ambulances were rattling in and out of the Corps HQ’s cobbled courtyard, bringing in the critically wounded casualties of the massacre in the woods. In a nearby office a clerk was singing, ‘I’m Going to Buy a Paper Doll that I Can Call My Own’, over and over again in poor imitation of Bing Crosby.

  Collins frowned and told himself he would have a word with that damned chief clerk after the conference. ‘I repeat, gentlemen, a complete goddam snafu.’

  General Huebner, the gross, sallow-faced commander of the US Army’s most experienced infantry division ‘the Big Red One’, opened his mouth.

  Collins, blond, handsome and looking rather like an older Andy Hardy1 the all-American boy, held up his hand to stop his words. ‘It’s okay, Clarence. I don’t want any justifications, excuses, apologies. I take full responsibility for the failure of our first attack. In Seven Corps, the buck stops here.’ He jerked a thumb at his own broad chest. ‘Get it?’

  Huebner and General Hobbs, the heavy-set commander of the 30th Infantry Division – ‘Roosevelt’s Butchers’ as they liked to call themselves, nodded their heads in appreciation. Most of the Corps Commanders in the ETO2 were prepared to pass the buck when operations failed.

  Outside a hoarse, beery voice was shouting. ‘Mass! Anyone of you lugs going to goddam mass? If you are, get goddam fell out!’ There was the sound of weary feet shuffling over the cobbles to form up and be marched off to the ‘church’ improvised in the barn behind the latrines.

  ‘All right, then,’ Collins went on. ‘So I made a mistake. I thought the Kraut had had it and I could bounce my way into goddam Aachen. I was wrong. Now what do we do?’

  ‘Perhaps, General,’ Huebner ventured, ‘we shouldn’t bother. We’ve got all the roads we need for the advance to the Rhine. Why get ourselves bogged down in Aachen? We could seal it off and leave the Kraut to sweat it out while we barrel for the Rhine. Believe me, General,’ he added urgently, ‘the capture of Aachen is going to cost us a helluva lot of doughs.’

  Collins nodded. ‘I agree, Clarence. The place has little military value. Its railroads are shot and the engineers tell me it’ll take weeks before we can use them again for our own supplies for the advance past.’ He paused and drew a deep breath, his handsome face set and worried. ‘But there are other factors we have to take into consideration. Aachen will be the first major Germa
n city the US Army has captured in its two hundred-year-old history – a prestige objective in a way. Ike3 is very keen on that. More important, Hitler has prophesied that his empire will last a goddam thousand years, just like Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. Thus, if we strike at Aachen, we are striking not just at a military objective, but at a shrine which is of tremendous significance for the Nazi faithful. When Aachen goes, the intelligence boys tell me, so does the man in the street’s belief in the National Socialist creed. And that, gentlemen, is worth the lives of your doughs, I think.’

  ‘All right, you fish eaters – over there,’ the beery Nomcom’s voice snarled, ‘Gefillte fisch and bagels – over here … The good guys, next to me.’ With a lot of shuffling of combat boots, the various sections of the church parade began to sort themselves out.

  ‘Aachen will have to be captured by a systematic attack,’ Collins continued, rising and walking over to the large map which decorated one wall of his office in the old Belgian chateau that he had taken over for his HQ during the Battle of Aachen. ‘Just as the Corps did at Utah Beach and Cherbourg. No more piecemeal attacks in other words, gentlemen, going in at half cock. Okay?’

  The two infantry commanders nodded.

  ‘All right, Clarence, let’s do this in a democratic fashion. What would you do, if you were me?’

  ‘Thank God I’m not,’ the commander of the Big Red One thought, but he said, ‘The squeeze, General, the squeeze’. He thrust out his big powerful hand and pressed the broad fingers together. ‘Cut the Krauts off from their supplies, reinforcements etc. Then, when that’s done, go in for the kill.’

  ‘You, Leland?’

  Hobbs, who was not given to talk, but preferred to express himself on paper with phrases full of bombast and appeals to the soldierly patriotism of his troops, grunted, ‘I concur, General – decidedly the squeeze before attempting to eliminate the enemy.’

  ‘Good, that is exactly my own idea. The question now is – where? Leland, I want you to get your doughs in positions around here.’ He tapped the little town of Herzogenrath on the Dutch-German border on the map. ‘That will be your start-line. How long would it take you to get into position?’

  Hobbs shrugged. ‘Two days – three at the most. My losses have been high in Holland. I’ll need replacements.’

  ‘You’ve got them, Leland,’ Collins snapped. ‘The First Army’s ripple-dipples4 have already been alerted to give you what you want in the way of bodies. Okay, let’s say three days.’ He turned to Huebner. ‘Now Clarence, your people are already in position. All I want you to do is tidy up your line, as Monty would say, and then when we’re ready to kick off the offensive, push a feint south-eastwards into the city itself, but making your main effort a drive for Verlautenheide. You and Leland will link up at this feature here – Height 239. We’ll commence the offensive two October.’ His voice hardened momentarily. ‘And I’ll expect you gentlemen to link up there eight days later. Get it?’

  Somehow the young Corps Commander’s confident tone irritated the much older Huebner. ‘Lightning Joe’ did not seem to understand the difficulties of fighting in industrial areas like Aachen. It was nothing like the swift gallops across France where even infantry divisions could cover twenty miles a day. The grimy industrial settlements around Aachen could swallow up infantry by the battalion: before you knew it, a whole division might be engaged in fighting for some third-rate objective.

  ‘Hill 239,’ he said reflectively. ‘Do you know what the GIs call it, General?’

  Collins, already preoccupied with the next problem, shook his head.

  ‘Well, you know it’s surmounted by a large wooden cross. You know what the folks are around here – one hundred per cent Catholic—’

  ‘Get on with it, Clarence,’ Collins snapped with a sudden bite in his voice.

  ‘Well, sir, the forward artillery observers have spread the word about the hill dominating the whole area and about the cross. So the GIs have made up their own name for it.’ Huebner allowed himself a faint smile of triumph. ‘Crucifixion Hill, General … Crucifixion Hill …’

  Lightning Joe Collins sat thoughtfully at his desk until he heard the doors of their sedans being slammed closed in the courtyard below and the voice of the MP sergeant bellowing: ‘Guard – guard – attenshun!’ Smoothly the olive green Packards that contained his infantry generals drew away. ‘Crucifixion Hill!’ he snorted to himself and pressed the brass bell on the desk in front of him.

  His bespectacled chief clerk came in almost immediately.

  ‘Tell Colonel Porter I’m ready for him now,’ he commanded. ‘And listen, Jones, get a grip on that damned crooner in your office, will you! I’m gonna get a baby doll to call my own doesn’t exactly go with a high-level military conference. Savvy?’

  ‘Yessir, General,’ a flustered Jones said.

  A few minutes later Colonel Porter of the First Army’s OSS section appeared and gave the Corps Commander another of his sloppy civilian sixty-day-wonder salutes.5

  Collins sniffed. A typical cloak-and-dagger soldier. No wonder that the Washington cocktail circuit sneered that the top-secret organisation’s initial – OSS – meant the ‘Office of Shush, Shush’, or ‘oh, so secret’.

  ‘Well?’ he inquired.

  Porter, a big florid ex-Boston lawyer, whose total experience of war had been a day at Château Thierry during the 1918 ‘champagne campaign’ in France, answered: ‘The kikes are ready, if you want to look them over, General.’

  Collins rose. ‘Okay, let’s go and see.’

  A few minutes later they passed the guard of white-helmeted MPs, armed with grease-guns, into the big castle hall which housed the volunteers. They sprawled out on the linoleum floor, drinking steaming hot coffee from metal canteen cups, their leggings undone, fatigue caps at the backs of their cropped dark heads, but as soon as they spotted the commanding general they sprang to their feet. Collins took a long look at them. They were from all arms of the service-infantry, supply, engineers – there were even a couple from a laundry unit. But in spite of their different insignia and uniforms, they had one thing in common, a rigidity of stance which Collins could not remember even seeing in the old pre-war Regular Army.

  ‘All right, men,’ he said at last. ‘At ease … you may smoke again if you wish.’

  There was hasty fumbling in pockets. Camels and Luckies reappeared while he waited, again noting that there was something foreign about the way the volunteers lit their cigarettes. The average GI could flip a cigarette out of the hole at the top of the pack and light it in one easy movement; these men made two separate movements out of it.

  ‘Now listen,’ he said energetically. ‘The Seventh Corps will be going over to the offensive on the Aachen front again in the near future. Intelligence tells us that the Krauts – er Germans – will have little to oppose us with, except for one elite outfit, which really fouled up the Big Red One’s attack yesterday.’

  Again he mustered them with his keen eyes and wondered for a moment what must be going through their minds, now that they were back where they had originated, spent their youth, gone to school, made friends before being driven into exile so cruelly only a few years before.

  ‘Now all of you men have volunteered for a special assignment. All of you are of German origin, speak the language fluently and are trained soldiers – a combination which is essential to the success of your mission.’ He paused. ‘Any questions so far?’

  A tall skinny lieutenant, whose chest bore the combat infantryman’s badge and the dark ribbon of the Purple Heart, said with little trace of an accent. ‘Sir, we don’t want you to pull any punches. Can we have it straight? What’s our assignment?’

  ‘Lieutenant Wertheim,’ Colonel Porter explained hurriedly, flashing the Jewish lieutenant an angry look. ‘Damn, big-mouthed kike,’ he told himself.

  ‘Well, Wertheim, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll give it to you straight. You’re going to kill someone. But I’d better leave the det
ails to Colonel Porter here. I just wanted to have a look at you – see what kind of fellers you were. All right, Porter, you can carry on now.’

  ‘Attenshun!’ Porter yelled.

  They sprang to attention. Touching his hand to his blond hair, Collins walked out while Porter grinned behind his back. Typical West Pointer, he told himself maliciously. As hard as nails, aggressive to an extreme, ready to walk over dead bodies to further his military career, as all the guys from the Point were. All the same his regular soldier’s code-of-conduct forbade him to involve himself more than necessary in the little scheme OSS in Grosvenor Square had cooked up – a scheme that might well produce more important results than one of his regular infantry regiments could. No, that kind of dirty work would have to be left to amateur soldiers like himself.

  ‘All right,’ he said when the door had been closed after the Corps Commander and the hard-faced MPs had taken up their positions again. ‘Relax and get a load of this. Wertheim, you want it straight from the shoulder. Well, here it it. The OSS wants you to sneak behind the Kraut lines in German uniform. You know what that means?’

  Wertheim spat drily. ‘You don’t need to spell it out, Colonel. We know. A short walk of an early morning if we’re captured, and the firing squad.’ He looked challengingly at the fat ex-lawyer. ‘What we want to know is why. Don’t we, guys?’

  The men all around him, their dark faces set and intent, nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ Porter shrugged. ‘It’s no skin off my nose, Lieutenant. The only opposition in Aachen which is capable of stopping our doughs is an outfit called Battle Group Wotan – it’s an SS unit. We want you guys to kill its commanding officer.’ He consulted the piece of paper he held concealed in the palm of his hand. ‘He’s a Kraut called von Dodenburg. Colonel von Dodenburg. Some kind of crummy Kraut aristocrat or other.