by Leo Kessler
And while the men of Wotan enjoyed their time out of war, Lieutenant Wertheim’s men, their faces blackened, their bodies clad in the hated uniform of the German Wehrmacht, slipped out into the cold autumn darkness, night after night, to train for their mission.
Notes
1. German Home Guard.
2. Massed flares.
TWO
The sound was unlike anything the Aacheners had heard before. It started in the distance as the sun slid up over the ruin-jagged horizon and they prepared to return to their hideouts with the loot of the night, a dull groaning noise unlike any of the other terrible noises of war they had heard in these last few years. Twice it sounded. Bright pink flashes sparkled to the west. For a moment the shabby night creatures seemed mesmerised. Then the low roar became a scream a baleful, angry scream – its fury elemental, but man-made and precise. They scattered, pelting madly down the ruined streets for the safety of their cellars. The enemy artillery shells, the first to strike the old city, burst with a mighty antiphonal crash. Dismembered bodies flew everywhere, the ruins splashed red with the blood of the victims. Men and women lay writhing in agony in the gutters. As the Amis settled down to the dawn bombardment, the sun revealed itself in its full frightening beauty, hanging in the pale blue sky like a blood-red ball. It was seven thirty on the morning of October 1st, 1944. Aachen itself had now become the front line.
Vicious purple tongues of flame leaped up from shattered rooftops all over the city. Weakened buildings collapsed everywhere. Military vehicles parked in the streets were up-ended or flung high in the air by direct hits. A convoy of horse-drawn goulash cannons1 trotting down the Komphausstrasse received a direct hit. The drivers, their mates, their tired skinny nags and four hundred litres of ‘giddiup soup’ disappeared in an instant. Shells ploughed into the cupola of Charlemagne’s Cathedral. Huge chunks of masonry started to fall on the terrified men and women sheltering below. They ran terrified into the Jakobsstrasse to be mown down by the red-hot, fist-large pieces of shrapnel. A military stable at the end of the little street was hit and the piteous whinnying of the horses mingled with the cries and shouts of the dying humans. Some of the horses stampeded out of the sudden inferno. Manes and tails blazing a fiery red, brown eyes wide with terror, they clattered down the street scattering all before them.
The merciless shelling seemed to have no pattern. It was aimless and incessant. Its razor-sharp, deadly shrapnel scythed down everything in front of it. In their foxholes the Wotan men huddled close together and cowered in abject misery as the earth shuddered and shook, thanking a God they no longer believed in that they were being spared – at least temporarily – while the civvies took the merciless pounding of the Ami guns.
And still the enemy artillery kept firing. The screams of their shells had now merged into one continuous cyclonic roar. Ami mortars joined in, dropping their 3-inch bombs into the centre of the city with obscene plops, the blasts of their explosions tearing out the lungs of the civilians cowering in the rubble. The new enemy rocket batteries followed with a fluttering chromatic whine, showering Aachen with the fiery, spark-trailing canisters, which exploded with such force that the dark red blood spurted from the civilians’ ears and noses. As the sun’s rays, growing warmer every minute, cleared away the dawn mist, the city was wreathed in thick yellow, choking acrid fumes and a fine cloying dust.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, the initial barrage ended, leaving behind it an echoing silence. Awed, white-eyed with shock, shaking their dust-covered heads to clear away the ringing noise, the shabby civilians rose slowly to their feet and stared at the new shape of their ancient city.
Aachen had stood in the path of many invaders in its two-thousand-year history. Once the Amis began to push into the city, there would be no leaving the refuge of their cellars at night; and SS Police General Donner – Devil Donner, as they were beginning secretly to call the hideous battle commander – would not waste precious supplies of food on them. They would have to fend for themselves.
The looting started almost immediately. Goods trains lined up outside the Hauptbahnhof were broken into by a mass of screaming, almost hysterical women. They grabbed cases of tinned fruits and the standard Wehrmacht ration meat cans – the notorious ‘Old Man’. A patrol of chain-dogs tried to stop them. The women tore them to pieces. When they had finished looting the trains, the four MPs were found, trampled to death and naked on the platform. In one case, the crazied women had thrust the MPs’ crescent-shaped, silver-metal badge deep into the dead, blood-covered man’s anus,
A rumour flashed through the crowd that one of city’s great department stores was being looted. Dragging their stolen tins of fruit and meat behind them in little handcarts, they streamed towards the store, fighting their way in a mob through the doors or crunching across the shattered glass debris of the shell-blasted windows. An old, bald-headed man in the shabby, but well-brushed frock coat of another era and a ‘father murderer’2 tried to stop the invasion. An enraged housewife in a coat made from a dyed blanket knocked him to the ground.
And the looting began all over again. The women grabbed anything in sight. If they discovered a moment later an item was useless, they simply dropped it. Soon the floor of the food department, where Donner had used the refrigerators to keep the supplies intended for Aachen’s fighting men, was a centimetre-thick carpet of sticky, slippery mud, made up of flour, honey, syrup, jam and condensed milk, all dropped or overturned by the screaming mob of women. They swarmed back and forth, grabbing coats, dresses, shoes – anything that could be worn or sold on the flourishing night-time black market. Suddenly whistles started to blow.
‘The head-hunters – Devil Donner’s head-hunters are coming?’ a fat woman with glasses screamed.
‘Devil Donner’s head-hunters!’ a hundred hysterical voices took up the cry of alarm.
Panic-stricken the women streamed out of the store, carrying their loot with them. Outside the dèbris-littered square, hefty middle-aged Army MPs were dropping heavily on to the cobbles, weapons at the ready. They formed up rapidly into line, Schmeissers levelled at the frightened but determined women. Suddenly the senior NCO, a florid-faced sergeant with his chest covered in decorations from the old war, nodded to his men to lower their weapons.
‘All right, let the bitches through. Hard times are coming, they might as well have their little bit of loot.’
The women streamed through the cordon, silent, subdued, eyes fixed demurely on the ground, as if ashamed of themselves.
They had just turned into the Grosskoelmstrasse when someone yelled, ‘Horses, dead horses!’
Before them lay a long line of singed dead horses, shot a few minutes before by the chain-dogs. They lay sprawled out everywhere, their skinny ribs showing through their moth-eaten skins. Knives appeared, as if by magic.
‘Fresh meat,’ the woman in the dyed blanket coat cried in delight. ‘Come on!’ She flung herself on the nearest animal, plunging her knife into the soft flesh of its flank.
Like the furies themselves, the other women followed suit, their hands red to the wrists, cutting and slashing at the flesh in a desperate attempt to get a share of the precious meat before it was all gone.
‘Animals – pure animals,’ Donner murmured metallically, as he and von Dodenburg watched from above. The Police General fixed von Dodenburg with his glassy-eyed hideous stare. ‘That down there is just the beginning, von Dodenburg,’ he said carefully. ‘Just the beginning.’ Devil Donner brought his terrible face closer to the younger man’s. ‘Soon all of Germany is going to be like that down there, a pack of whining undisciplined animals, snarling in the dirt of the gutter for the offal cast them by the victors, if we don’t manage to stop the Amis here.’ His crippled hand clenched tightly and his voice rose. ‘Von Dodenburg, you must hold Aachen for me, whatever the cost!’
Notes
1. SS name for field kitchen.
2. Stiff, wing-collar.
THREE
A sentry loomed up out of the coils of mist floating a metre above the fields and the curtain of vapour fogging the narrow beams of his half-track. ‘Wotan?’ he challenged, his machine pistol held at the ready, his body protected carefully by the ruined Sherman.
‘Wagner,’ the lieutenant answered promptly, with only a trace of a Viennese accent.
The sentry relaxed. ‘Pass, friend.’
The lieutenant raised his hand in signal to the other two vehicles, a grey ghost in the bleak glow of their headlights. ‘Any sign of the Amis, sir?’ the young SS man inquired anxiously as the lieutenant’s driver thrust home first gear.
‘Not yet, soldier. We’re just back from a recce. They must still be eating their Ami bacon and eggs – they never go to war on empty stomachs, they tell me.’
‘Lucky sods,’ the SS man replied. ‘I’ve had nothing but a bowl of giddiup soup in the last twelve hours.’
‘Tell the chaplain,’ the lieutenant snapped unsympathetically, as the half-track jerked forward. ‘Perhaps he’ll give you a signed certificate for a sausage sandwich.’
‘Kiss my shitty arse,’ the sentry cursed. But the half-tracks were already vanishing into the thick dawn mist. He yawned and went back to his vigil, his stomach rolling persistently at the thought of the canteen of ‘nigger’s sweat’ – black coffee and black bread – which would be his breakfast in another hour’s time.
Steadily the big half-tracks, laden with panzer grenadiers, rumbled towards Aachen, well behind German lines now, but still cautious as if every bend might conceal a platoon of infiltrators, heralding the all-out Ami attack which the defenders of the city had been expecting for nearly twenty-four hours now.
Suddenly the lead half-track came to a halt. The other two rumbled to a rusty-tracked stop behind it. While the panzer grenadiers gripped their weapons in sweaty palms, straining their eyes to penetrate the October morning mist, the lieutenant swung himself easily over the bullet-pocked metal side of his own vehicle. Dropping on to one knee behind the rear track, he waited tensely, feeling the morning dew soaking into his breeches.
The lights were getting closer now. His brain alert, his pulse racing, he counted the headlights. One … two … three … four. Four trucks heading towards them slowly. Tension built up inside him with an electric crackle. Would they turn off at the little muddy crossroads two hundred metres ahead, or would they continue on the side road and bump head-on the three half-tracks, their headlights now extinguished and engines turned off?
The four trucks came closer and closer. The lead driver began to decrease speed even more. The lieutenant, crouched in the grass, felt the sweat start to trickle coldly down the small of his back. He raised his machine-pistol. Had they spotted them? The lead truck braked. He could hear the squeal of the hard rubber tyres on the wet cobbles. He ducked swiftly. The thin blue beams swept by where his head had been. In the half tracks, the panzer grenadiers froze into fearful immobility. The lieutenant swallowed hard, but the first truck was turning off. It was taking the other fork, and its driver had not spotted them, for he was already gathering speed again. One by one the rest followed suit, while the frightened lieutenant prayed fervently that their drivers were as unobservant as the first one. Within a matter of minutes the sound of their motors was dying away in the distance and all was silence again save for the slow chattering of an Ami machine-gun a long way off in the west. The lieutenant breathed a sigh of relief and rose stiffly to his feet. His hands shaking slightly, he walked slowly back to his half-track.
‘You can start up again,’ he ordered the driver.
The lieutenant climbed aboard and slumped down wearily next to a man wearing the stars of a sergeant-major.
‘Great crap on the Christmas Tree,’ the swarthy NCO breathed in relief, ‘I thought they had got us by the short hairs just then, Lieutenant!’
As the first half-track began to jolt its way up the little secondary road again, the officer nodded his agreement. ‘Yes, Fein,’ Lieutenant Wertheim answered in English, ‘you ain’t shitting!’
Wertheim checked his watch. Nearly ten and still the fog was holding as Porter’s tame weather man had promised him it would. Thank God, although the fog cover had the disadvantage of making it damn difficult for them to find their base – the shattered farmhouse on the western outskirts, which Porter’s man in Aachen had promised him was deserted and one hundred per cent safe.
By now his nerves were thoroughly keyed up. They had been behind Kraut lines for four hours, and his mind was oscillating crazily between two impulses – the need for caution on this last lap of their mission, and the need to get under cover before the fog lifted and they ran out of time.
The three half-tracks clattered through what appeared to be an abandoned hamlet. Their tracks made a hell of a row on the cobbles, Wertheim thought fearfully. He glanced at his men. They were as pale and tense as he was, eyeing the gaping glass windows of the grey stone houses, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the SS to appear at them at any moment. The lead vehicle, provided like the rest from First Army Ordnance’s special park of captured enemy weapons, swung round a corner. There were GIs sprawled out everywhere in the extravagant postures of the dead. They were a gory, heart-moving sight, but they filled Wertheim with a sense of relief; for he knew that they were still the dead of the earlier offensive and indicated that no Krauts had been in this area during the period of lull. The Germans would have buried the corpses long ago.
‘Lieutenant.’ It was Fein.
‘Yes?’
‘There it is – Crucifixion Hill.’
Fein pointed a dirty forefinger at the hill which had suddenly appeared out of the grey gloom. ‘That’s the big wooden cross, Porter told us about in the briefing.’
Swiftly Wertheim focused his glasses. All round, the mist lay like thick grey pile carpet. But the height stood out clearly, its great cross an unmistakable landmark. They had made it, passing through the German lines from almost one end to the other. The Kraut front, facing the Big Red One, would be up there near the hill, perhaps only a matter of a mile away. They were right on target. Their farm hideout couldn’t be far away now.
‘Okay, driver,’ he whispered, lowering his voice instinctively, ‘take the next right. That should lead you on to the dirt road, going up to the farm.’
Just as the yellow October sun started to burn away the last of the mist, the three half-tracks began to edge their way down a narrow bumpy dirt road in first gear, the disguised GIs holding their weapons at the ready.
But their caution was unnecessary. As they ground closer to the holed roof of the little farmhouse, they saw that fields on either side, churned up by shell-fire, were also filled with American dead from the previous attack. The Krauts had not been in this area for a long time either, just as Porter had promised them. In spite of his obvious Bostonian anti-semitism, he had at least planned the mission well.
Half an hour later they had the three half-tracks under cover, had eaten, using the special self-heating cans so that they would not have to betray their presence in the smelly, deserted farm to any curious Kraut with nothing better to do than to run his field glasses over the forlorn, battle-torn countryside. Then they settled down to sleep. But, despite his tiredness, Wertheim lay awake. Even though he told himself that Porter’s contact man would not be arriving from Aachen for another two hours at least, his nerves were jangling like telephone wires from the benzedrine he had taken the night before. In the end he gave up and, rising stiffly to his feet, went outside to urinate against the farmhouse wall.
The sentry scurried into sight, alarmed by the noise of the hot urine gushing down the stones. When he saw the officer he was embarrassed,
trying to salute and lower his rifle at the same time.
Wertheim grinned at the soldier’s predicament. ‘Do you really expect me to return your salute with my dong in my hand, Rosen?’ he asked. ‘It ain’t exactly the textbook way of doing things, is it?’
Rosen was a twenty-year-old from Berlin whose father had been a captain in the Prussian Foot Guards Regiment Number Four in the old war and had died at Dachau despite his ‘Blue Max’1 gained for bravery at Verdun in ’16. Now he blushed furiously. ‘I didn’t know it was you, sir,’ he said stupidly.
‘Who did you think it was then – Betty Grable without her pants? I can’t sleep. Too much dope. I’m going to have a look-see at that hill up there. Top-Kick Fein is in charge while I’m away. Kay?’
‘Yessir,’ Rosen snapped, standing to attention as if he were in the old Prussian Foot Guards himself or back in training at Fort Bliss, instead of deep behind enemy lines on a life-or-death mission.
Shouldering his grease-gun and checking that his two grenades were still attached to his webbing, Wertheim set off cautiously in the direction of the hill feature which dominated the area, hopping expertly from cover to cover as he did so. He had been a trained and experienced infantry officer before he had volunteered for this mission; that was after he had heard his sole surviving relative, his sister Rosie, had died of a ‘heart attack’ at Theresienstadt. That, at least, was the Swiss Red Cross’s report. Rosie, who had been the star girl athlete of her high school in Vienna and the best amateur skier of her age and class in the whole of Upper Austria. That day something had snapped within him and afterwards he knew he would never be the same man again. Now the future no longer interested him. Survival neither. Not even the ordinary animal pleasures of his fellow soldiers – women, food, drink. The only thought present in his mind, save sorrow at Rosie’s memory, was that of murder – how he could kill the maximum number of Krauts before they killed him.
