The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  Twenty minutes or so later he was sheltering behind a knocked-out civilian Opel truck and surveying the hill with his binoculars, shading the glass carefully with his free hand to prevent it glinting in the slanting rays of the cold October afternoon sun. But he could spot no activity on the crown below the great cross save for a thin trail of blue-grey smoke, which might be coming from some careless soldier’s cooking fire.

  In the end he gave up; Porter had told him that the hill would play an important role in what was to come, but he would only learn the full details from the fat OSS man’s spy from the beleaguered city. Slipping away as carefully as he had approached, he made his way back to the farm, accompanied by the ever-increasing roar of the afternoon barrage that heralded the all-out attack of the morrow.

  He had almost reached their hideout, when a strange slithering sound made him drop to one knee, grease-gun at the ready, his heart thumping with apprehension. Someone was approaching stealthily through the long grass and bracken to the west of the farmhouse. He licked his suddenly dry lips and clicked off his safety catch. The intruder, whoever he might be, was only a matter of yards away now. He raised his grease-gun. Directly ahead, he could see the tops of the bushes waving slightly. He was in there.

  Making himself breathe more calmly, knowing that his aim would be unsure if he were forced to open fire, he swallowed and called softly. ‘The devil?’

  For what seemed an age, nothing happened, except that the soft crawling sound ceased at once. Yet Wertheim sensed that someone was out there in the long grass, as tense and as frightened as he was himself.

  He repeated the code word in German, curling his finger around the trigger of the grease-gun, ready to fire if he had made a mistake, ‘The devil?’

  Hesitantly, a scared voice answered only a score yards away, ‘Devil’s Shield.’

  Wertheim clambered to his feet, his dark eyes shining with refief. ‘Over here,’ he called urgently.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then a fat little man with a shining black eye, dressed in what Wertheim recalled with a shock of recognition was the uniform of the Nazi bully boys from the SA, popped up from the grass, his plump face gleaming with sweat in spite of the cold.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘Colonel Porter’s man from Aachen.’

  Note

  1. Highest imperial award for bravery in World War I.

  FOUR

  At nine o’clock precisely on the morning of October 2nd, ‘Roosevelt’s Butchers’ attacked. The German defenders of the northern flank had been expecting the attack ever since the great artillery bombardment had started. Still they were caught off guard in their bunker line. No matter how long you sat and waited, an attack always took you by surprise.

  A loud explosion. The first of the bunkers shuddered violently, like a ship in a high sea striking a trough. It was followed by a rapid series of explosions that plastered the whole line, held by second-class troops of one of Donner’s ‘stomach battalions’. Here and there the ashen-faced defenders panicked and tried to bolt outside. Their NCOs swiftly forced them back to their positions with curses and kicks.

  The softening-up bombardment lasted twenty minutes. It stopped abruptly, leaving behind it a sinister and unnatural silence. The stomach battalion men held their breath tensely and wondered what new horrors were going to be sprung upon them. Peering through the observation slits, their officers and NCOs could see a grey-fogged lunar landscape, stark, ruined and desolate. The minutes ticked by in leaden foreboding.

  Suddenly a heavy Ami machine-gun began to fire, hammering away like an angry-woodpecker. White tracer sailed through the air, slow at first, but growing faster with every instant. The first 50-mm slugs started to patter against the thick concrete walls of the bunkers. The observers ducked instinctively, atlhough they were safe enough. Everywhere now, other Ami heavy machine-guns joined in, aiming at the observation slits in an attempt to blind the bunker line.

  ‘Stand by,’ the NCOs barked. ‘Here they come!’

  The stomach battalion men sprang to their positions. In the command bunker, a choleric battalion commander who had lost half his stomach at Stalingrad whirled the handle of the field telephone and bellowed at the artillery commander dug in five hundred metres to the rear, ‘Get those shitty Ami mgs for me, will you! But quick!’

  Moments later the big howitzers crashed into action. Great half-metre-long shells hissed through the air, smashing into the Ami machine-gun battalion. One by one the machine-guns, easily located by their tracer, were knocked out. The Ami infantry, waiting in the long grass at the edge of the stream which fronted the bunker line, were without protection. But there was no stopping now.

  Their officers rose to their feet. Whistles were blown. Red-faced irate noncoms bellowed orders and kicked those to their feet who were too slow.

  ‘At the double,’ the battalion commander roared.

  Carrying the duckboards that were to provide dry paths across the stream, they lumbered heavily through the sodden fields of suger beat and turnips. A moving target is less easily hit than a stationary one, as their officers had drummed into them while they had been training for the great attack. Now they operated on that theory.

  A young second lieutenant, with the build of a football player, doubled forward ahead of the rest, duckboard clutched tight to his chest. He splashed into the stream and slapped it into place.

  ‘There’s your goddam bridge!’ he yelled at the men behind him.

  A second later the first German bullet slammed into him and he fell face forward into the water, his helmet rolling on one side.

  The German machine-gunners hissed into high-pitched action. The first wave of Amis was scythed down in a flash, turning the dirty water red with their blood. The second wave came on, using their fallen comrades as bridges, trampling pitilessly on their torn, bleeding bodies.

  For a moment they were in blind ground. Then they came up over the far bank of the stream, screaming angrily. In their midst they had half a dozen soldiers with strange unwieldy packs on their shoulders, bouncing up and down rapidly as they doubled forward.

  ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph!’ one of the stomach battalion men gasped. ‘Flame-throwers!’

  ‘Hold your stupid Bavarian trap!’ an officer snapped angrily, not taking his eyes from the observation slit.

  The first of the flame-throwers went into action. While the infantry men to his right and left poured a stream of covering fire at the nearest bunker, he doubled in from the side, safe now because the bunker was momentarily blinded. At ten-yard range, he pressed the trigger of his terrible weapon. A long tongue of blue-red flame, tinged with oily brown, blazed out and wrapped itself momentarily around the bunker. It disappeared in an instant, leaving a steaming blackened mark on the concrete. In front of the soldier the grass had vanished completely. He pressed the trigger again. The flame embraced the bunker greedily once more. Another soldier doubled forward, crouched low, an explosive charge tied loosely to the end of a ten-foot pole. Skilfully he poked it through the nearest slit. They heard a thick muffled crump and the sound of muted screaming. Heavy black smoke started to pour from the slit. The Amis waited.

  Suddenly a blackened, bare-headed figure stumbled out of the bunker’s rear entrance, his clothes in rags, his arms held high above his head.

  ‘Comrade … comrade,’ he croaked weakly.

  The man with the flame-thrower straightened up. He could tell from the Kraut’s boots that he was an officer. He would have a Luger and a Luger would fetch a small fortune on the black market in Paris’s Pig Alley.1 He began to run heavily towards him to get his hands on the pistol before the rest, but in that instant the officer fired. The Ami fell without a sound.

  ‘He killed Smitty!’ a furious voice yelled. ‘The son of a bitch shot Smitty!’

  A good dozen men turned their weapons on the German officer. His body was whirled round by the impact of the concentrated fire. The GIs rushed and pumped the rest of their magazines
into his twitching body. Still angry, they threw grenade after grenade into the bunker’s rear entrance. After a while no more sound came from within.

  The attack went on. By eleven o’clock the first bunker line had been taken. The stomach battalion was wiped out, the bunkers and their support trenches awash with blood. Mangled bodies, American and German, lay everywhere, locked together in death. And in the wraithlike smoke that covered the ground ahead, their commander staggered back to his own second line of defence, a bayonet thrust through his throat.

  Donner’s HQ at the Hotel Quellenhof on the outskirts of Aachen was in a state of acute alarm. Staff officers ran up and down the corridors, where genteel elderly guests had once walked to take the waters, maps clutched in their elegant hands. Dispatch-riders, their ankle-length leather coats splattered with mud from top to bottom, roared in and out of the courtyard. Black-clad SS NCOs bellowed orders to their men to form up, ready for instant action.

  But von Dodenburg, who had experienced this kind of situation many times in the last five years of war, did not seem to share Donner’s alarm.

  ‘General,’ he said firmly, tapping the big wall map. ‘The break-through at Rimburg cannot be the main push. Look at the distance the Amis will have to cover before they are within striking range of the city itself.’

  ‘But von Dodenburg,’ Donner protested. ‘They are pouring men into the gap they’ve forced there. Our observers are pretty shaken, I realise that, but they estimate that the Amis have passed through at least three battalions and a prisoner states that the whole of the 30th Infantry Division is involved, plus support troops.’

  Von Dodenburg nodded his agreement. ‘I don’t dispute that, General. But is Rimburg their Schwerpunkt?2’ He answered his own question. ‘Definitely not.’ He tapped the area on the map held by General Huebner’s First Division. ‘This is where our main attack will come. After all, the Amis there are almost in Aachen’s surburbs.’

  ‘But they haven’t made a move yet, von Dodenburg,’ Donner protested, taking out his glass eye and polishing it. ‘To the north, however, they must have already gained a kilometre since this morning. What are you going to do about it?’

  Von Dodenburg took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to take a calculated risk, General. If I commit Wotan there and the Amis attack on the southern flank, we are sunk. You could say goodbye to Aachen then. I haven’t got enough men to stop an all-out drive on both fronts. Rimburg is the lesser evil for me.’

  Donner sucked his yellow false teeth thoughtfully for a moment. ‘All right, von Dodenburg, so be it. We’ll wait with your Wotan until we see how the other flank develops. But what happens if you’re wrong?’

  Von Dodenburg forced a grin. ‘Then, my dear General, we are definitely in the shit – very deep in the shit indeed.’

  All afternoon ‘Roosevelt’s Butchers’ continued their drive towards Rimburg, steadily punching holes in Donner’s line and forcing his second-class troops to retreat to new positions. The fields were shell-pitted everywhere, grass torn and trampled. Abandoned, shattered farmhouses bore the signs of companies and battalions which no longer existed. The cobbled country roads were lined by trees, broken off half-way by the shellfire, the roads themselves littered with jagged shrapnel like the scabs of an ugly disease.

  Now the 30th Infantry was taking serious casualties. Some of the reinforcements, culled from the Service of Supply and thrown into the line as riflemen after a mere three weeks’ infantry course, were hit within five minutes of entering their first battle. Some survived the whole afternoon and found themselves as acting private first class, acting corporal, acting buck sergeant commanding platoons that had been reduced to five or six men.

  But the casualties did not worry Hobbs. The big general confidently told his attentive staff, ‘My doughs have got their feet over the dashboard. We’re nearly there. The Krauts are bugging out. They’ll be creaming their skivvies by night-fall.’ Privately he started to compose the divisional communiqué for the morrow, full of resounding bombastic phrases about, ‘living up to the glorious traditions of the 30th US Infantry Division … never in the history of land warfare … unparalleled in the annals of the United States Army’. He had just arrived at ‘and so I say to you, officers and men of the 30th US Infantry Division, that this day all America is watching you’, when he was called to the phone by one of his aides. It was Colonel Sutherland of the 119th Infantry Regiment.

  Sutherland did not pull his punches. ‘General,’ he gasped urgently, ‘the Kraut has got us by the short and curlies up here at Rimburg.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My point bumped into half a dozen flak wagons.3 Now they’ve got the whole lead battalion pinned down in an area of five hundred square yards. As soon as anyone dares put up his head, he gets it blown off.’

  ‘Hold yer water, Sutherland, hold yer water,’ Hobbs said soothingly. ‘I’ll fix it. The Division’s got a release on the Ninth TAC Air Force. I’ll have the mediums up there within the hour.’

  ‘You’d better, General,’ Sutherland answered shortly. ‘Because if you don’t, there won’t be much of the 119th left soon. Over.’

  ‘Over and out,’ Hobbs said perfunctorily and told himself once again that the guys in the line never saw the big picture – that’s why they invariably panicked when something went wrong. He talked to his G.I. ‘Get me Air will you – and make it snappy!’

  The twin-engined Mitchells came in at 300 mph. Flak screamed up at them. A bomber exploded in mid-air. When the black smoke cleared, all that was left was a single wing floating down like a broken leaf. Still they came on until they were over the front line. The deadly black eggs started to tumble out of their silver bellies. The American soldiers stared upwards happily, careless of the Kraut fire now.

  ‘Go on, boys,’ they yelled. ‘Give em hell!’ But their enthusiastic cries died on their lips when they saw the direction the bombs were taking.

  ‘Hit the dirt, guys!’ a young officer up front cried urgently, choked with sudden fear.

  He was too late, for the whole weight of the bombing had descended upon the American section of the front. They were submerged in a screaming inferno. The whole of the lead battalion was dead or dying. Frantic officers rose to their feet, bracing themselves against the trembling earth, unconcerned by the flying shrapnel, firing signal flares high into the air. The Germans at the flak wagons, a matter of two hundred yards away, reacted immediately. They fired the same colour flares, assuming – correctly – that the Ami pilots above them would think that the first set of flares was a trick to put them off their target. Then the battlefield was covered in thick yellow explosive fumes and nothing could save the 119th.

  By dusk, Hobbs’s advance had stalled completely and the survivors of the 119th, shocked and bitter called the Ninth TAC Air Force, the ‘American Luftwaffe’. Hobbs ordered an inquiry.

  In Aachen, a nervous von Dodenburg did not know of the failure of Hobbs’s attack till much later. All that long afternoon with the rumble of the Ami artillery getting closer and closer, and the alarming reports of further Ami advances flooding into Donner’s HQ, he wondered whether he had made the right decision. Twice he contacted the look-out post on Hill 239 which overlooked the Big Red One’s positions and asked for news. But the observer’s report was laconic and disappointing.

  ‘Nothing to report from up here, sir. Unless you want to know about the Ami over there who’s got the shits and is always using the latrine.’

  Colonel von Dodenburg did not want to know.

  It started to get dark. Still nothing from the First Division’s front. He began to wonder if he had not made a major tactical mistake. Donner did not say anything, but his glassy stare indicated that he thought von Dodenburg certainly had. At five-thirty, at the start of another Ami bombardment of the old city, he put his panzer grenadiers on red alert. They were to stand by their half-tracks, ready to be thrown into the battle on the 30th Infantry’s front. Still a voice within him warned h
im to hold them back. He hung on.

  At six, he decided he must make some sort of attempt to find out what the Big Red One’s intention was. He called Schwarz to his office.

  ‘Schwarz, I’m going to take out a patrol to Height 239. One can cover the whole Ami front up there. Even though it’s dark, I think I should be able to spot any large-scale concentration.’

  The one-armed major, who knew how his CO had sweated out the afternoon, nodded his agreement. ‘I think you are right, sir, but just one thing. I’d like to go with you sir. I’m getting sick of sitting on my arse here in the HQ.’

  Von Dodenburg made his mind up quickly. ‘All right, I’ll take you, Matz as driver and Schulze as muscle. By the way, where is Schulze?’

  But the ex-docker was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t even in the kitchen with the kitchen bulls, indulging in his second favourite activity – scrounging food.

  In the end Matz volunteered to find him. ‘I think I know where he is, sir,’ he told von Dodenburg with a knowing look.

  The CO smiled thinly. ‘Don’t tell me – I can guess, Matz. But tell him if he isn’t back here in battle equipment ready to go within thirty minutes, he’s going to be the unhappiest private soldier in Battle Group Wotan.’

  ‘So this is where you are, you randy ox,’ Matz gasped, as he pushed aside the little SA man with one careless sweep of his hand. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’