The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  But the enraged GIs were not their comrades. Bayonets plunged in defenceless stomachs, magazines emptied into ashen, terrified faces, ripping them apart, heavy, mud-encrusted boots crashed into crotches, sending their owners reeling back, mouths full of hot vomit. The survivors, screaming with terror, were kicked out of their holes and ordered to double to the rear towards the cages. Suddenly numb with fatigue, the men of the 18th Infantry Regiment – what was left of them – flopped down into the mud, eyes vacant, their trembling fingers the only indication of what they had just been through.

  ‘Hot damn,’ General Collins cursed. ‘We’ve broken through!’ He punched the upper arm of the aide who had brought the good news happily. ‘I knew old Clarence’s Big Red One would do it! Casualties?’

  The young aide with the Social Register accent nodded. ‘Yes, sir. General Huebner reports that—’

  Collins held up his hand imperiously to stop him. ‘For God’s sake, Jones, if they’re bad, don’t tell me.’

  ‘They’re bad, sir.’

  ‘Okay, I don’t want to know – not just now anyway.’ He swung round at his waiting staff, heavy portly men who looked a good ten years older than their energetic chief. ‘All right, gentlemen, what’s the situation with Hobbs’s Thirtieth?’

  A grey-haired staff officer with the red, white and blue ribbon of the Distinguished Service Cross of the old war on his fat chest licked his lips. ‘Eighteen hundred casualties already and about three hundred missing—’

  ‘Get on with it, Ben,’ Lightning Joe interrupted impatiently. ‘Give me the dirt.’

  ‘Well, General, quite frankly, the steam’s gone out of the 3oth’s attack. They took a bad beating at Rimburg yesterday. My guess is that Hobbs’s is stalled for twenty-four hours at least.’

  ‘The Air Corps?’

  ‘No deal, sir. General Hobbs’s doughs got plastered yesterday by the Ninth TAC. He’s already screaming for an inquiry.’

  ‘Sod it!’ Lightning Joe cursed. ‘He would.’

  He ran his hand through his thick hair and wondered whether he should relieve Hobbs or not. He knew he’d have the support of the Army Commander, General Hodges, if he did. Only the day before Hodges, an infantry man who, like himself, had served on the Western Front in France in 1918, had told him that Hobbs was always ‘either bragging or goddam complaining’. Still who would he put in the 30th Division Commander’s place? No, he would leave that problem till after Aachen had been captured.

  ‘All right, gentlemen,’ he snapped to his staff. ‘We’re gonna give the Big Red One all the muscle we’ve got spare. They’ll carry the main weight of the attack, seeing that the 30th is apparently stalled for the time being.’ Pausing for breath so that his staff could get out their notebooks, he began to issue his orders in a staccato bark. ‘Two battalions of tank destroyers from the Corps reserve … fighter bombers from the Ninth TAC … siege artillery from 12th Army Group … extra beef from the 29th Infantry … replace them in the line with the 1104th Engineering Combat Group … Gentlemen,’ he proclaimed sternly, his eyes flashing round their pudgy unsoldierly faces, ‘I want that height – what did Clarence call it at the conference, Ben?’

  ‘Crucifixion Hill, General.’

  ‘Thank you. Okay, gentlemen, I want that goddam Crucifixion Hill within the next twenty-four hours, regardless of the cost, do you understand?’

  ‘Okay, gentlemen, let’s pop to!’ And with an airy wave of his hand, he dismissed them to their wall maps with the acetate overlays and their red and black crayon markings. Stage two of the battle for Crucifixion Hill was under way.

  ‘Fasten down the hatch,’ von Dodenburg ordered. ‘Turret two o’clock. Range seven hundred. Ami Shermans.’

  A sweating Schulze spun his dials rapidly. Graduated lines, blurred and hectic, spun past his right eye.

  ‘Got it yet?’ Von Dodenburg followed the progress of the line of enemy tanks anxiously through his own periscope. Their lone Tiger had to stop the Ami Shermans before they got within firing range of the first line of panzer grenadiers dug in half way up the hill. The panzer grenadiers could take care of the Ami stubble-hopper by themselves.

  ‘On target,’ Schulze rapped, as four black shapes crawled into the bright circle of glass.

  There was a sudden hush as if a giant were drawing in a breath. A 75-mm AP shell, solid-white and slow, tumbled through the air awkwardly towards them. Schulze closed his eyes instinctively. The next instant it had struck the earth fifty metres behind them. The Tiger shook like a leaf in gale.

  ‘Shit in my hat,’ Matz breathed over the intercom, ‘that nearly cut my toenails for me!’

  Furiously Schulze set to work spinning the dials again. The range figures leapt before his eyes. ‘Six hundred and fifty. Six hundred. Five hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Holy straw sack, Schulze!’ von Dodenburg cried. ‘Aren’t you on yet?’

  ‘On, sir!’ he gasped.

  ‘Fire!’

  He jerked the lever. The blast hit him in the face like a fist. He opened his mouth automatically so that the pressure would not burst his eardrums. The gleaming, red-hot cartridge tumbled to the metal deck. Von Dodenburg pressed the fume-clearing apparatus button. The fans started to whirl. A sound of clicking and the great hanging 88 was ready again. Down below the Sherman had come to a sudden stop and was burning furiously. Tiny black figures were racing from it, angry machine-gun fire kicking up spurts of dust at their heels.

  ‘Target one o’clock – range four hundred. FIRE!’

  The turret swung round. Schulze spotted the target at once. An Ami self-propelled gun, heavy with its 105-mm cannon, the only gun the Amis had which could tackle a Tiger. Once they had knocked it out there was a good chance that the rest of the Shermans covering the infantry attack would break off the fight and make a run for it. The long cannon leapt at his side. A metre-long spurt of violet flame shot from the muzzle brake. The shell struck the SP just above the boogies. Von Dodenburg could see the red-hot glow of its impact. The SP rocked wildly from side to side. A man was flung from his position on the side of the armoured vehicle. For a moment it seemed as if the steel giant would overturn. Then suddenly the target disintegrated completely and a whirling mass of metal hurtled skywards.

  The remaining Shermans stopped in panic and attempted to retreat to the cover of the woods beyond. It was a fatal mistake, and Schulze did not waste the opportunity offered him by the inexperience of the Second Armoured Division’s tankers. The 88-mm shell ripped swiftly and surely through the afternoon sky towards the nearest Sherman. It struck it squarely on the glacis plate. Von Dodenburg could see the glow of impact, but nothing happened.

  ‘What the hell—’ von Dodenburg began.

  Suddenly a thin white spiral of smoke started to rise from the Sherman’s turret. Dark figures flung themselves out of the escape hatches, retching and gasping for breath while the flames leapt up greedily in search of anything combustible.

  ‘Oh, my aching cheeks,’ Matz chortled, ‘look at those banana suckers hoofing it!’

  But Schulze saw that there were still two Shermans to be dealt with. Swiftly he swung the turret round, his big hand whirling the dials. The first tank loomed up into the shining circle of glass. He fired. A Sherman disappeared in a sheet of flame. He fired again, bringing the last Sherman to a halt, its left track flapping uselessly in front of it. Schulze sat back, his right eye ringed a deep purple from the lens, the sweat pouring down his brow, his breath coming in great gasps.

  ‘Wow,’ he breathed, ‘that was shitty nip and tuck!’

  ‘It’ll get you another piece of tin, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg said hoarsely, thrusting back his helmet from a brow beaded in a sweat of apprehension.

  ‘Shit on the tin, sir,’ Schulze said thickly. ‘I’d rather have an immediate transfer to the paymaster’s branch!’

  Crucifixion Hill quaked. Thousands of tons of steel thundered from the enormous blast furnaces to the west and deluged the height. Dugouts collapsed
and the panzer grenadiers fought desperately to free themselves, clawing at the smoking earth with bloody fingers. A one-and-a-half ton VW jeep soared high into the air and burst apart thirty metres high. A machine-gun section was caught running across open ground and torn apart as they ran. When the smoke disappeared, all that was left was one lone boot, containing the bloody stump of a leg. The whole place was a bloody inferno of flying metal. The remnants of the 18th Infantry sprang up from their hiding places in the valley below. Screaming hysterically, they surged forward, confident now that all opposition must be dead. Von Dodenburg’s panzer grenadiers waited in their shell-holes and half-destroyed foxholes and let them come on. The veterans of Russia and Monte Cassino2 shammed dead as the first wave rolled over them, so confident that they did not take the elementary precaution of bayoneting the supposed dead. Through their half-closed eyes they could see the mud-encrusted buckled Ami combat boots and hear their hectic breathing. They waited, knowing that the second wave would be at least a hundred metres behind. Then, when they were sure that the stragglers had run by, they sprang to their feet, shouting in wild triumph. Tracer slammed into the backs of the men in olive drab. They turned in horror, realising too late that they had been tricked.

  Behind them the second wave came to a ragged halt. A few raised their weapons to fire into the SS men. Their officers yelled at them urgently, ‘You’ll hit your buddies!’

  It was the opportunity that the panzer grenadiers had been waiting for. They raced forward, carrying sharp-edged entrenching tools, combat knives, bayonets, anything which would cut and slice. In an instant they were in among the trapped Ami stubble-hoppers. Slipping in the mud, they hacked, slashed, clove their enemies, while above them on the height in front of the great wooden cross, their commander watched the slaughter. An Ami staggered, across the churned-up battleground, his hands held to his shattered stomach, intestines escaping from the ragged hole there. A panzer grenadier screamed like a wild man, slicing the face off an American sergeant, soaked in the vivid stream of blood that shot from his tortured mouth. A youth with the Red Cross armband on his sleeve knelt in the bloody mire, his arms limp at his side and allowed himself to be slaughtered like an animal by a great ox of a SS trooper armed with a razor-sharp entrenching tool.

  It was a massacre, ended only by the flight of the handful of survivors and the crash of the Ami artillery recommencing its frustrated barrage. Again the western horizon erupted in flame. The first shell hit the twenty-metre-high wooden cross. It creaked like the mast of an old sailing ship in a gale. Von Dodenburg looked up anxiously. Jesus, suspended there in immobile wooden agony, trembled violently. But the cross still stood there.

  ‘We’d better get on our hind legs, sir,’ Schulze said, eyeing the cross trembling above them. ‘That old boy up there won’t be lasting much longer in my opinion.’

  ‘Go on, Sergeant-Major,’ Matz cried mockingly above the roar of the tremendous barrage. ‘Don’t you know that Jesus loves you? He’ll protect and guard you.’

  ‘Shut up, you carpet-slipper soldier,’ Schulze roared. ‘Or I’ll shove your shitty wooden leg up yer lace-covered arse!’

  Another shell struck the great cross and they began to run for the shelter of the Royal Tiger. Behind them the cross reeled from side to side. Von Dodenburg stopped instinctively and swung round. A jagged crack was running across the base of the crucifix. Jesus’s head, surmounted by its crown of wooden thorns, dropped off and fell into the churned mud.

  ‘Sir,’ Schulze yelled urgently.

  Von Dodenburg did not move. The crack reached the other side of the cross. A chunk of worm-eaten wood fell from Jesus’s tortured chest. The whole structure teetered, dust pouring from the crack. Another shell slammed into its base. Slowly the headless figure began to disintegrate as the cross itself swayed and fell to the ground.

  ‘Great crap on the Christmas Tree, sir,’ Schulze screamed and grabbed the mesmerised officer by the arm, ‘come on! … or you’ll be looking at the potatoes from below in another second!’

  As von Dodenburg pelted to cover with Schulze, followed by the Ami fire, it seemed to him as if the destruction of the great cross symbolised the destruction of their hopes.

  Notes

  1. Nickname given to the 155-mm cannon in the US Army in World War II.

  2. See Leo Kessler Guns at Cassino.

  TWO

  As the battle for Crucifixion Hill raged back and forth, the shootings started in Aachen. In the second week of October, when it looked as if the bitter cold rain would never cease, Donner ordered a Gestapo detachment into the city from Cologne.

  They descended upon the shattered city in their ankle-length green leather coats, mouths full of gold teeth, cheap ten-pfennig working-men’s cigars stuck in their cold lips, and began their reign of terror.

  ‘Defeatists, deserters, looters,’ Donner had commanded, looking at the professional policemen’s faces from which pity had long been absent, ‘shoot the lot of them, without the slightest mercy.’

  A fat granny who had ‘organised’ a bag of coal in one of the ruins; a pale-faced, skinny deserter from one of the stomach battalions; a child who had written ‘surrender now while there’s still time’ on a wall in an immature chalk scrawl; a priest who had dared to ask the Lord’s forgiveness in a cellar sermon for ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – they were all rounded up, heard the old routine statement beginning, ‘In the name of the Führer and the German Folk, this specially convened court sentences you’, and were quickly dispatched by a burst of machine-gun fire at the back of the Quellenhof.

  But that wasn’t enough for Donner – ‘that godless Devil Donner’, as the frightened inhabitants of the cellars and ruins called him behind his back. He took to shooting prisoners himself, maintaining that it was criminal to waste more than ‘one bullet on such defeatist rabble at a time of crisis like this’.

  He wandered the city, followed by his sinister guard of Gestapo men, selecting his victims at random, maintaining that, even if they were innocent, they would serve as a warning ‘to the rest of these filthy Catholic traitors’. An army padre from one of the stomach battalions, with purple tabs and crosses on his collar instead of the usual Wehrmacht eagle and swastika. ‘Come here, Pope! Why aren’t you at the front with the rest of your battalion?’

  The priest’s face contorted with fear at the sight of Devil Donner and his leather-coated, squat henchmen with the machine-pistols cradled menacingly in their arms. ‘But, General I have just brought a convoy of wounded from my battalion down here to the field hospital,’ he pleaded. ‘My commander specifically instructed me—’

  ‘Shoot him!’ Donner barked and, without another word, turned his back on the ashen-faced padre.

  An ugly girl was sitting in the rubble of her shelled house staring vacantly at nothing, her legs spread apart so that passers-by could see the soft white flesh of her thighs above the shabby black stockings.

  Donner and his men found her. ‘What are you sitting there for, woman?’ he snapped coldly. ‘Have you no work to do at this time of crisis?’

  The girl stared at him blankly.

  Donner sneered. ‘A complete idiot. Result of too much inbreeding in this area. Bad blood – the lot of them. Shoot her!’

  As ‘Pistol Paul,’ the fattest of the Gestapo men, named because of his twin pistols, began to drag her away into the ruins to carry out the order, she started to cry. But she did not cry like young women normally do; her cries were those of an animal going to the slaughter. A single shot rang out from behind the cover of a shattered chimney stack. Pistol Paul ran his hand swiftly up her dress as she crumpled to the ground, licked his lips with pleasure at what he found there, then ran back to join the murder squad.

  And so the slaughter of the civilians went on all throughout that terrible week of October. Yet even Donner could see that, despite his reign of terror, the physical and moral defences of the city he had sworn to hold were beginning to crumble. Both civilians and soldiers
within the ruined city moved slowly and seemed indifferent to commands, even when those commands signified their own execution. Their faces had become pinched. Their glazed eyes sunk deep behind protruding cheek-bones, many of them just stared apathetically into space, dragging their feet leadenly behind them in the streets.

  As the Big Red One cut off road after road leading into the city from the nearest railhead at Juelich, food became scarcer. By October 12th the daily ration of the men in the line became one can of ‘Old Man’ and half a loaf of canned pumpernickel per two men. The rear echelon stallions managed with half that. The civilians weren’t fed at all.

  But despite Devil Donner’s heartless shootings, a hectic secret life went on among the ruins of the smoking city. When von Dodenburg came down to Aachen to report to Donner, Matz and Schulze seized the chance to visit the latter’s private whorehouse. Their stomachs empty, they were drunk within minutes on the shot SA man’s supply of cheap Korn.

  ‘Off with the rags!’ Schulze roared drunkenly, tearing off his own oil-stained black uniform until all that was left was his helmet, pistol belt and boots. ‘And get those pearly gates ready! I’ve limped all the way here!’

  ‘So I can see,’ the big blonde said with mock coyness. ‘Oh, put it way before I faint!’

  ‘Go on,’ laughed Matz, unstrapping his wooden leg and pausing momentarily to slap her heartily across her broad buttocks. ‘You’ve seen more of those than I’ve had hot dinners!’

  ‘Hands off,’ Schulze threatened, swaying drunkenly. ‘That’s my bride.’

  ‘Your bride,’ Matz sneered good-humouredly, still fiddling with the straps of his wooden leg, attached to the stump of his knee. ‘That Gerti of yours has been bride to half the shitty Wehrmacht!’ Schulze hit him playfully.