by Leo Kessler
But Seitz was still worried by the town’s sewer system, especially after the surprise attack on his rear echelon had thrown his whole first push off its stride. He ordered that each sewer and cellar be located, however costly it was in time, and blocked off. But how? In the end one of his staff officers came up with a solution. Just across the border at the little Belgian town of St Vith he had discovered a factory turning out liquid cement. Immediately Seitz had General Collins order that its entire production be turned over to military use so that the cement could be poured down each new sewer opening and allowed to harden under armed guard until it presented an effective barrier against any Kraut trying to jump the advancing infantry from the rear.
As for the civilians crowding the cellars of the front-line area, they were not going to receive any kid glove treatment. Watching the first troops move out, one of Seitz’s officers was approached by a hesitant private.
‘Pardon me, sir, I can’t find my officer,’ the young GI said. ‘And we’ve found some civvies in that house over there. We’d like to know what to do with them?’
The major stepped over the dead German, whose dusty boots were sticking into the street from the doorway in which he lay, and looked at the soldier. ‘If you can spare a guard to send them back to the civilian cage, okay. If you can’t, shoot them in the back! That’s what we always did in my old outfit. Don’t take no nonsense from them, boy.’
The 26th was taking no chances whatsoever this time, even if they had to commit mass murder to take the damn city.
By now Donner had transformed what was left of his command into a mass of barbed-wire entanglements, overturned tramcars and trucks, linked together with sandbags as barricades. The shattered houses had been joined together by interlinking tunnels, slits blown into their walls for machine-guns and heavy artillery. Disabled Tiger tanks had been buried into the rubble with only their heavy gun turrets visible. Mines had been strung across all the main approach roads and the rubble in front of the German positions was littered with deadly little butterfly anti-personnel mines.1
The city’s remaining flak had been pressed into service as field guns and each major street was covered by 88 and 20-mm flak cannons, manned by sixteen-year-old volunteers from the Hitler Youth and grey-uniformed girl ‘flak helpers’. And everywhere behind the line Gestapo man ‘Pistol Paul’ and his gang, plus a handful of middle-aged chain-dogs, kept watch lest there were any weakening in the troops’ ‘National Socialist fervour’.
That afternoon, the battle for Aachen became a battle for a shoe factory, the Technical University, a block of offices, the main police station. At the shoe factory, the 26th made a serious mistake. It attacked in the basement and started working its way upwards. By the time the GIs had cleared the first floor, their enemy had burrowed back into the basement again. Once that force had been dealt with, the defenders of the second floor had destroyed the staircases leading upwards. Then they cut holes in the floor and started dropping grenades on the frustrated GIs below.
In the end two staff sergeants scaled the outside of the building, pursued by angry bullets from snipers in other buildings and reached the flat roof in safety. There they knocked a hole in it, poured in petrol and started a flash fire by dropping in white phosphorus hand grenades. The surviving defenders came streaming out, hands raised high, screaming ‘comrade’ to be mown down as soon as they appeared at the shattered door.
That afternoon, as Colonel Seitz reported gloomily to Huebner, ‘Our gains have been measured from attic to attic and from sewer to sewer.’
Huebner remained firm. Before he slammed down the phone in poorly concealed anger, he snapped: ‘John, I want those goddam hills. You’d better get them for me – or you’d better not come back from this push!’
Donner was still worried by the strength and determination of the Ami attack. That evening he ordered von Dodenburg and the two hundred odd survivors of Battle Group Wotan to launch an all-out drive to stop the Americans’ attack along the axis of the Wilhelmstrasse, drawing ever closer to the vital heights.
The German bombardment caught the Americans off guard just before their supper. It lasted only fifteen minutes, but the point-blank fire of the multiple 20-mm flak guns, manned by the boys and girls, shattered the GIs’ nerves. Some broke down and cried. Others vomited the first bites of food and had to be ordered to eat by their officers. Some buried themselves at the bottoms of shellholes, hugging the mud. The battalion commander himself fled into his command post, ignoring the hectic activity all around him, sobbing softly, his haggard unshaven face in his hands.
For a while there was a heavy brooding silence. The officers and NCOs began to rally their nervous men. Here and there, the men finished their hasty meals and started to mount guard in the foxholes.
Suddenly there was a single burst of Schmeisser fire. Someone screamed. The GIs tensed. But no enemy infantry came scurrying out of the ruins, firing as they ran. Instead the mobile flak wagons moved up another fifty yards and with complete disregard for their own safety started plastering the American positions with a blistering hail of 20-mm shells from their air-cooled quadruple cannon. A sergeant tried to tackle one of the flak wagons with a bazooka. He didn’t get ten yards. A blast of ten shells hit him immediately. The GIs could stand it no more. Panic-stricken, their faces white and ugly with fear, the lead company broke, throwing away their rifles and equipment, in their haste to escape that withering fire.
Behind them the commander of the rear company lost his nerve. Firing his carbine wildly into the air, he yelled, ‘save yourselves … to the rear … save yourselves!’
The second company joined the rest in their fear-ridden rush to the rear. The battalion commander tried to stop them, as they came running down the Wilhelmstrasse, trying to outrace the 20-mm shells, pushing and shoving each other in their frantic efforts to escape. But it was no use. Stricken with terror they trampled over the seriously wounded men lying on the bloody cobbles screaming for help. They simply ran by him, thrusting aside his importuning hold. Even when he drew his forty-five and threatened to shoot, they took no notice.
‘They’re completely demoralised, sir,’ he confessed, brokenhearted, over the phone to Colonel Seitz. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in fifteen years in the infantry. There’s no sense in fooling ourselves, sir. Those men are not withdrawing – they’re running away.’
At the other end of the line, Seitz turned to his pale staff officers, listening in awed silence. ‘Charley?’ he snapped, ‘Get on to the goddam divisional reserve. I’m needing a new battalion commander. I’m sacking this guy – he’s broken down completely.’ But the shattered battalion commander never experienced the ignominy of being relieved of his command. At that same moment, von Dodenburg’s mixed force of tankers and panzer grenadiers struck the retreating battalion’s right flank with the dash of the great days of old. Screaming ferociously, the black-clad young fanatics crashed into the fleeing Amis. The battalion commander was shot where he sat sobbing at the phone. His staff were mown down around him. Pausing only to loot the dying bodies of their Lucky Strikes and Hershey chocolate bars, their killers swept up the cellar steps, firing and stuffing the precious chocolate in their mouths as they went.
Here and there, groups of Ami NCOs and officers tried unsuccessfully to stop the surprise German attack. Howling like wild animals, the men of Wotan simply swept them aside. Slashing, stabbing, gouging, firing, they broke up Seitz’s lead battalion mercilessly, leaving behind them a trail of dead and dying Americans. It seemed that nothing could stop them. Two hundred metres, five hundred metres, seven hundred.
‘Christ on a crutch,’ Matz gasped, limping red-faced and panting at von Dodenburg’s side, his belt full of stick grenades, ‘if this goes on, we’ll have the buggers running for the Channel soon!’
But Seitz reacted quicker than Donner had anticipated. He flung his mobile 155-mms into a stop line, risking the great guns without the protection of infantry. At the same time, he
appealed to the Ninth TAC for help.
‘God, General,’ he pleaded with the Air Force Commander, ‘I need air – and I need it now!’
‘But what about your own doughs? I don’t want another unfortunate incident, Colonel. You remember that business with Hobbs’s Thirtieth?’ The General cleared his throat. ‘Can’t risk that.’
‘I don’t give a twopenny damn about the doughs!’ Seitz screamed into the phone. ‘I must stop those goddam Krauts – whatever the cost. Now what about that air?’
He got it. The wild drive ran into the terrible fire of the 155s at two hundred metres range. Here and there small groups of crazied young men tried to tackle the self-propelled guns with their panzerfausts. But once the Ami Lightnings came barreling in at roof-top height, spraying the area with white-hot tracer, they too hit the ground and buried desperately into rubble, out of the murderous fire.
Von Dodenburg’s sudden counter-attack had been an unqualified success. He had wiped out an entire Ami battalion and stopped the main enemy drive for yet another precious day. But the cost had been prohibitive, thanks to American domination of the air. Only one hundred of the desperate young men whom he had led into the attack limped back into the littered courtyard of the Hotel Quellenhof. His casualties had been fifty per cent. Battle Group Wotan would not attack again.
As the Americans continued their attack, morale inside the garrison started to sag. That same night, the Luftwaffe tried to supply the trapped men by parachute. But not one of the ‘Auntie Jus’ reached their objective. A whole Ami anti-aircraft brigade had taken up positions around the city. They put up such a barrage with their 3.7-inch guns that the handful of ponderous three-engined planes which survived the fire turned and fled the way they had come.
Early next morning, the airfield at Cologne tried again. Just after dawn great black Do 242 gliders hissed silently over the American lines and came down to a crash-landing high on the Wilhelmstrasse, their skids bound with barbed wire to shorten their landing, flaps straight down. They crashed and braked to a halt in a cloud of dust, their wings ripped off here and there by the lamp posts. Their young pilots, the cream of Student’s First Parachute Army, sprang triumphantly from their cockpits and crashed open the gliders’ canvas doors to be met by a hail of machine-gun fire. They had landed in the midst of one of the Big Red One’s recce outfits. A few minutes later the excited GIs were running over the pilots’ bodies sprawled extravagantly in the dust to loot the stricken birds.
Another miserable day passed with Donner’s perimeter shrinking more and more. Behind the line the rear-echelon stallions slouched around, bent-shouldered, filthy and louse-ridden, their sunken eyes staring out fixedly from grey unshaven faces. In the line, the defenders crouched in the rubble, blinking all the time to keep their weary, blood-shot eyes open, only firing when fired upon, too exhausted to shoot at the enemy even when he exposed himself carelessly.
The Amis made steady progress round behind the perimeter, eating their way ever closer to the first of the three vital heights. That afternoon the first of the hills surrendered (in spite of Donner’s express command that the one-hundred-man garrison should fight to the ‘last round and the last man’.) Pistol Paul, who had been sent up there to stiffen their morale, put one of his famed pistols carefully inside his gold-toothed mouth, gagged at the oily taste of the barrel and pressed the trigger. To the last, his aim was excellent. When the American intelligence team found him, with the help of some of their new prisoners, the back of his head had been blasted away and he bled to death on the ground in front of their boots, unable to answer any of their urgent questions.
Pistol Paul’s suicide unnerved the rest of the Gestapo men. They went to plead with the Bishop of Aachen to save them, maintaining that they were non-combatants, civilian policemen at the most, whom he ought to give a certificate – any kind of certificate – to give the Amis when they captured the city.
The once despised Bishop looked at their craven faces in contempt. ‘But I’m only a mere – pope, to use your old phrase,’ he told them, between the ever new salvoes from the American 155s. ‘What good would a certificate from me be?’
The heavy-set Gestapo men, who had reigned with club and thumbscrew these last eleven years, their faces shaking with fear, almost went down on their knees in the rubble of the Bishop’s dining-room. But he remained firm and in the end they shuffled out in their ankle-length leather coats, defeated. One hour after Donner had been told of the incident by his own private information service the five Gestapo men had been sentenced and strung up as a warning to the rest by their former companions of the Field Gendarmerie.
Still the rot went on. During the night of the 19th, the garrison of the big bunker at the end of the Lousbergstrasse slipped out under their officers, after being battered by 155 cannon all day, and surrendered to the Amis. In Lousbergstrasse, the civilians came up from their cellars, blinking in the sudden light, and cheered the advancing Americans as if they were liberators, not conquerors.
More and more staggered into the smoke-filled street, as the GIs crept cautiously up each side, weapons gripped firmly in their hands. Ragged, filthy, sucking in the first fresh air they had breathed for days, they screamed: ‘Why didn’t you come earlier? Why did you wait so long to get rid of Devil Donner? He’s killed our children, ruined our homes, starved us.’
‘Aw,’ a red-faced master-sergeant growled, pushing aside a distraught woman, who was screaming directly into his face, ‘go and piss up yer sleeve, lady!’
His platoon commander, a weary young man in steel-rimmed GI glasses, who had the look of a school teacher about him, flashed a warning glance at the master-sergeant and said in poor German: ‘We are glad to be here … to have freed you from the Nazis—’
He ducked rapidly, as a sniper’s slug hit the brickwork a couple of feet from his head. ‘Get that Kraut bastard!’ he yelled.
Note
1. Named thus because of the many ‘wings’ protruding from them, which made them very difficult to defuse.
FIVE
Von Dodenburg’s redhead opened the door of the cellar, knowing that the hammering with the rifle-butts would change to something more drastic if she didn’t. Two Ami soldiers stood there: one tall and thin, unshaven and covered in mud, a carbine clasped in his hand; the other fat, undersized and Italian-looking, the spirit from the looted bottle of Korn stuck in his blouse dribbling down his dark chin.
For a long moment, the two of them gazed at her speechlessly. Even in her dust-covered shapeless dress, there was no denying the magnificence of her breasts, proud and upright despite months of near starvation.
The fat soldier whistled thinly through his teeth: ‘Jeez, Al, get an eyeful of them tits. Wow, is she stacked!’ He thrust a hairy hand into his pocket and brought out a bar of ration chocolate. ‘You sleep with me,’ he said in bad German, leering at her knowingly, his dark eyes flickering back and forth from her breasts to her deathly pale face, ‘I give chocolate – one, perhaps two.’ He held the bar under her nose in what he imagined was a tempting manner.
‘What about me?’ the taller man asked, not taking his hard blue eyes off the redhead.
‘Cos I’m more handsome, you get seconds,’ the Italian-looking soldier said, his voice suddenly thick with lust. ‘Come on, baby, let’s make some beautiful music together. We ain’t got all day, you know. There’s a war on.’ He edged closer to her, still holding the chocolate in front of her nose. She backed away fearfully. The two of them came after her. Al kicked the door closed with the back of his heel.
‘What do you want?’ she asked tremulously.
‘What do you think, baby,’ the smaller soldier asked scornfully. ‘To jig-jig, you Kraut bitch!’ He thrust out a hand to grab her breasts. She avoided his grasp and backed closer to the couch.
‘Aw, quit the fooling, Benny,’ the big soldier said, without taking his cold eyes off her face. ‘Get on with it. What the hell are you waiting for?’
‘I tell
ya, she’s got a hot body for me, Al,’ he said and took a swig of the fiery schnapps. ‘Okay, baby,’ he gasped. ‘You heard what my buddy Al said – we ain’t got all the time in the world.’
Benny lunged at her. She felt his hand clutch the cloth of her dress. She pulled backwards. The cloth gave with a rip. Benny was left there, holding the front of her dress. Her hands flew up to protect her suddenly naked breasts. Al’s hard eyes rested on them greedily for a moment.
‘Get the hell out of my way, Benny!’ he yelled and thrust the other soldier aside with one sweep of his big fist. With the other he grabbed at her dress and pulled with all his strength.
‘Hot shit!’ Benny breathed. ‘She ain’t got no drawers on!’
Al thrust out his big hand again. The redhead groaned with pain and tumbled over the back of the couch, her legs in the air. ‘Grab her arms, you stupid little wop!’ he ordered, breathing hoarsely, his hard face suddenly aflame. Benny dropped his bottle and grabbed the struggling redhead’s arms.
‘No,’ she screamed, ‘please – no!’
The two soldiers ignored her. While Benny held her, Al grabbed frantically at his belt. He dropped his mud-stained slacks. Swiftly he ripped away his khaki-coloured undershorts. ‘Okay, baby,’ he gasped, ‘I’m gonna get you now. Try this one on for size, you Kraut son-of-a-bitch …’
Slowly and painfully she reached for her father’s razor, feeling as if every bone in her body were broken. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of her bruised, swollen face in the little flyblown mirror. She looked away and slumped back on the stained couch. A long time passed while she thought of what the two soldiers had done to her. She flicked open the old-fashioned cutthroat razor and gazed at it lovingly. Outside the guns had started again. But her whole attention was focused on the little blade which gleamed in the flickering light of the candle. After a while she tested it with the wetted tip of her thumb, the way she had seen her father do it as a child. It was all right. Very sharp.
