The Devil's Shield (Dogs of War)

by Leo Kessler

  ‘And the sewers?’ von Dodenburg interjected harshly, wishing the young officer would get to the point, for time was running out.

  ‘Blocked and filled permanently with some sort of gas,’ he said despondently, letting the empty canteen dangle down between his mud-stained knees. ‘For what my opinion is worth, sir, I think we’ve had it – there’s no way out.’

  Schwarz looked as if he were going to protest. But von Dodenburg shook his head. Kleinbier was like most of his men – absolutely exhausted, out on his feet, kept going simply by the Wotan spirit, living off nervous energy. He bent over the bloodstained map of his position. His force had been crowded into an area of two hundred square metres of ruins and rubble set along a line of what had once been the Monheimsallee behind the Quellenhof. On both sides the Amis were crowding in on him down the Krefeld and Julich strassen. It was obvious that the Amis pushing up from the rear via the Peterstrasse would coordinate their attack, with the final push coming from between the two heights. It was obvious too that it would be only a matter of hours before that final push came. Probably at dawn, he told himself; the Ami generals were not very imaginative about the time of their attacks; they always seemed to stick to the old dawn routine.

  He stared at the map while the others crowded in the tight, candlelit cellar, watched him tensely, wondering how their CO was going to get them out of the trap. There must be a way out, he told himself. There had to be – over one hundred and fifty men’s lives depended upon it!

  Suddenly he remembered what his old tactics teacher had told them at the SS Officer Academy at Bad Tolz before the war: ‘When faced with an impossible situation, gentlemen, there is only one way out – to disappear up your own arshehole – somewhat smartly! You don’t just wait on your fat bottoms for the enemy to attack. How do you do it? You attack into the centre of the enemy’s attack force and, if you’re lucky, disappear before he can, recover. The disadvantage – you hit the full weight of the enemy. The advantage – you catch him with his knickers down.’

  Thus the long-dead Major von Arnheim. But how did one apply his ‘disappearing arsehole tactic’, as he had called it to the present desperate situation? How? Von Dodenburg racked his brains, while the cellar rocked to the Ami fire.

  ‘Kleinbier,’ he broke his silence, ‘come over here and look at the map. Here.’ He pointed to the green shaded area to the right of the Wingertsberg near the Julichstrasse, which he estimated would be the extreme left flank of the coming Ami attack. ‘What did you see there?’

  The young officer’s face, which had brightened when von Dodenburg had called him, fell again. ‘No good, sir—’

  ‘I’m not asking your opinion, Kleinbier,’ von Dodenburg snapped angrily, ‘just what you saw.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, a minefield, sir, one of our own, which has fallen into the enemy’s hands. It’s covered by machine-gun nests – here, here and here.’

  ‘Infantry?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of. But the Amis don’t need stubble-hoppers out there. They have the mines and the machine-guns on fixed lines of fire. They wouldn’t expect …’ Kleinbier’s voice trailed away, for von Dodenburg was no longer listening. He had found the arsehole he had been looking for.

  The final barrage was tremendous. It had been going on unceasingly since midnight. Now to their right, where the Quellenhof lay, the sky was a dull red so that everything to their front stood out starkly. Von Dodenburg looked at the dark outlines of the wounded who had volunteered to stay behind to man the machine-guns so that the Amis would not suspect that they were abandoning their positions.

  ‘Thank you, lads,’ he whispered, ‘and the best of luck!’

  ‘You, too, sir,’ answered a corporal who had lost his right leg. ‘Don’t worry about us. We know that the Wotan’ll come back.’

  Von Dodenburg felt the hot tears blind him momentarily. ‘Yes, yes,’ he lied hastily, ‘we’ll be back, lads.’

  A hand reached out and clasped his. Then they set off through the smoky gloom with the burnt grass brushing against their rag-muffled boots. To their right a slow Ami machine-gun opened up. White tracer stitched the darkness. But the slugs went off into a southerly direction, way off them. A hundred metres. Two hundred. Still no enemy reaction. Suddenly they heard the alarming chink of metal on metal. They dropped as one, hearts beating like trip-hammers, sweating forefingers curled round the triggers of their weapons. For a long time they crouched there, scarcely daring to breath. Then Matz, up front with a small patrol, crawled towards them.

  ‘All right, sir,’ he whispered softly, ‘Ami mg dug in about twenty metres to your right. My lads have got it covered. Just take it nice and easy and we’ll get by it without trouble. The Amis look as if they’ve got their heads down for the night.’

  The mg nest with its snoring Amis was behind them. They edged their way out of the grass into a shell-shattered wood, where the twigs cracked and snapped under the muffled boots like breakfast cereal and slapped at their faces viciously when the man in front forgot to keep hold. They passed a group of their own comrades, sprawled out in a heap, arms flung about in careless abandon, the white hush of the tracer painting their dead faces in a ghastly hue. The men filing by their comrades killed in the final counter-attack carefully looked away, as if they did not want to be reminded that the same fate could well overtake them soon.

  Suddenly von Dodenburg stiffened and held up his arm. ‘Halt!’ he hissed. Matz was barring his way, standing next to the familiar skull-and-crossbones sign with the frightening words written beneath it: ‘ATTENTION – MINES!’

  ‘We’re here, sir,’ Matz said unnecessarily.

  ‘And the Ami mg nests?’

  ‘As far as we can make out, sir, there’s one immediately ahead of us, perhaps a hundred and fifty metres off, and one to the right there. Look, there it is!’ Matz pointed to the sudden red blaze of muzzlefire, followed an instant later by the white morse of tracer.

  ‘Good. Thank you, Matz.’ Von Dodenburg turned round. ‘All right, take cover. The volunteers up here.’

  As his men dropped gratefully into the brush, the six men who had volunteered to clear the mines pushed through their comrades, bayonets at the ready. Von Dodenburg stripped off his equipment and handed it with his Schmeisser to Schulze.

  ‘Hang on to that.’

  ‘Be careful, sir,’ Schulze said anxiously. ‘If they’re magnetic—’ helplessly, he shrugged. ‘Then good-night, Marie!’

  ‘Don’t be an old woman, Schulze,’ von Dodenburg answered, with more assurance than he felt, ‘All right, the rest of you follow me.’

  Von Dodenburg clambered carefully over the rusty, twisted barbed wire which marked the start of the minefield and put his right foot gingerly to the ground. He pressed down, feeling the sweat spring up unpleasantly all over his body. Nothing happened. He put his other foot down. Again nothing. Drawing a deep breath, he advanced six metres, counting them out carefully, so that the first two men clambering over the wire behind him could hear. He stopped. There were three of them on the wrong side of the wire now.

  ‘All right,’ he whispered, ‘this is the drill. We’ll advance with myself in the middle, prodding the ground at every half a metre. If you hit a P.2S, remember it could well be wired in relay. If it’s a Teller,2 leave it.’

  ‘And if it’s a magnetic?’ Kleinbier, one of the two leading volunteers, asked the question von Dodenburg dreaded.

  The CO licked his dry lips. ‘Stop, move back and leave it to me. I’ll have a go at it. I’ve got nothing metallic on me. I might have a chance of defusing it.’ ‘Might’, a cynical little voice echoed within him. He ignored it by a sheer effort of will. ‘All right,’ he ordered, ‘let’s move out.’

  Behind them the other four men waited to cross the wire. They would act as reserves and check the verges of the path cleared, just in case a mine had been overlooked.

  Sweating like frightened pigs, hardly daring to breathe, each fresh step made only after what seemed an
age of deliberation, they advanced in a six-metre-broad line, testing out the soft ground, pace by pace. For what appeared to be a long time, nothing happened. Von Dodenburg’s heart began to react normally again. The sweat started to dry on his tense body. Then the man to his right froze.

  ‘Mine,’ he gasped. Behind them the reserves froze in the footsteps of the leaders.

  Cautiously the volunteer who had discovered the prong of the mine protruding out of the earth, bent and began to sweep away the surface soil with the side of his hand. There was no sound save his harsh gasps as he probed the earth, the sweat pouring from his brow in streams.

  ‘Teller,’ he breathed in relief.

  ‘Shit!’ someone cursed, his voice a mixture of anger and relief. They pressed on a little faster now. They found another Teller mine and another. Von Dodenburg could see that a pattern was emerging. Whoever had laid the mines facing towards the Ami position had apparently covered the last few metres with antitank mines. Would that mean they would soon bump into the anti-personnel ones? Five nerve-racking minutes later, Kleinbier stopped, whispered a hoarse warning and dropped to his knees. His hands moved rapidly.

  ‘S-mine,’ he whispered.

  Von Dodenburg breathed out. The S-mine was easier to deal with than the P.2S and all his men had been trained to lay them and pick them up again. Hastily Kleinbier cleared away the soil from the surface of the little anti-personnel mine, filled with deadly steel balls which sprang out to waist height and had gained the name of ‘deballocker’ from the troops. Very carefully he ran his hand round its sides. Nothing. Slowly he slid his fingers underneath it to check if there were a matchbox fuse3 lying there or a wire leading to another mine a few metres away.

  ‘Anything?’ von Dodenburg asked hoarsely.

  ‘No,’ Kleinbier answered, his voice equally hoarse, ‘thank God!’

  Slowly they progressed through the minefield, with the reserves playing out white tapes behind them within which the rest of the Wotan followed, tense and expectant, knowing that if the Amis spotted them now they were finished: helpless sitting ducks, crowded together in the narrow, mine-free lane driven through an open field, devoid of cover.

  They bumped into a line of P.2Ss, wired in relay. They spent fifteen terrible minutes, while the volunteers took the mines apart bit by agonising bit, until they came to the thin glass detonator, which seemed to slip about in their sweaty fingers, as if it were covered in fine grease.

  Von Dodenburg and another couple of men took over the lead while the original two slipped to the rear, their hands trembling. Now the whole western sky was a blood red hue. What was left of Aachen in German hands was burning. From their own section of the front, the machine-gun fire had ceased now. But they had no time to reflect on the fate of their wounded comrades; their own situation was too desperate. Von Dodenburg stopped suddenly. A cold shudder of fear ran through him. His fingers had touched the glass dome of a magnetic mine! He opened his lips to utter a warning. No sound came. He licked them and swallowed hard.

  ‘Magnetic,’ he croaked, ‘get back!’

  The other two backed hurriedly. Behind them the advance came to a ragged halt.

  ‘Take it easy, sir,’ Schulze’s voice floated forward urgently.

  Praying that he had nothing metal on him still, von Dodenburg’s fingers groped around the glass dome. ‘As if you were up your beloved’s knickers,’ their instructor at mine school had explained the technique coarsely. It came up. Slowly … slowly, he began to turn it to the left. One slip and the whole thing would go up in his face.

  The sweat was dripping from his brow now, almost blinding him. Hardly daring to breathe, he held on to the glass dome with his right hand. Carefully he reached out his left hand, his fingers trembling wildly, feeling as clumsy and as thick as pork sausages, and ran it around the mine. Nothing! Still holding on to the dome, he tried to force his hand underneath the mine. He couldn’t!

  ‘Anything wrong, sir?’ Kleinbier asked urgently.

  ‘Ach, hold your water!’ he snapped angrily, his nerves almost at breaking point now. He bent down so that his face touched the damp grass. With his teeth, he began to tear away tufts of it, pressing down on the edge of the mine with his chin. It started to move. The fingers of his left hand moved underneath it, seeking fearfully for other wires, booby traps, knowing now that if the mine went off it would blow his face apart. Millimetre by millimetre they crept forward, meeting no opposition – no wire, no fuse-plug, no book-match fuse. Nothing.

  For a moment he lay there, all energy drained out of him. Then he deliberately pulled himself together. With agonising slowness, he drew the mine out to reveal it in all its man-made ugliness. For a moment he longed to give it a great kick and send it flying. But there was no time for such outbursts of emotional relief. Carefully, he placed it to one side, as far as his arms would reach.

  Spitting out earth and grass, he called sharply, ‘Get that marker tape up here on the double, will you!’

  The volunteers moved forward quickly.

  ‘Kleinbier, get that mine out of the way!’

  ‘Sir!’

  Their snail-like progress began again while Kleinbier picked up the mine and let the hushed troopers slip by him, their eyes averted from the deadly little instrument. The lieutenant laughed drily.

  ‘Don’t look like that, lads,’ he said softly, ‘It can’t harm you now. It’s just a ten-pound piece of useless scrap—’

  Lieutenant Kleinbier, nineteen years of age, handsomely blond, with the body of a professional athlete who had never had a girl in all his life, suddenly erupted in a terrible violet burst of flame. The thick crump came a fraction of a section later. His face shattered and he disintegrated. Blood, bone and flesh flew everywhere.

  ‘Over there!’ a frantic voice screamed in English. ‘In the cruddy minefield!’

  An American machine-gun started to chatter. Tracer cut the night wildly. Lead sprayed the minefield. Another mg joined from the right, its fire more accurate. A soldier behind von Dodenburg clapped his hand to his shoulder suddenly and went down screaming. Von Dodenburg came to life.

  ‘Damn the mines!’ he roared. ‘Run for it!’

  Completely unarmed, he began to pelt towards the Ami positions. The men hesitated. Before them lay twenty metres or so of uncleared minefield.

  ‘Come on,’ Schulze yelled angrily, ‘Move, you dogs, do you want to live for ever?’

  The cruel exhortation had its effect. They stumbled forward. Another mine exploded, scattering bodies everywhere. It didn’t stop them. All around von Dodenburg, his men were stumbling, falling, sobbing with fear, as they pelted towards the flash of the mgs, which indicated both death and safety. A round Ami grenade hissed through the air towards him. He dodged like a startled horse. It went off behind him and flung him in a crater, lined with two of his men, heads hanging limp, their guts ripped open and spilled out. His hands were bathed to the wrists in the bloody mess. He sprang up, screaming, following his panic-stricken men.

  An Ami helmet loomed up. Someone kicked the GI in the face. He reeled back screaming. The nearest mg swung round on them. A line of troopers were mown down.

  ‘Don’t leave me … please, don’t leave me,’ a frightened voice pleaded. ‘PLEASE—’ Then they were in the American line, kicking, slashing, stabbing, shooting in a crazed frenzy of fear and rage. It was all over in a matter of seconds. Nothing could stand up to that terrible attack. A minute later, the survivors had broken through and were running leaden-lunged towards the east and safety.

  Notes

  1. Observation posts.

  2. An anti-tank mine, harmless to a foot soldier.

  3. A spring-loaded fuse shaped like a book of matches. Once the pressure is released, the spring activates the fuse.

  EIGHT

  At four o’clock on the morning of October 21st while the survivors of the Wotan were fleeing eastwards behind the Ami lines, an event took place which indirectly saved them. A telephone call came
from the Petit Trianon at Versailles, Eisenhower’s new Supreme Headquarters, and it was from his Chief-of-Staff, red-haired, ulcer-ridden Bedell Smith.

  ‘Listen, Courtney,’ he told Hodges, who had been awakened at his Spa HQ to take the call, ‘sorry to get you up like this, but we’ve just heard here that Congress is considering Ike for his fifth star.’

  General Hodges was awake immediately. ‘His fifth!’ he exclaimed. ‘He’ll be the first since Black Jack!’1

  ‘Yeah,’ Beatle said shortly, feeling his ulcers begin to act up again. ‘Well, it’d look good if your doughs took Aachen – as of now.’

  ‘Of course, Beatle,’ Hodges agreed. ‘I understand. Will do – and say – give my regards to Ike.’

  ‘Will do,’ Beatle said drily, telling himself that even army commanders fought their battles these days with one eye over their shoulders looking at the publicity boys.

  Hodges got on to Lightning Joe at once. ‘I’m sorry to get you up, Joe’, he apologised, as courteous as ever.

  ‘You didn’t, sir. I was up. We’re attacking at dawn, sir in the Aachen sector.’

  ‘That’s what I’m calling you about, Joe. I want you to get Clarence to release another regiment to Seitz – at once. I want Aachen taken – and I want it taken this morning.’

  ‘We could do it with Seitz’s 26th.’

  ‘I’m not so sure, Joe. At all events, I want to be certain. Remember that the folks back home must be getting a little tired of this Aachen business. It’s been going on for nearly two months now.’

  Lightning Joe told the ‘folks back home’ what they could do with their opinions. But to the Commander of the First Army, he said: ‘I understand. I’ll see to it, sir.’