by Dean Hughes
“What are you thinking, Heinrich? I know you have something on your mind.”
“No. Nothing important.” He looked at his wife and then looked away quickly. She had to know that he was up to something. What he wanted to tell her was that he wouldn’t let Peter die; he would do what he could. But he still wasn’t sure he would get his chance.
Chapter 8
Alex and his squad were crowded into a cellar in the little Dutch village of Veghel. Artillery was pounding the town in a steady rhythm. A Dutch girl, a teenager, and her little brother and sister were huddled together in one corner, and all three of them were crying, sometimes praying. The mother, close by, was holding a terrified baby boy, about a year old, who was crying incessantly in spite of all the comforting the mother could give. The father, in his farmer’s overalls and tall rubber boots, sat next to his wife on the dirt floor and stared straight ahead. When the crashing noises came close, he sometimes whispered to his children, calmly, but Alex saw in him a kind of fatalism, his eyes seeming to say, “If it comes, it comes. What can I do?”
E Company had retreated to Eindhoven from Neunen under the cover of night and then had been trucked toward Uden. The attempt to widen the salient–the Allied-held ground–had failed, but the 101st was trying desperately to hang onto the main artery of their operation, the road that soldiers had begun to call “hell’s highway.” Some of the trucks had made it through Veghel and had probably reached Uden, where a counterattack was expected at any time, but Alex’s squad, along with the rest of the platoon, had come under heavy fire. The men had had to jump from their trucks and find cover wherever they could.
Now artillery was zeroed in on the town, and German fighters were making repeated strafing runs. The highway had led to hell itself, it seemed, and Alex wondered whether there was any hope of getting out. He had never heard such a furious, constant cannonade. The house trembled from the concussions, and dirt shook loose from the floor above. The air was so filled with dust that it was hard to breathe.
And all the while the poor little baby, frantic with fear, continued to scream, and the other children sobbed. Alex knew how frightened he was himself; he felt sorry for these kids, who must have been terrified by everything going on around them–including the intrusion of all these rough-looking men. He remembered LaRue and Beverly when they were younger–the way he still thought of them–and wondered how they would have dealt with a war in the streets of Salt Lake City.
Every time a shell hit close, it seemed that the next one would surely take them all. Alex watched Howie, who was sitting next to Alex on the ground with his arms on his knees and his head on his arms. He seemed still, as calm as anyone could be under the circumstances, but Alex could see that he was shaking all over, panting more than breathing, grunting when the shells hit close. Curtis was on the other side of Howie, and clearly he was frightened too, but he seemed to be in better control. He kept glancing at Alex, giving little nods, and a couple of times he patted Howie’s back. “We’re all right. We’ll get through this,” Curtis would say.
And then the house took a hit. There was a terrible crash upstairs. Dirt and dust flew, and Alex heard timbers twist and tear, dishes fall. The ceiling wrenched, trembled, but held. The baby screamed with terror and clung to his mother, and the mother, in spite of herself, screamed too. There were a few seconds of confusion as everyone instinctively curled up and waited, but then it was over, and in spite of all the dust in the air, everyone was still alive and safe. For the moment, it didn’t seem to matter much what had happened to the house.
Alex had gotten used to the rhythm of the artillery shells, knew about how much time would pass between each little bombardment–the shells always coming three at a time. When the usual interval passed, then doubled, he felt himself breathe a little easier. The airplanes seemed to be gone too. But after a few minutes, reality began to set in. Artillery was for softening up a position. When the artillery stopped, the tanks, with troops, usually followed.
Alex waited five or six minutes and then said, “Okay, men, we have to get out of here. The attack is going to start. We’ve got to create a perimeter.”
“It’ll be tanks,” Pozernac said, without emotion.
“I know. Let’s go.”
The men got to their feet and picked up their weapons. Alex walked over to the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. She and her husband nodded. They didn’t understand the words, but they seemed to know what he was saying. The woman was still patting the baby, whispering to him. Tears were on her face. The man nodded and said something in Dutch. It sounded much like German, and yet Alex couldn’t follow it. What he sensed was that the man was relieving him of blame, saying it couldn’t be helped. But Alex knew their circumstances were now becoming clear: their house was blown apart, and the Germans might soon be returning. They had paid dearly, and yet, from all appearances, they had gained nothing.
Upstairs, Alex was glad to see that the house was at least holding together. One wall had caved in and the upper floor was hanging into the kitchen, but maybe there was some way to salvage the place. Alex didn’t know, nor did he have time to think about it. As he stepped from the house, out through the hole in the damaged wall, he saw Lieutenant Owen running toward him. “Thomas, take your men and establish a position straight down this street to the west. Get your machine gun in place. Do you still have that bazooka?”
“Yeah. But not much ammo for it.”
“Okay. If tanks come at you, you’ve got to hold your position and not fire too soon. We can’t waste the shells. I’ll send a 60 millimeter mortar with you, too. We need to put up all the fire we can–and make the Krauts think we’re still in good shape.”
“All right. We’ll do what we can.”
Alex led his squad to the edge of town. He found a little orchard there, and he told the men to dig in as fast as they could. He didn’t have to tell them twice. All the men pulled their entrenching tools off their belts and began shoveling furiously. The earth was soft, but the water table was high. Alex and Howie dug as deep as they could, all the while glancing across the fields toward a nearby hill and watching for the attack. At about four feet, water began to seep into the bottom of the hole, so they stopped digging.
Alex was surprised not to see tanks by then, or troops. But then the artillery opened up again. Alex and Howie dropped down into the hole. “What’s going on?” Howie shouted over the noise. “When’s the ground attack coming?”
“The Germans let up long enough to draw us out of the cellars. Now they’re hitting us again. It’s a smart trick.”
“We should have stayed at the house,” Howie said. His voice broke a little. Alex thought of his brother Gene, when he was a little kid, the way he would pretend he was mad sometimes when he was really just scared.
“We didn’t know. What if they had rolled into town with tanks?”
Howie said nothing more. The two of them sat in the water that was now a couple of inches deep. The rhythm of the artillery returned, the shells pounding in threes again. But now the Germans were changing their aim with each barrage, moving their target to the perimeter, where forward observers must have been directing them. Alex could hear, feel, with each round of shells, that one of the guns was moving its aim closer to the orchard. Before long the shells were crashing in among the trees, jarring the earth. The concussion would send shock waves through the air, sounding in the trees. “Keep your mouth open,” he yelled to Howie. “So your ear drums don’t pop.”
“They’re going to get us!” Howie shouted. “They’re getting closer. Let’s get out of here!”
“No. Just stay in the hole. That’s the safest place.” But Alex hardly knew whether he believed it. He wanted to jump and run himself.
Howie had curled up in the bottom of the hole, filling much of the space. Alex bent over him, staying as low as he could. He knew that a shell would have to hit them, almost direct, to get them. This soft earth would absorb a shell pretty well. But a direct hi
t seemed more of a possibility all the
time, as the shells hit so close that the ground around them trembled.
After each barrage, Alex could feel Howie, under him, take a deep breath and relax just a little, but as the seconds mounted, he would pull in tight again, getting ready for the next crash. And then it would come: the flash, and an instant later, the booming explosion, and the blast of the concussion, like wind, sucking the air out of the hole. And Howie would gasp, even though Alex knew he was trying hard not to. Alex was feeling the same terror, the silent seconds the worst because of the anticipation, and the explosions always bringing relief for a moment. But he knew something Howie didn’t. Alex never admitted it to himself, except at times like this, but he actually expected to die. He prayed every day that he would be allowed to live, but when the fire began, he found that he couldn’t pray. The shelling seemed something even God couldn’t stop–or at least didn’t. And sooner or later the odds had to catch up.
On and on, the crashing continued. Trees were torn from the soil, dirt pelted down on them, and the blasts vibrated through the ground. Two or three times the concussion was so close it sucked the air from Alex’s lungs, left him limp and panting. When the barrage finally stopped, he felt sick to his stomach, exhausted. Howie’s words sounded right when he gasped, “I can’t go through that anymore, Sergeant. I’d rather just die and get it over with.”
Alex was crouching now, looking from their hole toward the trees on the hill beyond the town. “Remember what I told you,” he told Howie. “Don’t think about it. Just take what comes and do the best you can.”
“Do you get used to it?”
“No.”
When no tanks appeared after a few minutes, Alex said, “I’ve got to check on the men. I’ll be right back.”
He pulled himself out of the foxhole and ran through the orchard. The men in the squad had been sprayed with dirt and broken tree limbs, but no one had taken a hit. What he saw in their faces, however, was the same exhaustion, the same fatalism, he was experiencing. Duncan and Campbell had been through more of this than anyone, and they were together. Duncan smiled, but not with any joy. “Having a nice day?” he asked.
“What do you think they’ll do now?” Alex asked.
“They’ll check us out. They’ll show themselves enough to see how strong we still are. And then they’ll hit us with more of the same. They don’t have to sacrifice a lot of men to get in here. They can sit back and hammer us. We don’t have any artillery to return fire.”
“I don’t know when we’ll get any help, either,” Alex said.
“Get ready for a long haul, Deacon.” Duncan was still wearing the helmet with the bullet hole. He had pounded in the rough edges, but that was all.
“What do you think happened to the rest of our company–the ones who got through here?”
“They’re probably getting shot up in Uden. I wish we were all together. We’d have a lot better chance.”
Alex heard the hopelessness in Duncan’s voice, but he didn’t respond to it. He ran back to his own foxhole. Howie had tried to scoop some of the water out of the hole with his helmet, but he had accomplished little other than to make a muddy mess of his helmet.
In a few minutes Alex heard a Jeep and turned around to see that Owen had stopped and hopped out. Alex waved, and Owen ran to him. He knelt by the foxhole and said, “We’ve got to expect an attack now.”
“I know. We’re ready. What’s holding them up?”
“I don’t know. They may be playing games. They might hit us with more artillery first, but they’re running out of daylight hours. If they’re coming with tanks, they’ll have to do it soon. Did you take casualties in this last round of fire?”
“No. What about the rest of the platoon?”
“We lost some men in a house in town, and two men took a hit in a foxhole. But we’ve survived pretty well. We just have to keep holding our own.”
“Is there any way we could pull out after dark and make it to Uden? We’d be a lot better off if we could get back with the rest of the company.”
“We can’t leave and let the Jerries cut the road. We have to hold out overnight. We’ve got tanks coming in the morning, and air support.”
“I hope this is worth it. Are the Brits getting through?”
“You mean to Arnhem?”
“Yeah.”
“Thomas, I thought you knew. We didn’t make it.”
“What do you mean?”
Lieutenant Owen held his hand up to shade his eyes, and he scanned the horizon. Then he crouched low again. “I don’t know the whole story. From what I’ve heard, the Limey paratroopers held the bridge for a couple of days, but the armored division got stopped. They couldn’t make it to Arnhem, and the paratroopers lost the bridge.”
“Then what are we fighting for?”
Owen seemed to have lost some of his mass over the past few days. He looked smaller, less formidable. His field jacket was covered with dirt, his face prickly with dark whiskers. He still had that “big kid” look about him, with the gap between his two front teeth, but his eyes were as empty as the craters in the mud Alex could see all around. “Thomas, we’re fighting for our lives,” Owen said. “We’ve taken control of this territory, and now we have to hold it. Maybe reinforcements can push in from Belgium, up this road, and we can eventually make the operation work. But the surprise is over. The quick run into Germany didn’t happen. Nothing turned out the way the generals hoped it would.”
Alex was taking long breaths by now. He knew that the big brass moved the troops around like pawns on a chessboard, and it wasn’t the place of those pawns to make the decisions, or in most cases even to know what was going on. But this whole operation had been sold to the men as a quick end to the war. Now it appeared to have been for nothing, and yet the price, in lives, was far from paid.
“Look, the road is just as important as it ever was. Everyone along this highway is dependent on it staying open. It’s our source of supplies. So we have to fight for it as hard as ever. When the attack comes, we have to hold on. There’s nowhere to run to anyway. The Germans are all around us.”
Alex nodded. He understood. “We’ll be all right, sir,” he said.
“If they come at us, we can’t give an inch. We can’t be the weak link.”
“Yes, sir.”
Owen stood up and walked away. Alex took another good look at the hill, the trees, and then he looked at Howie.
“All this is for nothing?” Howie said.
Alex shrugged. “I guess it was a gamble somebody thought we had to take,” he said.
Howie was facing Alex, very close. His eyes were fixed, as though the terror of the artillery attack were still clinging to him. “But think how many guys are dying out here.”
“Howie, we can’t think about that. Somebody else makes the decisions. What we have to do is hold this perimeter right here in front of us.”
Howie nodded, and Alex could see he was trying to accept all this, toughen himself, but all the color was gone from his face, and his lips were pale, almost white.
It wasn’t long before the artillery began again, and the two had to hunker down in the foxhole, now four or five inches deep in water. The shelling didn’t last very long this time, but when it ended the tanks appeared: four big Tiger Royals. They rolled forward relentlessly.
Alex yelled to his men, “There’s nowhere to go. We’ve got to stop these guys.”
Just behind the tanks were troops, moving cautiously, hunched over and making short runs, then dropping down. Alex waited until the tanks were close–maybe two hundred yards–and then he shouted, “Start the machine-gun fire. Duncan, are you ready with that mortar?”
“Yeah.”
“Go after that first tank.”
In just a few seconds the first mortar shell fired with a thumping sound, and the shell exploded close to the tank. The tank hesitated for a moment but then came forward again. Pozernac was firing his m
achine-gun by then, tracer bullets flashing through the air, the fire slowing the ground troops but not stopping them. The tanks were separating now, spreading out in a horizontal line. One of them had zeroed in on the orchard and was coming straight at Alex’s squad.
“Campbell, are you ready?” Alex shouted
He heard nothing from Campbell. The noise of the machine gun, and now the rifle fire, was too loud. Alex hoped Campbell was taking aim with that bazooka. But on and on the tank continued, its tracks now audible above the other noise, squeaking, clanking. Alex thought Campbell was holding off until the last moment, to hit the thing at close range.
Or maybe the bazooka was jammed. Nothing was happening, and the tank was almost on top of them.
And then the bazooka fired, with a flash, and the shell crashed against the tank, low and left. It didn’t break through the armor, but Campbell, either by luck or good sense, had hit one of the tracks. The big Tiger twisted to the side, only one track still pushing forward. And then the gun began to swing toward the orchard. Alex fired his M-1, pointlessly. He was expecting an 88 shell, from close range.
He saw Campbell, running straight at the tank–as he had before, back at the barn in Neunen. He was not thirty feet away when he finally dropped onto his chest, aimed, and fired the bazooka again. The tank fired at the same moment. The shell blasted through the trees, but when Alex looked up again, he saw that the tank was engulfed in smoke. The bazooka, at close range, had penetrated the armor. Campbell was up and running, returning to his foxhole. As far as Alex could tell, he was all right, and the tank was dead in its tracks.