by Dean Hughes
Alex had noticed the sky, to the east, brightening just a little. He knew they didn’t have a lot of time. The men moved quickly through the trench, which was maybe three feet deep–not deep enough to cover their movement once the sun came up.
Summers stopped and listened several times, and eventually he whispered, “The road is maybe two hundred meters up ahead. I’m going to go forward and scout the situation. Stay here.”
Alex and the others knelt in the ditch, which was muddy but not full of water. Alex felt the tension, the eerie presence of the enemy very near. He breathed quietly, listened, and hoped that Summers didn’t get himself into trouble.
Summers was gone only ten or twelve minutes, but it seemed three times that long. When he approached again, his voice sounded tense. “There’s a machine gun emplacement on the dike, overlooking the road. I think it’s a big MG 42, and I counted seven riflemen alongside it. There’s enough light to see a good silhouette. We need to get up there and take them by surprise. Hurry. The light is coming on fast now. But don’t stumble and make a noise.”
He was off, moving quickly and quietly through the ditch. Alex and the other men hustled to keep up. As they got closer, Summers slowed and crouched even lower. When he finally stopped, Alex figured they were less than a hundred meters away from the machine gun.
Summers slipped back to the men. He whispered something to Campbell, who began to set up his 60-millimeter mortar. When Summers reached Alex, he whispered, “Take the third rifleman from the left. Can you see him?”
“Yes.”
“When I fire, you fire too–and don’t miss him.”
He then moved to Howie and asked him to shoot the fourth man.
“All right,” Howie whispered. But Alex heard the tension in his voice.
Alex got himself into a good position, with his elbows resting on solid ground, and took aim. He knew that Campbell would fire the mortar at the machine-gun position at the same time the others tried to take out the riflemen, and Pozernac would open up with his machine gun. What he didn’t know was how many other Germans were out there in the dark.
Seconds continued to tick by, and Alex watched his target. The third soldier was a dark lump with the dim sunrise behind him, but Alex could see the outline of his distinctive “square” helmet. Alex tried to breathe evenly and keep his sights steady, but his heart was pounding in his ears.
When Summers fired, Alex squeezed his trigger and the dark lump jerked and then dropped over. At the same time, a whole volley of gun fire sounded around him, and all the German riflemen dropped. Alex also saw machine-gun tracer bullets flying high. Just as the bullets dropped into range, a huge explosion tore everything up. The mortar had been right on target, and the German machine gun was gone.
Alex could hardly believe how accurately his men had hit their targets, but small-arms fire–bursts from German machine pistols–began to pop in the night from the other side of the road. “All right, fall back. Quick!” Summers yelled.
The men took off back down the ditch, running hard. When they reached a ditch that angled off, parallel to the road but a couple of hundred meters away, Summers called out, “Turn here. Spread out along this ditch.”
Alex turned into the new ditch and ran hard. He let the men in front of him get far enough ahead to spread out, and then he called to the men behind him, “Take a position. Don’t bunch up.”
A moment later Sergeant Pearce called out the same order to his men. Alex had just dropped down to take his own position when he glanced back and saw a flash of light. He saw Pearce catch the full brunt of an explosion and get thrown backward. Alex knew immediately that a rifle grenade had hit him, but he wasn’t sure where it had come from. A quick volley of fire followed, however, and someone called out, “They were in a culvert, at the road. We put two of them down. One fell back.”
The men stayed down after that, and Alex wondered whether an attack might come at any moment. Maybe they had stirred up a hornet’s nest. He could hear Summers talking on the radio, calling for reinforcement troops and machine guns, but Alex didn’t know how long it might take for more troops to move in.
In a few minutes Summers sneaked along the ditch to Alex. “Thomas,” he said, “Pearce took some shrapnel in the chest–through the lungs. He’s still breathing, but he’s not going to make it.”
Alex nodded, and then he said, “We’re in a bad spot here, Captain.”
“I know. We had to take that machine gun out while we had the chance. But I’m not sure what we’ve got to deal with now. The Jerries have a better position than we do, behind that raised road. If we give them any time, they can head north, get some men over the road, and outflank us on the right. Or they might just come straight at us.”
“It they take us, what would stop them from crossing the dike and heading straight down that road to the battalion CP?”
“Nothing. If we let them get that far, they could overrun this whole sector. The way I see it, just as soon as those reinforcements get up here, we’ve got to attack. We’ve got to stop the Krauts right where they are and drive them back across the river.”
“How bad are we going to be outnumbered?”
“I don’t know. But if they come at us and catch us falling back across this muddy field, we won’t have a chance.”
“That’s right.”
“All right. As soon as we get those troops up here–and let’s hope it doesn’t take long–tell your men to be ready. We’re going to attack.”
Summers slipped away, and Alex continued to crouch in the ditch. He scanned the horizon, looking for any movement.
“Did he say something about attacking?” Howie asked, and Alex heard the panic in his voice.
“We’ve got more troops coming up to help us,” Alex said. “We’ll be all right.” But he didn’t believe it. He figured they were heading into a mess.
It was maybe twenty minutes before the reinforcements arrived, but it was fully daylight by then. There were fifteen men or so, with a Sergeant Scott. Sabin and Ernst had come along with them, and they rejoined Alex’s squad.
Summers pulled the squad leaders together. “Okay,” he said, “we’re going to go straight at that road. That’s the last thing the Krauts expect. Thomas, you take the left flank; Scott, the right. I’ll take Pearce’s men straight up the middle. I’ll have machine guns between our columns, and they’ll lay down cover fire until we reach the road. Once we do, they’ll stop firing and move up with us. So tell your men to fix bayonets, and when you see me move out, we’ll all go together.”
“Bayonets?” Sergeant Scott asked. Alex heard the alarm in his voice.
“We might as well have them ready,” Summers said. “It may come to that.”
Alex felt the adrenaline set his heart pounding. He didn’t ask himself whether this was a good place to die or whether it was worth it; he merely let the scene play out in his mind, and death seemed the most likely end to all this. He went back to his men, described the plan, and in the same tone Summers had used said, “Fix your bayonets.”
He saw the foreboding in their eyes, but he offered them no comfort. They wouldn’t have believed him anyway.
When the machine-gun fire began, Summers was the first soldier up and running. Alex took off hard at the same time. He slogged through the damp earth, moving slower than he wanted to. At any second he expected mortars or gunfire, and he wanted to get across the open field.
Summers outdistanced everyone, even though Alex was pushing to keep up. Alex was still twenty meters behind when he saw Summers jump onto the road and begin to fire his carbine. Alex made the leap a few seconds later, and he immediately saw a huge number of Germans on the other side–at least a hundred–massed tightly together and face down, forced to the ground by the cover fire from the machine guns.
But they were rising now, as though in slow motion. They were wearing heavy winter coats, and they made big, slow targets. Some were twisting to run, to escape the fire that Summers and Al
ex, and soon the others, were spraying at them.
Some stood and aimed, and others ducked away, but they were falling . . . falling . . . riddled by the heavy fire. And then all were running, slowed by the heavy coats and the muddy earth. More and more were falling. Alex didn’t aim at anyone but kept spraying bullets into the moving mass. Alongside him, he heard men laughing, exulting, shouting their pleasure.
The fire continued for some time as the Germans continued to retreat. Summers called out, “Get that radio up here.”
Alex saw what Summers had noticed. The surviving Germans were joining another group–probably another company–that had already crossed the dike farther to the west. This second group was pouring back over the dike and retreating toward the river. Summers got hold of the radio and barked out orders for artillery fire. Within a minute or so the first explosions began to strike among the escaping Germans, who were moving through the high weeds and marshes, scrambling onto another road, and then running north toward the river.
In a few more minutes Summers got back on the radio and shouted above the noise that he wanted more reinforcements. Alex knew why. Summers was not satisfied to leave that many Germans alive. He wanted to chase them down.
For the present, however, Alex’s men had time to drop down, to breathe. Alex walked along and checked with them. Earl Sabin had taken a bullet in the thigh. He was sitting down, cutting his pants away. He was grunting, puffing, but refusing to complain. Duncan walked over and looked, and then he laughed. “Some guys get all the luck,” he said. “I’ve been hoping for a nice, clean wound like that this whole war.”
But Sabin didn’t laugh. He was staring at his own blood.
As it turned out, four Americans had been wounded, but only Pearce had died. Eleven Germans were soon discovered hiding in some weeds and were taken prisoner. Maybe fifty or so were on the ground, many of them dead. Some of the men moved among them, looking for souvenirs, Lüger pistols, or binoculars. “They’re SS troops,” someone yelled. “We ought to shoot the ones who are still alive.”
Alex walked close enough to look at one of the bodies. He could see that the young man’s uniform, under his coat, was black, and on his collar was the double lightning-bolt SS symbol. No troops were hated more than the Waffen SS, since they were considered true Nazis, not just drafted soldiers. But Alex looked at the face of the boy: square jawed, clean cut, handsome. Hanging from his side was a brotbeutel, a cloth bag that German soldiers used to carry slices of military hard black bread. Alex thought about serving the sacrament in Frankfurt–breaking that black bread into morsels to symbolize the body of Christ.
Some of the wounded Germans were pleading for help now. Alex walked toward one, but Summers called to him, “Don’t get involved in that. I’ve got medics coming up.”
Alex knew what Summers was thinking: A soldier had no business dressing wounds. It was the wrong way to be thinking when the action was about to start again. Alex walked back to Summers. “You did the right thing,” he said. “If they had come across the road before we did, we would all be dead now.”
“I know. They were just getting ready to attack, too. We caught them all bunched up. We got lucky.”
“Are you going after them?”
“Yeah. Just as soon as those other men get up here. I’ve got a platoon on the way. But we’ve got to hurry. I want to catch them trying to cross the river. Keep your men ready.”
So Alex gathered his men together and told them to take a drink of water, and smoke if they wanted to, but not to worry about trying to eat anything. Alex saw the grim look in their faces when they realized they would be making another attack. Howie looked dazed.
When the reinforcements moved in, Summers had the new soldiers share their ammo. This backup platoon was not at full strength, but altogether there were now about sixty troops. Summers told the machine-gun teams to start a base of fire again, and then he had the men, half in each group, begin to leapfrog up the road, covering for each other as they charged. They moved up a few hundred meters and had maybe a couple of hundred more to go to reach the river. But just as they reached the point where a little grove of trees provided some cover, Alex heard the whine of an artillery shell.
“Hit it!” he screamed. He shoved Howie off the road and then jumped off after him. He heard the explosion just a second later, heard the shrapnel whirl over him as he lay on the ground. And then chaos opened up as explosions rained in on the men–mortars as well as artillery. Small-arms fire began, and Alex knew a counterattack was underway. He grasped his steel helmet and held on for a moment, but he knew he had to get his men out. “Fall back,” he shouted. “Now!”
Alex knew the only chance the men had was to get all the way back to the dike, and over, and that was a long run. He jumped up and took off, still screaming at his men to come with him. The artillery fire seemed zeroed in close to the dike. The last hundred yards were chaos. Explosions were everywhere, with mud spattering and shrapnel buzzing in all directions. Men were falling too; Alex saw that, expected to go down any time himself, but he reached the dike, scrambled up and over it, with Howie still close by.
As they reached the other side, they dropped to their knees, thankful for the cover. Alex kept watching the road. Duncan got over the dike, and Curtis, and then Ernst. Alex hoped the others weren’t down. But he and Howie had caught their breaths for only a couple of minutes when artillery shells began to land on their side, and Alex realized they weren’t out of danger yet.
“We’ve got to go again,” Alex shouted to his men.
Curtis was the first to take off. Just as Alex jumped up, he saw Curtis drop. Alex dove to the ground and crawled to him, then rolled him over. He saw blood smeared all across Curtis’s face, but he also saw the cut. Shrapnel had torn Curtis’s earlobe, creased his neck, but it wasn’t deep. “You’re okay, Curtis,” Alex shouted. “You’re okay. Let’s go.”
Curtis nodded and then pulled himself up. He and Alex ran hard again, Howie with them, until they reached another of the ditches that crisscrossed the fields. They jumped in, lay in the mud, and drew in all the air they could get. “We’re all right now,” Alex told Howie. “We’re out of their range.”
But Howie was huddled up, rolled into himself, and he was shaking uncontrollably.
“Howie, are you okay?” Alex asked him.
“No, I’m . . . I don’t know. I’m . . .” He was crying. Alex put his arm around his back, held on to him.
“Don’t worry about it. You did fine,” Alex told him.
Later that day Summers admitted that he had made a mistake. “The Germans were heading back to their ferries. We should have let them go. We didn’t have enough men. I just didn’t count on the artillery power they had backing them up.”
Alex knew why Summers felt so bad. Half the sixty men who had attacked toward the river had come back wounded. None had died, but a lot of them had been torn up with shrapnel, some of them badly. Alex was relieved that he had only lost Sabin who, by now, was probably realizing how lucky he was.
What Alex did worry about was Howie. He was silent that night, and he hardly said a word for a few days after. When Alex would ask him how he was doing, he would say he was okay, but he didn’t look well.
Within a few more days Alex’s squad was put back on the line, back into their foxholes. Rain was still falling off and on, so life was as miserable as ever, and the men knew they could probably expect further attacks from across the river.
The days were full of mud and cold again, bad food, tedium, and fear. At night Alex sometimes led patrols. Every second he was moving about, he expected another firefight. The fact that it didn’t come never made him feel that it wouldn’t. And the artillery fire continued, night and day. Each time it opened up, Alex could see that it was breaking Howie down, one deafening explosion at a time, shaking the will out of him.
One afternoon, after a barrage of shelling, Howie said, “Sergeant Thomas, I can’t stand much more of this. Sometimes I hop
e the next shell gets me, and this whole mess will finally end.”
“Hey, don’t wish that. If it gets you, it gets me.”
Howie was leaning against the end of the foxhole with his knees pulled up close, his arms around his legs. He didn’t smile. He looked thin and pale, and his uniform was caked with mud. He was hardly the same kid who had joined the unit back in Aldbourne.
“Look, Howie,” Alex said, “you’re doing all right. Maybe you’re scared, but you’re doing your job.”
Howie took a long breath and let his eyes go shut. “That ain’t true, Sergeant,” he said. “I don’t shoot.”
“What?”
“I don’t shoot at no one. I’ve never pulled my trigger.”
“You shot at that guy up on the dike, didn’t you? The one Summers told you to shoot.”
“No.”
“You must have. He went down.”
“Someone else got him. Maybe Summers. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t shoot.” Howie was gripping his knees tighter; his arms were shaking. “I told myself to do it. And I aimed right at the guy. But I didn’t fire. I just shut my eyes and waited for all the noise to be over with.”
“Look, Howie, I read somewhere that after battles, the army has checked, and only about half the men have fired their weapons. You’re not the only guy out there with that problem.”
“Maybe so. But guys like us get other guys killed.”
Alex believed that, but he didn’t want to put too much pressure on Howie. “Hey, it’s not natural to want to kill. No one wants to do it.”
“But I’ve got to do it. I know I do.”
“Sure. We all have to lay down some fire at times. It’s not very often that we aim right at someone, like we did at that machine-gun crew.”
“I didn’t shoot at those Germans that were all bunched up together by that road either. Pozernac and Gourley were laughing and yelling, having a good old time. But it was like shooting ducks on a pond. It made me sick.”
Alex wished there were a way to send this kid home. “Howie, how did you end up in the Airborne, of all places?”
