Ordinary Heroes (23 page)

"You wouldn't be the first guy, Captain, who walked behind a bush to take a leak and got a leg blown off instead," a sergeant told me.

Proceeding north, we passed occasional lines of ambulances heading to the local field hospitals. For lack of Red Cross trucks, jeeps had been commandeered, with the wounded strapped on stretchers over the hoods and backseats. Near 4:30, after we began thinking about putting down someplace for the night, we encountered an MP roadblock. A squint-eyed policeman pushed his head all the way inside our vehicle. I removed our orders from the inside pocket of my overcoat, but the MP didn't bother with them.

"Where does Li'l Abner live?" he asked me. "Are you sober, soldier?"

"Answer the question, Captain."

"Dogpatch."

"And what's the name of Brooklyn's baseball team?" He was pointing to Biddy at the wheel.

"The Dodgers," he answered grumpily. "And they ain't no kind of a team neither." Amazingly, that response drew a laugh from the MP and immediately solved the problem. All day, the policeman told us, they'd had reports of German impostors in American uniforms who'd crossed our lines to engage in sabotage, cutting phone connections, removing signs, and occasionally pointing our unit
s t
oward German forces, the same stuff Gita had done to them on D-Day.

"This happens again," the MP said to me, "show them your ID card. Theirs all say 'For Identification Only." Our officers' IDs bore a typo, Indentification,' quickly noted among the newly commissioned as a token of the value of their promotion. Some stone-headed Kraut had been unable to resist correcting the Americans on their English.

We crossed into the First Army zone and spent the night in Luxembourg City, in a hotel being used as rear-echelon headquarters by elements of the Ninth Armored Division. We had gotten farther than we expected, and it looked as if we would reach Houffalize by the next afternoon. I was awakened at about 5:3o a
. M
. by heavy shelling to the north. We would be headed straight that way, and I asked the major who'd arranged our billet what was happening.

"No worries. The Germans like to fire their guns while they still have them. They're not going anywhere. Bradley's pulled VIII Corps back for the time being. We're thin up on the front lines, but the Krauts know they'd just be running right into a huge force if they pushed forward. All this banging won't last more than an hour."

On our way out of town a young bazooka ma
n w
ith a strange accent asked if he could hitch a ride to his unit about ten miles north and climbed in back next to our packs. From a small town in Pennsylvania where they still spoke a German dialect, he was an amazingly cheerful kid, utterly indifferent to the war. He sang us several songs he'd learned at home in a strong, if not always perfectly pitched, tenor, and was in the midst of a ballad about a young lass pining for her lover gone to battle, when the jeep suddenly vaulted through the air aboard a tidal wave of sound and dirt. Next thing I knew, I was in a wet ditch at the roadside. When I looked up, there was a smoking pit in the farm field beside me, probably from a heavy mortar. The jeep was several yards ahead, canted at a thirty-degree angle with the front and rear right wheels also in the ditch. The canvas coverings I'd been thrown through flapped uselessly in the wind, while the young Pennsylvania Dutch boy was nearby in the field, still smiling as he got to his feet. I yelled to him to watch for mines, but promptly discovered that the rocket had fallen out of his bazooka and landed in the mud alongside me. I looked at the shell in a little pool of still water, afraid even to touch it for fear it would arm itself. I was edging away when another shell hit about a quarter mile ahead, leaving a crater that had taken out the road from side to side. The Germans had to be closer than anyone figured.

I yelled twice for Bidwell. He turned out to hav
e b
een thrown only to the vehicle floor, and he poked his head up, none the worse for wear. The jeep was still running, but Biddy looked it over and announced that because of the angle at which the vehicle was pitched, the differential wouldn't let the rear wheels turn. We swore at the thing as if it was a spavined horse, and tried to shoulder it back up to the road, well aware that another shell could land any instant.

A small convoy arrived behind us. The gold-bar lieutenant in charge jumped down from the truck to help, while he sent his sergeant ahead to try to figure how they were going to get past the crater in the road.

"Some hellacious fighting up ahead, Captain," he told me, when I explained where we were headed. "You picked the wrong day for legal work. Looks like Hitler's decided to make his last stand." He suggested we proceed west.

With the help of several of his troops, we got the jeep out of the ditch and fixed a flat on the right rear tire. The bazooka man put his weapon together and climbed onto one of the convoy's trucks, while Biddy and I headed in the direction of Neufchateau. Two of the canvas panels had torn and flapped as we drove, admitting a frigid breeze.

The sky was too low and bleak for aircraft and thus for bombs, but the pounding of heavy artillery was constant. About an hour later, we reached a crossroads, where the roads wagon-wheeled in all directions, beside signs for Aachen, Luxembourg
,
Dusseldorf, Neufchateau, and Reims. Two MP
s s
tood at the center of the intersection, holding u
p e
very vehicle. When one reached us, he asked fo
r o
ur papers, which he examined for quite some time.

"If you're headed north, how come you're goin
g w
est?

I told him about the shelling.

"Uh-huh," he said. "And how long you been stationed in Nancy?" When I'd answered that, he said, "What's the name of the main square there?"

I answered again, but pulled my ID card from my wallet. "See here." Biddy pointed out the word Indentification' but the MP stared as if we'd chosen another language.

"Sergeant, aren't you trying to make sure we're not German impostors?" I asked.

"Captain, all due respect, but I'm trying to make sure you're not a deserter."

"Deserter!" I was offended by the mere notion.

"Believe you me. Yes, sir. If you don't mind my saying so, Captain, those RTC boys," he said, referring to the replacement troops, "they don't know what the fuck to do when the shells start flying. Over in the 28th it seems like half the division has taken off for the rear. I found several hauling along dead bodies, making like they were looking for the medics. Another one told me he was a messenger, only h
e c
ouldn't recall what he was going to tell anybody. And plenty waving their hankies and giving themselves up to the Krauts with barely a bullet fired. I hear close to ten thousand boys from the io6th surrendered to the Germans already. And not just enlisted men, not by any means. We got plenty of officers running from the bullets today, saying they were going to check with battalion."

"Are we talking about Americans?" I asked. "What in the hell is going on?"

"Heavy woods up north. Apparently the whole fucking SS Sixth Panzer was hidden in the trees. Von Rundstedt busted out of there with tanks and artillery, going through our lines like grease through a goose. The VIII Corps is getting a pretty good pasting right now I'm hearing a lot of crazy stuff. Some guys are claiming there are German tanks fifty miles west of here already. We had an antiaircraft battalion in retreat come through twenty minutes ago, and some of the enlisted guys were saying rumor is their orders are to fall all the way back and defend Paris. I'll tell you one thing, Captain, this fucking war ain't over yet.''

We turned north from there, but within half an hour, as the MP had warned, the road was choked with trucks and armored vehicles streaming south in full retreat. Many of these units were in complete disarray, separated from command and driving on only to find safety. We came upon an armored battalion stopped on the side of the road, completely out of gas. A young boy, a buck private, was sitting on a wheel well, crying with abandon, wailing and looking around as if he expected someone else to tell him how to stop. Every minute or so, another soldier gave him a few pats on the shoulder. A sergeant explained that the boy's best buddy had been blown to bits not three feet from him this morning.

Back in the jeep, Biddy said, "Sir, this here ain't no time to be arresting somebody, not in the middle of a battlefield."

"We have orders, Biddy." I really didn't know what else to do.

"I'm just saying, sir, gotta have a way to carry out your orders. Better to hold back here for a day or two till the smoke clears. Wherever the hell Martin was, Captain, he's gotta be on the move now, probably comin right this way."

He was making sense. We headed west again, where we were stopped twice more by MP patrols pushing back deserters. Near dark, we finally arrived in Neufchateau. It was a postcard of a town, with a crush of pretty, narrow buildings and steep streets of cobblestone, but there was an air of chaos. We reported to the rear-echelon headquarters for VIII Corps, in the columned Palais de Justice, where they were receiving grim reports from forward command in Bastogne. Men seemed to be rushing in and out of every office, shouting information that someon
e e
lse immediately screamed was wrong. Several regiments had given up under white flags, while many other units were unaccounted for. Whenever I could get someone's brief attention, his eyes seemed to wander to the windows, expecting to see the German Panzers out there any second. Clerks were in the halls boxing papers, separating what needed to be carried along so the remainder could be burned at the inception of the retreat.

After a long wait in the signal office, I finally got a young corpsman to send a wired message to General Teedle, giving our current position and asking for further direction. Then I conducted a reconnaissance for a billet. I was directed to officers' quarters that had been set 'up two blocks away in the city hall. As I passed down the corridors, looking for an empty bunk, I encountered little knots of off-duty officers, huddled and often passing around whiskey as they talked in suppressed murmurs. No one seemed able to accept what was happening. There hadn't been a day since I'd landed in Europe that the Germans had made progress across a broad front. A fellow who claimed to have seen the latest maps said we'd been suckered too far east, that the Nazis were about to split the Twelfth Army group, dividing the First Army from the Third, and the Ninth from the other two, with pincer actions to follow on the northern and southern flanks. No one knew the limits of today's German advance, but i
t w
as clear they had the upper hand, and several of these officers remarked about earlier reports of Nazi movements that General Bradley had ignored. Every face reflected the same thoughts: We were not going home soon. We were not going to win the war by Christmas, or New Year's, or even Valentine's Day. When I bedded down, I finally asked myself the question that nobody would utter: Were we going to win the war at all?

We were, I thought then. We had to. We had to win this war. I would give my life in order to stop Hitler. And I knew, despite whatever panic gripped the replacement troops who'd deserted on the front, that most of the seasoned officers sleeping in this building felt the same way. I turned off the light and realized only then that I'd forgotten to eat. There was a K ration in my pack, but I was too tired and disappointed to bother.

Light across my eyes woke me a few hours later. My first thought was another explosion, and as I gathered myself I couldn't understand how I had missed the sound. Instead, I found the young corporal from the Signal Corps who'd taken my message to Teedle holding the flashlight against his face so I could recognize him. My watch said z:Io a
. M
. He whispered to avoid waking the other five officers snoring around me in the old office, and led me into the hall, still in my briefs.

"Captain, this signal just came through, sir, labeled 'Immediate Attention." I could see from the boy's face he had read the telegram in the envelope and thought immediate attention was warranted. It was from Teedle, and had arrived in code, the boy said, requiring deciphering by the cryptographers.

Classified Information/Top Secret/Destroy After Reading
OSS states man you seek Soviet spy STOP Arrest top priority STOP Further instruction by radio 0600 STOP

Chapter
15.

JUMP

Te
ed
le never got through on December 17. Many of the Allied communications centers around Saint-Vith had been cut off by the
Germans. Although we were south of there, the remaining lines and relays were dedicated to signal traffic more important than the fate of one man, even a spy, and I spent approximately forty hours on a bench in the VIII Corps signal office, waiting to hear from the General.

In Neufchateau, like many other places, the Signal Corps had established its headquarters in the dusty offices of the PTT--Poster, Telegrapher et Telephones--which was housed in a narrow pinkish building on a corner. Topped by a strange iron cupola, it looked as if it were wearing a helmet.

From my seat inside, I could watch the young women, with their bright lipstick and the sleek hairdos required to fit under their headsets, plugging and unplugging the lines in the tall switchboards. American enlisted men strolled back and forth to keep an eye on them, just as the Germans had been doing a few months ago. Every now and then, civilians would enter to mail a letter or package, which the dour clerks accepted with no assurance that the item would ever get through.