Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Twenty-Four

December 23, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Lepont. Saturday, 0100 Hours.

Private Edward Solvis sat hunched in the front seat of Docker’s jeep, protected from the winds by a blanket and a tarpaulin pulled around his shoulders.

He warmed his gloved hands around a canteen cup of coffee, and when he felt heat and life in his fingers, took a notebook from his pocket and began to bring his diary up to date.

His life as a soldier had been a time of profound change for Solvis and from the date of his induction, he had resolved to keep a complete written record of it. The weeks of training and range firing in the sweltering humidity of a Georgia summer, he had put that down. And shipping out from Boston at night in an atmosphere charged with secrecy and tension, all that was in his notebooks, as was the invasion and the sound of guns on Beach Red and Beach Tare... all fully recorded in his neat, precise handwriting, because Solvis realized with a sure intuition that these adventures would become the literal peaks of his existence, and that if he survived the war the rest of his life would serve only as a vantage point from which to look back on these dangerous and uniquely alive years...

Now he wrote: “It’s after midnight, about one o’clock. The usual snow and wind. Docker told us about meeting with the German officer, Colonel Jaeger. We know they’ve shot and killed hundreds of unarmed prisoners at Malmédy, so surrendering (this is Docker’s point) would be pretty goddamn stupid. But something isn’t kosher here and Docker knows it. There’s no way we can stand off a Tiger tank. So what are they waiting for?”

“We could fire point blank at that tank with our .40 and not even dent it. Maybe time’s working for them. Could be Bastogne is gone and the Germans are on their way to Paris. That colonel won’t risk casualties because he doesn’t have to. Kind of ironic to risk your life in a mopping-up operation that doesn’t mean anything.

“Docker’s got Linari, Trank and Laurel on the edge of the hill with bazookas and grenades. They’ll cut loose when and if the tank makes a move, so at least we’ll know it’s coming. I’m monitoring the X-42, but haven’t had a signal for a couple of hours. The last one sounded like an RAF crew down east of Frankfurt, that’s all I could get. I took Baird some coffee a while ago. He asked me for something to write with. Maybe he feels this is a last chance for a letter to somebody. A girl or his family. Everybody knows now who his father is.”

Solvis heard a whisper of static from the X-42 but as he fine-tuned the frequencies, the sound faded to a windy silence. He tried several times to pick up the elusive signals, then began writing again:

“Thinking about Baird made me decide to put down some thoughts of my own. But I don’t really have any ‘last thoughts,’ about the bank or Davenport. Which is kind of strange. I worked and lived there seven years but the things I remember could just as well have happened to another person. This seems to be the only important time of my life. Not heroic or anything, that’s not it, but it means something. I know I’ll never forget Gelnick and the others. His body is wrapped in a tarp pinned down with rocks on high ground in the woods. What I keep thinking about is why he couldn’t save himself, why he just froze like that...”

Solvis glanced over what he had written and saw that some of the words were already blurred by the melting snow.

Tex Farrel and Jackson Baird walked across the crown of Mont Reynard through the darkness, stumbling, trying to avoid the stretches of bare earth polished and frozen slick by the winds.

Farrel told Baird to wait at the revetment and went out to the edge of the precipice, where Docker was studying the dark valley.

“Sarge, Baird wants to talk to you. You want to blame somebody, blame me. He asked me if it’d be okay and I said sure.”

“What made you so sure?”

“Because I know what he’s thinking and I figure you’d want to hear it.”

After another sweep of the slopes. Docker gave the binoculars to Farrel and walked to the revetment, where Baird was waiting for him.

He noticed that despite the raw weather and driving winds, Baird was pale, the bruises on his cheeks standing out darkly. The youngster handed him several sheets of ruled notepaper, an uneasy smile on his damaged lips.

“Will you just look at them, sergeant?”

“First, let me ask you something. Before Trank unloaded on you, you started to say something. What was it?”

“Well, I wanted to tell you I didn’t think the tank is after this gun position. There’s too much firepower and rank down there. So it has to be that experimental aircraft we shot down. That colonel is here to retrieve it or destroy it.”

“If that’s true, then why in hell doesn’t he get on with it? Why not just knock us off and complete his mission?”

“If you’ll look at those notes, sergeant, maybe you’ll see what I mean.”

Docker nodded and snapped on his pocket flashlight and in its slender column of illumination saw that the sheets were covered with diagrams and penciled notations in Baird’s cramped, precise handwriting. After reading them twice and studying them for another moment or so in silence, he looked at Baird. “Where’d you get the specifications on the Mark II?”

“Some I knew from before, some I remembered from ID manuals in basic training. They could be off a fraction of an inch, but not enough to make a real difference.”

Docker spread the pages on top of the revetment wall and secured them against the tugging winds with his helmet and leather gloves.

“It could work, sergeant. I know it.”

Docker rubbed a hand over his head and felt the snow-flakes melting in his hair.

“Maybe it could, Baird.” Still, Docker felt little conviction about making the decision facing him, and worse, he wasn’t sure he even had the right to make it. A battle plan that could cost them their lives and this hill, that’s what Baird was proposing — Private Jackson Baird, a distraught eighteen-year-old whose knowledge of warfare had come almost completely from books and pictures... With his plans they would be facing a Tiger Mark II commanded by a field-grade officer who had probably been leading tanks and men for a decade or more... Docker hadn’t been deceived by the German colonel’s talk of linguistic priorities and Goethe and Schiller. Another reality was represented in the gold clasp Jaeger wore on the left breast of his tunic, the Nahkampfspange with its oak leaves and swastikas, the close-combat decoration awarded only to soldiers who had survived fifty hand-to-hand encounters with the enemy. He had seen that clasp when Jaeger looped the silk scarf about his neck, and he had seen only one before — on the torn jacket of a dead commander in the Afrika Korps...

Docker now used a pencil to trace the diagrams on the pages, checking the distance Baird had estimated between various points to their position. And watching the sergeant, it seemed to Baird that the inside of his head was as white as the snow spinning around them, a billowing expanse streaked and colored with names and memories. It was a remembered childhood sensation, the springs inside his body coiling painfully with anxious thoughts of examinations and grades, muscles tightening at the prospect of not making the cut on athletic squads or failing to hold fire when hen birds were walked up in the meadow by his father’s gunning parties, dreading the fear of hearing his shotgun go off without a single cock bird in the sky above them, scarlet against the clouds. His constant effort to measure up to somebody’s else’s standards had always trapped him between what was expected of him and what he could accomplish on his own, suspending him between equally demanding, and impossible, alternatives... He recalled now regiments and flags and medals and battles he had studied as a child in his dormer room on the third floor of their home in Virginia, turning pages of spidery maps and brilliant pictures until he fell asleep, and always knowing that the morning would be gloomy or sunny depending on how accurately and rapidly he answered his father’s questions at breakfast about those yellowing manuscripts and engravings—

“Couple of things I’m not sure about,” Docker said, and Baird felt his heart pounding in tense anticipation, as it might have when Jonathan Baird turned from the sideboard, shoulders and silvery head silhouetted against the frosted windows to say, “What you seem to forget about Grant, son, is what he learned at...” or “The element of surprise on the battlefield means very little unless it creates chaos. Don’t confuse surprise with the merely unexpected...”

“There are just too damned many assumptions here,” Docker was saying.

“But they’re all logical, aren’t they?”

Baird’s theory was that the reluctance of the German commander to attack was based on two factors: One, by what he did know about the strength of their gun position. And two, by what he didn’t know. According to Baird, it had to be assumed that the German tank crew knew there was an antiaircraft cannon on the top of Mont Reynard. Nonetheless, they couldn’t risk a frontal attack because of a structural weakness in their tank’s armor, a weakness noted in specifications Baird had remembered from United States Army manuals.

He had written out these specs on one of Solvis’ ruled sheets of notepaper. They read: “Panzerkampfwagen VIB, Tiger Mark II with Porsche turret; Weight: 80 tons; Crew: 5. Height: 10 feet, 6 inches; Width: 12 feet, 5¾ inches (with wide tracks) and 10 feet, 8¾ inches (with narrow tracks). Length: 36 feet, 8 inches. Engine: one Maybach HL 230 P.30 inline, 600 hp; Speed: 30 mph on roads and 12 mph cross-country; Range: 106 miles on roads and 75 miles cross-country; Armament: one 8.8cm KWK43L/71 gun (88-mm cannon) with 80 rounds, and three 7.92-mm machine guns with 5,850 rounds; Armor: hull front 150-mm (6 inches), turret armor, 200-mm (8 inches), decking, sides and rear armor: 100-mm (4 inches).”

Baird had underlined the final specification with double pencil strokes.

“BELLY ARMOR: 40MM (1-¾ INCHES).”

“If he comes straight up the hill at us, he’s got to risk—”

“Yes, goddamn it, I can see that much.”

“Then the rest of it makes sense. The German officer doesn’t know what else we’ve got up here. Wellington said all warfare was just finding out what’s over the next hill. You can see his problem. He can’t attack our center, not with real confidence, and he won’t risk attacking our flanks because he doesn’t know what we’ve got in reserve. That’s why he’s trying to con us into surrendering. My father told me once—”

“Baird, will you forget about Wellington who’s been dead a few hundred years? And your father who’s a million miles away in the Pacific?” Docker tried to light a cigarette but the tobacco was soggy and wouldn’t burn. He threw it aside and said quietly, “Okay, what did your father tell you?”

“He said he could look at the order of battle on a map and guess the grade of the officers who’d planned it. The higher the rank, the stronger the reserve — that’s what my father told me. Generals, he said, always keep a lot of strength close to their headquarters. So if we show that German commander everything we’ve got, flank the cannon with our machine guns, he’ll think we’re committing all our resources to defend the edge of the precipice. That kind of recklessness is what a field-grade officer would expect from a gun section with noncoms in charge.”

“Incompetent fuck-ups.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, I did. Okay, we make him think we’re throwing our whole reserve onto the line. Which gives him the option of attacking our machine guns, which are no real threat to him. That about it?”

Baird let out his breath slowly. “With the dynamite, that’s about it, sergeant.”

“Yes, let’s not forget that little item.”

Docker studied the pages spread on top of the revetment and realized he was almost hoping to find a flaw in Baird’s proposals. They were dangerous, of course. God-damn, they were dangerous, but the longer he analyzed them, the more it seemed they were so simple and logical that they had at least a prayer of working. Still he hesitated, feeling the wet snow on his bare head and wishing to Christ he’d had enough sense to put his cigarettes in an inside pocket where they wouldn’t have got soaked in this weather... Finally he said, “I’m not sure we’ve got enough dynamite.”

“We do, sergeant.”

“How do you know that?”

“Tex asked Laurel to check the ammo dump before we came over here.”

Docker nodded and looked at his watch. “I’m not sure we’ve got enough time left, but there’s only one fucking way to find out.”

He waved to Farrel, and when the Texan came running toward him, shouted over the wind, “Get the rest of the guys up here. Tell them to snap ass.”

Docker braced himself against the sleeting blasts and looked at the faces of the men in Section Eight who, except for Dormund and Linari, stood in a loose formation in front of the revetment. Linari and Dormund were on the firing seats of the cannon, leaning forward over the cranking handles to hear what Docker was saying.

“Our only chance is to immobilize that tank,” he said. “If we can stop it, we’ve got enough firepower to handle the crew when they come out of the turret. Baird has an idea how to do it. I’ll spell it out for you, then we’ll talk.”

When he finished, Trankic said, “Are we cutting it too fine. Bull?”

“If they hit us at first light, that still gives us about three and a half hours.”

Trankic rubbed his jaw, his hand making an abrasive sound against his whiskers. “We cut the machine guns with blowtorches and hacksaws, maybe we can make it. No problem setting them up on this side of the hill. But without tripods, wedged into rocks, they ain’t gonna have a three-sixty field of fire.”

“What about detonating caps and fusing wire?”

“We’re talking about maybe forty yards on each flank, we got plenty.”

Schmitzer said bluntly, “You guys are acting like it’s all settled. Don’t I get something to say about this deal?”

Docker looked at him. “All right, Schmitzer. Make it fast.”

There was a deliberate challenge in Schmitzer’s eyes, and anger in his voice. “You say make it fast, that’s what bothers me, Docker. What’s the point of going a mile a minute when you’re talking about something that could get everybody killed?”

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“Maybe I should ask the Boy Scout here.” Schmitzer stared at Baird. “Tell us, kid — what happened the last time you saw German soldiers.”

“Shit! We don’t need this,” Farrel said.

“Listen, goddamn it! I ain’t trying to make anybody look bad. I know how few heroes there are, how many guys shit their pants when a shell goes over.”

“Then get to the point,” Docker said.

“I’m saying we’re up here with a popgun for a cannon, and some rifles and grenades that couldn’t stop a snowball fight. And we’re going up against a Kraut officer and the biggest goddamn tank the Nazis got, and we’re using battle plans figured out by” — Schmitzer swung a long arm around at Baird — “by an eighteen-year-old kid whose only experience comes from playing with lead soldiers and reading a lot of shit about war in his playpen.”

“If I’m right, does it matter where I learned it? I’ll bet you that—”

“You’ll bet what?” Schmitzer said. “Next month’s pay? A three-day pass to Paris? You’re betting our lives.” Schmitzer turned to Docker. “Here’s another goddamn thing you haven’t mentioned. We don’t have to surrender to them Krauts. And we don’t have to stand here and let ’em blow hell out of us either. We can walk. Docker, we can get the fuck off this hill. Take our rifles and fade into the woods till they get what they want and get the hell out of here. That way nobody’s a hero, nobody’s a coward, but everybody’s alive.”

“I don’t care how close it is to Christmas,” Docker said, “we’re not giving them that kind of present.”

“Why the fuck not? It’s just another goddamn hill and you know it. Who cares now about those hills in Africa and Sicily you and me got our ass shot up taking? There’s nothing there now but rag-head Arabs and old ginneys walking up the trails through donkey shit. There’s comes a time when there’s enough of them hills. And that’s where I’ve got to.”

Docker thought fleetingly of jokes he’d heard before they went to war, when most Americans wanted no part of it, and comics in nightclubs made elaborate routines out of nothing but place names, demanding to know who in hell wanted to die for places called Minsk and Linsk and Pinsk and Cracow and Gdynia. Names you not only couldn’t spell but couldn’t pronounce, couldn’t even find on maps, full of people with beards who drank sour milk out of leather gourds and slept with goats and wouldn’t know what to do with an American toilet except maybe wash potatoes in it...

“It’s our hill now,” Docker said. “That’s what makes it different, Schmitzer.”

“Yeah, and for my old lady a couple of thousand square miles of the Pacific Ocean are different,” Schmitzer said. “That’s where my brother bought it on the Lexington. She’s got a telegram on the wall, and under it she wrote the latitude and longitude where the Lex went down, the Coral Sea, twenty-five thousand feet. Latitude fifteen degrees and twelve minutes south; longitude one hundred fifty-five degrees and twenty-seven minutes east. They welded steel plates over portholes to protect blackout. My brother got it when an explosion ripped one of those plates out and took the top off his head. There’s no grave markers there. Nobody’s ever going out there in a fucking rowboat and blow taps over him.” He looked hard at Baird. “Fm not trading my life for your cowboys and Indians.”

“We can handle this job with just five men, Schmitzer.” Docker looked at the group near him and beyond to Linari and Dormund. “I want four volunteers. Sound off.”

Dormund shouted, “I’m with Docker, and don’t you wretched bastards ever forget it.” Solvis and Tex Farrel moved away from the revetment to stand with the sergeant.

“Come on. Bull,” Trankic said. “What’s this volunteer shit? Like you always said, we ain’t a goddamned debating club.”

“Okay, pick yourself a detail and get to work.”

“Count me in,” Laurel said, and hurried to join Trankic.

Baird looked expectantly at Docker, who said, “Sure. What did you think?” Schmitzer stood alone, not moving.

“Schmitzer, you can take off if you want to,” Docker said. Then without any particular emphasis, he added, “But I think you’ve got a stake here, too, and it’s more than a few yards of rocky real estate.”

Schmitzer felt the words like blows. He forced himself not to look at Sonny Laurel, who was saying something to Farrel and Baird, his voice threaded with laughter and excitement. And Schmitzer wondered with a sharp fear how much Docker had guessed, because he did have a stake here, just as much as the other guys. If all the shit you read in the papers was true, they were fighting for what they loved and believed in. And they were proud of it. Well, so was he... Schmitzer allowed himself to look steadily at the boy for a last time, studying the lively eyes and full lips brushed with fleeting snowflakes, knowing that what he wanted so badly he could never have beyond his own fantasies. And yet — the thought was painful and bitter — if what he felt never contaminated anyone else, there might be for him the thing the priests were always talking about, even the rummy priest who told them about his brother — the condition of forgiveness and the state of Grace... He held on to the instant until he saw that Docker was frowning at him. He silently whispered good-bye to the boy and said, “I might as well volunteer, too, sarge. Make it fucking unanimous. I’ll get the ammo belts off them machine guns, Trank.”

Swinging his rifle across his shoulders, he walked from the revetment toward the crest of the hill, and within seconds his hulking shape was lost in the darkness and mists.