Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Twenty-Six

December 23, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Lepont. Saturday, 0530 Hours.

Section Eight had worked steadily through the early morning darkness. Trankic and Schmitzer with acetylene torches and hacksaws had cut the four machine guns from their yokes in the mobile mount and with assistance from Farrel and Solvis had carried the heavy weapons across the windswept crown of Mont Reynard, boots slipping on the frozen rocks, the cold metal tearing at their fingertips.

Under Docker’s direction they set up the .50s at natural strongpoints on the precipice, wedging them into forked outcroppings of shale approximately fifty yards on either side of the dug-in and reveted cannon. The muzzles of the machine guns and the ammo drums were concealed with underbrush, and the firepower of both these strongpoints was supplemented by bazookas and grenades.

As the faint morning light came over the valley, Docker knew they were running short of time. They had eaten nothing, not even breaking for coffee, but they still had not planted the dynamite charges, and Docker checked the rising sun as he carried a blasting machine out to the right flank, where Sonny Laurel and Kohler were cutting fusing wire into hundred-foot lengths.

At the revetment, Trankic prepared the dynamite for the insertion of electric caps, his muscular hand and wrist twisting a wooden punch into the brittle end of the sticks, driving the pin deeply into the hard-packed explosive. When three were ready, he lashed them together with heavy black friction tape and handed them to Docker, who attached an end of fusing wire to electrical detonator caps, inserted one into each of the holes Trankic had drilled into the dynamite, clipped the unattached ends of wire to the blasting machine and checked the hand plunger, the test-pilot light and the charging switch. Then, carrying the taped bundle of explosives under his arm and the coils of wire over his shoulder, he waved to Trankic, who was now standing at the opposite flank, a small figure in the hazy mists.

When he saw Trankic settle to his knees and go over the side of the hill, Docker started down the slope himself, crouching to take advantage of natural cover, clusters of iron-hard bracken and frozen clumps of bushes still bright with pips and berries. He crawled and slid headfirst a dozen yards, then stopped to rest, his chest and stomach numb with snow that had soaked through his woolen shirt. When his breathing slowed, he studied the area where he intended to place the charges, a level bed of rock about thirty yards below him. Raising himself on his elbows, he studied the floor of the valley which was quilted with white clouds, the tips of fir trees studding this screen like big green spools.

The Tiger Mark II was almost completely submerged in these ground mists, only the massive turret and cannon visible through the white layers.

In Baird’s theory, the Tiger II would attack either of the machine gun positions, and it was Docker’s job on this flank — and Trankic’s on the other — to anticipate its route up the mountain. He looked at the machine guns above him and moved eight or ten yards to his left, traveling like a crab on his knees and elbows to place himself at last on a direct line between the tank and the guns.

He saw Laurel and Kohler watching him from the crest of the hill, their helmeted faces framed by the machine gun barrels, and for an instant he was shocked by their ravaged appearance, until he realized they all must look like that now, dirt and fear and exhaustion a common mask.

Docker started down to his target area, a rough ledge of rock that would give the tank treads a solid grip for the final thrust up and over the top of the hill. Stretched at full length, he worked carefully toward it, freezing motionless whenever his body created a betraying spill of snow and shale. When he reached the flat shelf, he planted the lashed bundle of dynamite behind a small outcrop of rock and covered it with snow and matted brown grass. He then rested for a moment, feeling his sodden shirt begin to stiffen against his body.

After making a last check of the detonator caps, he started back up the mountain, rapidly playing out the fusing wire and aware now of the growing daylight and the black muzzle of the big cannon covering the steep slopes of Mont Reynard.