Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Thirty-Four

May 8, 1945. Near Ludendorff Bridge on the Rhine. Tuesday, 1300 Hours.

The war ended for Section Eight on the banks of the Rhine a dozen miles from the Ludendorff railroad bridge where it spanned the river at Remagen.

There were eight survivors from the original unit. Sergeant John Trankic, corporals Ed Solvis and Harlan (“Tex”) Farrel, privates Chet Dormund, Guido Linari and Shorty Kohler. Corporal Schmitzer had been transferred to an inactive unit in England to be processed for an honorable discharge. The eighth survivor, Buell Docker, was in command of Dog Battery’s second platoon since Lieutenant Whitter had been assigned to an administrative post at Battalion headquarters. The group was again at full strength with the addition of seven privates from a redeployment depot near Paris.

On the opposite side of the river lay the ruin of an industrial town, now a waist-high crust of twisted girders and powdered mortar and brick, flattened and compacted by months of aerial bombardment and artillery fire. Only one feature in that dismal landscape had escaped destruction from Allied bombardment; a tall, black smokestack remained standing, rising like a dark exclamation point above the heaps of rubble. It had not gone completely unscarred, however; a shell fragment had scored a hit near the top of the chimney, creating a narrow hole there like the eye of a needle.

Shorty Kohler called to tell Trankic the battery jeep was coming toward their position.

Docker parked on the roadside and walked to the revetment, the men gathering around him as he distributed mail and packages. Trankic put two canteen cups on the sandbags and splashed whiskey into them. Farrel unhooked the cup from his cartridge belt but Trankic said, “Tex, you’re too young for this stuff.”

“Goddamn it, I’m practically a married man.”

“When were you in Lepont?” Docker said to Farrel.

“Just last month. I stopped by Jocko’s place on the way to Bonnard’s. The damndest thing, sarge, I mean lieutenant, he found that big old dog of ours. It was lying by the stove like it owned the place, and I saw the schoolteacher. She was with her husband...”

Trankic sipped his whiskey and stared across the river. “That goddamn smokestack bothers me.”

“What bothers you about it?” Docker said.

“I don’t know, unfinished business maybe.”

“She told me to say hello to you, sarge,” Tex said.

Docker leaned against the revetment and looked at the river, the surface broken in delicate patterns by the hazy sunlight. There was a nice finality in thinking of her at ease in La Chance, her husband beside her, the bombs and enemy soldiers only a bitterness in the past, and Radar, taking a soldier’s rest in front of the big iron stove...

Kohler came down the riverbank from the jeep and joined the others standing around with Trankic and Docker. There was a strange look on his face.

“Hey, listen to this, you guys,” he said. “The fucking war is over.”

“Yeah, says who?” Trankic said.

“I just heard it on Docker’s radio. The guy on the radio says it’s all over.” Kohler looked at Docker. “I just heard it, on the radio in the fucking jeep.”

Chet Dormund let out a whoop of laughter and clapped his hands together, then subsided almost immediately, it being apparent even to him that no one else shared his mood.

Linari said, “Hey, Shorty, you sure you heard it right?”

“Go listen to it yourself,” Kohler said. “Why should he lie about it? Get it through your head, Guido. It’s over.”

Docker walked to the jeep and fine-tuned the radio. As the men joined him, a British announcer was describing the scene in London’s Piccadilly Circus, his voice broken up by static and lost completely at times in the sound of church bells.

They listened to an announcer speaking in French from Paris, and a U.S. Armed Forces reporter repeating the first comments on the cease-fire from General Eisenhower in France and President Truman at the White House. There were bursts of music and a recapitulation of the sequence of events by Armed Forces announcers, details of the German surrender and snatches of interviews with soldiers and civilians in the streets of London and New York. In a final interval of windy silence, there was a hush, an almost reverent stillness, and then, suddenly and jubilantly, came the sound of the big bells tolling from Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame in Paris.

Docker went back to the cannon and listened to the thin music of whistles drifting toward them now from captured German cities on both sides of the Rhine. He lit a cigarette from Karsh’s lighter with First Army insignia on its sides — a square black A on a gray field — and looked at Trankic.

“Let’s take care of that unfinished business now.”

“I guess we’d better,” Trankic said.

Picking up a clip of ammunition, Docker climbed onto the loading platform of the cannon. Tex Farrel joined him inside the revetment and secured the lever that locked the cannon into the directional apparatus. Trankic adjusted the azimuth and elevation scopes to the smokestack, and the barrel swung swiftly around to focus on it.

Docker looked across the river and studied the thin patch of daylight at the top of the chimney. “What about it?” he said to Trankic.

“What about what. Bull?”

“Think we could put a few rounds through that hole up there?”

“Sure,” Trankic said, and turned the operation wheels slowly, bringing the cross hairs of the sights in line with the jagged hole at the top of the smokestack.

The rest of the men had crowded around the rear of the revetment. “You guys are fucking gonna see something now,” Kohler said to the recruits who were bunched together in defensive isolation from the veterans.

“They’ll see it but it’s not like the wretched way it was,” Dormund said.

Docker slammed his foot down on the firing pedal. The sound of the cannon was all around them, the glowing tracers describing high arches of fire as they crossed the river toward the smokestack standing above the debris on the opposite shore of the Rhine.

When the first six rounds of ammunition, tracking each other at fifty-yard intervals, flashed through the circle at the top of the black chimney, there was a cheer from the soldiers, and another when the projectiles curved to the ground thousands of yards beyond the river to explode like strings of big firecrackers.

Docker called to Trankic, “Let’s take it down now!”

Trankic fed the adjustments into the director and the gun barrel dropped sharply, its flared muzzle zeroing in on the base of the smokestack, and when it locked there Docker hit the firing pedal and another stream of tracers soared over the river.

They struck the base of the chimney, the warheads exploding in rapid bursts, and the length of the stack shuddered as if the ground beneath it had twisted violently, and then the huge chimney began to tumble and fall in graceful patterns as slowly as if it were melting toward the ground, the bricks detaching themselves from the main shaft and spinning lazily through smoke rising from the exploding artillery shells.

Docker put the cannon on safe and listened to the sound of bells and whistles in the winds and watched the huge smokestack collapse in powdered heaps along the far bank of the river.

When the last of the explosions had come like winter thunder through the settling dust and smoke, when the air was clear again. Docker and his men saw that the distant stretches of earth were flat as a man’s hand from the silver shores of the Rhine to as far as they could see into the heart of Germany.