Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER THREE

On the morning of December 19, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially the Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater but known to the common soldier and the public simply as Ike, summoned his command staff to Verdun.

His mood and those of his high-ranking officers were just as gloomy as the surroundings. The town was gray and drab, the streets filled with slush, offering little sign that it was the Christmas season. There were a few wreaths and swags of greenery tied with ribbon, but they appeared dried out by the winter wind, the ribbons faded.

He had made his temporary headquarters in that French town, in an old stone barracks that dated to at least the seventeenth century. Ivy clung to the mortar along with an air of history repeating itself.

After all, it was near this spot that one of the bloodiest battles of World War I had taken place against German forces, resulting in more than three hundred thousand men killed on both sides. Some of his generals had been young officers back then. Now, twenty-eight years later, the Germans had once again upset the applecart by refusing to be beaten and launching an offensive through the rugged Ardennes region.

The German offensive had taken everyone by surprise. Since coming ashore on June 6, 1944, Allied forces had been making mostly steady progress against the Germans, pushing them across France and back toward their fatherland. There had even been optimistic predictions that the war would be over by Christmas. However, Hitler’s offensive had blindsided the Allies.

The inability to detect any signs of the German plan was a complete failure of military intelligence and downright embarrassing to Eisenhower. The intelligence failure was partly due to the overall assumption that the Germans were on the ropes and incapable of an offensive operation. The complete secrecy with which Hitler’s generals had carried out their plan put it on par with the secrecy surrounding the D-Day invasion itself.

To make matters worse, there were rumors flying that none other than Otto Skorzeny, the daring SS commando, had hatched a plan to kidnap or kill Eisenhower. Perhaps the rumor was far-fetched, but it wouldn’t have been the first time that the Nazis had attempted something so outlandish. Consequently, Ike had been slinking around Verdun, coming and going through side doors, while a double rode around in his staff car.

To say that Ike wasn’t happy might have been an understatement.

“Do you think we can get some fresh coffee around here?” he grumped.

“Right away, sir,” replied no less than a full-bird colonel, who went hurrying out of the meeting room to fetch a fresh pot of coffee.

Ike had looked like hell since the planning for D-Day began, thanks to the stress that weighed upon his shoulders and a lack of sleep. The bad news of the last few hours hadn’t done much to improve his condition.

It also didn’t help that the fifty-four-year-old survived mainly on a diet of cigarettes, black coffee, hot dogs, and two fingers of bourbon nightly. He preferred not to waste time on food and was well aware that his troops in the field didn’t eat any better.

A haze of stale cigarette smoke already filled the room. A couple of the British officers smoked pipes, which only added to the fug, along with the smell of wool uniforms, damp from the rain and releasing the smell of stale perspiration.

The bare stone walls and small windows set deep within them did little to add any sense of warmth to the room, heated by a rusty potbelly stove that burned damp chunks of scrap lumber and struggled to throw off any real heat. Easels displaying maps had been set up around the perimeter of the room, though that was somewhat unnecessary, considering that most of the men here spent several hours daily studying maps and could have drawn these from memory. The tobacco smoke hugging the ceiling continued to thicken like an approaching storm front.

Outside the room, the guard had been doubled as a precaution, with at least two burly MPs standing beside each doorway. They were doing a thorough job of questioning anyone who wasn’t wearing a general’s stars.

Present for the meeting were all the key players in Allied military operations, including Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Omar Bradley, General George Patton, Lieutenant General Jacob Devers, and Field Marshal Montgomery’s deputy, Freddie de Guingand. Conspicuously absent was Montgomery himself, who preferred not to meet personally with those he deemed of lower rank — such as Eisenhower. Nonetheless, it was Eisenhower who was in charge — and who would be blamed if the German offensive proved successful.

Accompanying these men were several staff members. Most prominent among them was the recently promoted Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, who served as Eisenhower’s chief of staff. He was known to all by his nickname, Beetle, which not only was a play on his actual name, but which also reflected his hard-shelled personality. With so many demands for the general’s time and attention, he guarded access to the busy general like an armor-plated sentry.

On smaller matters that weren’t worthy of Eisenhower’s scrutiny, his decisions carried all the weight of the Supreme Allied Commander. Consequently, he was not a man to be trifled with. This morning he looked even more worried than usual, which for Beetle Smith was definitely saying something.

The room filled with high-ranking officers was unusually quiet. The matter of the German counteroffensive was serious business. They all watched Ike expectantly.

It was clear that the Supreme Allied Commander was disgruntled. To start with, Ike disliked the name that the press had given this defensive fight, having dubbed it the Battle of the Bulge. It was an apt description, considering that on the map, the German offensive had created a deep bubble through the Allied lines.

However, Ike thought that “Battle of the Bulge” sounded like a diet plan or, worse yet, a hernia repair operation.

Ike was determined not to turn this meeting into a blame game. He looked around at the room filled with anxious officers. However it had come about, they now had to deal with the situation.

The colonel returned with the coffee, and Ike nodded his thanks.

“Gentlemen, let’s get started. We have some business to discuss,” he said. He nodded toward a young officer, who hurried to close the double doors to the meeting room. “The Germans are apparently headed for Antwerp. Maybe even back to Paris, if they can. The question is, What are we going to do about it?”

“I say we should open the gate and let them come all the way in,” Patton said, jumping right into the fray. Out of all the officers in the room, he was the most immaculately dressed, from his tailored tunic right down to his gleaming riding boots. He somehow managed to have more stars on his uniform than the rest of the generals combined. “Once the Germans are really spread out, we hit them with a meat grinder. I’ll be happy to work the handle.”

For emphasis, he used his right hand to slowly make a cranking motion, showing how he would turn those panzer divisions into sausage.

“That’s not going to happen, George,” Ike said. He agreed that letting the Germans get strung out and then pulverizing them wasn’t a bad military strategy, but the American public might not see it that way. “We can’t let the Germans get that far. The question is, How do we stop them, right now?”

“If the weather wasn’t so bad, our planes wouldn’t be grounded, and this would be a different story,” an officer pointed out.

“We can wish all we want to, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s foggy, snowy, and goddamn cold,” Patton said. He snorted gruffly. “Our planes can’t fly. My tanks don’t give a damn what the weather is like.”

Ike fixed Patton with a baleful glare. He knew that he should have welcomed Patton’s can-do attitude — it was what won wars. The trouble was that, coming from Patton, such words always sounded more like a taunt — as if everybody else had their heads up their asses and it was up to Patton to save the day.

Ike poured more coffee to allow himself a moment to rein in his temper and gather his thoughts.

If there was one general who had been a source of constant headaches for Ike, it was Patton. The problem was that Patton had a knack for making rude comments in speeches, bragging, and otherwise making himself unloved by the rest of the officers’ club. Only Montgomery’s ego was possibly bigger, but at least Montgomery conducted himself like a gentleman.

For the most part, the show that Patton put on resonated with the average soldier. He was like the army’s equivalent of Admiral Halsey, who was always making spirited comments. He meant them too. There was no general with more of a fighting spirit than Patton. But as was typical, Patton often went too far.

Nearly the final nail in Patton’s career coffin had come just a few months before, when he had slapped young soldiers hospitalized for shell shock and called them cowards. The incidents had incensed Eisenhower, and he had briefly sidelined Patton.

Then again, Patton was just the man you needed in a fight. And a fight was what they now had on their hands.

Perhaps Patton’s hour had finally arrived.

Ike sighed. “George, how long will it take you to get your tanks into action against these panzers?”

“I can have them killing Krauts the morning after tomorrow,” he said.

The other generals stared. Pivoting the entire Third Army that Patton commanded seemed like an impossible task. What they didn’t know yet was that Patton had already set the wheels in motion, issuing orders before he had even left for this meeting. He had bet that Ike would be desperate for help and so had planned ahead, unwilling to waste precious hours.

“Don’t be fatuous, George.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Patton said. “Hell, it’s not really the Boche that worry me. I’m more concerned about this snow and fog. That’s the real enemy.”

Quickly, Patton revealed his plan to send his troops and tanks to turn back the Germans. He spoke with such confidence that he seemed to consider the outcome to be a foregone conclusion.

As exasperating as Patton could be, it was a reminder of the man’s talents.

Soon after that the meeting broke up. There were other details to be set into motion, but in the end, Patton’s men would provide a key piece of the plan to fight back against the Germans.

Ike might not have cared much for the name — Battle of the Bulge — but more than anything else, he didn’t want anyone to call it a German victory.

Ike had good reason to be worried.

Germany’s bold Operation Christrose was coming closer to success as the Germans made a move to reach Antwerp and deliver a setback to the Allied advance. The port city of Antwerp remained vital to Allied supply lines. Fortunately for the Allies, the weather that enabled the Germans to attack without fear of retaliation from the air was a double-edged sword.

In addition to the winter weather wreaking havoc with German logistics, the poor roads and staunch resistance by US forces had slowed Hitler’s plans. However, the advance had not been entirely thwarted. There was a narrow window of opportunity before either the skies cleared or the Allies could respond in greater force.

While the prong of the German advance led by Kampfgruppe Friel was running into trouble, it didn’t mean that the Germans had been defeated or turned back everywhere. Case in point was the crossroads town of Bastogne. The German advance couldn’t go around it because there weren’t any roads in the countryside big enough to support the passage of their armor. No, the Germans must go through Bastogne. What they had not counted on was stubborn resistance by the beleaguered forces there.

Reinforcements had arrived in the form of the 101st Airborne. They were putting up a good fight, but they didn’t have any armor of their own. The battle for Bastogne had heated up as the Germans threw everything they had at it. Now US armor and personnel were rushing toward the fight — Cole and the men in the trucks included.

Cole’s eyes roved across the dark stretches of forest they rolled past. All that he could see were trees and more trees across low rolling hills carpeted with snow. It was the sort of landscape that Cole was used to from the mountains back home. However, the deep shadows among the trees gave the forest a sinister feel. Lucky for the convoy, they had not encountered any other Germans since the skirmish in which the Krauts had blown up one of the trucks with a Panzerfaust.

Nonetheless, he knew all too well that danger might lurk around the next curve in the road.

As a reminder of that, over the noise of the truck motor could be heard the occasional chatter of a machine gun in the distant hills and the deep thump of artillery. As the miles passed, the sounds gradually grew louder, indicating that they were headed toward the action.

“You’d think what we did at La Gleize would have been enough,” Vaccaro grumped. “Isn’t it someone else’s turn?”

“Hell now, city boy. You know they’re just sending us because they know we’ll get the job done.”

Still, Cole had to agree that they had already done their part, and then some, in the fighting around La Gleize.

At that village, Cole and the other members of his sniper squad had helped turn back the German panzer unit that had reached La Gleize before running out of fuel and ammo. The German commander Friel and nearly eight hundred of his men in Kampfgruppe Friel had escaped back toward Germany.

By some measures, allowing so many experienced SS troops to escape and fight again another day seemed like a disaster. The Germans had used a clever ruse of lighting cooking fires and giving the appearance of holding their position, but had slipped away in the hours before daylight.

You had to hand it to the Krauts for pulling that one off, he thought.

Had allowing the Germans to escape been a failure? Cole didn’t feel that way, because the truth was that the American forces had managed to end the advance of Kampfgruppe Friel. Also, the Germans had been forced to abandon their tanks and support vehicles — they’d nearly all been out of fuel, anyway.

Then again, not all the Germans had escaped. Cole had set a trap for the German sniper known as Das Gespenst and had caught him in the forest outside La Gleize. Das Gespenst had been attached to Kampfgruppe Friel, helping them cut a swath of destruction as the Germans advanced.

But no more.

Das Gespenst kaput.

Cole smiled at the thought, cold lips curling back from his teeth in a feral grin. The smile did not reach his pale eyes, which were thoughtful, remembering the moment when, with a single bullet, he had finally ended a feud that had begun on the bloody beaches of Normandy.

There was no telling how many Americans Das Gespenst had targeted in his crosshairs, but it had certainly been a terrible toll. The German sniper had finally been paid off in American lead.

Although one prong of the advance had been blunted, the Germans were far from done. They were still pushing hard at Bastogne. The American holdouts were blocking their advance but hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Whatever reinforcements could be rounded up were being rushed toward Bastogne before the Germans could break through.

Rushing was more like wishful thinking, considering the slow pace of the truck making its way through the muck and mire, the slush. The truck drivers and crew were the real heroes today, hunting for the best traction on roads that were little more than muddy tracks.

Some of the men jammed into the back stood up and stomped their feet from time to time to stay warm. Others sat motionless, hugging themselves, afraid to move and let any heat escape from their ragged clothes. It was hard to say which method worked best.

Cole figured that the best strategy was to ignore the cold. He had to admit that wasn’t working so far.

He turned to Vaccaro, who was hunkered down on the bench beside him, and said, “Ain’t you glad that you didn’t stay in that hospital? Hell, you’d be under a warm blanket right now, drinking hot soup. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself.”

Vaccaro snorted. “Don’t remind me. At least we’re better off than those poor bastards at Bastogne. I heard the Krauts bombed the hell out of them.”

The truth was, Vaccaro looked more than a little worse for wear, which was understandable, considering that he’d been wounded during the fight at La Gleize. By any sensible measure, Vaccaro should have remained in the makeshift hospital in a church. But like many of the walking wounded, Vaccaro had decided that he wasn’t going to sit this fight out.

Their recent skirmish on the road hadn’t helped. But Vaccaro wasn’t about to give up.

There was still too much at stake, and the truth was, every American soldier now had a burning hatred against the Krauts for the Malmedy massacre, where nearly eighty US troops, held as prisoners of war by Kampfgruppe Friel, had been murdered in cold blood. At La Gleize, they had also seen an innocent young woman gunned down as she tried to help the wounded. For many GIs, the fight now felt personal.

It certainly did for Cole.

As he watched the shadows lengthen among the trees and the forest grow darker, the thought crossed his mind that it was one helluva way to spend Christmas Eve.

They weren’t the only ones experiencing a miserable holiday. In the embattled town of Bastogne, the commanding officer, General McAuliffe, had issued the following statement to his men, written out on a typewriter that typed unevenly and copied onto thin paper using a mimeograph machine that needed more ink. The results weren’t pretty, but the message warmed the hearts of the defenders.

December 24, 1944

Merry Christmas! What’s merry about all this, you ask? We’re fighting — it’s cold — we aren’t home. All true, but what has the proud Eagle Division accomplished with its worthy comrades? Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South, and West.

In his own words, the general related the soon-to-be-famous story of how he had rejected German demands to surrender. It was a story that had grown and spread among the beleaguered troops in Bastogne, giving them a sense of pride at their ornery general. Just when the situation had been at its bleakest, the Germans had attempted to get the American defenders to surrender. Under a flag of truce, a German envoy had delivered the offer to General McCauliffe.

McCauliffe’s reply had been a single word: “Nuts!”

The response left the Germans scratching their heads. They didn’t understand what the unfamiliar term meant. Once they figured out that the American general was basically thumbing his nose at them, the firing recommenced. From the hills and forests surrounding Bastogne, more German shells fell like the snow.