The Doomsday Testament

8 May 1945. We were so close, I could see the snow-caps of Switzerland shimmering in the distance. They hit us just after dawn between Saulgau and some one-horse hamlet that wasn’t worth a name. A unit of half-starved SS stragglers and Hitler Youth holdouts who nobody had bothered to tell the war was over. I was in the second jeep, with the three Nazis in the back and Stan at the wheel. Commanding the first, Lieutenant Al Stewart had survived parachute drops in Sicily, Normandy and Holland, but like me he was worn out by war, the instincts that had brought him through half a dozen firefights and won him the Silver Star shaved wafer thin by a cocktail of exhaustion, constant fear and overwound tension. A month ago, even a week, he would have seen the little beech wood and sensed danger, but not today. The war was over, the sun was shining and I could hear his laughter blown back by the breeze from a hundred yards ahead. At least he died happy. The smoke trail of the panzerfaust came streaking from his left front and I screamed a warning I knew was wasted breath. The rocket hit the jeep square on the engine block and flipped it on to its back, throwing three of the occupants clear and crushing Al’s body beneath its two thousand pounds of steel. Even as Stan swerved into the roadside and I threw myself into the ditch I consoled myself that my friend had almost certainly died in the explosion. But one of the occupants had survived because I could hear him screaming. I’d heard that scream before, from a man who had been crushed by a Tiger tank in a street in Arnhem, and I knew that, whoever it was, I’d be burying him before dusk. If I lived. At the moment, that was an open question. My mind was in combat mode now, that instinctive, three-dimensional calculating machine that takes you above the action and allows you to work out angles, fields of fire and dead ground without conscious thought. Our ambushers continued to pour fire into the stricken jeep and the bodies of the men who’d occupied it; at least one MG-42 and probably a Schmeisser machine pistol and a couple of rifles. Combat mode told me this was an opportunist attack, or I would already be dead, crushed beneath my own jeep or burned, eviscerated and riddled with bullets, in that overkill that war is so fond of. If they’d had time to set up a proper ambush they would have done it so that the panzerfaust hit the first jeep and the MG-42 took out the second simultaneously. The fact that they hadn’t meant they’d probably reached the edge of the woods just as the jeep arrived and someone had decided it was too good a chance to miss. Bad luck for Al, good luck for me. That was the way it went. They’d been so focused on their target that they didn’t even know we were here, but that couldn’t last for long.

I looked round, and found three pairs of eyes staring. Klosse was calculating the chances of jumping me and taking my M1 carbine. Strasser’s were wide with pure terror, but I knew that if Klosse moved the SD man would follow him. Walter Brohm was wearing a little half smile that asked me what I was going to do next.

‘Stan!’ I kept my voice low and the Pole looked back from where he had been covering the road. He nodded as I signalled him to move into the forest and towards our ambushers’ flank. He shot a last look at the three prisoners, grinned at me and was gone into the undergrowth.

‘Here.’ I tossed my pistol to Brohm. ‘If they move kill them.’ Then I followed Stan into the wood.

Why did I put my trust in Brohm, who was undoubtedly the least trustworthy of all? Because the one thing I could trust was his instinct for self-preservation. Walter Brohm had a destiny. He was not going to join some ragged band of fanatics whose fate was, at best, to end up in a prison camp, or more probably be hunted down and killed by the Allies. Walter Brohm had placed his faith in America. Now I was placing my faith, and my life, in the hands of Walter Brohm. Stan and I had operated as a team on and off for a year and now we moved sweetly and silently through the trees, taking it in turns to cover each other. We froze as a last burst from the machine gun brought the firing to a halt. I was gambling that the firepower I heard was evidence of their strength. The MG-42 required a crew of two, one to fire and one to load, three more for the small arms and the faust, add two just in case. Say seven. We began moving again and I motioned Stan right, towards the trees edging the road. I heard voices, at first quiet, then high-pitched shouting as they celebrated their victory. In my mind I could see what was happening and what was about to happen and I picked up the pace, taking the chance of being heard and arming a grenade as I moved forward at the crouch. Stan kept pace with me. Thirty yards ahead I could make out movement through the trees and I prayed they were concentrating on their front and not their flank. They would be relaxed now, in that state of post-combat euphoria when a man is at his most vulnerable. They would be hungry and focused on whatever treasures the jeep held. I slowed and dropped to a crawl among the leaf mulch and the dead branches and I sensed Stan mirroring my movements to the right. Then I felt him tense, stop, half-sensed, half-saw the hand signal. Three, no, four, moving into the road to investigate the jeep. Wait. He nodded, his eyes intense, but not frightened. Stan had been fighting Germans since 1939 when the world had been looking the other way as they raped his country. He was better than I was. Wait. Wait. I imagined one of the men at the burning jeep looking at the mangled bodies, kicking them, just to make sure, turning, seeing the second jeep by the ditch a hundred yards away. A shout. Fire! Stan’s controlled bursts raked the road at the same instant I threw my first grenade. The second was in the air as the first exploded and I heard screams as lumps of razor-edged shrapnel scorched the air between the trees, tearing flesh and smashing bone. I ignored the men in the road. They were Stan’s. I ran forward, screaming, though I wasn’t aware of it, and firing short bursts at the two soldiers by the machine gun and the two who had simply been waiting to share the spoils of the attack. Three of them were down, caught in the grenade blasts, but the fourth blazed away and I felt the hot breath of a passing bullet on my cheek and heard the unmistakable shoop… shoop… shoop of rounds passing over my head. Inexperienced. Firing too high. I took my time, aimed and he was punched back with two bullets in his chest and another in his throat. A second grey-clad figure struggled to his feet at the edge of my vision and I fired as I turned towards him, the burst folding him in half like a puppet with its strings cut. It was finished, but I was still flying, my mind ranging over the scene around me and the carbine kicking as I automatically fired into the prone figures lying by the wrecked machine gun. I’d learned the lesson the hard way a long time ago. A wounded man can kill you, a dead man can’t. As I stood in the disbelieving void of the aftermath, I registered single shots coming from the trees by the road and I willed my protesting body across the pine needles to take up a position a few yards from the Pole.

‘How many?’

‘Just the one, hiding behind the jeep.’

I replaced the half-empty clip in the carbine with a full one and he did the same. No point in prolonging this. It had to be done.

‘Three-second burst then we rush him. I’ll take right. You take left.’ On such arbitrary decisions your life hangs. Stan just nodded.

‘Go!’

I fired towards my side of the overturned jeep, leaping forward as the last bullet left the barrel. When I was halfway across the road I saw a muzzle flash a heartbeat before someone kicked me in the right shoulder and I went down hard on the gravel. I heard Stan continue firing and a high-pitched voice call out ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’, which is what Gerry says when he wants to give up. But Stan hadn’t heard from his family since the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and he knew what that meant. A single shot was followed by a sharp cry, then there was silence.

I didn’t feel any pain yet, only a numbness in my right side, but I knew the pain would come. I lifted my head to see Stan’s grinning face looking down at me. He was holding my carbine. The German’s bullet had smashed the wooden stock and the impact had knocked me off my feet, but otherwise I was unharmed. He held out a hand to help me up and we walked slowly back up the road… where Walter Brohm waited.