Behind Hitler's Lines (31 page)

When the fog lifted, Second Battalion counterattacked in a scene from nineteenth-century war when foes stood, rushed and fired at one another without cover. That didn't last long on the Island. Infantry on both sides grabbed mud when artillery found them. A windmill became crucial, a place from where artillery could be directed. Neither side could hold the windmill.

Albers changed machine-gun barrels as they began to glow red. Darkness set in with both sides blazing away extravagantly and insatiably devouring ammo as fast as it could be brought up. To develop a more thickly defended line, I Company was ordered to withdraw a thousand yards from the jam factory. Dziepak's squad nearly revolted. They had ruled from their roost and would not likely get another nearly as strong.

“We were saying, geez, we're slaughtering 'em. Why pull back?”

Because Sink wanted a free-fire zone for
Jabos
to trample on German reinforcements. Thus deprived of nourishment, the Germans' attack withered. As the Currahee yearbook related, “[It had been] the hottest action this side of hell…. Dusk settled its dark cloak, but the savage battle went on lit by fires from gutted houses…. The next morning was still as the krauts left their dead and dying among ruined buildings and lying along a railroad track. Our price was heavy, theirs ruinous.”

Albers recalls, “After that we finally were pulled off the Island. The next night in Nijmegen we were taking our first shower in weeks when what looked like a meteorite in reverse took off from across the Rhine. What the hell was that? Next day another launched, a long white streamer like skywriting. Those were the first V-2 missiles headed for England.

“So, when we left, Arnhem Annie was bragging how Hitler's secret weapons were going to change the war. We
didn't know, didn't worry either, and celebrated leaving by throwing grenades into our old water-filled foxholes and cheering the fountains. Don't know what the Brits who relieved us thought about that. Maybe that we were as tired of the war as they were.

“We knew what the Dutch thought about us as we trucked on Hell's Highway for the last time. When they saw the Screaming Eagle on our shoulders they came out as they had in Eindhoven, hundreds of them, just as full of joy as the first time. They kept yelling, ‘Seventeen September! Seventeen September!’”
^*

The destination of the 101st was Camp Mourmelon, a former artillery garrison twenty miles from Eisenhower's headquarters at Reims. Since Caesar's time Mourmelon had been a military encampment and battlefield, still pocked by craters and scored with crumbling trenches from World War I. Most recently it had been a tank depot for the Germans, who left the barracks in graffitied tatters.

No matter: a roof overhead was luxurious compared with a chilled water-filled foxhole on the Island. Besides, passes were the order of the day, the first in nearly three months. Unleashed, Screaming Eagles took Reims by storm, frolicking and forgetting while swinging from crystal chandeliers as substitutes for parachute risers, doing PLFs from balconies onto feather beds. Drinking as if the dead were there with them, despising those who had not seen the elephant and smashed its tusks.

In early December General Taylor departed for Washington to represent the 18th Airborne Corps at a conference called by General Marshall concerning structural changes in Airborne divisions based upon their combat experience in Europe and the Pacific. The 101st's assistant commander went off to England for a critique of Market-Garden, leaving the Screaming Eagles to rest and recuperate under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who headed division artillery. The departure of the top of the chain of command raised no comment: the Western Front was quiet, the Germans seeming content to man the Siegfried Line while their hands were full of Russians on the Eastern Front. The prospective contest closest to combat was a football game between the 506th and 502nd on Christmas Day. Before then those troopers not on pass lazed about as the scent of a thousand turkeys from home wafted over mess halls.

Ed Albers was alone on duty in I Company's orderly room at 3:00
A.M.
on December 17 when the phone rang. Uh-oh; at that hour it must be MPs holding some trooper who had closed a Reims bar with a smoke grenade. Instead it was Captain Anderson, ordering the cooks to produce breakfast in an hour.

“What's up, sir?”

“The krauts have broken through somewhere. That's all I know, but the division's been alerted to move.”

General McAuliffe knew little more. His orders from Reims were just to motor march toward Luxembourg, Tony. Flatbed trucks are en route to pick up the 101st. You'll be with either 18th or 8th Corps, we haven't decided yet. You probably won't see any action, and we're sorry if this spoils the holidays.

A peppery but self-commanded man, McAuliffe rose from his chair, muttering profanity, as he received those instructions on the phone. He gathered himself to point out to Ike's staffer that the 101st didn't have winter gear or even much ammo. “I've got companies that haven't received new weapons for the ones disabled on the Island. I've got hundreds of replacements who haven't even been assigned.”

We know, we regret, but just get moving and report to General Middleton. Things will sort out, sir, and you'll probably be back in Mourmelon by Christmas. Ike's looking forward to seeing that football game (he was a punter at West Point). What did you call it—the Champagne Bowl?

There was a total of forty players on the two football squads. In the next month seven would be killed and seventeen wounded around the Belgian town of Bastogne.

STILL WEARING ITEMS OF JOE'S UNIFORM, ALBERS WAS PUT IN
for the Silver Star for saving Lieutenant Green at Veghel. In the meantime Joe was in a boxcar with trembling memories of the train across France. Now a homemade compass gave a depressing answer to the krieges' question of where they were going—east, deeper into Germany, farther from the liberation that seemed possible after initial good news from Market-Garden. They had just left a stalag that might soon be liberated, en route to one that obviously wouldn't.

As the suffocating miles rattled by, Joe's disappointment reached despair. The news of September 17—Market-Garden—had been like a call from the Screaming Eagles: we're coming! Then the echo faded. If luck were a lady, Joe had been her unnoticed suitor. Yes, he was still living after several events that could have killed him and nearly did, but merely being alive produced little gratitude at his age. It came over him that he'd have to change his luck by will alone. So Joe began eyeing the boxcar grille. The two troopers on the train from Paris could have been crushed on the rail bed for all he knew, but the memory of them disappearing into the night air was still an almost religious vision.

He maneuvered under the grille, pulled out his shiv, and started prying. Other prisoners helped. They pried, dug, pushed, and wrenched, but the German boxcar was better built than the French forty-or-eight. For two days and nights
they worked on it, then tried the wallboards but found them inches thick with a metal plate in the middle. Joe gave up when his shiv broke, a time mark of prudence in his mental recovery from the blow that had put him in a coma for six days and distorted memory the way sunspots short-circuit the electromagnetic field. He was able to reconstruct his thoughts for a period thereafter, able to reflect that breaking the shiv probably saved his young life.

“Even if I'd gotten out, I was in the heart of Nazi Germany— not France—with no real plan to get away. I pushed my luck. Lady Luck doesn't like that. After the war I read a perfect description: luck equals opportunity plus preparation. I sure wasn't prepared.”

Mostly at night, skirting air raids on Berlin, the train rumbled on, its occasional toots low, grim, and authoritative, as if saying, Make way for Hitler's
Reichsbahn.
Joe awoke feeling a different pulse from the rails, a new sound that came from a bridge over a good-size river. The best guess was the Oder, that the train had crossed the prewar frontier into Poland.

“Anything in Germany at that time was nothing compared to what had happened in Poland,” Joe says. “Now we were in it. One of the college guys on the train said, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ ”

AFTER THE FALL
of the Berlin Wall, it became possible for Joe to search for Stalag III-C, the destination of that train. During the cold-war years he had retraced his journey through France: St. Come-du-Mont, Starvation Hill, Alengon, the Paris railyard, visits therapeutic and resolving of memories. In 1992, when Joe crossed the Oder for the fourth time, John, his son in the State Department, was driving a rattletrap rental car. Joe had a detailed Polish map but only a vague idea of where III-C had been. As he had since V-E Day, Joe wore a small compass on his watch strap. It didn't help. With growing discouragement, father and son crisscrossed miles of unbroken pine forest. Saint Christopher never adopted me, Joe joked wanly.

Then on a dirt road they came upon a farmer trudging east.
Fluent in German as well as Russian, John hailed him with
wie gehts?
There was a slight but not too friendly response, so John tried a Russian salutation.

Stalag III-C? Da,
the farmer knew where it had been, and since he was headed that way, he'd gladly accept a ride. Joe moved to the backseat and peppered him with questions for John to translate. The farmer was impressed that Joe had been a III-C kriege, and was now the first American to return. But there had been French, he explained, and for good reason, as the visitors would see. He was a boy at that time … life had been extremely hard… he'd lost his parents, their farm confiscated when this part of Poland was annexed by the Reich. The Russians gave it back. They were hard masters but nothing like the Germans.

The dirt road became stone, huge flagstones pressed flush with the earth, stones scarred and marred by deep gouges, which, though anciently weathered, were so evident that Joe asked to stop and examine them. The farmer nodded; yes, down this road had come the first Russian armor, each cannon overlapping the hull of the tank ahead. No rubber treads, just the metal cleats clattering like tractors from hell. Stop, please. In twilight the farmer pointed to a low silhouette in the forest, a cairn. They got out to look, for this was all that remained of III-C, all that had not been reclaimed by the state-planted pine forest. The eerie cairn was a memorial to seven thousand French POWs who had been wiped out by a typhus epidemic in 1941-1942 when the stalag opened.

There was one other artifact. Where everywhere else the forest floor was flat, there was a field of wavy earth beneath the trees. Before years of gentle erosion the waves had been mounds, the mass grave for twenty thousand or more Russian POWs—the farmer could only guess how many. Most died he supposed, from starvation, for even farmers went hungry during the winter of 1944-1945, the hardest winter anyone could remember, the winter he'd lost his parents.

The three walked while Joe tried to orient the present with his memories, then returned to the car where he sat for long minutes hunched with hands clasped between legs. What
happened to the railroad track? he asked suddenly. They had not walked far enough, replied the farmer. Darkness was deepening, but Joe wanted to see it. They found it, the single track overgrown with weeds higher than the rusty rails, weeds so strong they had pierced a rotted platform.

JOE'
s
TRAIN HAD DISGORGED
its first load of Americans on the platform at III-C, half the size of IV-B, whence they'd come. There was no forest then; the surrounding land was farmed luckily for the new arrivals because local potatoes became their sustenance. Back in Germany everything had to be trucked to stalags or brought in by rail. The more the Anglo-Americans ruled the skies, the harder it was for the Germans to transport anything. But
Jabos
didn't strafe across the Oder. By Allied agreement, they left it to the Soviet air force, which at that time was out of range and not nearly so strong as the RAF and AAF. So in a way Joe never expected, III-C's location near the city of Kustrin was a blessing.