Himmler's War-ARC (34 page)

German machine gun fire ripped insanely a few hundred yards ahead of him. Morgan was too tired and too cold to wince. He almost agreed with the philosophy that if a bullet had your name on it, there wasn’t much you could do about it.

Fortunately, the Germans were only fighting a series of delaying actions as they moved men and equipment east and over the Rhine, and not making a major stand. More and more Volkssturm outfits were surrendering, including several that seemed to have somehow “lost” their officers. The consensus was that the enlisted men had killed them because the officers wanted to continue suicidal resistance. The only units that were now really fighting were the SS. Jack assumed that was who they were now up against.

“Morgan, can your pilots pinpoint the krauts?”

It was Whiteside and he looked angry and frustrated. “In a general sense, sir,” said Morgan.

“Could you give a fighter pilot a rough perimeter using smoke?”

Morgan said they could and Whiteside told him to have his pilots drop smoke and flares around the German strongpoint that was holding them up. Troops on the ground would do the same thing to identify their own lines. Whiteside informed them that the fighter bombers had a new weapon they wanted to test.

“And that means we pull out when the perimeter is outlined,” Whiteside said. “No insult to your past calling, Captain, but I don’t trust anybody else’s aim.”

“Sounds like a prudent idea to me, sir.”

Half an hour later, an area several hundred yards in diameter had been outlined by a circle of smoke and, hopefully, was visible from the sky. Just as important, the 74th had pulled back nearly a mile. Jack was wondering just what the hell was going to happen when a pair of P47’s flew over, turned, and began another run. This time, what looked like bombs dropped from them.

Jack was thinking that dropping bombs in a forest wouldn’t accomplish much, when the bombs hit and erupted in billowing clouds of fire.

Two more planes came and dropped their deadly cargo, then two more. Within seconds the area in which the Germans were supposed to be entrenched was engulfed in greasy clouds of roiling fire. He couldn’t see the base of the flames because of the trees blocking his view. He could tell, however, that the area in front was being consumed by raging flames.

“Smokey the Bear’s gonna be angry,” laughed Snyder. A bear in a hat and jeans was the hallmark of a new homefront plan to prevent forest fires back home because lumber was needed for the war effort.

They got the signal to move forward. Jack hoped the bombs hadn’t started a real forest fire. “Be a helluva note,” he muttered, “to be cremated by a forest fire started by our own planes.”

The fire was not spreading. There was little wind and the wet snow was stopping it from expanding. As they approached the burn zone, they again smelled the stench of cooked human flesh. Coverings over enemy bunkers had been burned away and the machine gun crews inside turned into charred ruins.

Not all the Germans had died that way. They found a number of bodies sprawled on the ground. “Looks like they tried to run away,” Jack said, and others nodded. “Tough shit,” said one of the men near him.

The dead Germans were SS and that made Morgan and the others feel good. Popular wisdom said if it wasn’t for the lunatics in the SS, maybe the war would be over. Jack didn’t think it was that simple, but the SS were easy to hate for a variety of reasons, such as slaughtering American prisoners, civilians, and running concentration camps.

As they moved through, somebody counted bodies and came up with twenty-four dead Germans. “We were held up by less than a God damn platoon,” Whiteside snarled.

“Were those fire bombs the something new you said the air force wanted to try, sir?” asked Jack. “If it is, I like the way it cleared a path for us.”

Whiteside actually smiled. “It’s called napalm and the top brass have big hopes it’ll clear a lot of paths for us before this war’s done.”

* * *

Tyree Wall was thirty years old, a sergeant in the United States Army and a Negro with skin as black as the night. He loved the army. It had given him food, clothing, and a sense of dignity, all of which were lacking from his childhood as the son of hardscrabble tenant farmers rooting in the red earth outside of Columbus, Georgia. He liked to joke that they were so poor they didn’t even notice the Depression. How can you lose something when you never had anything in the first place?

When the war started he had enlisted and excelled. A big man at five-ten and two hundred pounds, he found he had leadership abilities he never thought existed. Almost of necessity, he’d improved his reading skills and gone from scarcely literate to the point where he actually read books both for pleasure and knowledge. He’d just finished
Gone With the Wind,
by Margaret Mitchell and thought the depiction of the South around Atlanta was a hoot. Should’ve burned down all the damned white people’s mansions since they’d been built on slave labor, he thought. In many cases the Union Army had tried real hard, but they’d missed quite a few.

He was giving serious thought to staying in the army if the army would have him once the war was over. He wondered about that. It was clear that whites in the army resented Negroes and kept them out of combat positions as much as possible. In a way this was fine with Tyree. If the idiot whiteys wanted to keep the honor of getting shot at and killed all to themselves, well let them. In the meantime, he’d learned to drive a truck and to lead men.

The army had also given him an M1 carbine, which lay on the passenger seat of the truck he was driving across France en route to the front lines. He doubted that the white men who ruled rural Georgia would approve of him having it. Back home, only white people had the guns. That was one way they kept the blacks in their place.

Tyree commanded a squad of other drivers, also black, whose trucks were strung out behind him. They were part of a long convoy of more than a hundred trucks and tankers, all part of the Red Ball Express. The vehicles carried a variety of supplies, ranging from guns and ammo to gas and oil and more mundane supplies like food and toilet paper.

Second Lieutenant Jimmy Johnson, a complete horse’s ass even for a white man, commanded the convoy and was in the lead vehicle, a Jeep. He was from Alabama and rumor had it that the army liked to put Southern white men in charge of blacks because it was believed they “understood” black soldiers. Johnson didn’t understand shit. Behind his back, the colored soldiers joked that Johnson didn’t know how his asshole worked.

It was dark and they’d been driving for hours. Tyree didn’t mind that. Men were dying at the front and he was not going to complain about fatigue. Being tired compared well with getting shot at.

They drove with their lights partly blacked out. German planes were rare, but they did exist and being strafed was on nobody’s priority list. The way they were packed along the road, if a German plane did show up they were dead meat.

Tyree jammed on his brakes. The trucks in front were stopping hard. “What the hell!” he said and barely controlled the truck.

Men on foot appeared beside him, their faces blackened with soot. For a ridiculous instant, Tyree thought they were white men pretending to be Negroes, but realized the soot was a form of disguise. They opened the driver’s door and someone stuck a pistol in his face and yelled at him to get out. It was in French but he got the message and got out, his hands up.

Other drivers bunched up beside him. “What the hell’s going on, Sarge?” one of them asked. It was his friend, Leon. “These boys working for the black market?”

“Beats me,” Tyree said and tried to smile at one of the gunmen who simply glared back at him. In front of him, Lieutenant Johnson was struggling but stopped abruptly when somebody struck him hard on the head with the butt of a shotgun. He fell to the ground and didn’t move. Whoever these guys were, they weren’t all that well armed, but they were dangerous.

When all the drivers had been rounded up, a small man wearing a beret and with a red scarf around his neck stood before them. “I am Professor Avant. Before this war I was an instructor at the Sorbonne,” he said in heavily accented English. “Now I fight to free the oppressed people of France from the capitalist warmongers and their allies. If you do not resist, you will not be harmed. Unfortunately, your officer chose to fight and has paid the price. He was brave, but stupid.”

Tyree gulped. Did that mean asshole Johnson was dead? It probably did. Tyree was aware that the Sorbonne was some kind of French school and this Avant obviously thought it was important.

Avant continued. “We are communists, French communists, and we are going to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of De Gaulle and those like him. Since you Americans are fighting with De Gaulle, you are our enemy. Your trucks and the supplies they carry will be destroyed.”

Tyree and the others were puzzled. Weren’t the French our allies? “Thought we were all fighting the Germans,” he said.

Avant stood directly in front of him. Tyree thought he was an arrogant little shit, but a shit with a gun, which meant he would be respected. “There is a greater cause and that is the freedom of the worker. You are a Negro and I thought you would understand that. You, a Negro, are nothing more than a slave of the capitalists.”

Tyree bristled. “I ain’t nobody’s fucking slave. My granddaddy was freed by Lincoln and we may be poor but we ain’t slaves.”

Avant laughed. “Really? Are you free to vote, to go to school, to work, or to marry a white woman?”

He had a point, but Tyree wouldn’t admit it. “White women are ugly,” he said and his companions snickered. “And they’re afraid of black men because we all got such big cocks.”

Avant was about to respond when one of the tanker trucks exploded, sending debris flying and all of them running for cover. Avant yelled for his men to destroy the rest of the trucks and Tyree watched as several score French communists threw grenades into their vehicles.

“Fuck this shit,” Tyree yelled. He ran to the other side of his truck, opened the door and pulled out the carbine. He shot at the first Frenchman he saw and the man doubled over, his leg shattered.

Within seconds, the French were shooting at him and his comrades. Several other drivers had gotten their weapons and began shooting back. Tyree heard a scream and his friend Leon fell.

Tyree had only one extra clip. He forced himself to be calm, aimed carefully, and shot another communist. The American soldiers outnumbered the French and soon began to overwhelm them with fire.

Avant yelled something that must have meant retreat because the French began to pull back.

“No, you don’t,” muttered Tyree. He jumped from behind his truck and ran to Avant. “I ain’t no fucking slave,” he said and shot the Frenchman several times in the chest and head at point blank range.

Within minutes it was over and the surviving communists had departed into the shadows. Lieutenant Johnson wasn’t dead, at least not yet, but it did look like his skull was fractured since there was a big dent in it. Tanker fires billowed and ammunition exploded while other supplies simply burned. There was nothing to do but care for their wounded, and watch and wait for the next convoy to rescue them. It wouldn’t be long. The Red Ball Express ran an almost continuous line of vehicles across France to Germany. Another convoy would be along shortly and the fires must be attracting attention.

Other than Leon who’d been shot in the chest and was dead, no others in Tyree’s squad had been killed, although a couple had been wounded. Maybe twenty in the entire column were casualties, and at least a dozen dead French littered the area. Tyree walked over and looked down on Avant’s shattered body.

“Told you I weren’t no fucking slave. Maybe now you’ll believe me, asshole.”

       * * *

Morgan kept a low profile as he breasted the hill crawled down the other slope. He thought he was an innocuous target even if anyone did see him, and didn’t think anyone would shoot at him from such a distance, but why take a chance?

Levin crawled beside him. “Is that what I think it is?”

Morgan laughed. “Unless somebody’s moved the Nile, Roy, yes, that is the Rhine.”

“No pyramids and no Ay-rabs and no camels in sight, so I guess you’re right. Jesus, what a barrier and what a mess getting over is going to be.”

Their hill overlooked the German town of Remagen and the Ludendorff railroad bridge, that until only a few moments earlier spanned the Rhine. The bridge had been blown by German engineers and now lay in ruins in the river. Not only was the bridge down, but the shattered remnants blocked the river. They had watched the explosions in horror as there were still people crossing it. Those unfortunates had been tossed into the air like toys. All that remained of the bridge were the twin medieval-like towers at each end, now nothing more than useless artifacts. The railroad tracks on the German side ran slightly upgrade and disappeared into a tunnel.

“Kind of hard to believe the Nile is even bigger and longer,” Levin continued. “So too are the Mississippi and a whole bunch of other rivers. Statistically, the Rhine is small potatoes except for the fact that we’re going to have to cross the damn thing with people shooting at us.”

“Thanks for the redundant and irrelevant geography lesson,” Jack said. “Even though I went to what you think is a cow college, I did learn basic geography, beginning with the fact that the world is round.”

“Jews figured that out a long time ago during their wanderings,” Levin said with mock solemnity. “They knew that because they always kept coming back to where they started.”

The small town of Remagen was on the west bank of the Rhine and across from an even smaller town of Linz. Remagen was roughly halfway between the German cities of Cologne to the north and Koblenz to the south.

“Too bad we couldn’t have taken the bridge intact,” said Levin.

Jack sighed. “A pipe dream at best. And I’ll bet every other bridge across the damned Rhine is blown too. Or will be in the next ten minutes.”

It was downhill to the river and then steeply uphill from the other side. Worse, the land on the German side was higher than the western side which meant the defending Germans had another slight advantage. The river banks were not straight up like the Grand Canyon, but they were steep enough and would be difficult for a crossing army to take and climb. Numerous gashes in the hillside were clearly visible and represented German defenses. The sheer number of them was daunting.