How I Won the War (23 page)

I looked at my watch. It was 04.30 hours. I had been going for about four hours. Allowing for the twenty miles of the Echler, I would have been racing for about two hours down the Rhine.

There were no paddles in the boat—in my special drill they were issued against signature to the crew members. I searched the craft, but although I unearthed plenty of
chewing
gum, field-dressings, candy, and a sexy letter from Myra Kegover of the Rochford Rubber Goods Company inviting the finder to call her up for a good time when on leave, I found nothing to paddle with. I was helpless in the swift current, unable to divert the boat to the home bank or to prevent it grounding on the enemy side. Buildings sprung up on the German flank, and with daylight now up I deemed it wise to lie flat in the bottom of the boat again and make an appreciation of my situation.

There were three courses open to me. One, if the boat came up on the east bank I would have to find a hiding place and lie low till the Allies advanced. Two, if it finished on the west bank, I could make my way by night to the American lines. Three, if, as seemed likely from the pace I was going, the Rhine kept me driving straight down the middle and out to sea, I would have to pin my faith in the Royal Navy. As long as I lay flat in the bottom of the craft, the Boche would think it a piece of untenanted flotsam and I calculated that there was sufficient chewing gum and candy aboard to keep me alive for a week.

I was working out my likely time of arrival in the North Sea when the dinghy found a fourth alternative. It stopped in the middle of the river. I could feel obstructions pushing at both rubber sides and I peeked gingerly over the gunwales. To my right rose the concrete pier of a bridge, on my left lay the weed-tangled mass of a tree swept down the river and trapped against the stonework. Up above, the bridge towered from bank to bank, intact and unblown. I was completely
hidden from view between the branches of the tree and the face of the pier. I clambered out on to the trunk and pulled up the painter to make the boat secure. It was only half as long as it had been the night before. The end was frayed and tasselled, just like the ropes gnawed by the water rats of the Montone. I made a mental note to report that there was evidence of the same species on the Echler and a faster biting breed at that.

There was a maintenance ladder built into the western side of the pier leading up to the span. The tree screened it for much of the way and then it disappeared inside the curving line of the girderwork. If I got up there I could work my way along the underside of the bridge to the west bank. Carefully I climbed up the metal rungs … higher and higher above the rushing water … and had just reached the safety of the under-girders when there was a clink of metal behind and above me.

“Hände
hoch!
Kommen
Sie
hier.”

A German soldier had me covered from a bay built out from the side of the bridge. If he fired from his twelve-feet range I was a goner. If I put my hands up then and there I would fall sixty feet on to the pier, the tree, or into the Rhine. There was no way out. I scrambled up the last few rungs on to the bridgeway and raised my hands above my head. Fortunately I had anticipated the possibility of capture and had already planned a line of escape.

“Nicht
schiessen,”
I said.
“Ich
bin
Skorzeny-kommando.”

During the battle of the Ardennes, Otto Skorzeny, the Boche supercommando and rescuer of Mussolini, had infiltrated groups of Yankee-speaking Germans in American uniform behind the Allied lines. The odd one was still being picked up here and there, trying to get back to his own lines.

“Skorzeny?”
exclaimed the sentry.
“Komm’
mit.”

He kept me covered from behind, and I had no chance yet to bolt for it. We walked across the bridge and he motioned me into a reinforced signal hut at the end. An officer, a precise, middle-aged man with a tiny waxed Kaiser moustache, was at a desk leafing through a magazine. The sentry fired off a fusillade of German, gesticulating at me as
Exhibit No. 1. The captain put on a pair of slab-sided library glasses and studied me carefully.

“Skorzeny?
Hein?
Sitzen
Sie.”

I sat down. He dismissed the sentry and I heard the door lock behind him. He opened a drawer of his desk and produced a mouth organ. Placing it to his lips, he fixed his eyes on mine and burst suddenly forth into the commanding bars of “God Save the King.”

Automatically I rose from my chair and snapped to
attention.
As an officer holding His Majesty’s Commission, I had no alternative. The organist changed the tune abruptly to “Colonel Bogey” then put down his instrument and chuckled derisively.

“Just a little trick,” he said, “I have invented to trap the English. Sit down again, if you please. You are not one of Skorzeny’s men. You are a British engineer commando officer sent in advance of your troops to prevent the
demolition
of this bridge?”

I folded my arms defiantly. I was an experienced prisoner by now, having been captured successively by the Arabs, Poles, British, and Germans.

“I will tell you nothing but my name, rank, and number. I am number 131313, Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody.”

“They send you single-handed in your rubber boat by night to sabotage the demolition wires. An officer sent on such an important mission will be like Skorzeny, in direct contact with the very highest level command. Perhaps even briefed by Eisenhower himself … yes?”

“I am number 131313, Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody.”

He leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily.

“You are a brave officer. It was a most dangerous venture. Your higher command must be desperate to obtain a bridge over the Rhine …” He paused, leaned conspiratorially across the desk and emphasized his words with a finger wagging in my face. “To obtain a bridge across the Rhine …
undam
aged
and
intact.”

“I am number 131313, Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody.”

As I drew back to save my nose from his fingernail, my eye was caught by a familiar cover on the magazine he had
been reading. It was the
International
Corn-Chandlers
Trade
Review
and
Quarterly
Gazette.
There was a rubber stamp impression on the cover—“Gradheim and Koch, Silberplatz, Brunswick.” My mind rushed immediately back to dear old Kettering and my office at Cawberry and Company. Many’s the letter I had written to Gradheim and Koch, one of our main continental corn-chandling contacts.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Not you! At Gradheim and Koch’s?”

He picked up the magazine and smiled ruefully. I thought for a moment he was going to kiss the rubber stamp.

“Yes,” he said. “Heinrich Odlebog, Warehouse Manager, Gradheim and Koch, Brunswick.”

“Ernest Goodbody,” I said. “Chief Accountant, Cawberry and Company, Kettering, Northampton.”

“Cawberry and Company!” He beamed so broadly that the tiny spikes of his moustache pricked into his cheeks. “Of Kettering! And you, so brave a man, like me, a
corn-chandler
.”

For that moment, in the little signal hut, the war stopped. Corn-chandling, like love, knows no barriers. The language of lentils is international. Wars may come, wars may go, but the chicken food keeps cropping.

Odlebog stretched out a hand in the secret grip of the World Fraternity of Corn-Chandlers. I was about to
reciprocate
with the English knuckle twist when my patriotism flowed back. I nodded politely but refused his hand.

“No,” he said, “perhaps you are right…. But to hear again of Cawberry and Company. So many happy memories … taking me back to Brunswick … ah! to be back in the warehouse on Silberplatz.”

He sniffed in fragrant memory of the clean, dry, corn-store smell. The points of his moustache dropped now in
melancholy
and he rubbed his eyes wearily once more. He was a very tired man…. An idea began to blossom at the back of my mind … my greatest victory might be yet to come … as a successful corn-chandler he would undoubtedly be a realist and therefore aware that Germany had already lost the war. And then there was his strange, repeated emphasis of the Allied need for an intact bridge…. Could I smell a deal?
Left, someone said, can speak to Left; then corn-chandler can certainly speak to corn-chandler.

“As you say,” I opened, “we want a bridge over the Rhine. We shall get one in the end even though we may have to build it ourselves. The small delay will make no difference. Germany has already lost the war. The longer you make us wait on the Rhine the deeper into Germany come the
Russians
from the East. Who do you wish to occupy your country, the Allies or the Russians?”

“Gruss
Gott!”
He shivered at the Soviet prospect. “The Russkies! Wild animals!”

“Then why destroy the bridges? Why destroy yourselves?” It was time to strike home. “Why not save your country from the Russians and make your own fortune? We need a bridge. You have this bridge…. How much do you want for it?”

All the weariness left him. This was what he had been angling for. He leaned across the table, alert and wary. This was business, not war.

“Twenty-five thousand pounds. To be deposited in
Switzerland
.”

“Twenty-five thousand? That’s ridiculous. Eisenhower would never pay it.”

I would never be able to look Mr. Cawberry in the face again if I closed for the first offer from Gradheim and Koch.

“It’s a fine bridge,” said Odlebog. “Excellent strategic
situation
. Twenty-four thousand … as one corn-chandler to another.”

“We would build one for less. Seventeen thousand. It’s a bit farther south than we’d like.”

“Seventeen thousand? And I am risking my life! They’re shooting people already for not blowing bridges fast enough. Twenty-three thousand, take it or leave it.”

“All right, then … in view of the personal danger, eighteen thousand. But not a penny more could we get past the accountants.”

“Eighteen thousand? … Never! … You are joking? … Eighteen thousand may be a fair price for a road bridge. But this is a railway bridge. Very strong bridge. Take trains,
tanks, anything. For such a bridge … I will be a fool … twenty-two thousand and five hundred.”

“We’d sooner have a plain road bridge, actually. For a quick deal … my final offer … Nineteen thousand.”

We went on bargaining for a cutthroat half an hour and I finally closed for twenty-one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds and a Safe Conduct to Switzerland. Not only had I upheld the reputation of Cawberry and Company, but I had also saved the Government three thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds. I don’t suppose anyone else throughout the war made so direct a saving of public expenditure by just thirty minutes’ work. Odlebog drew up a contract in
duplicate
which I signed for and on behalf of General D.
Eisenhower
, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in Europe. He insisted on a sealing deposit and all I could muster without overdrawing my account was fifty pounds. I wrote him a personal cheque for that amount. It was laid down in the contract that when Odlebog was given the note of hand of an officer of general rank agreeing to his terms, he would hand over the plan of the demolition charges.

“I will tell the sentry who captured you that you are indeed a Skorzeny man and that now you are going back into the Allied territory. He will escort you down into the town and to the limit of our defences. After that, you will be on your own.”

“I’ll be back before dark,” I said. “I’ll make straight for the nearest American general.”

“Good luck,” he said. “And be careful. My future is in your hands.”

The sentry led me for a mile beyond the town and left me on the outskirts of a wire-fringed forest. Following Odlebog’s directions I made my way southwestwards through the scrub as fast as the ankle-deep peat would allow. After
three-quarters
of an hour I came to the edge of the pines and in view of a white road. As I worked my way down to it a convoy of German trucks came swirling back towards the bridge. I dived behind a clutter of rocks and was forced to lie there for a long time while odd parties of Boche infantry, dust-covered and downcast, struggled by in full retreat. It was gone three o’clock before the road was empty and I
could safely move on. As I came out from behind the rocks there was a clatter of tracks around the bend ahead and a Sherman came grinding into view. I ran for the road waving my arms.

“Stop! Stop! I have a message for the general.”

Three tanks swept by before I made the tarmac and three more ignored me as I tried to shout above the roar of their engines. Two armoured half-tracks loaded with American infantry rolled past me, but the third stopped as I stood steadfastly in its path waving my contract. A top sergeant leaned out.

“What the hell … Jesus! It’s a Limey.”

“Take me to your general,” I said. “I have bought a bridge over the Rhine and must have his immediate approval.”

“You bought a bridge?” His chewing gum fell from his dropped jaw. “How much you pay?”

“Fifty pounds down and twenty-one thousand two hundred later. That’s why I must see your general. I must have his promise to pay the rest.”

He looked at me from head to foot, nodding
rhythmically
.

“Elmer!” he yelled suddenly. “Limey out front here says he just bought us a bridge. Fifty pounds down and four years to pay.”

A prison-cropped, horn-rimmed face poked through my side of the canopy.

“Are you in charge?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said like early Brando. “That’s right. Me and Grover. We’s in charge. You the guy bought a bridge?”

“Yes. I have the contract all signed up, right here. I insist that you take me immediately to your general.”

“To the general? … Yeah, yeah … sure, sure…. You jump right in feller. Me and Grover take you to the general.” I climbed in the back. There was a wireless set grumbling away. The four soldiers made room for me.