Once There Was a War (23 page)

The commodore asked, “What were those explosions?”

“The Germans,” the old man said. “There are eighty-seven of them. They were set up with machine guns to fire on you when you entered the harbor, but when you landed troops in the false harbor and when you landed more troops on the breakwater they thought they might be surrounded, so they retreated. They are dynamiting as they go.”

“When we landed troops?” the commodore began, and then he shut himself off. “Oh, yes. I see,” he said. “Yes, when we landed troops.” One of the officers shivered and grinned at the commodore.

“I wish those paratroopers would come in about now,” he said.

“I wouldn’t mind it either,” the commodore replied. And he went on to the old man in the pajamas, “Where will the Germans go?”

“They’ll go to their radar station to destroy it. Then they have some entrenchments on the hill. I think they will try to hold them there.” And at that moment there came a very large explosion and a fire started back on the hill, a fire large enough so that it illuminated the little dock and the entrance to the bay. “That will be the radar station now,” the old man said. “They are very thorough. Too bad the troops you landed didn’t get there first.”

“Yes,” said the commodore, “isn’t it?”

More Italians came down the hill then and deposited their arms. They seemed to be very glad to let them go. Apparently they had never loved their guns very much.

On the dock the five Americans stood uneasily and the safety catches were off their guns, and their eyes moved restlessly among the Italians. The firelight from the burning buildings high on the hill made deep shadows in back of the dock houses.

The commodore said softly, “I wish those paratroopers would get here. If Jerry finds out there are only five of us, I wouldn’t give any odds on us.”

And then there was a sound of a boat’s motor and the commodore smiled with relief. The forty-three paratroopers were coming in to the shore. “Give them a light, coxswain,” the commodore called. “Show them where to come.”

December 8, 1943
—The five men from the destroyer moved restlessly about the quay on the island of Ventotene which they had accidentally, and with five kinds of luck, captured. The paratroopers did not arrive. There was no sign from the destroyer standing off shore and minutes got to be hours. The dark town on the cliff became peopled with imaginary snipers and back on the hill where the Germans had retreated an occasional explosion roared as they blasted more installations. They didn’t know how many Americans there were, and there were five, and the Americans did not know how many Germans there were, and there were eighty-seven. This was very largely in favor of the Americans, because if the Germans had known—It is not a nice thing to dwell on.

Your impulse when you are alone and not knowing when you are going to be fired on out of the dark is to keep moving, to pace restlessly about and to be very timid about getting a light of any kind behind you. This pacing about is probably the worst thing you can do. According to Bob Capa, who has been in more wars and closer to them than nearly anyone now living (and why he is living no one knows), the thing to do is not to move at all. If you sit perfectly still in the dark, he argues, no one knows you are there. It is only by moving about that you give away your position. He also holds that under fire the best thing is to sit still until you know where the fire is coming from. This is a hard thing to do but it must be correct, because Bob Capa is still alive. But every instinct is toward shuffling about and leaving the place where you are. But getting a light behind you is the worst. It seems to burn you in the back and in your mind’s eye you can see what a beautiful target you are to someone out in the dark, you and that great black shadow in front of you.

There probably is nothing in the world so elastic as subjective time. There is no way of knowing how long it took for those forty-three paratroopers to get ashore. It may have been half an hour and it may have been three hours. It felt to the five men ashore like three days. Probably it was about forty-five minutes. The dark, hostile island and the dark water gave no comfort. But after an interminable time there was a secret little mutter of engines. Then out in the dark there was a little flutter of light. The boat was asking for directions. One of the officers on the quay got down on his stomach and leaned over the stone parapet and signaled back with his flashlight so that it could not be seen from the island. And at intervals he flashed his torch to guide the boat.

It came out of the dark abruptly: out of the pitch dark it slipped noiselessly and bumped gently against the quay. And it was one of those boats even the name of which the Navy will cut out if I put it in, but the important thing was that there were forty-three paratroopers on board. They seemed to flow over the side; they were very quiet. Their captain went to work instantly. He sent out pickets before he had been one minute ashore, and they slipped away up the hill to guard the approaches to the harbor. Some crept up into the town, armed with their rifles and grenades, and they occupied the tops of buildings, and others went down to the beaches to watch the seaward approaches. Meanwhile a little gangplank was ashore, and the supplies were coming down onto the quay in the darkness.

In the middle of this work there was a growl of a plane overhead. The captain of paratroopers gave a curt order and the men took cover. The plane droned over, and as it got offshore again the destroyer burst into action. She flamed like a flowerpot at an old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks exhibit. Her tracers spread like a fountain. And then she was dark again and the plane was gone.

The unloading continued until there was a pile of goods on the quay, rations in cases and boxes of ammunition and machine guns and the light sleeping rolls of the paratroopers. They did not bring any luxuries with them. They never do. Food and ammunition are their main interests. They get along with very little else. But on Ventotene they brought water too, in those handled containers which are used for both water and gasoline. For Ventotene has no water. In other times water barges came out from the mainland. The only local water is that caught in cisterns during the rainy months.

When the supplies were landed the three paratrooper officers and the naval officers gathered in a little stone building on the waterfront. And an electric lantern was on the floor and the doors and windows were shut so that no line of light could show out. The faces were lighted from below and they were strained faces, with the jaw muscles pulled tight. The maps were out again.

“I’m not going to throw my men against a bigger force in the dark,” the captain of paratroopers said. “Jerry will be trenched by now. I’m not going to move until morning. We’ve only got half as many men and no artillery.”

An officer said, “Maybe—maybe we could talk them out of it. Let’s have some of the Italians in and see what we can do. The Jerry doesn’t know how many men we have or how many ships. Let’s think about that a little. It’s just barely possible we could talk them out of it.”

“How?” the captain asked.

“Well, would you let me go up with a white flag in the morning?”

“They’d bump you.”

“Would you let me try?”

“Well—”

“Might save a lot of trouble—sir—”

“We can’t afford to lose officers.”

“You won’t lose me. Just give me a nod.” The captain looked at him for a long time and then he smiled thinly and his head dipped, almost imperceptibly.

December 10, 1943
—The lieutenant walked slowly up the hill toward the German positions. He carried his white flag over his head, and his white flag was a bath towel. As he walked he thought what a fool he was. He had really stuck his neck out. Last night when he had argued for the privilege of going up and trying to kid the Jerry into surrender he hadn’t known it would be like this. He hadn’t known how lonely and exposed he would be.

Forty paratroopers against eighty-seven Jerrys, but Jerry didn’t know that. The lieutenant also hoped Jerry wouldn’t know his guts were turned to water. His feet sounded loud on the path. It was early in the morning and the sun was not up yet. He hoped they could see his white flag. Maybe it would be invisible in this light. He kept in the open as much as possible as he climbed the hill.

He knew that the forty paratroopers were crawling and squirming behind him, keeping cover, getting into position so that if anything should go wrong they might attack and stand some chance of surprising the Jerry. He knew the fieldglasses of the captain would be on the German position, waiting for something to happen.

“If they shoot at you, flop and lie still,” the captain had said. “We’ll try to cover you and get you out.”

The lieutenant knew that if he were hit and not killed he would hear the shot after he was hit, but if he were hit in the head he wouldn’t hear or feel anything. He hoped, if it happened, it would happen that way. His feet seemed very heavy and clumsy. He looked down and saw the little stones on the path, and he wished he could get down on his knees to see what kind of stones they were. He had a positive hunger to get down out of line. His chest tingled almost as if he were preparing to receive the bullet. And his throat was as tight as it had been once when he tried to make a speech in college.

Step by step he drew nearer, and there was no sign from Jerry. The lieutenant wanted to look back to see whether any of the paratroopers were in sight, but he knew the Germans would have their fieldglasses on him, and they were close enough so that they could even see his expression.

It happened finally, quickly and naturally. He was passing a pile of rocks, when a deep voice shouted an order to him. There were three Germans, young-looking men, and they had their rifles trained on his stomach. He stopped and stared at them as they stared back. He wondered whether his eyes were as wide as theirs. They paused, and then a hoarse voice called from up ahead. The Jerries stood up and they glanced quickly down the hill before they came out to him. And then the four marched on. It seemed a little silly to the lieutenant, like little boys marching up an alley to attack Connor’s woodshed. And his bath towel on a stick seemed silly, too. He thought, Well, anyway, if they bump me our boys will get these three. In his mind’s eye he could see helmeted Americans watching the little procession through their rifle sights.

Ahead was a small white stone building, but Jerry was too smart to be in the building. A trench started behind the building and led down to a hole almost like a shell hole.

Three officers faced him in the hole. They were dressed in dusty blue and they wore the beautiful high caps of the Luftwaffe, with silver eagles and swastikas. They were electronics engineers, a ground service for the German Air Force. They faced him without speaking, and his throat was so tight that for a moment he could not begin. All he could think of was a green table; Jerry had three deuces showing and the lieutenant a pair of treys. He knew they had no more, but they didn’t know what his hole card was. He only hoped they wouldn’t know, because all he had was that pair of treys.

The Oberleutnant regarded him closely and said nothing.

“Do you speak English?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes.”

The lieutenant took a deep breath and spoke the piece he had memorized. “The colonel’s compliments, sir. I am ordered to demand your surrender. At the end of twenty minutes the cruisers will move up and open fire unless ordered otherwise following your surrender.” He noticed the Oberleutnant’s eyes involuntarily move toward the sea. The lieutenant lapsed out of his formality, as he had planned. “What’s the good?” he said. “We’ll just kill you all. We’ve got six hundred men ashore and the cruisers are aching to take a shot at you. What’s the good of it? You’d kill some of us and we’d kill all of you. Why don’t you just stack your arms and come in?”

The Oberleutnant stared into his eyes. That what’s-in-the-hole look. The look balanced: call or toss in, call or toss in. The pause was centuries long, and then at last, “What treatment will we receive?” the Oberleutnant asked.

“Prisoners of war under Convention of The Hague.” The lieutenant was trying desperately to show nothing in his face. There was another long pause. The German breathed in deeply and his breath whistled in his nose.

“It is no dishonor to surrender to superior forces,” he said.

December 13, 1943
—When the lieutenant went up to the Germans with his bath towel for a white flag, the captain of paratroopers, peering through a crack between two buildings, watched him go. The men hidden below saw the lieutenant challenged, and then they saw him behind the white stone building. The watching men hardly breathed then. They were waiting for the crack of a rifle shot that would mean the plan for kidding the Germans into surrender had failed. The time went slowly. Actually, it was only about fifteen minutes. Then the lieutenant appeared again, and this time he was accompanied by three German officers.

The watchers saw him walk down to a clear place in the path and there pause and point to the ground. Then two of the officers retired behind the white building again. But in a moment they reappeared, and behind them came the German soldiers. They straggled down the path and, at the place that had been indicated, they piled their arms, their rifles and machine guns, and even their pistols. The captain, lying behind his stones, watched and counted. He tallied the whole eighty-seven men who were supposed to be there. He said to his lieutenant, “By God, he pulled it off!”

And now a little pageant developed. As the Germans marched down the path, American paratroopers materialized out of the ground beside them, until they were closely surrounded by an honor guard of about thirty men. The whole group swung down the path and into the little white town that stood so high above the harbor of Ventotene.

Since Ventotene had been for hundreds of years an Italian prison island, there was no lack of place to put the prisoners. The top floor of what we would call a city hall was a big roomy jail, with four or five big cells. The column marched up the steps of the city hall and on up to the third floor, and then the Germans were split into three groups and one group was put into each of three cells, while the fourth cell was reserved for the officers. Then guards with tommy guns were posted at the doors of the cells, and the conquest was over.