The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (39 page)

At 0100 hours this morning, a solid sixty minutes of artillery barrage plastered the east bank of the Rhine. Thirty-five hundred field guns plus two thousand antitank guns and rocket launchers poured more than a thousand shells per minute over the German positions. Fourteen hundred B-17s bombarded the DZ until daybreak. Throughout the night and into the morning, Plunder shoved eighty thousand American, British, and Canadian troops across the Rhine in eight-man assault boats at ten crossings along a twenty-mile front. Right now, on all sides of Bandy in the air over the Dutch-German border, Varsity wings east with seventeen hundred transport planes and six hundred and fifty tug planes towing two infantry-bearing gliders apiece. Over the DZ and Landing Zones, two thousand fighter planes patrol for enemy activity.

In Bandy’s plane, the jump master raises a balled fist, the hand signal to hook up static lines to the wires overhead. Bandy clips in. He gives his lanyard a good testing tug. The soldier in front of him turns to give a big, American cornfield grin and a thumbs-up. The kid has freckles and a little caterpillar moustache.

Bandy pats the boy on the shoulder.

In the din, the soldier mouths the words, “You take my picture when we get down. Okay?”

Bandy hoists his own thumb in answer.

The flak worsens. Black smoke sweeps in the doors from a blast off the starboard wing. The plane jumps. Bandy hears a rattle like hail on the fuselage. Another thump sounds close by. The paratroopers in line clench fists around their static lines, they bunch toward the doors, they want to get the hell out of the plane.

A few other photographers will be on the ground with Montgomery’s infantry, dozens more are in a B-17 at this moment circling the DZ. Hundreds of civilian and military journalists are spread out across Eisenhower’s broad front facing the enemy all along the Rhine. But Bandy has made up his mind that the northern route with Monty is still the best bet to get to Berlin. Two weeks ago, the breakthrough at Remagen in the middle sector had been dramatic, but Bradley’s bridgehead on the east bank has been bottled up by a remarkably fast German response. In the south, Patton is going great guns; his Third U.S. Army crossed the Rhine two days ago, scooping Montgomery’s bigger operation. When Patton himself walked across the river on a pontoon bridge, he unzipped his fly and pissed in the Rhine, calling it the “pause that refreshes.” But Patton’s not a realistic threat to reach Berlin from down there. Too much territory to cover and occupy. Besides, Ike will probably send him south to make sure the Nazis aren’t gearing up their rumored National Redoubt in the Bavarian Alps. In a few minutes Bandy is going to parachute in with the men and machines of the Seventeenth Airborne at the farthest point east of any Allied army. Again, Charles Bandy will be at the vanguard of the war.

The C-46 comes in low and slow, altitude six hundred feet at one-twenty knots. The gush of air coming in the open doorways is fresh against Bandy’s face, the black flak stink has cleared out. Spring invades Germany.

The jump master yanks his balled fist up and down, a pistoning motion that says, Get ready! He kneels by the door and raises his index finger. The first soldier moves to the opening, the rest shuffle and tighten up behind him. Stepping forward, Bandy looks down; it’s required paratrooper style to tuck their pants legs into their jump boots. Bandy has too.

Bandy thinks Vic would brain him if she knew where he was and what he was about to do. She’d tell him in no uncertain terms he should be on a tractor tilling soil for seed, not falling out of a plane at six hundred feet into gunfire and artillery. He should be home, in green hills and the first budding azaleas. Cool nights on the porch swing. Warm wifely arms and crisp bedsheets. The cameras wrapped to his thighs jiggle with the flak-dancing airplane, snatching his attention away from home, hugging at his legs like children from a second and competing family, telling him, No, stay here with us! This’ll be great!

The red ready fight goes out and the green light under it flashes on. The jump master drops his arm like a checkered flag and aims his finger now at the ground. The first soldier without hesitation skips out of the door. The jump master’s pointing hand goes up, pauses, then down, a metronome marking the two-second pause between leaping men. Bandy can’t hear him, but he sees the man’s mouth go round, his neck tendons bulge, shouting, “Go!”

The flak thickens over the DZ. The plane bucks, the men stagger and hold on to the static line. Bandy allows some space between him and the young soldier ahead. The lashing of shrapnel against the fuselage intensifies. Sabers of light dice like a magician’s swords through the cabin ahead of Bandy where hot metal has pierced the plane’s skin. Bandy tells himself he wants to get the hell out of here too, but the rest of him isn’t quite as certain as that voice in his head.

He doesn’t let himself think. His turn to jump is only four men away, eight seconds. The voice warns, this is no time to start reviewing your life. No regrets to Victoria or promises to the Almighty. Just step forward, pause, step again, pause, step.

Bandy’s toes are inches from wide-open destiny. Everyone else is gone except the jump master, who lifts his gateway hand, smiles up behind his goggles to Bandy, salutes, then points down. This time Bandy hears him through the wind and heartbeat and fear, clear as a bell: “Go!”

What is extraordinary to Bandy is the emerald of the world. Below him are trees and fields peacefully verdant and endless in all directions. Above him and all around in the sky are olive drab airplanes almost wing to wing everywhere he looks, an unbelievable armada sent from free, green nations. Companies of men in battle fatigues float down under white chutes, like pearls set around the emerald.

Bandy thinks of spring pollen and tobacco blossoms. Mountains. Rain-dappled moss. And Victoria.

“Go!”

Bandy’s yell, “Aaaaaaaah!” disappears in the boom of the engine wash and the rush of nothing catching him.

The static line yanks the chute out of his pack. The canopy unfolds with a wonderful swish above his head. His crotch and armpits jolt. His teeth clack when his fall is broken and the blue sky goes blank and he’s under the shade of a white firmament. For a few seconds he sways in his harness, then he only dangles and drifts. Everything worked. Bandy is glad.

Now the morning takes on a different tone. The day roars. Plane engines of every kind storm above. Small arms fire spits out of the ground and Bandy feels as though he is falling into a crackling blaze. German 88mm guns and tracers scream at the sky. Above it all, Bandy hears his own breathing.

Then silence, so quickly. Nothing exists but the coming grass. Fast. Is it supposed to come up so fast? Bandy doesn’t remember his other jump, was it like this? No time ...

His helmet hits the back of his shoulders, his neck smarts from the snap. His knees buckle, his ankles roll on their own, and he collapses facedown, barely able to get his hands out in front. He opens his eyes and the ground is a lot closer now, inches.

He has bit his lip. His right knee feels jammed, his hips ache. The turf under his nose could be Tennessee on a cloudy day. It’s just grass and dirt, it has the odor of fecundity. He relaxes for a moment and lays his bare cheek to the earth.

But the clouds are his parachute lapped over him prone. The sounds are gunplay and running and war shouts. The earth under him is behind enemy lines.

Bandy rolls over to check that his cameras made it down safely. This tangles him in the chute and cords. He bats the silk away and after seconds of struggle sits up, feeling stupid for lying here as he did.

Men and guns scramble everywhere. Sergeants and lieutenants shout and wave their arms for their platoons to form up. A shadow crosses Bandy’s place. There is no attendant engine blare, it’s an eerie sensation like a winged doom crossing your path, then one of the canvas-and-wood gliders comes to ground just missing Bandy with an ugly but effective landing. The plane is shredded with bullet holes though Bandy sees the young pilot alive and gripping the stick. While the thing settles ungainly and tilts on busted landing struts, Bandy is up and running. Even with legs pumping, he reaches to loose the straps holding his Speed Graphic and the 35mm Leica.

He finds cover in a hedgerow boundary of the field where he landed. The shrubs won’t stop a bullet but they will conceal him until he gets his bearings. He squats among the branches to discover the bushes have stickers, so he lies under them instead.

His lower body feels like it wants to swell up on him, but of his two jumps this was by far the most successful—if, he thinks, he manages to survive what he has jumped into.

Bandy unleashes his cameras. He stows the bulky Speed Graphic in his pack and begins sweeping the Leica over the battle scene before him. He looks through the lens now, his vision and all his senses becoming more acute. The camera is his third eye and it makes him keener, the way three men are stronger than two. Through the Leica the combat is no longer helter-skelter but reveals to Bandy its linear nature, lines against light, force measured by tempo, arithmetic where men are the integers; the historic scale of war exposes its constituent, single human moments as though Bandy’s camera lens were a microscope and he views the nucleus and electrons that make up a complex atom.

Another thousand soldiers arrive under parachutes or in gliders, all hushed until they touch the ground, then they scrabble for cover, drawing fire from the surrounding hedgerows and farm buildings, and returning it. Some of the chutes have gotten tangled in tall tree limbs, their riders have to cut their way out of the harness with a knife to drop precarious distances. The white silk splayed in the trees looks oddly decorative. One of the paratroopers is dead in these trees, shot while strung up and helpless. The soldier hangs and sags like a waiting puppet.

Bandy uses up the first roll of film and loads another. He moves with practiced velocity, eagerly wanting the camera back in front of his face. He snaps pictures of men running in crouches, their carbines ready at the hip. He records those masses overhead still falling from planes, he composes a poetic caption: “Black dots transforming into silken flowers.” Men on the ground clamber out of shriveled chutes and mangled gliders, thankfulness in their eyes, then sudden ducking fright hits them when the first bullet whizzes by. Alarm becomes purpose. All of this enters Bandy’s lens.

It’s time to move out of the hedge.

Fifty yards off is the south edge of the field and a rim of trees. There the platoon Bandy jumped alongside has clotted around their lieutenant and sergeants. Bandy rises on complaining knees and ankles. Bent low, he jogs the open distance to the men. At these times, exposed and under enemy fire, Bandy inhabits not just the hands and eyes of his body like he does when taking photos; now he is in every inch of his own skin and bone and gut, his brain has sent out nervous sentries into all parts of him. He feels his toes in the hurrying boots, his brow under the bouncing helmet, the muscles in his abdomen that keep him in a running hunch. He has waited through six years of combat photography for the meeting with his first bullet. He waits now. Several rounds come to greet him in this field east of the Rhine; a few whisper “Welcome” flying past, others plow a path for his feet in the dirt, but none yet embraces him.

Bandy slides like a baseball player into the middle of the platoon. One wag says, “Safe.”

The lieutenant smiles. “Mr. Bandy, sir. Will you be joinin’ us this mornin’?”

Bandy works to catch his breath. “If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. You just stay toward the rear. Keep your head down and follow. That okay?”

Bandy sees his young, caterpillar-moustached paratrooper. The boy’s freckles glow when he gives Bandy another thumbs-up.

The officer doesn’t wait for a reply. He pulls his rifle from his shoulder.

“Fan out. Move up.”

The platoon absorbs itself into the trees and heads west, away from the sporadic firelight in the Drop Zone. They are part of a large moving force tramping with care through the rising countryside. A gentle slope begins. The trees here are not thick, there’s plenty of room between them, and their branches bear only the first blooms, so Bandy can see well in all directions, and be seen.

From this wooded hill Bandy hears the fight for Wesel, two miles to his right. At this height, through the trees he makes out the red roofs and steeple of the nestled town. Sporadic gunfire comes from all directions while the Americans encounter German defenders in isolated homes, barns, and cowsheds. The area is riven with streambeds, ditches, hillocks, and clay roads. Bandy knows this kind of land, was sired and raised on it. It seems a great shame to him to see blood spilled on it.