The Grapple (63 page)

Even more revolting, the United States had not only more barrels but also better barrels. The Confederates desperately needed a new model to match or surpass the latest snorting monsters from Pontiac. They needed one, but where was it? Where were the engineers who could design it? Where were the steelworkers and auto workers who could build it?

Clarence Potter knew where they were. Too damn many of them were in uniform, doing jobs for which they weren’t ideally suited, just like him. The Confederacy was running headlong into the same problem that bedeviled it during the Great War: it couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. One or the other, yes. One
and
the other? Not so well as the United States.

After Patton’s third ferocious lunge failed to wipe out or even shrink the Yankee bridgehead on the south bank of the Tennessee, he called an officers’ meeting in an elementary-school classroom. Sitting at one of those little desks, smelling chalk dust and oilcloths, took Potter back over half a century.

“What are we supposed to do?” Patton rasped. “We’ve got to stop those bastards any way we can. If they get into Chattanooga…If they get past Chattanooga…We’re screwed if that happens. How do we stop ’em?”

Though for all practical purposes only an amateur here, Potter raised his hand. Again, he thought of himself in short pants. He hadn’t been shy then, and he wasn’t shy now. Patton pointed to him. “Let’s make the enemy come to us for a change,” he said. “Let’s pull back into the city and give him the fun of digging us out.
That
worked up in Pennsylvania. We can make it work for us, too.”

“It means abandoning the river line,” Patton said.

“Are we going to get it back, sir?” Potter asked.

Patton gave him a dirty look. Chances were the general commanding had intended his remark to close off debate, not keep it going. Potter nodded to himself. Yes, Patton had more than a little Jake Featherston in him. Well, too bad. He shouldn’t have called this council if he didn’t want to hear other people’s ideas.

“We will if we can get some more air support,” Patton said.

“From where?” Potter said. “The damnyankees have had more airplanes than we do ever since the Pennsylvania campaign went sour.”

Patton’s expression turned to outright loathing. He’d been in charge of the Pennsylvania campaign, and didn’t like getting reminded it hadn’t worked.
Too bad,
Potter thought again. He spoke his mind to Jake Featherston. A mere general didn’t intimidate him a bit.

“If the airplanes come—” Patton tried again.

“Where will we get them from?” Potter repeated. “We can’t count on things we don’t have, or we’ll end up in even hotter water than we’re in now.”

“You talk like a damnyankee,” Patton said in a deadly voice. “I bet you think like a damnyankee, too.”

“By God, I hope so,” Potter said, which made Patton’s jaw drop. “About time somebody around here did, don’t you think? They’ve done a better job of thinking like us than we have of thinking like them, and we’re paying for it.”

“You haven’t got the offensive spirit,” Patton complained.

“Not when we don’t have anything but our mouths to be offensive with, no, sir,” Potter said. “The more we keep charging the U.S. lines, the more they slaughter us, the worse off we are. Let them come to us. Let them pay the butcher’s bill. Let them see how well they like that. Maybe we’ll be able to get out of this war with our freedom intact.” He used the word with malice aforethought.

“I’ll report you to the President,” Patton said.

“Go ahead. It’s nothing I haven’t told him, too,” Potter said cheerfully. “Having people who love you is all very well, but you need a few men who are there to tell you the truth, too.” He mocked Featherston’s wireless slogan as wickedly as he took the Freedom Party’s name in vain.

Several officers moved away from him, as if afraid whatever he had might be contagious. He saw a few men nod, though. Some people still had the brains to see that, if what they were doing now wasn’t working, they ought to try something else. He wondered whether Patton would.

No such luck. Potter hadn’t really expected anything different. He thought about going over Patton’s aggressive head and complaining to Jake Featherston himself—thought about it and dismissed it from his mind. Featherston was as fanatic about the offensive as Patton was, or he would have pulled back sooner in Pennsylvania and lost less.

“We open the new counterattack at 0800 tomorrow,” Patton declared. “General Potter, you
will
be generous enough to include your brigade in the assault?”

Potter didn’t want to. What was the point of throwing it into the meat grinder now that it was rebuilt to the point of becoming useful again? Wasted matériel, wasted lives the Confederacy couldn’t afford to throw away…But he nodded. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I don’t disobey orders.”

“You find other ways to be insubordinate,” Patton jeered.

“I hope so, sir, when insubordination is called for.” Potter was damned if he’d let the other general even seem to put him in the wrong.

He got the brigade as ready as he could. If they were going to attack, he wanted them to do it up brown. He didn’t think they could reach the objectives Patton gave him, but he didn’t let on. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped so. If they succeeded, they really would hurt the U.S. forces on this side of the Tennessee.

It all turned out to be moot.

At 0700, Confederate guns in Chattanooga, on Lookout Mountain, and on Missionary Ridge were banging away at the Yankee bridgehead. Potter looked at his watch. One more hour, and then they would see what they would see.

But then a rumble that wasn’t gunfire filled the sky. Potter peered up with trepidation and then with something approaching awe. What looked like every U.S. transport airplane in the world was overhead. Some flew by themselves, while others towed gliders: they were so low, he could see the lines connecting airplane and glider.

One stream made for Missionary Ridge, while the other flew right over Chattanooga toward Lookout Mountain. “Oh, my God!” Potter said, afraid he knew what he would see next.

And he did. String after string of paratroopers leaped from the transports. Their chutes filled the sky like toadstool tops. Confederate soldiers on the high ground started shooting at them while they were still in the air. Some of them fired back as they descended. By the sound of their weapons, they carried captured C.S. automatic rifles and submachine guns. The damnyankees had seized plenty, and the ammo to go with them, in their drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. Now they were using them to best advantage.

As the paratroopers landed atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, a captain near Potter said, “They can’t do that. They can’t get away with it.”

“Why not?” Potter answered. “What happens if they seize the guns up there? What happens if they turn ’em on us?”

The captain thought about it, but not for long. “If they do that, we’re fucked.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself—or worse, depending on your point of view,” Potter said. The racket of gunfire from the high ground got louder. The USA had dropped a lot of men up there. They weren’t likely to carry anything heavier than mortars—though God only knew what all the gliders held—but they had the advantage of surprise, and probably the advantage of numbers.

They caught Patton with his pants down,
Potter thought, and then,
Hell, they caught me with my pants down, too. They caught all of us.

“We’re not going to go forward at 0800 now, are we, sir?” the captain asked.

“Sweet Jesus Christ, no!” Potter exclaimed. “We—our side—we’ve got to get those Yankees off the high ground. That comes ahead of this counterattack.” If Patton didn’t like it, too bad.

But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a wireless operator rushed up to him. “Sir, we’re ordered to hold in place with two regiments, and to bring the third back, fast as we can, to use against Lookout Mountain.”

“Hold with two, move the third back,” Potter echoed. “All right. I’ll issue the orders.” He wondered if he
could
hold with two-thirds of his brigade. If U.S. forces tried to break out of the bridgehead now, at the same time as they were seizing the high ground and guns in the C.S. flank and rear, couldn’t they just barge into Chattanooga and straight on past it? He hoped they wouldn’t try. Maybe their right hand and left didn’t have even a nodding acquaintance with each other. It had happened before.

Not this time. Twenty minutes later, as his rearmost regiment started south toward Lookout Mountain, U.S. artillery north of the Tennessee awakened with a roar. Green-gray barrels surged forward. It was only August, but winter came to live in Clarence Potter’s heart.

D
r. Leonard O’Doull worked like a man possessed. In part, that was because the new senior medic working with him, Sergeant Vince Donofrio, couldn’t do as much as Granville McDougald had. Donofrio wasn’t bad, and he worked like a draft horse himself. But Granny had been a doctor without the M.D., and Donofrio wasn’t. That made O’Doull work harder to pick up the slack.

He would have been madly busy even with McDougald at his side. The United States hadn’t quite brought off what they most wanted to do: close off the Confederates’ line of retreat from Chattanooga with paratroops, surround their army inside the city, and destroy it. Featherston’s men managed to keep a line of retreat open to the south. They got a lot of their soldiers and some of their armor and other vehicles out through it. Down in northern Georgia, Patton’s army remained a force in being. But the Stars and Stripes floated over Chattanooga, over Lookout Mountain, over Missionary Ridge. The aid station was near the center of town.

Up in the USA, newspapers were bound to be singing hosannas. They had the right—this was the biggest victory the United States had won since Pittsburgh. It was much more elegant than that bloody slugging match, too.

Which didn’t mean it came without cost. O’Doull knew too well it didn’t. He paused in the middle of repairing a wound to a soldier’s left buttock to raise his mask and swig from an autoclaved coffee mug. His gloved hands left bloody prints on the china. He set the mug down and went back to work.

“Poor bastard lost enough meat to make a rump roast, didn’t he, Doc?” Donofrio said.

“Damn near. He’ll sit sideways from now on, that’s for sure,” O’Doull replied. “Like the old lady in
Candide.
”

He knew what he meant. He’d read it in English in college, and in French after he moved up to the Republic of Quebec. But Sergeant Donofrio just said, “Huh?” O’Doull didn’t try to explain. Jokes you explained stopped being funny. But he was willing to bet Granny would have got it.

He finished sewing up the fellow’s left cheek. The stitches looked like railroad lines. It was a nasty wound. You made jokes that didn’t need explaining when somebody got hit there, but it was no joke to the guy it happened to. This fellow would spend a lot of time on his belly and his right side. O’Doull didn’t think he would ever come back to the front line.

After the stretcher-bearers carried the anesthetized soldier away, they brought in a paratrooper who’d got hurt up on Lookout Mountain. He had a splint and a sling on his right arm and a disgusted expression on his face. “What happened to you?” O’Doull asked him.

“I broke the son of a bitch, sure as hell,” the injured man replied. “Looked like I was gonna get swept right into a tree, so I stuck out my arm to fend it off, like. Yeah, I know they teach you not to do that. So I was a dumb asshole, and I got hurt without even getting shot.”

“Believe me, Corporal, you didn’t miss a thing,” O’Doull said.

“But I let my buddies down,” the paratrooper said. “Some of them might’ve bought a plot ’cause I fucked up. I shot myself full of morphine and took a pistol off a dead Confederate, but even so…. I wasn’t doing everything I should have, dammit.”

“What did you do when the morphine wore off?” Donofrio asked.

“Gave myself more shots. That’s wonderful stuff. Killed the pain and kept me going just like coffee would. I’ve been running on it two days straight,” the corporal said.

Sergeant Donofrio looked at O’Doull. “There’s one you don’t see every day, Doc.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said. Morphine made most people sleepy. A few, though, it energized. “You’ve got an unusual metabolism, Corporal.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Neither, I don’t think. It’s just different. Why don’t you get up on the table? We’ll put you under and make sure your arm’s set properly and get it in a cast. That’ll hold things together better than your arrangement there.”

“How long will I take to heal up?” the soldier asked as he obeyed.

“A couple of months, probably, and you’ll need some more time to build up the arm once you can use it again,” O’Doull said. The paratrooper swore resignedly. He wasn’t angry at being away from the fighting so much as for letting his friends down.

O’Doull gave him ether. After the soldier went under, the doctor waved for Vince Donofrio to do the honors. Setting a broken bone and putting a cast on it were things the medic could do. He took care of them as well as O’Doull might have.

They fixed several more fractures: arms, ankles, legs. Paratroopers didn’t have an easy time of it. Coming down somewhere rugged like the top of Lookout Mountain was dangerous in itself. Add in the casualties the desperate Confederates dealt out and the U.S. parachute troops suffered badly.

But they did what they were supposed to do. They silenced the enemy guns on the high ground. They turned some of those guns against the Confederates in and in front of Chattanooga. And they made Featherston’s men fear for their flank and rear as well as their own front. If not for the paratroopers, the Stars and Bars would probably still fly above Chattanooga.

The wounded men seemed sure the price they’d paid was worth it. One of them said, “My captain got hit when we were rushing a battery. ‘Make it count,’ he told us. He didn’t make it, but by God we did like he said.” He’d had two fingers shot off his left hand, and couldn’t have been prouder.