Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller (5 page)

Hank froze, this time not from the cold. "What should we do?"

"Get out of the truck! We need to get in those ditches along the road. We're sitting ducks out here!"

They scrambled out of the truck. All around them, men were doing the same thing, taking cover in the ditches. Machine gun fire chewed into the trucks behind them. A few bodies lay sprawled in the snow. So far, the fighting seemed one sided because none of the Americans was shooting back. Most of them didn't even have weapons.

When the Americans did not return fire, the Germans stopped shooting. The faster vehicles in the German convoy reached the hub at the village and raced up the “spoke” or road that the Americans were on. More Germans approached across the field, covered by the tanks. Hank couldn't take his eyes off them—the tanks were huge, much bigger than the American Shermans he had gotten used to seeing.

"Tiger tanks," muttered Ralph, who must have been thinking the same thing.

Not every American soldier had forgotten his weapon. In the ditch next to them a man still carried an M1 rifle. His hands shook as he worked the bolt, then laid the rifle across a clod of frozen dirt to aim at the oncoming Germans.

"Hey, what are you doing!" Ralph reach out and wrenched the rifle away.

"I'm doing what I'm supposed to do," the soldier stammered. "I'm fighting Germans!"

"You take a pot shot at them and you'll get us all killed," Ralph said. "They've got us pinned down with those tanks. Are you going to take on a Tiger tank with that rifle?"

"But to just give up without a fight—"

"If you're smart, you'll toss that rifle in the bottom of the ditch," Ralph said. "The Krauts will shoot you if they see you with a weapon."

The soldier looked at the rifle in his hands, then let it fall to the ground.

Up and down the ditches, men began to wave white handkerchiefs, just so there was no mistaking their intention to surrender. The Germans came closer, moving at a trot now. Then Hank could actually see their faces under their square, blue-gray helmets. He had never seen a German up close before. Except for the uniforms, they looked pretty much like Americans. One of the Germans started yelling in English, "Out of the ditches! Hands up!"

Beside him, Ralph muttered, "Look at the insignia on their collars. These guys are SS. Hard core. Ain't that just great for us. Just do what they say, Kid, and we'll be all right."

His stomach churning with fear, Hank climbed out of the ditch and raised his hands high.

CHAPTER 6

Within minutes, the Germans rounded up the American unit. The GIs came out of the ditches with their hands up, looking scared. Von Stenger did not know if he should feel sorry for them—or if he should feel contempt. They had given up like sheep.

It soon became clear why they had been captured so easily. This was an observation and support unit rather than a combat unit. Most had never fired a weapon in battle.
 

"That's good for us, Kurt," Friel said happily, standing tall in the Volkswagen and surveying the groups of captured Americans and their vehicles. He was clearly pleased with the outcome of the encounter. "A fight would only have slowed us down, and we have a schedule to keep!"

"We took them by surprise," Von Stenger said. "They did not even know what hit them."

"Look at all these trucks! We can put them to use, hey Kurt! Ha, ha! Imagine riding right around the Americans using their own trucks."

Von Stenger had to admit it was a positive turn of events. In spite of himself, he was starting to become hopeful about the offensive. Maybe Hitler was right. By attacking the soft underbelly of the Allied line, they could demoralize and defeat the enemy. It was almost too much to hope for, but here he was, surveying a group of more than a hundred Americans with their hands raised over their heads and twenty or thirty captured trucks full of valuable petrol. And the day was yet young.

• • •

Hank stood with his hands in the air. He shivered, but not just from the cold. It was hard not to be frightened when enemy soldiers had their guns pointed at you.

"Jesus, Ralph, what should we do?"

"Just keep your hands up and do like they tell you, Kid. It's gonna be all right."

The Germans came closer, covering the American prisoners with their Mauser carbines and submachine guns. Hank thought briefly of making a run for it, but those guns made him think better of that plan.

"Hands up! Over here now!" shouted one of the Germans in English. Others simply shouted in German and used the muzzles of their weapons to indicate where they wanted the Americans to go.

The Germans began to fan out into the ditches, forcing out those Americans who had tried to hide or even to play possum. So far as Hank could tell, the short burst of gunfire the Germans had sent into the column had not killed anyone.

More German soldiers went from truck to truck, peering into the backs of the trucks and cabs. An American soldier who had hidden himself in the back of a truck was discovered and came out with his hands up. A German clipped him in the side of the head with a rifle butt and knocked him down for his efforts to escape capture.
 

An officer jumped down from one of their funny-looking amphibious vehicles.

"Merry Christmas!" he shouted. He was tall, blond and blue-eyed, like some actor playing an officer in a movie. "You will be spending the holidays with us! You were smart to surrender, or you would all be dead."

Amid the shouting, seemingly angry enemy soldiers, the arrival of the jovial officer put Hank more at ease. The officer approached an American lieutenant, who was standing nearby, hands held high.

"What unit is this?" the German officer asked.

"This is the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion," the soldier said.
 

"Where are you heading?"

"Saint Vith," the young officer said. "We're going to Saint Vith."

"Hey, don't tell him anything!" someone shouted.
 

The German officer just laughed. "Come now, these are hardly military secrets."

"You're a goddamn Kraut!" an American shouted. Then he spat on the frozen ground.
 

A German sergeant with a nasty scar on his cheek stepped forward and drove his rifle butt into the man's belly so that he crumpled to the ground. The soldier lifted the rifle as if about to club the man again.

"Nein, nein!"
the handsome officer said sharply. The soldier stepped away. Then the officer raised his voice again and addressed the Americans. "You are all prisoners now! Do as you are told and there will be no trouble."

At gunpoint, the Germans began to herd the captured Americans away from the road and into the snowy fields. The village was within sight with its modest houses and a few small outbuildings. At the edge of the field was a low stone wall topped with a worm fence like you saw in old Civil War photographs. The edge of the forest began just beyond that.

There was enough of a breeze to give the air an icy edge. Hank wasn’t wearing gloves and his hands began to tingle in the cold. He did not dare to lower his arms, so he flexed his fingers, trying to keep them warm. Wherever they were going, it promised to be a long, cold march.

"Nothing to it, Kid," Ralph muttered. "In fact, we're lucky. We'll be sitting out the rest of the war in a POW camp eating schnitzel while the other poor bastards shoot at each other."

They stood in the field for what seemed to be a very long time, getting colder by the minute. For now, the Germans largely ignored the captured Americans, except for a few guards who had been posted to keep an eye on them. More than a few guys studied the distant stone wall and calculated whether or not they could reach it before the guards opened up on them. Nobody tried it—out in the open field, there was no way to outrun a bullet, no matter how fast you were.

Ralph seemed to read his thoughts. "Don't even think about it, Kid. You’ll never make it."
 

Over by the road, the Germans ransacked the convoy. The officer who had interrogated the lieutenant was all business now, shouting orders to his men. They quickly commandeered the trucks and drove them over to their own vehicles, then began loading equipment aboard. They seemed particularly excited when they came across a few spare drums of gasoline. Hank figured they must be hard up—a tank had to use a lot of fuel. Also, it appeared that the Germans had been short vehicles so that a lot of their men had to hoof it through the snow. Laughing and joking, the Germans climbed aboard the trucks.
 

"I guess we're gonna have to walk," somebody said. "It's gonna be hard to keep up."

"Nah, they'll send us back behind their lines."

"What lines? As far as we knew as of yesterday, the nearest Germans were twenty miles away."

Then a change seemed to come over the Germans. The activity of securing the American trucks ended, and they turned their attention back to the prisoners. Hank could not tell what they were saying, but there was a definite change in the mood, almost like the way the air changes before a thunderstorm.

Ralph felt it, too.

"Something's up," he said. For the first time, he sounded nervous. "I hate to say it, Kid, but I don't like the looks of this."

The SS officer climbed aboard a tank and waved, and the German column began to move off. However, another officer stayed behind with about twenty men, who formed a loose line between the road and the captured soldiers. One of the Germans shouted something, and the guards moved away from the Americans to join the other SS men. None of them were that far away—maybe about thirty feet, which was close enough to see the looks on the Germans' faces. What scared Hank was that they did not appear angry, just blank—as if they weren't looking at anything at all.

Then the SS sergeant with the scar on his face stepped forward, leveled his rifle at the nearest American, and shot him. In the cold air, the noise of the rifle going off was like a slap in the face, yet the prisoners were so surprised that no one so much as shouted. The German worked the bolt and shot another American.

It all happened so fast. Terrified and defenseless, the Americans stood in mute silence like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. The Kid thought it was unreal, like watching someone else’s nightmare. He kept hoping to wake up.

Then the other Germans started firing. The ones with machine guns opened up and groups of Americans jerked and danced as the bullets him them before their bodies fell into the bloody snow.

Something struck Hank like a sledgehammer and he found himself facedown on the frozen ground.

• • •

Von Stenger watched in disbelief as the SS sergeant named Breger stepped forward and shot first one American, and then another. He opened his mouth to shout an order for Breger to stop, but then the other SS men opened fire and there was no chance of being heard.

The shooting was over in less than a minute, leaving his ears ringing and a smell of cordite hanging in the winter air. At such close range, the automatic weapons had done their work all too well. The field was now littered with a mass of bodies.

A few GIs, however, had somehow survived. Two men jumped up after the shooting ended and began running toward the fence line. Fear made them fleet, because they were already out of effective range of the Schmeisser MP 40 submachine guns. A couple of SS men tried to shoot them with their rifles, but hitting a running target is no easy feat. It looked as if the men were going to make it over the fence to safety.

"Herr Hauptmann?" The driver was looking up at Von Stenger with an expectant expression, the way one might look to a politician for a speech.

Von Stenger was still too shocked by what he had just witnessed to understand what the driver’s look meant. But then he realized.
The rifle.
Gripped tightly in his hands. He tossed away his cigarette.

Automatically, he raised the Mosin-Nagant to his shoulder, put the sight on the back of the closest fleeing American, and shot him. The second man was even faster and was almost at the fence line. Von Stenger worked the bolt, acquired the target, and squeezed off another round. He worked the bolt again and a second empty shell casing went spinning toward the ground. This man had been running so fast that he tumbled before he lay still.

"Good shooting, sir!" the young SS driver said with something like awe. "I thought you were going to let him get away. What a shot! Incredible!"

Even the SS sergeant looked back toward the vehicle and gave Von Stenger a stingy nod.

"It is better if there are no survivors," Von Stenger said. "The Americans will never forgive us for this. But what is done is done—at least now there are no witnesses."

The young driver seemed confused. "Witnesses to what, sir?"

"To a massacre. We just shot more than eighty unarmed Americans prisoners of war. Once word gets out, there won’t be another German taken alive."

Most of the other soldiers began to move away in order to join the column that was leaving. Breger saw that he was still there and called out to him, "Herr Hauptmann, do you wish to help us finish them off?"

"No, I will let you have that honor." He turned back to his young SS driver. "Get us out of here."