Behind Hitler's Lines (14 page)

Off and on, his guards probed further as the grim march continued along lanes between hedgerows, many with gaps blasted out of the foliage where he could see crashed gliders and wrecked jeeps. His captors didn't gloat. They were Hitler's Airborne, accustomed to victory starting in Crete. Joe heard that word as he listened with a new ear, his ear for German. But it was difficult to conceal it.
Wie heist du?
(What's your name?) a guard asked casually. It took a suspicious moment for Joe to nonreact.

hardly have been instructed to learn the equivalent English command— hands up!—when all their training had been to fight to the death.

HE WAS DELIVERED TO
an apple orchard of some twenty trees. Beside it was a small stone farmhouse with a chicken coop and pigsty enclosed in a crude courtyard. With permission from the sergeant in charge, Joe's two guards took a bottle of calvados from the wine cellar. Apparently that was their reward for each prisoner brought in, and they departed with a swagger and a promise that they'd be back with more.

“Ja, hoffentlich.” Yeah,
I hope so, the sergeant replied, but with little conviction. It was late evening yet still semilight. Background war noise flooded and ebbed with little indication of which way the tide was running; consequently the sergeant and his comrades were antsy.

The orchard was their POW-collection point, while the farmhouse served as a medical-aid station for a dozen American and German casualties, wounded or otherwise disabled. Most of the Americans had suffered bad jump injuries. What Joe immediately noticed was that the POWs were guarded closely, the casualties much less so, so the Class Shark convincingly faked a fractured back.

Sometime during that surreal night, Major Kent, the 506th regimental surgeon, was brought in to examine the most serious cases. Joe was glad for the wounded but also worried because if Kent had been captured, that meant the whole vertical invasion had not gone well. Joe could only get in a few words with Kent, who said he'd allowed himself to be captured with the American wounded in his care. The Geneva Conventions required that in those circumstances he be given unique status, a doctor for both sides. The Germans very
much respected Kent in this capacity, addressed him as
Hen-Major Doktor,
and deferred to his every medical judgment.

From his paymaster jumps Joe knew a little more about the Geneva Conventions than other men of his rank.
^*
In all the Currahees' preparation and planning for the vertical invasion, the only order was that if captured they were to give the enemy no more than name, rank, and serial number— not a word about how difficult that might be. Maybe no one knew because in Europe few Americans had been captured since the First World War, when prisoners were routinely treated well.

Determined not to be a prisoner much longer, Joe took a place in the farmhouse with the real wounded and wondered what to do. To lie there among them was a trauma of tense guilt. They were in extreme pain, not faking it. For lacerating wounds there was only a sprinkle of sulfa powder and maybe a self-applied pressure pad to slow the bleeding. No painkillers, though every trooper had jumped with a morphine surette in his first-aid pack. That was the first thing Germans took away to use themselves.

In the farmhouse, Jack Harrison from Third Battalion was the worst off. He'd been gut shot by a burp gun. Joe could feel, because he heard, every outcry as Harrison struggled with his agony. That got on the Germans' nerves too. Joe understood that they were debating whether Harrison should be delivered from his misery. The guards were for it and put the question to their chain of command.

The answer never came—too minor for consideration while the war hung in balance. The battle din grew louder. From one hour to the next, the Germans didn't know if they might be overrun by paratroopers, maybe by Harrison's battalion. So the guards punted to Major Kent. Exhausted from lifesaving emergencies outside the orchard, he nevertheless came around whenever possible. Kent, of course, was not advised by the Germans that Harrison had been nominated for execution but told them that his life was savable.

Late that night or very early the next morning, Harrison's travail became too much for Joe. The hour fit his plan: when the guards were sleepiest, he'd fake the need to flex his back and hobble over to the stairs. If no one stopped him, he'd go up to the loft.

No guard was present when he rose achingly to his feet. The wounded were moaning, some calling for their mothers. Joe had to get away from that. Their crying was undoing his training. It was too much to be around them any longer.

The stairs were like a steep ladder. At the top was a farmer's attic, just junk piled up, but in the dark Joe saw a sliver of faint light. He tiptoed to it, but the attic floor creaked a lot, and the window tapered into just a slot, not big enough to get through. This wasn't going to be his chance, so he backed away. The floor creaked again. Then he heard the stride of jackboots.

The German at the foot of the ladder seemed drunk, enraged, and desperate. He pointed a machine pistol. If he'd stitched Joe, it would have been just another unrecorded incident during the fury of the invasion. Like the opening shock of his cherry jump, Joe for the first time felt a man's lethal hatred, saw it in a tightening trigger finger and spittle on the guard's lips. The Germans had something of his, even more than freedom, that would be awfully hard to get back. He'd need every bit of himself to recover it.

He raised his arms fast, felt like a kid caught stealing hubcaps, while the guard ranted and cursed. Most of his steam seemed about Joe's bogus injury, but he was also called a gangster fighting for Jews while Germany held off the Bolsheviks. Joe meekly came down the ladder to be knocked against a wall. The guard shouted to others, identifying Joe as an uninjured actor who needed watching. He was shoved into a corner to squat with hands behind head.

Joe's Currahee training had developed strong squatting muscles, but in an hour they began to give out as his morale
also slipped. Though he'd destroyed the company radio for a respectable purpose, that thoughtless escape attempt had no merit but audacity. Even if he'd made it through the window, he'd still have been in the courtyard with no idea how to get out. What he'd done, Joe berated himself, was not brave but brainless. When a guard came over and gave him a random kick in the kidneys he only grunted as if receiving fair punishment.

He could hear what was going on behind him. Harrison was gagging as if his throat were being slit slowly. Joe exuded sweat, thinking that no matter what pain was his it didn't compare with what he heard from Harrison. He also listened for sounds from the guards. It seemed the one who'd caught him didn't want to be around for Harrison's final agonies and went off-duty. That's when Joe decided to slip down on his butt, hoping the new guard wouldn't notice.

He didn't, and soon Joe was pushed across a dirt lane to the orchard where about twenty unwounded POWs were seated in rows on the ground. The sergeant in charge denounced Joe to them: only a malingerer; no real soldier pretends to be wounded. A rabbit punch sent Joe sprawling. His fellow POWs were silent. He took a place among them. In the next hour he strongly needed to piss and raised his hand for permission. The answer was in German: piss where you are. It was important to pretend not to understand, so he kept his hand up and finally heard an impatient
“Ja,
okay.”

As he got up a burst of machine-pistol fire made him jump, but all the other POWs stayed slumped on the ground as if this were nothing unusual. There was another burst, this one closer. Daylight had returned. He looked over into the orchard to where the fire was directed. Hanging from a tree, about ten feet off the ground, was a body so swollen in a parachute harness that it bulged as if to explode. German reinforcements marching by were using it for a little target practice.

The body was Robert Wolverton's, pitted, caked with blood like hardened lava. With each burst Wolverton vibrated and
twisted, his head tilted much farther back than it could bend naturally because his throat had been cut almost in two.

Squads continued to swing down the lane, some whistling a jaunty marching song that goes, “When we march through the German gate, you, Madeleine, come out to watch…”

As a German-American Joe had never used the word “krauts” before, but now in his mind that's what the Germans became—for lack of a more despicable term—overriding a respect he had grudgingly developed for the
Fallschirmjagers
who captured him. Considerable soldiers they, from what he knew of their record and had seen himself. Now the entire Wehrmacht were hardly soldiers at all by any definition he'd learned with the Currahees.

Joe began to cry like the wounded he had tried to escape. Blues believed in their commander as much, sometimes more, than they believed in themselves. In the army he was their foster father. Before D Night Wolverton had gathered his battalion together to announce plans for the first postwar reunion, whenever that would be, but it surely would be because “we're going to win this war. We have to. All of us, no matter what happens to any of us.”

Wolverton announced that the reunion would be at the Muehlbach Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. He'd buy the steaks—cheers—but couldn't afford the drinks—boos— then he asked them all to kneel and pray, pray as they were dressed and primed for kill-or-be-killed battle.
^*

He asked God to notice that their heads were bowed, not downcast for themselves, but so they could then look up and see Him better.

That's the way Blues remember Bob Wolverton: humble, not a rah-rah leader but one of the battalion, the one who led.
^†

Joe seethed with a virulence that had to be converted into some directed action, as when boiling water becomes usable steam. He collected himself enough to ask a guard for permission to take Wolverton down and bury him. Joe did this by gesturing. The guard looked like he understood and agreed but shrugged—it wasn't his decision, and he wasn't about to bother an officer to ask.

Almost like the answer of God, a huge projectile ripped overhead. Everyone ducked, the guards first. The POWs glanced at one another. That message was from a cruiser in the invasion fleet, firing a huge warhead with very high velocity and flat trajectory so that if it was off-target, the shell kept going for miles.

The navy spoke again with the sound like a ripping newspaper, followed by another. The cruiser seemed to be ranging in on the steeple of St. Come-du-Mont, the same target Joe had peppered on D Night. It was now shot ragged, just a quarter mile from the orchard. The Germans were probably still using the steeple for observation, so the 101st wanted it leveled.

His mind filled with jagging emotions, Joe didn't know what he wanted. Like all POWs in the combat zone he longed for the Germans to be plastered by shells and bombs but not to suffer casualties themselves, something like watching a tornado head toward them while grappling with a deadly enemy. Around St. Come-du-Mont they were prepared to take their chances because a full-fledged attack by the 101st might free them.

Their captors were thinking along those same lines. Late in the morning a tired squad came with bayonets to herd the POWs through woods and across fields. Joe tried to get a sense of direction and whispered about it. The consensus
seemed to be that they were being moved a few miles southwest of St. Come-du-Mont.

But the seriously wounded were left behind. Some of the Americans had objected, a brave thing to do. The wounded were out of the war anyway, so for the Germans it made sense to leave them where they would be an American burden. Relying on Western humanity, they often left their own seriously wounded on the Western Front. What enraged Joe's group— and they said so loudly—was abandoning Harrison in his death throes with no medical help at all.

This unexpected protest had caused a delay. Before the POWs were marched off, a German lieutenant came over and told them that Harrison was too far gone; to give him anything would be a waste of medical supplies, better used for casualties (German and American) with better chances. Harrison heard that and began wailing. His countrymen started to yell, though a few kicks and bayonet prods shut them up. The lieutenant was genuinely surprised by the outcry. He'd explained his logic and couldn't understand why it wasn't accepted. In the orchard, in the eye of a hurricane, he'd shouted “Who do Americans think they are?”

TO THE VINDICATION
of the lieutenant, Harrison died where he was left. When Screaming Eagles recovered Wolverton's body it was so mutilated he could only be identified by his dog tag, which had slipped down the trachea.