Behind Hitler's Lines (15 page)

JOE'S NEW POW COMPOUND WAS AN APPLE ORCHARD ENCLOSED
by both a fence and a hedgerow. This told him that the farther back the prisoners were moved, the tighter would be their security. His group from St. Come-du-Mont was joined by about twenty more. They arrived bedraggled, hands on head, eyes on ground, as if shame were the worst of their predicament. Joe looked for a familiar face, saw none, and felt that he too would not want to be recognized among the losers, those who a few days before were as potent and powerful as the
Fallschirmjagers
now guarding them.

For a while the prisoners could mingle and talk, learning what misfortune had brought the others here. It was consoling for Joe that most had been captured as he had, alone.
^*
Some had been dropped twenty miles from their intended drop zone. They'd fought till their ammo ran out, and all appeared benumbed like survivors from a train wreck. This initiation to captivity was unlike anything they'd ever experienced in the hardest training, nothing in the past they could relate to, contradicting what had been vital in their lives, which was to take prisoners, not become one. Addled by lack of sleep,

Joe's thoughts drifted a lot, but he found some vitality in reconnecting with his countrymen. The previous days had been an evil epiphany for which he needed some sort of sounding board. The incoherent, the babblers he shunned as he had the wounded in the farmhouse, but huddling with grim POWs encouraged him, and vice versa. He kept hearing that what happened was a crap game. Snake eyes had come up, but they still had the dice to roll again. Joe saw God as his croupier, taking chips when he lost but also pushing enough across the table for another bet.

However, there was also Third Battalion's collective gamble, which meant infinitely more, and Joe knew nothing of how it had turned out. It seemed that the Blues had dropped off the map and out of the war. Now, Joe wondered fitfully, was he their only POW, maybe the only survivor?

Down narrow lanes like those on which the FFFs horse had carried him, he was marched with the others southwest. Guards and prisoners froze when P-47s, General Bradley's ground-support fighter-bombers, called Thunderbolts, thundered overhead. The march resumed, despite interruptions by P-47s, till in a copse the POWs were halted and seated in a circle, facing inward with one German rifleman behind them. If there was a signal, Joe pondered, they could all rise at once and overpower him. But what then? They were farther from American forces than ever before.

One by one the prisoners were pulled to their feet and led away, never to return. Joe knew his turn was coming. He was taken into some heavy woods and nudged to stop; he looked around, got another nudge, then noticed a hole with a dark stepped passage into the ground. Guards ordered him to descend. Belowground was a huge bunker expertly excavated perfectly camouflaged from someone walking by, even less detectable from the air. Entirely subterranean, it accommodated the headquarters of a battalion of the 6th Parachute Regiment.

Joe was faced against the bunker's earthen wall. Suddenly his knees buckled and chunks of wall calved off from an explosion above, the largest and most shaking he ever heard. It
was probably one of the naval projectiles hitting a huge German ammo dump miles away. It took a moment for him to understand that this was friendly fire. It took longer for the Germans to start talking again, their voices lower than before.

That was a morale lift for Joe. He was their prisoner, but the krauts were the ones in trouble, an impression they strove to change right away. As soon as the earth quieted Joe was shoved into a small room and stood at attention in front of a seated lieutenant who spoke with an Oxford accent.

“Name, rank, and serial number,” he commanded.

“Tech-4 Joseph R. Beyrle, 16 085 985.”

“Unit.” Joe stood silent. “Beyrle, I can
see
the escutcheon” (What was that? Joe wondered) “on your sleeve. We are required to confirm that you are a member of the 101st Airborne Division, which so obviously has had no combat experience.”

Joe flushed from the insult. “Sir, I am required to tell you only what I've told you.”

“How do you expect to receive Red Cross parcels if we cannot identify you?” Joe had no idea what Red Cross parcels were and, having said what he was going to say, said nothing. “Near here we have Red Cross rations designated for confirmed prisoners of war. I request confirmation of unit so that you may be fed. Nothing more.” He looked for reaction from Joe, but there was none because he was suddenly overcome by exhaustion. His eyes drooped, bringing a smile from the lieutenant. “The International Red Cross is, of course, a humane organization trusted by both sides. Would you like to meet their representative?”

Joe may have nodded, for the guard pushed him into a second room as the lieutenant looked at the top file on a thick pile of papers, then called for the next POW In those moments Joe came wide awake as he realized that the Red Cross representative must be a fake. After closing the door of the second room, another lieutenant seated himself behind a field desk. Greta was sitting on it with her legs crossed like Mar-lene Dietrich.

“Hello, Joe. I've been waiting for you,” she said with convincing sincerity but belied by the lieutenant's grin. “How 'bout a dance? Remember those times in Ramsbury? New-bury? I always wondered why you wouldn't dance. Well, there's time now. Nobody to cut in, and we've got music.” She gestured to a gramophone on another desk, but Joe shook his head. So Greta tacked. “No, I don't feel like dancing either.” Her handkerchief stifled a sniffle. “Lost too many friends the last few days.”

Joe indeed believed she had. Wolverton was very social. Greta mentioned him first. “I can't get over what happened to Bob. Harwick was luckier. McKnight too. But the Blues were pretty much wiped out, Joe. There are not many of them left. This is a horrible, horrible war. Let's get on the same side. Please?”

Joe wouldn't reply, so the lieutenant started off on how we of the West were really together against the “Bolshi.” Joe felt like puking. The Russians hadn't cut Wolverton's throat and used his body for target practice. Greta chimed in with names of more Blue casualties, starting with officers. Joe shrank from her when she began to get very friendly.

“I understand, trooper.” She sighed. “I just want to show you that there can be love in all the hate of this war. I know what you love—you're Jumpin' Joe. You love it. Lieutenant, Corporal Beyrle was the 101st's most accomplished parachutist.” The
Fallschirmjager
officer nodded respectfully. “Joe, this is an Airborne outfit you're with now,” Greta continued. “It was those lousy static troops who killed Bob. They're going to be punished by the 6th Regiment. I know them—they're jumpers like the 506th Regiment, Joe. You're among brothers here.”

“Did you have a hard landing in Normandy?” the lieutenant asked in a brotherly way.

Greta winked at him. “Which one?” she asked, then exchanged some quick words in German with the lieutenant, who looked at Joe appraisingly and jotted in his file. With a flick of the hand he beckoned for the next prisoner to be summoned.
Joe emerged from the bunker into daylight, then was stood in a line parallel to one entering for interrogation. He recognized the face of a Screaming Eagle, Fred Berke.

“Watch out for Greta,” Joe muttered before he was pushed along, his head shaken as after the opening shock of D Night. She seemed to know everything. Probably, Joe suspected what Greta wanted from him was the frequency of I Company's radio, but it was her wink and rhetorical question that unnerved him. Whatever she was after, he had deflected in the only way he could, by a soldier's silence. Joe felt he had passed a minimal test after his failures so far.

CARENTAN WAS THE 101ST'S
final objective, and the Screaming Eagles were closing in. Under savage attack, the
Fall-schirmjagers
moved their POWs south at twilight, scores of them, a long column with just a platoon of guards trudging down Highway 13. Some miles to the east, combat sputtered and roared like an untuned carburetor, over a constant background of two-sided sniper fire.

The road sloped down imperceptibly toward Carentan. Faking a bad leg, Joe dropped back through the shadowy column, muttering, “Sink Blue.” He was answered by Captain Harwick from H Company and PFC Tucker of I Company. The guards were nervously alert but widely spaced, so the three Blues were able to talk unheard. They guessed the krauts wouldn't move this column many miles because with deepening darkness it would be relatively easy for someone to slip away. That was the premise of Harwick's plan—that this was the time, in front of them the place, to put it to the touch and make a break. In England he had memorized the Norman terrain so well that he knew the roadside for the next half mile was flat with few bushes or trees.

The roadside was now unnaturally marshy after Rommel had flooded the lowland to slow down the invasion. Harwick scooped up a chunk of broken asphalt, as did Tucker and Joe, to be flung far out into the marsh for a splashing distraction when they darted in the other direction. The signal to do so
would be Harwick's throw. He studied the terrain ahead while Joe and Tucker trudged along whispering as they watched his arm.

“Who do you know about?” Joe asked.

This was hard for Tucker to tell him. “Lieutenant Johnston's ship… they got it… all of 'em.”

“Jack Bray? Orv?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “They're gone, Joe.”

THAT KIND OF DISMAL
information was going up and down the column—who'd been killed and how, who'd made it out with wounds, who'd been captured. Everything later was words, words, words—in telegrams, on citations, in tributes, on tombstones. Everyone who'd put on a parachute or strapped into a glider had anted up. For the first time Joe learned who had lost their bets.

The image of Jack and Orv consumed by a fireball was a blow to Joe's stomach, not his head. They'd never reached the ground. Joe had. That was something more he owed them. They'd been incinerated, mangled in jagged metal, maybe charred pulp in some of the smoldering wreckage Joe had passed on D Night. The impact on him was not immediate, rather a feeling that those killed were not dead, only gone— like jumpers ahead of him snatched by the prop blast, standing one moment, invisible the next, a flashing pair of dice in the great crap game. Irretrievably, numbers came up, winning or losing, ever-changing yet constant, to appear in every combination of life, death, and in between. Jack and Orv seemed out there waiting for Joe on a drop zone toward which he was descending.

Tucker whispered more, glad to change the subject to other results. Currahees smoked the krauts at exits from Utah Beach (the 4th Infantry Division consequently came ashore largely unopposed). Blues seized and held the two Douve bridges, under command of Captain Shettle, the highest-ranking officer left in Third Battalion.

That's what Jack and Orv had set out to do. It had been
done, and that seemed like a temporary memorial to them.
^*
Now the impact of their deaths came over Joe like the onset of flu. It drained his heart to think about the trio's last pass together in the States: the visit to Forty-second and Broadway, their glitzy introduction to a world-famous place, to be part of it for some hours, the experience and youthful accomplishment. Joe moved away from Tucker, who understood why

There was slight time to grieve before the night was ripped by a huge missile. In the same seconds it was heard, the naval shell erupted in the middle of Joe's column. The 101st had probably slipped an artillery observer up to watch the Carentan road. In the gloaming and at a distance he saw a column of troops, not knowing they were prisoners. On his command a cruiser in the English Channel delivered sudden devastation on friend and foe.

The earth jerked sideways. Joe felt a sting burn in the butt, smelled the scorched rent in his pants, with dreamlike detachment saw how the fringe of wool still smoldered. He'd been blown into a ditch and penetrated by a shell fragment at sonic speed, but that didn't register at first because all along the dusky road hands clawed the air as bilingual screams merged like their blood. Two guards closest to him looked like shark food, not quite digested, not quite quiet.

Despite the carnage, somehow Tucker found Joe, pressed a handkerchief to the wound, and led him off to Harwick, who, not aware that Joe had been hit, appeared pleased. He whispered that sooner or later they'd have to move east of Highway 13, so better do it now in the confusion—odds in the crap game had changed in their favor, and they had the dice.

They stumbled over two mangled bodies in marsh water. Tucker looked them over and recognized one was a Currahee named Richie Johns. Most of one leg had been blown away. He was so covered with blood they assumed him dead. Then he groaned. So did the other man. Harwick took off his belt and twisted it into a tourniquet. The other “body” had lost both legs. Belt tourniquets were tried for him too but could not stop spurts from femoral arteries.

With a faint hope that the Germans would sweep up survivors, the amputees were pulled onto the cratered road. That's what Harwick told them, though they were too much in shock to understand.
^*

In hiding, Joe watched the remaining guards reassemble prisoners and continue toward Carentan leaving blood trails on the road. Tucker tapped him, asked if he could follow; if so, it was time to go. Into the marsh and deeper darkness Joe limped behind Harwick, the trio's guide, east toward sporadic flashing of naval gunfire. They paused at a stream close to Highway 13 and drank noisily. A German patrol squirted automatic fire in their direction. Harwick and Tucker dodged one way; Joe heaved himself in the other, t

He listened for their splashing but heard none and made no sound himself. On elbows he pulled along like a turtle with a bad rear leg. In the excitement of escape he'd ignored his butt wound, but now it throbbed with a piercing ache. He felt very much alone again. The second time was like the first, but he resolved to do better from his experience. From what could be seen at dawn the Germans were thick east of Highway 13, so he pulled back to the west side where there was a little more concealment. With Carentan as their final objective, a lot of Screaming Eagles must be headed that way. Joe decided to lie low and let their attack sweep him up.