Behind Hitler's Lines (20 page)

No other regiment in Overlord had lost a larger percentage of officers than the 506th. As the bulk of Currahees dribbled back around the Fourth of July—more than three weeks after General Taylor had promised, before D Day, that they would be relieved—Sink was intent on reestablishing his chain of command. Regenerate the regiment, integrate our replacements, and revive Currahee standards, he directed. Eyewash and horseshit, this amounted to for the troopers, including battalion guard mounts.

There had not been such formality since Toccoa. Mounting the guard fell to Sergeant Engelbrecht of Third Battalion, to which Albers had been assigned. Engelbrecht ordered Ed to fall out in class-A uniform, and though only a private he was to be corporal of the guard. Ed went to his duffel bag, unopened since the
Queen Elizabeth.
The contents had been stirred, and his two dress shirts were missing. With trepidation he reported the loss to Engelbrecht, who swore like a trooper, a paratrooper. Gruffly he directed Ed toward the I Company supply room.

“Turn out in a nice pressed shirt, Albers.”

Luteran, the supply sergeant, was uneasy. The only source for such items of uniform was the duffel bags of Blues who had not made it back from Normandy. There were several hundred, stacked in bins marked KIA, MIA, POW. No one but duly designated officers was authorized to open these bags, which regulations required be sorted through for personal effects to be returned to next of kin.

“Make it snappy,” Luteran muttered, trying to remember which of the casualties was about Albers's size. He retrieved a bag, flung it on the counter for Ed to open. “This guy's shirt might be a little big,” said the supply sergeant, glancing at the door. “Try it.” At the top of the bag was a dress shirt neatly folded, if not pressed. Ed held it up by the sleeves to drape on his body. “Good enough,” he heard Luteran pronounce, but Ed's attention was on the name stenciled inside the collar.

“Did you know ‘Buy-early’ Sarge?” he asked with wide eyes.

“Sure did. Company radio operator. How did you know how to say his name right?”

“Where was he from?”

“Someplace in Michigan.”

THE BLOW OF A RIFLE BUTT CAME FROM OVER JOE'S RIGHT
shoulder. Behind him the guard must have raised his weapon high, awaiting a signal to strike. He did with a cross-body sweep like the paddling lunge of a canoe racer—down, back, and deep.

The indentation of Joe's skull fracture is like a heel print, tapering upward parallel to the angle of the blow. He fell backward off the high chair, sustaining a secondary concussion upon hitting the floor. That much has been established by forensic surgery; what happened during his coma can only be inferred. Among the scores of POWs interrogated in the chateau, Joe by then must have been labeled a waste of time, or why else club him with such finality? So his overall resistance strategy succeeded, his paymaster secrets remained secure. Indeed, within a week of being bludgeoned, all FFI territory in which he'd jumped was liberated.

Unconquered but unconscious, Joe presented something of a problem for the interrogators. There on the floor, bleeding slightly from nose and ears, was this stinking, low-rank prisoner about to die. He had a previous wound, but it could hardly be blamed for his death. To avoid an investigation, the interrogators would have moved him into medical channels at once, perhaps citing serious infection of his butt as the reason. They no doubt hoped that hobnailed boot prints on his
torso would go unnoticed in a German field hospital, rife with horrific wounds.

Joe had been kicked viciously while he was down, while he was comatose. Permanent damage resulted from scar tissue that pressures the top of the sciatic nerve. On occasion it has caused him to black out. The skull fracture remains sensitive to barometric changes, especially with high humidity, another reason why Joe lives in Muskegon with its cool lake breezes.

FOR ABOUT A WEEK
he was in and out of consciousness, hearing things the way music can be heard, not with the ears but in the mind. At the same time Joe visualized things that didn't relate to what was heard. Body sensations were the last to check in, not preferable to delusions that made him feel as if he were in the afterlife. The transition to reality came when he focused on two white figures hovering over him, talking about him. It was then he knew this wasn't heaven because angels don't speak German.

Coming back was very much coming down. There was the body pain, pulsing headaches, but mostly a woozy feeling like the worst case of flu times ten. Joe realized he was back when his senses became continuous and connected, as when he perceived that one of the “angels” was a doctor, the other a male nurse. An interpreter came over and asked him how he was. Sore all over, was his response, especially where my ribs were kicked in.

Joe was sat up to take pills. During his unconsciousness he'd been washed down and put in a hospital smock. The ever-efficient Germans had laundered his underwear and tattered uniform—nothing left of it except jump pants and khaki shirt—which was labeled with his name and left on a chair by his bed. The ward was crowded. Every time an orderly came around he asked if Joe could get up. Foolishly Joe did as soon as his legs could support him. A doctor watched him totter around, then told Joe to get dressed. Shortly afterward he was returned to a stable by the chateau.

It would have been entirely natural to fear more interrogation, but Joe's reasoning faculties had not been impaired: he was sure that he now had a medical entry in the punctilious German records, so it looked as though he wouldn't be put through life-threatening interrogation again (unless perhaps Greta reappeared). Rommel's question to the prisoner with a head wound—”Are you receiving medical treatment?”—was an encouragement for Joe. He was beginning to learn that humane treatment was sometimes employed by the Wehrmacht under certain circumstances. Joe made the best of that possibility, seeming slightly loony, drooling when appropriate, mumbling when guards could hear him. Eventually a couple of other wounded POWs were shoved into his stall.

“Tell them what happened to you, Beyrle!” the guard yelled. Though Joe craved companionship, he continued to act like a dazed dunce even with his stablemates. They didn't want to talk about their interrogations and asked Joe nothing about his. They were reinterrogated; he was not.

The Allied advance was approaching the chateau, and the Wehrmacht evacuated POWs in the bow wave of retreat. One evening they were loaded onto trucks for Alengon, then on to Chartres—so said the ones unwounded and alert. Joe listened to them appreciatively. He had been acting demented for the krauts, but now it seemed impossible to drop the role with his countrymen, who apparently were as convinced as his captors that a screw had been knocked loose in Joe's head. It had not to be rethreaded for several weeks, during which time he was pretty much like a drunken spectator of his life.

The drive to Alengon took all night. The destination did not register with Joe as the region he knew from paymaster jumps. He was disgorged into a huge warehouse with hundreds of other prisoners, most from Starvation Hill, including a Currahee, George Rosie, who shared many POW experiences with Joe, although they were never to meet till after the war. Rosie's memories are of rain that soaked and resoaked. The French blamed the monsoon on all the combat dust and gunpowder in the air, the same as in World War I, when it rained for months.

The German commandant of Alengon decreed that if one man escaped from the warehouse, ten of his fellows would be shot in reprisal. That night POWs huddled to discuss the seriousness of such a threat. Unacquainted with Geneva Conventions that absolutely banned reprisals, they dispersed from the huddle with no consensus. Rosie felt that the commandant was full of typical kraut bluff and bluster. If he had a chance to escape, he'd take it. That was the Currahee way. The next day he was put on a work detail to dig up dud bombs, told to dig down in a crater till they found a bomb, then the Germans would haul it out with a winch or detonate in place. The craters were on city streets. Guards provided picks and shovels, then went behind buildings, which they could peek around to see if the prisoners were working. They were, digging very softly and slowly. When the guards weren't looking, they broke tool handles. After his first sabotage Rosie strolled up to a guard and said, Sorry, Fritz, but we can't dig anymore. The guards provided more handles, with advice as to where they would be shoved if they were broken again. Even so, Rosie never dug down far enough to uncover a bomb. But the detail on another street did, and a huge explosion rocked the block. It jarred Joe back in the warehouse where he was splinting handles like those Rosie had sabotaged.

The warehouse had been used to store coal, so the POWs were covered with a black dusty film. The straw on the cement floor was full of fleas and lice, and soon so were the prisoners. There was barely room for everyone to lie down at night. Turning over started a chain reaction. Scuttlebutt was that, as soon as the krauts repaired the railroad, POWs would be shipped to Germany. Furthermore, they'd go through Paris, the ultimate tourist destination. From the way railroads were being bombed, Rosie figured the line to Germany would be repaired shortly after Christ's reappearance, but sure enough, the Paris part came true.

The August 1944 triumphal march of the American infantry down the Champs Elysees became one of the most famous and photographed events of World War II. Earlier that month American troops had made another march on the
streets of Paris, this time for Nazi cameras. Joe and Rosie were part of that spectacle of humiliation. Filthy and famished, they were trucked into Paris. The Germans must have wanted them that way because at other times they could make prisoners look presentable, as they were for Rommel or for a visit by the International Red Cross.

Rosie remembers standing in formation till “the Huns' Hollywood got everything ready.” He was confused. For whom was this film being shot? France was being liberated a mile a minute, so there didn't seem much use in convincing the French they were better off under Hitler. Slowly it became apparent that there was another purpose: to show Americans as a contemptible presence in Europe. The miserable POWs surely looked the part.

Loudspeakers announced the start of a parade of murderers and rapists paroled from U.S. prisons to attack Franco-German civilization. French collaborators took up a chorus of hisses and jeers, then began to throw garbage at POWs shuffling by, some of whom were so hungry they caught and ate it.

Joe's heightmade him stand out, a magnet for abuse. Aftereffects of his six-day coma had turned him into a zombie in this zombie jamboree. Rosie was on an edge of the column closest to the collaborators, a number of whom took pleasure in tripping the wounded on canes. There was also a Nazi whore drunk enough to run up and spit. She got to Rosie's buddy, Jim Bradley, and started to spit in his face when he blew a huge honker into hers. Rosie muttered, “Boy, are we going to catch hell now!” But a guard pushed her back into the crowd and nodded at Bradley approvingly.

For Joe, with his brains full of static, the Paris march was incomprehensible. Not until years later, when he watched POWs exhibited on TV in Hanoi and, later, the American body dragged down a street in Somalia, did his victimization by the Nazis reveal its intent. POWs were not just military captives for such enemies, they were a propaganda resource.

The office buildings on the route were used by German bureaucrats, who hung out the windows as a sound truck, working
up the crowd, preceded the show. Movie and still cameramen were positioned on pedestals at various points. It made Joe think of how the press publicized the Currahee march from Atlanta to Fort Benning. Physically he felt about the same at the end of both marches; the first had been 142 miles, the second about 2.

Lights, camera, action, mostly for French civilians whose jobs depended on the German occupation. They shouted on cue, some pelted the POWs, but most were just grim, no doubt aware that the next American soldiers they'd see in Paris would be carrying weapons and riding tanks. Something revived in Joe when a trooper started singing the 82nd's march, which begins, “We're all American and proud to be …” Joe tried to stand tall, march like a soldier, and stare down spectators. Rosie remembers it as a surreal spectacle. There were the Germans at the windows, cursing without much gusto. He had crossed the ocean to rid France of them, but there were the French spitting on him.

At the end of the shameful parade a thousand prisoners bound for Germany squatted at the squalid station till trains sent on higher-priority cargo. After some twelve hours without food or water, boxcars arrived: “forty-or-eight” boxcars, famous from World War I—they could hold forty humans or eight horses. One such boxcar is on permanent display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The German filmmakers had a final scene to shoot. They kept some cameramen around to photograph a guard light up, take a couple of puffs, then throw the cigarette on the ground in front of POWs. Smokers like Rosie hadn't had a drag for weeks. They'd scramble on the ground for the butt. To increase mortification, guards started dropping butts, then ground them with a boot while POWs clawed to save them.
^*
This got to be too much for Jim Bradley, who was gaining a reputation for guts personified. He whispered to Rosie: next time they
throw a butt on the ground, step on it first—and anyone's fingers who tries to get it. This they did while cursed by fellow POWs and cameramen wanting more shots of Americans groveling for smokes.

Overloaded fifty to a boxcar, without food, with only one bottle of water and a can for waste, the POWs were bolted behind sliding doors. In humid heat the train languished in a railroad yard hour after hour. They tried to arrange themselves so everyone could sit down, but there wasn't nearly enough room; about ten in each car had to stand. Rank was as nothing in their situation. When it was agreed that a couple of hours had passed, ten seated men would change places with standees.