Behind Hitler's Lines (5 page)

Joe had been a reluctant smoke grenadier, but to support his tripod of buddies he'd joined the fray. For a GI, Joe was more serious than most, while Jack was the leading fun lover. He had fun training, and fun afterward, and he thought even war would be fun. Joe hadn't had much fun in his life except with family and in athletics. Coming at fun from different directions drew them together.

Orv fit somewhere in between. He'd had a serious girlfriend back home and wrote to her steadily, but she jilted him before the 101st went overseas. That was as serious a tragedy for Joe as when his sister had died of scarlet fever. He and Jack mourned with Orv, trying to direct him toward local girls but mostly watching him because they cringed to see him change very much, as vicariously they were much a part of him, sharers of experiences and what was to come. Joe, Jack, and Orv were a trinity, three in one and one in three. There were pairs like that and a few quartets—the largest such group a squad of twelve—with overlapping bonds of different strength and codependence.

The communication squad of company headquarters was
where the three worked under Sergeant Todd, closely integrated with officers. Because of his build and stamina, Joe carried Captain Shettle's radio, a forty-pound SCR 300, plus a small walkie-talkie. Joe knew his job and liked it for keeping him Best Informed about I Company in the field. Being around headquarters also kept him current with the concerns of Wolverton, Sink, and even some of the commanding general, Maxwell Taylor. What concerned them all was lack of jump training. Scarce aviation fuel was the reason, and balloons became an expedient, “barrage” balloons levitating all over Great Britain to snarl German bombers.

It was widely though not officially recognized that Joe had done a lot more parachuting than most paratroopers. Back in Georgia he had jumped illicitly for others who were afraid that a bad landing would result in injury that could put them out of the Airborne, reducing them to legs. Such worriers paid Joe five bucks per proxy, a reward for what he would have done for free because he loved to jump. Impersonation at Fort Benning was easy because jumpers had only numbers on their helmets, not name tapes on their chests.

Joe made over a hundred dollars that way till his shambling gait became familiar to the parachute-school cadre (not part of the 506th). One day a cadre jumpmaster consulted his manifest, stopped in front of Joe, and asked if he had a brother going through the school. Joe sounded off, Yes, Sergeant, he did, that his was an Airborne family. Good, said the jumpmaster, knock out twenty-five push-ups for your brother and twenty-five more for yourself. This was a tip-off that Joe was under suspicion; it took Jack and Orv to convince him to give up proxy jumps, so as not to risk splitting the triune by way of either a broken leg or a court-martial.

Now, for approved jumping, he began to be split from his best buddies. Based on sub-rosa reputation, Joe was selected to experiment with new techniques of putting a paratrooper on the ground with more equipment within reach. The 101 st's planners reasoned that if each jumper could drop something ahead of him, something tethered, his payload could be increased significantly. This load carrier became known as the
leg bag. A yardlong sack of strong canvas, holding up to 125 pounds of gear, ammo, demolitions, anything, it was wrapped around the jumper's leg. After opening shock he was to pull a cotter pin, dropping the bag on a thirty-five-foot tether. Because it hit the ground before he did, the additional weight would not make his landing harder.

A valuable innovation, the leg bag, but one that Joe demonstrated was unworkable after many balloon jumps. The problem was the standard landing method, called the British tumble, which all paratroopers had been taught. With two years' head start on the U.S. Airborne, the British had favored a landing where the jumper tucked his knees, then rolled like a tire bouncing on the ground. Joe could do the tumble in his sleep and in any direction, but with a leg bag ahead, acting as an anchor on the ground, he couldn't tumble at all. Division observers watched him in jump after jump. Wherever he tried to tumble, his leg bag jerked him back. He arose slowly, feeling fortunate, like a test pilot who'd completed something as dangerous and problematic as it was necessary.

After a particularly violent land-tumble-jerk, an officer from division G-3 went over to Joe, helped him to his feet, and murmured instructions for the final balloon jump of the day.

“Beyrle, when your feet hit this time, just kind of collapse. Relax and crumple, don't tumble.”

Joe did, landing as close as he could to his leg bag. They both stuck like darts on a board, the tether slack in between. Consequently the British tumble was discarded in the 101st, to be replaced by what became known as the PLF—parachute landing fall. Joe practiced it day after day till G-3 decided he was ready to demonstrate the PLF for the British, sort of a courtesy, saying thanks for pioneering in this field, but, respectfully, we are bent another way.

In a demonstration at an RAF airfield, Joe did PLFs forward, backward, and to both sides, with leg bags. He sensed a certain rubber-meets-the-road stardom and for his final jump showboated with a “standing landing,” outlawed in the 101st but admired by the British. With the parachutes of the twenty-
first century, a standing landing is easy, but in 1944 the jumper had to judge very accurately how fast the ground rose, chin on his risers, then release them at just the right moment so that his body weight bounced up exactly enough to counteract the rate of descent. It all happened in a moment when Joe landed on his feet with no more impact than stepping off a curb. The Brits loved it. Wolverton heard about it.

ON A MISTY MORNING
in April 1944 Sergeant Kristie looked at him warily and muttered, “Get in that jeep, Beyrle. Report to Wolverton at regimental HQ.” It was a long drive to Sink's headquarters, an ivy-walled manor house in Littlecote, giving Joe time to nervously speculate about the summons. Smoke grenades? No, Joe was never implicated. But the brandy? Civilians, acting like detectives, had been browsing around Ramsbury, and Duber was unusually silent. Joe's orders were to report to the CO himself, not to his first sergeant as an enlisted man normally would. He sensed this would be face-to-face, only his third time with Wolverton.

The first had been more than a year earlier in North Carolina, at a camp named for PFC John Mackall, the first U.S. paratrooper killed in combat, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, already fighting in the Mediterranean theater. At Camp Mackall, Wolverton had struggled with the perpetual problem of paratroopers: assembling after being scattered in a mass drop. Flares and smoke grenades were one way to guide them, but he needed something audible. Combining a classic instrument of war with the most advanced means of warfare, Wolverton came up with a way to sound the call. It was a bugler named Ross.

Joe knew him; all the Blues did because of the innumerable mornings Ross had woken them at reveille. He blew loud enough to be heard a half mile away. Wolverton's idea was for him to blow assembly (the traditional bugle call that draws racehorses to the starting line) after a battalion-size drop, then everyone would head for the sound, whether in daylight or darkness.

But Ross blew a lot better than he jumped. He had been
tucked in Wolverton's stick with orders to follow the CO's canopy down to the ground, then start bugling. But he kept his eyes closed till his chute opened, then couldn't find Wolverton's among dozens in the sky, then got caught in a tree a quarter mile away, where he frantically started bugling— and as planned, everyone headed in his direction.

That was the opposite direction from where Wolverton had landed and the battalion was supposed to assemble. When Joe got there Wolverton was beside himself, but with few others, while a hundred Blues helped Ross out of his tree. When Sink heard how the experiment turned out he sent a memo down suggesting that Wolverton either learn to bugle himself or try a drum.

Joe's first occasion with Wolverton was at the end of Third Battalion's 142-mile forced march in December 1942. The Currahees were to move from Toccoa to Fort Benning, on the opposite side of Georgia. They had taken a train to Atlanta when news reports—all grim and disheartening in those days—carried a Japanese boast that their army had set a world record for endurance by marching 130 miles in eighty-five hours while whipping the British in Malaya. Those numbers rang Sink's chimes. He ordered Wolverton to break the record and made sure there was plenty of press coverage.

With full combat loads, including mortars and machine guns, the Blues indeed beat the Japs by several hours, Wolverton leading the whole way, at the end shod in only socks after swollen feet had herniated his boots. Only eleven of the seven hundred Blues who'd set off in the rain from Atlanta failed to complete the march. Blues knew Wolverton was proud of them but also that he was less talker than walker, a foil for Sink whose strong craggy face and Clark Gable mustache seemed designed by Hollywood for a “full bull” colonel's role.

Wolverton had given Joe a pat on the back for assisting Bray across the finish line, but this summons at Littlecote was unlikely to be a reminiscence. The CO was in the midst of training and planning for the invasion of Hitler's Europe. It was hard for Joe to imagine what possible interest Wolverton
would have in him, a lowly tech-5, equivalent of a corporal. The only possibility was chilling: warm, ancient brandy.

Values clashed traumatically in Joe as he straightened his fatigues in the orderly room. He would not draw in anyone from I Company and was steeled to accept Wolverton's penalty for remaining silent. Unless it meant expulsion from the Airborne. Joe was inveterately stubborn but not sure if he could accept that ultimate punishment. It would be the excruciating test between pride and loyalty. He'd do anything to avoid it, call upon Wolverton's sense of soldierly honor as best he could and if he could find the words.

Like a criminal about to receive sentence, he knocked on the door, was admitted, and snapped his battalion commander an Airborne salute. Wolverton looked like a lumbar support when seated at his desk. He was short and, despite paratrooper fitness, appeared more fit for logistical staff than leading men into combat. He returned Joe's salute, gestured for him to sit down, then nodded to a civilian seated next to him. Joe suspected he was a local constable, but he spoke American English.

“I hear you're called Jumpin' Joe,” he said as an icebreaker. “Why do you like to jump?”

“Fifty bucks, sir.” That was the monthly premium for enlisted paratroopers.

“What else?”

That would take a long explanation, and Joe was never long on words. Neither was Wolverton, but he provided an answer. “There's nothing like the blast, is there, Beyrle? The opening shock, the coming down.” He shoved Joe's brief military resume over to the civilian for his next question.

“I see here you had a classified jump. What was that about?”

“Sir, I was in a squad-size drop into Panama to test the range of walkie-talkies in the jungle.”

“Fun?”

“No, sir. The bugs ate us alive.”

“Glad you're in the ETO instead of the Pacific?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many jumps have you had?”

The official number was right in Joe's file, so the question seemed to lead to his unauthorized proxy jumps. Joe did not try to dissemble. “About forty, sir. Maybe fifty, counting balloon drops.” Among real paratroopers, the latter was considered sissy because there was no opening shock.

“Quite a few more than average,” the civilian noted. Wolverton nodded. “Would you be interested in another one? Sort of like Panama.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You'd be going to where
brandy
comes from. You know where that is?”

“France, sir.”

“That's right. And you'd be going solo. Think it over.”

He didn't need to. “I volunteer, sir.”

“Currahee,” said Wolverton—high praise from him— “there's a jeep outside. It'll take you to division G-2.” Joe rose to salute. “You know where I remember you from, Beyrle?”

“At the end of the march, sir?”

“No, after that, at Camp Mackall. “Assembly—
ta-ta-te-da”
Joe grinned. “Ever see Ross?”

“I think he's carrying a mortar in G Company, sir.”

“I'll see you again, trooper. Don't worry about anything while you're gone.”

That was reassuring. Whatever Wolverton said, he meant, and he never promised what he couldn't personally deliver. But how could he this time, Joe wondered as he began his second jeep ride of the day. His destination was division headquarters about fifty miles away at Greenham Common, near Newbury. There Joe saw more officers than the total number he'd seen so far in the army. At Greenham Common, captains were like privates, majors like sergeants, and lieutenant colonels like Wolverton scurried around like somewhat important clerks. Joe even got a glimpse of the division artillery commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe.

In the G-2 (intelligence) office no one knew why Joe had been sent for; eventually a major appeared to ask about his background, as if Joe were being considered for a security
clearance. This was the pretense for a sizing-up, a checking-out for general steadiness. Joe had it; he spoke slowly while keeping eye contact. Now, what about his German name? How close were his ties to Germany? The question offended: both sides of his family were devoutly Catholic and American. There had been a Berlin, Michigan, but during World War I German-Americans, like the Beyrles and Schmidts, had changed the name to Marne.

Joe's interview was interrupted by a phone call, then quickly ended. A lieutenant from G-2 drove him back at top speed to Ramsbury, telling him to pick up just overnight stuff as if for a weekend pass. I Company was out in the field as usual, so Joe didn't have to do any explaining. At even higher speed honking most of the way, the lieutenant drove him to the Hungerford railway station. The jeep sped off, then hit the brakes. The driver had forgotten to give something to Joe, something important. He went into reverse, tossed Joe a bag, and was gone. Inside were new coveralls, called a jumpsuit, dark but otherwise the same as paratrooper fatigues. Joe was elated to have them, as his fatigues were tattered from training.