Guns At Cassino (21 page)

`But
they can't get tanks up that slope!' he protested.

`They
always say God is on the side of the big battalions, sir. Perhaps they prayed. At all events, we can hear tanks down there on our sector of the perimeter.'

`All
right, what do you suggest, von Dodenburg? The recoilless rifles? I can let you have one.'

`
One!
’ von Dodenburg exploded.

`Yes.
Your position is very exposed. If you're overrun, I can't afford to lose the little heavy stuff I've got.' The Vulture smiled cynically.

`You
mean - '

`I
mean,' the Vulture cut him short, 'you have picked the wrong side, my dear chap.'

The
vehicles von Dodenburg had heard were not in fact tanks. They were something worse: little tracked vehicles, which he knew the Tommies called Wasps (1), armed with strange snub-nosed cannon attached to trailer tanks which bumped up and down behind them. Schulze, crouched with von Dodenburg and the Creeper behind the recoilless rifle, groaned out loud as the Wasps ground closer and closer, their infantry tightly packed behind their cover.

`Oh
my sodding aunt – flame-throwers!'

Von
Dodenburg gulped with fear. A vision of his childhood flashed through his brain: Colonel-General Hammerschmitt unwrapping the black bandage he always wore around his head to reveal a bald head, yellow and wrinkled like that of some Egyptian mummy, with two dark holes where the ears should have been.

`A
flame-thrower – he was caught by a Frog flame-thrower at Verdun in sixteen, that's all my boy.'

His
father had comforted him when he had run screaming to blab out what he had seen in the bedroom. But he hadn't slept well for many a month after that. Now he was to face up to that most terrible weapon himself.

A
slug from one of the Sussex's snipers flattened itself on the rock next to him. The Creeper yelped with fear. Von Dodenburg ignored him.

`Listen,
Schulze,' he rapped, not taking his eyes off the slow-moving Wasps for one instant. 'We've only one chance. We've got to hit the bastards quick - one, two, three. You've got to load and re-load damn smartish.'

`Don't
worry about me, sir,' Schulze said, licking his dry lips. `You concentrate on knocking the sods out. I'll go at the loading like a squaddie at his missus after four months in Russia.'

`Good.'
Von Dodenburg jabbed his elbow in to the Creeper's ribs viciously. 'And you - let's have those shells coming right quick.

The
leading Wasp was less than two hundred metres away now, grinding up the steep slope with difficulty, its following infantry tense and ready for the killing. Von Dodenburg swallowed hard. The little Tommy vehicle was still out of range. He kicked the tripod to check whether it was set firmly and then crouching behind the strange weapon again began to follow the Wasp's slow approach.

Now
the snipers, hidden in the rocks all around, opened up knowing that they must keep the Germans' heads down and cover the carriers' advance. Slugs struck and whined off the rocks. Creeper's face blanched. The Wasp's gunner pressed the trigger. There was a hushed intake of air. A forked tongue of oil-flecked flame shot out a good hundred metres. The dust shrank in its path. But it was still short of their positions. Before their horrified eyes, the boulders twenty metres away turned a dull glowing purple. The heat was horrific. They felt their breath dragged forcibly from their lungs.

Von
Dodenburg wiped the sweat from his brow and felt his cheeks glow with the heat. Again the long tongue of flame licked out at them greedily. They ducked hurriedly. Von Dodenburg felt his tunic begin to singe. There was a smell of burning cloth and hair. He gasped for breath like a fish in its death throes. It was now or never. He peered through the sight. The Wasp rattled into the centre of the crossed lines. He could see the white blob of the driver now through the slit in the armour. Behind it he glimpsed the helmets of the infantry. He pulled the firing bar.

There
was a dry crack. A wave of acrid fumes slapped him in the face. Automatically he opened his mouth to prevent his eardrums from shattering.

`
Now!
' he yelled above the roar of the explosion.

Schulze
slammed home another shell into the gaping breech. Metal struck metal with a hollow boom. The Wasp came to an abrupt halt, a bright hole in its side. White smoke started to pour from its engine.

`
You
hit
it
,
sir
!
'
Schulze shouted exuberantly, as the crew bailed out.

But
von Dodenburg had no time to enjoy his triumph. The remaining two Wasps were still coming on past the stricken flame-thrower. The first one came parallel with it and fired immediately. The flame engulfed a bunker to their right. Two young troopers ran out, screaming frantically. Before they had gone five metres, they had been consumed by the greedy flames. They dropped slowly to the ground, charred black and shrunken already to the size of pigmies.

Behind
von Dodenburg, the Creeper retched violently. His bile rose and he spewed over the back of the Major's tunic. In that same instant, von Dodenburg pulled the firing bar again. The gun crashed into action. The shell hit the Wasp squarely in the bogies. The stricken Wasp swung round, smashed to one side by the force of the blow. The gunner slumped dead over his weapon. His hand still on the trigger. A fatal oversight.

The
terrible weapon fired of its own accord. The flame engulfed the Sussexs following it. In an instant all was chaos. The dead gunner kept the gun flaming, wreathing them in its fiery blast. One by one they dropped, screaming frantically, charred skeletons.

It
was too much for the remaining Wasp. It swung round crazily on its axis. With a crash of gears, the maddened driver shot forward, cutting a great swathe through the following infantry, scattering them on both sides, leaving a crushed pulp of dead men behind as it scurried down the steep hillside. The next instant the terrified survivors fled, and the second Wasp's flame-thrower finally fell silent.

Von
Dodenburg sat down abruptly in front of a sobbing Creeper.

`Let
them go, Schulze,' he breathed and pushed back his helmet from his blackened, sweat-lathered face, as the big Hamburger raised his Schmeisser. 'The poor bastards have had enough.' He gulped in a deep breath of the cold air gratefully. 'Don't worry, they'll be back ...’

Sixteen

They were. Time and time again. Sussexs and Sikhs. Rajputs and Royals. One day their attackers would be black men; another white men. Sometimes they seemed neither one colour nor another. The New Zealand Maoris came rushing up the hill. Burly men, who looked a little too heavy to be good infantry in von Dodenburg's opinion. They got to within fifty metres of the Panzer Grenadiers' positions - all shining Polynesian faces and big white teeth. They melted away in front of the massed machine-guns.

Once
their attackers were yellow, and they came by night: the stocky little mountaineers of the 1st/2nd Gurkhas. Unlike the others they tried to outflank the position, climbing up and beyond the perimeter and coming down near to the Twin Tits just before dawn. But the Vulture had anticipated even that approach, although Kesselring, who knew something about mountain warfare himself, had told him it was impossible. He had strewn the area with their home-made `deballockers', as Schulze called the primitive anti-personnel devices: a bullet inserted in a little container, which sent the bullet flying upwards at groin-height if anyone stepped on it.

`You
might live after you step on one,' Schulze was wont to comment about them. 'But you ain't going to be much good in the hay afterwards!'

The
Ghurkas' leading platoons came swinging confidently from the height right into the minefield, their kukris held at the ready. Before they had a chance to use their deadly curved knives there was a series of staccato explosions. The little men howled and clutched at their shattered crotches, letting their kukris fall. A moment later the flares hissed into the night, casting their ruddy unreal light on the terrible sight below. The spandaus opened up. The Gurkhas' Colonel went down with a slug in the base of his stomach. He called the next wave to attack. They ran over the tormented bodies of their injured comrades. But they could not break through the line of spandaus. By dawn there was little left of the 1st/2nd Gurkha Rifles.

Freyberg
sent in the Fortresses. They came at fifteen thousand feet. To von Dodenburg crouched at the bottom of his command bunker the four-engined bombers, pressing on steadily towards their position, looked beautiful and arrogant. When their bombs came whistling down with their messages of death, it seemed to him that at that height the war must have appeared very remote to those flying supermen, busy with their dials and buttons.

But
the bombs did not dislodge the tenacious defenders of Peak 555, although they were taking serious casualties. Now most of the bunkers dug in around the Twin Tits were filled to overflowing, and the Battle Group's two surgeons worked night and day trying to save the wounded. But as February gave way to March time began to run out. The Chief Surgeon who looked more like a butcher in his blood-stained rubber overall and gumboots than a doctor, told von Dodenburg when he came to visit some of his own wounded Panzer Grenadiers:

`Nowadays,
von Dodenburg, we have no time for the difficulties occasioned by complicated wounds. Our rule now is - head or belly shot, curtains.'

He
made the gesture of shooting a hypodermic into a man's arm.

The
pile of dead, stacked there like logs of wood, began to grow behind the Twin Tits. And as the first of the spring sun began to warm the shell-pocked landscape, the flies appeared. They feasted, while the shocked, ashen-faced Grenadiers defending the height starved. Big flies that looked like black Italian grapes on wings: flies on the dead; flies on the wounded; flies on the faeces that lay everywhere among the shattered rock. For them there was food enough and no amount of gluttony could satiate them as they buzzed lazily over the dead and dying strewn over the height, enjoying the warming rays of the sun and dimming the sunlight when they rose in one of their swarms.

The
Grenadiers took to wearing crude masks and in quiet periods they lit smoke pots, filled with the bloody rags torn of the dead, to ward them off. But the flies always came back. As an exhausted Schulze said vehemently, giving up his attempts to fight them off:

`If
you ask me - the only shitting things which enjoy this war is those shitting turds of flies!'

One
day the venerable Abbot of Monte Cassino was waylaid on the road to Rome by Goebbels' agents and forced into a series of broadcasts denouncing the 'Allies' barbaric bombing of one of Europe's foremost cultural treasures'. The same week the steam went out of Freyberg's attack on the Cassino front. As he told a worried Clark, 'going to give my chaps a ruddy breather, you know'.

But
the 'ruddy breather' did not help the men of Wotan trapped on a square kilometre of shell-pitted mountain top.

Now
they were hemmed in on three sides, with the New Zealanders dug in further down the slope, their positions permanently covered by a thick brown fog of smoke. But at night when the heavies had stopped their barrage, Wotan's sentries could hear the enemy coughing or whispering softly together and they knew the New Zealanders were not much more than fifty metres away.

It
was on one such night that the Vulture, his body filthy and unwashed, decided that he would sneak through their perimeter and crawl up the mountainside behind them to the stream which supplied them with their water, to wash off some of the last few days' grime.

It
was a beautiful night, the sky above the peak silver with moonlight, with the faint breeze from the south warm and balmy. Down on the slope the New Zealand positions were silent and wreathed, as ever, in smoke from the pots they kept burning permanently in front of their trenches. The Vulture decided that he could confidently anticipate no trouble this pleasant spring night. All the same he warned the sentries where he was going and told them to be on the alert in case he ran into trouble. Then he set off alone up the sparkling, silver mountainside, his mind full, not only of his own situation, but of that of Germany in general.

So
far Wotan had managed to hold back the Allied drive for Cassino; the door to Rome was still held, but only just. The bombing of the Monastery had shown to what lengths they would go in their drive north to Rome and then on to the Reich itself. Soon Schellenberg in Berlin would have to make his decision about Hitler. Then, he, Geier, would have to make his own decision. But could he rely on that young fool von Dodenburg to bring his devoted Panzer Grenadiers in on the side of the conspirators when the time came?

Ever
since he had come back from Berlin, von Dodenburg had acted very strangely, seeming to avoid him; and in the heat of the battles of these last few weeks he had had no chance to question him. If he only knew what had gone on in Berlin when von Dodenburg had met Schellenberg! But he didn't. It had not been safe to contact Wagner since the offensive started. And that damn little spy Kriecher seemed to be everywhere, listening and making notes. One day, he promised himself, he'd put a bullet in the back of the pudgy, bespectacled Lieutenant.