Ordinary Heroes (28 page)

"How old was the daughter?"

"Young, I guess." Barnes dragged his sleeve across his nose. "You know, Captain, I'm like any other fella, but I was pretty grateful to he out of the cold, I wasn't gonna give that girl the hairy eyeball. She was small," said Barnes, and smiled for the first time in the half hour we'd been with him. "You know, I'
m k
ind of always watching out for short women. That's about all to tell you. I remember she was the right size.''

Once they were gone, Biddy and I waited for Algar to return, shooting the breeze with the troops and officers who passed through the headquarters. The shelling continued in the mid-distance. It had begun at daybreak and started and stopped intermittently. Reports on Patton's progress were mixed. For each man who'd heard the Third Army was gaining, there were two bearing rumors that its divisions were stalled. In the meantime, the shortages of food and ammunition were past critical, not to mention the complete lack of medical items. This was not the moment to get wounded. The wises Division Clearing Station, and the eighteen doctors who manned it, had been captured on December 19. Yesterday, American artillery units south of the German troops had tried to cannon in bandages and plasma in howitzer shells, but the firing charge had blown all of it to smithereens. Everybody we encountered thanked us for the medical supplies that had fallen with us.

However, what the men here really craved was a few more degrees on the thermometer. They had stopped referring to the town as Savy. Everyone, officers included, usually called the village 'Save Me,' with salvation from the cold being their chief desire.

Tank turrets and gas lines had frozen, and the soldiers routinely found their Mis inoperable until the bolts were freed by beating them with hand grenades. Some of the men who'd started suffering frostbite a couple of days ago claimed that they'd been cold so long that the intense burning sensations had ceased. The troops called themselves 'doggies' and everybody made the same joke: "This doggy can't feel his paws."

Algar came in, stamping the snow off his boots. He asked if I was satisfied after the interviews.

"Not to be grisly or cynical, Colonel, but I'm going to have to view the remains when they're recovered. Martin's been fairly slippery and there are people in London who'll want proof positive. I'd like to be certain myself."

I had irritated Algar again. He told me I'd know better than to say that if I'd ever seen a wooden building hit by four tank rockets. But he promised that as soon as the skies cleared and supplies came, we'd all be back on that hill, not so much for my sake but so that the men who'd died there, including Martin, could receive a proper burial. At his desk, Algar spent a minute shooting fire into the bowl of his pipe.

"And have you had a chance to consider what kind of duty Teedle's orders foresee for you now, Captain?" Algar asked this neutrally, as if it were no
t a
loaded question. Biddy and I had discussed the answer at length this morning once Gideon had walked up here.

"Well, sir, Bidwell and I called a Yellow Cab so we could get back to Nancy, but they say there will be a delay picking us up, so we thought we might be able to serve with you, sir, in the meantime." Biddy had grumped around when I told him we had to volunteer for combat, but by now I understood that for him that was simply a prelude to bravery. He knew the score. If we didn't volunteer, Algar would have to order us into action. And there was no choice, anyway. The town was surrounded. It was a matter of fighting for our own survival.

"I don't suppose you two have any combat experience, Captain."

I said that Bidwell had gone up Omaha Beach. Algar had been there, too.

"That was a bitch," he said to Biddy.

"Hell on earth, sir."

"That's about the size of it. And what about you, Dubin?"

I told him I had only been shot at twice, including last night. "But I was trained as an infantry officer before I went to JAG school, sir."

Algar actually jumped out of his seat.

"A trained infantry officer? Ho my God," he said. He turned to his Exec, Ralph, who'd just arrived. "A
trained infantry officer fell out of the sky, Ralph. Christmas has come early."

The
110
th Infantry Regiment, what little was left of it, had been aggregated in a combat unit which Algar and his officers had named Team SNAFU. They were now under the ioist Airborne, plugging gaps as General McAuliffe designated, working in coordination with the 5oznd Infantry Regiment. I was placed in command of a re-formed rifle company in a re-formed battalion. Given my lack of experience, I would have been challenged as a platoon leader, but on the other hand, G Company, which at full complement would have numbered around 193 troops, was all of 98. I had no lieutenants, just three sergeants, including Biddy, in charge of three platoons, and sparse support personnel.

On the afternoon of December 22, the newly reformed G Company was assembled at the center of Savy. By daylight, Save Me was no more than it had seemed at night, a cluster of farm buildings composed of small slate-toned stones with thick joints of yellowish mortar. The tin-roofed structures had been added on to over centuries, and the windows and doors were all different sizes and varying heights, making them look as if they'd been thrown onto the buildings.

My first sergeant, named Bill Meadows, functi
o
ned for all purposes as my first lieutenant. Meadows greeted me when we met as if we were going out together for a night of drinking.

"Whatta you know, Captain?" He smiled widely and seemed on the verge of delivering a comradely poke in the shoulder. Bill Meadows was a stocky man in his early forties, wearing metal-framed specs. Like every other soldier I had, he was unshaved and his face after nearly a week of fighting was grayed by perspiration, gunpowder, and the airborne debris of shell bursts. "All right, boys," he called out to the troops. "Bend an ear. Captain Dubin's going to give us our orders.

Outmanned and outgunned by virtually everyone, Team SNAFU had been positioned here on the west of Bastogne because it was the least likely point of attack. Most of the German tanks and artillery remained north and east. Given the difficulties of moving over the snowy hills, particularly with the remaining softness in the bottomlands, the odds were against the Germans mounting a major offensive from this direction. The fact was they didn't have to. Due to the thinness of the western defenses, Team SNAFU had been unable to prevent the Germans from working their way around us, flanking south toward the town, where they were now positioned.

For all of that, no place around Bastogne was secure. There had been a skirmish outside Champ
s e
arlier yesterday, when a German grenadier team and one half-track had briefly appeared there. But just as McAuliffe situated Algar to be less in harm's way, so Algar was locating G where we were not as likely to suffer attack. We were assigned to seal off a narrow farm road that came down from the west through Champs and Hemroulle and joined the main byway at Savy. Algar wanted G to go out after dark and dig in, in a wooded draw just north of Champs, on high ground that looked down on the road and the railroad track and a cow path directly to the west. The Germans, in theory, could come from any of those approaches. We were relieving E Company, who had been closer to Hemroulle and were taking a shellacking from German artillery which had gotten a fix on their position. E, which was down to seventy-two men, would serve as Headquarters Company, waiting as reinforcements if there was an assault.

Algar was certain that yesterday's encounter near Champs was a diversionary feint. If the Germans launched a significant western attack, they were far more likely to come at Savy, which was on one of the main roads to Bastogne. It ran north to Longchamps, and was big enough to make it vulnerable to the King Panzers. For that reason, Algar kept what little armor he had with him. Naturally, if the Krauts sent an armored column toward Champs, he would use his tanks and half-tracks an
d t
ank destroyers to reinforce us. Our job would be only to hold the road for a short time until the cavalry arrived, but that was a formidable assignment given our lack of ammunition. Algar ordered us not to shoot, even when fired on, unless we could see a human target. I was with Algar when Colonel Hunt, the soznd's commander, called, and Algar described his intended defense of the Champs road as consisting of "a couple of empty muskets." It was something less than a vote of confidence.

I sent the men to pack up, ordering them to be in formation at 1615. Meadows drew what few rations we were allowed and gathered the maps. At 4:15 p
. M
., as dark was falling, I walked down the line for inspection, greeted every man by name and checked his equipment. Not one had an overcoat. They were dressed only in field jackets, sometimes more than one. All of them looked dirty, grim, and sleep deprived, but I was already proud to be their CO. They were prepared to fight, and that, I recognized, was what I'd really wanted to know in all my fretting about combat--what was worth fighting for.

The feelings of admiration were far from mutual. Most of the men hated me on sight and were sullen at best when I addressed them. For one thing, I had warmer clothes and a Thompson submachine gun, neither of which I was about to surrender, even after I learned that the undersupplied mist had been instructed to shoot anyone in an overcoat, on the theory they were German impostors. Envy, however, was not the primary motive for my troops' discontent. They knew they were under the command of a man with no combat experience, and might as well have been led by a crawling infant.

I had little appreciation at that point for what these boys had been through, since nobody ever talked about the beating the
110
th had absorbed in the last week. After my time in the VIII Corps signal office, I knew that the LVII Panzer Corps had literally swept the entire 28th Infantry Division, of which the
110
th was part, from the map. But positioned with only two of its three battalions along Skyline, the paved highway that paralleled the border between Luxembourg and Germany, the 'loth had absorbed the worst of the initial assaults, when the Panzer infantries had crossed the Our River in rubber boats in darkness and overwhelmed them at dawn.

In the desperation of the first hours, with no Americans behind them, the
110
th had been ordered not to surrender and had forced the Germans into house-to-house fighting in towns like Clervaux, Consthum, and Holzthum. Most of the men I commanded were alive only because they had run when their lines finally broke, and, given their orders, probably didn't know how to regard their survival. The majority of my troops had been replacements themselves, with less time on the Continent than I'
d h
ad, but they all seemed to feel they had unfinished business with the Germans, whatever the perils.

At 163o, Meadows called out, "Drop your cocks and grab your socks, gentlemen, we're heading out." We marched south a few blocks to the crossroads, then turned north and west out of town, proceeding a little more than a mile. Despite the cold, nobody complained, knowing they were warmer than they'd have been traveling in the back of an open truck. Halfway to our position, we passed E Company marching in. A sergeant was in command, because the other officers were dead, and he and I exchanged salutes. The enlisted men were less formal. Some wished us good luck. Several suggested my troops should write their wives and sweethearts now and tell them to forget about having a family. "The only good your nuts will be is for ice cubes." Meadows put an end to the banter. We were on foot because it was imperative to arrive unnoticed. Yesterday's skirmishing had made it clear the Krauts were nearby. The intelligence officers in McAuliffe's G-2 believed the grenadiers were hidden north and west of us in the trees.

When we reached the place the maps called for us to set up, we found a zigzagging network of foxholes already there, each of them set about five yards apart. They had almost certainly been dug in the late summer by the Germans, rearguard units protecting the retreat from Allied forces coming up from th
e s
outh. After consulting with Meadows, I ordered most of the men to shovel out these holes, rather than digging our own. Each of the three platoons had a Browning water-cooled machine gun, a cumbersome high-caliber piece manned by a three-soldier crew, and I directed the Brownings to be set up on three strongpoints running around the curved edge of the woods. Then I ordered two squads to scout defensive positions at our perimeters, forward and rear. The squad moving back discovered an old pump house, good news since the closed structure would provide a few men at a time some relief from the biting wind.

Shoveling the snow out of the holes revealed the Germans' debris--empty rations and rucksacks, spent ammunition, rusted rifles and canteens. Despite the severe cold, there was a distinct odor. This area had been liberated in mid-September by the V Corps, First Army, and I had no memory of hearing about any major action at Hemroulle. The Nazi company that had preceded us here--probably SS given the difficulty of their assignment--had to engage the Allies and slow them, knowing that there were no reinforcements behind them. Two of the foxholes in the group had been hit by Allied artillery, reducing them to half circles twice the depth of the others. I suspected that what we smelled was the German soldiers who had been in there, literally blown to bits that had moldered through the wet fal
l a
nd now were sprinkled under several inches of snow.