War Stories Page 9

  The pilot frowned. “I say! That would be three days without food or water. Plus blood loss from the leg—” He keeled over, unconscious.

  It took less than an hour for battalion to send an ambulance to pick up the rescued British pilot. By that time, the flight lieutenant had downed three canteens of water and two chocolate bars, and was chatting with Bravo Company like they were old friends. He seemed genuinely dismayed when the medics came to take him away from such a “grand bunch of Yanks.”

  As the ambulance pulled out, Lieutenant McCoy cast Jacob a swift nod. “Nice catch.”

  Moments like this made Jacob feel good about his decision to walk into that recruiting center more than a year ago. It was true that in this war, he was nothing more than a tiny cog in a vast machine. But he could still make a difference.

  The company resumed its progress south. Several times, they had to leave the road to allow armored and mechanized columns to pass them. At intersections among the hedgerows, other infantry units joined them, until thousands of soldiers were all marching in the same direction.

  “Big party,” Beau observed.

  “My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail,” Jacob put in.

  “Oh, we’re invited, all right,” Beau assured him. “The army insists.”

  As the troops mingled on their movement south, bits of information passed from mouth to mouth. Some of these were obviously rumors, and pretty wild ones at that: the war was almost over; they’d be home in two weeks; Hitler had abandoned Berlin and was holed up in a farmhouse somewhere. But amid the unbelievable stories, one word rose above all others: Cobra.

  “I’m afraid of snakes,” Leland volunteered. “Ever since I was two and a grass snake bit me.”

  “This isn’t a real snake,” Beau said impatiently. “It’s one of those code names the brass hats are so crazy about. Operation Cobra.”

  “Another plot to get us all killed” was Leland’s opinion.

  “If what everybody’s saying is true, we’re breaking out of Normandy,” Jacob offered. “Can’t be too soon for me. If I never see another hedgerow, that’s just fine.”

  By late afternoon, Bravo Company had left the procession and was draped in various poses around an abandoned farm, consuming field rations. In the distance, they could see the single tower of a ruined cathedral.

  “That’s Saint-Lô,” Sergeant Rajinsky told them. “That church used to have two steeples, but the air corps knocked one of them down on D-Day.”

  “Now we know what happened to our air support at Omaha,” Jacob commented. “They were in the wrong place, bombing churches.”

  Rajinsky favored him with a crooked grin. “Any time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, remember the people of Saint-Lô. They got flattened by us on D-Day. They got bombed by the Germans. And guess where the generals have decided Operation Cobra should be.” He checked his wristwatch. “They’re going to get it again in about twenty minutes. Poor Frenchies.”

  It was typical of the military. Bombs meant for the coast might fall on a cathedral fifty kilometers inland, but when an air raid was scheduled for 1742 hours, it would not happen at 1743.

  Right on schedule, two spotter planes appeared in the sky above Saint-Lô and fired flares over the town. Almost immediately, a squadron of dive-bombers came streaking overhead. Puffs of anti-aircraft fire bloomed all around them.

  “Those flyboys, they’re something else,” Jacob commented admiringly.

  The bombs began to fall, a series of distant rumbles that blended into a general roar.

  Pretty soon, Saint-Lô disappeared under a pall of flame-tinged smoke. Only the single church tower was still visible through the billowing clouds, which blew across the fields in their direction.

  “Oh, great,” Beau complained. “Now we have to breathe it.”

  But the onslaught wasn’t over yet. The earth began to vibrate and an approaching hum grew into a painful buzzing in their ears.

  Leland pointed. “Look!”

  A squadron of heavy bombers filled the air, moving in such tight formation that they looked like a pattern on wallpaper. Bravo Company watched their approach until the windborne smoke from Saint-Lô obscured the spectacle in the sky.

  And then the first explosion came from the second wave—far too close. The bomb hit just a few hundred meters to the south of them, sending a huge geyser of earth and brush straight up.

  “Incoming!” bellowed Rajinsky.

  The company scattered, scrambling for any kind of cover on the abandoned farm. Jacob pulled on his helmet and sprinted for the farmhouse. At that moment, a second bomb hit, blowing the stone structure to tiny pieces. A rock the size of a cantaloupe sailed past his left ear, and he was battered with dust and mortar debris. The blast knocked him flat on his back, and for a moment, he lay there, stunned. Then he was being dragged by the arms through the open door of the barn. Beau and Leland. They were shouting at him urgently, but now the bombs were falling in a nonstop barrage, and he couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  The three of them crawled under a buckboard and huddled there, praying that the heavy wooden cart would be strong enough to protect them. A moment later, another body squirmed in beside them. Rajinsky.

  “Why are they bombing their own guys?” Leland howled in terror.

  “They don’t know it’s us!” the sergeant bellowed back. “All they can see is the smoke from the first wave.”

  For more than an hour, American and British bombers pounded Saint-Lô. And for more than an hour, far too many of those bombs fell on the little farm where Bravo Company had stopped for a meal break. The noise was unlike anything Jacob had ever experienced before, even on D-Day. It went beyond hearing—it was a physical presence. He felt each explosion in his vital organs and in the gums beneath his teeth. The earth shook with each blast, rattling his brain inside his skull. It was impossible to think, even to be afraid—although on some level he understood that if one of those bombs scored a direct hit on the barn, he and his companions would be blown to bits. There was a time during the barrage that he even toyed with the possibility that he might be better off that way. At least then the torture would be over.

  It was impossible to tell when the bombing stopped. The entire company had gone temporarily deaf, and the reverberations continued in their minds long after the air raid had ended.

  When the four of them climbed out from under the buckboard, they found themselves buried in shattered pieces of lumber. The whole ghastly experience had been so loud that none of them had noticed the barn collapsing around them. If it hadn’t been for the shelter of the buckboard, they would surely have been crushed.

  It took some doing for the four soldiers to dig their way out of the wreckage of the barn. At that, they needed several platoon-mates heaving splintered boards off of them. Jacob emerged to find a world he barely recognized as the place he’d had his field rations an hour earlier.

  The farm was gone. Not a single structure remained. Not a field was left undamaged. Craters twelve feet in diameter and four feet deep dotted the landscape like chicken pox. One bomb had blasted a twenty-foot gap in a hedgerow, scattering trees, bushes, and heavy tangles of roots. Smoke hung in the air, along with the acrid smell of gunpowder, burnt earth, and concrete dust.

  Medics scrambled everywhere, tending to the wounded. Two bodies were covered by crimson-stained blankets. Close to the rubble of the house, a jeep was flipped over and burning.

  “Our own air corps,” Jacob said aloud.

  Beau and Leland regarded him questioningly and he realized they were deafened and couldn’t hear him. He could barely hear himself.

  “Our own air corps did this,” Jacob repeated, practically shouting just to register his own voice. “With friends like them, who needs the Germans?”

  Leland nodded his bitter agreement. “We’re suffering when the enemy is getting off scot-free!”

  “I don’t think so.” Beau pointed through the dispersing smoke in the direction of Sa
int-Lô.

  The smoke over the town glowed bright orange. Leaping tongues of flame showed over the horizon. The entire place was ablaze.

  “Looks like they saved some bombs for the bad guys after all,” Leland commented, patting at his right ear.

  Jacob stared at the burning city. Perhaps a couple dozen bombs had accidentally fallen at the farm, and it had been, by far, the most traumatic experience of his young life. But what must it have been like to be the actual target of all that weaponry?

  What was it like for the people of Saint-Lô as wave after wave of death and destruction rained down on them?

  “That can’t be true!” Trevor protested. “Why would the planes bomb their own guys? Are you sure you’re remembering it right?”

  It was early afternoon, and the Firestones were finally on the road to Paris after the rental company had provided two new tires for the Citroën.

  G.G. laughed mirthlessly. “Believe me, you don’t forget something like that. We lost two guys in the raid, and our wounded couldn’t be evacuated until Cobra was over. First things first, you know.”

  “But that’s no good,” Trevor insisted. “I understand that soldiers die in battle, but not sitting around on a snack break. And not because their own pilots don’t know who’s where.”

  “It’s called friendly fire, Trev,” Dad put in from behind the wheel.

  “It isn’t very friendly, but it happens,” the old soldier added. “And when it does, you couldn’t care less who’s shooting at you—the Germans or FDR himself.”

  “But it’s wrong.” Trevor struggled to put his emotions into words. “I get that war is risky, but the least we can do is make sure our troops don’t get killed by mistake.”

  “You’re thinking of today—smart bombs, smart weaponry, smart this, smart that. It sounds more like a convention of eggheads than any battle. Back in the war, we didn’t have that stuff. No matter how much you plan and strategize and calculate all the angles, once the shooting starts, it’s basically chaos.”

  “It may be glamorous to imagine fighting an enemy,” Dad added. “But bombs and bullets don’t care who they hit, and the real enemy is the fighting itself.”

  “Are you saying war is so bad that we should have just let Hitler take over the world?” Trevor challenged.

  Dad paused for a long moment before replying. “Some things are worth fighting for. I’m just saying that it’s awful, that’s all. Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.”

  Trevor waited for G.G. to break in and tell Dad that he didn’t know what he was talking about. But the old man kept his eyes on the passing French countryside and stayed silent.

  He perked up later on, when road signs began to mention towns he remembered from the war—Évreux … Fauville … Miserey.

  “I guess you were pretty miserable there, huh?” Trevor wisecracked.

  “You said it,” G.G. agreed with a grin. “That’s where Leland, the dope, got himself bitten by a dog. He thought he had his million-dollar wound—you know, the one that gets you sent home. No such luck. The medics gave him rabies shots all the way to Paris.”

  Dad was impressed. “I’m surprised the army thought to bring medicine for that.”

  “Are you kidding? The army thought of everything. They even had ten-gallon barrels of camphorated VapoRub to open up your sinuses after a long day inhaling battlefield stink.” He pointed at another sign. “Hey, there’s the road to Villegats. We lost Rajinsky there.”

  Trevor looked solemn. “How did he die?”

  “He didn’t. He just got lost. We were the first Americans through there, so they threw us a parade, because they thought we were the whole US Army. Rajinsky was looking for a bathroom, but they wouldn’t stop kissing him. He had to take a taxi to the next town to catch up with us.”

  “Kissing him?” That didn’t sit well with Trevor’s view of the war. “I thought you had to fight your way across France!”

  “There was plenty of fighting, believe me,” the old soldier assured him. “Back in hedgerow country, you could be dug in for three days just to take one field and six cows. But Cobra was the breakout. We weren’t slogging through bushes anymore; we were riding in trucks and jeeps. When there weren’t enough spots, we rode on the tanks, eight men to a Sherman, hanging on for dear life. Better than walking, but not much. Because if you fall off the front, the flattest thing in France won’t be the crepes.”

  “But where were the Germans?” Trevor asked.

  “They were regrouping—falling farther back into France to solidify their positions. The battles were vicious, but once they were over, we might have fifty klicks of clear sailing ahead. It was whiplash, really—going from slogging over every inch to sailing across the country—stop the car!”

  Shocked, Dad jammed on the brakes. The Citroën screeched to a halt and almost fishtailed off the road.

  “Grandpa! What?”

  The old man had raised himself out of his seat, twisting around to peer out the rear window. “Back up! Back up!” he ordered urgently.

  “To where?”

  Trevor was on his knees in the back seat. “Are you talking about that pile of rocks in the ditch?”

  G.G. threw open the door, unfolded his long legs out of the Citroën, and began to stride purposefully along the shoulder toward a small structure. Dad and Trevor were hot on his heels.

  “Grandpa, where are you going?” Dad called irritably.

  When they finally caught up, they found the old man bent over a small stone cistern, drinking water that was bubbling out of an ancient spout.

  “Grandpa, that could be poison!” Dad exclaimed.

  G.G. looked up, flushed with pleasure. “It wasn’t poison seventy-five years ago and it isn’t poison now. Help yourself.”

  Trevor put two and two together. “This has been here—since the war?”

  “Probably before that. It was old when we found it. We’d been on the road all day. It was hot, and the captain had us in full gear so we wouldn’t lose anything. I’ve lived ninety-three years and I’ve never been so uncomfortable. Our canteens were empty. Our field rations were useless. Our mouths were so dry that we couldn’t chew anything and swallow it. And then the driver pulled up beside this.”

  “It must be an underground spring,” Dad concluded, “if it’s still here after all these years.”

  “Nothing ever tasted better,” the old soldier said with authority. “We drank. We filled our canteens. We ate our rations and we drank some more. From the whole war, my best memory is right here. Try it. You’ll go nuts.”

  Trevor took a sip. It was cold, and tasted very clean and pure. But it was just water. What was the big deal?

  So Trevor closed his eyes and pretended he was a battle-weary soldier on a scorching-hot day, exhausted and thirsty. He was bathed in sweat from a firefight that had turned into hand-to-hand combat. His uniform was stained with blood and dirt, his throat baked dry from the heat of the flamethrowers. He took a long drink.

  “You’re right, G.G. It’s the best water I ever tasted.”

  The old man beamed. “What did I tell you? Can’t believe it’s still here after seventy-five years. Made my day.”

  “Seventy-five years isn’t very long for a country like this,” Dad lectured. “Remember, France dates back to Roman times. This used to be ancient Gaul.”

  Trevor rolled his eyes at his father. “Another teachable moment, Dad?”

  G.G. laughed appreciatively. “You got it, kid. But your old man isn’t wrong. In a lot of ways, France isn’t that different than it was during the war. Just older—like me. See that grove of trees over there? They were saplings when we stopped here in forty-four. That’s where we buried the Iron Cross.”

  “Iron Cross?” Dad repeated. “The German medal?”

  “Hazeltine had one—a machine gunner in our unit. He’d found it on a battlefield a couple of days before. The problem was, he wasn’t supposed to keep it. We weren’t allowed to collect souveni
rs. Battalion had been calling a lot of surprise inspections, and Hazeltine was getting nervous. So while we were stopped here, he took the medal over to those trees and buried it. Third one on the left-hand side.”

  “And what happened to it?” Trevor asked.

  The old soldier shrugged. “How should I know? I haven’t been back to check on it.”

  “I’m going to go see if it’s still there!” Trevor was off like a shot, running across the field.

  “I hope he doesn’t find it,” G.G. said quietly. “I don’t want to have to explain what Hazeltine did to the German who used to own it.”

  “Never mind that, Grandpa. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Trevor, but you need to take a look at this Facebook page from Sainte-Régine.” Daniel held out his phone.

  G.G. made no effort to take it. “I don’t hold with all that antisocial media nonsense.”

  “It’s not nonsense, it’s this group called La Vérité,” Dad insisted. “Someone in that town hates you. I mean really hates you.”

  The old man shrugged. “America doesn’t have a monopoly on crackpots, you know. There are bigmouths everywhere, only here they speak French.”

  His grandson was not convinced. “That was my first thought too—a random complainer, maybe someone who doesn’t like Americans. I figured these comments would die out after a while, but they seem to be getting worse as the date approaches. There are at least a dozen new posts every day now. They appear faster than the Sainte-Régine people can delete them. At first, they were all in French, but now they’re coming in English too. What do you think that means?”

  “I don’t care what language they’re in—I’m not going to read them” was G.G.’s opinion.

  Daniel paused to wave at Trevor, who was on his hands and knees in the grove, scrabbling with his fingers in the earth at the base of the third tree. Absorbed in his digging, Trevor didn’t notice him.

  “The messages switched to English because you’re the audience,” Trevor’s father went on. “And they’re getting downright threatening. Listen to this: ‘We know the truth about your crimes against Sainte-Régine.’ ‘If you come here, you’ll face vengeance.’ ‘You will pay for the suffering you caused.’ What do you have to say to that?”