One of our machine gunners called from the ridge overlooking the river. Rushing over to him, we saw a macabre drama on the enemy-occupied bank. Pursued by a group of terrorists, a comrade from Gruppe Drei was staggering toward the river. The trooper was obviously injured. He must have lain unconscious in the shrubbery for some time only to come to with enemy troops surging all around. The Viet Minh did not fire. They wanted the man alive.
Reaching the water, the trooper fell. He rose and waded a few more steps. An instant later the guerrillas swarmed over him. We could do nothing to save him. The terrorists were dragging him back toward the woods.
I ordered three machine guns to open fire on the struggling group. A young trooper at the nearest gun closed his eyes, swallowed hard, then grabbed the fire lever. He knew only too well what would be waiting for our comrade in the hands of the Viet Minh.
The group was caught in the murderous crossfire of the three MG’s. In a few seconds it was all over. For our wounded comrade it was indeed a mercy killing. The Viet Minh would have skinned him alive. It had happened before.
The troopers whom I had sent to look for Eisner returned. They looked pale and shaken, trying to catch their breath. “Eisner is dead,” one of them reported. “Sixteen others received direct hits… Nothing’s left of them but bits of flesh and clothes.”
“Sergeant Zeisl and nurse Thi are tending the wounded,” the second trooper added. “Nine men were hit, some of them badly.”
The rate of the enemy fire was still on the increase. Defying our machine guns, more and more guerrillas deployed on the far side of the river, but no crossing was yet attempted. Karl must have silenced some of the Viet Minh howitzers but a few shells were still coming in to blast the trail and the hillside. Seven more of our comrades were killed. The mortars sent salvo after salvo. I could see projectiles bursting around the small patch of shrubbery where Karl had deployed. He was already moving the howitzers to a safer place.
All of a sudden Erich swore and rushed to the wireless.
“What’s the matter?” I yelled after him.
“The girls!” he shouted and for a moment my breath failed me. “Look at them!” Schulze waved in the general direction of Karl’s position. The next instant he was calling Pfirstenhammer.
Grabbing my field glasses I scanned the trail along the woods and understood Erich’s consternation. I spotted Suoi and Noy kneeling beside a wounded comrade, ducking whenever a shell screamed overhead. Mortar shells exploded all around them.
“Karl!” I heard Schulze shout, “get the girls out of there and be quick about it.”
“They are with a badly wounded man, Erich.”
“I don’t care if they are with Jesus Christ… Get them out of there.”
“I’m sorry, Erich,” I heard Karl replying. “I have to attend to the guns. We have a battle going here, if you haven’t noticed it.”
“Karl, if anything happens to Suoi…”
“I love Noy as much as you love Suoi, Erich.”
I was much too preoccupied to listen to the rest of their conversation. I had to improvise a plan for tackling the situation and I had to do it very quickly. It was evident that as soon as darkness fell the enemy would cross the river. It was also very likely that they could wipe us out before sunrise through a series of human-wave assaults. I decided to call for reinforcements and aerial support.
“Hans, let me go over to the girls,” Schulze spoke with a miserable look on his face.
Still preoccupied with my own thoughts I replied mechanically, “Go!” I knew be would be of little use to me if I refused.
Unable to do anything but sit tight, I sent word to our widely dispersed troops to ease up on the ammunition. The machine guns were gradually phased out, but the riflemen went on firing at individual targets when the target was clear enough to give a fair chance of scoring. Since we were self-supporting and independent from supplies and reinforcements, prolonged engagements with the enemy could cause us serious setbacks. We simply could not afford to fire off ammo at a rate of two to three thousand rounds per minute.
Our lower rate of fire only increased the guerrilla endeavors. One Viet Minh company crept right up to the river and made preparations for an early assault across the bridge. Our sharpshooters were picking off the boldest ones as fast as they could fire, reload, and fire again, yet the fearful toll did not seem to lessen the guerrillas” determination. They were pressing closer and closer to the possible crossing places.
In the nick of time two squadrons of fighter bombers dived out of the clouds. The moment the planes appeared, the enemy ceased firing on us and sprang for cover. The planes began to hammer away at the guerrillas, scores of whom had no time to reach the woods. Cannon shells, fragmentation bombs, rockets, and napalm rained from above. It was a great spectacle to watch— and needless to say, a welcome spectacle. Taking the mike, I settled down at the radio to send corrections to the squadron leader.
“How long has it been going on?” he asked me from somewhere above.
“Since morning!” I informed him.
He whistled. “You’re lucky to be alive, man—you stepped into a real anthill. They are swarming all over the place.”
“It’s your game now, squadron leader. Make the best of it.”
Again the planes screamed in over the treetops. The Viet Minh advance parties were plastered with steel and fire; explosions rumbled along the riverside and thick, oily smoke rose where the napalm bombs had been at work. The squadron leader came back on the line.
“They say you have enlisted a couple of cuties in your outfit just to keep up spirit,” he called.
“We need lots of spirit,” I replied. “There’s no five-o’clock tea in the jungle, squadron leader.”
“Just clear the trail of those guns. When the party is over we might decide to land, cher ami.”
“At the rate you are moving you’d burrow a tunnel through the hill.”
I heard him chuckle. “Roger… Roger… There is a whole bunch of them down below ready for the frying pan.”
“Tres bien, Charles, Roger, zdro-cent-dix-sept—zdro-huit.”
“Attaquez!” Three of the planes banked, came down over a patch of forest and rained napalm. At four o’clock the transport planes arrived. The Paratroops began to descend, twelve hundred of them. Air ambulances settled at the foot of the hill. Their arrival signaled that for once we could deliver our wounded comrades to a hospital.
The battle came to a sudden end. The Viet Minh ranks eddied and then fled. On the far side of the river the trail was covered with hundreds of shattered bikes, wagons, boxes, crates, bales—and corpses; in the woods a hundred fires burned and the Paras were busy shooting down the panicked oxen and water buffalo that milled along the riverside. Not even beasts could be spared, for they were the principal means of Viet Minh transports.
That evening we gave a last salute to sixty-five of our fallen comrades. Among them were Sergeant Schenk and Bernard Eisner.
16. THE LITTLE TRAITORS
I found the muffler-equipped machine guns which we used on so many occasions extremely effective, so long as no prolonged firing was necessary. With mufflers the barrels would quickly overheat. Another shortcoming was that mufflers blotted out the gunsights and tracers had to be used to zero in on the target. After several months of experimenting. Sergeant Krebitz discovered that fairly good silencers could be made from sections of hollow bamboo, padded with wet clay and wrapped in layers of cloth. The result was a clumsy contrajftion which nevertheless worked.