They weren’t. Just as he started to grab another chew, tracers snaked out from either side of the road, smashing into metal and flesh. Bullets swept the column, dropping screaming men from the jeeps. The lead vehicles were quickly driverless and crashed, while the others tried desperately to turn and get away from the deadly rain of bullets. Gas tanks exploded. Men screamed as burning gas enveloped them.
“Turn around!” Hill yelled. The jeeps in front of him were already trying to do just that, but they too were quickly hit with bullets. There was the loud crack of an antitank gun and another jeep simply exploded. He didn’t need his radio to tell the others to get the hell out. He was about to radio the company commander when something smashed into the side of his jeep, slowly turning it on its side.
Hill hit the ground and crawled towards the cover of a ditch. The gas tank exploded, sending debris and burning gas over him. His uniform was on fire. He rolled around in the snow and mud and finally put it out after a few seconds that seemed like forever. He hurt like the devil from a number of burns, but he could deal with it. He had to.
More machine-gun bullets sprayed the area and made sure the dead were well and truly dead. Hill and a couple of other survivors lay in the ditch. The whole damn platoon had been pretty near wiped out. If it was any consolation, the idiot boy lieutenant was likely one of the bodies smoldering at the head of the devastated column.
“Damn it,” he snarled. He’d only been with the inexperienced unit for a couple of weeks and didn’t know any of them well, but they were still his men. Or had been, he thought angrily.
The wind shifted and he could smell burning flesh. He managed not to gag but one of the men with him wasn’t so lucky, vomiting violently. After a while, he got up the courage to look over the edge of the ditch. The Germans had come out of their holes and were headed slowly up the road. They checked American bodies and found a couple still living. They called for medics to take care of them. At least, he thought, they weren’t SS. One German shot a body that was still burning. A mercy shot, Hill thought. In North Africa he’d killed a badly burned Italian soldier who’d been screaming through charred lips to be put out of his pain.
He signaled to the other two men and they crawled slowly towards the safety of the Austrian forest. Hill waited until after darkness to go by himself to the head of the smashed column. He quickly found the sites where the shooting had come from. The Germans had evacuated, correctly feeling that American artillery or fighter planes would soon bomb and shell the area. Maybe the planes would use that new napalm to cook up a passel of Germans and call them “Fritz Fries.” He liked that thought. The Germans also likely assumed that a stronger American column would rescue the one they’d massacred. They didn’t know that all the platoon’s radios had been destroyed in the attack.
Nobody’d had a chance to pick up the dead and the German positions had been evacuated. He wasn’t going to bring back the dead either, but he did want to identify them. He gently removed one set of dog tags from each of twenty-three bodies, including the young lieutenant’s.
Hill couldn’t even recall the poor kid’s name until he saw it on his tags. The boy had arrived only a few days earlier. Now he would be buried in a local cemetery or shipped home in a box. Just because he’d been stupid didn’t mean he ought to have died.
The snow began falling again. In a few seconds it was almost impossible to see more than a few feet. Someone had told them that this was one of the worst winters in decades and he believed it. Alabama got bone-chilling cold and damp and of course it snowed every now and then, but this, he thought, was something else. At least the snow would cover their withdrawal. Thank God for small favors, he thought.
They got another small favor. One of the damaged jeeps actually started and ran, although they couldn’t get it out of second gear. Beat the hell out of walking, they thought.
* * *
General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived without incident at Lieutenant General Jake Devers’ Sixth Army Group headquarters near the old border between Austria and Germany. The U.S. owned the skies so the handful of passengers and crew of the modified B25 bomber had little to worry about except boredom and the weather. Even so, the flight had been accompanied by a dozen P51 fighters. Nobody was leaving anything to chance. The Germans had very few planes left, but it would only take one ME109 or one of the new jet-propelled ME262s and the Allied High Command could have been decapitated. There had also been some disturbing instances where German planes had carried out suicide attacks on U.S. bombers.
Devers Sixth Army Group was the smallest of the three army groups fronting the Nazis in a line that ran from the North Sea south to the Alps. A fourth army group, the Fifteenth under Mark Clark, was clawing its way up Italy. Devers had twelve American divisions in General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army and seven French under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in the French First Army.
Coffee and pastries were served by awed privates in a large house that had once been owned by a wealthy German. A large but slashed and mutilated portrait of Hitler decorated a wall. With the bulk of the war raging to the north, there was the feeling that the Sixth Army front was pretty well forgotten. The presence of Ike told them otherwise. Rumors quickly flew saying that big things were in store for the Sixth and that meant bloody fighting.
It wasn’t that the Sixth had been sitting on its collective hands. It hadn’t. They’d fought long and hard and successfully. They’d just completed eliminating what was called the Colmar Pocket, a German holdout on the west bank of the Rhine. As a result of that effort the city of Strasbourg was once again part of France. Unfortunately, Ike had not been impressed by Devers and the Sixth Army Group’s performance in that fighting. If the war in and around the Alps was to become critical, Ike had been thinking that a change in command might become necessary.
Ike gave Devers copies of the latest Ultra intercepts received from the code-breaking center at Bletchley Park in England. Only a handful of Allied leaders were privy to the fact that the U.S. and Britain had been listening to much of the German military’s communications for quite some time. He lit up a Camel, his current brand of choice, while Devers scanned the papers.
Devers shook his head and handed the documents back to Ike who stuffed them in a briefcase. They would not be left around for curious eyes to see. “This changes a lot of things,” Devers said. “A lot of people thought that the idea of an Alpine Redoubt was a figment of somebody’s imagination. The idea of the Nazis turning the Alps into a fortress is a frightening prospect. We’ve got to get across the Rhine and fast and that isn’t going to be easy.”
Ike nodded. At least Devers wasn’t saying I told you so. He’d been one of the American generals who’d thought that a German move to an Alpine redoubt was a likelihood. He’d even urged Ike to let his Sixth Army Group troops be among the first to cross the Rhine and cut off a German retreat to the Alps, but Ike had emphatically shot down that idea. Without proof that a redoubt was actually going to be built, there was no reason to change Allied strategy. They would press on towards the Rhine and then the Elbe. Thus, the Rhine crossings would be to the north. But now the situation was different.
Ike accepted that Devers was right about the Rhine preventing any move to cut off a German dash to the Alps. Plans were being made for Montgomery to command an enormous crossing force near where the Rhine flowed into the North Sea. Unfortunately, that would place Montgomery’s army as far from the Alps as possible. They would be in no position to stop the German exodus. As always, hindsight was a great view.
Ike drew deeply on his cigarette. “Once we’re across, Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group will give up any and all thoughts of heading to Berlin. As planned, they and Monty’s troops will stop at the Elbe. Patton’s Third Army will swing south and east to try and cut off forces trying to make it to the mountains. Patton’s angry as hell but he’ll deal with it. This seals the fact that we will not send men to Berlin just so they can give it back to the Russians.”