“Well, perhaps I was inspired by Hansel and Gretel,” Stahl told me after the war. “But actually I can’t recall making any sort of decision.”
Stahl rose and began pumping for the tank. As he ran, he dropped parts of his kit, first his canteen, then his spade, then his respirator case, then his haversack, marking his path through the minefield.
“I ran in a straight line, and I knew that any step might be my last,” he recalled. “Bullets flew all around, making this funny fizzing sound.”
Hours later, when the corporal had a moment to take inventory, he found two holes on the left side of his tunic, where a bullet had passed between his arm and his chest.
Breathing heavily more from fear than exertion, Stahl rounded the burning tank to reach the crew of the lead tank. He sank to the ground among the panzer’s dead and wounded crewmen. The tank commander’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was moving. He was alive. The driver moaned, alive also. Stahl lifted the commander onto his own back, then crawled toward the nearest marker, his haversack, which loomed like a harbor beacon in front of him. By then his platoon had set up their two machine guns and were returning fire, covering him.
Stahl made his way steadily, arm over arm, his face just above ground. He felt the tank commander’s blood on his pants. They passed the haversack, then the respirator case. He heard a shell scream into the lead tank. When he glanced behind, the turret had been blown off the chassis and was upside down on the ground, looking like a turtle on its back.
He carried the tank commander to the platoon, which was now dug in and giving more than they were getting. The American machine gun may have been knocked out by this time, Stahl was not sure. He immediately turned on his belly and retraced his route, wondering when his luck would end, spitting out grass and bits of thistle that caught in his mouth.
The driver was still alive when the corporal returned. Stahl yanked him onto his back, and began again toward his platoon. The driver’s mouth dropped onto Stahl’s ear, and every time Stahl pushed himself forward, the driver clamped his jaw painfully onto his rescuer’s ear. The corporal’s legs were cramping. His back felt like flame was searing along it. His throat was so dry it felt like canvas.
Except for his gnawed ear, Stahl made it back to his platoon unscathed. Gunfire from the woods redoubled. A squadron had encircled the American unit. Wehrmacht soldiers had been told the Yanks were underequipped, undernourished, and undertrained. They would not last long.
Stahl received a firm handshake from his lieutenant. The Reich was more generous, awarding him the Knight’s Cross.
General Clay once said, “Canadians are odd ducks, and the French are crazed, so when you add the two, the combination can scarcely be imagined.” Sergeant René LaPoint, a French-Canadian, may have proven the general correct.
LaPoint, from the town of Laval near Montreal, had joined the British Army the day after the German invasion of Poland. His avocation was training dogs for search and rescue in the north country, and he was a member of the Quebec Rescue League. LaPoint shipped four dogs with him to England. I have seen the memorandum written by Commander in Chief, Home Forces, Arthur Stedman, reluctantly approving La-Point’s plan. The memo stressed the dire shortage of antitank weapons.
LaPoint taught his German shepherds that food would be found under a tank. For weeks, he fed them only under a panzer mock-up, and in the days before S-Day, he kept them a bit hungry. He endured the taunts of his fellow soldiers, who called him Canine René. He vowed he would show them.
On S-Day, the 4th Panzer Grenadiers, an armored infantry regiment, pierced the line and gulped up half a dozen miles of southern England. The sergeant, his dogs, and two other French Canadian canine trainers had been detached from their unit and rushed south to meet the German armor. The Germans who had landed east of Brighton were pivoting west. The sergeant and his dogs found the 4th Panzer just inland from Worthing.
LaPoint and his team hid in a farmhouse north of Worthing. He was gratified when the panzers stormed by, then paused to regroup a hundred yards behind him. The armor had outrun their infantry support.
He left the house with the other two trainers and his four dogs. The animals were on tight leather leashes. Robespierre—whom LaPoint had nicknamed the Incorruptible, the same nickname given to the revolutionary—led the way. On each dog was a pack containing three sticks of dynamite and a detonator. The sergeant carried rolls of wire, an electric switch, and a battery. The tanks had churned up a cloud of dust, which helped hide the French Canadians as they ran tree to tree, closing in on the German armor. Danton, the second dog, barked. LaPoint flicked the German shepherd’s nose to silence him.
The AT team stopped behind a hedgerow fifty yards from the nearest panzer. The tanks were painted in what was called an ambush scheme: patches of red-brown over a yellow base coat with spots of yellow on top of it all, to simulate sunlight filtering through trees. The tanks were almost invisible, even at LaPoint’s short distance. Through the dust and tree branches he thought he could see a tank commander standing in the cupola of his machine, using his radio.
Messerschmitts soared overhead. The sergeant connected the wire to Robespierre. He quietly thanked the dog, wished him God speed, then ordered, “Robespierre, go.”
The dog trotted around the end of a hedgerow. The wire peeled off the spool in LaPoint’s hand as Robespierre traveled toward the nearest tank, an Ausf E.
Feverish with his imminent redemption from all the jokes that had been told about him and his dogs, the sergeant readied his hand on the switch. At his feet, Danton and Marat and Abbé Sieyès patiently waited their doom.
Twenty yards from his target tank, Robespierre paused to lift his leg on a beech tree. Then the German shepherd looked over its shoulder at LaPoint and apparently decided it was not hungry enough to crawl under a tank. Robespierre lay down, resting his muzzle on a foreleg, duty forgotten.
LaPoint heard the other two French Canadian soldiers laugh derisively from the safety of the hedgerow.
Rage enveloped LaPoint. His failure would be reported to all his scoffing friends. He was still angry when I interviewed him at his home in Quebec after the war. “That mangy cur, that ingrate, that mutt.”
Flushed with anger, the sergeant jumped over the hedgerow and ran through the woods to his dog. “I was so mad it didn’t cross my mind that I could be spotted by the tanks.”
Robespierre leaped up to greet him, panting, happy for the sudden reunion. LaPoint yelled, “You do as I tell you, goddamn it.”
He reattached the leash to Robespierre’s collar and started toward the tank. Just then the panzer’s driver wound up his engine, and the dog balked. This was no wood mock-up. Cursing, the sergeant dragged the dog between trees toward the panzers. LaPoint bellowed at Robespierre, “I will not be disgraced by a bastard mutt.”
But twenty yards from the nearest tank, Robespierre dug in his heels and refused to take another step. “The Germans must have expected nothing to approach from their rear. They simply didn’t look back.”
Blind with fury and humiliation, LaPoint yanked the dynamite sticks out of Robespierre’s backpack. “This is what I’ve trained you to do, you son of a bitch mongrel. You watch this.”
Carrying the explosives, the sergeant dashed to the rear tank. He threw the packet under the chassis and retreated, trailing the wire behind him. Robespierre followed.
LaPoint threw the switch. The explosion ruptured the tank’s belly and was quickly followed by the blast of its ammunition, which blew the vehicle onto its back and knocked down three nearby trees. The ground under LaPoint’s feet shuddered with the tank’s weight.