“The Incorruptible, my ass,” LaPoint said as he attached another wire to Robespierre. LaPoint’s fellow soldiers looked on in awe from the hedgerow. The sergeant signaled one of them to bring another package of dynamite.
The lead panzer’s commander had dropped back into his turret, and the three other tanks slowly moved ahead and fanned out, looking for the American AT team. They rolled over elm saplings, which bent to the ground under the panzers’ weight.
LaPoint dropped the dynamite into the satchel and made the connection. “Now, Robespierre, go.”
The dog took off again, aimed at another tank. The wire played out from the spool. The German shepherd ran, then walked, then dawdled, then sat and yawned, looking without interest at the burning, overturned tank.
“Bastard,” LaPoint screamed over the guffaws of his friends.
In a white fury, he raced again to Robespierre. “You flea-infested pile of fur. I’ll teach you if I die trying.”
Again he withdrew the dynamite from the pack and bolted after the German armor. The aft tank’s turret spun his way, but stopped before it drew a bead and then swiveled back. The sergeant gained on the tank, hurdling over fallen elms. “That goddamn kraut dog.”
The tank abruptly stopped. LaPoint ran up the tank’s exhaust plume and hurled the sticks under it. He retraced his steps, playing out the wire. The panzer turned in its own length. LaPoint felt the cold wash of fear and sensed the periscope finding him.
The ball-mounted MG 34 spewed bullets, felling a tree near LaPoint and Robespierre. The sergeant flipped the switch.
According to the two French Canadian onlookers, who testified on behalf of LaPoint’s decoration, the panzer lifted five feet off the ground, all fifty tons of it, then dropped to the earth in a landing that must have shaken the entire county.
LaPoint made it back to the hedgerow and was reaching for another charge when the other French Canadians wrestled him to the ground. They shouted that he would never make it again, that his berserk luck would surely end.
Frothing, LaPoint yelled back, “I’m going to strangle that goddamn Robespierre.”
They held him on the ground, LaPoint shaking with rage and screaming he was going to kill the dog the first chance he got. Then panzer machine gun bullets piped overhead, sobering the sergeant. Without another word the three rose and scampered along the hedgerow, a full retreat, the dogs in tow.
“I’ve never felt I deserved the Victoria Cross that I received,” LaPoint told me. “But my friends testified that I ran up to the two panzers and destroyed them single-handedly. They never mentioned that mutt Robespierre or my demented rage.”
At the end of our interview, I asked him what had happened to Robespierre. LaPoint shrugged, “He’s in the kennel out back with the others. I’m trying to teach him to find lost hikers, but as you’ve gathered, he’s a slow learner.”
A silver star is not a Congressional Medal of Honor or a Victoria Cross. But I’m proud of mine, and let me report here how I earned it.
Five days before S-Day, General Clay and I were on one of his endless inspection tours, this one in Kent. We had just finished meeting with Colonel Richard Barnes of the 46th Field Artillery Battalion, assigned to the 5th Infantry Division, and were driving by a supply depot on our way to the 5th’s headquarters near Canterbury. The depot was hidden among trees, with camouflage tents strung from trunk to trunk. An air raid siren sounded—the constant refrain of my stay in England—so I pulled the jeep under a roadside glade of trees to wait for the all-clear.
AA guns near the depot rumbled. The general and I stepped out from under the branches to watch the shells explode high overhead. German airplanes—I couldn’t tell which kind, or even if they were fighters or bombers—flitted in and out of the clouds.
Its stertorous sound indicated the AA gun was a three-inch M3, which fired shells to an altitude of over three miles. At the beginning of the war, the Americans guessed that one German airplane would be shot down for every fifty AA shells fired from the ground. “We had hoped for the Kipling equation,” Clay said, “‘Ten thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee.’” Events had proven the ratio to be one plane for every twelve thousand shells. The AA units’ long and pounding productions usually produced very little. “All pop and no punch,” Clay summarized.
But this time, as he shielded his eyes against the luminous clouds, the general said, “I’ll be go to hell. They got one.”
The AA gunners were on a ridge two miles to the east. Their victim left a blazing trail as it fell from the sky. The pilot desperately tried to right the plane, and he almost accomplished the maneuver, but the craft dipped and rolled. As it rushed across the sky toward us, I recognized the plane as a Heinkel Griffon, a fighter bomber that appeared to have only two nacelles and propellers, but I knew to have four engines in pairs on each wing. Prone to engine fires, it was an experimental plane that had somehow made it into general Luftwaffe service. German pilots called it the Flying Coffin.
“Jack, with that plane gliding right in at us, I’ll bet you’re tempted to run or duck,” Clay said.
It came on steadily, billowing black smoke.
I replied, “Not at all, sir.” A whopper. The damned thing seemed headed straight for the bridge of my nose.
Losing altitude quickly, the Griffon streaked across the pasture east of us, then ripped into the trees fifty yards up the road. An explosion shook the trees, and a yellow mushroom of flame lifted skyward.
The general and I arrived at the crash sight a moment later. The plane had landed in the depot, tearing away camouflage nets and branches before it skidded into a Quonset hut to explode, shooting balls of flame in all directions. The remains of the Griffon were lost in the roaring conflagration. A dozen fires dappled the depot grounds. Three flatbed trucks were blazing, as was a hill of gunny sacks, perhaps flour. Fire was eating at one end of a stack of crates. Stripped away by a tree, one flaming wing had spun into the quartermaster’s tent. Pillars of flame rose from the canvas, lapping at the tree branches above.
Clay climbed out of the jeep, intent on directing fire control. I heard a cry from the tent, then a muffled whimper. I dislike reporting here that my first thought was, “I shouldn’t be expected to check this out.”
There was no one else near, so I ran toward the tent. I slowed several times, praying someone would overtake me. No one did. The wing had sliced off half the immense tent. Flame crawled along the remaining portion. The fire made a frightening hiss. I circled the tent until I found the entrance. The flap was on fire. I stepped toward it, close enough to feel the heat on my face. I heard the cry again.
“Goddamn it, I don’t want to go in there,” I said to myself bravely.
Inexplicably, I did, bowing my head and raising my arm, a fullback’s charge through the flap. Heat engulfed me. I took a breath and the air seemed to scour my throat and lungs. Mad waves of fire danced all around.
Two soldiers were on the ground at the back of the tent, trapped in the canvas that had been pulled down on them by the wing. One had a bloody slash on his forehead and was burbling, but may have been unconscious. The other, tightly swaddled in the canvas, was wailing in terror. Fire was crawling along the rumpled and twisted canvas toward them.
Unable to breath, I stumbled forward. The conscious soldier’s arms were pinned behind him, so I grabbed him by his armpits and yanked. I was losing strength to the heat. I pulled again and again, tugging him bit by bit from the cloth. He finally slipped out, kicking and yelling. He stood, but locked his legs against moving toward the burning flap. I took him by an arm and towed him through.