Another mystery, this one grotesque, began with the bombing of Madam Tussaud’s waxworks in London. The morning after the blast, many of the costumes were missing. The police were baffled, and Londoners were outraged at this petty crime committed during the horror of the London bombing.
As General Clay put it diplomatically to the prime minister, “You English have a penchant for bizarre crime, but you aren’t looters, normally.”
Pedro Esteban was with the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service. His duty was to locate and attempt to identify the bodies of soldiers killed during the invasion, then move them to approved cemeteries.
Esteban complained to me after the war, “I signed up hoping to be a Ranger, and I ended up using a number two idiot stick my entire enlistment.”
Several citizens of Coldred, a tiny village just inland from Dover, suspected a common grave was to be found in a pasture east of the town. Pedro Esteban and his crew arrived to find freshly turned earth and the faint scent of rot.
“We began digging, knowing what we’d find. In those two years, I dug up more bodies than Carter’s got pills.”
After several shovels of dirt were tossed aside, the blade hit a metal belt.
“A gold belt,” Esteban said in his Spanish accent. “I brushed aside more soil to find gold and jewels on a breastplate. I thought I’d dug up an old English king. Damn, we were excited. We dropped to our knees and began brushing aside dirt with our hands, figuring we’d hit it rich, just like Forty-Niners.”
Esteban learned later the jewels were cut glass and the gold was paint. “The body was real, though. A German with a hole through his neck. Then one of my team shouted, “That’s Henry VIII.”
So it was. The Wehrmacht soldier was wearing one of Madam Tussaud’s costumes.
“We lay the king aside and pulled up another body. This one had on a dress and a white wig. I didn’t know it then, but it was Marie Antoinette’s costume. That German’s lower legs were missing, probably from a mine. Then we pulled out Lord Nelson, then Ben Franklin, and Dick Turpin, the highwayman. All were Wehrmacht soldiers who looked like they’d been killed in action.”
Esteban and I were sipping tequila, which, frankly, I wasn’t familiar with. I will relay his final words of the interview as accurately as I remember them. He said, “You know, we in the Registration Service began to think after only a week on the job that we’d seen everything. How many goddamn ways can a guy be killed, and how awful can they look when they’re dug up? I thought I’d seen it all. But I never saw anything like this, before or since, and it spooked me. I never figured it out.”
Neither did the U.S. Army or Scotland Yard. The costumes were returned to the rebuilt waxworks after the war, where they appear today, little the worse for wear. I suspect their appearance in a Kent pasture will always remain a mystery.
I have had a bit of fun setting out these insignificant puzzles for you. But I’m done with it and must return to the battle for England. There was nothing mysterious and nothing fun about the largest armored battle of the invasion. We move to that next.
17
“Ihave visited hell,” Fritz Stumpff told me, “and now I’m afraid of dying because I might return there.”
Stumpff’s hell was in the turret of a Panzerkampfwagen III during the Battle of Haywards Heath, which lasted most of the second day of the invasion. Corporal Stumpff was a gunner with the 4th Panzer Regiment, 8th Division, in the first landing wave.
The engagement is known by the name of the village where opposing armored forces first came fully to grips.[3] But Haywards Heath was only the easterly edge of the fray, which was fought on a fifteen-mile long, fifteen-mile deep battleground. There are early indications that Haywards Heath may surpass Custer’s Last Stand (342 books with doubtless more to come) as the most analyzed battle of all time. But I find that sacrifice is necessary for this narrative, lest I bewilder myself and you by trying to write down all I learned about Haywards Heath. Rather, I take a magnifying glass to the battle map and focus on several small skirmishes, negligible of their own right, but accurate miniatures of the vast and bloody contest.
“Our Schwerpunkt broke through the American line,” Stumpff said. “But then, just when my company pivoted left to hit their flank, we came to a fierce pocket. It mauled us.”
The panzer regiment was caught in what Earl Selden called a web defense. No one in the history of blitz warfare had divined how to stop panzers massed on a narrow front. The old British armor theoretician came close.
“The inside of the turret was about the size of two coffins placed side by side. So you see my problem, don’t you?”
I conceded that I did not. We were sitting in the rebuilt Hoffbrau Haus in Munich, the site of the beer hall putsch in 1923. He pushed the bench back and stood. He was over six feet tall.
He explained, “I’m too big. Panzer units usually recruited people a head shorter, or else they’d get bumped around too much. At the physical exam, I slouched low, compressed myself, so I was allowed to join an armored regiment. Shows how smart I was.”
He pulled at his beer and said, “So there were three of us in the turret: the commander, the loader; and me. We sat almost shoulder to shoulder. And below us were the driver and radioman, who was also the hull gunner. We had destroyed two American tanks and were looking for our third.”
The tank commander, a lieutenant, sat directly below the cupola. Stumpff was to his left, bent forward, an eye on the sighting telescope and his forehead against a rubber bumper. His left hand was on the elevation handwheel. On his left was the traverse indicator, and on his right was the 50mm gun breech, which had a shell case deflecting shield to prevent spent shells from ejecting into the commander’s face. The gun was muzzle-heavy, so a lead ingot was mounted on the deflecting shield as a counterbalance.
To the right of Stumpff’s head were two voice tubes. Behind him was a gas mask canister. Also in the turret were a co-axial machine gun in front of the loader, water canteens, machine gun belt bags, a signal flare bag, a rack of spare vision blocks, and a Schmeisser submachine gun and a service pistol on racks.
Five rounds for the cannon were under the gunner’s seat and another twenty-two were in a locker behind Stumpff. Seventy-six more rounds, each the size of an arm, were stored elsewhere. Surrounding the crew was rolled homogenous steel plate.
“It was close, very close, inside that turret, you understand,” Stumpff said. “Every time the tank hit a bump or a hole, which was constantly, I banged my head or my chin or my shins or an elbow. But even so, we felt invulnerable. Tank crewmen feel indestructible. That’s the big lie that makes any young man want to be a panzer crewman. Why be a Landser, carrying a puny rifle with only your trousers for armor, when you can be a tank crewman, surrounded by all that steel, unconquerable.” Stumpff laughed harshly, lest I miss the irony.
The driver yelled through the tube, “Panzerspähwagen, links fünfzig.” Armored car, fifty degrees left.
Stumpff adjusted the sight and found an American M8, a six-wheeled vehicle carrying a 37mm gun and a crew of four. The car was three hundred yards in front and to the left of Stumpff’s panzer, and was traveling at less than ten miles an hour.
“They didn’t see us,” Stumpff concluded, waving at a waitress.
The commander ordered, “Kill it. Fire when ready.”
Stumpff cranked the handwheel. Stumpff and the commander’s seats were attached to the turret, and swiveled as the turret spun, but the loader had to walk after the gun breech, scooting left and right, trying to avoid being hit by the swinging breach and deflector. “Loaders were as dumb as they came, so it gave them something to think about.”
3
German military historians call the engagement the Battle of London Road, after the road between Brighton and London.