No such luck. Potter hadn’t really expected anything different. He thought about going over Patton’s aggressive head and complaining to Jake Featherston himself-thought about it and dismissed it from his mind. Featherston was as fanatic about the offensive as Patton was, or he would have pulled back sooner in Pennsylvania and lost less.
“We open the new counterattack at 0800 tomorrow,” Patton declared. “General Potter, you will be generous enough to include your brigade in the assault?”
Potter didn’t want to. What was the point of throwing it into the meat grinder now that it was rebuilt to the point of becoming useful again? Wasted materiel, wasted lives the Confederacy couldn’t afford to throw away…But he nodded. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I don’t disobey orders.”
“You find other ways to be insubordinate,” Patton jeered.
“I hope so, sir, when insubordination is called for.” Potter was damned if he’d let the other general even seem to put him in the wrong.
He got the brigade as ready as he could. If they were going to attack, he wanted them to do it up brown. He didn’t think they could reach the objectives Patton gave him, but he didn’t let on. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped so. If they succeeded, they really would hurt the U.S. forces on this side of the Tennessee.
It all turned out to be moot.
At 0700, Confederate guns in Chattanooga, on Lookout Mountain, and on Missionary Ridge were banging away at the Yankee bridgehead. Potter looked at his watch. One more hour, and then they would see what they would see.
But then a rumble that wasn’t gunfire filled the sky. Potter peered up with trepidation and then with something approaching awe. What looked like every U.S. transport airplane in the world was overhead. Some flew by themselves, while others towed gliders: they were so low, he could see the lines connecting airplane and glider.
One stream made for Missionary Ridge, while the other flew right over Chattanooga toward Lookout Mountain. “Oh, my God!” Potter said, afraid he knew what he would see next.
And he did. String after string of paratroopers leaped from the transports. Their chutes filled the sky like toadstool tops. Confederate soldiers on the high ground started shooting at them while they were still in the air. Some of them fired back as they descended. By the sound of their weapons, they carried captured C.S. automatic rifles and submachine guns. The damnyankees had seized plenty, and the ammo to go with them, in their drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. Now they were using them to best advantage.
As the paratroopers landed atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, a captain near Potter said, “They can’t do that. They can’t get away with it.”
“Why not?” Potter answered. “What happens if they seize the guns up there? What happens if they turn ’em on us?”
The captain thought about it, but not for long. “If they do that, we’re fucked.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself-or worse, depending on your point of view,” Potter said. The racket of gunfire from the high ground got louder. The USA had dropped a lot of men up there. They weren’t likely to carry anything heavier than mortars-though God only knew what all the gliders held-but they had the advantage of surprise, and probably the advantage of numbers.
They caught Patton with his pants down, Potter thought, and then, Hell, they caught me with my pants down, too. They caught all of us.
“We’re not going to go forward at 0800 now, are we, sir?” the captain asked.
“Sweet Jesus Christ, no!” Potter exclaimed. “We-our side-we’ve got to get those Yankees off the high ground. That comes ahead of this counterattack.” If Patton didn’t like it, too bad.
But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a wireless operator rushed up to him. “Sir, we’re ordered to hold in place with two regiments, and to bring the third back, fast as we can, to use against Lookout Mountain.”
“Hold with two, move the third back,” Potter echoed. “All right. I’ll issue the orders.” He wondered if he could hold with two-thirds of his brigade. If U.S. forces tried to break out of the bridgehead now, at the same time as they were seizing the high ground and guns in the C.S. flank and rear, couldn’t they just barge into Chattanooga and straight on past it? He hoped they wouldn’t try. Maybe their right hand and left didn’t have even a nodding acquaintance with each other. It had happened before.
Not this time. Twenty minutes later, as his rearmost regiment started south toward Lookout Mountain, U.S. artillery north of the Tennessee awakened with a roar. Green-gray barrels surged forward. It was only August, but winter came to live in Clarence Potter’s heart.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull worked like a man possessed. In part, that was because the new senior medic working with him, Sergeant Vince Donofrio, couldn’t do as much as Granville McDougald had. Donofrio wasn’t bad, and he worked like a draft horse himself. But Granny had been a doctor without the M.D., and Donofrio wasn’t. That made O’Doull work harder to pick up the slack.
He would have been madly busy even with McDougald at his side. The United States hadn’t quite brought off what they most wanted to do: close off the Confederates’ line of retreat from Chattanooga with paratroops, surround their army inside the city, and destroy it. Featherston’s men managed to keep a line of retreat open to the south. They got a lot of their soldiers and some of their armor and other vehicles out through it. Down in northern Georgia, Patton’s army remained a force in being. But the Stars and Stripes floated over Chattanooga, over Lookout Mountain, over Missionary Ridge. The aid station was near the center of town.
Up in the USA, newspapers were bound to be singing hosannas. They had the right-this was the biggest victory the United States had won since Pittsburgh. It was much more elegant than that bloody slugging match, too.
Which didn’t mean it came without cost. O’Doull knew too well it didn’t. He paused in the middle of repairing a wound to a soldier’s left buttock to raise his mask and swig from an autoclaved coffee mug. His gloved hands left bloody prints on the china. He set the mug down and went back to work.
“Poor bastard lost enough meat to make a rump roast, didn’t he, Doc?” Donofrio said.
“Damn near. He’ll sit sideways from now on, that’s for sure,” O’Doull replied. “Like the old lady in Candide.”
He knew what he meant. He’d read it in English in college, and in French after he moved up to the Republic of Quebec. But Sergeant Donofrio just said, “Huh?” O’Doull didn’t try to explain. Jokes you explained stopped being funny. But he was willing to bet Granny would have got it.
He finished sewing up the fellow’s left cheek. The stitches looked like railroad lines. It was a nasty wound. You made jokes that didn’t need explaining when somebody got hit there, but it was no joke to the guy it happened to. This fellow would spend a lot of time on his belly and his right side. O’Doull didn’t think he would ever come back to the front line.
After the stretcher-bearers carried the anesthetized soldier away, they brought in a paratrooper who’d got hurt up on Lookout Mountain. He had a splint and a sling on his right arm and a disgusted expression on his face. “What happened to you?” O’Doull asked him.
“I broke the son of a bitch, sure as hell,” the injured man replied. “Looked like I was gonna get swept right into a tree, so I stuck out my arm to fend it off, like. Yeah, I know they teach you not to do that. So I was a dumb asshole, and I got hurt without even getting shot.”
“Believe me, Corporal, you didn’t miss a thing,” O’Doull said.
“But I let my buddies down,” the paratrooper said. “Some of them might’ve bought a plot ’cause I fucked up. I shot myself full of morphine and took a pistol off a dead Confederate, but even so… I wasn’t doing everything I should have, dammit.”