One Man's War Read online

  Their numbers continued to increase as they met other advancing squads. Kafak heard growling behind him and looked back. The tank and the tank destroyer had fixed their problems and rejoined the group. Kafak felt better about that. They had a good-sized force now, Kafak thought. They could really do some damage.

  The Germans must have thought so too, he figured, because then everything the Germans had started hitting them. Small arms fire as well as mortars and self-propelled vehicle cannons and artillery. German 88s flew overhead. They made a sound but only after they exploded. You never heard it before. You could hear the guns popping, though, and every time he did, Kafak hugged the ground. He didn’t wait for the shells to blow.

  The noise was deafening. Most shells hit the ground when they burst, so the shrapnel flew up and outward, fountaining in every direction. If you got low and flat, it would usually fly over you. Air and tree bursts were the worst, though. When a shell prematurely detonated while still in the air, or when it hit the top of a tree, then the shrapnel rained down everywhere and being flat was no protection at all. Then you had only luck to keep you from being hit. No skill the army could teach you could help you survive that. Only luck.

  A lot of the guys were firing their weapons, so Kafak did his as well. He fired in the direction he saw the other men firing. He had no idea what they were all shooting at. He figured someone had seen a German in that direction. He couldn’t see a thing, though. Only dirt cascading up into the air, smoke from burning vehicles nearby, and the sweat in his eyes. He continued to fire. It might do some good, he thought.

  He wondered what the tank and tank destroyer were doing. He didn’t hear them any longer so he figured their mechanical problems had returned and they were out of it. Well, good for them, but not the rest of the troop.

  An 88 shell landed fairly close to him, nearly on top of a guy he’d met once but didn’t really know. He saw the guy’s body fly up into the air and then plop down in about twenty different pieces.

  The force of the explosion rattled him, slammed him harder against the earth. He felt like the air had been ripped out of his lungs and like his entire chest had been shoved backward, slamming into his spine. He felt compressed. That was the word, he thought, but thought it only later, when he had time to think. Just then he didn’t think anything at all. He just felt.

  “Fuck! Shit! Fuck!” he said.

  All of that was more in his head than in his mouth, though. He didn’t have the breath to really shout out loud just then.

  He tried to shove himself deeper into the ground. He felt something tug at his jacket. He thought it might be a bullet hitting him. He looked up and saw his sergeant yelling at him. He couldn’t hear anything the guy was saying. It seemed obvious, though, that the sergeant was telling him to get up and advance. Kafak got up to his knees, wobbled a bit. The sergeant pulled him to his feet by his jacket. He started running in a crouch. Advancing. Right next to the sergeant. Suddenly, the sergeant was no longer beside him. Kafak looked back and didn’t see the guy. He glanced down. The sergeant lay in a twisted heap on the ground, his chest seeping blood, his eyes wide open.

  Kafak knew he was dead.

  He kept moving.

  Later he would think about that. Think about how the bullet had taken a guy out right next to him. Right next to him. But not him. Why that man not four feet away, yet he, Kafak, went unscathed? How did that work?

  He knew there was no answer. God. Fate. Your time. Whatever you wanted to say to give yourself comfort. It was luck. Pure and simple dumb luck. Bad for one guy, good for another.

  He didn’t deserve it. He knew that much. When the shit was coming down like that, he understood that no one deserved it, no one deserved to live through that. If you did, you had only luck or God or fate or whatever else you wanted to thank for it, but it was nothing you’d done to deserve it. The good died just as readily as the bad. Everyone died, he thought. Or everyone should have.

  Kafak moved along with the rest of the men in his troop. When they hit the ground, he hit the ground. When they advanced, he advanced. They fired, he emptied his rifle right alongside them.

  They kept going, bullets whistling with that eerie, mechanical whizzing all round them. All morning long. It just never stopped. Shells kept exploding. The concussions slammed him, oftentimes knocking him to the ground. Each time he thought he was dead. Or something close to it. And each time he inspected himself and found no blood, no wounds. There was only that force smashing into him, collapsing his lungs and muscles and blood vessels and organs into a squash. Like an accordion being compressed. Slowly, eventually, like an accordion, it all expanded back to normal. Only it never felt normal again. Not ever.

  They had gone what seemed forever, a long distance, Kafak thought. He could see Cisterna, their objective, ahead. He guessed it was maybe a couple miles away yet. They could make it, he thought. They might make it. Then two men at the same time, one to his far right and the second to his left, though not so far, and both of them maybe thirty yards ahead of where he and his fellows were advancing, flew up into the air. Mines. One guy came back down a crumpled mess. He was dead. The other guy had lost a leg. He was shrieking from the pain of it. And from not being able to believe he no longer had a leg.

  It was horrible, Kafak thought. Those screams. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t do anything, and he knew it. A medic rushed to the guy. He had him quieted after a while.

  Meanwhile, everyone had stopped pushing forward. They all dropped to the ground. The German guns pounded down upon them, the shells crushing and slamming them, the bullets whizzing around them. Everyone stayed pressed as close to the ground as they could. They would have crawled down into hell if they could have managed it to escape that heavy, unceasing fire.

  He heard the lieutenant, about four bodies off to his left and a row or two in front, shouting into a radio. Asking for engineers to come clear the field. Or if not that, artillery to blow it all to hell, exploding the mines in the process.

  “We’re pinned down here,” Dunphy said into the radio. “Under heavy fire.” He got off the radio and hollered to everyone near enough to hear him. “Just stay put and keep your asses down. They’ll send us help in a while.”

  Only they didn’t. There was too much going on. They didn’t have the men to send or the artillery to spend. Or maybe they just lost his request in a shuffle of paper back at HQ. Whatever the reason, they were stuck there, the minefield on their front, the Germans on both their flanks. They could no longer move if they wanted to. The German small arms fire pinned them down. It was terrible because they were sitting ducks, and more than a few guys were hit by well-aimed rifle fire. On the other hand, because the German troops were so close to them, it meant that the enemy artillery slowed down. They didn’t want to take the chance of hitting their own people. That was a small relief because Kafak could breathe again even if it hurt his chest to do it.

  He fired his weapon sporadically. It didn’t matter where, in what direction, he fired. Germans were everywhere. He couldn’t necessarily see them that well, but he knew they were there. He could feel and hear the results of their fire. Once or twice there was a tug at his clothing. Once on the back of his jacket, again on the back of his pant leg, near his calf. The second one stung quite a bit, so he figured a bullet had struck him. It didn’t hurt terribly, though, so it probably hadn’t gone in. Just streaked him.

  He lay there, unmoving and hugging dirt for the most part, occasionally firing when he felt the mood strike him or some one of his comrades nearby started in.

  The entire troop lay there like that, under heavy fire, waiting, pinned down, all afternoon. He could hear Dunphy cursing over the lack of response to his repeated requests. About four o’clock in the afternoon, one of the Germans realized Dunphy was the guy with a radio and he shot the lieutenant. Dunphy died with a bullet in his back. One of the sergeants took over.

  Word spread, whispered from one man to the next. When it got dark, they
’d move. Out of this depression and open ground and back to the closest Allied line they could find. They’d regroup and set up a defensive position.

  Darkness couldn’t come soon enough, Kafak thought. They all had to wait it out, though. One guy hadn’t. He’d become overwhelmed by the fire and the tension of waiting to be hit and he’d gone a little nuts. He’d jumped up and begun running back toward the lines. He didn’t make ten feet before a German rifleman brought him down.

  Nobody tried it again. Nobody else lost it. Or, if they did, they stayed on the ground, shaking and hugging the earth.

  Every so often Kafak heard someone shout very loud, curse. Sometimes cursing the Germans, sometimes the army, sometimes God Himself. Kafak might’ve joined in if he could find the breath in him to do it, but he was still feeling compressed by the battering of shells.

  Then it was dark. It didn’t seem like it would ever happen, and then it just did. Word whispered down again. “Let’s go.” “Now.” “Quiet as you can.” “Watch your fucking asses.”

  Kafak rose up like the men around him. In a crouching run he began his personal retreat from the spot where they’d been pinned down all afternoon. He’d nearly made it out when the sky suddenly exploded into light. A German Kampfpistole sent up a flare. It burst high up, then rode down ever so slowly on its small parachute, illuminating everything as bright as day. Or nearly so. Enough, anyway, that the Germans could see them. They opened up again. The Americans stopped crouching and ran hell-for-leather. Kafak ran as fast as any of them. They all ran until they were out of that cross fire.

  Once they had reached the safety of some rocks and a depression in the otherwise long, flat plain they had been on most of the day, the sergeant halted them and they regrouped. They prepared for any German attackers coming after their retreat. The Krauts didn’t come, though. So they took the time to treat those wounded who could be treated and made makeshift slings to carry those they had had to drag out of the battle. They got their ammo squared away and started out again.

  They moved back carefully now, looking for Germans they had bypassed during the day. They found a few of them, but these Germans were in no mood to fight anymore. It was dark, they were worn out right through, and most of all they had run out of ammo. They surrendered. The troop brought back half a dozen prisoners to the lines.

  Kafak just wanted to fall into a stupor right there on the ground within the American lines. He knew he couldn’t, though. He had to dig a foxhole for himself. He started in, bone weary and barely conscious of what he was doing. After about half an hour, he felt someone join him. He looked across. Marshak was digging, too.

  “Willie,” he said.

  “You made it. That’s a good fucking thing.”

  “You, too.”

  “I lost you there, somewhere along the way.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck was happening half the time,” Kafak said. “The other half, I didn’t want to know.”

  “Fuckin-A right,” Marshak agreed.

  They finished their hole and fell into it.

  While one of them slept a couple of hours, the other kept watch.

  “And tomorrow,” Marshak said just before he dropped off to sleep, “will just be more of the same fucking shit.”

  Kafak expected Marshak was right.

  2

  The next morning, well before sunrise, the Allied forces were once more formed up to make another push toward Cisterna. Marshak was indeed right, after all, Kafak thought. It was more of the same.

  The Germans defended the town from well-fortified positions. Kafak had always loved to read, especially history and biography. And in that reading he had learned that a well-trained and entrenched army had to be outnumbered at a minimum of two to one for the offensive force to overcome such defenders. And right now it didn’t feel to him as if the Allies outnumbered the Germans.

  He’d come out of the previous day’s struggle with nothing worse than a horrible, banging headache and a slight deafness in one ear. And a scratch on the back of his calf. Other than that, he was whole and complete, much better off than a lot of guys could say. He wondered whether he’d come out as well after another day of more of the same.

  The Fifteenth Regiment advanced, pushed forward. The Germans held, then released. Then held again.

  Kafak was part of a platoon, starting out.

  “We’re going to follow the footsteps of the main force,” Sergeant Collins said. “Our job is to pick up any Kraut stragglers that the main force bypasses in order to keep moving forward. So be extra careful on account of these fucking Krauts will be behind our lines, and they’ll know it, and that’s gonna make them skittish and desperate. And ain’t nothing fucking worse than a skittish, desperate enemy. So watch your fucking asses.”

  They moved out.

  They found pockets of German troops here and there. The first five groups were in fairly exposed positions, hiding in ditches or behind rocks and the like. They put up brief firefights, doing some damage to the American platoon, but once a few of them were killed or wounded and they realized the overwhelming numbers against them and just how trapped they were, they surrendered. Kafak figured that half the Germans they came across in those encounters surrendered, while the other half got themselves killed or badly wounded. Some proved as desperate as Collins said. Others not so much. All of them, though, were skittish as hell. And that made them extremely dangerous.

  The next encounter, the last of the day, was the worst. A squad of Germans with an MG42 had lain low while the main force passed them by. They had made themselves comfortable in a three-quarters-standing farmhouse. Once the main force had gone on, they popped out of hiding and applied harassing fire from behind. A squad had stayed behind to keep them cooped up in the house, but it was a waste of men. Those Germans weren’t going anywhere now they were behind Allied lines.

  When Kafak’s platoon showed up, the squad left behind moved out to rejoin the main force. It was left to the wipe-up crew to eject the Germans from their squat.

  Kafak was one of a group of the platoon put into position on a small rise that overlooked the farmhouse. They would supply cover fire for the group that would perform the actual assault. Collins led the attacking squad. He waved and the covering group opened up with everything they had. Rifles, a BAR, Thompson submachine guns, and a .30-caliber air-cooled machine gun the main force troops had had brought up.

  As the group laid down a wall of fire to keep the Germans’ heads down, the rest of the platoon leapfrogged forward, closer and closer to the farmhouse. But the Germans had superior cover and good weaponry. And they were experienced troops. They wiped out about half of the original assault squad, killed or wounded, before the rest of the men reached the walls of the house.

  The cover group had to be careful now so as not to pick off their own men. A couple of the guys near the house tossed in grenades. They followed the explosions by bursting into the farmhouse, firing as fast as their weapons would allow. The sound of bullets flying, rolling out of the guns, smashing and ricocheting against the interior walls of the farmhouse, built to a mad crescendo. The cover squad moved down toward the farmhouse to provide closer support. All of a sudden the firing within stopped. The troops outside the farmhouse dropped behind cover or straight to the ground if they were in the open. Kafak was in the open. He had his rifle trained on the farmhouse door. Then he realized that was stupid if the Germans had won the firefight, so he quick switched his aim to a window. None of them knew who had won the battle within. They’d find out soon enough, though. Either their guys would come out or the Germans would start firing again.

  A tense few seconds hung in the cold, wet air.

  “Don’t shoot, you fuckheads,” Collins said. “We’re coming out.”

  Kafak and the others relaxed. Stood up and waited. Collins came out of the house with four other men. They were all that was left. No prisoners accompanied them. No one asked about that.

  Collins said, “Why’d you
assholes let down your guard, for fuck’s sake?”

  “What do you mean, Sarge?” Marshak said. The guys all looked at one another. “We heard you telling us not to shoot at you. So we didn’t.”

  “It coulda been a trick, yeah?”

  Marshak frowned.

  “I don’t see how,” he said.

  “The fucking Krauts coulda made me say that just to fool you.”

  Marshak paused, clearly thinking about this. Kafak felt suddenly guilty, exposed as a fraud. Not a soldier at all.

  Then Marshak grinned. He said, “Not you, Sarge. The Krauts could never make you do something you didn’t want to do. You’re too tough.”

  Collins shook his head.

  “Keep laughing, Marshak, you’ll be dead soon. The rest of you, pay attention to what I’m telling you. It might keep you alive for a few minutes longer.”

  It was near to dark by this time, so Collins led them back to the lines. They were closer to Cisterna than they had been in the morning. Still, they weren’t close enough. The German line, strong and seemingly unbreakable, remained standing between them and the town itself.

  Even so, the Allies were digging in a good deal closer to the objective than when they started.

  “Wonder if we’ll make another push tomorrow,” Marshak said.

  Kafak found a foxhole to drop into. Marshak fell in right alongside him. They were eating their C-rations. Kafak had a can of stew while Marshak had one of beans. Neither felt much like talking. They were both bone weary and just wanted rest. They would trade off once more, couple hours’ sleep, then a couple hours’ guard.

  Kafak said, “I don’t know.”

  “We’re getting close, but goddamn, every day we lose more and more guys. You know?”