time in Germany during World War II)
Riding in the back of that deuce and a half was always bumpy and the recent rains had just made the roads that much worse. Ruts and potholes were every where. It was like riding across a field that had just been plowed. I guess thats what happens when you follow behind tanks on dirt roads. Looking out across the wheat fields I could see them beginning to turn to liquid gold in the late afternoon sun. If it hadn't been for the war, it would have been right around harvest time. Men would have been cutting and stacking bundles, sending bundles to the mill to be threshed and ground. Now all that wheat was going to go to waste since all the men were gone off to fight. And here I was, a country boy from Somerville, Alabama. Thousands of miles away from my home and my new wife. Fighting a war because sometimes wars need to be fought and when your country says go, you go. Germany was just a place I had heard of on the radio before a few months ago. Now I was smack dab in the middle of it, going from town to town fighting with Hitler's boys and trying to roust them out of local areas.
As we were headed into the next town that was some name I couldn't understand, much less pronounce, some deer burst from the field nearest the truck and sprinted for the nearby woods. Now rations weren't exactly scarce but anything could help and Cookie being a backwoods boy from Arkansas said if we could knock one down that he would skin it and make a meal out of it. So me and some of the other boys cracked off a few shots to no avail. Now I'm not saying that we missed, but if we hit any of them it wasn't in a vital enough area to put one down for the count.
It was just a few more minutes before we got to the edge of that town, but it felt like 10 miles because we had to go so slow to make it over that terrible road. As we got there Sarge hollered at me to get around the back side of the town so I could watch for any of the enemy that tried to sneak away from us through the hedge row that was around the back of the town. So I high tailed it around through that wheat field and set up to keep an eye out for anything that might come my way.
After a little while of seeing nothing and twiddling my thumbs I got the bright idea that I would clean my M1 so I wouldn't have it to do that night before I went to bed and could get a few extra minutes of sleep. So I took my handkerchief out and spread it on the ground and on my knees broke my rifle down into its individual parts and began to clean it up, thinking only of how good it was going to be to see the look on the faces of my buddies when I got to go to sleep before they did that night.
Now the M1 is not an easy weapon to take apart and put back together. It takes a few minutes to get it apart and you are not going to get it back together in a hurry so when I heard some movement through the wheat I hoped it was the deer that were coming back to graze and not any Germans trying to escape from the town the rest of the company had just started searching.
After a minute or two of trying to convince myself that it was just the wind, I heard voices speaking German and knew I was either in trouble or about to be. Well I chanced a glance up from where I was crouched. My quick look showed me good news and bad news. The good news was that they weren't headed towards me and that if they kept walking the same way they were now they would probably miss me and never even know I was there. The bad news was that not only were they German soldiers, but I could see by their uniforms insignia that they were SS. Hitler's elite special forces. They had warned us about these soldiers and everything we had heard about them made them seem like each one of them was 7 feet tall and indestructible, so the very last thing I wanted to do was tie it on with one of these boys, much less two of them.
Another minute, that felt like an hour, went by and I chanced another look; my luck looked like it had run out, they had changed direction and were headed right for me. Well I started doing some thinking. I couldn't run. If I did, they'd shoot me in the back for sure. I couldn't put my rifle back together in time to use it. Looked like my only option was my bayonet. So I put the bolt of my gun back in and rolled the rest of the pieces up in my handkerchief. I put my bayonet on the end of my gun, put my hand over the bolt so it wouldn't fall out, and got ready to do what I had to do. They had their rifles on their shoulder so I knew I could get one of them and if the other one got me in turn, Sarge knew where I was so they wouldn't leave me over here.
So with nothing else in front of me and these Germans getting closer to stumbling on to me sooner and sooner I jumped up out of that wheat and yelled at the top of my lungs for them to stop. Standing face to face with those SS boys, I realized something. They looked as scared as I did. Both of them stuck their hands up in the air and didn't move. So I motioned with my rifle for them to turn around and start walking back to the town. Following them back into town, I had to holler at them a few times to stop talking and keep their hands up. I don't know if they understood me or not, but they would put their hands back up and hush.
I marched them back into town with their hands in the air and me with a rifle with no bullets. Sarge told me that I had done a good job and to get back out there in case I any more Germans tried to sneak out. So I went back, but the first thing I did was stop and put my rifle back together faster than I had ever done before.
No comments:
Post a Comment