Invasion Read online

  “If you guys like what they’re serving us,” Petrocelli said, “then you gotta be desperate!”

  “How come you’re over here with us now?” Captain Milton said.

  “To pick up supplies,” the Canadian said, his voice suddenly softer. “Burial stuff.”

  That ended the conversation.

  Ten minutes before we were to shove off toward St. Lo, we got hit with an artillery and mortar barrage. In the damp morning, the smell of cordite mixed with the sickly sweet smell of dead animals to form a heavy curtain of pure and nauseating stink. Shells hitting the trees seemed to explode into firework displays, and the shells that missed the trees sent columns of dark earth into the air. There was no place to run. If they missed you then you lived, and if they didn’t you were dead.

  Our guys got on the radio to call for an answering barrage. Half the telephone lines were cut, and nobody was sure how many of the messages were getting through to our artillery. Overhead, cub planes tried to spot their gun positions.

  My body shook with the earth and trembled in between the blasts. No one spoke. It was almost as if we didn’t want to call attention to ourselves, as if we were trying not to let the shells, or the Germans, or God, know where we were.

  I prayed. Not for God to save my life, because I didn’t think he was listening to us anymore, but because the pounding and the noise had gotten into me and had pushed everything out except a few prayers, a smattering of curses, and an urge to pee.

  The medics moved from hole to hole, giving whatever comfort they could to the wounded. I noticed that none of the wounded screamed out for help. They would just lift a bloody arm, or thrash about silently until someone noticed them.

  The pounding went on for a full ten minutes before it stopped.

  “We got movement!” This from a radio man.

  Movement. German soldiers moving toward our position. We dug in, checked our rifles, looked for something to hide behind, and waited. Seconds later, there was shooting.

  “They’re trying to knock out the cub!” Petrocelli called out.

  The cub plane, small and fragile in the thick air, looked like an awkward dragonfly against the gray sky. It dropped a flare over the Kraut troops coming in.

  I saw the plane lurch and spin as one wing was ripped by a burst from a machine gun. The plane twisted, rose, and then leveled off as it headed away.

  Then more planes, thankfully ours. P-38s peeling off and shooting at the enemy, dropping bombs that looked like a row of sticks falling to the ground. More explosions. Nothing to think about except to wait for the sight of the Nazi helmets.

  Two men moved up with a bazooka from the chow area and started making their way toward a low brick fence that faced what once had been a small feed barn. Two fighter planes, one coming very low, the other up and behind him. A burst of gunfire, and the two men went down.

  “Wave them off! Wave them off! They hit our guys! They hit our guys!”

  Several of us stood and waved frantically at the planes. They circled, then took off.

  And then the attack was over. It had been beaten off. A chaplain got to the men with the bazooka before I did. I saw the bodies, one lying facedown and the other crumpled on his side. They were both dead. The man on his side was Freihofer.

  A panzer had been hit, and several Kraut soldiers lay dead on the roadside. There were two wounded Germans, their bodies shaking from the pain, and now from the cold rain that had begun to fall.

  “I finally figured what ‘being in reserve’ means,” Stagg said. “It’s when the incoming artillery, mortars, and sniper fire don’t start until after we have our chipped beef on toast in the mornings.”

  “It beats the hell out of running across a field toward a hedgerow,” I said.

  “I’m getting faster.” Burns was puffing on a cigar he had bummed from a Frenchman. “Either that or me closing my eyes when I’m running makes it seem faster.”

  I wasn’t getting any faster. The thought had come to me to run as fast as I could, but then I thought that if I was out front the Germans would think I was special and pick me off first. But then if I ran in the pack they might try to shoot into the pack to be sure to hit somebody. Thinking had slowed me down all my life, and now, when I needed it most, it still wasn’t helping.

  One good thing about being in reserve was that the supply trucks could almost always make it and the mail and food reached us three times a week. We got extra ammunition, toilet paper, and first aid kits the first day. The bad part was that guys were still getting killed. The Krauts couldn’t move their tanks by day because we were controlling the skies and a plane with a bomb could wipe out the biggest tank. But they could still send over artillery, as Stagg said, and there were little pockets of German squads all over the area.

  I got three letters at mail call. One was from my mother, and two were from Vernelle. My hands were shaking when I read Mom’s letter.

  Woody, Baby,

  Please take care of yourself. By that I mean for you to be kind of selfish and look out for your own needs. I know you are not that kind of young man, but please do it for me, as I am so nervous about your being over there. I remember you did very well in French at Moneta High, and I hope it is coming in useful. The newspapers say that you are chasing the Germans all over France. Do not get too close to them, especially if they have guns. I guess they would all have guns, but you know what I mean.

  Things are going well here, so there is no need for you to worry about anything. When you come home I would love to spend some time with you before you go back to school in New York City. Of course I will keep your room ready if you decide to stay a while. Ezra is keeping it neat (for Ezra). Vernelle Ring said to tell you hello. I didn’t know you knew her that well, but she seems like a very nice girl.

  Uncle Joe has a cough, but it is nothing to worry about. He is taking rum and honey for it, and I think he rather enjoys having it.

  Everyone in the church has you and all the boys in their prayers. The Gold Star Mothers sit together and keep their heads high even though their hearts are heavy.

  Woody, don’t think of taking care of yourself as not caring about your fellow man. I know you care about everyone.

  Aunt Anna, Marcus’s mother, said that he saw you in England and that you were looking well. I asked her if they had a Gold Star Club in her church, and she said that they did not.

  Please write when you can, but if you can’t I’ll understand.

  Your loving mother, Margaret

  Of the two letters from Vernelle, I read the second letter first, figuring she had had time to think about us more.

  Dear Josiah,

  Please, please disregard my last letter. I am so ashamed of myself for saying what I did and for mailing the letter off so quickly. I went down to the post office the next day, but it was already gone. I feel so stupid. If you can forgive me, I would like to write to you again, and in the future I promise to be more intelligent in what I write.

  I spoke to your mother yesterday. She has worried herself sick about you and the other boys from town. We pray for each of you every day. But that doesn’t seem to stop the flow of telegrams that keep coming from the government. I hope this letter finds you well and I hope that you can forgive my first letter as the crazy ramblings of a nineteen-year-old girl who thought she was being clever.

  Yours, Vernelle Ring

  I didn’t want to read the first letter right away, hoping to keep it for a later time. I really wanted the second letter to say something about her liking me, but it hadn’t. Her wanting to write to me didn’t mean much, or at least I didn’t think it meant much.

  Our battalion, or what was left of it, was moved another mile back, and the rumor was that we were going home. Then Captain Milton said that the docks at Cherbourg and off the beaches had been damaged and we were low on supplies again.

  “So since you didn’t have any bullets to shoot at the Germans, Uncle Charlie decided to give you a vacation,” he said. “
And they’re sending a lot of material to the Canadians.”

  “Why?” Gomez asked. “They don’t know that friggin’ Canada is another friggin’ country?”

  “They know that, Gomez,” Milton said. “But they’re going to ask the Canadians and the British to attack the Germans’ strongest position, where they have the most tanks and the most men. They’re going to attack head-on so that the Krauts can’t call in any reserves to defend St. Lo. If it works, we’ll look great. If it doesn’t, we’ll suffer. Either way, the Canadians are going to lose a pissload of people.”

  “Shit,” said Gomez.

  “My thought exactly,” Milton said.

  “Is that whole plan still going to happen?” I asked. “We’re going to capture St. Lo in sixteen minutes, then run over and stop the Germans from attacking the flanks while Patton does an end around for the touchdown?”

  “And if it works on paper, it’s got to work in real life,” Captain Milton said.

  A USO troupe came and set up loudspeakers and passed out coffee, chocolate bars, and donuts. Guys who didn’t even drink coffee were lining up just to see some Americans who smelled a little like civilians. There were seven people traveling with the USO van, and four of them were women. They had three drivers and some MP guards. I watched for a while as they were setting up, then opened the other letter from Vernelle.

  Dear Josiah,

  It was such a thrill to hear from you. I am so glad that you have not been killed or wounded. Josiah, from the first day that I heard you were going off to study art in New York City, I was thinking of going to New York to follow you. I didn’t know what I would do in a city that big, but just the thought of it, the two of us away from our little town roots and fancy-free, got my head spinning!! I thought we could live together in a walk-up apartment the way artists do in motion pictures. I even thought up some background music! Can you imagine that?

  And about the living together business — I didn’t think we had to do it as man and wife; I just pictured us in the apartment, with you painting pictures and me maybe going to school at night and working in the daytime.

  I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I do know that I do not want to spend my life with a man who is dumb or who is not wanting to have a more exciting life than the guys here in Bedford. What I wanted, I think, was to be swept off my feet, and your letter did exactly that.

  Josiah, I do not know you that well, but I think I have a good idea of the man you are and I LOVE THAT MAN.

  I was listening to some songs on the radio, and the one I like best is “I’ll Walk Alone” by Dinah Shore. I’ve been a little lonely, and thinking about you being lonely at the same time, even though you are so far away, is a great comfort to me.

  Josiah, I cannot wait to mail you this letter. I am already seeing you reading it somewhere in France with your uniform on and your rifle leaning against a tree. That is so romantic to me, but I imagine to you that is old hat by now. I look forward to seeing you again and this time really getting to know each other.

  ’Til Then — Vernelle

  I wasn’t supposed to be thrilled or anything even coming close to it, but I was. Girls had never made a lot of sense to me before. My body reacted to them, my mind sort of chased them around, but I had never been serious about a girl. Now I was falling-down serious about Vernelle Ring, a girl I could only half remember from my days in Bedford, and who I wanted as much as anything I had ever wanted. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole. Maybe, but I know there is no one in a foxhole who doesn’t want someone to love.

  The five days out of the fighting were good, but thinking about starting in again was the worst thing. Freihofer had said it best: If any of us had known what we were going to be facing on the beach that day, what we would see and how many of us would be dead, they would have had to shoot us on the Thomas Jefferson to get us off of it.

  Gerhardt came by again and smirked about killing Germans. He said that General Patton was so eager to get into the war, he could “taste it.”

  We captured more Germans. Some of them were only boys. Even the older ones were younger than the ones we had faced on the beach.

  “‘Men who went out to battle, grim and glad.’” Mink’s soft, high-pitched voice seemed to come out of the air, not from his skinny, unshaven head. “‘Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.’”

  As much as I liked Mink, I was also starting not to like him. He gave words to everything. Words that he was pulling out of a memory crammed with too damned much to reason with and words you didn’t want bouncing around your own skull.

  The Germans were surrendering faster and faster, and yet our officers were picking up the same messages from Berlin: They were being told to fight to the last bullet.

  Captain Milton asked me to question two of the new prisoners. I told him that I didn’t speak German, but he shrugged me off. I was to talk to the prisoners with Petrocelli. I knew Petrocelli wanted to shoot them. I think that’s what they would have done to them in Hoboken.

  The prisoners were a young man and an old guy. The old man was a hundred years old, maybe a thousand. His neck was wrinkled and gray, and his hands were shaking. His lower lip was larger than his upper, which made him look a little like a baby. Neither of the prisoners spoke English, or at least that’s what they suggested with their gestures. Petrocelli searched the old man and found a card in his pocket with a picture of Jesus on it. He put it in his own pocket.

  Then Petrocelli started searching the young soldier. The tall, wide-shouldered grenadier looked at Petrocelli with clear contempt, and Petrocelli spat in his face. Then the contempt turned to fear as the soldier realized that he was only a trigger-squeeze away from being dead.

  I opened his jacket and found a small, rectangular book in his inside pocket. It looked vaguely official, and I took it. We put the prisoners on the ground, back to back, and waited for Milton to come back.

  Some of the guys came over and took turns looking at the prisoners. Some put the muzzles of their rifles against their heads just to scare them. I didn’t think it was right, but I didn’t say anything. I knew all the guys were sick of this war, sick of all the killing, and wanted to find a way of getting their frustrations out.

  Milton came back and we turned the prisoners over to him, along with the book. He looked at it and shook his head, then started leafing through it quickly.

  “Look at this!” he said. “This is a Command list of the 29th. And in the 116th, 2nd Battalion, they’ve got Charles N. Cawthon listed. His name is Charles R. Cawthon. How do you think they made a mistake like that?”

  Captain Milton let us look at the book again before taking it and the prisoners to Headquarters Company.

  “You believe that crap?” Petrocelli’s eyes widened as he looked at me. “They know everything about us!”

  “You see what they had about you?” I asked.

  “They had … You’re kidding me. Woody, I’m going to get you back in Hoboken and mash your head in with a pool cue!”

  We were on the move again, and I wondered if anyone really knew what they were doing. The Germans still controlled the high ground, and their artillery and mortars were chewing us up. A Colonel Reed — I’d never seen him before — waved us off the road.

  “Yeah, stay off the roads because the Krauts have them zeroed in.” Petrocelli had his steel pot on the back of his head. “Didn’t anyone tell these clowns you can’t get equipment through the friggin’ woods?”

  Petrocelli was right. The woods were too dense for trucks or antitank weapons.

  “I blame the French for all of this,” Mink said. “Look at the way they’ve got their country laid out. The hedgerows are like killing grounds. The roads are just places to get blown away, and you can’t see far enough to even get a good look at the enemy. What kind of layout is that to fight a war in?”

  “He’s right,” Petrocelli chimed in. “Maybe we ought to start blasting a few Frenchies. I bet if you shot
one he’d say ‘Gott im Himmel!’ or something like that.”

  Mink looked at me and shrugged. I knew he was wondering if Petrocelli was kidding or not. It didn’t make a lot of difference. We were coming together. If Mink and Petrocelli could hold a conversation that made even a little sense, it meant we were really getting into one another.

  Colonel Reed called up three bulldozers from somewhere and got them started clearing a path through the woods. It looked like a bad idea.

  “The Germans spot that and they’ll send enough 88s our way to make it look like the Fourth of July,” Stagg said.

  The first bulldozer got thirty yards before getting knocked out. The driver was killed and his body was hanging from the side of the vehicle. Two guys pulled him out and away from the wrecked vehicle. The rest of us stopped moving and dug in. I got the feeling we’d be stuck for a while.

  I read Vernelle’s letter again. She was right, it was rash and romantic and even a little schoolgirl silly, but I loved it. I wanted to think of her back home waiting for me and thinking about me. I thought of writing a letter to her saying how much I loved her. It wouldn’t have been true — I hardly knew the girl — but I just wanted to say it.

  It had been almost six weeks since we landed on the beach. It seemed like six years. The rain had come down hard the last three days, and we were all cold and soaked through.

  It rained hard in the morning and harder in the afternoon. Not just plain rain, but the kind that goes right through the skin and into your bones and gets so cold, your whole body shakes. I hated the rain, and there was nowhere to go to get out of it. We wrapped our canvas half shelters around our shoulders. Mine had a rip in it just to add to my misery.

  “But you gotta remember,” Burns said as he checked on his squad, “there’s a Kraut out there somewhere getting just as wet and just as cold as you are. With any luck he’s got hemorrhoids, too. And he knows he’s losing this damned war. Now don’t it make you feel good knowing that?”