CHAPTER THREE
EXCEPT FOR JACK AND ORV, THERE WAS LITTLE CURIOSITY about Joe's absence. It was nothing unusual for a radioman to be pulled out for days of specialized training, like how to guide fighter-bombers onto targets because the 101st would have little of its own artillery available when they first met the enemy. Such training would have been excuse enough for Joe, but division G-2 went further. Realizing that Joe's absence might be open-ended, they provided a cover story that Bill Beyrle, stationed with the air corps in Kent, had taken seriously ill, so Joe had been granted emergency leave to see his brother. Upon his return from France, Joe deflected questions by asking them.
“Yeah, Bill's okay now. What's been going on in I Company?”
From everyone the answer was exercises like tactical drills, maneuvers, and night movements after company-size jumps, followed by critiques, cleaning equipment, and preparation for the next drill, maneuver, et cetera, to the point where a graffito went up in Ramsbury latrines: “One more exercise and we'll be too tired to make it over the Wall!”
That's what all the Screaming Eagles' preparations were for—to vault what Hitler called the Atlantic Wall of Fortress Europe. No one expected an easy landing. Indeed, German radio made specific reference to the 101st, how a warm welcome awaited them if they survived parachuting into minefields, plus acres of sharpened stakes known as “Rommel's asparagus” to impale gliders. Never had an invasion been so taunted by those defending against it.
But the taunters had immense problems themselves, starting with where was Rommel to plant his asparagus and sow his mines? Between Spain and the tip of Denmark were sixteen hundred miles of potential invasion sites. To defend that span Rommel and his boss, Gerd von Rundstedt, had thirty-five divisions of widely varying strength. Rommel wanted them all, especially panzers, close to the coast, where they could go into action with much less interference from the Allied fighter-bombers that now ruled the sky.
Rommel knew the fighter-bombers could paralyze movement on the ground, for he had suffered their devastation in North Africa. Rundstedt had had no similar experience and wished to concentrate most panzers well back from the coast to counterattack when the invasion site was confirmed (a preliminary Allied feint was anticipated). Moreover, Hitler reserved unto himself the decision of where and when four of the ten panzer divisions in France would be committed. Consequently, German deployments on and behind the Atlantic Wall were a compromise between contrary defensive strategies.
Even if Rommel had commanded all thirty-five divisions, the Atlantic Wall, like the Great Wall of China, was too long to be impregnable for its entire length. Hitler, Rundstedt, and Rommel knew the Mongols were coming, but where? A wily deception plan, featuring a phantom army, commanded by Patton and apparently poised to strike across the Strait of Dover, kept the German high command befuddled.
Currahees were also guessing, but because of huge bets placed on where they would drop. Otherwise location didn't matter much. They were the Mongols, ready to breach the wall anywhere. All they had been told was that the 101st would go in ahead of amphibious forces and hold off counterattacks against the beachheads. Yeah, we can do that. Let's get on with it. What are we waiting for?
Of more immediate concern in I Company was repercus-sions from the brandy heist. During Joe's absence, the heat was on. An eminent earl had raised it to the point that General Taylor was obliged to admonish Sink to recover the brandy or hang the thieves. Briefly the 101st's intelligence resources turned from the Atlantic Wall to domestic sleuthing.
A noose tightened on Duber but, aware of Sink's fondness for fine spirits, he found a loophole by approaching a trustworthy officer with this proposition: if the heat was turned off, two cases of brandy would be found under the canvas of Sink's jeep trailer. Through intermediaries the deal was cut. Duber sensed that no enlisted man in I Company seemed to be in better favor with Wolverton than Beyrle, no one less likely to be punished if something went awry in transferring the brandy; furthermore, Beyrle would be the last man to squeal on his buddies if the deal turned out to be a trap.
But Joe, remembering his trepidation when summoned for his unexpected interview at Littlecote, was not an easy sell this time. If another paymaster opportunity came along, he was not about to jeopardize his favor with Wolverton. So Du-ber's offer of prime venison cutlets was declined (Joe had had better in France). Okay, what about four bottles of the brandy? No thanks, Sarge. Joe still had the two that had been his reward for standing guard during the heist. They might be worth hundreds of dollars—as Duber averred—but a price could not be established while no one dared put Napoleonic brandy on the market. When Sink gets his cut that's going to change, said Duber. Maybe, said Joe, and he took the offer back for consultation with Jack and Orv. They both advised him to pass. Duber had too many irons in too many fires, and it was always someone else who got burned.
So Joe declined again, but Duber took that as an objection, not final rejection. He claimed to be a trustee—at what level, no one knew—of the invasion-site gambling pool. For transferring the brandy, he would let Joe in on how the betting was going, very confidential, very valuable insider information. This appealed to Joe's bent to be Best Informed, and he proposed that if Duber put in five hundred of his own money—but as Joe's bet—then he would participate in the transfer.
This counteroffer revealed his Class Shark trait, but compared with Joe, Duber was a great white and glided to another inducement: he would give Joe a secret weapon—a crossbow— easily fitted into a leg bag. That was enticing. Already the Screaming Eagles were arming themselves for the invasion with personal weapons like shotguns, six-shooters, and German machine pistols.* Joe asked for time to think about the crossbow.
A significant part of the 101st's training in England had been devoted to operating French civilian vehicles and German weapons, even tanks. Paratroopers were expected to capture such munitions in the enemy rear, then use them till resupplies arrived amphibiously some thirty-six hours after jumping. Till then, the Screaming Eagles' logistics were in their leg bags and whatever they could seize (“liberate” was the term, as “requisition” was in England), most important, German weapons and ammo.
This expedient was debated at division headquarters. Do we really want our men firing German weapons in the dark? How will anyone know friend from foe? The problem was a factor in a command decision that in the dark no one should fire at all unless fired upon by an identifiable foe. The preeminent factor was to conceal planned drop locations. Widely dispersed beyond the DZs, hundreds of mechanical puppets were to be parachuted into Normandy. Hitting the ground they set off loud bursts from firecrackers, hopefully drawing Germans into a wild-goose chase, while Screaming Eagles assembled and organized on relatively silent DZs * So Sink's policy was to stay silent, stay concealed for as long as you can. Till situations sorted out in the morning, the approved weapon was your hand grenade.
Currahees were skeptical and felt unreasonably constrained if they had to wait hours before pulling a trigger. They had a particular fondness for the enemy's Schmeisser submachine gun; its rate of fire was so fast that it went burrrrp while a hundred rounds filled the air in a few seconds, hence the Americans called it the burp gun. A model of German engineering excellence, it was a Mercedes compared with crude Model T's like the Sten and the tommy gun. No one could wait to capture a burp gun. Somehow Duber already had one, dismantled and concealed in his footlocker. It could be Joe's for transferring the brandy, but again he passed.
The “don't shoot unless fired upon” policy was not pronounced till the eve of D Night, but much earlier most Screaming Eagles comprehended the value of a well-aimed silent weapon, no matter what its rate of fire. Consensus had developed that initially they would be fighting singly and in the dark, when a firearm gave away its origin much more than by day when a thousand weapons were crossfiring. The troopers deduced their jump would be at night because the amphibious invasion would have to be at dawn so that legs like the Keystone Kops could locate their objectives.
So, while declining the burp gun, Joe remained curious about a crossbow. Did Duber have one? Yes. Did he know how to use it? Not yet, but he was practicing. Joe said let him know when a crossbow was as good as the silencer on his deer slayer.
Duber was persistent, but he was down to his last fillip. How was Joe dealing with censorship? Were the folks back home reading what he wanted to tell them? Were there some confidentialities he'd rather keep from Blue officers?
All mail—V-mail it was called, letters on special folios that could be photocopied for minimum bulk—was censored by officers whose unwanted duty was to expunge references to unit locations. A trooper's letter that mentioned pubs meant head scratching for his platoon leader because it was supposed to be a secret, despite the taunting of German radio, that his unit was even in Great Britain. Hundreds of V-mails like that kept censors reading late by lamplight, often with embarrassment. If the officers didn't know their men already, they surely learned more than they wanted to after reading love letters. When they sent men into combat, it affected them, sometimes acutely, knowing the names and feelings of loved ones they had never met but would never forget.
To have an officer figuratively reading over his shoulder was not disturbing for Joe, so Duber's last enticement of bypassing censorship fizzled. Unlike most of his buddies, Joe didn't have a girl waiting for him back home, so he never gave a censor cause to blush. Dating had been too expensive while the Beyrle family was down and almost out before the war. In England, camaraderie was stronger for him than companionship, though after his paymaster adventure there had been a lass named Greta of the Auxiliary Territorial Service who took a fancy to him. He never mentioned her in any letters to his parents. Joe only suggested that he was chased and no longer chaste.
Letters from home (also by V-mail) were not censored, and for Joe they were an increasingly remote connection with the past. Whatever was back there had already exerted its influence, a vital impulsion but expended, a booster rocket that had done its job. Now, to finish the job, whatever it entailed, was the be-all and end-all for Joe and those around him, no matter how much they joked or pretended otherwise.
The paymaster experience had sparked his sense of being special, as part of what mattered most. It had developed an expanded and novel perspective of the war, a vague but keen appreciation of components previously beyond his ken. Joe declined Duber's blandishments because he wanted to remain eligible for more uniqueness—someone else would have to carry out Sink's conditional return of the brandy.
Duber recruited Jack Bray, leaving Joe nonplussed. He had acquiesced to Jack and Orv in turning down anything Duber offered. Now here was Jack picking it up like a girl Joe was no longer interested in. Okay, buddy, what's going on? Well, Jack said, this was an investment. Four bottles, sure to appreciate, were worth the risk. Yeah, he had counseled Joe otherwise, but… hell, this is going to be fun! Joe, you got in on the fun (and the reward) when you stood guard for the heist. On a maneuver while Joe was away, Duber had poached game in Sherwood Forest, gotten caught, and told the sheriff of Nottingham that he was America's Robin Hood—and he got away with it. Duber was a proven winner. His plan for the brandy transfer was simple, the odds very good.
Then why, Joe demanded, didn't Duber transfer the stuff himself? Well, the heat was on; Duber was under suspicion and maybe under surveillance. You've been the risk taker, Jack said, referring to Joe's proxy jumps; now we want some fun-risk-reward. We joined the Airborne for that. And Duber is a sergeant. We do what he tells us in the field and will in war, so you can't separate that from off-duty.
Jack and Orv were basically mild young men, resembling each other in their countenance and slim physiques. Neither of them took to Airborne bravado. Each felt, as General Taylor was to say, that he didn't much like jumping out of airplanes but loved being around men who did. As only soldiers do, they loved Joe, he loved them, and they proved to be right when the transfer went down as smooth as the brandy— brandy with which Sink and his staff toasted the crumbling of the Atlantic Wall hours before they took off to vault it.
With the transfer accomplished and the heat off, the Blues' attention spun down to a shrinking vortex of concentration on what they were to do and how to do it. It didn't help when Captain Shettle moved up to be Wolverton's operations officer, replaced as CO of I Company by Captain McKnight, a taciturn, Lincolnesque man.
As McKnight's radio operator, Joe was his shadow in the field and had to understand his unrevealing personality, anticipate his orders, actions, and inactions. This resembled a new libidinous relationship: a complicated ebb and flow of affection, admiration, incomprehension, and fury. Nothing had gone outstandingly well under Shettle; there were no particular plaudits from Wolverton or Sink but no pratfalls either. McKnight was comfortable with that, satisfied with continuing Shettle's high standards and not pressing for major changes. As the man closest to McKnight's shoulder, it was for Joe to reassure his fellow enlisted men that though I Company was changing quarterbacks before the big game, it was still a winning team. The game plan was so immense and comprehensive, I Company's component so subordinate, that staying the course was tantamount to success.
McKnight's attitude was the prevalent one in I Company: let's just get to the kickoff fairly rested. Those above him, however, Wolverton and especially Sink, felt their team could not be overtrained—latrine graffiti notwithstanding. Lives lost from inadequate training would be the colonel's responsibility, as would the onus of writing letters to widows. Better to be safe than sorry, even if Blues felt overworked. Like Antaeus they were expected to regain strength as soon as then-feet struck the earth.
During this exhausting run-up to a marathon, flashbacks came to Joe: how the FFI were over there, not that far away, waiting to detonate in the German rear somewhat as the 101st would, albeit the latter explosion would be infinitely stronger. He wished he could have told the FFI how strong. His mind encompassing both sides of the Atlantic Wall, Joe longed for the day that would link them. He felt it would be during the invasion.
Not quite.
NO CIVILIAN WAS PRESENT this time, and Wolverton had even less to say, yet when they saluted, something passed between them, an acknowledgment from the officer that the enlisted man had been there, done that—a tip of the hat. With nothing prefatory, Wolverton smiled and said that brother Bill had taken a turn for the worse. Did Joe wish to visit him again?
Yes, sir! A week of escape and evasion in France would be like rest and recuperation. Once again Joe was jeeped to the Hungerford train station and again joined there by two men. This time, to his surprise, they claimed to be Screaming Eagles. Their cover story was special training at Bournemouth Airport. Joe didn't tell them he'd been through this before, and it was their turn to be surprised when the three went out to a hangar and drew golden bandoliers.
More excited than apprehensive, the paymasters joshed with their pilot that they would skyjack the plane and spend the rest of the war in Swiss luxury. He was a Battle of Britain pilot whose wounds had disabled him from ever flying Spitfires again. Without irony he announced that these days the RAF never put enough fuel in paymaster planes to reach Switzerland.
The young Americans looked at one another, unsure if he was kidding. They had little comprehension of British weariness, how years of mortal struggle against Hitler's tyran-nosaur had either killed, drained, or enervated the few to whom so much was owed by so many. In 1944, from sheer fatigue, Great Britain was not reluctant to hand off the heavy lifting to America, rightfully considered to be both the United States and Canada. Like a tag team the three nations were hell-bent on taking down Hitler from the west, but with the freshest members wondering why their veteran partner seemed most patient for victory.
IN FLIGHT JOE'S PARTNERS nattered so much about going over the wall, going to France, that he worried whether they could stop talking about it when back with their units. We're going to be the first! they exulted. No, you're going to be the second and third, Joe reflected, wondering if there was something he should say about their upcoming FFI experience that would help them get through the adventure. He held his peace. Though his tips would be useful, what if either of these guys was captured?
Joe wouldn't be—he refused to believe he could be—but what about the others? If his description as a second-time paymaster circulated in German security channels, it might make it more difficult for the FFI to move him to exfiltration. That was his apprehension now, as fear of a broken leg and convalescing with the FFI had been on his first paymaster jump. This time he wanted in and out of France quickly, like a senior-class outing before high school graduation.
It was another two-hour night flight, bobbing and weaving. In the blacked-out cabin the jumpers were shadows swaying against one another. Being the veteran among them was a peculiar feeling for Joe. They asked him nothing, said nothing. It occurred to Joe that maybe they weren't Screaming Eagles at all. Maybe they all had clandestine covers like his. Maybe they were supposed to test Joe's ability to keep his mouth shut. Things didn't add up, but he felt higher-ups were doing calculations that would work. Wolverton backed what he was doing, and that was good enough for Joe.
The engine shook the fuselage, rattling the deck on which they sat with increasing pain. This time Joe was scheduled to jump last. At some signal Joe couldn't hear, the man nearest the cockpit pushed open the hatch. Joe slid closer for his second look at France. “Currahee!” Joe yelled to the first jumper; he received a nod in return, then the man was gone. Joe was more excited watching him than he had been when he first jumped a month before. He grew increasingly excited as his remaining comrade crouched in the door and disappeared into the rushing night. They leaped out about ten minutes apart. No aborts. That was encouraging—the RAF-FFI system was working smoothly.
Then he was sitting alone as the slipstream screamed by that black hatch that seemed to suck at him like a whirlpool. It was the aloneness that troubled him. Yes, there were allies down there, but he wouldn't know any of them from before. Almost sentimentally Joe wished to be back with Jack and Orv as he fidgeted, waiting for the command to go.
The pilot was an RAF sergeant with a regimental mustache curling at the ends. He flicked his hand up, and Joe wasn't sure if that meant to hook on to the anchor line. The pilot nodded but was more concerned with finding the pattern of lamps a thousand feet below. Quickly he reached back and gave Joe a rap on the shoulder.
“Currahee!” he yelled into the wind that in seconds was hurling him a hundred miles per hour horizontally.
The shout spit out any misgivings. Life at twenty could be no better than this. No matter that the night was even blacker than the first, without any horizon between an earth and sky that were equally dark. His chute blasted open for that moment of suspended animation when he was neither falling nor parachuting. It should take about three minutes to descend. Joe lost count on the way down, too eager to pick up a light source somewhere.
There were a few, scattered and distant, probably isolated farmhouses. Normandy wasn't completely blacked out despite the German curfew. In England even little lights like those would have brought the police in minutes.
Some murky colors emerged below him, the kind a scuba diver sees when approaching the bottom of an opaque sea. Joe steered for the palest patch within a spiky collage.
At the last second he prepared for a tree landing by crossing his legs. Joe's children are glad he did. His feet crashed through twigs; the trunk swayed as he knocked off branches and hit it bruisingly hard. With all of that tree holding him back, touching the ground was soft. His jumpsuit was ripped as was his skin beneath it.
In a spider's web of parachute cords, branches, and twigs, Joe noisily freed himself as leaves floated down like a light snow. He scrambled away more afraid than ever in his life. Another ten yards of slip would have missed the clutching tree and set him on a meadow. Silently, from the perimeter of the meadow, a dozen figures stepped out in silhouette like the chorus in an opera.
“I'm off to see the wizard!” Joe yelled. The answer should have been, “The wonderful wizard of Oz.” But there was a quizzical silence.
The British briefer had advised, “Now, dear fellow, if they're Germans, it will sound like ‘vonderfiil vizard.’ You should then take appropriate action.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe had replied. “What would that be?”
Some of the silhouettes appeared to be in uniform, and all prickled with weapons. Appropriate action for the moment was not to go for his holster. A figure stepped forward, a woman, to say, “Do you have something for me?”
That was good enough for Joe. He unsaddled the bandolier and gave it to her like the offering at mass. With that, as suddenly as they had appeared, ten Frenchmen disappeared into the woods, leaving him with two English-speaking guides. No wine this time. Grimly Joe was offered a burp gun, as if the three might soon be in action.
A burp gun was better than wine, and he longed to take the weapon but couldn't figure out how he could explain his possession of it to Jack and Orv, and especially to Duber. So Joe declined the gun, indicating that his hosts' valor was all the protection he needed. Such sangfroid ingratiated him with the FFI. Once more he was taken to safe houses, fed, and bedded. He ate very well and slept very soundly.
One morning from the foot of his bed he was awakened by a dog barking, one who didn't like strangers and hadn't been briefed that Joe was an ally. Bijou was the dog's name, like Joe a fugitive because she had bitten a German of the SS who had intruded on her mistress. Consequently Bijou had been marked for execution. She was hostile to Joe because of his black jumpsuit, a uniform the same color as that worn by the SS. For reasons he never asked, during this sojourn with the FFI Joe was never disguised as a peasant.
One morning he woke to a serene view of rolling farmlands with squares of tidy trees. It was hard to comprehend that there was a world war going on, that he was behind German lines, especially when he was served breakfast in bed as if he were lord of the manor. If this was war, Joe wanted more of it. But he noticed something different in the eyes and attitude of the FFI. They were noticeably tense, more impatient. They had expected the liberating invasion by now. From large-scale maneuvers in England, Joe had sensed the Anglo-Americans were headed toward the Atlantic Wall like a locomotive; but to the French who had waited four years it was different, the occupation apparently a permanent humiliation, and they let him know.
“We are called the resistance,” one of them said, “but our countrymen's resistance is weakening. There has been too much time for them to adjust to life under the Germans. Too many of us are adjusting to it. When are you coming?”
“Wish I knew.”
Between sleeping and eating there was a languid time for such talk in safe houses. When a guide's English was good he'd draw Joe out about Franco-American relations. Joe knew only about Lafayette and the First World War. The FFI tried to indoctrinate him, and he didn't mind at all even though European politics were way beyond his pay grade.
But when the invasion? The recurring question was put subtly, put bluntly, put in every way. Joe wasn't about to tell them his guess, which was that they could expect to see him again in the next month or two; but he did divulge the latrine graffiti that said much more training would exhaust the Americans to the point where the Atlantic Wall would be too high. This went over well with the FFI, most of whom had been soldiers in the French army when it was blitzed in 1940. Okay, they liked to say, the invasion must be coming. Joe's question to them was where.
Just prior to exfiltration, the local leader, Camille, made a pitch to him: Joe could play a much more important role in the war if he stayed in France rather than returning to England and the fate of infantrymen, most of whom, said Camille assuredly, would be killed during the invasion. It would be like attacking the German trench lines in World War I, when Camille's father and all his uncles were mulched by machine guns.
No, it would be German infantry slaughtered this time, Joe corrected him. Camille toasted to that but went on; French and Americans were the most freedom-loving people in the world and should be the closest allies, work hand in glove, forget the British. Joe liked to blow up things, didn't he? During his stay in safe houses he had provided the FFI some valuable instructions on how to mold charges (delivered by the OSS) for maximum damage with minimum explosives. He'd shown them that by packing a little nitro starch on the outside of a railroad track the blast effect would also clear the opposite track like a bulldozer blade.
Camille rubbed his hands. There was a railroad junction about twenty-five miles away that Joe should see and advise on how best to destroy it.* Stay with us a while longer, dear ally. You will never forget our hospitality, nor the hostesses of Argentan.
Argentan? Joe perked up. Camille seemed to know some practical information. Might it include the location of the invasion? His answer came with a sigh as if it embarrassed him how ignorant Joe was of grand strategy. “But of course, my friend, the landings will come between the Seine and the Somme. Why else did the Canadians rehearse at Dieppe?” Then Camille commented on how Churchill sacrificed the French-speaking Canadians in a cold-blooded experiment.* So the location of the upcoming invasion could not be more obvious: “Normandie, n'est-cepas? “ So apparent that Joe should support it from behind German lines.
So it would be Normandy; he had it straight from the horse's mouth. Joe was wondering how to change his bet from Picardy and double it without arousing the curiosity of
Duber, when someone interrupted Camille, causing him to bilingually curse.
Word was that a German patrol had come across Joe's drop site and noticed the tree he'd torn up when landing. It had torn him up too, leaving multicolored bruises. The Germans had also discovered scraps of his jumpsuit, deducing that there had been an aerial infiltration. Joe was impressed by their sleuthing while Camille railed against the crew who were supposed to sanitize the site. They had reached it too late the morning after Joe's jump.
The heat was on, in a way as it had been in Ramsbury, Joe thought at first. Things get screwed up and involved, but the Dubers of the world (Camille, evidently, was one of them) dodge or deflect bullets, and things turn out right. But now Joe heard a different chord being struck. Camille reported random arrests and interrogations, safe-house keepers declining his requests. French eyes and attitude now expressed hatred of the occupiers, whereas previously there had been nonchalant distaste. Before, the FFI had referred contemptuously to the Germans by their World War I sobriquet, boche, which Joe took as the GI equivalent of “clerks and jerks”— drones of the occupation administration.
The Gestapo were appallingly different, their very name uttered quickly and quietly. Joe asked more about them, as he felt responsible for their present focus. He learned they were despisedly professional as well as sinister, most of them police officers before the war, now with five years of international experience. In Normandy the Gestapo studied the flow of money and transients in the province. Their principal means were records of the French police and co-optation. For that reason the FFI dealt with local gendarmes only through intermediaries. In Camille's plans, all gendarmes were considered Gestapo auxiliaries: bribe them if possible; kill them if necessary.
The Gestapo's duties in France were far more immense than their manpower. Rounding up Jews and other “vermin” was the task for which they evinced the most enthusiasm, but the Gestapo (an acronym for Secret State Police, an arm of the SS) was also responsible for Rommel's rear-area security and counterespionage, normally military functions.
Corpulent Hermann Goring was godfather of the Gestapo, whose original success was to ferret out Communists in Germany. Moving up as Hitler's deputy in 1934, Goring turned over the Gestapo to its wartime chief, thirty-five-year-old Heinrich Himmler, a prim, pedantic headmaster and professor of agriculture. At all concentration camps—the Gestapo ran them—Himmler directed that there be an herb garden. His eleven-year reign of terror, carried out by twenty thousand secret policemen, would cover Europe to the Volga. His was the key instrument of Nazi power, the knife at the throat of every German, the scourge of conquered peoples, the flywheel that kept Hitler's war machine functioning to the end.
The Gestapo's charter in France was Himmler's 1941 decree, titled Nacht undNebel (“Night and Fog”), which stated “Measures [to date] taken against those guilty of offenses against the occupation forces are insufficient, and even penal servitude or hard labor sentences for life are regarded as signs of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by actions which leave the family and population uncertain as to the fate of the offender.”
Himmler's frustration, expressed in Nacht und Nebel, was because hostage taking had not worked well in occupied France. Indeed, in Camille's opinion, it had helped FFI recruitment. If a Norman feared a midnight knock on the door, Camille could rusticate him as proprietor of a country safe house like those that had harbored Joe; thus a fugitive and a potential hostage found shelter together. What infuriated Camille now was that Himmler's intimidation might be succeeding through the heat applied after discovery of Joe's drop site.
The Gestapo's unblinking eyes scanned the entire Atlantic coast, too wide a panorama for constantly detailed surveillance, so it took an incident, some evidence of underground resistance, before they focused on a locale. The evidence of Joe's jump near Alengon was such a precipitator. Though san-itizing the drop site was not his responsibility, he faulted himself for not avoiding the trees, thus bringing Nacht undNebel upon his hosts. He needed no instruction that Nazis were as bad as anyone in the world, but up till then they'd been simply the enemy, rather than perpetrators of terror and torture. Now Joe heard Camille's reports on the Gestapo, and his offer of a “kill pill” for the possibility of capture. Joe asked instead for the burp gun he had previously declined.
With the heat on, movement to exfiltration was slower, the stops longer. In transporting Joe, the FFI took any encounter with Germans as a failure of their intelligence sources, their strongest and utterly vital asset. Someone had not posted himself as a lookout on schedule, or had left her watch early. Or the bought corporal at the Germans' motor pool had not, as promised, reported the departure of several vehicles, his quid pro quo for a gold coin. Camille had led the corporal to believe that his bribe was from black marketeers wishing to move contraband on the roads.* If his officer discovered that treachery, he would be demoted and packed off to the Eastern Front; however, if he had knowingly been an accomplice for the FFI, his penalty would be execution, either by interrogative torture or firing squad, with his company formed up to witness.
When they torture their own, Camille had informed Joe, the Gestapo use whips and cords. For French victims, they start with things that burn the skin. They have written instructions for what to use on different people. Obviously it's different for males and females, he noted, downing another jelly jar, and who do you think holds out longer? Not us but the women, once they get through the initial humiliations. What do you think, Joe—is it because nature endows them for the agonies of childbirth?
“I've tried very hard to obtain the torture instructions,” Camille said “but we haven't yet been able to bribe a Gestapo.”
“Why do you want their manual?”
“It helps to know what they'll do to you. You're better prepared to hold out as long as possible. We pledge ourselves to four hours. Could you do that, Joe?”
“Hell no. My body'll look like a Swiss cheese before they get it.”
JOE WAS THINKING THAT way when his cart made an unexpected halt. Stuffed under hay with his clothespin and burp gun, he heard imperious German commands. That was unnerving for him, but the French had always demonstrated an effective sense for what worked. Laugh it up, play the drunk or the flirt as necessary. Other times be very correct and respectful—that always meant a German officer was present at the checkpoint. No bilingual joking by his driver this time, only short, polite answers. And a long, quiet pause.
Joe listened for one word Merdel, the emergency signal to burst from the hay firing his burp gun. Waiting for the probe of a pitchfork, he strained to hear what the driver would say now. What he heard was a German curse, a resounding slap, the horse neighing from pain and surprise as the cart jerked forward. The driver said something servile, clucked, then the cart creaked and slowly moved on.
At the next safe barn, Joe came out sneezing. His driver apologized as if Joe were a mistreated dignitary and congratulated him in a way he couldn't understand till shown two small gold coins. Joe had brought them from England and another of his coins had just bribed his way through the unexpected roadblock.
That outcome was rewarding, but being behind enemy lines had definitely lost its appeal. The powerlessness, more than the danger, grated on Joe. It was hard to be clandestine cargo when he was a soldier longing to do what training had taught. On his last day he was moved nearly thirty miles. Itching from hay, this time Joe was glad to exfiltrate. Darkness came very late, with the Lysander right behind it; he was the only agent to be recovered. The FFI departure committee was grim and their kisses hasty. No cognac this time, no one to talk with in flight. As he snuggled behind the cockpit, Joe wondered about the two jumpers who had accompanied him outbound. They'd probably exfiltrated earlier while Joe was delayed by the Gestapo dragnet. Or had they been caught in it? How could he find out? Reluctantly he realized that he probably never would.
The RAF debriefing was brief—obviously much more was now in the wind than single parachutists supporting the FFI. Joe was sent off with thanks but no transportation and had to hitchhike to the railway station. That didn't bother him; he had a greater gratitude, for it was certain that his next jump into France would be with six thousand Screaming Eagles.
He'd missed the 101st's final dress rehearsal, called Exercise Eagle. Vanderpool said he was one lucky guy: five hundred troopers couldn't jump because their planes didn't even find the DZs at night. There were also four hundred jump casualties: broken bones, sprains, and cuts from farmers' barbed wire. And that wasn't even under fire.
“We'd better go soon, Joe,” Orv said, “or there won't be many of us left.”
*In armies other than the Wehrmacht, a machine pistol was considered a carbine in the shoulder-fired species of submachine guns, Sten guns, and tommy guns. Hitler, as a corporal in World War I, had had a bad experience with carbines, so when he became fiihrer of the Third Reich, he banned them. That didn't at all alter the Wehrmacht's need for a rapid-fire assault weapon; technically theirs was a folding-stock carbine, but they were compelled to call it a machine pistol.
* The firecracker paratroopers and unintended dispersal of real ones thoroughly discombobulated German intelligence, which reported on the morning of June 6 that 94,000 Allied paratroopers had landed in Normandy the night before—more than seven times the actual number.
* Most important transportation targets, like this railroad junction outside Argentan, were “dual-targeted” by the Allied high command—that is, assigned to the FFI as sabotage missions but also struck by bombers. This redundancy policy exasperated the FFI, who would risk lives, and often lose them, hitting a target that subsequently was obliterated by heavy American or British bombers. Because the FFI received missions through well-established British channels, of which the paymaster system was a part, guerrillas like Camille blamed the British.
* Dieppe (August 1942) was a raid in force, meaning a short heavy strike with a scheduled withdrawal rather than the objective of holding ground permanently. As such, Dieppe was the largest raid in history and probably the least successful, though British commandos and American Rangers significantly contributed. The Canadians sent 5,000 of their best men across the Channel to Dieppe and returned with but 2,200. The raid was an experiment to test the prevailing Allied thesis that a sizable port must be seized by direct assault immediately, as had been accomplished in North Africa. The well-learned lesson of Dieppe was that, in the face of Rommel's defenses, the way to success was to first seize beaches before attacking ports. That was done to perfection in Normandy; the port seized was Cherbourg.
* The FFI were major players in the black market, though of course they never identified themselves as members of the resistance when they approached Germans with bribes. However, a nonperformance, like that of the motor-pool corporal, resulted in effective blackmail when the FFI informed him of the true source of his bribe.