5. OPERATION “TRIANGLE”
Colonel Simon Houssong was a calm and considerate officer who seldom lost his temper. But the extermination of a battalion under the command of Captain Arnold Lorilleaux must have hurt him deeply. Apart from having been a much-decorated officer of the Second World War, the unfortunate captain had also been a brother-in- law of the colonel.
It was well after midnight when he sent a corporal to request my immediate attendance. “The colonel is in his office,” the corporal informed me. “He hasn’t left his desk tonight, except to get another bottle. He’s been drinking all evening.”
I was already in bed but dressed quickly and hurried over to our headquarters. In the corridor I ran into Lieutenant Derosier, Colonel Houssong’s ADC. Derosier was carrying a small tray of coijee. “Here!” he said, handing me the tray. “Take it to him. Maybe he will listen to you.”
“What’s wrong with the colonel?” Derosier shrugged. “Lorilleaux!” he said. “The old man just can’t digest the news yet.”
I entered the office and closed the door behind me. Stripped to his undershirt, Colonel Houssong was standing at the open window with his forehead resting against the mosquito netting. He was holding an almost empty bottle of Calvados and the room was strewn with papers and broken glass. Slipping the tray onto the desk, I reported. “First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller, at your request, mon colonel.”
He turned slowly and came toward me, wiping his face with a towel. Taking another gulp from the bottle, he tossed it into the waste basket.
“First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller,” he repeated with a hint of mockery in his voice. “Sit down, Wagemueller… Sturmfuhrer Wagemueller, the Lord High Executioner of the Waffen SS… or the French Foreign Legion… It does not matter which, does it?”
“Would you like some coffee, mon colonel?”
“To hell with your coffee,” he roared, pushing the tray aside and spilling coffee over his desk. “Leave it!” he stopped me when I jumped to rescue some of his papers. “We have a far greater mess to worry about.”
He paused for a moment, then dropped behind his desk, turned on the fan and looked at me with his eyes drawn. “Do you know why I called you?”
“Out, mon colonel.”
“You go and put those bloody bastards to rot, Wagemueller,” he breathed with hatred in every word. “The whole village… they were all feasting over the corpses of Lorilleaux and his men.”
His fist came down heavily on the table. “Seven hundred and twelve men, Wagemueller. All dead! You go and get those bastards who killed Arnold… “Give them a first-class SS treatment. Spare nothing and no one except babes in their cribs. If this is the kind of enemy you were fighting in Russia, then many of your SS buddies were hanged quite innocently. I fought you in the Ardennes, at the Meuse, in North Africa, but now I am beginning to think that I may have fought the wrong enemy all the time.”
“Mon colonel—”
“Shut up, Wagemueller! Those poor devils must be buried and the murderers put to rot. I know what you wanted to say. I will leave it to you how to go about it. You will manage it somehow. You always do.”
“Do you want prisoners, mon colonel?”
“To hell with them!”
“Oui, mon colonel!” It was an order I could appreciate: “I will leave it to you how to go about it.”
In my opinion it was the only sort of order a field commander in Indochina could act upon with responsibility and return with results. After studying the maps and aerial photos it took us less than three hours to prepare “Operation Triangle,” one of our most successful raids on a Viet Minh stronghold. Every local landmark on our operational maps was given a German code name. The target village, a heavily fortified terrorist stronghold deep in the mountains (now in Laos), was renamed “Altdorf.”
Similarly we referred to Hanoi only as “Hansastadt” and to Saigon as “Schwaben.”
The river which we were to cross, the Nam Ou, we called “Schelde.”
The expedition was to be an extended one, over two hundred miles, with the last stage of it to be covered on foot.
The enemy was aware of our coming. For three days we had been advancing on the open road, following the tracks of the unfortunate French battalion. Air reconnaissance reported that the plank bridge across the river was still intact, as I suspected it would be. Why should the terrorists demolish a bridge across which Captain Lorilleaux and his seven hundred men had so conveniently marched into oblivion? The Viet Minh invitation had been left open for us too. Intelligence estimated the number of guerrillas in and around the village at more than a thousand men.
Had there not been seven hundred bodies beyond that plank bridge, I could have laughed at the guerrilla’s naivete. The Viet Minh, in fact, always planned with a certain amount of naivete, seldom conceiving a plan of great complexity. Even today, the Vietcong guerrillas are only repeating the well-worn ruses of the Viet Minh, their forerunners. It was never guerrilla ingenuity but only French ignorance that fostered spectacular terrorist coups. Superior weapons mean little in the jungle and superiority in numbers could also be an unimportant factor. A thousand tough experts may cause more damage to the enemy, spread more terror, destroy more of their ranks than a division of green recruits can. My head-hunters had often destroyed Viet Minh detachments three times their number, accomplishing more with their bayonets than other units of the Legion ever accomplished with artillery.
The bridge was intact, open and inviting. The only thing missing was a placard saying “Please cross.”
On the way toward the river we collected ample evidence of the persistent terrorist surveillance we had been subjected to from sunrise to dusk. As a rule, we trusted no one and considered every native Indochinese a potential enemy, unless half of his or her family had been executed by the Viet Minh. From their ranks we selected our few but trusted guides. They had been truly loyal to us and we respected them highly. We had some routine precautionary measures that we always took, “The rules of survival.”
If we passed by some rice paddies, for instance, where a few dozen peasants were at work, Eisner would give the word: “Abwehrmannschaft abtreten!” and six of our sharpshooters would quietly drop into the roadside underbrush, carrying telescopic rifles with silencers attached— a formidable weapon against guerrillas. The column would march on as though nothing had happened. Sometimes, and as soon as the army was out of sight, some peasants would turn into armed terrorists, taking off after the column head over heels. Our sharpshooters would drop them before they reached the jungle.
It was also one of our tricks to pass a Viet Minh-controlled village without bothering a soul. The column would vanish into the hills, except for the sharpshooters, who would drop back to cover every exit. In ninety percent of all cases, Viet Minh messengers or even groups of guerrillas would emerge from the village and depart in a hurry. The silencer-equipped guns were excellent for dropping them quickly and quietly. Indeed, our marksmen were capable of hitting a dozen terrorists within a few seconds, starting invariably with the last man in a line or group. Erich Schulze had once eliminated five running guerrillas, repeating aloud, “Mitte-mitte-mitte-mitte- mitte”—“Center-center…,” pulling the trigger at each word which corresponded with one shot per second. We had used the same ruse in occupied Russia and invariably it worked.
Nevertheless we could not have possibly eliminated all the Viet Minh observers. Some vital information, however, we would never let them learn: our exact strength, equipment, and combat order. Where the enemy observed only three hundred men carrying light weapons, in reality there were seven hundred troops equipped with mortars, machine guns, flamethrowers, and two 4 CM rifles.
For three days we had been advancing in a fashion which we called the Frachtzug—Goods Train—for it was a slow but very effective process. Group One, code named ATA, with myself in command, was the only force the Communists had been allowed to see. We moved openly during the day but never covered more than ten to fifteen miles and always camped down for the night. We set up what was in reality only a decoy camp, for as soon as darkness fell most of our force would quietly evacuate the camp to deploy on the flanks.
Group Two, ROTKAPCHEN, and Group Three, PER-SIL, each consisted of two hundred and fifty men. They
