“But they are citizens. They have their constitutional rights like anyone else.”
“You also have a sentence of death, already signed in the Kremlin,” I replied coolly. “Only the day of the execution has not yet been fixed.”
My conclusion provoked a small revolution in the conference room.
“I agree with him!” someone exclaimed.
“Lunacy!” someone else yelled. “They should be disbanded!”—“They should receive every support.”—“Shame upon France!”—“Shame upon those who are ready to sell France down the drain…”
“You are a… fanatic!” one of the newsmen exclaimed, with a look of astonishment and hostility on his lean face.
“I know that you wanted to say either “Nazi fanatic,” or simply “lunatic,* monsieur,” I remarked with a smile and rose slowly. “Go ahead. We are Nazis if one has to be a Nazi to think in terms of years and not only in terms of days. And if one of us had not become a Nazi under Hitler, he would have turned into a Nazi right here in Indochina. You may also consider us crazy but that was exactly what the British thought of Rudolf Hess when he foretold what would happen if Germany lost the war: Soviet domination of Central Europe, Communist takeovers, rebellions, the dissolution of the British Empire… I can see that some of you are amused. Just wait a dozen more years, gentlemen, and you will no longer be smiling.”
I was perfectly aware that the ideas of a “Nazi extremist” must have sounded quite insane to a group of petty bourgeois newsmen who had probably never smelled gunpowder in their lives. Nevertheless they wanted the truth and that’s what I gave them. We Germans can believe and follow only determined and powerful leaders. It has nothing to do with Nazism. It is our heritage of centuries. We would have followed Julius Caesar, Attila, Napoleon, or Washington with the same devotion we showed Adolf Hitler. But we think nothing of rich boys who gain a plush chair or a marshal’s baton because their parents happen to have plenty of money.
It was evident that the Free World was already looking toward America as the Lord Deliverer and Protector. Surely America is a great country, wealthy and very advanced. But so was the Roman Empire in its own time. Wealth is not a precondition of power and history tells that the richer a nation grows, the weaker it becomes. It was not a wealthier or a more advanced nation that destroyed the Roman Empire. It was the barbarians! Shortly after the interview we were out again for three weeks of hard trekking along a wide and well-maintained trail. Gia Xuey thought it was one of the principal Viet Minh routes to “Nambo”—southern Indochina. We crisscrossed some three hundred square miles of guerrilla territory, which Ho Chi Minh considered conquered and secured forever.
We succeeded in wiping out that illusion. Within the first ten days my men destroyed two major Viet Minh bases, each of which accommodated two or three guerrilla “sections” (about one hundred men-constituted one “section” or company).
Our task was relatively easy, because in the conquered areas the customary guerrilla vigilance appeared to be relaxed. With the nearest French garrison holed up at Luang Prabang, a hundred miles away, the Viet Minh could move and manage its affairs practically unhindered. In the liberated villages the enemy openly displayed the Viet Minh ensign, along with large propaganda posters and banners inscribed with slogans. Small groups of terrorists moved freely within the village and a pair of binoculars always revealed their presence. The loudspeakers, which some propagandists used for mass indoctrination, could be heard from miles away. In their jungle camps, too, the enemy had grown astonishingly careless. Across the wilderness their singing, chattering, and shouting served as “beams” on which our trailblazers could home. Masquerading as guerrillas, Xuey and Noy often infiltrated enemy- held localities and returned with important information. In fact, that little native nurse proved so effective in reconnaissance that I decided to assign her to Gruppe Drei—a great distinction. Noy was as resourceful as she was daring. She would casually stroll into a terrorist camp and hold a sentry’s attention while Sergeant Krebitz and his men closed in on the unsuspecting enemy. With the sentries eliminated it was always easy to penetrate into the camp proper. We did it either at dawn or at dusk, invariably posing as guerrillas ourselves. The ruse always worked.
Frantically the Viet Minh High Command was trying to suppress our activities in their vital staging areas, hitherto safe from French harassment. Giap concentrated over a thousand guerrillas in an all-out attempt to destroy us, but the more troops he concentrated, the less he could preserve the secrecy of their whereabouts. General Giap found us a hard nut to crack. We were too strong for Viet Minh units of company strength and could in fact easily outgun any guerrilla battalion. The enemy needed at least a brigade to tackle my headhunters. A brigade, however, cannot play hide-and-seek in the jungle. Units consisting of over three thousand men need ample supplies; besides they also make a great deal of noise. Whenever the enemy appeared to be concentrating several battalions in a particular area we either delivered a preemptive strike to grind them up piecemeal or we slipped quietly away towards safer hunting grounds.
The loss of one guerrilla camp must have been particularly painful for the Viet Minh. In it we discovered twelve fully equipped workshops for servicing weapons, manufacturing mines, spear guns (the terrorists were still extensively using this brutal weapon), sandals, bombs. A printing shop and a dressing station were also among the camp facilities. Lathe benches, grinders, power drills and other machines were in the workshops. The power came from five small diesel generators placed in a long underground tunnel to deaden sound. Some of the machines weighed over a ton and had obviously come dismantled from one of the principal cities.
The battalion killed over a hundred guerrillas and captured thirty or forty of them in that camp. The majority of the casualties were irreplaceable specialists: machine tool operators, electricians, weapons makers, five engineers, six printers, two pharmacists, and two doctors.
Among the prisoners were six Lao Dong functionaries, including a district secretary and a district Agitprop secretary.
The camp was a marvel of guerrilla ingenuity. The overhead camouflage netting was covered with natural green that matched the surrounding flora. To keep the foliage fresh it had to be replaced every other day, and for that purpose the various sections of the netting could be lowered or raised. Where air reconnaissance observed only unbroken forests, in reality a spacious clearing spread for hundreds of yards, with permanent huts, living quarters, water tanks, mess halls, depots, and workshops.
Strolling about the camp with Schulze I spotted Xuey, who was closely inspecting a section of ground where I saw piles of bamboo spokes neatly arranged under a tarpaulin sheet.
“Anything wrong?” I tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
He looked up and nodded. “Plenty wrong! There were French prisoners working here, sharpening stakes. Dead or alive they should be somewhere around.”
“Prisoners?” Schulze exclaimed incredulously. “We searched the whole camp, Xuey—”
“Look at the footprints,” Xuey said. He squatted on his heels and drew a finger around the contours of a bare print. “It was made by a very large foot… No local people have feet as large as this one.”
A glance at the print was enough to convince me that Xuey was right. “But where on earth could they be?” Erich pondered.
“Somewhere in the woods, maybe underground,” Xuey suggested. “We should start looking for them or they may die.”
I called for Sergeant Krebitz and he came running. I told him of Xuey’s discovery. “Get a hundred men and comb the neighborhood. Don’t destroy anything, unless the place has been searched with the utmost care.”
The troops surveyed the entire area and combed the woods for five hundred yards but all in vain. There was a trail which Xuey and Krebitz went to investigate as far as a mile and a half, but it ended in a rocky depression among barren hills strewn with boulders and dead trees.
The depression seemed to have several exits and it would have taken days to examine them all.
The surveying parties found neither prisoners nor caves and tunnels where prisoners could have been kept confined. I spoke once again with Xuey. “Are you sure that those prints were recent ones?” I asked him.
He looked at me and asked in turn, “Have I ever erred in my judgment, Commander?”
“Not that I know of, Xuey,” I had to concede.
He nodded contentedly. “I am not mistaken now!”
“But where can they be? They aren’t in the camp and if there was another place nearby, we ought to find a path leading to it.”
“I was looking for a path,” Xuey said. “Sometimes they are very difficult to detect. Often the Viet Minh make no paths at all but use different routes between two bases every day, allowing the grass to recover. Such trails cannot be detected. Only the people who use them know their location.”
