“I’m sorry, Erich,” I heard Karl replying. “I have to attend to the guns. We have a battle going here, if you haven’t noticed it.”
“Karl, if anything happens to Suoi…”
“I love Noy as much as you love Suoi, Erich.”
I was much too preoccupied to listen to the rest of their conversation. I had to improvise a plan for tackling the situation and I had to do it very quickly. It was evident that as soon as darkness fell the enemy would cross the river. It was also very likely that they could wipe us out before sunrise through a series of human-wave assaults. I decided to call for reinforcements and aerial support.
“Hans, let me go over to the girls,” Schulze spoke with a miserable look on his face.
Still preoccupied with my own thoughts I replied mechanically, “Go!” I knew be would be of little use to me if I refused.
Unable to do anything but sit tight, I sent word to our widely dispersed troops to ease up on the ammunition. The machine guns were gradually phased out, but the riflemen went on firing at individual targets when the target was clear enough to give a fair chance of scoring. Since we were self-supporting and independent from supplies and reinforcements, prolonged engagements with the enemy could cause us serious setbacks. We simply could not afford to fire off ammo at a rate of two to three thousand rounds per minute.
Our lower rate of fire only increased the guerrilla endeavors. One Viet Minh company crept right up to the river and made preparations for an early assault across the bridge. Our sharpshooters were picking off the boldest ones as fast as they could fire, reload, and fire again, yet the fearful toll did not seem to lessen the guerrillas” determination. They were pressing closer and closer to the possible crossing places.
In the nick of time two squadrons of fighter bombers dived out of the clouds. The moment the planes appeared, the enemy ceased firing on us and sprang for cover. The planes began to hammer away at the guerrillas, scores of whom had no time to reach the woods. Cannon shells, fragmentation bombs, rockets, and napalm rained from above. It was a great spectacle to watch— and needless to say, a welcome spectacle. Taking the mike, I settled down at the radio to send corrections to the squadron leader.
“How long has it been going on?” he asked me from somewhere above.
“Since morning!” I informed him.
He whistled. “You’re lucky to be alive, man—you stepped into a real anthill. They are swarming all over the place.”
“It’s your game now, squadron leader. Make the best of it.”
Again the planes screamed in over the treetops. The Viet Minh advance parties were plastered with steel and fire; explosions rumbled along the riverside and thick, oily smoke rose where the napalm bombs had been at work. The squadron leader came back on the line.
“They say you have enlisted a couple of cuties in your outfit just to keep up spirit,” he called.
“We need lots of spirit,” I replied. “There’s no five-o’clock tea in the jungle, squadron leader.”
“Just clear the trail of those guns. When the party is over we might decide to land, cher ami.”
“At the rate you are moving you’d burrow a tunnel through the hill.”
I heard him chuckle. “Roger… Roger… There is a whole bunch of them down below ready for the frying pan.”
“Tres bien, Charles, Roger, zdro-cent-dix-sept—zdro-huit.”
“Attaquez!” Three of the planes banked, came down over a patch of forest and rained napalm. At four o’clock the transport planes arrived. The Paratroops began to descend, twelve hundred of them. Air ambulances settled at the foot of the hill. Their arrival signaled that for once we could deliver our wounded comrades to a hospital.
The battle came to a sudden end. The Viet Minh ranks eddied and then fled. On the far side of the river the trail was covered with hundreds of shattered bikes, wagons, boxes, crates, bales—and corpses; in the woods a hundred fires burned and the Paras were busy shooting down the panicked oxen and water buffalo that milled along the riverside. Not even beasts could be spared, for they were the principal means of Viet Minh transports.
That evening we gave a last salute to sixty-five of our fallen comrades. Among them were Sergeant Schenk and Bernard Eisner.
16. THE LITTLE TRAITORS
I found the muffler-equipped machine guns which we used on so many occasions extremely effective, so long as no prolonged firing was necessary. With mufflers the barrels would quickly overheat. Another shortcoming was that mufflers blotted out the gunsights and tracers had to be used to zero in on the target. After several months of experimenting. Sergeant Krebitz discovered that fairly good silencers could be made from sections of hollow bamboo, padded with wet clay and wrapped in layers of cloth. The result was a clumsy contrajftion which nevertheless worked.
The soundless death coming from the “nowhere” always shattered the guerrilla morale. The initial shock and the ensuing panic usually prevented the enemy from executing necessary defensive measures. By the time their leaders decided what to do, it was too late for them to do anything but flee or perish. So whenever given a chance we killed in silence.
Scouting the Phu Loi mountains, Gruppe Drei spotted twelve terrorists as they were moving across a narrow footbridge suspended eighty feet above a deep gorge. Our sharpshooters went into action with their telescopic, silencer-equipped rifles. Within seconds the twelve Viet Minh were dead; their bodies fell into the abyss to be swept away by the swift current. The footpath leading to the bridge circled a cluster of rocks. Subsequent groups coming toward the crossing could not see the bridge and consequently were unaware of the fate of their comrades. Thinking that the group ahead of them had already crossed and entered the woods, the enemy detachments kept coming in groups of twelve at hundred-yard intervals. They were in turn shot off the bridge quietly but efficiently. Our sharpshooters exterminated three groups before one mortally wounded guerrilla entangled himself in the supporting ropes and remained hanging over the precipice in plain sight. Even then we managed to kill seven more Viet Minh who rushed forward to help what they thought was a comrade in distress. The rest of the enemy then dispersed among the rocks and we refrained from any further activity. The enemy could do nothing but watch our side of the gorge. Hours went by while the opposing parties waited in tense expectation; then we spotted a couple of guerrillas crawling toward the bridge. The sharpshooters allowed them to proceed until they showed their heads; alas, that was the last guerrilla endeavor to reach the bridge. Our sharpshooters were quite capable of hitting a man in the head from five hundred yards.
At another time we encountered a small Viet Minh detachment as it moved single file down a trail. Our sharpshooters went into action. They began by shooting the last man in the file. With a bullet in the brain, one does not make much noise. The rearmost terrorist dropped and those ahead of him marched on unaware of the mishap. A dozen terrorists could be liquidated before their comrades realized that they were under attack.
In such attacks the survivors would disperse and take cover, not knowing where to turn, where to shoot. The sudden realization that the jungle was no longer their ally, that it harbored an invisible adversary who killed in silence, the thought that they might be sitting in the center of a deadly trap, demoralized the enemy. In my opinion all troops engaged in antiguerrilla warfare should be issued rifle silencers. It was the kind of opposition the Viet Minh dreaded: the unknown, the unseen, the unheard death. One should remember that the majority of their troops were primitive men, naive and superstitious. When fighting against primitives, every psychological “trick” that one could think up should be exploited; the fact that the Viet Minh had discarded their spears and bows and, thanks to the benevolent Soviet supplies, now brandished rifles and automatic weapons did not cancel out the fact that they were still primitives. Except for a few of their higher leaders, the average intelligence and general mentality of the Viet Minh fighter was that of the Stone-Age man, educated only in the art of killing.
With my battalion at large in their jungle sanctuaries, the guerrillas could no longer set up camps in the hills or in the villages. Only at the constant risk of severe punishment could they light open fires, play music, chatter aloud, laugh, or sing. When they ignored the new rules of the game, death came to them swiftly and unexpectedly. By the end of our fifth week in the Communist rear, the Viet Minh High Command had mobilized about five thousand men to trap and exterminate us. Their equipment had been seized from the French or was the very best that their Soviet and Chinese patrons could offer.
