casings filled with snow.
With the Humvee nearing the perimeter, Al Banks heard the splintering of timber and an eruption of black earth only a few hundred yards ahead of them, his eyes, like those of the driver, frantically searching either side of the road for some kind of shelter, the pines of the forest too close together for the Humvee to hide in them. The road turned sharply to the left. Ahead they saw a small bridge had been taken out, one of the bridge’s elegantly carved wooden posts miraculously intact, its dwarf’s face smiling sweetly beneath a hiker’s hat capped with snow.
As the shelling increased, Banks thought that for a moment enemy intelligence must have somehow found out where Freeman was and “bracketed” his position, ordering its artillery to saturate the area. The driver, seeing a small forester’s hut in a clearing a hundred yards to the right of the bridge’s ruins, wasted no time in pulling the Humvee off toward it, the other two Humvees, one front and back of the general’s, braking and following.
Approaching the hut, Freeman saw it was unlocked and what he thought was movement inside. He spotted discarded ammo belts and empty cans. He saw the movement again — something orange. Drawing his pistol from the shoulder holster beneath his camouflage jacket, he flicked the safety off and opened the door. Inside the gloom he heard a huffing sound, like someone out of breath, as if they’d been running. Then he saw a blackened face gazing up, terrified, from a pile of Hessian sacks. The soldier, an American, didn’t move; the woman — her green- and-brown-splotched Bundeswehr jacket open, breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her khaki T-shirt — reached quickly for her trousers, crumpled by her side. Looking first at the soldier as be grunted and rolled off her, she gazed up in terror at the general. Freeman saw the flash of Day-Glo orange, the woman clutching her trousers.
“Sorry… sir…” began the GI, his camouflage greasepaint catching the light from the snow as he scrambled awkwardly to his feet, two feet in one trouser leg, falling and knocking over a pickax and shovel in the corner of the hut.
“Where the hell’s your squad?” asked Freeman.
“Don’t know, sir. We got separated…”
The general holstered his.45. “Well, son, finish up here and get aboard one of our jeeps. We’re going up to the front. You—” He looked across at the German woman”—and your young lady friend can come with us. If that isn’t too inconvenient?”
The soldier was too frightened to answer. Freeman left the hut. “Goddamn it, Banks!” he said. “I’ve been in this man’s army for over forty years, and the incompetence we harbor never ceases to amaze me.”
The shelling seemed to have subsided, or at least passed beyond the immediate area, the Humvee drivers taking the opportunity to brush off as much snow from windshields and windows as possible.
“Take a message,” Freeman told Al Banks. “Immediate and confidential. SACEUR.”
Is it necessary to compound the danger to our fighting men by the issuance of Technicolor rubbers, which can be seen by the enemy at a thousand yards in snow conditions? The resulting injury to our men from enemy fire would be far more hazardous than that which you seek to avoid.
The message puzzled both Supreme Allied Command Europe and Commander in Chief, Channel Forces, in Northwood, England, until it was explained by an American liaison officer that “rubbers” were
“Oh—” replied a brigadier.
Mirth in the British officers’ mess aside, SACEUR realized that the American general had a point quite apart from the fact that over 12 percent of all casualties in all armies were due to venereal disease — often higher than the casualty rate suffered in combat.
In any event, the story of the general’s encounter with the battlefield lovers swept like wildfire through the decimated ranks of American X Corps and other contingents around the perimeter, including those among the American airborne who had not been blown off course into enemy territory beyond the drop zone. By the time the story had reached Dortmund, only fifty miles in the rear, it was attaining mythical proportions and was completely changed, the story now being that Freeman “comes across one of our guys humping a Fraulein and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, soldier?’ Well, this dogface looks up at Freeman and says, “This little honey bee if she’ll let me, General.” So Freeman says to his aide, ‘Al, you’d better promote the son of a bitch. Any man that quick on all fours deserves a battlefield citation.’ So his aide says, ‘You want him made a sergeant, General?’ and old Freeman says, ‘You make him a lieutenant. And that’s an order!’ “
Back at his headquarters in Minister, Freeman was told the story and, though he smiled, was curiously ambivalent about it. On the one hand, he told his aide, the story would probably do more to raise Allied morale in the pocket than a dozen speeches. On the other hand, the distortion that the story had undergone in the retelling disturbed him, for it was as clear an example as you’d want, he told Banks, of how “screwed up the simplest verbal exchange gets as it’s passed down the line.” No matter how sophisticated the communications equipment, all the more vital in a war of rapid movement, it often came to naught when messages had to be relayed verbally. The general state of communication glitches that had been reported from Heidelberg, before it fell, was one of the reasons he was so determined to reestablish personal contact with as many units as possible within the chaos of the shrinking perimeter. He particularly wanted to rally the airborne, who had taken a terrible beating, many of them, like young David Brentwood, who had fought with him in Korea, now reported missing, apparently having come down on the wrong side of the drop zone. Well, there was nothing he could do about those out of reach.
In the rear, the media army, most of them safely across the Rhine, were clamoring for interviews with Freeman once they’d heard the Fraulein story. Freeman’s press aide suggested to the general that it might be prudent before he spoke to any of the reporters to “rephrase” his response for home consumption.
“Hell, no!” was Freeman’s response, too busy in any case with trying to figure out how he would meet what he was sure would be Yesov’s massive and final assault upon the perimeter. “Doesn’t matter what you say,” said the general as he held out his hand impatiently for his map case. “Newspapers screw it up anyway.”
Freeman placed his forefinger on Bielefeld and, moving the second finger to form a divider, checked the rough measure against the map’s scale. It was twenty-seven miles east from Bielefeld to the Weser River. If only there were some way he could push the Russians back to the river, to suddenly reverse the position, to buy time for NATO reinforcements to pour in from the convoys that he hoped were now unloading at the British and French ports. The Russians had damned good Leggo bridges, but if they were forced to withdraw, the crossing would slow them down, giving the Allies a vital pause so that RAF, USAF, and Luftwaffe fighters could bring all the firepower they still had from their fast-dwindling supplies to bear onto the smaller, concentrated areas of the bridges. With hopefully devastating results. “You know,” he told his press aide without looking up from the map spread out before him, “that James Cagney never said, ‘You dirty rat.’ “
“No,” said his aide, somewhat nonplussed. “I didn’t know that.”
Freeman ordered the Dutch mobile infantry to close on what he believed would be the northernmost right- handed punch of the Russian armor. The Dutch had always been a concern for prewar NATO HQ. But recognizing the implications of being stationed farther away from the front line, they’d made up for it, developing a speed that had won the respect of even the Bundeswehr. “Well,” Freeman told his press aide, trying to boost morale with a little trivia, “Cagney didn’t say, ‘You dirty rat.’ What he
When the press aide saw Al Banks walking toward the command bunker, the snow was falling heavily. As Banks took off his coat, the aide noticed he had a somber, pained look about him. The aide poured a mug of coffee for him and, handing it over, asked, “What the hell’s the general on about — Judy, Judy, Judy?”
“What—?” asked Banks, cupping the coffee mug in his bands. “Listen, we’ve just got Stealth infrared overflight photos that show the Russians are moving in three more tank regiments under this blizzard. Another two to three hundred tanks.”
“Jesus—”
“I think they’re just trying to frighten us,” said Banks, laughing. There was a hint of fatigue-craziness to it that unsettled the press aide.
“T-90s?” asked the aide.
“No. PT-76s apparently.”
“Well, that’s not as bad as the 90s.”
“Yes it is. I think the old man hates them more than the 90s. Nineties are like our M-1s. Great when everything’s going great, but one good bang and out go half the electronics. With the 76s, we’re down to VW
