enemy and that’s all that matters.”
“Wonderful,” his driver muttered and Pieper laughed. Was there anything better than fighting a war?
Muffled by the rain, he heard the sound of heavy weapons followed by the chatter of machine guns. Somebody had already made contact. He closed the hatch. No sense being a fool and getting killed by a sniper or a piece of shrapnel. They would find the Americans soon enough, maybe in minutes.
Carter’s twelve heavy Pershing tanks were lined up along the dirt road a couple of hundred yards inside the forest. They would have been invisible even on a sunny day. He’d sent out scouts with walkie-talkies but had heard nothing from them. In the distance, he could hear the rumblings of explosions. The fighting had begun.
“Damn it,” he muttered. Finally, the scouts came running back with the info that the German army was passing them and that there was a very large number of tanks. How many, they couldn’t be sure because of the crappy visibility.
“Time to earn our pay,” Carter muttered. He gave the order to move out, and the column slowly snaked its way out of the woods along paths he and Morgan had marked out with white tape on stakes the day before.
In short order they were in an open field. Carter arrayed his tanks in a line and they rumbled forward very slowly. He did not want to rear end the German army.
Shapes began to appear in front of him. Men, and they were hunched over and moving in the same direction as his tanks. Jeb keyed his radio. “We’re gonna hit the kraut infantry. Use machine guns if you have to, but not our main guns. We save those for their tanks.”
The sound of the approaching American tanks awoke the German infantry to their peril and they turned to confront the apparitions emerging from the mist. Some were puzzled. Were these more German tanks? Others saw the strange shapes and the American markings and reacted by either running or shooting. An old man leveled a panzerfaust, but a burst from a machine gun killed him. Other Pershings cut loose with their machine guns and German infantry began to drop by the score. “Kill them and keep moving,” Jeb ordered. “Don’t take chances.”
He thought he could hear screams from the outside and over the sound of his engines but wasn’t sure. He felt his tank run over something. Christ, was that a person?
Large shapes were dimly visible. German tanks. But so damn many of them, Carter thought. What the hell have I gotten myself into?
“Hit them in the rear. Kill them quickly.”
Pieper was confused. What the devil was the source of the automatic weapons fire from his rear? What Volkssturm asshole had begun shooting his own men? Ah well, it was inevitable in such crummy fighting conditions.
At the same time his mind registered the sound of cannon fire also coming from his rear, the Panther to his left exploded. A second burst into flames, and then a third.
“Turn, turn,” he ordered into his radio. “The goddamned Americans have tanks in our rear.”
He spun his tank on its own axis to face the new threat. There, he saw one. It was bigger than any American tank he’d seen before and quickly identified it as a Pershing. There’d been rumors that the Amis had some in the area and they’d just been confirmed.
Several more Panthers and T34’s exploded or started belching smoke before his men could find targets and respond. The American main gun was a killer. The attack on the American defenses would have to wait until this new threat was taken care of.
Carter was appalled. What kind of hornet’s nest had he disturbed? The weather seemed to be lifting slightly and he could see maybe a quarter of a mile. More than a dozen German tanks were burning, but what looked like every tank in the whole damned German army was turning and driving in his direction. They were already within almost point blank range and this was going to turn into a street fight.
Reports came in that several of his Pershings were destroyed and there seemed to be at least fifty Panthers or T34’s headed in his direction.
“Fall back,” he ordered. They had done their bit to hurt the Germans. Now they had to get the hell out of danger. Suicide was not on his agenda. If they got back into the woods, maybe they could hide out.
His tank lurched hard, slamming him against the turret. “Won’t move, sir,” said his driver. “I think something hit a tread.”
“Everybody out,” Jeb yelled just as a half dozen shells from German guns hit his tank and turned it and everyone inside into cinders.
They could hear the fighting but not see it. Morgan leaned on the wall of the trench and tried to will himself to see. Something was indeed coming, but it wasn’t tanks. Infantry, and thanks to the mist, they were only about a hundred yards away.
“Open fire,” he yelled redundantly as everyone in the line was already shooting. Morgan put his submachine gun on the dirt wall and fired into the crowd. It was difficult to miss and men fell, but still more came in behind them.
The few strands of barb wire did little to stop the German horde and they swarmed over it and towards the American trenches.
“Bayonets,” someone yelled. Shit, thought Morgan, I don’t even have a bayonet. A screaming German was right in front of him. Jack fired a burst and the man fell back only to be replaced by another kraut. This one too went down and another ran at him. Jack pulled the trigger. Empty. He fumbled frantically to change the clip. Something slammed into his shoulder and spun him around. He checked and found that he wasn’t shot, but his bad shoulder had been hurt again. A German jumped into the trench and started clawing at him with his bare hands. Jack tried to fight him off but his left arm wouldn’t respond.
Sergeant Major Rolfe pushed Jack aside and shot the German in the head only to be gunned down himself by another. Jack took Rolfe’s rifle and tried to fire with one hand. He hit nothing and screamed as the pain overwhelmed him.
Feeney and Snyder appeared beside him, shooting and killing. Jack pulled his pistol and shot another German in the face. He pointed the . 45 at another who threw down his rifle and raised his hands. “Kamerad,” he screamed. Others began to scream the same thing and they too dropped their weapons and held up their arms.
All around them, German soldiers were surrendering. Not only that, the sun was coming out. He paled. There were scores of German tanks approaching his position.
Overhead, Phips dropped through the clouds in his Piper and saw the German tanks heading west. He radioed in his position and gave a rough estimate of their numbers, admitting that there were so many that a proper count was impossible. Finally, he exulted, he was doing something useful.
All the American planes in the world, or so it seemed, had earlier been arrayed on landing strips for this very moment. In anticipation of the clearing weather pushing in from the west, they’d taken off and had been circling overhead, hoping to God that they’d find targets before they ran out of gas.
Even as he watched, the clouds began to part. It was like a curtain lifting on the set of an epic play with him as a front row audience of one.
Time to get out of the way, he thought, and climbed to ten thousand feet. He laughed as he saw literally
