Behind Hitler's Lines (17 page)

When there was any food at all, it was a kettle of swill POWs called “whisper soup.” Tom Gintjee, a man of wry humor, wrote in his memoir of captivity that when he first tasted it he had no idea that water could be diluted. With only two small bowls per day, prisoners weren't just weak, they were collapsing. Joe spent most of his time in a stuporous sprawl, and blacked out if he had to rise quickly for the air-raid siren.

Fortunately it sounded only false alarms. The monastery had been identified by the Germans with a huge
POW
lettered on the roof, saving it from the pelt of bombs nearby. Indeed when P-47s finished their passes some would pull off and waggle wings as POWs waved feebly, a charged space between men in the air and those on the ground, expressing some kind of common will.

At all other times the slowly milling prisoners were as heartsick as they were hungry. Evidently Rommel had the invasion bottled up. The Germans, now that their panzers had joined the battle, seemed to have stopped the British at Caen and were holding around St.-Lo. French farmers confirmed this as each day more POWs of every kind trekked into the compound, Airborne and Rangers, infantrymen from the beaches, and a few British. Ironically, though salutes from fighter-bombers had caused weeping, a pilot was shoved through the gate, bringing tears of laughter.

Under his flight suit he wore a Class A uniform—”pinks and greens”—complete with ribbons and necktie. The famished, filthy GIs gawked at him. This lieutenant had a very sad story. Last night he was going to propose to his English girlfriend in London at a supper club where reservations had to be made a month in advance. His strafing mission was at six, his reservation for seven, not enough time to change uniform after landing. What made matters worse was that he knew of fellow pilots who coveted his fiancee-to-be. This he
related to the POWs, whose reaction was such that the lieutenant was grateful to be taken away to a Luftwaffe camp before the Americans on Starvation Hill tossed him into the swill kettle, necktie and all.

Eventually a few cows were led into the compound and milked, providing a half cup per prisoner every third day. To Joe it tasted like the richest cream, even after being cut with an equal quantity of water. But the protein of meat was what was needed most. To get it, the milk had to be sacrificed, a decision made by the senior POW (a lieutenant colonel) and approved by the Germans; so for a few days the whisper soup had a taste of cowhide and contained tiny slivers of beef. Then two old horses, wounded in action, were brought in and slaughtered. No one had ever eaten horse meat before, but at the time it tasted like T-bone steak. Cuts from the butt were called “sirgroin.”

With Joe on Starvation Hill was Jack Brown from I Company. Like Private Ryan of movie fame, Jack and his twin brother were “sole surviving sons.” They hailed from Alaska. Wolverton had given them a couple of extra days' leave after Toccoa so they could get home and back. In the D Night marshaling area he summoned the Browns because a new War Department directive had come out prohibiting one or the other of them from going into combat. The brothers looked at each other and told him that if they both didn't go, neither would. What could Wolverton do—court-martial one of them for refusing an order? But which one? He took it upon himself to disobey the War Department and let them both jump on D Night. Jim Brown made it through Normandy and the Netherlands but was killed near Bastogne.

On Starvation Hill Jack Brown plotted escape with another trooper as Joe listened. The plan was to go over the wall. That didn't make sense to Joe, who was too addled to understand but he stood watch for the attempt, much as he had for the brandy heist. Brown got up on the wall during a guard shift and lay there for hours in the ivy. At dark someone threw a sheet rope up to him so he could go down the other side.

Currahee! Jack got away.

Joe thought about that a lot, wondered if he was losing it: the daring and determination, even the physical ability, to escape—the will and guile to gauge the odds, then put it to the touch. This became a persistent uneasiness for him, like the compulsion of a race driver to take the wheel again after a near-fatal crash. He tried to collect some sheets to make a rope, but they were scarce and valued on Starvation Hill as bandages for the wounded. He was told no, but the asking helped him psychologically.

Anyway, whatever ambition Joe had to follow Jack Brown over the wall was short-circuited a few days later when he was pulled out, with a score of other troopers and glider men, to be packed onto another convoy. From time and direction he figured their arrival was around Alengon and mentioned it to the guards, but they said nothing and seemed to know no more about locations than the Americans did. Joe was developing an appreciation of the strata within the Wehrmacht— whom to fear, whom to test, who could be ignored. Watch, wait, pray, learn: these became articles of practice that induced patience. Patience did not come naturally to the Most Obvious Temper of his class; he would still seethe with anger, but indulging it was now a deprived luxury.

He was delivered to another stable, a small one, three POWs in each stall. Food was a little better than on Starvation Hill: cabbage in the whisper soup, a crust of black bread, sometimes something from a K ration. Whatever there was the POWs divided equally. Sharing hardship that way thwarted German policy to split solidarity among the prisoners by presenting food so that they had to divide it up themselves. With less resolute POWs the strong would take advantage of the weak, and that pointed out potential collaborators for the Germans. In Joe's stall, equal division was guaranteed because the man who did the dividing got last choice of the thirds.

The stable (probably about halfway between St.-Lo and Alengon) was a temporary respite from the war now evident only in the sky. A German medic pulled the shell fragment out of Joe's butt and patched him up pretty well, though recuperation weakened him. The relatively decent handling meant
his group of POWs had been selected and collected by a high echelon of the Wehrmacht. Joe's comrades in the stable had reason, and some extra calories, to feel lucky, but his nervousness grew about the improved treatment; he dreaded Greta walking in and saying, “Joe, are you ready to dance?”

But she was not to be the celebrity.

The staff began looking their prisoners over, standing them up, sitting them down, moving them around like there was to be a big inspection. There was. At dawn they fell out into the courtyard while the guards kept talking about
Feldmarschall
while polishing boots and hand-pressing high-collar uniforms. The prisoners assembled as if it were their first day in the army. A parade-perfect
Oberleutnant
addressed them quickly, announcing that a preeminent visitor was about to arrive, that talking was strictly forbidden unless he asked a question. Now stand at attention to await the next order. The Americans ignored him, slouching till a Wehrmacht sergeant with a burp gun bellowed to march into the courtyard and form three ranks,
schnelll

Minutes later they heard trucks. A flak (antiaircraft) wagon rolled in, its four-barrel machine gun trained on the POWs. Then a couple of Mercedes limos followed by another flak wagon. Generals and high-ranking staff piled out of the cars. The senior colonel adjusted his uniform and opened the back door. A small, very Prussian-looking officer stepped out and glanced at his watch. He wore a visored cap and carried a baton. Joe watched from the corner of his eye, and it was the baton that identified this impressive inspector. “Rommel,” he whispered, and spontaneously the prisoners beside him came to attention. For Joe it was a strange feeling, showing respect for a great commander, at the same time showing him that here were soldiers for him to respect.

Starting in North Africa,
Feldmarschall
Erwin Rommel had obtained a feeling for the enemy by sizing up their prisoners. Joe squared his shoulders and popped his chest as if Colonel Sink were trooping the line. With head up he almost missed seeing Rommel, who was short like Montgomery
(whose height had prevented Joe from seeing him when he went by during a regimental review in England).

Rommel trooped the POW platoon rapidly. Reading from a roster, his aide-de-camp mentioned each man's name going by. “Beyrle” drew a twitch of a smile but not a glance from the field marshal, who was said to ignore tall people unless he was far enough from them to neutralize their height. His momentary smile at Joe's name may have been from the thought that Rommel's family was living in Bayern; in fact he had been visiting them on D Night.

Rommel didn't say anything till he went around to the rank behind Joe where a trooper was barely able to stand because of a head wound. From what Joe could hear, Rommel asked the man if he was receiving medical treatment. Joe couldn't understand the answer.

The field marshal's visit lasted less than ten minutes. His motorcade roared away, and the prisoners were shoved back into their stalls. In a few days they were taken back to Tessy Not long after Rommel's inspection he was out of the war himself, strafed and wounded. Not long after that he committed suicide rather than face trial for participating in the July plot to assassinate Hitler.

In the weeks without a calendar, Rommel's wounding (July 17,1944) became a time marker for Joe's future experience and those of fellow “prisoners of the second front,” as Germans called POWs from Normandy. The second and universally remembered milestone was the carpet bombing just west of St.-Lo (July 24-25), the decisive factor in enabling Patton's breakout into open terrain.

At Tessy, what Joe saw of the carpet bombing was the sky full of B-17s after they'd dropped their bombs in such tight clusters that craters overlapped. The bombers came on in waves, double the number in the D Night armada, using Tessy as their landmark to turn north back to England. For hours the ground shuddered and the air rumbled, as dust and smoke rose like a pall over some gigantic forest fire, the crematorium for thousands of German soldiers whose destruction opened a five-mile rent in the front lines. Joe's stable was
solid stone, but he felt it would tip over. The POWs began to talk escape: if they could just get out and hide, Patton would overrun Tessy in a few days. In fact the general arrived the next week, but by then Joe was gone.

FOR THE FIRST TIME
he was blindfolded, put in a truck with ten others, and driven east to a chateau estate (probably around Falaise) housing a high-level interrogation center. Again prisoners were stabled; this time each was put in a separate stall and told not to talk. Naturally they whispered at night or when vehicles went by, but for the most part there was only the quiet of the countryside, the war far away.

From the number of guards and staff, there must have been a hundred priority prisoners on this estate. All day long Joe could see them being led off to the chateau. It was several days before it was his turn. He knew it was coming when men in the first five stalls were taken away individually, an hour or so in between. Their stalls remained empty, and Joe's was the sixth.

Before the morning bread and water, a guard opened Joe's gate. Like a judge pronouncing sentence, he called out, “Beyrle.” Handcuffing him, he asked with a laugh,
“Bist du aus Bay em? “
(Are you from Bavaria?) Joe was led to the basement of the chateau, into the servants' kitchen. It was about twenty feet square, and all the cookery had been removed. It surprised him that the kitchen, appearing tidy, smelled like a public urinal. He was turned over to two guards, who gestured for him to sit on a stool high enough so that his feet dangled. They leaned their rifles in a corner and conversed while waiting for the interrogators, two lieutenants who came in and took comfortable seats behind an ornate desk (furniture no doubt from upstairs) facing Joe in the weak light of a dangling lightbulb.

The first lieutenant asked for name, rank, serial number, then continued with questions to which he already knew the answers, like “Where were you captured?” and progressing subtly to answers he in all probability knew, like “When did your division arrive in England?” Joe's steady reply was,
“Sir, I'm required to tell you only my name, rank, and serial number.”

This went on for an hour, then another. The lieutenant was not at all discouraged, his questions more probing (for example, “Where were you trained?”), as if Joe had answered earlier ones. As he grew more weary Joe began to wonder if he had. He lost much sense of the time but tried to keep track of how often the door opened and closed behind him when the guards went to chow or to take a piss. The first lieutenant slowly grew annoyed. Joe could feel a guard close behind, ready for the order to strike. It never came, and the first lieutenant got up, as if insulted by Joe's stupidity, and left in disgust.

The second lieutenant, the good cop, took over. His questions were to put Joe at ease. Nothing military, but rather “Where's your hometown?” “What did you do before the war?” As bored as he was tired, Joe was tempted to get into a casual conversation like that but decided against it. He had to convince them they were wasting their time with him. To the second lieutenant he either said nothing or repeated name, rank, and serial number.

Then sometime during the hours Joe said something else (he can't remember what) because the good cop started in with a new approach, how he was a Bavarian like Joe and couldn't understand why he would fight his own people.

His own people! Fury rose in Joe's gorge as he thought of Wolverton's throat cut almost in two. Good cop homed in on the new reaction but followed up all wrong by asking how Joe could have been “traduced”—Joe savors the word because he didn't know what it meant then—traduced by Roosevelt, Morgenthau, and all the other Jews who ran America. The lieutenant had a well-rehearsed pitch about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Listening to it gave Joe time to settle himself and go back to silence. Finally good cop tossed out a few common German phrases to note whether Joe showed some understanding, but he appeared as dumb as the FFFs horse.

At last the first interrogation shift went off-duty, turning Joe over to two other lieutenants. They took up the theme of
how we westerners were killing one another while the mutual enemy was Russia. What do you know about communism? We will tell you. Marx was a renegade German, not a patriot for his country like us—like me and you, Beyrle. You're a patriot too, just a misguided one. We understand how you feel about America. We understand how democracy could appeal to you, but that's because there's no hostile nation next door, one that takes everything you have and calls it property of the people.