Guns At Cassino (29 page)
Authors: Leo Kessler
Eighteen
1. SS slang for jackboot (
transl
.)
2.
See Leo Kessler:
SS
Panzer
Battalion
for further details.
3.
A thick, long burning candle, first invented in World War II and named after FM Hindenburg (
transl
.)
Nineteen
1. Yiddish for 'crazy', commonly used in the SS (
transl
.)
2.
Typical SS defensive position (
transl
.)
Twenty
1. Forward Observation Post (
transl
.)
If you enjoyed
Guns at Cassino
you might be interested in
Schirmer’s Headhunters
by Leo Kessler, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from
Schirmer’s Headhunters
by Leo Kessler
They were the survivors of the SS Assault Regiment Wotan. Together they had survived the savagery of the Russian front. Now they have to face death again in the jungles of Indo-China, fighting a bitter war for France in the Foreign Legion.
Ex-SS Colonel Schirmer and his battle-scarred crew of “Headhunters” are pitched into vicious combat as the Foreign Legion is ordered into Massacre Valley. Their mission: to seek and destroy Ho Chi Minh’s dreaded kamikaze elite, the Death Volunteers. But as the carnage mounts, Schirmer’s Headhunters begin to fear they are the hunted — not the hunters.
Colonel Schirmer thrust his camouflaged kepi to the back of his big, scarred, shaven head and stared down at the terrain below. In the fading light there wasn’t much to see.
Two bare ridge-lines, almost parallel, were sticking up barren and brown through the usual lush-green canopy of Indo-Chinese tropical jungle. Running north to south, a little closer together at the northern end, they marked the boundaries of the twenty-kilometre-long valley in which his Headhunters — of the Foreign Legion’s Special Para Battalion — would soon commence their march into the unknown.
Involuntarily, the big ex-SS colonel with the bold scarred face, tanned a deep leathery-brown by the tropical sun, shivered despite the wet heat. In the last eight years since he and his bunch of renegade SS paras had been forced into fighting France’s dirty war in Indo-China for her, he had flown over thousands of similar canopies but he had never been able to throw off the ominous feeling of dread whenever they approached a new one.
There were always the same old questions to which there were no answers, save those written in hot blood. What did the jungle hide? How many unfriendly brown Slant-eyes were watching the fleet of choppers pass at this very moment? Who or what was responsible for those faint wisps of grey smoke at the far end of the long, narrow valley? And what was waiting for them down there in what the awed, frightened, Frog stubble-hoppers were now beginning to call “Massacre Valley”?
“Massacre Valley,”
Schirmer licked his suddenly dry lips and mouthed the name silently to himself as the fleet of choppers began to come down, their radios already crackling noisily. The name was appropriate enough. Twice in the last month, battalion-strength strike forces of the French Army had crossed the Red River and had marched north into the valley below, heading for the war-torn country’s frontier with China. Their objective had been to find out what the Chinese-supported Viet Minh rebels were up to. Uncle Ho had not staged a single major action against the Frogs since Christmas, 1953. Now it was February, 1954, and the monsoon season was only three months away, when all ops would have to cease. And twice the Frog stubble-hoppers had disappeared somewhere down there without trace.
“Merde, alors!” one-armed Colonel Mercier, the Legion’s political adviser and France’s secret strong-man in Indo-China, had cursed at his last briefing for the mission. “Nearly two thousand men cannot disappear without trace, Schirmer! Impossible!”
The plump, red-faced, cunning-eyed Frenchman had glared at the big, bronzed German whose camouflaged blouse bore no decoration or badge of rank save the cloth wings of a Legion para and the tarnished silver runes of the SS and spluttered, “The legs” — he used the Legion’s contemptuous term for the Infantry — “are shitting their drawers in fear. Massacre Valley they call the place.” He blew out his lips under the trim military moustache in Gallic disgust. “They’d rather shoot their officers in the back than go up there. But no matter, Schirmer, they won’t have to. Instead you’ll take your bunch of Boche cut-throats into the valley and find out what’s going on. What I — and the High Command pansies — want to know is what is so important about that damned bit of jungle that makes Uncle Ho want to take on two battalions of regular French troops while the whole of the delta, full of tempting targets, is left in peace. There is something going on up there in the north, Schirmer, mark my words — something shittingly well unpleasant.”
“Schirmer!”
The German colonel took his eyes off the jungle looming up ever larger and turned round.
It was White Lightning, his American second-in command. Nature had played an evil trick on Washington Lee Lincoln Lightning, formerly of the US 101st Airborne Division before he had killed a superior officer and been forced to desert. His face, despite the lidless eyes, was straight from an Army recruiting poster — keen and hard, with a finely chiselled nose and a lean, tough jaw — perfect, save for one thing: from birth he had not had one single hair on his body. Lacking eyebrows, facial or body hair, he was completely and utterly bald — hence his nickname.
“What is it, Major?” Schirmer snapped, forgetting Massacre Valley and Colonel Mercier abruptly.
“Point ship just radioed no sign of enemy activity,” the American answered in his cool efficient manner. “If there are any gooks down there, they’re pretty well hidden.”
“They always are, Major. Take the usual precautions. We go in at an angle to the smoke flare. No landing. All troopers to drop out at five metres, and warn everyone to look out for those damned punji sticks.”
“Wilco, Skipper,” the American answered and hurried up the swaying helicopter to where the command radio operator was waiting.
Sergeant-Major Schulze, the Headhunters” senior NCO, thrust his pornographic magazine into his pack with a sigh. “Why all the fuss, Colonel?” he said with a lazy grin on his broad, good-humoured, Hamburg face. “One good blast from my fart cannon, after all that pea-soup we had yesterday, and I’d blast Uncle Ho and all his Slant-eyes from here to Moscow.”
Schirmer smiled and started buckling on his helmet. “Yes, you big rogue, that’s what I’ve been thinking all the way here. I’m surprised the damn chopper’s still flying.” His voice hardened. “All right, Headhunters, prepare to land!”
Now all was swift, purposeful activity in the command helicopter. The hardened veterans of six years of fighting in Europe and eight years in Asia slapped machine-pistol magazines to check they were securely fixed, heaved their packs higher on their shoulders, grabbed hold of the hand-holds, held their breath and prepared to bale out.
Schirmer poised at the door, the wind whipping his uniform tight against his lean, muscular body. Suddenly his blouse was damp with sweat from the heat coming up from the reen mass of the jungle. He looked down, his stomach tightening as it always did at this moment. Were they going to land right in the middle of the Slant-eyes? He swallowed hard and dismissed the dread thought.
The command pilot eased back on the cyclic. The helicopter’s nose came up. Speed dropped until they were almost hovering. The chopper started to vibrate crazily, as if it would fall apart at any moment. Long grass, flattened by the prop blast, and the grey stream of the smoke marker appeared suddenly.
“DZ!” Schirmer yelled above the racket.
The Headhunters rose as one and shuffled towards the open door. Schirmer tried to dismiss the thought that at this very moment one of the Slant-eyes might be drawing a bead on him as he crouched there. He raised his right thumb, to signify that they were right above the dropping zone.
They were about twenty metres above the ground. He threw a glance upwards. The blue spurts of exhaust flames were everywhere; the racket was impossible. The whole battalion was dead on target. Fifteen metres… ten metres… He could wait no longer. The chopper was virtually at stalling speed. He drew a deep breath. “ALLES FUER DEUTSCHLAND!” He gave the old Waffen SS war-cry and flung himself out of the door.
Colonel Schirmer hit the ground hard, rolled over and came up, grease-gun at the ready. All around him in the swirling, elephant grass and whirling leaves, thrown up in a mad dance by the roaring choppers’ rotors, the Headhunters were slamming to the deck, completing the same roll and dashing for the cover of the tree-line, weapons at the alert.
“First Company, ready to march!” a coarse, beery voice sang out to his right. That would be Spider-Arse, officially Lieutenant Kurtz, a survivor of the old 666th SS Para Battalion.
“Second Company, ready to march!” Lieutenant Thiel, formerly of the Bodyguard, cried somewhere to Schirmer’s front.
Schirmer nodded his approval, but still he didn’t relax his hold on the grease-gun and his eyes searched the jungle for the slightest sign of suspicious movement.
“The girls of the Third, ready to sway their delicate, sweet little bottoms!” an affected, feminine voice shrilled. Schirmer grinned despite his inner tension. Lieutenant “Pansy” Petersen, formerly of the Death’s Head, holder of the Knight’s Cross and Oak Leaves, was running true to form.
“Colonel Schirmer, sir,” Tod’s sickly whine cut through the racket close to the CO’s ear.
Schirmer spun round to face Tod, the ex-Gestapo man, who was officially the Headhunter’s political officer but whose real function was still that of torturer. Involuntarily Schirmer wrinkled his nose in disgust. The sallow-faced, bespectacled officer with the wet, slack, drooling lips was crouched there, as if he expected to be shot by a Slant-eye at any moment, his splay-fingered hands playing nervously with his good-luck charm: a tobacco-pouch made from the tanned skin of a negress’s breast, complete with dun-coloured nipple.
“What is it, Tod?” he snapped irritably.
“I’ve just found something, sir.”
“I’ll piss in my boot,” Schirmer roared above the racket as the choppers, having dropped their cargoes, were beginning to rise once more. “What — one of those juicy arsed little boys’ bums you drool over?”
“No, no, not that, sir,” the ex-schoolmaster answered hastily, blushing a deep-red with embarrassment. “You know I’m almost normal. I would never…”
“Piss or get off the pot, man,” Schirmer interrupted him brutally. “What have you found?”
“Footprints, sir.”
“What!”
Tod repeated what he had just said and, tugging Schirmer’s sleeve, led him to a spot a couple of metres away. “There,” he announced, pointing at the trampled grass. And they can’t be from our Legion boots. Those are the marks of their sandals!”
Colonel Erwin Schirmer did not need to be told who “they” were, for already he could smell the stench of nuoa-man, that nauseating, rotten fish-paste the Slant-eyes used to season their rice; there was no mistaking it.
“Slant-eyes, Skipper?” White Lightning’s calm voice asked quietly behind him.
Schirmer nodded grimly, as the sound of the departing choppers began to die away and vanish altogether. “Looks like it, Major,” he said slowly.
“What now, sir?” Tod quavered, eyeing the jungle ahead through his gold-rimmed spectacles with undisguised apprehension.
For what seemed a long time, Schirmer did not answer. The other two waited, no sound disturbing the silence now save the rustle of the damp tropical breeze in the trees. Finally Schirmer shook his head like a man coming out of a deep sleep and said quietly, “What now you ask, Tod? What else can we mercenaries do but march, fight and die.” He raised his voice harshly, “All right, you dogs of death, do you want to live forever?” he bellowed. “Headhunters — advance!”