Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

1944

World War II has raged in Europe for five long years, but the tide has turned decisively in favor of the Allies. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, the western part of the Soviet Union, and North Africa have all been occupied at one time, but now the edges of the Nazi Reich are being rolled up.

In Italy, Hitler’s clownish fascist henchman, Benito Mussolini, has been overthrown. Pro-Nazi governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Yugoslavia are looking for ways to make peace with the Allies. The Nazis are out of North Africa and southern Italy.

The Soviet Union is ruled by the paranoid monster Joseph Stalin. Having once made a treacherous peace with Hitler allowing the Soviets to stab Finland and Poland in the back, Stalin found himself betrayed in turn by Hitler. Ignoring a peace agreement between them, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, inflicting unspeakable brutality on Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, and, of course, above all, the Jews.

But the Soviet Union has proven to be too big a meal for Hitler to swallow. The Nazis have been turned back at Stalingrad and Leningrad, forced to flee after the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, and are now retreating with a vengeful Soviet Red Army hot on their heels.

From June 25, 1940, and the surrender of France to June 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Great Britain, her Commonwealth and her Empire, stood alone against the Nazi tidal wave. With British cities being bombed by the Luftwaffe and British shipping largely at the bottom of the Atlantic, Britain still stood—cut off, hungry, and alone—the indomitable hero of the western world.

But after Hitler’s ally, Japan, attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the great sleeping giant across the sea finally awoke. The United States of America, which had till then limited itself to supplying material aid to Britain, was all at once, overnight, fully engaged in the war.

America’s not-so-secret weapon was its productive capacity. By 1944 the USA was producing 96,000 warplanes per year, more than 10 planes each hour in a twenty-four-hour day. In the total war effort American industry produced 110 aircraft carriers, 41,000 cannon, 100,000 tanks, 310,000 aircraft, 12.5 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition.

It also raised, trained, and equipped a military that by 1944 numbered nearly 12 million soldiers, sailors, and marines.

The world waited as the Americans put on a poor show in North Africa and became bogged down in Italy under ineffectual generals. America’s allies granted the genius of American war production, but they doubted the fighting spirit, grit, determination, and competence of American soldiers, from Eisenhower down to the private in a foxhole.

The Americans faced the ultimate test: leading a fractious, suspicious coalition of British, Canadian, Australian, Free French, and Free Polish forces to invade and liberate Europe and to destroy Hitler’s evil regime.

The Nazis were no longer advancing, but the Nazi empire was very far from beaten. New German weapons, the V-1 cruise missile, the V-2 ballistic missile, the world’s first jet fighter, the Me 262, and the massive Tiger tank, were coming online.

Now on the defensive, the superbly equipped, experienced, well-trained, well-generaled, and dug-in German army, the Wehrmacht, and its brutal and fanatical counterpart, the Waffen SS, were fighting to save the Nazi regime and their Fatherland.

The Nazi beast cornered was at its most dangerous.

Between D-day, June 6, 1944, and the German surrender on May 7, 1945, 125,000 American GIs—more than 350 per day—would die bringing freedom to western Europe and destroying the greatest evil humanity had ever faced.

Prologue

107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

There’s a story going round, Gentle Reader, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but supposedly a guy heard it from a German POW. The story is that the first Allied bomb dropped on Berlin killed an elephant in the zoo.

I guess I’m sorry for the elephant, but that sort of sums up the way it goes in war. There’s no moral sense to it. Sure, one side may be better than the other. I mean, I was at Buchenwald. No one needs to convince me the Nazis are evil. But what I mean is that in the day-to-day of it, death and destruction do not rain down on the bad and spare the good. Death does not care whether you’re a bright and sparkly hero or a yellow coward. Death doesn’t know you, or care to know you. You’re just the poor dumb bastard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re just that elephant.

The philosophy of the combat soldier in a nutshell: you’re gonna die. Might be today, might be tomorrow, might be fifty years from now all safe and snug in your bed. But when your number is up, your number is up. And that might be in three . . . two . . . Bang!

Do I sound like a weary old veteran? A sweet young slip of a girl like me? Shall I blush?

When this all started, when the US of A got into this war and the Supreme Court decided what the hell, let’s send women too, everyone wondered what effect it would have.

Could women fight? My girl Rio has a shiny Silver Star, a fistful of Purple Hearts, and a notched M1 that say yes.

Could the men fight alongside women, or would the simple creatures be too distracted by feminine curves? Well, I once spent a long night in a hole with Luther Geer, who has never been a gentleman but he is a good soldier, and he never even made a pass at me. Possibly he was distracted by the artillery barrage coming down on our heads. Possibly it was that I hadn’t showered in . . . God only knows how long, you’d have to ask my fleas. We were not a man and a woman in that hole, we were two scared little babies screaming and cursing and so cold we were grateful for the warmth of our own piss running down our legs.

It was not a romantic evening.

> And people wondered what it would do to us afterward, to us “soldier girls.” Would we lose all our feminine attributes? Would we become mannish?