Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

The tank sits idling, exhaust fumes rising. The tank commander and the bow gunner are both poking up from their respective hatches. The Germans will hear them. They’ll know tanks are coming. Hopefully they won’t know from where and they’ll have all their Panzerfausts at the corners of the field.

If this doesn’t work, I’ll be in the doghouse.

Rio looks down the line at her squad. Her solid soldiers, Geer, Pang, Jenou, and Jack; the risen-from-the-dead Dick Ostrowiz, who reappeared three days after the landing, having been given up as drowned; the enthusiastic and overly eager Jenny Dial; the goldbrick Rudy J. Chester; Beebee, indispensable as a scrounger, but not the most eager beaver of fighting men; and Maria Milkmaid Molina, who was shaping up to be a decent soldier.

Two short of a full complement, not that she wishes for more green replacements, God forbid. But someone who could handle a BAR or remember to throw a grenade after pulling the pin would be nice. Despite the tension, or perhaps because of it, her thoughts go to the soldiers who have not made it this far. Cassell. Suarez. Even Magraff. And the new ones, Hobart and Camacho.

“Ready?”

They nod or grunt.

The signal comes. Rio yells up to the tank commander, who waves her off and says, “Don’t you worry, honey, we will tear up that little old hedge.”

He guns the engine, and the Sherman gathers speed. It’s going maybe fifteen miles an hour when the welded teeth bite into the base of the hedgerow. The bushes tilt away and wave wildly, a clear-as-day signal to the Germans.

The tank backs up, hits it again, and this time sits grinding its gears, treads kicking up clods of dirt and grass as the squad stands close by.

It takes a third and then a fourth rush by the Sherman, and suddenly the front of the tank tilts up and it plows right over the hedgerow into the field beyond, tilting like a playground seesaw.

Now the squad competes for space behind the tank, and no one but Jack, Jenou, Pang, and Geer is employing marching fire, firing from the hip even without specific targets to keep the Krauts pinned down.

Machine guns open up from the far corners and Chester and Ostrowiz promptly fall on their faces as the tank pulls away.

“Get up! Get up!” Rio yells. “How many times do I have to tell you? Move!”

Now comes the whistle of artillery and a dirt flower erupts in the middle of the field, showering the GIs and the tank with dirt and debris. The tank buttons up, closing their hatches, relying now on inadequate periscopes for steering.

“Move, move, move!” Rio shouts and reaches down to grab the collar of Chester’s uniform and haul him to his feet. The German gunners must be careful not to hit their own position, so the safest reaction to mortar fire is to advance. “Ostrowiz! Move!”

The tank is ahead of the inf

antry, racing toward the far hedgerow in the knowledge that the German artillery will have to stop firing or risk hitting their own men. The tank hits the second hedgerow like it did the first, but the tank commander has learned, and this time it takes only three charges from the Sherman to knock a hole in the hedgerow.

Rio is at the rear, pushing Chester and Ostrowiz. Geer leads the way through, with Dial and Pang beside him. They pivot left out of Rio’s sight, and she hears frantic rifle fire.

The tank commander, no longer worried about the mortars that rain down on the now-empty field behind them, is up out of his hatch and swiveling the big machine gun toward the tree line. The tank is behind the German line now, behind gray-clad soldiers rushing up with their Panzerfausts at the ready.

This Sherman has a .50 caliber for the tank commander and a .30 caliber bow gun. Both lacerate the hedgerow, cutting through the Germans like a scythe going through wheat.

Rio pushes through the gap, pivots, sees Jack trip, and for a heart-stopping moment thinks he’s been shot. But he’s up, cursing, and firing at German troops who now retreat in both directions along the hedgerow.

“Dig in, dig in!” Rio shouts. She grabs the entrenching tool from the back of Chester’s pack and shoves it in his hands. “Soon as those Krauts are clear the arty’s coming!”

Shovels out, the dirt clods start flying as the tank continues spraying deadly fire, now into the next hedgerow. Then the tank fires its big cannon and the center of the next hedgerow explodes. The Germans over there are firing back, but only sporadically in the presence of the Sherman’s annihilating fire.

A Panzerfaust, the German counterpart to the American bazooka, flies, trailing sparks. It misses the Sherman, and the Sherman chases the track of Panzerfaust smoke with lacerating machine gun fire.

Then the tank turns and roars back through the hole it has made.

Rio checks her watch. Eleven minutes start to finish, and another square of Normandy’s endless checkerboard belongs to the Americans.

Berlin is closer.

18

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NORMANDY, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

It is the refugees who make it possible for Rainy.