“Off we go.”
Cronley punched Tedworth affectionately on the arm and started up the stairs.
[ TWO ]
The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound
Pullach, Bavaria
1125 24 January 1946
The sun had come out, which was unusual for late January, and Hammersmith got a good look at the village as the single-engine L-4 aircraft circled it, losing altitude to land.
It was a typical small Bavarian village, one nestled in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. There were perhaps a hundred fifty or so houses, most of them small cottages, plus some barns. On the village square was a church. There were also three large three-story buildings—kasernen—which had been built in the 1930s to house the reserve 117th Bavarian Infantry Regiment.
An outer fence ten feet high circled the village. On it every twenty yards or so were signs Hammersmith tried and failed to read.
One hundred meters inside that fence, and probably not visible from the road passing Pullach, was a second fence, this one topped by barbed concertina wire. On it every twenty meters were more signs that Hammersmith also could not read.
There was a gate through the second fence guarded by both Poles and Americans, two of each. Hammersmith could see that the Americans, both sergeants, were very large black men, armed with Thompson submachine guns. Their shoulder insignia was a triangular insignia that Hammersmith decided was most likely that of the 2nd “Hell on Wheels” Armored Division. One of them, and one of the Poles, manned the barrier.
One hundred yards inside the second fence was a third.
This one, also ten feet high, had concertina barbed wire on top and laid on the ground, the latter to make getting close to the fence difficult. At one-hundred-meter intervals along this fence line were guard towers equipped with floodlights and machine guns.
On the third fence were signs every twenty meters. He couldn’t read these, either, although he could make out skulls and crossbones that signaled danger.
The L-4 aircraft, which was the Army designation for the Piper Cub, dropped its nose and landed on what Hammersmith decided was a recently built crushed stone runway between the second and the inner fence.
The pilot taxied to the end of the runway, stopping at a sort of a hangar there—tarpaulins held up by poles. Workmen were laying bricks on what was going to be a permanent hangar. Under the tarpaulin were two Fieseler Storch aircraft, the Wehrmacht’s version of the L-4, which Hammersmith had heard were far superior to the Army’s Piper Cubs.
Two jeeps were waiting for them. One held two black soldiers, both three-stripe “buck” sergeants, in a jeep with a .50 caliber Browning machine gun on a pedestal mount. It wasn’t for show. Hammersmith saw a belt of ammunition was in place. And he saw that he’d been right—the triangular shoulder patch was that of “Hell on Wheels.”
The second jeep, which did not have a pedestal-mounted Browning, held an American technical sergeant, a large black man, and a large white man in a dyed black U.S. Army uniform.
The white guy’s a PSO guard, Hammersmith decided.
He knew all about the PSO, which stood for Provisional Security Organization. It had been formed from former members of either the Free Polish Army or the Free Polish Air Force. After escaping captivity by the Germans or the Russians when Poland had been overrun in the early days of the war, they had made their way to England. There, they had spent the rest of World War II serving with the Free Polish Armed Forces.
When those organizations had been disbanded almost immediately after VE Day, the discharged officers and soldiers had refused to be repatriated. They knew the Russians had murdered in cold blood more than eight thousand Polish officers, and had good reason to believe the Russians would do the same to them.
Although the Soviets had angrily demanded their forced return, General McNarney flatly refused to do so.
And then someone in the Farben Building in Frankfurt am Main, now the headquarters of U.S. Forces in the European Theater (USFET), decided that the former Polish soldiers and officers, who were languishing in displaced persons camps, were the answer to a serious problem USFET faced.
Guards were needed to protect Army Quartermaster Corps supply depots from the German population, which was on the cusp of starvation. The U.S. Army was short of soldiers to perform the guarding. And since the Polish “DPs” had military training, and hated the Germans nearly as much as they hated the Russians, they seemed to be ideally suited to guard Quartermaster depots.
McNarney agreed, and the Provisional Security Organization was formed. A school had been hastily set up in Griesheim, outside Frankfurt. There the Poles had been issued fatigue uniforms that had been dyed black, taught how to fire the carbine and the .45 pistol, and been quickly put to work as guards at Quartermaster—and other—supply depots.
Hammersmith had thought the idea made as much sense as putting foxes in chicken houses, and predicted there would be mass thefts of Army property.
As the PSO Pole in the jeep got out and walked toward the L-4, Hammersmith thought about this, and admitted he had been wrong. No mass plundering of depots had occurred.
Then he had other thoughts.
The Pole walking toward him had a Thompson submachine gun slung over his shoulder.
Jesus, when did they start issuing Tommy Guns to the Poles?