Invasion

  Josiah, I love you with all my heart and I always will. I don’t know what else to say. I truly don’t. I feel so bad that I had not been praying for you every day until after we got the news about what happened during the invasion. We have read the newspapers and we have heard stories, but nobody can get a good picture in their minds about what it was like. Oh, please understand how much I love you and want you to come home again. Anything that I have not done in the past I will try to make up to you. We all miss you so.

  When Ellen Fuller, Carter’s grandmother, told us he would not be coming home again I felt so bad, I couldn’t look her in the face. I feel so bad for all of the boys and wish this war had never happened. Josiah, I don’t know what else to say except that I love you and I hope to hold you and see you as soon as God is willing. Please do not be concerned about our well-being or us getting on here in Virginia. It is you that we all are worried about.

  Yesterday I passed by Vernelle and she held my hand and said she missed you so. That’s how people feel about all of our young men, that we miss you so!

  Your loving mother, Margaret DeVera Wedgewood

  We marched, each with our own thoughts and our own feelings, back to the town we had been chased from. On the way there we passed two panzers that had been knocked out. Next to one there was a German soldier, black from being burned, one arm out to his right as if he was reaching for something, the other one pointing to the darkening sky. The wheat fields were burning, most of them already down to the ground level. The little group of houses that had huddled in the center of the village were now nothing more than a few jagged walls. Now and again I could see the charred remains of what might have been a person.

  Waves of fatigue, each stronger than the one before, washed over me. My body was in full surrender to the war.

  I fell asleep standing up. When I awoke it was with a start, my rifle flying in one direction and something I had been holding in my left hand, I thought it was a book at first, against the nearby wall.

  “If you can tap dance when you do that we’ll take it on the road,” Stagg said. “Pretty good trick.”

  More startled than embarrassed, I picked up my rifle, glanced at the object across the room, and remembered being offered the roll by an old man. A sort of an apology came to mind and ended in a shrug.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “The captain wants you and Freihofer to question a prisoner,” Stagg said. “Freihofer because he speaks German and you because you look like you got a brain in your head. You awake enough to do it?”

  “I have a choice?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m awake enough. The guy speaks English?”

  “Yeah. What they want to know from the beginning is whether or not he’s a spy. They found him in civilian clothes. If he’s not, they’re going to want to know what outfits he was with and what their morale was,” Stagg said. “And let me tell you something, Woody, they’re going to want you to come up with something, so don’t talk to this guy and come away with nothing. Make something up if you have to, but give them a report.”

  “Where is he?”

  Stagg nodded toward the door and started off, and I followed. Talking to a prisoner was better than running across a field, better than shooting at Germans, and a lot better than being shot at.

  Our brass was setting up in a house they had commandeered, and Major Johns was there with a general I didn’t know. When Stagg stopped and saluted, all I did was to come to attention, then throw a late highball toward the general.

  Freihofer was in the room, too, and there was a young man, stocky and broad-faced, standing against the wall. His right arm was in a sling, and he seemed to have trouble breathing. As Stagg had said, he was wearing civvy pants and a vest. A shirt that was too big hung outside of the pants, and I noticed that the bottom was covered with mud.

  “We got a Kraut in civvies,” Major Johns said. “So we have a choice of killing him outright as a spy, handing him over to the French Resistance who’ll probably kill him, or taking a couple of guys out of our line to get him back to the rear. I’m in favor of shooting him, especially if he doesn’t cooperate.”

  Johns turned and looked at the prisoner. The guy looked down at the ground, and I knew he was scared.

  Johns told us to take him out to another house that Headquarters Company was setting up in and talk to him to see how much he wanted to live. I thought of what Stagg had said, and wondered if he had chosen me because there was a chance I could get out of combat by taking the guy to the rear.

  Freihofer poked the guy in the back on the way to the house we were to use. There were three guys from a military police unit in the building and some clerks setting up a communications station.

  The house wasn’t one of the better ones I had seen. Most of the houses in Normandy were simple, with a few chairs, a table, a stove or fireplace, and rooms to sleep in. A smallish woman sat in one corner, and I imagined it must have been her house at one time.

  “You speak slowly, and tell only the truth,” Freihofer said to the prisoner, who sat on a box we had put in one corner. His shoulders were rounded forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Or we’ll kill you right away. You got that?”

  The man nodded. He looked at Freihofer, then quickly down, then glanced at me and away again, just as quickly.

  “What company were you with?” Freihofer asked after we had sat the man down.

  “Grenadier Regiment 915, sir.”

  “You were with them for the whole war?” Freihofer asked.

  “When the Amis — when you arrived and we were forced back from the beach, I was put with the 352nd, sir.”

  “You were on the beach? At Omaha?”

  “Omaha? I don’t know this word, sir,” he answered slowly. “We were in front of Vierville.”

  “Fucking Omaha!” Freihofer’s hand tightened around his M1, and I saw the German’s eyes shut.

  “You joined the army to kill Americans?” Freihofer sounded as if he was going to lose it.

  “Not to kill anyone,” the German said. “Only to save my brother.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?” I asked.

  “I spent a year studying in the Netherlands. We were thinking of switching our farm to raise livestock before the war.”

  “You said you joined the army to save your brother,” I said. “How does that work?”

  “We lived on a farm in Elbersberg, in Bavaria. We were not soldiers. No one in my family was a soldier —”

  “According to you!” Freihofer spat the words out. I thought he was losing it.

  “You want to do this by yourself?” I asked Freihofer. “If you do, just say it and I’ll leave.”

  He looked at me hard and I returned his look. Then he gestured toward the prisoner.

  “Look, they’re trying to decide whether or not to kill you as a spy,” I said. “So you better tell us anything you can. What did you do in — Bavaria?”

  “In Elbersberg we grew hops to make beer,” he said. “Sometimes we grew wheat. Small amounts of wheat. There were fourteen houses in the village. Our house was the last one in the row. One day some soldiers came and they lined up all the men and asked why we weren’t in the army. They saw me and my brother Phillip and my brother Rudolf. My name is Helmut. They gave us papers to fill out and dates to report to the army. Me and Phillip were given two weeks to get our affairs in order and to report to the army for assignment. Rudolf was given the classification of Blöde because he is different.”

  “He’s retarded?” Freihofer asked.

  “He does not think quickly,” the man Helmut answered.

  “So then what happened?” Freihofer asked.

  “We had heard what they were doing to men and boys who were not fit,” Helmut said. “My mother began to cry, and my father wanted to take him away and hide him. But then my father said that it wouldn’t do any good because they would find us and say we were deserters.”

  “
What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’m not getting this picture.”

  “If a man was not — how do you say? — have all of his parts, or if he has a disease, sometimes they were taken away. It’s been said they were killed,” Helmut said. “They give them needles to put them to sleep and they don’t wake up again.”

  I looked at Freihofer and he shrugged.

  “So what did you do?”

  “My older brother had a plan. We were, all three of us, to go and join the Grenadiers,” Helmut said. “We tore up the papers the army had given us. We went south toward Nuremberg and joined an outfit that was short of its quota. Then we trained together. My brother and I looked after Rudolf and we took care of him. You don’t have to be so smart to be a soldier.

  “Still, it was seen that Rudolf was not too strong in his head. Some of the officers wanted to get rid of him, but they were short of men and so they used him as a worker. It’s the same way that they used the ones from the East.”

  “You were on the beach on June sixth?”

  “I was in Resistance Nest 63,” Helmut said.

  “What was your farm like?” I asked.

  “What the hell do you want to know that for?” Freihofer asked me.

  I didn’t have a reason; I just wanted to know.

  “So what happened on the beach when you saw us coming?”

  Silence. After a while his lips began to move, and I could almost hear his thinking. We all knew what had happened on the beach.

  More silence from Helmut.

  “You going to fucking talk?” Freihofer asked.

  “We didn’t expect you on that day,” Helmut said. “I don’t know really when we expected you to come, but some of our commanders did not think you would come on the water. They thought you would all come by plane, by paratroopers. When the alarm went off and we rushed to our posts, we looked out and at first we could see nothing. Then in the distance we saw the dark outlines of the ships. We had been told we could see the smoke from the ships when they came across the channel, but there was no smoke. There were more ships than anyone had imagined.

  “When the guns began it was a hard time for us. The ground shook from the explosions. We had been told that we would be safe in the nests. They were concrete over steel. Very strong. But what seemed strong to keep you out began to look … began to look like it was only meant to keep us in. A man in my company, he was from Metzingen, saw the boats, and we knew that you were in the boats. Somebody said it was the British, and others said it was the Amis. We couldn’t tell from the nests.”

  “Did you work on a farm?” Freihofer asked me.

  “Part-time work,” I said.

  “Tell him what you did on the farm,” Freihofer said to Helmut.

  “On the farm I got up each morning — our house had only two small windows so that it was not too cold when it snowed — and fed the animals. Then my father and my brothers and I would take the cart out to the fields to see what was there to do. When it wasn’t harvest time we took care of the crop, weeding and trimming the plants. When it was harvest time, we would gather the crops and —”

  “How did it feel shooting down Americans?”

  “It felt like I was waiting for my death,” Helmut answered quietly. “I felt that they had all come only to kill me and my brothers. At first when the boats came to the shore, and the tanks in the water, we thought we would stop you. That was the plan. But so many soldiers were falling, and still they came. Still you came. My brother said we should run. But some of the soldiers from the East, captives from the Russian front, tried to leave and they were shot down.”

  “By the Navy guns?” Freihofer asked.

  “By our commanders,” Helmut said. “After a while, the feeling came that it was all useless. I told my brothers good-bye and they told me good-bye. Rudolf thought when you shot Amis it didn’t matter to them, they just got up again. There were so many. Just so many.”

  “What was the mood of the men?” I asked.

  “I don’t know this word mood?”

  “Were they happy? Stimmung?” Freihofer asked. “Your soldiers, were they happy?”

  “Before you came we were mostly bored,” Helmut said. “Every day it was just looking out over the water and waiting. Every day listening to the radio and to our officers, who would look at the sky and at the water and make up little stories about why you would come or why you would not come. From the new people that came into our outfit —”

  “The 352nd?”

  “The 352nd,” Helmut said. “We thought it was going badly for us. Not as bad as on the Eastern front, where the stories we heard were terrible. It was not bad sitting by the water.”

  “And when they saw we had come?” I asked.

  “They were scared,” Helmut said. “I was scared. Everybody was scared. The guns from the ships came closer and closer, and you could feel the ground shake around you. The smell was terrible. You had to know that sooner or later it would break down, that the nests would fall apart. Our officers said we would all fight to the last bullet.

  “Then the Amis … We didn’t know yet that they were Amis even though we could see their helmets. We weren’t sure,” Helmut said. “Some had begun to run up the hill, and we began to retreat to our first position.”

  “What’s that mean? First position?”

  “We had positions to retreat to before you came,” Helmut said. “It seemed simple. But then we were told not to retreat. That we were to fight to the last bullet.”

  “How did you get into civilian clothing?”

  “I was afraid,” Helmut said. “I wanted to run away because I was afraid, but I was just as afraid of my commanders. They were shooting more and more people. They shot the ones from the East first, and then anybody who wanted to run away.”

  “Anything else you have to say?” Freihofer asked.

  Helmut shrugged. “I am a shadow,” he said. “There is nothing to a shadow. I am not a man anymore.”

  “Who cares?” Freihofer said.

  “How many men from your company got off the beach?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Freihofer swung the butt of his rifle against Helmut’s head.

  He cried. His head down, sobbing, his hands in his lap, thinking that any moment he might be killed. He sobbed.

  Freihofer asked the prisoner a few more questions, but there weren’t any more answers. After a while we took him back to Major Johns and said that the morale of the regiment on the beach, the 352nd, had been bad.

  “You think he’s a spy?” Major Johns asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Freihofer said.

  Johns was a small man with a neatly trimmed mustache, which he kept touching. He looked at me and then at Freihofer and gave a quick nod of his head and saluted us.

  The MPs took Helmut. I asked Captain Milton what I should do, and he said that Freihofer and I should go back to the company.

  “You did a good job,” he said.

  “What’s going to happen to the prisoner?” Freihofer asked.

  Milton shrugged.

  We heard two shots as we walked away.

  Freihofer and I got back to the bivouac area, and I saw Stagg near the chow line and I headed toward him. There were three garbage cans — we called them GI cans for some reason — in a row at the end of a long table. One would have cans of food we could take, and the other two would be to wash our mess kits. Stagg looked up when he saw us coming.

  “You got a problem with the way I handled that scene?” Freihofer was a half step behind me.

  “You got a problem with me?” I stopped and faced him.

  “Maybe I do,” Freihofer said.

  “What’s going on?” Stagg took a step toward us.

  “Woody doesn’t like the way I treated the prisoner,” Freihofer said. “Maybe he’s getting attached to the enemy.”

  “Freihofer, what you were doing back there wasn’t about getting information,” I said. “You were trying to
prove something to somebody, and I didn’t give a damn about that. Hitting him in the face didn’t get anything more out of him, and probably just let him know you weren’t listening anyway.”

  “What was the German about?” Stagg asked.

  Freihofer turned away and strode off.

  “Not much,” I said. “He said him and his two brothers joined the army at the same time. The older two guys joined so they could be with the youngest. They were afraid that the youngest guy was going to get killed by the Nazis because he was weak-minded or something. I guess you can’t be a good German soldier if you’re not too smart.”

  “Freihofer is trying to prove he’s a good American soldier,” Stagg said. “Guys do that. No big deal. Don’t take it personally.”

  I tossed an okay to Stagg because I really liked him. Back home, in Bedford or even in New York, I wouldn’t have been friends with him, but in France he was okay, even someone I admired.

  There was a buzz and a lot of instant cursing. Gomez was sitting on two gas cans he had put together, and I asked him what was going on.

  “All I hear is a lot of swearing,” I said.

  “You know I hardly ever cursed before I got into the Army?” Gomez had a nice smile. “One day I was home and I heard my mother on the phone. She was talking to my tia Consuela, her sister, and telling her that she had heard a lot of cursing on the bus by young men and that she was so glad I didn’t use language like that. Before then I cursed some, but not that much. After that I stopped cursing altogether, until I got into the Army. I think that’s all that some people understand.”

  “What are they cursing about?”

  “We’re moving toward St. Lo again tonight,” Gomez said.

  “Shit!”

  “At 1800 hours!” Gomez said. “I’m sure the Germans know exactly when we’re coming, how many infantry will be on the line, how many machine guns. They know everything about us and then get us in their sights as we come dancing up to wherever they are. We’re like those clay pigeons they have at Coney Island. You ever been to Coney Island?”