The Crossroads, Part Three

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Privates Edward Walsh and Joseph Scott were on watch together in their squad's section of the line. Neither man had really gotten any sleep. They were two-thirds of Sgt. Diego Pena's Browning Automatic Rifle team, the other man, Pvt. Dan O'Neill was sleeping fitfully to Walsh's right.

They were in a ditch next to the road running parallel to the German position about 150 yards away across a snowy field. The Germans were in the woods, they were in a ditch. The three men had managed to scrape a deeper hole in the ditch but Scott had not taken his field jacket off while he was working. As a result he had sweated and when they were done, the sweat chilled him to the bone. Now his nose was running and he couldn't stop sneezing.

"Geez Joe, ya sound like shit." Walsh remarked.

"Good, 'cause I feel like shit." Scott said, then sneezed again.

Walsh heard O'Neill stirring beside him, "Hey, are you two gonna yap all f**king night or what? Can't a guy get some sleep around here?"

Walsh checked his watch, "It's almost time for stand to anyway, Dan, so ya might as well get up."

"Already?" O'Neill asked. As he did so, he heard a rumbling noise emanating from the German line. "What the heck is that?"

"Krauts have been running their engines periodically, all damned night, probably to keep the oil from getting too thick." Walsh explained.

O'Neill rolled his blanket up and began to strap it to his pack when a loud pop came from the other side of the field. He looked up to see a single red flare arch into the sky.

"That can't be good." He muttered as he picked up his Garand and checked to see that it was loaded.

"Shit," Walsh groaned, "keep your heads down fellas, I think things are about to get hot."

Obergefreiter Anton Krausse saw the red flare and looked at his loader, Panzerkanonier Oskar Albrecht. Albrecht said over the intercom, "Nebelgranate geladen!¹"

Over the radio, Krausse ordered, "Alle Sturmgeschütze, Nebelgranate feuer!²"

From their widely separated positions the 7.5 cm cannons of Krausse's three vehicles barked once, then a second time, sending smoke rounds toward the American line. As those rounds detonated, they began to form a thickening veil in front of the American positions.

Krausse waited perhaps two seconds after his gunner had fired their second smoke round when he ordered, "Laden Sie Sprenggranate!"

Albrecht had already loaded a high explosive round, so he barked, "Sprenggranate geladen!"

Each vehicle in Krausse's small platoon fired three high explosive rounds, when the cannons went silent, they loaders each shoved an armor-piercing round into the breeches of their 7.5 cm guns. Then their vehicles rolled forward.

"L.T., there's a crap load of Krauts boiling out of the woods, they've got three assault guns backing them up, they're all rolling right at you!" Though it was still dark, Cpl. Charlie Gammell was able to see a lot from the knoll he and Pvt. Jeb McCall were occupying. He was using his walkie-talkie to communicate with the platoon CP, which was roughly twenty yards back from the road.

"We're blind down here Charlie!" Cpl. John Myerson was on the other end of the conversation, 2nd Lt. Stephen Hernandez was currently out on the line with two of his basic duty privates, Fred Strickland and Philip Dyer.

"You guys might want to skedaddle, there's gotta be a hundred plus Krauts headed your way!" Gammell radioed once more.

"Keep your heads down you guys, I gotta find the L.T., if you see us start to fall back, meet us at the rally point! Charlie Two, out!" With that, Myerson signed off.

"Go slow, Hubert, we don't want to run down any of the infantry." Krausse was worried about running over the grenadiers to his front, they were supposed to keep to the intervals between the lumbering assault guns but you never knew what a man would do in a firefight. He could hear automatic weapons fire and men shouting in German. He also heard muffled explosions to his front, that had to be the rifle grenades the men behind were firing over everybody's heads.

"I hope to God those Schießbecher³ lads know what they're doing!" Panzeroberkanonier Hubert Hering muttered, he was getting a headache from all of the noise. He didn't fancy those kids accidently dropping a grenade on his head, he was driving with his hatch open, it was the only way that he could see what he was doing.

2nd Lt. Hernandez and his two men were running low, heading for the center of the platoon's position. He was worried that the men manning the .50s on the halftracks would fire too low and hit their buddies, he was stunned when he realized that no one was firing at all!

He reached the halftrack belonging to Sgt. Diego Pena's group and yelled up at the man manning the gun. "Can you see anything, Private, anything at all?"

"Negative, L.T., we can't see shit, but we can hear the Krauts coming and..."

At the moment a German rifle grenade went off in the air about ten yards to Pvt. Frank Genovese's right, he ducked down when it detonated, though had it been closer that would have been a waste of time.

"SHIT! F**kers are getting close L.T.!"

"Open fire, keep your muzzle up!!" Then Hernandez was running back to the platoon CP. When he heard Genovese open fire, it was as if it was a signal for all the vehicle machine guns to open up. Hernandez felt better hearing the roar of the big .50s. No doubt the Germans were less thrilled.

Unteroffizier Jürgen Klügmann's squad was ten meters from the road when his squad was hit by automatic weapons fire. Three of his men, Grenadiers Harry Zimmermann, Johannes Kaufmann, and Richard Meier were torn to red ruin almost immediately.

"Follow me boys!" Klügmann screamed as he advanced firing from the hip. The remainder of his squad, only four men besides himself, also began to scream and fire their Stg 44s.

As he stepped forward he stumbled over a snow bank, it was snow piled up from when the road had been plowed some days ago. As he caught himself from falling, there in front of him was an American. His eyes were wide and staring. The kid didn't know what was going on, Klügmann shot him.

Pvt. Bill Ramsey had no chance, the burst from the screaming German nearly took his head off. His squad mate, Pvt. Curtis Lambert, yelled "F**k" then emptied his weapon into the German. The German's momentum carried him into the ditch where Lambert's squad was beginning to fire into the dissipating smoke.

Four more Germans stumbled into the ad hoc trench line. The first man, Obergefreiter Gerd Weber, Klügmann's assistant squad leader, drove his bayonet into Lambert's chest. The young American gasped, then died.

Sgt. Diego Pena felt his men beginning to give way, he fired at, and thought he hit one German, then he saw one of his men run. The other men fired another round or two but when Pena went down with a bullet to the chest, his assistant, Cpl. John Chapman realized that they couldn't hold.

"Fall back, keep firing, fall back to the tracks. Steady boys, steady!"

Sgt. Doug Harrell, commanding the Sherman named "Misfit" couldn't see a damned thing, it was dark, it was smoky, but he was doing his damndest to fight back. He stood on the engine deck of "Misfit" firing his .50 cal towards the Germans. But there seemed to be a lot of Germans, and a lot of German bullets in the air, he could hear them pinging off his tank from time to time.

Then he saw it, one of those damned Stugs, lumbering right into the line. Time to be a tanker again, he jumped into his hatch and hurriedly connected his intercom lead, "Jay, target, 11 o'clock, Kraut Stug!"

As the turret moved in that direction, Harrell saw a flash, he had the sinking feeling that they were too late.

Gefreiter Berthold Schantz in StuG 314 hissed between his teeth when he saw the round his gunner had fired hit the Ami tank. "Laden sie Panzergranate, schnell Alois, schnell!!"

"Panzergranate geladen!" Panzerkanonier Alois Specht barked.

"Feuer!" Schantz screamed as he stomped on his commander's override, firing the gun.

The tank in his view port exploded.

"Shit! Misfit is toast, anybody got a target, I can't see a damned thing!" Sgt. Otto Walls, in his tank, "The Wall" was nearly sobbing. Doug Harrell was his best friend. Then the telephone attached to the rear of his tank buzzed, "WHAT?" he screamed into the handset.

"It's Lieutenant Hernandez, we're getting clobbered. My men are heading to the rear, we've lost one tank and at least two tracks, fall back to the rally point, we are NOT dying for this f**king crossroads!"

"Okay, get out of here, we'll cover."

"Woody, it's Otto, you up?!" Sgt. Walls yelled into the radio.

"Little busy over here Otto!" Sgt. Walls recognized S/Sgt Bradley Woodstock's voice, the platoon commander.

"The infantry is falling back, their lieutenant ordered us to do likewise!"

"Shit. All tanks, this is Woodstock. Reverse back to the rally point, keep the MG rounds going downrange. Start popping smoke!"

Slowly the Americans were falling back. Major Jürgen von Lüttwitz and his radioman, Grenadier Ernst Schottenstein, were moving up and down through the advancing troops. He wanted the men to stop when they hit the road. His objective was the crossroads, he did not intend to go one step further. He caught glimpses of the Americans falling back, they were in fairly good order, groups covering each other, some moving, some firing.

He could see that at least one Ami panzer was burning, along with at least one of their halftracks. But he could see that one of his StuGs was immobilized, the track had broken and run off the rollers.

Now to get the men in hand and under control. But his damned radio seemed to have given up the ghost.

S/Sgt Jack Wilson was in contact with all three squads, but he had no idea where Hernandez was. He knew that Pena was down, his squad hit pretty hard, but Chapman had rallied the survivors.

Stump and Cat had reported in, both had lost men, no one seemed real sure of who had been hit, but a head count turned up three men missing from Stump's 3rd Squad and two from Cat's 1st Squad.

Now if he could just find the lieutenant.

"Do you see that guy, Charlie? He's got a radioman close by." Pvt. Jeb McCall was sure that he had spotted an officer, they had to move and soon, but at least they could nail one of the bastards that had driven their boys from the crossroads.

"I see him, Jeb." Cpl. Charlie Gammell settled himself, he seemed to become one with his rifle. The sounds of battle faded away as he judged the range. There was almost no wind. He was probably 30 feet higher than his target.

He studied the man in his crosshairs, definitely an officer. He took a breath, let some of it out slowly, then began the slow squeeze which would end a man's life.

The big Springfield barked, surprising Gammell as it did every time he fired. His eye came away from the scope and he sighed. He looked at McCall.

"You got him Charlie, his head came apart! Now let's get the Hell out of here!"

One of the American tanks fired a single round before it disappeared into the early morning haze some five hundred meters away. That round sailed harmlessly over Gefreiter Viktor Hanneman's disabled StuG. Hauptfeldwebel Klaus-Peter Keller, the company Spieß had things well in hand. The company had rallied on the objective, now the squad leaders were trying to get things sorted and organized.

"Guenther, have you seen the Major?" Keller asked Unteroffizier Guenther Burkhard who was standing nearby, distributing ammunition.

"Last I saw him he was headed over to the left, apparently our radios were failing badly today. He couldn't raise Leutnant Sauer or Feldwebel Hase on his radio, he said he could hear Brückner just fine, but couldn't talk to him." With that Burkhard pulled another case of ammo out of the company's wagon, which had just come up moments after Keller himself had arrived on the objective.

Now if he could just find the Major.

The sun came up and slowly cleared the morning fog, it promised to be a clear day, already the American P-47s, P-38s, and P-51s were taxiing in preparation to take to the air for another day of hunting Germans.

B-26s and B-25s were already hitting targets just beyond the German front lines, which were rapidly falling to pieces under the onslaught from the air and the ground.

Elements of a German unit were caught moving near a small crossroads inside Germany by a single flight of P-38s. They strafed the Germans, but those men got under cover in short order. The flight lead was low on fuel, so were his wingmen, he didn't have time to play with the Germans at the moment. He'd head back to base, refuel and re-arm, they'd be back this way in a few hours. The Krauts weren't going anywhere.

¹ Smoke round loaded. (Literally "fog grenade loaded")

² All assault guns, fire smoke!

³ Literally "shooting cups," the term for the rifle grenade attachment on the German K98k rifle. Each Grenadierkompanie had nine men assigned to this role.

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