The End is Near

(Source)

1st Lt. Nathan Paddock sat in the cab of the well-worn GMC deuce-and-a-half and marveled at the long columns of German prisoners marching down the autobahn's median strip. On either side of the defeated Germans roared the mechanized might of the United States Army heading in the opposite direction.

"Kinda nice to see those bastards disarmed and defeated, ain't it L.T.?" Sgt. Woody Sherman was grinning and waving at the prisoners. He was driving the truck which held the men of the platoon headquarters, the other three squads had their own trucks and were following behind.

"It's nice to know that we don't have to fight those guys any more. Word has it that the Germans are giving up in droves now. There may be some holdouts in Czechoslovakia, which is probably why we're headed there." Paddock said.

"I'm glad to get out of those damn forests. I tell ya L.T., when I get out of the Army, I'm moving someplace flat with no trees at all." Sherman shook his head, then continued, "How about you L.T.? What are you going to do after the war?"

Paddock looked at his platoon guide, "I'll think about that when the war's actually over, Woody."

"Damn, I hope they don't send us to the Pacific, Sir."

"You and me both Woody, you and me both."

Patton's Third Army was scouring the Czech-German border, but Eisenhower was worried about the reports of the Nazi Alpine Redoubt in southern Bavaria. He wanted Patton's army to close on that area. So the 1st Infantry Division was headed south to relieve one of Patton's divisions.

Cpt. Hernandez was in a jeep driven by his first sergeant, Mort Saeger. Riding in the back was his radioman, Cpl Jacob Winters. He wasn't sure what to make of this Alpine Redoubt, earlier intelligence had indicated that the Harz Mountains were intended to be a fortress area. That had fizzled when the Big Red One had gone through. Even still, eleven men of Charlie Company didn't make it out of the Harz.

One lieutenant relieved of command, the company commander himself, his predecessor Cpt. Tony Palminteri, was a psychiatric casualty. Then there were the wounded and the dead, four of the former, five of the latter.

Hernandez was somewhat depressed about that, nine of his men wounded or killed within days of the end of the war. He prayed to God that there would be no more.

Oberfeldwebel Jürgen Holzmann trudged wearily along, placing one foot in front of the other, concentrating on the back of the man in front of him, something he'd been doing for many years. For Holzmann was an infantryman, he had gone into France on foot, just as his father and uncles had. He had marched into Russia, then had retreated on foot from France. The Panzers got all the glory, the infantry still did most of the dying.

They definitely did all of the walking!

He looked around, watching the American vehicles roaring by on either side, tanks, trucks, the small open-topped cars he'd been told were called jeeps. There were hundreds of vehicles. It was no wonder to Holzmann that they had lost the war. The leadership had to have been insane thinking that they could take on the world. They urge us to fight on, yet where are they?

Sgt. Melvin Katz stared morosely out to the side of the road. He had been watching the long columns for a while, then the reports of the concentration camps that he had read would fill his head. How could a civilized nation like Germany do such a thing?

Although his father had seen the writing on the wall and had managed to get his immediate family out of Austria prior to the Anschluß and prior to the Nazis, he knew that he still had cousins in Austria. He couldn't help wondering if they had wound up in the camps. Were they even still alive?

One thought filled Katz' mind, this could never be allowed to happen again.

Though Sgt. Charlie Gammell was a combat veteran and now led his own squad, he had trouble remembering that he was just 18-years old. He should have been back on his father's dairy farm back in Vermont. Hunting in the fall, fishing in the summer, helping his grandfather with the maple sugaring in the spring. Gammell couldn't help but feel that his youth had been stolen from him.

He had really looked at himself in the mirror the night before as he had shaved. His eyes had bags under them, he had crow's feet at the corners of those eyes, he looked ten years older than he actually was. He felt much, much older than that physically.

The strain of combat, of sleeping in the rough, usually outside, tended to age a fellow. Gammell couldn't really remember what life had been like before he'd joined Charlie Company. He wondered how many of the men he'd met at the Repple Depple were still alive.

His goal now was to stay alive and to keep his men alive. It struck him that with the influx of all the new replacements, he was no longer the youngest man in the squad.

As the men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry head towards Czechoslovakia, the men of Major Jürgen von Lüttwitz and Leutnant Manfred Sauer still languish in the improvised POW enclosures near where they had gone into captivity.

The food was slightly better, the men had built better shelters, and as the weather improved the sickness rates were down. Even still, there were one or two men a week who succumbed to the poor conditions, sickness, and poorly healed wounds.

Von Lüttwitz had remarked to Sauer one day that he was proud that the men he had led into captivity all still lived, not one man had died. Unlike some units, the men of the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Panzergrenadier Regiment looked after each other. As comrades should.

In six days Adolf Hitler will kill himself in his bunker beneath the city of Berlin as the impact of Russian artillery shells fall nearer and nearer.

In two weeks, the Germans will surrender.

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