The Final Days, Part One

The ruins of the Reichs Chancellery
(Source)

Cpt. Stephen Hernandez sat at the small table in the room he was using as an office. The message he'd received from regiment was crumpled in his hand. Radio reception in the hills and valleys of this area of Czechoslovakia had been bad over the past few days and a courier had brought the piece of paper.

He stood up, sighed, and walked over to the map pinned to the wall. It marked the latest known positions of American and Russian units. There were no German units marked on the map, a question mark or two where there might still be organized German resistance, but it looked as if the war was winding down, finally.

Which made the death of Major Josephson all the harder to stomach. He had been returning from a meeting at regiment, the problem they were having with their radios had made that face-to-face meeting necessary in the first place. His jeep was being escorted by two armored cars and it was only sheer bad luck which had led them to take the wrong fork in the road.

A mine had knocked out one armored car, a well-armed German armored car, also lost, had killed the second armored car and it's crew. The survivors had spent the night hunkered down, waiting for daybreak, they had two wounded men and the Major had refused to abandon them.

Near morning a rescue party led by C Company's XO, 2nd Lt. Mitch Hornsby had arrived. The survivors were nearly home free when some insane German diehard had come down the street firing his weapon and yelling something about Hitler. Major Josephson had the misfortune to be hit by a burst of fire from the German's initial, unaimed fusillade. Major Josephson had lingered for a short while, then he had died. Hernandez wondered if things might have been different had he been there.

Hitler was dead, according to the message he held in his hand. The remaining Germans were surrendering in droves now. Columns of refugees, military and civilian, were clogging the roads from the east. It seemed as if all of eastern Europe was trying to get to the American and British lines. Seemed that no one trusted the tender mercies of the Soviets.

The war was nearly over, but the Major hadn't made it. Close, but in the end he died like so many other soldiers.

Hernandez' radioman, Cpl. Jacob Winters, was a wreck. He'd been Josephson's radioman when he had commanded Charlie Company. Hernandez realized that Winters was probably finished as a soldier. The man was broken, Hernandez had sent him to the rear to get him away from the front for a few days. He had seen too much, the Major's death was the last straw. With any luck the war would end before he came back.

One could only hope.

2nd Lt. Mitch Hornsby was walking back to the CP, he had escorted Winters back to the battalion aid station. The medics had dropped him off after assuring him that they'd take care of Winters. Everyone in the battalion was pretty torn up over Josephson's death.

But looking at things realistically, the Major had no family, his wife and young son had been killed in a car crash back in July of '44. Maybe that's why he had smiled just before he died. Hornsby had been impressed by the man and was sad that he was gone, especially with the end of the war so near. He wondered who would take command of the battalion. Would they bring in an outsider or would the senior company commander, Cpt. Jack Walker get the nod?

1st Lt. Nathan Paddock's 2nd Platoon was wearily making their way up the hill to Charlie Company's position. He had taken the entire platoon out on patrol. The men were getting sloppy being in defensive positions all the time, he wanted to exercise them and to check for German activity in the area. There had been no sign of the Germans in the valley nor on the next ridge.

A couple of abandoned positions had been found, hastily evacuated. Paddock wondered where the Germans had gone. Talking with some of the locals had revealed little, many of them were ethnic Germans and had no love for the American army or their Czech neighbors.

One older man, who spoke a little English, had told them that everyone, German and Czech, were nervous about the oncoming Red Army. Rumors were rampant, refugees spoke of drunken Russian soldiers raping and pillaging. Not the front line troops, but those in the second line who weren't focused on fighting Germans, they were out for revenge.

From a hilltop not two miles from C Company's position, Paddock had observed a refugee column on a road in the distance. He had seen no military equipment, just farm carts, bicycles, and the like. While there may have been German soldiers within the crowds, many appeared to be civilians.

While he had been observing, the column had actually been attacked by aircraft. Paddock couldn't tell the aircraft types from a distance, but he didn't think they were American. The world had gone insane in the '30s, now it appeared that things would get worse before they got better.

But now they were approaching their own lines. As the men filed off to get something to eat, he was met by the commander of 3rd Platoon, 2nd Lt. Bob Poole. He looked deadly serious.

"What's up Bob?" Paddock asked as he slung his M1.

"The Major was killed in action last night."

"What?"

Poole explained the situation, Paddock couldn't quite grasp it. The war was nearly over, and now this. Initially he had been somewhat scared of the man, but as he matured as an officer, he began to see that Major Josephson was a superb leader of men, brusque at times, but fair. Paddock would miss the man.

Unterfeldwebel Horst Bergschneider trudged along with the collar of his greatcoat pulled up, his cap pulled down low, and his head bent forward as if he'd been doing this forever. The long column he was a part of was mostly military but with a large number of civilians mixed in as well.

"If you had fought harder, we wouldn't have to flee our homes!" one particularly strident woman had kept reminding him and his fellow soldiers, at least once a kilometer. Her voice had been silenced a short while ago.

It had been another passing Soviet aircraft, probably returning from a mission as they never dropped any bombs, which had come down the line of the road, its guns blazing. The poor woman had been hit in the chest and had been flung to the side of the road. She had died without a whimper.

A Luftwaffe man, from his insignia he was an anti-aircraft artilleryman, had looked at her corpse and had noted in passing, "If you had stayed home, you wouldn't be dead in a ditch now, would you?"

In the first hours of their trek out of the Reichs Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, the initial Soviet air attacks had caused mass panic. People had tried to escape into the fields alongside the road, but there was no place to hide.

After each attack, the column moved on, like some great beast tormented beyond caring anymore, shedding the wounded and the dead with equal indifference.

Now when the aircraft bearing the red star of Soviet Communism appeared, the people just kept moving, hoping the odds were in their favor. Usually they were.

At first the officers had tried to maintain order and discipline among the military units, but as more and more civilians joined the column, discipline eroded. One particularly forceful colonel had not been around one morning, rumor had it that his own men had killed him in the night.

The war was ending, no one wanted to be the last to die.

So the column containing the pathetic remnants of Hitler's quest for Lebensraum moved on, to an uncertain future and an unknown fate. But anything was better than facing the wrath of the Soviets.

(Source)

Link to all of the Chant's fiction.