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Pause

Remnants

Tactics

Pause

General Bradley had decided to give V Corps time for a pause, a time to replenish it's exhausted infantry forces for another concentrated push towards St. Lo. The Allied assault in Normandy had long petered out shortly after D-Day; gains in ground were made in meters, not miles, as timetables for OVERLORD had designed. Schedules were further disrupted by a sudden gale on June 19, one that stopped all shipping to the Allied beach head for a crucial day, which was also partly why the advance on St. Lo had been cut short. Caen, a British Second Army objective scheduled to be taken by the end of D-Day, still lay in German hands two weeks later, and Bradley's untimely halt only served to exacerbate a growing fear in Allied High Command - that stalemate had cemented the invasion force on the dirt roads of Normandy.
And so, the pressure for results, for a progression of the war, as the senior officers of the Allied forces had coined it, inevitably bore down upon the fighting soldiers, the company-grade officers and rifle infantry.
Progression meant an advance. Advance meant more shoving against machine gun-infested hedgerows, barb-wired farmhouses. It was not progression that would be made at the company-level, the fighting-level, but as long as the front line was pushed further and further south, as long as the beach head continued to expand, it was progression enough for the colonels and generals.
Corporal Truttman watched the country side roll past him, saw the dead cows rotting in the sun, the empty hamlets that were invariably pocked with bullet-holes lined side-by-side in a wavering arc, and ragged farmers and their families, refugees, on the road-side. Those that had mules or donkeys had baggages, their worldly possessions, clopping behind them.
Truttman didn't know where they were going, or if they even had a particular destination; many families simply sat outside their orchards, watching the American supply line motor past. Ever since he'd boarded the truck, the French natives, particularly the farmers, had called out to him and the other Americans, waving their fists.
"What are they saying?" Truttman heard a soldier.
"'Worse than the Boesche. Worse than the Boesche,'" the translator replied dryly. "Fucking bastards."
"Yeah, buddy, it's completely unjustified, I mean I did see you raiding some Frenchman's chicken coop last night but it's not like the details matter."
"Hey, who're the bad guys here? We're liberating them, right? It's providing a fighting soldier with some real goddamn food, you know? Tit-for-tat."
The men in the trucks were mostly replacements for the 116th. A few, like Truttman, were wounded men returning to their units, having recovered after some time off the frontline.
The soldier who spoke French - "high school French, you know," as he had explained - was named Cook. Truttman had met him a two days after he'd been sent to the field hospital in London shortly after being medevaced.
"Shell burst hit me around Vierville," Cook had re-counted. "I had my arm up to cover my face, so most of the shrapnel got me there, along with a few bits and pieces into my side."
He'd been with 1st Battalion's push towards Pointe-du-Hoc, third platoon of A Company.
"Anybody know what's going on?" one soldier asked. "What's next?"
"Word has it we're pushing for Saint Lo. Jerry's not letting it go easy, of course, but they say that the three-fifty-second's been put out-of-action."
"You're damn right the three-fifty-second's out of action," another confirmed. "You're damn right. First Battalion stopped a battalion of them around Isigny. B Company captured a platoon section. All the krauts said that they didn't have a clue where the rest of their division was."
"I heard A Company grabbed a platoon, too, but the CO gunned them down before they left for the rear."
"What? Lieutenant Wayne?" Truttman's interest was called to attention.
"Yeah, that was him. Except he's a captain, now."
"I thought he was supposed to be a pacifist," Cook said. "Truttman, you were in his platoon before he got those bars, right? Any insight?"
"No. No, but that's got to be bullshit. Wayne wouldn't do that."
The other soldiers shrugged. "Hey, it could be just hear-say but you never know anymore. Old boys break-down more than ever now."
The conversation shifted to what had become known as psychological casualties - "men who snapped under the strain of battle." Fear of death, or simple out-right fear had paralyzed more than one man into submission. Sergeants saw their closest friends ripped to shreds in front of their eyes and suddenly they couldn't shoot back into the machine guns anymore. A few cases had been sent to London, but in most cases a short period off the line got the casualty back on his feet.
Of course, some of them didn't snap, but "went a little screwy," as the men on the truck coined.
Truttman had stopped talking. Wayne hadn't seemed to be a ruthless man. Truttman saw him running a drug store more than he did running a company. But somehow rumor had gotten around him, and he was supposed to have shot an entire line of prisoners in Normandy.
The trucks stopped outside a beat-up village, identical to countless others, and the troops were ordered off. Men lying in stretchers and their buddies lined the main road into the village, and those troops unloading that had previously been wounded immediately set out to join their companies. The replacements milled about in the road aimlessly, looking for some sign of where to go.
"Hey," someone, apparently a battalion staff officer, called to them, "Are you boys replacements?"
"Yeah," one of them answered.
"How many of you are there?"
Nobody knew.
"What do you say, about forty?" He turned to a sergeant standing nearby and dictated a short list of distribution to him, pausing as he wrote the figures down on paper. "Fifteen need to report to A Company. Fifteen to B. Send the rest to C. Anyone here know where to take them? Good. Get it done."
The staff officer left, then, and the replacements slowly divided themselves to head for their destinations, still unsure as to where exactly they were headed, while more sergeants and a lieutenant stalked towards them. They were cool, a little arrogant, and they treated the replacements distantly and like children. "Don't buckle your chin-strap, son, a shell burst hits you and your head will be torn clean off."
"Everyone reporting for A Company, gather 'round," a tall, lean sergeant called, hands cupped to his mouth.
When the majority of the replacements had shuffled their way to him, the sergeant spoke again. "I'm Sergeant Wescott, I'm your company First Sergeant. I will be taking you down to our section of the line, and you'll be assigned to your platoons there. You will immediately be entering a combat situation. I want you men to understand that, out on the line, we are still under German observation, meaning if you make a lot of noise or call attention to yourselves, they are going to call down artillery on us."
Wescott paused a moment, let the replacements murmur their astonishment and whatnot.
"So, when we head out of here, I don't want anybody shouting, and I don't want anybody wandering off. You listen to what I say, and you don't do anything on your own, you stick close to me until you're assigned to your platoon, and then you stick close to your platoon, understand? Okay, then, let's go."
Wescott turned and headed down the main road, not looking back to see if the replacements were following. Truttman and Cook trotted up to him, rifles slung, and the replacements followed just a second after, apparently in a sort of dis-belief at how fast the war was happening. A few hours ago they'd been in the stockage, where they had received their weapons and equipment and some last-minute training.
"First Sergeant, I'm Corporal Truttman."
"Top of the morning, to you, Truttman."
"How's ah, Captain Wayne doing?"
"He's doing fine," Wescott shrugged. "I don't know, he's out on the line so he's not wounded. He's okay."
"I mean, I heard he shot a few prisoners."
"I don't dig around in any of that. You hear something, a rumor, if you want to find out about it you can ask him yourself."
"Hey," Cook joked, "We were here on D-Day, you don't have to be like that, partner. We know what's happening."
"Yeah, well we don't."

The fifteen A Company replacements were split up into three groups, and one-by-one the groups, led by Wescott, Truttman, and Cook, filtered out of the town and into the bocage that immediately materialized from the main road. They were told to keep quiet and pay attention to where they were going, because the German line was only a hundred meters or so past A Company's positions, as the opposing soldiers were separated only by an empty field.
The replacements, and even Cook and Truttman, Wescott noticed, were clearly unsettled by the extreme silence that cloaked the field. The Germans were within talking distance - and probably even grenade-range in some areas of the line.
One of the replacement privates, trying to keep his breath easy, leaned in close to Wescott. "Why are we so close to them?"
"They do it so we can't just hit them with artillery to push them back. They closer they hug against us, the riskier it gets to call-in supporting fire."
Turning to the others, Wescott whispered, "First platoon's just off this path. Follow me, nice and easy."
Wescott took them through a nest of low-hanging branches and into the muddy foxholes a few meters beyond them. The privates slipped down into them, and nodded at the first platoon troops who crouched in the muck of wet earth.
"How are things holding?" Wescott asked a sergeant.
"Quiet."
To the newly-arrived privates, Wescott explained, "If you had come a few days earlier you would have been fighting through these goddamn bushes."
"Lucky you," the sergeant added.
"What makes us so lucky?"
"There was a storm yesterday that hit the coast, slowed everything down in the rear. Normally we'd have orders to advance, but right now old Bradley's given us permission to hold."
One of the privates took a few seconds to ask his question, glancing at Wescott a few times before gathering the nerve.
"What's it like?" he said, "The fighting."
Wescott told the truth; "I don't know what to tell you."
"Oh, don't think about it too much," someone said.
The private, apparently not satisfied with the answer, continued to press for a response, a narrative, anything, annoying some of the other troops but reminding quite a few men of themselves a few days, a few weeks before. In the 29th, a soldier was a veteran after surviving three days on the line; by that time, they had picked up the competent, didactic attitude that the "regulars" exhibited. When a replacement came in, he was chided, lectured to, and alienated until he had grown-up - and in Normandy, where time was long and things happened fast, it didn't take more than a few days.
"It's close, real personal," another private relented at length. "Sometimes you're not standing more than an arm's length away from Jerry before you put one in him, or he puts one in you. You know that there are other guys around you, behind the hedgerows, but you can't see them. Sometimes you can hear them shouting, and you can't tell if they're friendly or Jerry."
"Crazy, that's what it is, crazy," the sergeant said. "Don't know what the fuck's going on, don't know where the rest of the company's at, you're always out on your own. You just sit tight and keep shooting, make deals with the Almighty. You become very superstitious."
"Everything happens so fast," the private snapped his fingers, "Bang, bang, bang, like that. But it feels like you're in it forever each time."
"That's what the fighting is like," a squad leader said. "Except you don't think like that while it's happening, you're too busy staying alive. By the time it's sunset, you realize you haven't jerked the trigger in a while and for the first time you take a good look in front of you and there are bodies lined up all along the hedgerow."
"All right," Wescott stopped them, receptive to the sudden tense expression on the newcomers' faces, "That's enough. I think they get the picture."
None of the replacements spoke much for the rest of the day, keeping silent all the way until nightfall, speaking only when spoken to. They were kids, all right. Normandy was still an adventure for them, out on their own with rough young men, out to liberate France. They listened in quiet respect to the veteran squad-mates speaking tersely to one another. The regulars didn't like the attention; "Give me some fucking space," they said.
On the front line everyone acted differently. Everyone thought and moved like a soldier and stayed alert, tense, spoke only in clipped phrases and in low voices. Wescott could not tell the difference between Martin from F Company or any of the corporals in A Company. Training took-over in the front line, over-rode the usual garrulous and jovial attitude of the 29th Infantry Division.
"Hey," a private tapped the curious replacement, "They don't mean to spook you, kid. Things just get to you, you know. Just don't think about it."
Somewhere on A Company's flank, a sniper's rifle cracked.

Remnants

The 352nd Infantry Division found itself completely smashed a week after D-Day. Three regiments had been ripped to pieces in the heavy fighting around the Allied beach head, and by 9 June the division could only field enough men to fill the roster of a single regiment. Several German field commanders re-organized their depleted units into ad-hoc kampfgruppes; infantry, artillery, and armored formations banded together to fulfill various offensive and defensive operations.
1. Kompanie absorbed elements of the battalion's 3. Kompanie, including its commander, a Leutnant Marcks, known to be as careless with his life as he was with his dress.
Marcks, 32, was an officer from the old 321st Infantry Division; he had been wounded during the operation in Kursk, and when he was fit for service again he was told that he would be commanding a new company. The 321st had been destroyed at Kursk; its remnants would form the core of the 352nd, and freshly-trained troops would be added to its ranks to fill the roster.
Life was risen out of death.
The 352nd was the one of the few upper-tier divisions in Normandy - that is, it was capable of offensive as well as defensive maneuvers, as opposed to being designated a static defense unit. When it had been assigned to Normandy, it was a full-strength division.
But while it seemed to represent a re-vitalization of the German Heer, it was actually a symbol of the opposite. The soldiers were all boys. Many of the veterans from the 321st walked with a noticeable, though deliberately masked limp. The 352nd was the last-chance-stand of a German victory in the war, made up of a few desperate old soldiers and enthusiastic kids.
And, Marcks thought, the 352nd was now shattered, in complete shambles.
Marcks, unlike Geissler, did not have a clear purpose that gave meaning to fighting a war. Geissler had fought to keep his men alive, and get them back home, regardless if their homes were empty or not. He had failed, had watched his men die after fighting for four years with them - seventeen old soldiers dead in a stone courtyard, and their officer lying at the gates.
"You never get any mail," a soldier from 3. Kompanie had observed curiously one day.
"No, I don't. I don't have a family."
Marcks had never gotten married.
"We missed you at today's service," the battalion chaplain stopped him another day, while the division was stationed at St. Lo.
"I'm not Christian," Marcks told him.
"Not Christian? Leutnant, in this type of situation, everyone should have God in his life," he laughed, half-joking.
"Perhaps next week, sir," Marcks had smiled somewhat sheepishly, and walked away.
The battalion chaplain never saw him at any service.
"Marcks," the battalion commander had told him as he reported out on numerous occasions, "You're a good man, I like you. You've got ability in every aspect of battalion operation, and I don't want to lose a good officer like you. How would you like a staff position, take some time off from combat-duty?"
"No thank you, sir," Marcks responded, "I don't want to leave my kompanie."
The battalion commander had nodded understandingly, and perhaps approvingly. "I expected that from you, Marcks. Like I said, you're a good man. Out for medals, yes? Out to become a decorated soldier, show the old man up?" He grinned heartily.
"No, none of that, sir. Just the kompanie."
Marcks had strode out of the tent, and the battalion commander had watched him leave with a curious admiration.
To the men, including the 1. Kompanie troops that had only recently come under his command, Marcks seemed as though he didn't mind the constant combat in Normandy. But he wasn't like the war heroes, the officers who sought fame; he didn't take any pleasure in it.
Some of the kompanie thought he was a little crazy. They weren't quite sure what it was, but Marcks had a certain manner that was vaguely disconcerting.
"No, no, there's nothing wrong with him," the sergeants would discuss, "He's the same old soldier he was in the Three-Twenty-First."
"What, do you mean defeatist?"
"No, he was never defeatist."
"Yes, he was always hard-working."
He was a mystery.
"The Battle for Normandy," Marcks had said sardonically to a small squad, "is now taking a short hiatus. It seems that the gale yesterday has impaired Allied shipping, so we're in the clear for a while, boys. Anyone have any wine, cognac?"
"Hah, haven't got any on us, Leutnant."
"Ah, so it is." Marcks folded his hands behind his back.
It was a familiar scene. Marcks often assumed that pose when he was with the troops, seemingly amused. Although he'd taken up the habit since the unit had been formed in Hanover, he often joked that anyone that had spent a few years in Russia was automatically a hero, and it was difficult to determine how a hero should stand.
"How the hell should I know," he added after repeating the comment to the squad. "I'm just a Hanoverian."
And the men, Hanoverians as well, still could not figure out what made Marcks so foreign.

Tactics

Marcks supervised several machine gun teams digging out positions along a hedgerow position, advising the men to dig enough for three positions for each of the seven MG-42s Marcks had on-hand. It was an old tactic, especially effective in the limited visibility of Normandy; by shifting single machine guns around to different firing points, the volume and variance of machine gun fire intensified so that it seemed as though an entire company held a hedgerow, rather than a single platoon. "Finesse," Marcks explained to a sergeant, "Technique, tactics. Whatever the hell the books call it. The idea is to confuse the enemy so you can kill him."
A tank company of the 747th Tank Battalion motored idly just outside of the village, with 1st Battalion reinforcements riding on-board. The 29th Infantry Division had developed its own theories of hedgerow combat, emphasized by short, easy-to-remember lines such as, "One squad, one tank, one field."
"It is important," Wescott read half-disinterestedly from a document he had picked up at battalion hq, "to instruct the men to advance through the center of the fields, rather than along the hedgerows. It is common for assault groups to become pinned and suppressed there, as the Germans frequently position their machine guns in the corners of the hedgerow."
The A Company NCOs were silent for a moment, until one muttered, "Oh, that is bullshit."
"Oh my Christ."
"That's just not good policy. That's just not smart."
Wescott listened to the squad leaders complain bitterly. Supposedly, the tank supporting the infantry in the field would be able to pin down German fire with its 75mm and a few of its own machine guns, allowing the Americans to advance rapidly with bayonets and grenades.
Grenades and bayonets were a gutsy business. It took speed and determination, both of which could be destroyed the second a machine gun opened a few feet away. It took "real fighting spirit," the battalion commander dictated to Wayne. "Get your men into the killing mode." What it really took, Wayne knew, was heavy fire suppression, and this is why the tanks were assigned to the rifle companies. But the bulky Shermans were no good in hedgerow-fighting; every corner was a tank trap, hiding a kid with a panzerfaust or a 75mm AT piece. If the Shermans tried to roll over the hedgerows instead to enter the fields, another German would be waiting for a clean shot at the vehicle's under-belly, an instant-kill for the German and five casualties for the 747th Tank Battalion. The armor needed a way into the hedgerow.
This was made possible by using engineer units equipped with high-explosives to blast a hole in the hedgerows to first allow the tank to actually enter combat.
"They had better have some balls," Wayne told Wescott after the engineer squad assigned to A Company reported to him. "They had better have some balls."
The engineers would be too busy operating their demolitions equipment to participate in the actual combat. For the one or two minutes it would take for them to drill a hole in the hedgerow and prepare the explosive, they would rely completely on the rifle infantry for fire support.
"Hey, buddy," Cook asked one of the engineer privates, "How's it going?"
"Good," the young soldier answered measuredly.
"You ever been in combat before?"
"Yeah. I was at Omaha." He said it with some pride, which Truttman found disgusting and Cook found amusing.
"Whoa, holy shit," Cook jumped in mock-shock, a grin on his face, "Welcome to the party, Thundercat."
The engineer private's name was Holt, no first name given, just a curt glance and "Holt."
"He's quiet."
"Yeah, a good kid," Cook agreed.
A Company spent the next few days rehearsing the new 29th Infantry Division doctrine, training each detail down to the last minute as well as they could. Wescott worked with each platoon, teaching them how to maneuver, how to shoot with the best effect, drilling every aspect of cover into them. He wondered how much this would actually help the company.
"Books," he told Wayne, "do not and will never replace experience. It's good that we're training them, but we're only giving them something new to work with - they've got a whole other bunch of mistakes to learn from."
Holt, who had been sitting with his squad sergeant, had noted, "But we'll be much better off with some idea of what's going to happen."
"Tactics," Holt's sergeant agreed. "Just get the boys a working plan."
Wescott had shot a glance to Wayne, who explained diplomatically, "Sergeant, we could work on a plan for a year, like the brass did on this entire invasion, and the plan will be completely worthless once the Germans are factored in, like it is now."
Truttman watched the Sherman crew operating during one test-trial, and asked if the tank commander would keep his head out of the turret in actual combat as he was doing so now.
"No, are you fucking crazy?" Cook snapped.
How would the tank crew be able to cooperate with the infantry? Truttman wondered. How would they identify and target German positions?
"Oh, we're just going to paint the fuckers," the sergeant, the tank commander waved Truttman off. "Three Brownings and a seventy-five - they'll be suppressed, you'll have plenty of fire support."
Truttman pressed the question; what about coordination?
"Look, we've got a radio set in the back, something goes wrong and you give us a ring. Relax, kid, you've got a thirty-ton stack of steel behind you and the Germans have empty space."
Material resources had always been in scarce supply for the Germans, and Marcks accepted this. They had no armor to support them against enemy armor; only orders to hold at all costs. If armor was brought against them, they would have to deal with it with grenades, rifles, and panzerfausts. "But most of all," he told his squad leaders, "we will need determination. We know how to beat them. Break-up their coordination, and dispatch them as separate entities. Nothing stands behind us. That's why we're here."
So the 1. Kompanie NCOs, the remnants of an outfit of men who had all come from the same Hanoverian town, picked up their weapons and walked to their squads, to tell them that they must stop the American advance with nothing but the rifles in their hands and the grenades at their belts.
Their squads nodded, without comment or complaint, and began to set-up their positions.
They had nothing behind them. They didn't ask to have anything behind them.
"They had better have balls," Wayne said again, though now he was watching the engineers creeping out into the field, the A Company riflemen pouring in fire against the opposing hedgerows in the orchard. Wescott had positioned two machine guns along the corners of the field, to create interdicting lines of fire. The Brownings were tracking erratic lines against the hedgerow, now, odd patterns punching into the bush with tracer, and the Germans were firing back, though they had chosen not to use tracers - nobody knew exactly where the fire was coming from, and could only guess by the thunderous report of automatic fire.
Marcks slammed the action of his submachine gun somewhat angrily as he saw one of his machine guns falter. It was not unusual for the Americans to expend a ridiculous amount of ammunition in a short period of time, but up to this point they had tended to hold their fire until a definite target had been acquired.
The mortar squad supporting A Company lobbed a ranging shot over into the field. A moment later a 60mm round plummeted neatly on top of the German-occupied hedgerow, and carved a jagged tear into the branches, which had been obliterated into dust and twigs that rose with an all-too-familiar smoke that reeked of cordite.
Without orders, the machine gun teams - the targets that the mortars had been aiming for - packed up their bipods and MG-42s and ammunition boxes and shuffled hastily into their secondary firing positions, crouching from ribbons of red and a shower of black as a second shell crashed into their cover. Wescott could make out one team making the shift through the hedgerow, but he didn't take the opportunity to fire - he was with one of the assault teams, hiding in cover, waiting to advance forward through the middle of the field where the machine guns could shoot at them in the open. Within nine seconds, the MG-42s were deployed again, returning fire, now with tracer rounds.
In that slight pause of shooting the engineers, under constant fire from a half-dozen snipers, had completed drilling their holes into the hedgerow. Their munitions were primed and ready to be detonated, and Holt crammed them in as gingerly as time and desperation would allow and scrambled away, down into a ditch. He waited for his partner to clear the hedgerow, then announced over the staccato of machine guns, "Fire in the hole!"
"Fire in the hole," a soldier repeated, "Fire in the hole!"
Two meters of hedgerow burst into powdered wood and dirt, the earth splitting apart underneath it into a crater, and the Germans not manning machine guns stopped shooting and waited - snipers prepared to shoot at the officers that would lead the charge through, riflemen crouched in anticipation for a maneuver to an exposed flank.
"Clear, clear," an engineer waved from the field, and was clipped in the shoulder by an MG-42 round.
Marcks became aware of a rumble, an engine, a diesel roar, and then saw the bulky silhouette of an American tank roll across the tattered branches and roots, machine guns already thumping through the field, its main gun swiveling about and settling for a shot.
"What are we shooting?" the gunner's voice chirped into the net.
"Eleven o'clock, gunner - fire when ready."
And the 75mm jumped, its fire-laced report loud and bone-shaking. A well-judged shot, an HE round that popped into boiling smoke within the bank of a hedgerow root. None of the machine guns ceased fire, and no Germans could be seen fleeing from their positions, but the simple fact that the Sherman was there, gunning the field down with everything in its arsenal, was support enough for most of A Company.
Wescott nodded at Wayne, directing the mortar squad, who nodded in return and said, "Take them in, First Sergeant."
A platoon section of second platoon filed out into the field, crouching down behind the Sherman in a line as the tank began to advance, because machine gun rounds were ricocheting off its armor with obscene pings. Another hollow boom, and a second rush of black and gold flame shattered another section of hedgerow. This time, the machine gun fire slackened - one team was re-positioning - and Wescott ordered the men to fan out into a skirmish line, while more mortar shells sailed high overhead, to plummet down onto the hedgerows that crashed into splinters.
"Marching fire! Don't let them take a shot!"
The men employed marching fire, stopping every few steps to shoot from the shoulder, but the Germans did take shots, and when the MG-42s had re-aligned their sights or switched-out their barrels or cycled a new belt through the action the skirmish line began to fade out - Wescott could see men to his right twisting roughly to one side, dropping and dying in the sun-soaked field as countless machine guns criss-crossed their fire back and forth into the skirmish line. While the right-wing of the advance across the field melted away to nothing, the men disappearing as they fell into the tall grass to die with their mouths in the black dirt or their eyes searching an empty sky, the Sherman treaded forward, Brownings chucking their heavy ammunition into the brush at Germans the gunner and commander could not see.
"Jesus Christ, they're killing them," a private cried, and Wayne for some reason was struck by the private's revelation.
Marcks could hear a sergeant shouting at him - "Leutnant, we have nothing against the armor, we have nothing against the armor, what do we do, what do we do."
"Don't panic, keep shooting."
"We have nothing, we have nothing, oh God we have nothing."
"Keep shooting," Marcks repeated over and over, "Keep shooting."
He didn't realize that the sergeant was bleeding to death, that the sergeant's side had a chunk as deep and as wide as his fist cut away by shrapnel.
That is how the flanking squad had found Marcks's flank; a sergeant moaning in his foxhole, and an officer trying to tell him to keep shooting. They shot the second the Germans were visible, from all the away across the field on the left, and Marcks had thrown himself against a hedgerow bank with his submachine gun firing blindly over the top. The other riflemen had turned and were shooting as well, but none of them knew how many Americans were shooting back, just that the field seemed to be alive with the winks of rifle fire.
Americans were advancing, Marcks could see, and they were moving hard and low, keeping to the edge of the field while their automatic weapons fired down the center. Two black blobs arced into the grass - grenades, potato mashers. The Americans saw them, and scattered, some pressing themselves lower against the dirt and covering their heads, others breaking into a sprint, and the grenades flashed, throwing one forward off while his legs came underneath him. He was dead before his comrades had reached him, because metal chunks were lodged in his spine and lungs. More determined fire from the German riflemen, and the Americans were crawling away, to re-group.
"They'll be coming back. Fall to the main line," Marcks told the men.
Wayne watched the tracers flooding the field, swarming and buzzing in intense droves. They were tracking high, aimed for heads and chests, and many of the rounds had hit brains, faces, necks, shoulders, lungs, and hearts. Most of the platoon section had gone down low, to crawl forward while the Sherman provided fire support at near point-blank range against one visible machine gun team, while the other MG-42s bore down intently on the infantry in the field.
The tracers had stopped fluttering, and it took a moment for Wescott, prostrate and swathed in a grass blanket, to realize that the Germans were now shooting low, without tracers. Wet thwocks, the sound of flesh being stabbed over and over again, resounded here and there, and Wescott wondered how many men were left in the assault. The grass shattered with each brutal cough of machine gun fire, but Wescott was not going to stand up out of it. He crawled forward, though, and fired through the grass, in the direction of the MG-42 reports; their fire was slackening, thanks in part to the Sherman parking fifty feet away from the hedgerow and pumping the branches with HE.
When third platoon returned to attempt another flank against Marcks, they found empty foxholes in the smoking mist of their grenades. Marcks's rifle detachment had already pulled out. They sent a runner to report to Wayne, and pushed on through the hedgerow, to find the German machine gun teams fleeing their positions while the Sherman deluged them with .50 Browning fire. The main gun crumped, and a black, steel MG-42 leaped, while its carrier rolled and cart-wheeled, right arm snapping back like a twig, not that it mattered, since he was not much more than a charred and fileted corpse now.
It was not a retreat. They were withdrawing, and before the engineer squad had moved up to occupy the next hedgerow, the one beyond was live with more small arms fire. Marcks had retained four of his seven machine gun teams; but now, he had his entire company to deploy against the American advance, which had already lost momentum in the field before.
"There are Americans pushing in on our flank," he said, and sent a squad to put a stop to it.
Wescott counted nine men when they had risen from the earth, and these nine men accompanied the engineers to take up position in the next hedgerow, which was already trembling from the volume of small arms fire that pounded against it. The Sherman idled behind them, waiting to move forward through the crushed gap of brush and roots that Holt's explosives would cut.
"Second platoon, forward positions," Wayne instructed.
The last remaining German machine gunner in the hedgerow could not stop the Americans from pushing forward. Holt and the other engineers were walking forward, their carbines flashing, firing down on the Germans with impunity, while Wescott's team jumped into the foxholes that the Germans had dug farther to the right. They directed fire against the next hedgerow, where the majority of 1. Kompanie held their positions.
Second platoon found the last machine gun team dead in their ditch, with the engineers creeping out into the next field to set up their explosives. Ahead of them, they could see the last few German machine gunners deploying in the next hedgerow, while the platoon section Wayne had sent on a flanking mission fired from the edge of the next field.
Truttman, with second platoon, did not exactly how many wounded were out in the field, but he could see the medic in the grass, on his knees and with red-splotched bandages lying about him.
"I'm dying, Doc, I'm dying." Truttman couldn't see the wounded soldier, just his hands, which were quaking uncontrollably at his sides.
"Shut up," the medic snapped, "Shut up," and Truttman could see tears in his eyes.
He looked at Wayne, who seemed completely obvlivious to the dying men in the field behind him. "Deploy the Brownings," he was saying, "All right, fire superiority - carpet the Krauts, don't let them hit the engineers."
Holt was in the field, flinching everytime a carbine round spanged into the dirt next to his head or hand, but he drilled into the hedgerow as quickly as he could, silently praying, saying in his mind God, please don't let me die, God, please, please, an endless series of pleases and Gods and don't let me dies. Beside him, his assistant was lying as flat as he could in a muddy ditch, the explosive resting in his hands. He was bleeding from his shoulder, but he was all right.
"I'm fine," he answered briskly everytime one of the other engineers checked on him. "It's not bad, I'm fine."
Wescott's Thompson was kicking back into his shoulder, chng-chng-chng, a steady metallic rythm of impact that danced .45 bullets across the field in an erratic shot-pattern. He knew he was killing someone, or silencing their weapon; a rifle stopped flashing from the German line, something slumped in the branches. Second platoon men behind him, still taking up positions, were folding, as well, because the Germans were shooting high with tracer again, and their fire passed through the hedgerow into the American-occupied field.
Marcks could hear the rumble of the Sherman, knew exactly where it was at by the roar of its engine. An American mortar broke through the branches of a squad's cover, and exploded in the rained-out ditch they were sitting in. Bodies and boots and gloves, tattered articles of clothing, tumbled in the acrid smoke; 1. Kompanie would not last much longer in a stand-up fight.
Holt was again lying flat in a ditch, with a machine gun spraying his cover, and a disturbingly heavy amount of explosives in his hands, handed to him by his wounded partner. Brownings were firing on either side of him, and Holt's ears were ringing.
Truttman's rifle ejected a spent magazine, and he slipped down into the ditch to jam another in. When he came back up, Holt was not more than fifteen feet to his left, carefully placing the explosive charges - "TNT," he could remember Holt explaining to him, "Trinitrotoluene, this stuff kills." - in small gaps within the branches. Oblivious to the machine gun tracers wrapping around him, Holt checked the primacord, then flattened down against the ditch, his heart pounding.
"Holy shit, I could have died."
"Clear out, fire in the hole!"
When some of the platoon section on the German flank found themselves scattered in the field, a few of them bleeding into the earth, their first thought was that they had been caught in the TNT blast. But that was impossible, because A Company was in a completely different field. Their second thought was that they stumbled into a minefield, and that is when they realized they were in trouble, not because of the possibility of mines, but because another grenade had burst in the field.
"There they are," and rifle rounds hammered into the two German grenadiers, hitting them in the body and thudding dust off of their field coats.
Submachine guns opened on their right, and most of the platoon section was cut down there, by three or four Germans with Schmeissers emptying their magazines into six bodies twenty feet away. Three others were dying of shrapnel wounds, and two were crawling to cover while the Schmeisser bursts buzzed overhead.
As the Sherman rolled through dead brush on Marcks's front, Wescott led the men behind it much more aggressively, keeping hard on the Sherman so that they could use it as cover for a moment. The main gun boomed, an HE round brought shattered branches down onto the invisible Germans, and the machine gun fire did not abate.
This time, Wayne committed another platoon in the advance, because Wescott's detachment was reduced to a single squad. They filed in just behind first platoon's advance, moving into the grass at high-port, while ahead of them Wescott and a few others sprayed Thompson fire into the ditches. Wayne sprinted towards the Sherman, moving with second platoon, rifles shouldered and pointed low.
A sniper fired from their left, and a private crouching behind the Sherman tottered back, his helmet already pooling with blood from his skull. There was a tearing burst shortly after, and then A Company spotted the fire-group - six Germans.
More automatic fire, this time ahead of them and to the right, another half-dozen Germans, and grenades crashed, tearing apart the grass and the dirt and the hedgerow banks. A Company assembled into a skirmish line, with BAR teams on either end shooting against the fire-groups, and even as a few privates rushed forward to hurl grenades, other Germans were rushing from yet another position with their own grenades.
A squad leader tried to hook-in to the radio mounted on the rear of the Sherman, but he was dead before he could pick up the receiver from its cradle, shot five times as he slumped to the ground. The tank crew did not know that A Company was held-up behind it; it continued to pour-in fire all across the hedgerow ahead, moving forward at a crawl.
"Keep her straight," the tank commander droned monotonously.
"I can't see for shit," the gunner muttered.
Wescott had found cover in a ditch, and he tracked an advancing pair of Germans before downing them both with a half-magazine burst. There were several more, however, and their grenades were ripping the dirt and grass into the faces of A Company men. A moment later, they were stumbling with bayonets into the Americans, and the forward men in the skirmish line were giving way - that is, dying from stab wounds - while the others pulled back, running through a cross-fire that cut their legs beneath them as a few BAR men fired from ditches. Americans caught by the bayonet charge were stabbed with the force of a hammer. The Germans drove cold steel into thudding hearts and pulsing stomachs, and the Americans were jerking with the blows, suddenly unable to move, only flexing in comical spams and gasping when the blades cut into them.
The machine guns had stopped firing, leaving only the grenade bursts and a few halting rifle shots, and men dropping and rolling in the grass with a wet shuffle. Wescott had fired a long burst into a German squad and was now on the run, tapping one of the BAR men on the shoulder as he passed him.
"Don't stick around too long, it's heating up."
It's heating up.
More fire from the right, then, more grenades, and the remnants of A Company staggered back to the foxholes that the Germans had abandoned. Wescott was not sure how much of the company had been lost. Behind them, Germans jumped onboard the Sherman, dropping grenades down the hatch, shooting through the view ports, and scrambling away as smoke exploded with a metallic echo inside the tank, a few men tumbling head-first into the grass as Garand fire caught them in the back. Thompson fire grabbed for the others who were fleeing from the tank, and Wescott found that it was his Thompson fire, because he had dropped a spent magazine and snapped in another, his last one.
By the time second platoon had started shooting from cover, the Germans had dispersed out of the field, dis-banding into perhaps a half-dozen small fire groups, each maneuvering independently of the other and at the same time forming a mutually-supported field-of-fire. Individual Germans, snipers, were targeted and bombarded with the Brownings, but within moments, the German hedgerow was alive again with shattering sweeps of MG-42 fire.
"Where's second platoon," someone was asking; Truttman, it was Truttman, "Anyone from second platoon? Where's Dunn? Where's the Sarge?"
Behind him, across the field, Wescott could hear Dunn and Master Sergeant Burkeley moaning, along with eight others from second platoon. He knew they were moaning because they had gone down in the first field, when the machine guns had ripped a hole in the skirmish line's right.
"Don't use the bayonets," Burkeley had said to the closest soldier, "Just kill the bastards."
And Holt had begun to empty his carbine into a machine gunner.
"Fuck the tactics," someone said, and Wescott turned to see Holt wiping the black off his face.
The Sherman was still and quiet in the field, the gaping 75mm muzzle an un-nerving presence for some of Marcks's kompanie. A few privates lay draped over it, bleeding onto metal, and an American lie in the grass nearby - the driver had tried to escape, and had been killed.
"Did anybody make it out?" Truttman asked of the tank crew.
"They got them all."
Inside, the tank commander, gunner, and assistant gunner slumped against the turret, plastered to the steel that they had put their faith in. The tank had protected them from countless bullets, but today it had been the instrument of their destruction.
"Where the hell's the infantry?" the driver was calling. "The radio's not working."
"I can't see 'em," the gunner had shouted, "They're too close!"
"They're on top of us," they realized, and the tank commander had grabbed the carbine just as the Schmeisser roared in the view port, and then the hatch had flung open and grenades had pounded against the floor of their compartment, and the crew had been shattered and sliced against the Sherman.
After-action reports would attribute the Germans with a tactical victory. The armor and infantry had been separated, which broke-up their coordination, and then they were dealt with as individual entities. The reports would organize and analyze the different phases of battle, and detail the movement of each platoon. Intelligence would then draw tactical observations from the text and write-up modifications to 29th Infantry Division's combat doctrine.
The tactics and the doctrine, however, were inconspicuous while the sobbing company medic told a dying soldier to shut up, keep quiet, as he bled to death in Normandy.

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