On the road a few dozen terrorists had already fallen, others had dropped beside the road, wounded or dying. Realizing that they had run into a trap, the guerrilla commander wanted to withdraw but bumped into Schulze’s outfit. Turning toward the ravine, they were beaten back by Eisner’s machine gunners. On the road, Pfirstenhammer’s platoon was pushing them back with MG’s and flamethrowers spitting fifty-foot flames. It was massacre.
The enemy had only one way to flee—through the booby-trapped patch of forest, a bit of real estate which I cheerfully permitted them to have. About seventy of the survivors now began to throw away their weapons. We stopped firing at them but kept the flamethrowers working, pushing the demoralized mob farther back on the road, step by step into their own trap with the bamboo bombs and God knows what else. They would either run or get roasted.
The trap did the rest. A quarter of an hour later we could still hear explosions and death cries coming from the woods.
Climbing from the turret, I heard a sudden blast inside the tank. Dropping back inside I saw Tan Hwan falling from his seat, blood oozing from his head. Somehow he had gotten hold of our driver’s gun and had shot himself in a moment of anguish. He was our only casualty.
The convoy arrived at its destination. Not only a few trucks but the whole convoy. The Viet Minh had begun to know us in the way we wanted them to know our battalion.
Bomb for bomb! Bullet for bullet! Murder for murder! They had enjoyed many years of unpunished rampaging. We were resolved to put an end to it. We were determined to make their lives a prolonged cry of agony.We succeeded.
5. OPERATION “TRIANGLE”
Colonel Simon Houssong was a calm and considerate officer who seldom lost his temper. But the extermination of a battalion under the command of Captain Arnold Lorilleaux must have hurt him deeply. Apart from having been a much-decorated officer of the Second World War, the unfortunate captain had also been a brother-in-law of the colonel.
It was well after midnight when he sent a corporal to request my immediate attendance. “The colonel is in his office,” the corporal informed me. “He hasn’t left his desk tonight, except to get another bottle. He’s been drinking all evening.”
I was already in bed but dressed quickly and hurried over to our headquarters. In the corridor I ran into Lieutenant Derosier, Colonel Houssong’s ADC. Derosier was carrying a small tray of coijee. “Here!” he said, handing me the tray. “Take it to him. Maybe he will listen to you.”
“What’s wrong with the colonel?” Derosier shrugged. “Lorilleaux!” he said. “The old man just can’t digest the news yet.”
I entered the office and closed the door behind me. Stripped to his undershirt, Colonel Houssong was standing at the open window with his forehead resting against the mosquito netting. He was holding an almost empty bottle of Calvados and the room was strewn with papers and broken glass. Slipping the tray onto the desk, I reported. “First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller, at your request, mon colonel.”
He turned slowly and came toward me, wiping his face with a towel. Taking another gulp from the bottle, he tossed it into the waste basket.
“First Lieutenant Hans Wagemueller,” he repeated with a hint of mockery in his voice. “Sit down, Wagemueller… Sturmführer Wagemueller, the Lord High Executioner of the Waffen SS… or the French Foreign Legion… It does not matter which, does it?”
“Would you like some coffee, mon colonel?”
“To hell with your coffee,” he roared, pushing the tray aside and spilling coffee over his desk. “Leave it!” he stopped me when I jumped to rescue some of his papers. “We have a far greater mess to worry about.”
He paused for a moment, then dropped behind his desk, turned on the fan and looked at me with his eyes drawn. “Do you know why I called you?”
“Out, mon colonel.”
“You go and put those bloody bastards to rot, Wagemueller,” he breathed with hatred in every word. “The whole village… they were all feasting over the corpses of Lorilleaux and his men.”
His fist came down heavily on the table. “Seven hundred and twelve men, Wagemueller. All dead! You go and get those bastards who killed Arnold… “Give them a first-class SS treatment. Spare nothing and no one except babes in their cribs. If this is the kind of enemy you were fighting in Russia, then many of your SS buddies were hanged quite innocently. I fought you in the Ardennes, at the Meuse, in North Africa, but now I am beginning to think that I may have fought the wrong enemy all the time.”
“Mon colonel—”
“Shut up, Wagemueller! Those poor devils must be buried and the murderers put to rot. I know what you wanted to say. I will leave it to you how to go about it. You will manage it somehow. You always do.”
“Do you want prisoners, mon colonel?”
“To hell with them!”
“Oui, mon colonel!” It was an order I could appreciate: “I will leave it to you how to go about it.”
In my opinion it was the only sort of order a field commander in Indochina could act upon with responsibility and return with results. After studying the maps and aerial photos it took us less than three hours to prepare “Operation Triangle,” one of our most successful raids on a Viet Minh stronghold. Every local landmark on our operational maps was given a German code name. The target village, a heavily fortified terrorist stronghold deep in the mountains (now in Laos), was renamed “Altdorf.”
Similarly we referred to Hanoi only as “Hansastadt” and to Saigon as “Schwaben.”
The river which we were to cross, the Nam Ou, we called “Schelde.”
The expedition was to be an extended one, over two hundred miles, with the last stage of it to be covered on foot.
The enemy was aware of our coming. For three days we had been advancing on the open road, following the tracks of the unfortunate French battalion. Air reconnaissance reported that the plank bridge across the river was still intact, as I suspected it would be. Why should the terrorists demolish a bridge across which Captain Lorilleaux and his seven hundred men had so conveniently marched into oblivion? The Viet Minh invitation had been left open for us too. Intelligence estimated the number of guerrillas in and around the village at more than a thousand men.
Had there not been seven hundred bodies beyond that plank bridge, I could have laughed at the guerrilla’s naivete. The Viet Minh, in fact, always planned with a certain amount of naivete, seldom conceiving a plan of great complexity. Even today, the Vietcong guerrillas are only repeating the well-worn ruses of the Viet Minh, their forerunners. It was never guerrilla ingenuity but only French ignorance that fostered spectacular terrorist coups. Superior weapons mean little in the jungle and superiority in numbers could also be an unimportant factor. A thousand tough experts may cause more damage to the enemy, spread more terror, destroy more of their ranks than a division of green recruits can. My head-hunters had often destroyed Viet Minh detachments three times their number, accomplishing more with their bayonets than other units of the Legion ever accomplished with artillery.
The bridge was intact, open and inviting. The only thing missing was a placard saying “Please cross.”
On the way toward the river we collected ample evidence of the persistent terrorist surveillance we had been subjected to from sunrise to dusk. As a rule, we trusted no one and considered every native Indochinese a potential enemy, unless half of his or her family had been executed by the Viet Minh. From their ranks we selected our few but trusted guides. They had been truly loyal to us and we respected them highly. We had some routine precautionary measures that we always took, “The rules of survival.”