Finally, the order came to launch the boats. Marty and Frenchie slogged through the water to get the rubber boat away from the shore. They didn't have to go far because the banks of the Moselle dropped off steeply. This was an unforgiving river. They clambered over the sides into the boat and tried to find a comfortable way to sit.
"We're jammed in here like sardines," Marty muttered.
"More like sitting ducks," Frenchie said.
They both grabbed paddles and began to dig into the water. Their pace against the current felt agonizingly slow. Due to that current, Frenchie had no hope of landing directly across from their original position. Instead, their boat and all the rest had to settle for a point downstream.
Immediately, the ungainly, overloaded rubber boats came under enemy fire. Bursts from German machine guns swept the river. Tracers lit the gloom. The men in the boats kept low, but the rubber sides didn't provide any protection.
Mortar rounds burst periodically, erupting in fountains of water and shrapnel. Even boats that didn't lose all the men aboard to a burst of machine gun fire were shredded and began to sink. Loaded down with gear and ammunition, the men who found themselves trying to swim for it didn't stand a chance and quickly slipped under the surface. Those who could grabbed hold of a passing rubber raft, although the drag of the men in the water further slowed the progress of the boats.
All that Marty and French could do was to keep paddling frantically. The boats ahead of them got chewed to pieces, but their own boat somehow managed to slip through — so far.
Survivors from the shredded boats grabbed the sides of their raft. One of those guys tried to eel his way over the side into the raft and Marty reached back and clanged the guy over the helmet with his paddle. "Hang on and kick, or we ain't gonna make it!" Marty shouted as the chastened soldier slipped back into the river.
Finally, the first of the boats reached the far shore and the men scrambled up the steep, overgrown riverbank. Sporadic artillery fire came from the American side, but it was enough to silence the German guns. Shells were in short supply, however, and it was not long after the big American guns stopped that the German firepower started back up.
Ashore, it was like D-Day all over again.
Men made themselves as flat as possible as the mud erupted all around them, churned by machine gun fire. They heard the distinctive ripping sound made by the deadly German MG-42 guns that let loose with twelve-hundred rounds per minute.
"Move it!" a sergeant shouted. "You want to die, you stay right here!"
Screaming, his own rifle held ready although he had nothing to shoot at yet, Frenchie ran forward. They struggled across the open ground with tracers hissing around them and occasional bursts of mortar shells. The terrified troops had nowhere to go but onward. Finally, some of the men reached the relative shelter of the copse of trees midway between the river and the German fortifications.
Frenchie fell down beside Marty, panting with exhaustion, spent both physically and emotionally. Overhead, bullets snicked away at the autumn leaves, sounding like steel sleet. It seemed impossible for them to go on, and yet they must. Already, the sergeant was rallying them for a push toward the forts. They had a lot of ground to cross, all covered by enfiladed machine gun positions.
Frenchie felt someone grab his arm.
"It's been nice knowing you, Frenchie," Marty said. "Write to my parents, will you?"
"Don't talk like that, goddammit," Frenchie said, his own rule about swearing forgotten. "But listen, if I get killed, you'll do the same for me, right?"
"Sure I will," Marty said. Every soldier knew that his number might be up at any moment, but the two of them had been in so many scrapes together that they almost took it for granted that they would get out of this one alive. That outcome seemed even more uncertain. "Now, let's go tell those Germans to shove it up their asses."
At the urging of their sergeant and a lieutenant — their captain hadn't made it off the boats alive — the young GIs sprang up and joined the others running at a crouch toward the nearest fort.
On the way, they passed a group of five dead civilians, including two women, all lined up in a row where they had been mowed down.
"What the hell?" Marty wondered.
"Must be SS that done that," the sergeant said. "They shoot anybody who looks like French Resistance."
The unit moved on. To their relief, the German firing subsided as the Americans advanced and hit the enemy positions with mortars and grenade launchers.
But the Jerries had hardly rolled out the welcome mat. The GIs were faced with rows of barbed concertina wire, which they slowly hacked their way through using the few pairs of bolt-cutters that were available. Others wrapped scraps of cloth or webbed utility belts around their hands and simple yanked a path through the tangles of barbed wire, so desperate that they ignored the vicious slices to their hands and wrists and faces.
The wire wasn't the worst of it. At the edge of the barbed wire was a moat. The bottom was filled with yet more concertina wire, along with rusty metal spikes. These Krauts really knew how to make a guy feel unwelcome. They smelled gasoline, too — the sheen in the bottom of the moat was definitely not water. If the Germans fired just one tracer round into the moat, the Americans would be caught in the resulting conflagration.
Frenchie had thrown himself down into the dirt at the rim of the moat, bracing himself for what was coming next.
Nobody was giving any orders to cross, though, because on the other side of the moat rose the sheer walls of the fortress itself. Even if they made it across the moat, scaling those walls would be impossible without ropes and ladders, and maybe an engineering platoon to help. They would die like bugs hitting a windshield on a summer night.
"Fall back to the river!" the sergeant shouted. "We're here to secure a bridge, not sack a fort."
For the first time that day, Frenchie felt a sense of relief. Apparently, the Germans had fled the fort, which was so imposing that, defended or not, the only way forward was to go around it. The GIs had succeeded in driving off the Germans and securing a river crossing. Their job now would be to get back down to the river and dig in until more troops could be brought over. Having wrested the riverfront from the Germans, their job now would be to hold this position.
Cautiously, the GIs reversed direction and returned using the path that they had so laboriously cut through the tangled barbed wire. To the south, they could hear sporadic firing in the distance, a reminder that they were not the only ones at war this day. Frenchie was glad to be headed back toward the relative safety of the riverbank.
“Guess we showed them,” Marty said.
But Frenchie and the other GIs could not have been more mistaken. They had just cleared the barbed wire and reached open ground again when the Germans counter-attacked.
Chapter Seven
Trap, Frenchie thought, as soon as the first tracer rounds from an MG-42 arced across the sodden ground, cutting the Americans to pieces.
Frenchie threw himself flat and stayed there, too terrified to move a muscle as the sound of “Hitler’s Buzzsaw” filled the air.
He saw immediately what had happened. The Germans had not abandoned the fort in the face of the attack, as the Americans had thought. Instead, the Germans had slipped out unseen to flank the attackers — and even to hit them from the rear. The men had been so intent on going forward that no thought had been given to the fact that the fort might have been a ruse.
It was all a trick, a devious trap set by the SS troops, and the Americans had fallen for it.
They were now caught in a crossfire of tracer rounds coming at them from three directions.