Tolliver shook the fatigue from his brain and looked again. As usual, Holmes was right. It was a mob of civilians heading toward their position. That would complicate things a bit. They would have to frisk them and let as many of them as possible cross before making their own escape and destroying the bridge. What the hell was the matter with those people, didn’t they realize the field they were crossing might have been mined? It would have been had there been more time. Then he realized the awful truth, the reason for the advancing wave of civilians.
“Holmes, are those soldiers behind them?”
Holmes moaned. “Aw Jesus, the Reds are pushing them in front.”
Tolliver looked at the approaching horde of panic-stricken people. The closer they got, the better he could see the Russians pushing them, prodding them forward with gun butts and bayonets. Worse, there were women and children among them. I’m going to be sick, he thought. But what choice did he have?
“Tell everyone to open fire,” he ordered, then turned to Holmes, who, as usual, had the radio. “Then get mortars on them, fast. Come on. If you don’t we’ll be overrun!” Holmes paled but complied, quickly relaying the message to the weapons platoon.
For a moment, there was no rifle or machine-gun fire from his platoon. No one wanted to kill women and little kids. At least, no one wanted to be first. The wave of people was only a couple of hundred yards away and Tolliver could see faces. Their mouths seemed to be open in frightened Os. He also thought he could hear a kind of collective singing moan coming from them.
Tolliver jumped out of his foxhole and stood upright. “See,” he screamed, “this is how you do it!” He fired his carbine at the advancing host, emptying the clip. Even though it was a long shot for a carbine, the mob was difficult to miss and he saw several people fall over, and the moaning turned to screams. It was enough. The rest of the platoon opened up and bullets cut the advancing people down in rows, not discriminating between soldier and civilian, adult or child. Within seconds, the mortars arrived and bodies and parts of bodies were hurled into the air as the shells exploded.
Holmes paled and sobbed, but he too kept on firing. With macabre satisfaction they saw that Russian soldiers were lying dead among the fallen civilians. Holmes wondered if he could ever have been the first to kill those people, like Tolliver had. Then he saw that Tolliver too was crying.
The Russians stopped advancing and began to withdraw, leaving the dead and dying civilians. Tolliver lifted fire and directed the mortars to follow the retreating enemy infantry. Along with the civilian casualties there was a number who were unhurt. These milled about in confusion until a couple of them realized that the Russians had abandoned them. Then some of them started to walk slowly toward the American positions while a few of the other survivors searched among the bodies for loved ones.
A runner appeared beside Tolliver. “Captain says the last truck is about to cross and we should get ready to leave.”
“Did he say anything about this mess?” Tolliver asked.
The runner gulped at the sight of the slaughter. “He said he understands, and that you should still get out right now. He said battalion thinks there’s Russian armor coming up real fast.”
Which means, Tolliver thought as he gave the order to withdraw, there will be no aid for those poor wounded civilians lying there. It was funny. Just a few weeks ago, he would have thought of them as Nazis, the enemy, people to be punished. Now he thought of them as flesh-and-blood human beings, just like himself.
It took only a few minutes to reach the bridge and sprint across. Tolliver found his captain and asked for orders. The captain said nothing, only pointing. A line of civilians was crossing the bridge. They could see safety in their grasp and some began running. Then he saw the first Russian tank starting to cross the field a couple of hundred yards from the bridge. Oh no, he thought.
Suddenly, the lead tank exploded, its turret flying off. Seconds later, Tolliver saw the blur of a barrel-chested P-47 Thunderbolt pulling out of its dive. The air force had arrived.
“Hey, Captain. Now we can delay blowing the bridge, can’t we?”
The captain started to say something, but it was too late. Both ends of the bridge disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame. The civilians were thrown off by the explosion and soon disappeared in the water. Tolliver shook his head in mute anger and sorrow. He already knew why some of the old guys back home who had fought in France in 1918 wouldn’t talk about their experiences in that war. If he ever made it back to Alabama, there was no way he could speak and let mere words try to describe what he had seen and what he had done.
Suslov was careful not to get too close to the Weser, staying instead in a line of trees a half mile away. There wasn’t much cover for the tank column from air attack, and he had heard what had happened to a couple of tankers who had strayed too close. The Yank army had retreated across the Weser and taken all their bridges with them. The Americans had escaped.
As if there was a doubt, he thought. After crossing the Leine, it seemed that the American resistance had suddenly collapsed. Gains that had been measured in yards suddenly became miles. While it had taken two months to go from the Elbe to the Leine, it had taken only a little more than a week to go from the Leine to the Weser.
Had the Americans broken and collapsed? Suslov didn’t think so. The withdrawal across the river had been done without any panic that he could see. They had left neither their equipment nor their wounded. No, it was obvious to him that the slow fight to the Leine had permitted them time to build up defenses along the Weser.
Ivan Latsis opened his hatch. “Well, Sergei, that is a real river, not one of those piss trickles we’ve been crossing all this time.”
Suslov could not recall any piss trickles. The Oder had been real, as had the Elbe and even the smaller Leine. He estimated this one at somewhere between two and three hundred feet across, deep, and flowing fairly quickly. While there were no truly steep embankments on either side, there would be no testing of the depths to see if a tank could cross. Instead, they would have to do it the hard way. Again.
“What’s our fuel status?” Suslov asked.
“Less than half and nothing in the drums,” Latsis replied.
Popov reported they had only a dozen shells for the 76 mm gun and a hundred rounds total for the two machine guns.
Latsis shrugged and smiled. “I don’t think we’ll be leading the attack this time. Not unless they want us to run dry right away. This time I think the rumor is true.”
Suslov agreed. The scuttlebutt was that the brigade would again be pulled out of line, reinforced, and refitted for a while before attempting to force a crossing. It only made sense. They had been fighting constantly since the assault on Berlin in April, and the wear and tear on men and equipment had been horrific. Once again, their numbers were down. The entire battalion numbered only eight functioning tanks. Two had been lost to aircraft the day before, while the rest all needed major overhauls. Suslov wondered if he could get a replacement engine for his tank. The existing one was running hot and making strange noises.
They needed ammunition and fuel. They needed food. God, Suslov thought, when did they last have a good, hot meal? Their uniforms were smelly rags that sometimes barely covered their private parts. There was no way his brigade was going to help force a crossing of that river in their current condition. Even though the infantry would likely lead any assault, as it had in the past, it was imperative that the armor rest and refit in order to support them.
Suslov knew his geography. The Weser ran north-south well into the mountainous regions below them. Behind the Weser was the mighty Rhine. It seemed dumbly improbable that they would be able to force the Rhine. He had heard it was wide and deep, and protected by steep cliffs. Logically, he thought that the plan would be to force the defeat and the destruction of the Americans on the relatively flat terrain he’d been told lay between the Weser and the Rhine, and then drive on to the ocean. Amsterdam or Antwerp seemed the most probable ultimate targets. Maybe then they could stop fighting.