Harold Coyle
The Ten Thousand
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following for their assistance in making this book possible:
To Gerry Carroll, who is an author in his own right, for taking valuable time away from his own projects, family, and self-inflicted home improvement projects to look over my rough draft and comment on all that aviation stuff. Thanks, Gerry.
To Chet Burgess, one of Ted Turner's originals at CNN, for doing likewise and not only for commenting on the portions of the book concerning the media but for giving valuable advice on other areas as well. Most of all, however, I would like to publicly thank you for taking the time from what must have been a miserable schedule in January of 1991 to give me and Major Bill Little, both Desert Shield/Storm-bound, a great sendoff while we were cooling our heels and chewing our nails in Atlanta during the twilight period between peace and war.
Next, I would like to extend my appreciation to Michael Korda, of Simon Schuster, who has served as a guide and shepherd in my writing career since my second book and Paul McCarthy of Pocket Books for his editorial comments and yeoman's work in making this book a readable commodity. Even though my name is on it and theirs aren't, no book is a one-person effort.
Finally, as always, I extend to my wife and children a special thanks for putting up with the long hours and all too frequent fits of passion that this book produced. Too often they absorbed the brunt of shots meant for others and still came back smiling. I can't think of anyone more deserving of my thanks and appreciation than those who kept me going by providing a gentle smile and encouraging word when I needed it. Thanks.
This book is dedicated to GEORGE BANNON and those of his generation who, as riflemen, bore the brunt of World War II.
"Christianity has somewhat softened the brutal German lust of battle, but could not destroy it."
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and founder. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln (1858)
Map 1: Germany and Central Europe
PROLOGUE
The transition from night to day was subtle, almost unnoticed by the stunned survivors of the neighborhood. There were no birds chirping, no animals scurrying about to announce that a new day had started. The only difference that day was a slow, almost torturous, change from the cold oppressive darkness of night to a leaden gray sky that brought no warmth, no hope to those people who huddled in the corners of their shelters. Even the thought that the end of their nightmare was at hand brought no relief, no end to their strain. Six years of war and twelve years of National Socialism had crushed all emotions, all hope. All they had left that morning was eyes that had stopped seeing, ears that stopped hearing, and souls that stopped living a long time ago. It was truly the twilight of the gods.
In the corner of one of the basements, a mother and her five-year-old daughter huddled together. Only an occasional spasm or hacking cough shook the bundle of rags that covered them and differentiated the mother and daughter from the stack of corpses across the room from them. The mother was ever mindful that little separated them from the heap of dead. Whenever the little girl shook, the mother tightened her grasp on her in an effort to keep the girl from slipping away from the living. Though she no longer understood why she struggled to stay alive and keep her daughter warm and safe, it was all she knew, all that was left to her. Slowly over the past years everything that she had ever known and had ever loved had been stripped away and smashed as they had descended into a world of death and nightmares. Now only the five-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old boy who had once been her son were left. With the corruption of the boy's mind by the Hitler Youth, the mother had only had her daughter to keep her in touch with life and the living. With all the strength that she had left, the mother tightened her hold on her daughter. She would not let that life go.
Across the dark, dank basement the eight-year-old boy paced. Unlike his mother and sister, he was animated, alive, anxious to continue. The stench of rotting bodies and human waste that could not be disposed of mingled with the smell of burning wood and stagnant water. Such smells did not bother him. They, like many things, had to be endured. It was easy, he knew, to tolerate such inconveniences if you believed in yourself, the Fatherland, and the Führer. The smells, like the dead, were a part of war.
As he moved from one side of the basement to the other, his piercing gray eyes didn't see the torment of his own mother or the pile of bodies which, in accordance with regulations and emergency orders, he had dutifully segregated from the living and covered with a layer of lime. Instead they were fixed straight ahead and glazed over with images of soldiers and weapons, and tanks and planes, the implements of war that had made the Reich great and in the end would crush the Führer's enemies. Soon he and the other boys in his unit would have their chance to join his father, a tank commander who had fought the Russians and now faced the Americans. The thought of being able to fight and die for the Führer only served to increase the boy's excitement, an excitement that masked the rumble of heavy vehicles approaching.
Keeping as close to the rear of the Sherman tank as he dared, Private George Kozak kept his eyes open and his rifle at the ready. He hated going into towns and villages, hated it with a passion. There were so many places for the enemy to hide, so many places from which a sniper or a machine gun could suddenly appear. Out in the country, where it was more open, you didn't have to worry about basements and sewers or death from above. In a city the bastards could be, and usually were, everywhere.
Just the thought of a firefight caused Kozak to tense up. Sweat began to bead up and run in little rivulets from under his helmet liner band down his face. For a moment he considered unbuttoning his jacket but decided not to. Kozak knew that as soon as he paused, he would lose the protection of the tank. Another member of his squad would quickly move around him from the more exposed tail of the squad file and take Kozak's spot right up next to the tank, leaving Kozak in the open. Or if he turned his attention away from his search for the enemy to fool with his jacket, they might choose that moment to open up. No, Kozak thought, best to keep my eyes open and stay where I am. Something was about to happen, he could feel it. And when it did, he wanted to be ready. In a little over a month he would be twenty years old, an age not many of his friends had lived to see. Though he would still be too young to legally drink or vote back in Pennsylvania, his next birthday would nearly coincide with a rare event, completion of a full year in continuous combat. Of the ten men in his squad who had crossed the beach at Omaha three days after D-Day, Kozak was only one of three who could boast of seeing that much combat. The others had been taken away feet first. Kozak intended to see his birthday, as well as his first anniversary in combat, alive and in one piece.
That he didn't have any goals or even conscious thoughts of anything beyond his twentieth birthday never occurred to Kozak. While it was fashionable for politicians and dreamers to speak of a brave new world, such thoughts were foreign to the American rifleman in 1945. Like a million other infantrymen, Kozak's world was defined by the field of vision that the Sherman in front of him offered, and a future that was not his to control and was measured in minutes.