Even the attitude that his superiors seemed to hold concerning the welfare of their own men and equipment during the marching and countermarching of the past few days bothered Seydlitz. For two days he and his company had sat in their assembly area south of Dresden waiting for their resupply of food and fuel to find them. Orders to move, however, found them first. If it were not for the soldiers going off on their own and buying the food themselves, no one in Seydlitz's company would have gotten a hot meal while they waited. Even their combat rations, as Buhle had so painfully pointed out, were running low.
Then, in the midst of bemoaning their fate, Seydlitz recognized the tactical symbol of his brigade on several fuel and supply trucks in the eastbound lane of the autobahn. Despite the orders to remain in radio listening silence, Seydlitz felt the need to inform his commander. Could they not, he asked, flag down the column in which their brigade's trucks were moving in order to refuel and draw rations?
Without any hesitation, his battalion commander informed Seydlitz that they could not. Both the battalion and, no doubt, the brigade's supply vehicles had to adhere to the march tables that controlled the movement of all units in the area. "If every commander stopped when and where he wanted to," the battalion commander explained to Seydlitz, "then this intolerable situation would become totally unmanageable." Reminding Seydlitz that the march orders they were moving under had a maintenance and refueling stop set up by corps supply units and scheduled in another two hours, the battalion commander went on to reassure Seydlitz that if everyone did what they were ordered to do, everyone would eventually get to where they were going.
Acknowledging his commander, Seydlitz gave up as he watched the trucks carrying the fuel and food his company so desperately needed roll away to the east into the gathering darkness. There was, of course, no fuel and no food waiting for Seydlitz and his company at the end of two hours. The corps supply unit responsible for establishing the refuel and rest stop was still on the road somewhere to the west, tied up behind a broken-down tank and the armored recovery vehicle, also broken down, that had stopped to retrieve it. With fuel almost expended, Seydlitz and his company, as well as the rest of the brigade, would wait, lined up on the side of the road and unable to continue due to a simple lack of fuel. For nearly twelve hours they would wait while staff officers at corps and division desperately shuffled and reshuffled march tables and units without ever realizing that their efforts were for the most part creating more problems than they were solving. It would take the direct intervention of both the corps commander of the 2nd German Corps and his division commanders, riding up and down the route of march and herding and directing units like cowboy trail bosses, and another twenty-four hours, to sort out the 2nd Panzer Division and get it moving again.
News that they had arrived at Grafenwöhr was greeted with moans and groans by Captain Hilary Cole and the other nurses of the 553rd Field Hospital. Somehow in their minds they had come to believe that once they were out of the Czech Republic and back in Germany things would be different, that everything would be all over. The long, seemingly pointless road marches in the back of a cold five-ton cargo truck were supposed to end.
There would be, they thought, no more endless waiting as they sat on the side of nameless roads waiting for another column to pass and gnawed at cold combat rations. And the jerky stop and go, stop and go, as they wound their way through the Czech mountains, would be over once they were in Germany.
So it came as a rude shock when the trucks pulled into a loose circle in the middle of a large well-used gravel and mud parking area, and they were informed that they were at Grafenwöhr. The unit first sergeant could have told them any other German name and, although Cole and the other nurses would have been unhappy, they would not have suffered the severe depression that hit them when the word "Grafenwöhr" was mentioned. Built as a training area with numerous tank and artillery live-fire ranges and maneuver areas by the Wehrmacht before World War II, elements of Erwin Rommel's famed Afrika Korps, as well as units of the elite and notorious Waffen SS, had trained there during the war. Taken over by the Americans after the war with little done to improve creature comforts, few soldiers serving in Germany escaped the horror of doing time there. Grafenwöhr was to those soldiers who went there to train synonymous with misery, discomfort, cold, wet, sleeplessness, and every other word that is used to describe the pain and discomfort a soldier experiences when serving in the field under the worst possible conditions. It was described by more than a few American soldiers as the armpit of the world.
It didn't matter why they were there. It didn't matter what they were supposed to do there. All that mattered was the fact that they were there, and not in some nice clean hospitable piece of Germany untainted by the foul reputation associated with Grafenwöhr. Even when a group of soldiers came by and shoved another brown plastic MRE combat ration into Cole's hand, she didn't react, though she felt like it. At that moment, she felt like sinking onto the ground and crying. It wasn't fair that they were being treated like that. This was not what she was trained to do. Cole could deal with the pain and suffering of others. She could watch and assist in a very detached manner as doctors pieced torn bodies back together. She could even handle the frustration of doing everything within her power to save a life and then watching that life slip away. All of that was manageable, reasonable, and expected. This, however, was beyond comprehension. Even worse than the horror before her eyes was the sudden realization that there was no discernible end. There was no well-defined conclusion to which they were headed. This terrible endless chain of suffering and wandering had to be endured without any chance of really influencing it in any way, no way of stopping it. That to Cole was the horror of it all.
Just when she was about to break, to give in to her desire to break down and cry, Hilary noticed that someone had beaten her to it. In the darkness she heard her friend Wendi. Looking about, Hilary could see her standing off from the group alone in the darkness clutching her arms tightly across her chest as she rocked from side to side and cried. Though her own pain and frustration were still with her, Cole handed her ration to another nurse standing next to her and went to Wendi. Wrapping her arms about Wendi, Hilary Cole gently pushed Wendi's head down onto her shoulder. Reaching up under Wendi's helmet, Hilary slowly began to stroke her friend's hair. As Wendi cried, Hilary softly repeated through her own sobs, "It's going to be all right, Wendi. It's all going to be all right. I'm here."
Under normal circumstances, Big Al Malin didn't like to bother his subordinate commanders when they were getting ready to start a major operation. He made sure that he had good people working for him and that he issued clear concise orders and directives. "The rest," he liked to tell people, "was in their hands and God's." This operation, now referred to as Malin's March to the Sea, was not a normal operation. Though it was planned and briefed to everyone in the same manner as a purely military operation, it was not. The intricate civil-military relationships that were woven into the entire fabric of the operation and designed to prevent or defuse problems between the Tenth Corps and the German populace that they would be moving through touched every aspect of the operation, both planned and potential.
Some commanders voiced strong reservations about the rules of engagement imposed by Big Al. The commander of the 55th Mechanized Infantry Division had on several occasions pushed Big Al to soften his order restricting the use of artillery fire to only confirmed enemy locations that were a danger to the command. Every chance he got, Big Al would remind his commanders that "We, an army used to the indiscriminate use of firepower, must look twice and three times before we pull the trigger. Otherwise we're going to leave in our wake a hostile populace that will cut our combat service support units to ribbons and deny us the use of their fuel and resources that the success of this operation depends upon. It is totally unreasonable to expect us to ask a German mother or father to allow us free and unhindered progress after we've blown up their home and killed their children. If you can't picture that, then just ask yourself before you make a call for fire, Would you still do so if your wife and child were in the target area?"