Tales of the Three Anchors: Route Step

It was kind of a cold spring night at the Three Anchors. A hard nor'wester was screaming in off the sea, rattling the older windows in the back and blowing eddies of chill across the floor. A bunch of regulars and a fair number of newcomers were swapping tales about being someplace else on a particular day.

"Thanksgiving, ya know. Every Thanksgiving I can remember where I was even to this day..."

"When you're sober enough..."

"Well, how about when Nixon resigned..."

"That was, what, '74? Yup. Remember it plain. I was in Alexandria with a load of rubber bound for Marseilles..."

"How about the death of Franklin Roosevelt?" Now there were a few old timers in the crowd, but not enough to turn a real round of talk. But, nothing else had actually started yet and we had nowhere else to go...

Old Hans, our one"'armed bar tending Stalingrad survivor said, "I was in Ust Izma camp, I think. 1945..."

"Yeah, OK. I was in high school in Chicago," Barry recalled, a ship fitter just about to retire. "Everybody got all hot up about it..."

"Germany," Jack said. "Czechoslovakia, actually. Guarding a half million Germans." Well, now, this was interesting, I thought. What else...?

"Prisoners," I prodded. "Big PW camp...?"

"Well, they were, well a lot of 'em were prisoners. But most of 'em were just going home."

Now this was from a nondescript looking ad executive somewhere in his fifties or sixties who stopped by when he was in town, two or three times a year or so. Hans got the hint and filled his glass. We were tired of everybody else's stories, anyway. In a dockside joint without a television, pool table or even a dartboard, the chance to listen to new stories is a pretty exciting prospect.

"Yup. Just marching home at a rout step, and me and about two hundred other guys were trying to get 'em all on the same road. It didn't start out like that, though." He kinda stared into space the way folks do when they're telling stories they'd as soon not think about. Not that they're particularly painful, they're just too damn depressing.

"Ya see, me and my tank platoon spent most of our war in Patton's dust, always trying to catch up to the leaders, mopping up one little pocket or another left over from the Battle of the Bulge. Anyway, we got grabbed up to escort a few hundred prisoners out of Third Army's rear area. They teamed us with about 90 MPs, a bunch of trucks and an Italian field kitchen and started marching out of Czechoslovakia and back into Germany. Luckily we had a few CIC guys along that could speak German.

"When we started it was pretty chilly, being late March, and it was raining some. But there was a couple hundred of us and my four tanks and only about eight hundred Germans with about fifty miles to walk, so nobody figured it would be a lot of misery. Boy, I'd been wrong before, but that time, brother...

"Anyway, about noon the first day we bump into a convoy headed the other way, and we got told we had to take another road. We marched off at a fork down this little cart track. By then it was raining pretty steady and the track was knee"'deep in mud. Then we got word that another batch of prisoners was going to join our group at the next junction. Seems another cage was breaking up. No sweat, we figured...

"Well, we got another six hundred prisoners to add to our bunch, but the guys guarding 'em said they had orders to rejoin their outfits. So now we've got close to twice what we started with and just as many guards. We try to map out the route we had to use and discovered we'd have about seventy"'five miles to go. Three days, not two...

"So the first night we found a meadow to bunk down in, and the Italians set up a mess and fed the prisoners while we ate K"'rations. The Krauts spread out on the grass in the mud and wet and got what sleep they could. We weren't much better off...

"Next morning somebody had decided they needed better organization than they had, and they sent out scouts to mark the route, and the Italians went ahead to find a spot for lunch. The trucks were starting to fill up with sick prisoners, and it was still raining, but we got started by mid"'morning.

"Most of that morning I was riding drag, and I could have sworn the pack of Germans was getting larger. My crew thought so, too, but they couldn't say just how they knew.

"Just before noon chow I stopped at an MP checkpoint and asked them about it. Yup, they said, it's getting bigger, all right. More cages added, I says. Nope, he says. They're just coming out of the woods and joining the line. War's gotta be over, I thought, if all they want to do is march home..."

"Giving up without a fight," Craig sniffed. "After all that..." Hans glared at him briefly, and then bought him another drink.

"That's the funny part," Jack replied. "A lot of 'em were still armed. They didn't really surrender; they just figured they were joining other Germans going home. Ya see, we couldn't guard the whole road or the whole column, but they just marched along where we pointed 'em.

"Well, at chow some bright boy figured that there were too many of them and not enough of us, so our best weapon was exhaustion. Keep 'em moving, somebody said. Stop 'em for ten minutes out of every three hours but otherwise just keep puttin' one foot in front of the other. By then our route was about a hundred miles, avoiding main supply routes, big towns, columns of refugees, bombed"'out bridges and a few pockets of German resistance. And we still had only two hundred guys guarding what the MPs now figured was about twenty thousand prisoners. And it was still raining. 'Shove 'em down the road' they said. OK, I said, but I was just a tech"'sergeant so I said OK a lot...

"My driver struck on an idea that smacked of genius. The Eyeties were running out of chow so they'd put out a sign telling the prisoners to deposit extra food at the mess tent, and it worked like a charm. Since we noticed that a lot of these guys were still armed we had no way to disarm them with our numbers. So we put up a sign telling 'em to deposit their weapons and ammunition. Hell, they're Germans, they follow orders, we figured.

"So we got a CIC guy to write down the words and we paint it on a ration crate lid in crankcase oil, and you know what..."

"They left their weapons," Hans said wryly. "Of course, a German officer was standing next to the sign."

"Oh, THANKS," Jack exclaimed, faking indignity. "Steal all my punch lines." And everyone had a good laugh, Hans most of all. "But the joke's on you, 'cause it was an Italian cook dressed like a German officer." Another round of laughter and drinks. When everyone was recharged somebody said, "So then what?"

"Well," Jack went on, "we shoved 'em down the road. Now, mind you, it wasn't just a matter of watching 'em walk. We had to break up fistfights, brace bridges, chase rock"'throwing civilians away, reroute 'em around convoys bound for the front, pick up their wounded and sick, try to see that everybody got enough chow, disarm a few stragglers, and all this time try to stay as warm as we could 'cause it was driving goddamn rain and cold most of the time, with a little late"'season snow thrown in for good measure.

"After four days and three nights of this we got word that the front of the column had hit German territory, but we were still ten miles or so from the border, and I could see a river of prisoners on both ends of the horizon just slogging through the mud. The MPs gave up trying to figure out how many prisoners we had when they got to a hundred thousand, and that was on the second night. They literally rolled out of the woodwork just to join us. And we still only had about two hundred guards with us, and none had slept more than an hour at a time in nearly a week.

"One night we stopped the tank at a mess"'and"'rest tent about a mile from the German frontier, one a Kraut medical unit and some Red Cross workers were running to take care of prisoners that just couldn't go on and we didn't have the transport for. There were some pneumonia cases, some influenza, and a minor outbreak of measles in a Hitler Youth unit that had joined the column. We'd had nothing but water and K"'rations for four days; we were wet, cold, tired, dirty, hungry and about deaf from the engine. An MP said he'd watch the tank while we went in to dry off.

"Inside that tent they had a space heater that turned it into a sauna, but dammit I'd never been so glad to sweat in my life. We took off our wet stuff while the Germans just made room for us around one of the heaters, and we set our stuff down to dry off. Didn't think much of it at the time...

"In one corner a German medic and a Red Cross woman were trying to deliver a baby, which in the nature of it was kinda noisy, and the girl was Czech and couldn't understand a thing anyone was saying. So this other Kraut goes over and starts talking to her in Czech. Well we get curious and forget all about the heater, and everybody in that tent was watching this with a gasoline lantern over her head and the rain pummeling the canvas all around. Kinda spooky, ya know?"

"Yeah," I said. "Spooky ain't the word."

"Yeah, but I don't know what the word is. Just a few minutes later there's this big commotion over by the space heater and we go back and there's a couple Krauts fighting a couple other Krauts over our weapons. We'd forgot all about them, curse our luck, and one wiseass Kraut decides he's gonna restart the war. Well, a couple others don't like that idea so a fight broke out, and in just a few seconds there's some shooting and the MPs come in.

"Well, we got our weapons back and a couple prisoners have busted body parts and black eyes, and that tent had a couple new holes, but nothing else untoward. MPs haul off the wise guys and we go back to the space heater. A few minutes later the baby decides it's time and there's a new baby girl in the world."

"Well, I'll be damned..."

"Yeah. Anyway the rain let up a bit and we head back down the road, following that Feldgrau river into Germany. At one crossroads I see an old man and a couple of boys, just standing there. The oldster was the boys's grandfather and the boys were just too tired to keep going, so they were waiting for transportation. It'd started to snow again and the wind was picking up, so I hauled them aboard the tank. Well, once I got started it was pretty hard to stop, so pretty soon my tank was looking like the Joads coming across, with all kinds of people hanging off the sides, back, front, top. I put the gun tube in travel"'lock and parked another ten guys on it..."

"After ten days on the road in the rain and snow we'd driven some two hundred miles back and forth and escorted about three hundred thousand prisoners back into Germany. I unloaded at a PW cage outside Nurnberg, and it was then I heard FDR was dead. I can't remember feeling anything but cold and tired."

"Shit," somebody said. "So that was the end of the German Army."

"Yup," Jack said, "guarded by four tanks and two hundred guys."

"Small world, Jack," I said, staring at my beer. "I was at Ft. Bliss a few years back, and spent some time with a German officer there with the Luftstreitkrafte training unit. He said him and his older brother and his grandfather were carried back into Germany by an American tank after they'd stopped, waiting to die...."

"Really," Jack said. "Mighta been my tank..."

"Must have been, my friend," Hans said, stretching Jack another drink. "For those might have been my father and my young brothers, and even if they were not, I must thank you for them."

And for all the Jacks on that convoy who remembered they were human beings, guarding a Feldgrau river flowing homeward in the rain and snow, forever thanks.