Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The Volkspolizei took him away, his wife screaming as he was hustled inside the small Volga sedan.

In the second apartment that had been split open as if struck by an enormous ax, several suites were open to the air like a doll’s house, a body visible and still near the lip of the third floor. And, astonishingly to most of the onlookers, a radio was blaring with news reports of the “brüderlicher Hilfskrieg”— the “fraternal war of assistance”—the boys around the crater fighting now over who would be Bomber-mannschaft, “bomber crew,” and who AA-Flak, “AA battery commander.”

After a while another Volkspolizei returned and checked off names against those on record as having lived in the two apartment blocks. They managed to identify some by wedding rings, medical bands, odd podiatric shoes, and so forth. There were still eleven people unaccounted for, among them the temporary permit holder, Leonhard Meir.

By nightfall Meir had decided to try again to escape from Berlin. At first he felt somehow responsible for the old couples’ death, for not having been there with them, for having left, all of them in a bad temper. But soon guilt gave way to his determination to reach the west. He had hatched the plan on the way back from his work after having seen several dead Stasi- led AA battery crews near Tegel Forest. All that remained of one battery after a direct hit from one of the Canberras’ iron bombs was strips of flesh dangling from tree branches like sodden toilet paper. But nearby, the headless corpse of one man was still sitting upright in the sidecar of an army motorcycle, the dark blue boiler suit and AA armband the man had been wearing bloodied and lacerated by shrapnel. Meir also noticed that several other corpses nearby which were not burned and were dressed in the boiler suits looked as if they were in their fifties — about his age.

Racing against what he knew would be the imminent arrival of the ambulances, their Klaxons wailing in the distance, Meir quickly stripped a boiler suit from one of the corpses, snatched up one of the helmets strewn about the edge of the wood, and made his way over to the motorcycle. He kicked the starter pedal. Nothing. He kicked again and again until he was exhausted, then gave it what he told himself would be his last try. The bike coughed and promptly died. “Shit!”

Now he could hear a car, perhaps a hundred yards or so away down by the lake, and voices coming toward him. He ran back to the gutted battery and into the wood. The voices receded, going farther down the lake. Back at the bike, Meir kicked the starter again. It spluttered, coughed, and rattled to life. He unscrewed the petrol cap and stuck his finger in it. It felt ice-cold. Full tank. He had no excuse — it was either now or never. A dash for freedom down the Corridor or wait. Would the Allies come? Or would it be slow starvation in the occupied sector? No one knew. He let the engine die. If stopped by the GDR Polizei or the Stasi— with nothing but his “enemy alien” card, it would mean torture and interrogation.

He hesitated, got off the bike, moved around, looking for a piece of ID, finding an identification card on one of the dead. The card’s photo, even in the pale, shimmering moonlight over the lake, looked nothing like him. Entscheide doch, Meir! — ”Make up your mind, Meir!”—he told himself. Brio! Do it with brio! He kicked the starter pedal again and, as it gained power with a throaty roar, switched on the slit-eye headlamp and tightened the chin strap of the AA helmet. Slipping the bike into gear, easing out the clutch, he sped over the grass down toward the lakeside road and from there headed out for the autobahn, singing, his voice rising, though drowned by the noise of the bike and sidecar, “La Donna e Mobile” louder and louder, trying to drown the fear that kept telling him to turn back, a heavy drone of Russian bombers overhead. He had strapped on a holstered gun but had absolutely no idea how to use it, wondering if it had a safety catch or not.

On the other side of the world, a flooded green rice paddy below, outside Munsan, heading north, though still five miles south of what used to be the 150-mile-long DMZ between North and South Korea, the loud rotor slap of the Seventh U.S. Army Cavalry choppers could be heard above eight escorting Cobras. The latter’s chin turrets, whose chain machine guns were slaved to the pilot’s helmet eyepiece, kept moving side to side, up and down, like a mosquito’s proboscis.

The usual thin head-on silhouettes of the Cobras were fattened this day by the thirty-eight rockets on each side of the stubby wings, giving the eight choppers a bug-eyed appearance, their tails higher than their bodies. Each of the 304 rockets was armed with a fragmentation head to provide covering scattering-shrapnel fire for the ten Hueys following and the sixty soldiers of the air cavalry aboard them. Their task was to steal the southern end of what was hoped would be a successful encircling movement against a company of North Korean regulars that had ambushed a U.S.-ROK convoy the previous night en route to Kaesong, north of the old DMZ.

All across the Korean peninsula, 120 miles wide at this point, hundreds of such missions continued to press home the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the NKA, a counterattack made possible by Gen. Douglas Freeman’s daring hit-and-run airborne attack against the North Korean capital. Like David Brentwood and many others who had fought and been decorated for the raid that stunned the world and bought valuable time for the fleeing U.S.-ROK forces, General Freeman was no longer in Korea. On leave after undergoing a violent allergic reaction to a tetanus shot, Freeman had, despite his protest, been taken off the active list for some weeks, and now there was concern that without him, the counteroffensive in Korea would bog down.

In the lead Huey, Major Tae, liaison ROK-U.S. officer for the Seventh Cavalry, a man whom Freeman had never met but who had been among the first to see action on the DMZ, was gripping the open door’s edge so tightly, his knuckles were white. The sound of 152 smoke-tailed rockets from the Cobras near him, streaking toward the scrubby side of the paddy, along with the howling rumble of the twin chin turret guns, each gun spraying out 550 rounds of 7.76-millimeter per minute into the scrub, was so loud that even though Tae was plugged in to the Huey’s intercom, he had difficulty hearing the pilot telling him and the six American cavalrymen in the chopper that they were about to put down on the south side of a long east-west irrigation ditch.

Some of the cavalrymen in the chopper, also veterans of the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the invading North Korean army, took no notice of Tae, his eyes watering with the wind, his viselike grip on the doorframe nothing more to them than confirmation that the South Korean major was as apprehensive as they were. The truth, however, was much different.

Before the war, Tae, an intelligence officer in the ROK, had conformed exactly to the ideals of West Point. A gentleman in every sense, he seemed to some more American than the Americans, despite his short, slim build. Indeed, Tae, though not nearly as widely known as Freeman and not known in America at all, had become something of a legendary figure throughout the U.S. Army in Korea. Interrogating the usual peacetime quota of would-be NKA infiltrators who had been captured while trying to slip into the South, Tae, who forbade torture of any kind, was struck not by anything the NKA prisoners said but by the fact that the chopsticks found in the NKA infiltrators’ kits were shorter — fourteen inches long rather than the standard seventeen. From this he had deduced that the North Korean army, in a country with an acute shortage of timber, was stockpiling wood. In a calculation that merely amused the U.S.-ROK headquarters in Seoul and made no sense to the U.S. officers born and bred in a throwaway consumer society, Tae had predicated that the North’s saving in wood, given the millions of chopsticks used, was probably going to the manufacture of chiges. These were the NKA militia’s famed A-frame backpacks, on which they carried all their ammunition and food, including the shoulder roll of ground pea, millet seed, and rice powder, which, mixed with water, would sustain them and which made the North Korean regular much more self-sufficient than the more elaborately supplied-from-the-rear U.S.-ROK forces.