Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

Slowly, in dribbles and drabs, the decimated units were resupplied and reinforced with replacements, mostly green, partially trained men fresh out of basic training Stateside, with a sprinkling of veterans just released from various medical facilities and dumped into the replacement depots or “repple-depples.” When one of these somehow wound up in the unit that had been his before his wounding, the scenes could be heartwarming. This was exactly how Sergeant Bernie Cohen came back to Charlie Company, to be immediately grabbed by Milo and made first sergeant. Chamberlin had declined that job and had also declined an offered commission; he still was running the second platoon, but as a master sergeant.

In November, the other two battalions, the mortar company, the tank company and most of the medical company were sent off to join in the push through the Hurtgenwald, their objective Cologne. But the drive quickly bogged down in the face of the stiff resistance offered by the troops of General Walther Model.

On the banks of the Meuse, the battalion camped, licking its wounds, integrating the trickles of replacements for the men and equipment and weapons lost and serving as perimeter guards for the regimental headquarters complex. They ate class-A rations and loved it, not often having had access to fresh, hot food since leaving England months before, though they still bitched and groused about it as soldiers always have and always will. They were issued winter clothing and, as the weather worsened, devised ways to supplement their bedding and windproof their shelters. Old John Saxon, now a lieutenant colonel, came back with some facial scarring and a slight limp to take over his command, and still the battalion just sat in place. But it was, for them, the calm before the storm of death that awaited too many of them.

In early December, First Sergeant Bernie Cohen and a detail had gone into the regimental complex and there scrounged or “liberated” enough material to construct of wood and corrugated metal a smallish, airtight building centered by a wide firepit filled with coarse gravel and small boulders which would retain heat well. The resulting steam baths had become very popular, and that was where Milo and Bernie were when the CQ runner found them to say that battalion was on the wire for Milo.

John Saxon was clearly agitated when he spoke with the officers gathered in his heavily guarded headquarters tent. “Gentlemen, the fuckin’ Krauts have done broke through in the Ardennes. Division is damn near as short-handed as we are, what with all them men tied down up to Hurtgenwald, and the word is to send them ever’ swingin’ dick can be scraped up here, and that means us, thishere battalion. So git back to yore comp’nies and saddle up, fast. And I mean ever’ fucker you got on the mornin’ report, too—clerks, cooks and all, ever’body that can shoot a rifle. Full packs, all the clothes they can wear and still fight, three days’ worth of C-rations and weapons. Two hunnert rounds for each MI, and ammo in proportion for all the other weapons. Send your tents and records and all up here on the trucks you send to pick up ammo and rations and gas and all. Okay? Git!”

The drive down into the Ardennes was pure hell, as Milo recalled it. A snowstorm of near-blizzard proportions started up soon after the convoy took to the so-called road. Visibility quickly became bare feet, and this meant that each vehicle had to drive close enough to see the vehicle ahead with the narrow, dim “cat’s-eye” head beams that were all that regiment would for some reason allow. The inability to see meant that the lead vehicles were plotting direction with map and compass, and this kept the advance painfully slow while the men huddled together for warmth in the backs of the trucks, forbidden to smoke and thoroughly miserable.

When at long last the trucks ground to a skidding halt, the men were all instructed to leave on the trucks everything save their weapons, ammo, rations, entrenching tools and ponchos. Thus stripped for immediate action, they were marched, single-file, past a long line of GI cans fitted with immersion heaters. Each man had his canteen cup filled with hot coffee and was allowed to hurriedly fish a can of C-ration out of the boiling water.

Milo thought that the greasy corned beef hash had never before tasted so good. The coffee could have served equally well as battery acid, but it was hot, and that was just then the important thing to him. But he had had only a single drag on his postprandial cigarette when the order came down to form up and move out into the numbing cold. The snow seemed to be slacking off, but what was still falling was being whipped on by an icy-toothed wind. As he tucked away his canteen cup, he reflected silently that this was damned, poor weather in which to be expected to fight, but then any weather was.

Two days later, Milo crouched in the snow among the nineteen men that were what now remained of Charlie’s headquarters platoon and first platoon. It could well be all that remained of the entire company for all he knew, since there had been no contact with Chamberlin of the second or Hogan of the third for … ? He was just too tired to remember how long.

There gradually approached unseen an ominous grind-ing-clanking-roaring, and lumbering over a low saddle came a German tank, a big one. A black-capped man stood with his black-leather-clad torso sticking out of the turret hatch, and a dozen or so rifle-armed soldiers rode clinging to the hull behind him. As the tank began to descend the slope into the little vale that lay between his hill and Milo’s, the front of the half-track appeared in the saddle behind the lumbering steel behemoth.

“Are there any rockets left for the bazooka, Bernie?” said Milo quietly.

“Yeah, Milo, two,” whispered First Sergeant Bernie Cohen. “But they won’t do no good—that’s a fuckin’ Tiger tank. They’ll just bounce off the fucker.”

Milo nodded. “Well, tell the bazooka man to take out that half-track back there, while the BARs and the rest of us try to kill those infantrymen. They’re what we really need to worry about—this slope is too steep for that tank or any other to make it up here.”

“He won’t need to,” said Cohen sadly. “The fuckin’ hill ain’t too steep for fuckin’ eighty-eight shells to climb. He can just sit down there and blow the whole fuckin’ top off this fuckin’ hill, and us with the fucker.”

The flash and tohooosh of the launched antitank rocket coincided with the tremendous explosion capped by a huge, black-smoky fireball rising from the saddle and announcing that the vehicle had been carrying gasoline, not troops. These sounds also coincided with the spraying of a deadly hail of small-arms fire on the Tiger below. The black hat spun from off the head of the man in the turret, even as that turret began to turn toward the hilltop, its long-barreled 88mm cannon beginning to rise. The unprotected Panzergrenadieren fared poorly, with no cover or even concealment to shelter them from the rain of death.

“Okay, okay!” Milo shouted. “Cease firing, cease firing, and let’s get the hell off this hill before the Krauts blow us all to hell!”

The men needed no further urging, rolling out of their firing positions and running, sliding, rolling down the more gentle reverse slope as fast as was humanly possible. Not until yet another snow-covered hill lay between them and the Tiger did they halt, panting, listening to the main armament of the Tiger bombarding their late position relentlessly.

Milo clapped Sergeant Cohen on the shoulder. “Well, it worked, didn’t it, Bernie? Why’re you still so glum?”

“Yeah, it worked, a’right, Milo, that last time, but it ain’t gonna work again, not for us. We down to one rocket for the bazooka now, and damn little fuckin’ ammo for any fuckin’ thing else. One of the BARs ain’t workin’ no more, and Bailey’s ankle is either busted or sprained real bad. We gotta find either battalion or regiment, Milo.”