George Elford - Devil's Guard

“I know,” he admitted. “I saw them dying. They died horribly.”

He asked for another cigarette. Schulze gave him a whole pack. The man broke four matches trying to light his cigarette.

“Is there an ambush in the making as well?” Erich asked.

“No, not immediately. The men are farther up in the hills. But they could not remove the bombs anyway. The Viet Minh will attack only after the bombs have exploded. I know a bypass,” Tan Hwan added after a pause. “Will you still set me free?”

“You are free! I am going to give you a pass to Hanoi.”

“I don’t want to go to Hanoi. I am going to Saigon. No one knows me there.”

“Where is your family?”

“I have no family. The Japanese killed them.”

“We will get you to Saigon, Tan Hwan.”

We had to cover up his sudden defection, and I knew the best way of doing it. I told Schulze to escort Tan Hwan farther down the road where he could board the tank without being seen by his companions or the civilians. I drew my revolver. “Now yell!” I told him. “Yell as loud as you can… Long live Ho Chi Minh… Down with the French colonialists.”

As he yelled, I fired five bullets into the woods. “Now you won’t have to be afraid of any Viet Minh revenge, Tan Hwan,” I told him as I reloaded my gun. “Cheer up! You have just been executed. Old Ho might even give you a posthumous medal.”

“Come!” Erich urged him and the two walked down the road. I returned to the convoy. The two other guerrillas had already been returned to the tank turret. I ordered them removed to truck eleven.

They had seen us marching off with Tan Hwan, had heard the yells and the five shots. Now they saw me returning without their companion. “You shot him!” one of the captives yelled at me. “You killed him in cold blood… Remember this day, officer… Remember this day.”

The man cursed all the way back along the convoy, lamenting the fate of the “martyred” Tan Hwan.

Mounting the tank, I called Pfirstenhammer in the troop carrier. “Karl, you stay put with the convoy for about five minutes, then follow us.”

“O.K., Hans!” Driving on with the tank we picked up Schulze and Tan Hwan. Similar tricks had worked well in occupied Russia where we used to “execute” a large number of turncoats every day, especially for the benefit of their families still living in the shadow of Stalin and the secret police.

Forward! Tan Hwan was as good as his word. He showed us the bypass, a cleverly arranged diversion through a dry, shallow ravine. But we could not leave that deadly booby-trapped section of road behind for other troops to fall into. Tan Hwan had already mentioned that the guerrilla camp was farther up in the hills and that the enemy was waiting for the explosions before attacking the convoy.

It did not take long for us to prepare a counter-trap. Leaving the convoy in the sheltered ravine we hauled ten large gasoline drums and a few ammo cases onto the road. At a safe distance, Riedl parked two trucks at awkward angles, one of them with its front wheels in a ditch, with its doors and windows wide open. The vehicles appeared to be broken down and abandoned. The tank was driven partly off the road, its turret turned around with the gun pointing against a tree barely five feet from the muzzle. Around the tank and the vehicles we planted a few oily rags and dumped some diesel oil on the ground.

Not far from the trap a narrow footpath ran up towards the hills, the path of the terrorists. “They should be coming down on that path,” Tan Hwan explained. “When they hear the explosions, they won’t be long. There is no other way for them to come.”

Taking a hundred men from the convoy we proceeded to establish a ring of steel about the place. Schulze and thirty headhunters took care of the path. Pfirstenhammer, with two platoons carrying light machine guns and flamethrowers, went down the road to seal the escape route toward Yen Bay. Eisner and forty men deployed on the far side of the “abandoned” vehicles, between the road and the ravine. Riedl remained in charge of the convoy and I stayed in the tank with Tan Hwan, the driver, and the two gunners.

I called to my companions in German. We never spoke French on the wireless. Everyone was ready.

Eisner fired a short burst into the gasoline drums. They burst into flame and began to explode, setting off the ammo crates; in a matter of seconds the place looked like hell, with thick black smoke rising above the woods. Ten minutes later Schulze radioed: “They are coming, Hans!”

“Let them pass!” I signaled to Eisner, who thereupon sent a couple of men to set fire to the rags which had been scattered near the vehicles. The scene was indeed very realistic. Everything on the road seemed to be afire. “They are passing now,” Schulze reported again. “About two hundred of them.”

“Hold your fire, Erich,” I warned him. “It is damned difficult,” he replied in a subdued voice. “We could kick them in the ass.”

I closed the turret hatch down to a few inches to permit observation and soon saw the first batch of guerrillas spilling from the bushes, swarming onto the road. “Xung! Phong!” they screamed. “Forward! Kill!” The “dead” tank suddenly came to life. Backing onto the road, we began to fire point-blank into the terrified mob. Eisner and his machine gunners began to play their own music and from the trail Schulze closed in with guns blazing. We had the enemy in the bag.

On the road a few dozen terrorists had already fallen, others had dropped beside the road, wounded or dying. Realizing that they had run into a trap, the guerrilla commander wanted to withdraw but bumped into Schulze’s outfit. Turning toward the ravine, they were beaten back by Eisner’s machine gunners. On the road, Pfirstenhammer’s platoon was pushing them back with MG’s and flamethrowers spitting fifty-foot flames. It was massacre.

The enemy had only one way to flee—through the booby-trapped patch of forest, a bit of real estate which I cheerfully permitted them to have. About seventy of the survivors now began to throw away their weapons. We stopped firing at them but kept the flamethrowers working, pushing the demoralized mob farther back on the road, step by step into their own trap with the bamboo bombs and God knows what else. They would either run or get roasted.

The trap did the rest. A quarter of an hour later we could still hear explosions and death cries coming from the woods.

Climbing from the turret, I heard a sudden blast inside the tank. Dropping back inside I saw Tan Hwan falling from his seat, blood oozing from his head. Somehow he had gotten hold of our driver’s gun and had shot himself in a moment of anguish. He was our only casualty.

The convoy arrived at its destination. Not only a few trucks but the whole convoy. The Viet Minh had begun to know us in the way we wanted them to know our battalion.

Bomb for bomb! Bullet for bullet! Murder for murder! They had enjoyed many years of unpunished rampaging. We were resolved to put an end to it. We were determined to make their lives a prolonged cry of agony.We succeeded.

Colonel Simon Houssong was a calm and considerate officer who seldom lost his temper. But the extermination of a battalion under the command of Captain Arnold Lorilleaux must have hurt him deeply. Apart from having been a much-decorated officer of the Second World War, the unfortunate captain had also been a brother-in-law of the colonel.

It was well after midnight when he sent a corporal to request my immediate attendance. “The colonel is in his office,” the corporal informed me. “He hasn’t left his desk tonight, except to get another bottle. He’s been drinking all evening.”