George Elford - Devil's Guard

The base must have been only one of many similar bases established along the Red Highway. It included permanent huts where the arriving troops or coolies could rest for a while before resuming their long walk south.

Despite the difficult approach, Krebitz had identified nine storage shelters which contained hundreds of bulky bales, jute bags, and wooden crates. He had also observed brisk traffic in the area. Viet Minh units arrived or departed at about six-hour intervals, even at nighttime. Among them were armed troops and coolies who drove heavily laden bullock carts or pushed bikes. Still others transported crates suspended from long poles shouldered by four or six men.

Xuey had wanted to infiltrate the base alone. There were so many strangers in and about the place that he thought he would be in no danger while mingling with the enemy. Then the downpour had started and Xuey had come down with fever and the pain in his abdomen.

Sergeant Zeisl was sure of his diagnosis of appendicitis. “I don’t think I am mistaken,” he said.

“What are his chances?” Schulze wanted to know, much depressed by the unexpected calamity.

Zeisl shook his head slowly. “Without an operation— none at all, Erich. The antibiotic will slow down the infection but Xuey should be on the operating table very soon.”

“How soon?”

“Within twenty-four hours at the most.”

Xuey dozed off into a restless sleep and we huddled under the narrow burlap, trying to decide what to do.

“We are certainly having it all right,” Riedl fumed. “And it had to happen right now… What do you want to do about Xuey, Hans?” He was looking at me as though fearing my answer in advance.

“What do you want me to do, Helmut?” I asked him in turn.

He flicked away his cigarette butt and ran a nervous hand through his dripping hair. “We just can’t watch the poor devil die.”

“We should call for a copter,” Schulze suggested.

“Call a copter?” Sergeant Krebitz chuckled. “Sharks might fly in this downpour but nothing on wings, Erich.”

“Copters have no wings,” he sulked. “Xuey is too good a buddy to let him die like this.”

“Besides we might need him in the future,” Riedl added gloomily.

I was already considering that possibility. Whether the army would be willing to risk craft and crew on such a mission remained to be seen. Besides could the pilot find us in the pouring rain with visibility almost zero? “We are very close to the enemy base. They will hear the copter coming in,” Krebitz remarked.

“No, not in this rain,” Erich insisted. “You wouldn’t hear a thirty-two-centimeter shell exploding two hundred yards from here.”

“The rain might stop at any time.”

“We could move Xuey a few miles from here and guide the copter to a safer place.”

“That we might try,” Krebitz agreed.

“If they will send a copter at all,” I remarked.

“Colonel Houssong will send one,” said Riedl. “He would never let us down.”

I turned to Corporal Altreiter. “Will the radio work, Horst?” He shrugged. “One can always try.”

“Try it then—” And so we decided to do something for Xuey that we had seldom done for our own kind…

Twenty minutes later our signals were answered and my message went through. A copter was to take off within an hour and we could expect it to arrive in three hours. I chose to transport Xuey to a barren ridge four miles away. It was a devilish undertaking in the pouring rain. The stretcher bearers had to ford swollen streams and climb slippery elevations where every instant landslides or tumbling trees threatened to wipe out the group. Eight men of Gruppe Drei volunteered for the perilous trip, and they had to start immediately if they were to reach the ridge before dark.

We agreed to transmit a steady radio beam which the copter could “ride” to within a few miles of our camp, then Sergeant Krebitz was to take over with walkie-talkies.

I wrote a short but informative report to Colonel Houssong, in German. The colonel did not understand German, but neither did the Viet Minh. If my report, written in French, fell into enemy hands the consequences would be immediate. The German text would always provide us with time to do whatever there was to be done. The guerrilla commanders had no immediate means of learning the implications of a message in German.

In this respect, however, 1 underestimated the Viet Minh. A few months later we learned that for over six months three German nationals from the Soviet Zone had been attached to the Viet Minh High Command. Their principal task was to keep track of our communications and to evaluate our activities in general. The three German Communists had often been to the field, sometimes quite close to places which we had actually attacked and badly mauled. Knowing us well, the Viet Minh had been extremely careful not to allow them into any dangerous areas but since our movements were, in most cases, unknown to the enemy, their precautionary measures had been quite useless. It was only sheer luck that prevented our treacherous “compatriots” from falling into our hands on two occasions. From the interrogation of prisoners we learned that we had missed by only three miles the turncoat camp at Muong Bo. On another occasion, they had been among the thirty-four survivors who escaped Pfirstenhammer’s flamethrower attack on a small Viet Minh camp south of Cao Bang, an action in which over a hundred terrorists had perished. It would have given us immense pleasure to entertain those envoys of Walter Ulbricht. Erich nicknamed them “the ratpack of Pan-kow” and we loathed them even more than we hated the Viet Minh.

We had bad luck with our Communist counterparts but we did manage to capture a Soviet instructor in 1950; according to his papers he was Major Senganov. His interrogation led to the capture of one more Russian “adviser” and two high-ranking Chinese officers in a tunnel system two miles away. After questioning, the Chinese were shot out of hand. I was about to call for a copter to ferry our illustrious Russian guests back to Hanoi when Erich quietly remarked that we should not place Colonel Houssong and his superiors in an impossible position.

“Not even Paris,” he reasoned, “can hold the Ivans and at a word from Stalin they will be given a first-class air ticket back to Moscow.”

Indeed, with the Berlin blockade still fresh in the postwar history, the incident could easily trigger another crisis with unforeseen consequences. “The moment the French High Command knows about the Russians, their hands will be bound by Paris and in the end we are going to pay for it,” he explained. I accepted his reasoning.

We executed the Russians in a cave which Sergeant Krebitz then blasted shut. Seven months later, when we passed the place again, the fallen boulders and earth were already overgrown with vegetation, erasing all traces of the secret tomb. When told of the incident, Colonel Houssong’s only comment was a relieved “dieu merci.”

“You cannot imagine what would have happened if you had brought them in,” he said and requested us to erase the place from our maps—even the footpath that led to the one-time cave.

The men of Gruppe Drei improvised a stretcher and lay the dozing Xuey on it. Schulze covered him with a burlap, which he then fastened to the primitive contraption with a couple of belts. “The sedative will keep him asleep for a while,” Sergeant ZeisI told me. “Let’s hope he gets to Hanoi all right.”

We shook hands with Sergeant Krebitz. “The hills are going to be slippery. Take care!”

“Don’t worry,” he replied, wiping the rain from his face. “If we cannot climb, we are going to swim them. There is enough water in the hills to float a raft between the peaks.”