George Elford - Devil's Guard

Although we did not dare approach too close to the jungle road, my prolonged efforts to gather intelligence had not been without results. We had spent considerable time in surveying the surrounding country, and Schulze had drawn a map of the area about five miles on either side of the Red Highway. Curiously enough it was the only accurate map ever made of the district. It was truly amazing to see how the uniform landscape, indicated on the regular maps only as forested hill-tracts, resolved itself into individual hills, valleys, ravines, and streams, revealing the vital details without which it would have been very difficult to plan an attack.

Even without Noy’s report we soon agreed that a direct assault on the base should not be attempted. There were too many hidden machine guns along the road and at the foot of the hills. The eight emplacements which had been spotted by Xuey and Krebitz were likely to be only a fraction of the total number of guns deployed near the Viet Minh lifeline.

The base, however, did have its Achilles” heel. Like most of the other terrorist bases in the jungle, this one, designed to accommodate several hundred people, had been constructed at a permanent water source. A small river, about twelve feet wide, ran through the compound and this became the focal point of our attention.

Erich, who had surveyed the hills farther westward, boldly suggested that we should cut the flow of the river by blasting a dam across a deep ravine further up, about a mile and a half from our jungle hideout.

From his map case, Schulze extracted a diagram and unfolded it on the ground between us. “You know that I would never insist on doing something based only on guesswork,” he said. “I surveyed the ravine with Krebitz, calculating as accurately as possible without the proper instruments. We agreed that the blast should bring down enough rubble to form a block in the ravine from fourteen to sixteen meters high.”

He glanced up. “That is the size of a five-story building, Hans.”

“Carry on.”

“I believe a temporary reservoir is going to form right here.”

He ran his pencil across a section of his diagram. “It will be six hundred meters long and twelve meters wide. When full, the ravine could hold one hundred and twenty thousand tons of water.”

“Do you think your barrage can stand the pressure?”

“I can’t say that,” Erich admitted, “but that’s unimportant. When the pressure reaches the critical level the rubble is going to burst.”

He looked at me triumphantly. “Now what do you think will happen when all that water rushes downhill? It will swamp the entire rathole.”

“And a long section of the road as well,” Krebitz added.

“The water in the ravine flows at a rate of approximately seven tons per minute, Hans,” Schulze continued. “Our reservoir should fill up within thirty-six hours. Since we intend to blast during a thunderstorm, the downpour will probably cut that time by half.”

“How did you calculate that rate of seven tons per minute, Erich?” I asked, casually examining his diagram.

“It was very simple,” he replied with a grin. “We built a one-meter by one-meter crate with a sliding door opening upward, sank it in the river, opened the door, and measured the seconds it took to fill.”

“You did that, eh?”

“Sure, Hans. A one-by-one crate holds exactly one ton of water,” he went on explanatorily. “The crate filled to capacity in six seconds. The width of the ravine could accommodate twelve similar crates—which would come to one hundred and twenty tons per minute or seven thousand and two hundred tons of water per hour and so on.”

“And so on,” I nodded, quite overwhelmed by Erich’s rapid display of mathematics.

“What do you think of it?” he asked me.

I was actually thinking that one could not lose a war with companions like Erich Schulze. But I reserved final judgment until after I had seen the site myself.

Leaving the camp to Riedl and taking only twenty men along with Schulze and Krebitz, I set out for the hills. Schulze and his party had already cut a path to the ravine, so we traveled light. Even so it took us almost four hours to cover the five miles between the camp and the ravine.

The jungle appeared so peaceful it was hard to believe that it belonged to a ravaged country, where men had endeavored to exterminate their fellowmen for over a decade, with still no peace in sight. Now with the terrain wide open before us, Erich explained his plan again in detail. I found it plausible. Although Sergeant Krebitz hastened to emphasize that it might be some time before Schulze’s plan could be realized, we remained enthusiastic about the idea. Riedl’s expedition, Sergeant Krebitz reminded us, might take a week or ten days. The mining of the ravine would also require three days of hard work and when all was ready we would have to wait until a thunderstorm came.

How long that waiting would be, no one could foretell. Our dependence on the caprice of Mother Nature was the only kink in Erich’s ingenious scheme. But then, we had been searching for the Red Highway for many months. And as long as our supplies lasted, we never lacked patience. I would prefer to strike a month later and preserve the lives of my men than embark on a premature attack only to suffer casualties.

Every day small three-man patrols kept the jungle road under observation. Their reports invariably said that Viet Minh units were on the move—armed guerrillas and Dang Cong coolies. Then to our immense relief the girls returned and from their excited account I deduced that the base was indeed a major one. Apart from tons of ammunition and weapons, foodstuffs enough to sustain several regiments and five hundred bicycles had also been stored there. Bicycles were the principal transport vehicles of the Viet Minh. The quantity of material which the terrorists could load onto bicycles and transport for hundreds of miles bordered on the incredible. A three-hundred-pound load on a flimsy bike was quite common for the coolies to manage. Of course they had to walk, guiding the bike by an extra long handlebar.

There were consistently five to six hundred people in the base, Noy said. Around the compound were trenches with machine guns. “You cannot get close,” the little nurse insisted. “Every path is covered and the forest is mined.”

For two days the girls had worked with a group of women carrying ammunition boxes into underground shelters. “We go down seventeen wooden steps into a cellar,” Thi explained. “Twelve cellars full to ceiling.”

I asked them about the crates and bales which we had previously observed in stored open sheds. “Many sheds have rice, salted fish in them. Others store bullets and bicycle tires,” Noy stated.

The next morning Riedl and his men departed. Noy went along with Helmut. Sergeant Krebitz and fifty troops moved to the ravine and began to prepare the blasting site. Schulze, Suoi, Corporal Altreiter, and a platoon went to prepare the site where we intended to ambush the terrorist working party. Erich selected over fifty concealed positions where machine guns and flamethrowers could be deployed to our advantage, covering not only the ravine but also the escape routes.

“We are not going to wait for the pressure to burst the barrage. It would be too chancy,” Sergeant Krebitz informed me two days later. Using watertight containers, Gruppe Drei planted fifty pounds of high explosive in the ravine. “The charges will be buried under the rubble,” Krebitz said, “ready to blast the barrage at the right moment.”

Our sojourn in the woods soon became a trial. To be on the move is relaxing but to hide in the woods so close to the enemy, keeping quiet, doing nothing but watching and waiting is exasperating. The men were terribly bored. Their activities were severely restricted. There was no loud talking, no laughing, no unnecessary walking about, for even the crackling of the dry branches could have alerted a terrorist outpost, the closest of which had been detected by Krebitz barely a mile from where we camped. Fires were naturally out and our spirit cubes were insufficient for cooking a decent meal of sweet potatoes, rice, and meat. Small hunting and fishing parties, however, were constantly making forays farther west, where the silencer-equipped rifles could be used. Game was plentiful in the area. In eight days our hunting parties bagged five boars, two deer, and over a hundred jungle fowl. We weren’t choosy about our meals and consumed practically everything that moved and had flesh. Hedgehogs, monkeys, snakes, and monitor lizards also belonged to our regular diet. Reptiles, as a matter of fact, taste very good and their flesh is quite tender.