Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends by William Guarnere

Author:William Guarnere [Guarnere, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101207574
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

BABE

One night at the end of October we moved to an area closer to Arnhem where they told us we’d be out of the elements. My squad was positioned in a barn with no roof, so it wasn’t exactly out of the elements. We were relieving B Company, we always relieved B Company, and when we got to the barn, there was this big dead kraut lying there. He was about six-foot-four, black uniform—he was SS. He was lying next to a dead cow. A kid from B Company said, “You should’ve been here last night, we had a party.” The story was, the SS officer followed the rope down to CP, where Welsh was. They were all sitting on boxes, so you floated in the water. The kraut walked in by himself and said in perfect English, “Put your hands up, you are now prisoners of the German Reich, the barn is surrounded.” One of B Company’s forward observers was sitting in the corner, and drew his pistol, and shot the kraut in the head. They all started fighting over his Luger, and the forward observer got it. Meanwhile, the kraut’s squad heard the gunshot and took off back to their lines, so the B Company guys threw the dead kraut next to a dead cow. Someone said, “He was an animal, that’s where he belongs.” We all concurred.

The German lines weren’t far away, and our barn was in a spot where, if the krauts attacked from their position on the dike, we could put up enough resistance for the rest of the platoon to get a counterattack ready. The morning after we got there, a German soldier stood up out of his foxhole, and faced our lines and put his thumb to his nose, grabbed his middle, like he was laughing, and waved. I thought, Well, there’s a fresh son of a bitch! The next morning, same thing. The morning after that, we had two British snipers sent to our line to take him out. They set up positions twelve hundred yards away, he did his nose-thumbing thing, and they shot, and missed! He was too far away and too well dug in. A sergeant with the 377 Para Artillery that was attached to us devised a plan to get rid of him. He said “I’ll have a surprise for him tomorrow morning.” Next morning, the kraut stood up and did his thing. The sergeant picked up a phone, called in the coordinates, and said, “Fire,” and shells flew over our heads. They gave him what they call “air burst.” The shell blew before it hit the ground and took the German soldier with it. We were all hooting and hollering. Let’s just say you could find that kraut up in Scranton “spreading the news.” We have a law in combat: If you’re a wise guy, you’re on your own.

At night, in the barn, we crawled into bins full of hay to get some sleep. You went in feetfirst, with your head out, so you could see.

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