“How the Mighty” Chapter 7— Rudi

Two Men: One Sergeant

May the odds be even

Gefreiter Schmitt turned away. Clearly he wasn’t going to get his fresh milk if Rudi hadn’t brought it with him, and the smell of cowshit wasn’t going to vanish until Rudi took a bath, and that wasn’t going to happen in the middle of a battle.

“Look at that,” he exclaimed in wonder. “There’s not that many ships in the whole Kriegsmarine!”

“So why aren’t you shooting at them?” Rudi asked. “You know your duty.”

“Right,” Schmitt replied, firing the machine-gun out into the bay. “We kill the enemy on the beach and save the Fatherland. Meanwhile, the Russians have been pushing us backwards since Stalingrad.”

“My father was at Stalingrad,” Rudi said.

“Ja, and did he get out?”

Rudi shook his head. Nobody had gotten out. A whole army, gone.

“I was at Kursk,” Schmitt went on, “and we were supposed to save the Fatherland there. Some bloody Cossack shot out one of my lungs, and as a result, we went nowhere. If I lose the other lung here, the war is over!”

Rudi shrugged. Schmitt wasn’t big on logic.

“The General says we can beat them, and we will beat them,” he said. “So that’s what we do.”

That was logic, right there.

Schmitt squirted off another burst, not bothering to aim.

“I’ve heard that before. Look, you do the counting. How many ships out there?”

Rudi surveyed the armada filling the bay. It was a lot. “I don’t know. Five hundred, a thousand, a million?”

“There’s a hundred of the little ones on the beach right now. And more lines coming, all the way out. There’s what, twenty, thirty enemy in each boat, and look, when they get out, the boat goes back for more. Every line of boats has more enemy than there are German soldiers here. We might be worth ten of them, even cripples like me, but if they don’t stop coming, they will win. Just like the Russians.”

“But what else can we do but our duty?”

“That bastard Bock will shoot us if we do anything else, so there’s no point arguing about it. And if he doesn’t, those bastards will when they get here. I’m going to keep my head down and not get it shot off, simple as that.”

Rudi wasn’t sure if this was the correct way to fight a crucial battle, but Schmitt had seen combat and he hadn’t, so there was that to it.

Schmitt had his head well over the rim of their Ringstände for the time being, however, so Rudi joined him in looking out at the spectacle. Every few seconds Schmitt sent a burst of bullets down to the beach, and there were enough enemy staggering around that every now and then he would hit one.

“Good work!” Feldwebel Bock appeared from the underground trench, automatically ducking his head as he entered. He handed Rudi a fresh belt of machine gun ammunition. “How are you for grenades?”

“We have a bag full,” Schmitt said, indicating.

“You’ll need more if they get through the mines,” Bock said. “Come, soldat, leave the veteran to his job and be a packhorse for me.”

Rudi followed Bock out and ran after him along the trench. At the end of the lane a truck waited, two soldiers unloading boxes.

“Take some grenades to Schmitt, and then the mortar rounds to the mortar pit. Two boxes at a time. Schnell!”

Rudi eyed the growing pile.

Bock caught his look. “The mortar men are busy killing Americans. Your job is to help. When that pile is gone, take some more belts to Schmitt and make sure he doesn’t run out. Run!”

Rudi ran. So, the Americans were here. Of course. They had turtles on their heads. The British had soup bowls. And he had…

Nothing. Shit. It must still be in that ditch. He had better keep his head down, hey?

As it turned out, fewer Germans than Americans died at Omaha Beach. For one thing, there were about ten times as many Americans.

The Germans, acting on Hitler’s orders, tried to defend strongly everywhere, and as a result were spread thinly.

It cannot have been too difficult a calculation for the defenders, on viewing the thousand ships arriving out of the dawn, that they were unlikely to do more than delay the inevitable.

Russia had been a steady retreat since Stalingrad over a year earlier. The final German offensive in the East at Kursk had failed to make progress and had done little but destroy vast amounts of tanks and troops on both sides.

The Russians were able to replace their losses and keep moving. The Germans, not so much.

The Axis had been kicked out of North Africa, Sicily, and were in the process of losing Italy. In fact, the Italian government had surrendered in 1943, and the Germans were fighting alone to retain their occupied territory.

Few, apart from Hitler and his Nazis, retained much hope of victory in 1944. It was now a matter of doing the best they could.

The Americans had been pursuing a policy of treating captured Germans well, and made sure that their POWs wrote back home reporting the comfortable conditions, generous rations, and easy life.

For many of the defenders at Omaha, it would be fair to say that they were not interested in fighting to the bitter end. If they could somehow swing a victory, that would be great, but if the Americans broke through the thin line of defence, then there was little prospect of anything other than a series of defensive battles before being pushed back to Berlin.

Perhaps one’s duty lay in surviving the war, rather than dying for a lost cause, and if survival meant a diet of steak and ice cream and idleness in America, well, so be it.

Britni

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