The Ten Thousand (44 page)
While it could be easily argued that there was no comparing the two, wounded personnel and disabled vehicles, the dedication of the officers and soldiers in the maintenance units to the accomplishment of their duties is no less real and pressing than that of their counterparts in the medical units.
While Ilvanich and his rangers worked to clear the corps’ line of march, the personnel of the 553rd Field Hospital prepared for another night of aimless wandering. Hilary Cole was charged that night with supervising the transfer of three Tenth Corps soldiers injured in traffic accidents over to the Germans.
Leading the stretcher bearers carrying the wounded personnel from the ward tent of their field hospital set up in the parking lot of a German civilian hospital into the emergency room of the German hospital, Cole pondered the wisdom of leaving Americans behind. Though all three Americans had sustained internal injuries in separate incidents that required a recovery period of rest and care that a moving field hospital could not provide, the idea of leaving fellow countrymen in the hands of “The Enemy” bothered Cole.
Leading the small parade of litter bearers and wounded, Cole was greeted by a German nurse whose English was about as bad as Cole’s German was. The German nurse, an older heavy-set woman with a round face and dressed in an immaculate white uniform, was seated behind a counter when Cole and her charges entered. After shouting out something in German to Cole that she did not understand, the German nurse stared at Cole for several seconds, looking her up and down with obvious disdain. Cole, like everyone else in her unit, had been unable to take proper care of herself or her personal needs.
Moving about in what had appeared to her and the other nurses of the 553rd to be a totally random fashion, without ever knowing where they were going or when they would get there, unable to fully set up their hospital and the living areas for the staff, left Cole looking and feeling miserable, dirty, and haggard.
Realizing that everyone in the hospital was staring at them, half unsure what to do and half disgusted, Cole decided that she needed to assert herself. As much as she hated the idea of leaving her wounded here in the hands of foreigners, she knew in her heart that it was the right thing to do. The fact that she couldn’t even properly care for herself made her realize how foolish it would be to saddle the 553rd with severely injured soldiers. When it became obvious that the Germans were not going to make the first move, Cole motioned for the stretcher bearers to set the wounded down, took off her helmet, and walked over to the counter where the big German nurse sat. Though she suspected that the German nurse wouldn’t understand the words, Cole hoped that she would understand the meaning. Supplemented with motions of her hand, Cole tried to explain who she was and what they were there for. “I am a nurse.
Those soldiers are injured and we cannot take them with us. We have an arrangement with your hospital to leave them. Who do I see to make the transfer?”
There was at first no sign of comprehension on the German nurse’s face. She just sat there staring at Cole while Cole went about pointing at the wounded and talking. After a pause of several seconds, during which Cole became convinced that she had totally failed to communicate, the German nurse stood up and called for another nurse. A thin young nurse, her long blond hair pulled back and secured in a neat tight bun, who had been standing off to one side watching and listening, came up next to Cole and introduced herself. “I am Marie. The head nurse doesn’t speak English, so I will assist you.”
The smile on Marie’s face caused Cole to relax. “Where can I take my patients? They are, I’m afraid, in the way where they are, and it’s not a good idea to leave them for long near the doors. Drafts and all, you know.”
Marie nodded and smiled. “Yes, yes, we know. If you would have your stretcher bearers pick up the injured, I’ll take you to an examination room. Our doctors would like to examine them themselves and have them cleaned up before we send them to the wards and begin treatment.”
Cole blushed slightly in embarrassment. “I am so sorry that they are not in better shape. We’re very hard pressed to tend to even the most basic needs. These are hard times for us.”
Marie glanced over at the big German nurse as she leaned, closer to Cole. “Yes, I know,” she whispered. “These are hard times for all of us. Her son,” Marie said while nodding toward the big German nurse, “is a soldier with the 2nd Panzer Division. But don’t worry. She is a good nurse, and your soldiers will be well cared for, just like our own.”
The look in Marie’s eyes, her efforts to ease Cole’s concern, and the smile on her face told Cole that it would be all right, that she was doing the right thing. After thanking Marie for her kind words, Cole signaled the stretcher bearers to pick up the wounded and follow Marie. For the first time in days, Cole felt that something she was doing made sense. Perhaps, she thought, things weren’t as bad as they had seemed. Perhaps, she thought, this would all work out in the end.
Within easy walking distance of the hospital where Cole was transferring her charges over to the Germans, men and women of the Tenth Corps’ G-2 counterintelligence section were doing their part to blind or at least confuse German intelligence. Their current task of keeping German intelligence from gathering all the information that it needed to form a complete and accurate picture of where the Tenth Corps was and what it was up to at first seemed impossible.
The Tenth Corps was, after all, moving through the heart of Germany. Even in those towns and villages that dotted the corps’ route of march with great regularity, where the populace supported the American efforts through noninterference, there were always a few who were outraged by what they called “the rape of our homeland by the foreign invaders.” Together with local police officials dedicated to their duties, this network of informers provided the German intelligence agencies, both military and civilian, with a wealth of information. The Tenth Corps policy of noninterference with civilian property and operations seemed to aid this, since no efforts were made to cut the civilian phone system or hinder the movement of German civilian police. Even mail deliveries were still being carried out with great regularity between what was now referred to by Chancellor Ruff as occupied Germany and the rest of the nation.
Knowing full well that they would be unable to hide even the smallest piece of the corps from German eyes, the corps operations officer and intelligence officer decided that their deception plan would capitalize on this free flow of information. A special corps counterintelligence section formed a detachment manned by American personnel fluent in German as well as some trusted Germans, collectively known as the Valkyrie. This detachment, using a master deception plan drawn up by corps, used the same system and format utilized by the regular German informers to insert volumes of misinformation into the German intelligence system in an effort to both mislead the Germans and to discredit genuine information. By providing information that ranged from very nearly accurate to wild exaggerations, the Valkyrie matched the manner and the nature of the reports coming in from real informers who were zealous but untrained, and thus were indistinguishable from the real German information sources.
To assist this active program, a passive deception plan was also carried out corpswide. All distinctive unit markings and vehicle identification numbers and patches were removed from vehicles, equipment, and uniforms. In selected cases, however, some numbers were left on, while in other cases some numbers were changed to reflect a different unit. To totally confuse the Germans, and encourage the discounting of reports from real informers, some of the false unit markings placed on vehicles were those of units still stationed in the United States. So even if a real informer reported that a tank company rolled through his village at such and such a time headed in such and such a direction, the intelligence officer in Berlin would have to discount that report when the informer added that two of the vehicles had bumper numbers showing the tanks belonged to 1st Battalion, 32nd Armor, a tank battalion stationed at Fort Hood, Texas.
Inundated with masses of reports whose reliability was becoming more and more suspect, the German Army began to turn to its own intelligence-gathering efforts. Like tiny tentacles, air and ground reconnaissance elements crept forward in advance of the German combat units. Some of the recon units were very circumspect, relying on stealth and caution to close with and gather information on American forces. The techniques and methods used by German armored reconnaissance or
Panzeraufklärung
units ranged from the conventional to the artistic. One German cavalry sergeant, finding an ideal spot from which to observe a major north-south highway near Fulda, buried his eight-wheeled Luchs armored reconnaissance vehicle in a farmer’s dungheap up to the turret ring and smeared the turret with dung.
Only the keen eye of an American soldier who noticed an antenna waving gently in the breeze above the dungheap gave the German away.
Other German reconnaissance units were quite open and bold in their efforts. Taking advantage of the ambiguousness of the confrontation and the fact that no one had yet fired a shot, it was not unusual to see German Luchs armored cars parked on hilltops or right in the middle of a road, their crews sitting up on the turret roof as they counted the American vehicles that went by. In these cases, American vehicles with smoke generators, when available, were dispatched to pull up close to the German vehicles and then turn on their smoke generators. Depending on the mood of the American sergeant commanding the smoke-generating vehicle, the smokescreen was used to block the Germans’ view or actually blow right across the German reconnaissance vehicle. This, of course, made it necessary for the German vehicle to move, which in turn caused the American smoke-generating vehicle to follow. Hal Cerro, watching one such pursuit with Scott Dixon, commented that it was like watching a cat run around with a can of rocks tied to its tail. Dixon, ever the realist, pointed out that this cat had big claws and sharp teeth that eventually it would use when it tired of these antics.
In support of the ground and air reconnaissance effort, units of the German Army responsible for gathering signal intelligence, called “sigint’’ for short, scanned the airwaves in search of units of the Tenth Corps. When a Tenth Corps radio was activated and its signal detected by a German Army signal intelligence unit, the Germans could eavesdrop on the conversation if it was not encrypted in an effort to find out what type of unit was making the transmission, what their situation was, and who they were talking to. If the signal was encrypted, then the Germans could at least locate the transmitter through a technique known as “resection” and, with this information available, create a picture of unit locations to confirm or deny information provided by informers. If all else failed, the Germans always had the option of jamming the American radio frequencies in use or recording the transmitters’ locations for targeting at a later date.
To further hinder the reconnaissance efforts of the German Army, the Tenth Corps operations plan called for the bulk of the corps’ movement to take place during periods of limited visibility. Since the son set in central Germany before five in the afternoon during January and didn’t come up again until after seven in the morning, the corps had plenty of darkness to operate with. Use of multiple routes, including countless logging and farm trails that ran through Germany like tiny capillaries through the human body, aided in confusing the Germans.
Darkness and fog, however, could not hide radio signals. In an effort similar to that of the Valkyrie informers, dummy headquarters were set up to simulate radio traffic of real headquarters. Consisting of three or four vehicles equipped with the same type of radios used by the real headquarters, these dummy headquarters moved about the Tenth Corps area in accordance with the Tenth Corps deception plan, the same used by the Valkyrie. While the real headquarters continued to move in radio-listening silence, using messengers or the German telephone system for communications, their dummy counterparts operated radio nets that normally would be used by the real headquarters. As they passed information back and forth, German signal intelligence units would track the dummy units, feeding that information into the German intelligence system. Of course, eventually most dummy headquarters were discovered for what they were. When the Americans were able to detect that a dummy headquarters had been compromised, those dummy headquarters were shut down and sent elsewhere to assume the identity of another headquarters, but not always. As an added twist, when everyone at Tenth Corps was sure that a dummy headquarters was in fact identified as one, the dummy headquarters was co-located with the real one. In this way, information provided by the German Army signal intelligence units claiming that a unit was a dummy actually discredited good solid information from other sources that identified the real headquarters and its associated units.
This war for information and intelligence that was being waged on the ground and in the airwaves over central Germany was not without its risks and costs. While flying back from the 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment’s forward command post in Fulda to the air squadron’s command post, Major Bob Messinger, the squadron operations officer, noticed movement that he thought was a helicopter off to his left. He ordered his pilot, Warrant Officer Three Larry Perkins, to come around so that he could get a better look. After searching the area for several seconds, Messinger saw what he was looking for. “See ‘em?
Do you see them over there to the left?”
Perkins, watching his altitude and speed with one eye, glanced over to where Messinger was pointing.
Finally, in the failing late-afternoon light, Perkins caught a glimpse of two German scout helicopters flying low and slow toward the west, side by side. “Oh, yeah. I see.” Then as an afterthought he added, “Tryin’
to be sneaky little devils, aren’t they?”