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First published in Great Britain in 2018
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA
Text copyright © 2018 by Michael Grant
First e-book edition 2018
ISBN 978 1 4052 7388 6
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1656 7
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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To all the real soldier girls.
“Today we rule Germany, tomorrow, the world!”
—Adolf Hitler
“And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I’d shoot a snake!”
—General George S. Patton
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: D-DAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
LETTERS SENT
PART TWO: PARIS
19
PART THREE: HÜRTGEN FOREST
20
21
22
23
PART FOUR: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
LETTERS SENT
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
PART FIVE: THE CAMPS
31
32
PART SIX: VICTORY
LETTERS SENT
33
INTERSTITIAL
PART SEVEN: AFTER
34
35
OBITUARIES
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IMAGE LIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Back series promotional page
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1944.
World War II has raged in Europe for five long years, but the tide has turned decisively in favor of the Allies. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, the western part of the Soviet Union and North Africa have all been occupied at one time, but now the edges of the Nazi Reich are being rolled up.
In Italy, Hitler’s clownish Fascist henchman, Benito Mussolini, has been overthrown. Pro-Nazi governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and parts of Yugoslavia are looking for ways to make peace with the Allies. The Nazis are out of North Africa and southern Italy.
The Soviet Union is ruled by the paranoid monster Joseph Stalin. Having once made a treacherous peace with Hitler allowing the Soviets to stab Finland and Poland in the back, Stalin then found himself betrayed in turn by Hitler. Ignoring a peace agreement between them, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, inflicting unspeakable brutality on Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians and, of course, above all, the Jews.
But the Soviet Union has proven to be too big a meal for Hitler to swallow. The Nazis have been turned back at Stalingrad and Leningrad, forced to flee after the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, and are now retreating with a vengeful Soviet Red Army hot on their heels.
From June 25, 1940, and the surrender of France, to June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Great Britain, her Commonwealth and her Empire stood alone against the Nazi tidal wave. With British cities being bombed by the Luftwaffe, and British shipping largely at the bottom of the Atlantic, cut off, hungry and alone, Britain still stood, the indomitable hero of the western world.
But after Hitler’s ally, Japan, attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the great, sleeping giant across the sea finally awoke. The United States of America, which had till then limited itself to supplying material aid to Britain, was all at once, overnight, fully engaged in the war.
America’s not-so-secret weapon was its productive capacity. By 1944 the USA was producing 96,000 warplanes per year, more than ten planes each hour in a twenty-four-hour day. In the total war effort, American industry produced 110 aircraft carriers, 41,000 cannon, 100,000 tanks, 310,000 aircraft, 12,500,000 rifles, and 41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition.
It also raised, trained and equipped a military that by 1944 numbered nearly 12 million soldiers, sailors and marines.
The world waited as the Americans put on a poor show in North Africa and became bogged down in Italy under ineffectual generals. America’s allies granted the genius of American war production, but they doubted the fighting spirit, grit, determination and competence of American soldiers, from Eisenhower down to the private in a foxhole.
The Americans faced the ultimate test: leading a fractious, suspicious coalition of British, Canadian, Australian, Free French and Free Polish forces to invade and liberate Europe, and to destroy Hitler’s evil regime.
The Nazis were no longer advancing, but the Nazi empire was very far from beaten. New German weapons, the V1 cruise missile, the V2 ballistic missile, the world’s first jet fighter, the Me 262, and the massive Tiger tank were coming online.
Now on the defensive, the superbly-equipped, experienced, well-trained, well-generaled and dug-in German army, the Wehrmacht, and its brutal and fanatical counterpart, the Waffen SS, were fighting to save the Nazi regime and their Fatherland.
The Nazi beast cornered was at its most dangerous.
Between D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the German surrender, on May 7, 1945, 125,000 American GIs—more than 350 per day—would die bringing freedom to western Europe and destroying the greatest evil humanity had ever faced.
PROLOGUE
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945
There’s a story going round, Gentle Reader, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but supposedly a guy heard it from a German POW. The story is that the first Allied bomb dropped on Berlin killed an elephant in the zoo.
I guess I’m sorry for the elephant, but that sort of sums up the way it goes in war. There’s no moral sense to it. Sure, one side may be better than the other, I mean, I was at Buchenwald. No one needs to convince me the Nazis are evil. But what I mean is that in the day-today of it death and destruction do not rain down on the bad and spare the good. Death does not care whether you’re a bright and sparkly hero or a yellow coward. Death doesn’t know you, or care to know you. You’re just the poor dumb bastard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re just that elephant.
The philosophy of the combat soldier in a nutshell: you’re gonna die. Might be today, might be tomorrow, might be fifty years from now all safe and snug in your bed. But when your number is up, your number is up. And that might be in three . . . two . . . Bang!
Do I sound like a weary old veteran? A sweet young slip of a girl like me? Shall I blush?
When this all started, when the US of A got into this war, and the Supreme Court decided what the hell, let’s send women too, everyone wondered what effect it would have.
Could women fight? My girl Rio has a shiny Silver Star, a fistful of Purple Hearts, and a notched M1 that say yes.
Could the men fight alongside women or would the simple creatures be too distracted by feminine curves? Well, I once spent a long night in a hole with Luther Geer, who has never been a gentleman, but he is a good soldier, and he never even made a pass at me. Possibly he was distracted by the artillery barrage coming down on our heads. Possibly it was that I hadn’t showered in . . . God only knows how long; you’d have to ask my fleas. We were not a man and a woman in that hole, we were two scared little babies screaming and cursing and so cold we were grateful for the warmth of our own piss running down our legs.
It was not a romantic evening.
And people wondered what it would do to us afterward, to us ‘Soldier Girls.’ Would we lose all our feminine attributes? Would we become mannish?
Stupid question. Women don’t stop being women, and men don’t stop being men. Both of us, men and women, become an entirely new creature: the combat soldier. You don’t recognize combat soldiers by legs or breasts or the hidden bits; you recognize them by their eyes. Maybe a civilian wouldn’t spot it, but we always will. We are our own separate tribe. We know things. And we are none of us, men or women, the people we started out being.
Sorry, Gentle Reader, I’ve been prosing on and I should be sticking to the story. It’s just that as bad as North Africa and Sicily were, as miserable and brutal and pointless as Italy was, what comes next I am afraid will defeat my meager talents as a writer. I don’t know quite how to explain Omaha Beach, or the bocage country, or the bloody goddamned forests they call the Hürtgen and the Eifel. And Shakespeare himself could not do justice to Buchenwald or Dachau.
Sorry.
I guess you can’t tell, but for a minute there I couldn’t type. Maybe it was more than a minute. I suppose it must have been a while longer because one of my pals here in the hospital came up and for no reason laid her hand on my shoulder and that’s when I realized I’d been crying.
There are things in my head, pictures and sounds and smells . . . I did not need to know these things, Gentle Reader. I could have lived my life and never known, but now I do, and perhaps it’s perverse of me, but I’m passing those terrible things along to you.
Not very nice of me, really.
Maybe that’s why the old guys, the veterans from the first war, don’t talk much. Maybe they don’t want to inflict it all on unsuspecting civilians. Maybe they are kinder than I am. But I figure you deserve the truth.
Here’s some truth: I once shot an SS prisoner in the throat. He was begging for his life, half dead from hunger and cold. He only had one boot and the other foot was black from some combination of trench foot and frostbite. And I put a carbine round right through his Nazi throat. I could have shot him in the head, but I wanted him to have a few seconds to reflect on the fact that he was going to die.
You don’t approve, Gentle Reader? Are you tut-tutting and shaking your head? You would never do that? Oh? Were you there in the Hürtgen? Were you there on Elsenborn Ridge? No? Then with the greatest respect I have to tell you that your moral opinion means nothing to me. My judges are the filthy, freezing, starving men and women who were there with me. Come with me to the beach and the bocage and the forests, Gentle Reader, spend a few days, and then render your judgment.
Well, enough of that. Tell that story when it’s time. Wipe your eyes and keep typing, old girl.
Time is short. They’re shipping me out soon, back to the land of Coca-Cola and Cadillacs, and I need to finish this story. At night I read bits of it to some of the other guys and gals here. We drink the hooch smuggled in by our buddies outside, and we chain-smoke, and we don’t say much because there isn’t much to say.
This last part of my story begins with the most long-awaited battle ever.
For long years the Nazi bastards had been killing people in Europe. Doing things, and not just at the camps, things that . . . Well, you’ll see. Let me just say that anyone who says G2 aren’t real soldiers, I’ll introduce you to Rainy Schulterman. She may be in intelligence, not combat, but she’s a soldier that girl. She told me some things.
Where was I? Right, reminding you that we were still mostly new to this war. Everyone had been at it longer than we had, we were the new kids at school, but everyone knew we were the biggest new kid they’d ever seen. Before D-Day the war in the west had been mostly Britain and its Commonwealth.
After D-Day it was our war.
Every eye on the planet was turned toward us. From presidents and dictators, to car salesmen and apprentice shoe-makers, from Ike up in his plush HQ down to the lost little children with helmets on their heads and guns in their hands, the whole world held its breath.
D-Day. June 6, 1944. On that day many still doubted the American soldier.
By June 7, no one did.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground.
Our Home Fronts have given us a superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your devotion to duty and skill in battle.
We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)
1
LUPÉ CAMACHO—CAMP WORTHING (SOUTH), HAMPSHIRE, UK
“Camacho comma Gooda . . . Goo-ada . . . Gooa-loopy?” Sergeant Fred “Bonemaker” Bonner does not speak Spanish.
Camacho comma Guadalupé, age nineteen, cringes and glances left and right down the line of soldiers as if one of them can tell her whether or not to attempt to correct the sergeant.
But there are no answers in the blank faces staring forward.
“It’s Guadalupé, Sergeant!” she blurts suddenly. “But you can . . .”
She had been about to say that he can call her Lupé. As in Loo-pay. And then it occurred to her that old, gray-haired, fat, bent, red-nosed sergeants with many stripes on their uniform sleeves do not always want to chat about nicknames with privates.
The Bonemaker turns his weary eyes on her and says, “This here is the American army, not the Messican army, honey. If I say it’s Gooa-loopy, it’s Gooa-loopy. Now, whatever the hell your name is, get on the truck and get the hell out of here.”
Guadalupé starts to go but Bonemaker yells, “Take your paperwork. I didn’t fill these forms out for nothing!”
Lupé takes the papers—there are several carbon sheets stapled together—and rushes to the truck. Or at least rushes as fast as she can with her duffel over one shoulder, her rucksack on her back with the straps cutting into her shoulders, a webbing belt festooned with canteen and ammo pouches, and her M1 Garand rifle.
She heaves her gear over the tailgate of an open deuce-and-a-half truck and struggles to get up and over the side herself until one of the half dozen soldiers already aboard offers her a hand.
She slumps heavily onto one of the two inward-facing benches. She nods politely and is met with faces that are not so much hostile as they are preoccupied by nervousness and uncertainty. That she understands perfectly.
She is only five foot five, tall enough she figures. She has black hair cut very short, the sort of dark eyes that seem always to be squinting to look into the distance, a broad face that no one would describe as pretty, and dark, sun-tanned hands and forearms marked with lighter-toned old scars from barbed wire, branding irons, horse bites and even a pair of tiny punctures from an irritable rattlesnake.
Guadalupé has had a mere thirteen weeks of basic training from an Arizonan sergeant who had precisely zero affection for ‘wetbacks,’ and who, as far as Lupé could tell, had no direct experience of anything war-related. Just the same, she was not a standout at basic, and to Lupé that was a victory. Lupé does not want to be here at this replacement depot, or in any other army facility, especially not in England getting ready for the invasion everyone says is finally coming.
Her only outstanding quality at basic had been her endurance. She had grown up on a ranch in southern Utah, a family-worked ranch. She started riding horses at age three, learned to accurately throw a lasso by age five, and by age twelve was doing about ninety percent of a full-grown ranch hand’s work. Plus showing up for school most if not all of the time.
But Lupé has another talent which did not come out during training. She’d shot an eight-point mule deer buck right through the heart when she was nine at a distance of three hundred yards. She’d killed a cougar with a shot her father advised her not to take because it was near-impossible.
Guadalupé Camacho could shoot.
In fact, she shot well enough to consistently fail to qualify with the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine while making it look as if she were trying her best. She failed because she did not wish to go to war and shoot anyone, and she was worried that had she shown any ability she would be shipped off to the war. So on the firing range she amused herself by terrifying instructors with near-misses and general, but carefully-played incompetence.
It turned out not to matter. The pressure was on to move as many recruits as possible to the war in Europe, so Lupé was marked qualified with the M1 Garand, the M1 carbine, the Thompson submachine gun and the Browning automatic rifle—the light machine gun known as the BAR. She had in fact never even fired the Thompson, and with the BAR she legitimately could not hit much of anything—it was nothing like a hunting rifle—but various sergeants stamped various documents and thus she was qualified.
Stamp, stamp, staple, staple, and it was off to war for Guadalupé Camacho, Private, US Army.
Lupé had been drafted very much against her will. She was not a coward, nor lacking in patriotism, but she was needed at home. She had already missed the spring round-up, and if she didn’t get out of the army and back to Utah she would miss the drive up to the Ogden railhead. It was to be an old-fashioned cattle drive this year—trucks, truck tires, truck spare parts and most of all truck fuel were hard to come by. You could buy everything on the black market, but Lupé’s father simply did not do things like that. Besides, Lupé knew, he’d been pining for the days of his youth when cowboys still occasionally ran cattle the old-fashioned way. So her father, looking younger than he had in twenty years, had decided to do it with horses and ropes and camping out under the stars, bringing some extra hands up from below the border—Mexican citizens not being subject to the rapacious needs of the US military.
Lupé felt she was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.
She looks around her now, trying not to be obvious, sizing up the others in the truck. Five men, one woman. The woman draws her eye: she is an elegant-looking white woman with blonde hair and high cheekbones and an expression like a blank brick wall. Closed off. Shut up tight.
The only one who returns her gaze is a cheerful-looking man, or boy really, with red hair and a complexion that would have doomed him out under the pitiless sun of the prairie. He is gangly, with knees so knobby they look like softballs stuffed into his trousers. He has long, delicate fingers unmarked by scars or callouses.
Not the sort of man she’s been raised around. The men she knows are Mexican or colored or Indian for the most part, compact, quiet, leathery men who can go days without speaking more than six words. Cowboys. Men whose list of personal possessions started with a well-worn saddle and ended with a sweat-stained hat. Some also owned a Bible and/or a Book of Mormon, because Guadalupé’s father was a Latter-Day Saint and he tended to hire fellow Mormons on the theory that they were less likely to get rip-roaring drunk. They were also less likely to get ideas about his young daughter.
Guadalupé’s mother had died of the fever shortly after her birth. Her father, Pedro, who everyone called either Pete or Boss or (behind his back) One-Eyed Pete, was determined to raise his daughter to be a proper lady.
A proper lady who could rope, throw and tie a two-hundred-pound calf in thirteen seconds. Not exactly rodeo time, but quick just the same. A proper lady who could cook beans and rice for twenty men and laugh along as they farted. A proper lady who could string wire, castrate a bull calf, cut a horn, or lay on a branding iron.
Now instead of putting her skills and talents to work, Lupé sits in the back of a truck beneath a threatening British sky being eyeballed by a city boy with red hair and a happy grin.
The truck lurches off, rattling through the hectic camp, weaving through disorganized gaggles of soldiers and daredevil jeeps before heading out into the English countryside.
“Hey,” the redhead says.
“Me?”
“What are you, some kind of Injun?”
Lupé blinks. “No.”
“What are you then?”