Monte Cassino Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the turret, but the turret hatch fell forward and he remained hanging there. The flames leaped across his uniform, caught in his hair and he half rose up, screaming, desperately trying to put the flames out with his bare hands. More flames shot up through the turret; he held his hands to his face, where they slowly charred. Then he disappeared into the glowing interior of his tank.
    A suffocating smell of burned flesh reached us. Someone swung a mine to throw it at us--but he never did. He was crushed beneath the tracks.
    A group of infantry squeezed back against a wall in the naive hope we might not see them. Heide laughed wickedly. His forward machine gun chattered and they collapsed one on top of the other with perforated stomachs.
    A soldier cook was running across the open space of the square, hoping to hide behind one of the four burning Shermans, but a short spatter from the turret MG stopped him as though he had run into a wall. He clapped his hands to his head and gave a loud, piercing shriek, his helmet rolled on across the dusty square; he spun half round, then collapsed with a kick or two. A Sherman came bursting out from some bushes. Two 8.8 armour-piercing shells bored into it and it blew up with an ear-splitting explosion. Its turret was flung high into the air to descend with a whine to bury the long muzzle of its gun deep into the ground.
    Another Sherman appeared. A direct hit knocked its turret off and flung it into a house. We could see right into the tank. There was only the lower part of the commander's body left, for he had been shorn through the middle. The remains of the loader hung there caught between the breech and the shellracks.
    Mike's tank, which had two heavy flamethrowers mounted on the turret, burned up a group of infantry. Though some put their hands up in surrender, they died beneath our tracks, for tanks can't take prisoners. The grinning death's-heads on our lapels were well suited to our arm.
    And so it was all over and not one of them had escaped. We had surprised them as completely as a few hours before they had surprised our infantry. We had had our revenge.
    Jumping out, we pushed our goggles up onto our foreheads, went to the drinking fountain in the square and drank and drank, tried to wipe some of the oil and powder off our faces. The acrid fumes in the air inside the tanks had made our eyes bloodshot; our throats and lungs smarted and breathing was painful.
    Some terrified survivors emerged and stared at us. One of them knew a word or two of German.
    "Nicht schiessen, Kamerad. Wir nicht Juden, nicht Japsen. Wir von Texas. Wir O.K."
    A few minutes later we were chatting away, showing each other pictures, exchanging souvenirs, beginning to laugh together. We had lost one man: the gunner in Leutnant Herbert's tank. The hatches had been shut tight and it had not been noticed that the ventilator had shorted. The gasses had suffocated him. We also had two wounded: one was Feldwebel Schmidt, the commander of 531 tank who had bent down to pick his map off the bottom of the turret just as the gun recoiled smashing his right arm to pulp. A couple of needle-sharp bits of bone struck out from his shoulder.
    One of the American prisoners, a medical orderly, gave him a blood transfusion beside the drinking fountain, while we stood round watching. It was most interesting. Feldwebel Schmidt was lucky; for him the war was over, but if the American had not been there with his transportable blood bank, Schmidt would have been dead.
    The other wounded man was one of the loaders, who was relatively new. He had been hit in the lung by a pistol bullet. His tank commander, Oberfeldwebel Brett, had been loading his pistol, when it had gone off and hit the loader.
    We hid the American who gave Schmidt the blood transfusion, a corporal from Lubbock, from the unit which came round collecting prisoners. Four days later we took him in a tank to within a few yards of the American position and let him jump