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christopher@30seconds.org
The attack was coordinated the night before under some scrub brush in a little ditch by the side of the road to Rosmalen. It was a little village, typical of the Dutch countryside. It held a Church, some shops, a row of houses, and was surrounded by farmland.
The two soldiers looked over the area and talked about what areas they thought to be occupied by the Germans. The belfry, that row of shops, definitely an AT gun by the church, type unknown. Both soldiers had fought from Normandy. Both new what to expect. One was a tanker, the other infantry. It was the first time they'd met, and it would probably be the last. If death didn't separate them the shear size of the war would.
The two went opposite directions in the darkness and everything was set for first light the following morning.
The jumping off point had been a thin line of woods and the troop had teamed up there with some Cromwells just before the advance. By the time it was done the troop had lost one Crocodile, seen a Cromwell brew up, taken out the AT gun, and row of houses, ending up on the other side of the village attaching keepers to the damaged tracks of their bullet riddled Crocodile.
Casualties had been light, the advance slow, and for the first time since Normandy the advance stopped long enough for the Croc's crew to survey the order of battle.
They traced backward through the village. All off them had heard screams, but from the inside of a Crocodile, always moving forward, directions and feelings are vague. Isolated. A crew outside the tank is a crew horribly exposed, and out of place. Tankers are not the infantry. Rosmalen proved that.
The AT gun was crushed. The charred bodies were naked except for their boots and helmets. They lay spread in a slit trench where the Crocodile's flame thrower had caught and covered them with fiery liquid that couldn't be shaken off.
Back at the refueling area the soldier who had crouched in the ditch the night before was impatiently waiting for his 400 gallons of pasty, white, flame fuel to be dumped into the trailer on his Croc. He smelled cordite. Tasted the fuel in the back of his throat. He wanted to move. And soon...
The above is a true account of an early morning attack on the village of Rosmalen, west of Nijmegen, just off the road Hertogenbosch. Autumn, 1944. It is my take on the events via the soldier in the ditch, Capt. Andrew Wilson.
I skipped a lot as his own personal account is much too long to get into here. Bear in mind the above is not fiction. It happened. The reason I even bring it up at all is the last few lines in Wilson's own account, which I will quote. Keep in mind his tank was damaged. He and his crew could have remained out of the field long enough to get left in the rear. Wilson said no. The last exchange between Wilson and his flame-gunner is key.
"'What did you go and do that for?' said Randall. 'We could have been here till tomorrow.'
Wilson didn't answer. Even if he had wished to answer, he couldn't have explained what the sight of those bodies at Rosmalen meant--that either one threw up everything and made one's protest, or else did everything more thoroughly and conscientiously than ever before, so that there was no time to think."
(Capt. Andrew Wilson)
goodnight 7.11.98
