For Malice and Mercy, page 50
“Oh. Do we know how long that will be?”
“The War Department will notify you as soon as possible.”
Mr. Bailey looked at his wife, who covered her face with her other hand. His heart shuddered in his chest, seeing her in such anguish.
The chaplain continued, “You can also expect to hear from the War Department about Chester’s death benefit. Your son had signed up for the National Service Life Insurance program, and they will discuss the details with you.”
“Thank you. That’s very helpful.”
For almost a half-hour, the Baileys talked about Chester, about his good nature, his athletic ability, how he loved to dance with Billie. The chaplain listened. Then the conversation went silent for an uncomfortable minute.
“Um. Would you like us to stay? Will you both be okay, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey?”
She looked up at her husband, and he reached for her other hand to help her to her feet.
The chaplain asked again, “Will you be alright if we leave?”
She wiped her eyes and gave a pained smile.
“I wish we could have met under different circumstances,” the officer explained. “We wish you all the best during this very difficult time and hope you will find peace and healing very soon.”
Mr. Bailey walked the two officers to the door and watched as they drove away.
The word of Chester’s death spread fast throughout the community. The neighbors watched the Army’s car, a rare sight in rural Huntsville, following it to the Bailey’s driveway. As soon as the officer and chaplain drove away, people from all over the valley came to their door.
“It’s not right,” they said to each other, shaking their heads. “It’s not fair for this to happen to such a happy-go-lucky kid like him.” To his parents, they offered smiles and condolences. The entire town walked about with gray faces and slow, forgetful strides, like something was missing from them.
Grandma Russell called Ella, who cried herself to sleep that night. How could she write this news in a letter to Hank? Should she wait to tell him? What about Billie? What should she say to her?
A week after the official visit, the Baileys received a letter postmarked with “Fifth Marine Division Headquarters,” from Chester’s commanding general, Major General Keller E. Rockey.
Mr. & Mrs. Richard Bailey
Huntsville, Utah
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bailey.
It is with the greatest regret that I write to confirm the Adjutant General’s telegram regarding your son, Pharmacist Mate Third Class Chester Bailey, who died in combat against the enemy at Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands.
The sadness and distress caused by his sacrifice is fully realized here among his brothers-in-arms, and I hope the knowledge that he died in the act of saving another man’s life will, in some measure, alleviate your pain at his passing. He died instantly and with minimal suffering.
Eyewitnesses confirm that he and his platoon were attacked by a series of enemy hand-grenades. Chester heroically ejected several live grenades that landed near him. When two grenades simultaneously landed near his feet, he threw himself on the grenades in the supreme act of self-sacrifice.
Those whose lives he saved will forever be in Chester’s debt. He was a true hero who went above and beyond in the performance of his duty.
His remains rest in the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery, Plot 2, Row 17, Grave 138, on Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands. A burial rite was conducted by the chaplains in charge, in accordance with your son’s faith. A formal memorial service was held with full military honors.
As a result of ongoing efforts to defeat Japan within the Pacific theater of operations, along with other circumstances outside the control of the War Department, unfortunately, it is still not known when his remains will be repatriated.
Nonetheless, the unconquerable spirit of your son Chester, his bravery, and indomitable soul, will forever be an inspiration to the men of the Corps. May the courage he demonstrated comfort you in the days ahead.
On behalf of myself and his comrades, I convey my most heartfelt condolences, and wish to extend to you our best wishes for the future.
Major General Keller E. Rockey
Commanding General, 5th Marine Division.
They read the letter in silence. Mrs. Bailey finished and pushed it away from her, taking a slow, deep breath.
Mr. Bailey folded it, like any piece of mail, and said, “I’ll tell the bishop not to make any plans for a memorial service.”
She went to the window and pulled away the drapes, standing back to look at the red silk banner. The gold star shone with fresh, newly sewn stitches. Mrs. Bailey set to scrubbing the windows inside and out, the better to see the monument to her son’s memory in the clear polished glass. N31
Chapter 71
March 26, 1945
Kronberg im Taunus, Germany
Karl did not hear from the examiner for days, or could it have been weeks? He wasn’t sure. His captors let him out once a day to use the toilet, sometimes supporting him by the elbows when he stumbled from his cell. They spoke only a few words to him, but even in the darkness, he learned to recognize each one by the smallest grunt or the tread of his footsteps. The guards would lead him back to his cell, and that short outing was Karl’s only marker to measure the passing of time.
He wasn’t sure if he was the lone prisoner in the hotel. In the beginning, he had heard faint stirring in other cells, but as time went on, he called out for anyone to respond and heard only silence in return. He hadn’t noticed when they left, wondering if they were ever there at all.
The first explosion sounded to Karl like thunder, a weak, far-away rumbling that caught his ear. They grew louder as the days passed. With each boom, the walls trembled, and dust rested on his head as the ceiling crumbled from overhead. At that moment he realized the truth: The Allies were coming.
For the first time, he bowed his head in thanks that his cell was underground.
The guards’ daily visits grew more and more tense, with shoves and barking commands as if the advancing enemy were somehow his fault. One day the guard threw open his cell door. “You will be examined early in the morning. You must be ready.” The door slammed shut.
When sleep wore on Karl’s mind, and his eyelids drooped, he let himself fall into a light slumber. He wasn’t about to exhaust himself again, waiting for an examination that never came. They could wake him up, if they arrived. He let himself fall into a deep sleep.
But in the morning, they did wake him. The guards dragged him from his bed, bringing him, foggy-brained and dizzy, to his feet. He followed them upstairs, passing a window in the hall that showed darkness outside. They left him in a dark room, closing the door behind them. Karl patted the furniture with his hands until he found a chair, the same one he’d sat in before. He sank into its cushioned seat. With the curtains drawn tight over the windows, no reflection or glow from the streetlights filtered into the room. He couldn’t be sure he was alone, though after being in solitary confinement for so long, the silence of isolation had heightened his sense of hearing. He steadied his breathing, making it low and quiet beneath any other possible noise.
Between one inhale and exhale, he caught the tread of footsteps. Voices murmured through the walls, from the room next to his. He held his breath. Had they said the word “retreat”? His heart pounded as fast as it dared in his weakened state. There it was. He heard it crisp and harsh in the German tongue, “Americans, British.”
The urgency in their voices told him more than the words themselves. The tide of the war was changing, but against whom? Were the Germans retreating or the Allies?
He was listening so intently that the sound of the door opening startled him. The Gestapo officer flipped on the light and leveled an annoyed glare at Karl.
“You know why you are still here?”
Karl put his hands on his lap. “Is my wife still here?”
“Your wife is dead. She admitted to being a member of the underground, communicating with the enemy, and passing along coded messages.”
Karl didn’t hear the rest of what he said. Accusations of Karl’s crimes against Germany, feeble attempts to get him to confess to something, anything. Everything faded away as his heart echoed in his ears. How long had she been gone? Had he been singing hymns and reciting verses to a Marta who wasn’t there?
He squeezed his curled fist three times, and he knew: Marta would never confess to something untrue, even under such torture as he had endured.
”You’re lying,” he blurted. “My wife isn’t dead.”
The officer stopped speaking, the next syllable still on his lips. He raised his hand. In the next moment, pain exploded in Karl’s jaw and his eyes smarted.
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody. I swear.” Karl’s voice cracked as a sob wrenched all remaining strength away from his words. “I am only trying to help people,” he cried. “I just wanted to help.”
“Stop your blubbering. You disgust me.”
Karl rubbed the side of his head and answered, “People are hungry. We knew they would need food over the winter.”
“You are telling me that you planted hundreds of pounds of potatoes, risking that you would draw our attention, because you…”
The floor beneath them rumbled, and the windowpanes rattled. The officer gripped the edge of his seat, tilting his head to listen, eyes turned to the ceiling as dust fell from the light fixture. His gaze darted over the room, no longer seeing Karl.
Three explosions blasted somewhere outside. Karl winced and covered his ears with his palms, certain the bombs fell just outside their room. The officer jumped from his desk and yelled for the guard outside the door. “Take him back to his cell.” He darted out of the room. His hurried footsteps could be heard despite the ringing in Karl’s ears.
Karl craned his neck around to stare after the officer, frowning. The door did not fall shut behind him, and the hushed tones of the guards outside could be heard, although diffused and muffled by the distant explosions.
Minutes later, a guard came in to escort Karl down the stairs.
Before he closed Karl’s cell door, he shoved a tin plate of food across the floor. “This is your meal. We are finished with you.”
The door slammed with a metallic echo, the lock clicking into place. The weight of the guard’s words carried a strange finality, a feeling that sank into Karl’s gut. The guard hurried back up the stairs.
Odd, he thought. They usually remained downstairs to maintain order and keep the prisoners from talking to each other…if there even were other prisoners. A sense of dread tingled down his limbs, and his hands trembled.
“Hello! Is there anybody in here?”
Silence, yawning out before him in the pitch blackness.
“Please, anybody!” he yelled. “Are you here? Is anyone here?”
Panic rose in his throat. Had he been left alone to die?
From above, a door opened and boots thudded on the stairs.
Karl shouted again, “Help, is anyone—”
“Shut up, or I’ll put you out of your misery!”
Relief flooded his chest, and his breathing returned to normal. He curled up on his bed and drifted off to sleep.
He woke again, hours later, by more explosions, even closer than before. But these were different, without the same hiss as they fell from the sky. A flurry of artillery rounds flew, hitting the ground and buildings and everything in between. The entire building trembled.
Karl leaped from his bed and pounded the door with his fist. The iron creaked and groaned, joining in the chorus of rumbles from overhead. “Please help! Anyone!”
For twenty minutes, he screamed for help. Then he stopped. He needed to save his energy. They were gone for good, and now he was alone with little to eat or drink.
Chapter 72
March 15, 1945
Stalag 17-B, Krems-Gneixendorf, Austria
A Kriegie spotted the railroad cars full of Red Cross packages, smoke from the engines swirling into the sky. The organized work detail of Kriegies unloaded the contents, but as they stood in line watching the guard’s rifle through the boxes, their hopeful faces fell.
“What are the chances any of these packages have anything left in them?” Hank was asked by another prisoner.
“Who knows?” Hank was too tired to even look at him.
“Last time our package was filled with garbage. The guards ate everything and put it all back in to make it look like it was new.”
The prison hospital overflowed with sick, starving men. Hank had heard of a few men who went blind from malnutrition, and others who were so weakened they didn’t care whether they lived or died.
Hank continued trying to eavesdrop on conversations between guards. As the threat of German defeat loomed, their care with keeping their conversations quiet soon gave way to indifference. They spoke loudly, the chatter overlapping and bouncing just like any conversation, not the deliberate hushed tones of sharing secrets. He came upon the guards easily, slinking around between barracks and stopping just far enough away not to be seen.
“Will you do it?” one asked.
“If that’s the order, I guess I’ll have no choice,” the other replied, a note of concern in his voice.
“Have you heard an official order?” the first one asked.
“No, just the stuff on the radio from Hitler.”
“So, it’s coming directly from Hitler?”
“That’s what Oberst Kuhn said.”
The guard paused to contemplate his dilemma. “They’ll shoot me if I don’t do it.”
“I know,” the other replied. “But maybe the American Army will be here before they make us do it. We’re supposed to kill them all before they get here.”
Hank’s knees weakened. He ran, legs tired and stumbling, to the White House.
Kurtenbach looked on at Hank in disbelief.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Clear as day,” Hank replied. “Hitler ordered that all American prisoners had to be shot.”
Kurtenbach sent out an order to each barrack to devise a plan to resist. “Figure out what you can do,” he said. “Even if it’s rushing the gates en masse; someone’s bound to get through before they can shoot us all,” he said.
Ted Ross, the barrack’s chief, called all the Kriegies from Hank’s barracks together. “We’re not going to go down without a fight. As soon as we’re near any guard who’s pointing a rifle at us, we work together to attack and get his weapon,” he explained. “We can create a lot of havoc if we can somehow get a weapon.”
Conversation erupted among the men. “How are we going to overtake a guard?” someone shouted. “We’re too weak. We’re too slow.”
“We’ll gang up on them,” another replied. “I say we all just rush them at roll call. They won’t know what hit them.”
“That’s stupid,” someone else snapped. “You’ll get us all killed.”
With men shouting and arguing with each other, Ross called the meeting to a quick end. The Kriegies’ nerves were on edge, watching the guards’ every move. They feared the guards could open fire at any moment.
The days dragged on and nothing happened, but like a finger poised on the trigger, the Kriegies tensed more and more with paranoia. Some men cracked under the pressure, kicking and screaming nonsense until they were taken to the hospital.
On March 26, the clandestine crystal radio set picked up a news report. Patton’s Third Army had crossed the Rhine River, and the Russians were advancing from the south. The Kriegies looked at each other with a fear in their eyes so bright they saw nothing else. Would the Americans arrive at Stalag 17 before the Germans began shooting?
Chapter 73
March 25, 1945
Kronberg im Taunus, Germany
Karl was left alone in his cell for three days. At least, that’s how long he estimated he had been there, since he could only deduce the time of day from the sound of vehicles passing by on the street in front of the hotel.
He had run out of food. What little he had stored under his mattress was gone. The slice of bread he was given just before the Gestapo abandoned the hotel was savored to the last morsel. He rationed his ersatz coffee to one sip, twice a day. Each day that passed, the coffee receded, disappearing as fast as his hope of any chance he’d be rescued.
At times he forgot which wall faced the door. He would feel around the cold, concrete walls with the palms of his hand until he felt a hinge or the doorknob. Then he would laugh at himself for caring where the door was. But curling his hand around the doorknob, like he would his own front door at home, brought reality closer when his frayed thoughts tried to push it away.
He still heard someone crying for help; though as the days passed, children’s anguished voices replaced Marta’s. When they echoed in his ear, he spoke louder to keep them quiet. “How would anyone ever find me? I’m in a hotel that has no military significance. Why on earth would anyone come here?” He paused to think. “Maybe the Americans know this place was being used by Gestapo? But then again, how would they know? Maybe some of the locals are curious to see if the Gestapo left anything behind? What if the hotel owners decide to come back and retake the property after the war?”
He sang when he could find the strength. Hymns and German patriotic songs resounded off the bare walls. To keep order, he kept the bucket used for his toilet in the corner farthest from the door, as far from his bed as he could put it. In the corner closest to the door, he stored his valuable cup of coffee. It was in the opposite corner of the toilet bucket to keep it from spilling as he paced the short distance from wall to wall.
On his sixth day, Karl woke feeling a new burst of energy. “I’ve got to keep my blood moving, to stay alert!”
