The Front Lines series

First published in Great Britain in 2017

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 © 2017 by Michael Grant

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 4052 7385 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1655 0

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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Dedicated to 1st Lt. Shaye Haver and Capt. Kristen Griest.

They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?

—Evelyn Waugh, 1939

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

PART I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

PART II: OPERATION HUSKY THE INVASION OF SICILY

JOURNALS AND LETTERS

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

INTERSTITIAL

PART III: OPERATION AVALANCHE THE INVASION OF ITALY

25

26

27

28

29

LETTERS

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

INTERSTITIAL

AUTHOR’S NOTE

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CREDITS

Back series promotional page

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1943.

Three great Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Italy’s Benito Mussolini began as Hitler’s mentor, but after failure upon failure it has become clear that Mussolini’s Italy lacks the resources and the will to fight effectively. The war in Europe will be fought between the Allies and Germany, with Mussolini more a hindrance than a help.

For too long Britain stood alone while the Soviet Union’s paranoid dictator, Stalin, purged his own army and worked backroom deals with the Nazis to seize Finland and divide Poland. But in one of the great mistakes of history, Hitler attacked Stalin. The Soviet Union’s vast size, terrible winter, and the astonishing courage and endurance of its people have proven too much, even for the Wehrmacht.

And now, thanks to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States of America is in the fight, bringing staggering industrial might and a military that will, in just a few short years, go from being a negligible force of 334,000 to a 12 million strong juggernaut.

In the Pacific, the US Marines have survived a protracted living nightmare on Guadalcanal. Japanese expansion is halted. Australia and New Zealand are safe, but China, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia still bleed under brutal Japanese occupation.

In Europe, the Soviet Red Army has fought the German Wehrmacht to a halt at Stalingrad. Hitler’s mad order allowing no retreat will lead to the death of a third of a million Germans and the surrender of 91,000 more. The greatest tank battle in history will be fought at a place called Kursk, and by dint of sheer numbers and steely determination, the Soviet T-34 tanks will beat the German panzers back.

London is still struggling to recover from the Blitz, and now German cities cringe beneath falling bombs. In Poland, the Jews who had been herded into the ghetto to be starved to death rise up against their Nazi oppressors and, despite great heroism, are exterminated.

The Americans, British, British Commonwealth, and Free French forces have pushed the Nazis out of North Africa. Benito Mussolini is weakened and discredited but not yet destroyed.

No one is certain about the next objective, including the Allied leadership.

The Germans have been bloodied, but Nazi Germany is very far from beaten. And in places called Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, the killing gas still flows and the ovens still burn hot.

PROLOGUE
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

Welcome back, Gentle Reader, welcome back to the war.

I’ve got quite a pile of typed pages now, quite a pile, and I’m not even a third of the way through. But I’ve already got some readers, some of the people here in this hospital with me, and, well, they’ve stopped complaining about me being up typing at all hours. So I guess I’ll keep at it.

I’m still not quite ready to tell you who I am. I’m not being coy or cute, I just find it easier to write about all of it, even my own part, as if it happened to someone else. And if I put myself forward you might start thinking of me as the hero of the story. I can’t allow that because I know better. I know who the heroes are, and who the heroes were, and I am neither. I’m just a shot-up GI sitting here typing and trying not to itch the wound on my chest which, dammit, feels like I’ve got a whole colony of ants in there. I suppose this means I’ll never be able to wear a bathing suit or a plunging neckline. That will bother me someday, but right now, looking around this ward at my fellow soldier girls, and at the soldier boys across the hall, I’m not feeling the urge to complain.

I hear civilians saying we’re all heroes, heard someone . . . was it Arthur Godfrey on Armed Forces Radio? I can’t recall, but it’s nonsense anyway. If everyone is a hero, then no one is. Others say everyone below ground is a hero, but a lot of those were just green kids who spent an hour or a day on the battlefield before standing up when they shouldn’t have, or stepping where they shouldn’t have stepped. If there’s something heroic about standing up to scratch your ass and having some Kraut sniper ventilate your head, I guess I don’t see it.

If by “hero,” you mean one of those soldiers who will follow an order to rush a Kraut machine gun or stuff a grenade in a tank hatch, well, that’s closer to meaning something. But the picture in your imagination, Gentle Reader, may not bear much similarity to reality. I knew a guy who did just that—jumped up on a Tiger tank and dropped a grenade (or was it two?) down the hatch. Blew the hell out of it out too. But he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his fiancée in the same batch of mail that informed him his brother had been killed. So I guess it was right on the line between heroism and suicide.

Don’t take me for a cynic, though; I am not cynical about bravery. There are some real heroes, some gold-plated heroes, here on this ward with me. There are still more lined up in rows beneath white crosses and Stars of David in Italy and France, Belgium, Holland . . . And some of them were friends of mine.

Oh boy, it’s hard to type once I get teary. Goddammit, I’ll just take a minute here. . .

Anyway, my feeling bad doesn’t raise any of those people from the grave.

They brought some wounded Krauts in today, four of them. They’re in a separate ward of course, but I saw them through the window, saw the ambulance, dusty olive green with a big red cross on its roof. It wasn’t easy to tell that they were Germans at first—they were more bandage than uniform—but even through the dingy window glass I could make out that one still had some medals pinned to his tunic. Not our medals. So I guess he was a hero too, just on the wrong side.

I hope the medals give that Kraut some comfort because he was missing both legs above the knee and his right hand was gone as well. I saw his face. He was a handsome fellow, movie star handsome, I thought, with a wide mouth and perfectly straight Aryan nose and dark, sunken eyes. I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the war, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye sockets.

No, not like animals, like GIs. There’s nothing a soldier knows better than squatting in the bottom of a hole. Cat Preeling wrote a poem about it, which I’ll probably mangle, but here’s what I recall:

Dig it deep and in you creep,

While all around there’s the boom-boom sound.

Mud to your knees while your buddy pees.

Another hole, like the hole before . . .

Yeah, that’s all I remember. It goes on for a couple dozen verses.

Anyway, I still type away at this battered old typewriter, and some of the girls come by and take a few pages to read when they’re tired of the magazines the USO gets us. They seldom talk to me about it; mostly they just read, and after a while they bring the pages back and maybe give me a nod. That’s my proof that I’m writing the truth because sure as hell I’d hear about it if I started writing nonsense. We soldier girls—sorry, I mean Warrior Women or American Amazons or whatever the hell the newspapers are calling us now—we’ve had about enough of people lying about us. The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves.

We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s ward over the question of which set of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brothers have done.

We won’t have either.

We women are a red flag to the traditionalists—which is to say 90 percent of the military. But as much as we don’t want to be, the truth is we’re a symbol to people who think it’s about time for women and coloreds too to stand equal. Woody Guthrie wrote that song about us. Count yourself lucky you can’t hear me singing it under my breath as I type.

Our boys are all a-fightin’ on land, sea, and air,

But say, some of them boys ain’t boys at all,

Why, some of those boys got pretty long hair.

It may surprise, but I can tell you all,

When it comes killin’ Nazis, our girls stand tall,

And Fascist supermen die every bit as fast,

From bullets fired by a tough little lass.

For our part, we sure as hell did not want to be a symbol of anything, though we did sort of like Woody’s song. We wanted exactly what every soldier who has ever fought a war in foreign lands wants: we wanted to go home. And if we couldn’t go home, then by God we wanted hot food, hot showers, cold beer, and to sleep in an actual bed for about a week solid.

But we’re just GIs, and no one gives a damn what a GI wants, male or female.

Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. Vicious little firefights you’ve never heard of and great battles whose names will echo down through history: Kasserine. Salerno. Monte Cassino. Anzio. D-Day. The Bulge. About all I missed was Anzio, and thank whatever mad god rules the lives of soldiers for keeping us out of that particular hell. There’s a woman here, a patient on the ward, who was a nurse at Anzio. All she ever does is stare at her hands and cry. Though the funny thing is, she can still play a pretty good game of gin rummy. Go figure.

Whatever the newspapers tell you, we women are neither weak sisters nor invincible Amazons. We’re just GIs doing our job, which after Kasserine we’d begun to figure out meant a single thing: killing Germans.

So, Gentle Reader, we come now to a period of time after Kasserine, when those truths were percolating inside us. We were coming to grips with what we were meant to do, what we were meant to be, what we had no choice but to become. We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only just begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.

It’s a hell of a thing when a person in that wonderful, trembling moment of readiness is suddenly yanked sharply away from everything they’ve ever known and is handed over to drill sergeants and platoon sergeants and officers.

“Ah, good, the youngster is learning that her purpose is to kill.”

Yeah, we figured that out, and we knew by then how to be good army privates. We could dig nice deep holes; we could follow orders. We knew how to unjam an M1, we knew to take care of our feet, we knew how to walk point on patrol. Mostly we knew what smart privates always figure out: stick close to your sergeant, because that’s your mama, your daddy, and your big brother all rolled into one.

But here’s one of the nasty little twists that come in war: if you don’t manage to get wounded or dead, they’ll promote you. And then, before you’re even close to ready, you are the sergeant. You’re the one the green kids are sticking to, and you’re the only thing keeping those fools alive. Right when you start to get good at following, they want you to lead.

Some of us made that leap, some didn’t. Not every good private makes a good sergeant.

But enough of all that; what about the war itself ? Shall I remind you where we were in the narrative, Gentle Reader?

After Kasserine, the army in its wisdom got General Frendendall the hell away from the shooting war, and it turned the mess over to General George Patton, “Old Blood-and-Guts.” He and his British counterpart, General Montgomery, finished off the exhausted remains of the German Afrika Korps and their Italian buddies and sent General Rommel back to Hitler to explain his failure.

Everyone knew North Africa had just been the first round; we knew we were moving on, but we didn’t know where to. Back to Britain to prepare for the final invasion? To Sardinia? Greece? The South of France? Being soldiers, we lived on scuttlebutt, none of it accurate.

Turned out the first answer was Sicily.

Sicily is a big, hot, dusty, stony, hard-hearted island that’s been conquered by just about every empire in the history of the Mediterranean: Athenians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Normans, you name it, and now it was our turn to conquer it. And damned if we didn’t just do it.

This is the story of three young women who fought in the greatest war in human history: Frangie Marr, an undersized colored girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma who loved animals; time after time she ran into the thick of the fight, not to kill but to save lives. Rainy Schulterman, a Jewish girl from New York City with a gift for languages and a ruthless determination to destroy Nazis. And Rio Richlin, an underage white farm girl from Northern California who could not manage her love life and never was quite sure why she was in this war, not until we reached the camps anyway, but she could sure kill the hell out of Krauts.

They didn’t win the war alone, those three, nor did the rest of us, but we all did our part and we didn’t disgrace ourselves or let our brothers and sisters down, which is all any soldier can aspire to.

That and getting home alive.

PART I

1
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“What was it like?” Jenou asks. “That first time? What did you feel?”

Rio Richlin sighs wearily.

Rio and Jenou Castain, best friends for almost their entire lives, lie face up on a moth-eaten green blanket spread over the hood of a burned-out German half-track, heads propped up against the slit windows, legs dangling down in front of the armor-covered radiator. The track is sleeker than the American version, lower in profile, normally a very useful vehicle. But this particular German half-track had been hit by a passing Spitfire some weeks earlier, so it is riddled with holes you could stick a thumb into. The bogie wheels driving the track are splayed out, and both tracks have been dragged off and are now in use as a relatively clean “sidewalk” leading to the HQ administrative tent.

The road might once have been indifferently paved, but has now been chewed to gravel by passing tanks, the ubiquitous deuce-and-a-half trucks, jeeps, half-tracks, bulldozers, and tanker trucks. It runs beside a vast field of reddish sand and loose gravel that now seems to have become something like a farm field with olive drab tents as its crop. The tents extend in long, neat rows made untidy by the way the tent sides have all been rolled up, revealing cots and sprawled GIs in sweat-soaked T-shirts and boxer shorts. Here and there are extinguished campfires, oil drums filled with debris, other oil drums shot full of holes and mounted on rickety platforms to make field showers, stacks of jerry cans, wooden crates, and pallets—some broken up to feed the fires.

The air smells of sweat, oil, smoke, cordite, and cigarettes, with just a hint of fried Spam. There are the constant rumbles and coughing roars of passing vehicles, and the multitude of sounds made by any large group of people, plus the outraged shouts of NCOs, curses and blasphemies, and more laughter than one might expect.

At the edge of the camp some men and one or two women are playing softball with bats, balls, and gloves assembled from family care packages. It’s possible that the rules of this game are not quite those of games played at Yankee Stadium, since there is some tripping and tackling going on.

Both Rio and Jenou wear their uniform trousers rolled up to above the knee, and sleeveless olive drab T-shirts. Cat Preeling, fifty feet away and playing a game of horseshoes with Tilo Suarez, is the only female GI with the nerve to strip down to bra and boxers. She’s a beefy girl with a cigarette hanging from her downturned mouth. Tilo, like many of the off-duty men, wears only his boxers and boots, showing off a taut, olive-complected body that Jenou would be watching much more closely if only Tilo were six inches taller.

The bra and boxers look is a bit too daring for Rio and Jenou, but Cat seems to have a way of deflecting unwanted male attention, like she’s wearing a sign that reads: Don’t bother. Even the ever-amorous Tilo is content to toss horseshoes with her, though the shoes in question are actually brass rings roughly cut from discarded 155 brass and the peg is a bayonet.

Rio and Jenou both have brown-tanned faces, necks, and forearms, but the rest of them blazes a lurid white with just a tinge of pink where the skin is beginning to burn.

“What was what like?” Rio repeats the question slowly. She has a wet sock laid over her eyes to afford some shade. There is a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola beside her. It was almost cold once and now is the temperature of hot tea. Jenou has a book held up to block the sun, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in a paperback edition.

It is the summer of 1943 in Tunisia, and it is hot. Desert hot. Completely immobile—except when they swat at a fly—both young women are still sweating.

“You know,” Jenou insists. “The first time. I’m just trying to get an idea.”

“What are you, writing a book?” Rio says sharply. “Suddenly you’re reading books and now you’re trying to plumb the depths of my soul?”

“My usual appetite for fashion and Hollywood gossip isn’t being satisfied,” Jenou says, adopting a light, bantering lilt before restating her question in a more serious tone.

Rio sighs. “I don’t know, Jen.” She pronounces the name with a soft j, like zh. Jenou’s name is inspired by the word ingenue, a perfectly inappropriate reference point for Jenou, who is far from being the innocent the name suggests.

Jenou is blond, with hair cut short to just below the ear. General Patton has decreed that all female soldiers will have hair cut to above the bottom of their earlobe. The general is improvising—army regulations have not quite caught up with the realities of female soldiers. In addition to being blond, Jenou is quite pretty, just shy of beautiful, and has a pinup’s body.

Jenou remains silent, knowing the pressure will build on Rio to say something. And of course she’s right.

“It was . . .” Rio searches for a word picture, a metaphor, something that will convey enough meaning that Jenou will not feel the need to ask anymore. Thinking about it takes her back to that moment. To the sound of Sergeant Cole’s voice yelling, Shoot!

Richlin! Suarez! Lay down some fugging fire!

Rio remembers it in detail. It had been as cold then as it is hot now. Her breathing had become irregular: a panicky burst followed by a leaden thud-thud-thud.

She remembers lining up the sights of her M1 Garand. She remembers the Italian soldier. And the pressure of her finger on the trigger. And the way she slowed her breathing, the way she shut out everything, every extraneous sound, every irrelevant emotion. The way she saw the target, a man in a tan uniform lined up perfectly on the sights.

The way her lungs and heart seemed to freeze along with time itself.

The moment when her right index finger applied the necessary seven-point-five pounds of pressure and the stock kicked back against her shoulder.

Bang.

The way she had first thought that he had just tripped. The way the Italian had seemed to be frozen in time, on his knees, maybe just tripped, maybe just caught his toe on a rock and . . . And then the way the man fell back.

Dead.

“Like it wasn’t me,” Rio says at last. “Like someone else was moving me. Like I was a puppet, Jen. Like I was a puppet.”

This is the third time, not the first, that Jenou has asked about that first killing. Rio is vaguely aware that it has become important to Jenou that Rio remain Rio. She understands that Jenou does not have the sort of home you get sentimental over, and that as a result Rio is home to Jenou. Sometimes she intercepts a look from Jenou, a passing betrayal of inner doubts. Jenou, who Rio would never have thought capable of any sort of reflection, has developed a sidelong, contemplative gaze. A judging gaze tinged with worry. And sometimes Rio looks for ways to reassure Jenou, but at this particular moment it is just too damned hot.

“Doing my job,” Rio says with a hint of wry humor. “Rio Richlin, Private, US Army, sir! Shootin’ Krauts, sir!” She executes a lazy salute.

A truck rattles by, and a dozen male GIs whistle and yell encouragement along the lines of “Hey, sweetheart!” and “Oh baby!” and “Bring those tatas here to papa!”

Rio and Jenou ignore the catcalls as just another bit of background noise, like the coughing engine of a Sherman tank lurching toward the motor pool, or the insect buzz of the army spotter plane overhead.

“Hey, I got a letter from Strand,” Rio says, wanting to change the subject and dispel her own lingering resentment.

A dozen soldiers, mostly men, march wearily past, coming in from a patrol. “Which of you broads want me between your legs?”

Jenou raises a middle finger without bothering to look and hears a chorus of shouts and laughs, some angry, most amused.

“Well, dish, sweetie. How is tall, dark, and handsome doing?” Jenou asks.

“He says he’s fine. And he’s looking for a way to get here.”

“From Algiers? Kind of a long walk.”

“I think he was hoping for a train. Or a truck. Or a plane.”

“He’d fly his own plane over here if he really loved you.”

Does he? Does he still? Am I still the girl he fell for?

Rio reaches blindly to give Jenou a shove. “I don’t think the army just lets you borrow a B-17 whenever you want one.”

“He could offer to pay for the gas.”

“Let’s roll over. This side’s parboiled.”

They roll over, Rio recoiling as bare flesh touches the metal skin of the vehicle.

Suddenly a siren begins its windup and both girls sit up fast, shield their eyes, and scan the horizon.

“Aw, hell,” Jenou says, pointing at two black dots rushing toward them from the direction of the sea.

The cry goes up from a dozen voices. “Plane! Plane! Take cover!”

They climb down quickly—much more quickly than they climbed up.

“Under the track?” Rio wonders aloud, looking toward the nearest ditch, which is already filling up with scrambling GIs.

“The Kraut will aim for the track!” Jenou yells.

“He’ll see it’s one of his own and burned out besides,” Rio counters in a calmer tone. They crawl madly for the shelter of all that steel and lie facedown, breathing dust, almost grateful for the shade. Antiaircraft guns at the four corners of the camp open up, firing tracer rounds at the dots, which have now assumed the shape of Me 109 fighters with single bomb racks.

Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap! The antiaircraft guns blaze, joined by small arms fire from various soldiers firing futilely with rifles and Thompsons.

The Messerschmitts come in fast and low, and starbursts twinkle on their wings and cowling. Machine gun bullets and cannon shells rip lines across the road and into the tents. A voice yells, “Goddamn Kraut shot my goddamn coffee!”

The planes release one bomb each, one a dud that plows into the dirt between two tents and sticks up like a fireplug, smoking a little. The second bomb is not a dud.

Ka-BOOM!

The front end of a deuce-and-a-half truck, clear at the far end of the camp, explodes upward, rises off the ground on a jet of flame before falling to earth, a smoking steel skeleton. The engine block, knocked free by the power of the bomb, twirls through the air, rising twenty feet before falling like an anvil out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon as GIs scurry out of the way. Rio does not see where it lands.

The planes take a tight turn and come roaring back overhead, machine guns stitching the ground like some mad sewing machine.

And then they head off, unscathed, racing away to the relative safety of their base in Sicily.

Rio and Jenou crawl out from beneath the half-track and gaze, disgusted, at the caked-on dirt that covers their fronts from toes to knees to face.

“They could have waited till we toweled off,” Jenou says.

“We best go tell Sarge we’re still alive,” Rio says.

The air raids are fewer lately, as the Royal Air Force planes with some help from the Americans have claimed control of the North African skies. But now Rio hears a distant shriek of pain and thinks what every soldier thinks: Thank God it isn’t me, followed by, At least some poor bastard is going home.

A term has become common: million-dollar wound. The million-dollar wound is the one that doesn’t kill or completely cripple you but is enough to send you home to cold beer and cool sheets and hot showers.

A team of medics, three of them, rush past, with only one taking the time to turn and run backward while yelling, “I have some training in gynecology; I am happy to do an examination!” as he grabs his crotch.

He trips and falls on his back, and Rio and Jenou share a satisfied nod.

The US Army, Tunisia, in the summer of 1943.