Allies Read online

  For my longtime ally Paul Harrill

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Operation Neptune

  A-Hunting We Will Go

  Night and Fog

  Dee-Day

  Operation Tortoise

  The Dice Are on the Carpet

  In the Doghouse

  Unleashed

  The Best Actress in Her Class

  Little Lost Dog

  A Bit of Theater

  The Cross of Lorraine

  Hippolyta’s Daughter

  The Switching Station

  Cyrano Introduces Himself

  Sabotage

  A Different Story

  Operation Tonga

  Absolutely Average

  If Day

  Stronger Together

  Green Light

  Knees in the Breeze

  Rommel’s Asparagus

  That Way

  A Change of Plans

  Goldilocks and the Two Canadians

  Reinforcements

  When Day

  Operation Neptune

  Nowhere to Go

  The Hedgehog

  Operation Amiens

  William the Conqueror

  Achilles

  The Wrong Beach

  Bursting Bowels

  Digging a Hole

  Operation Neptune

  Valiant

  Operation Integration

  Open for Business

  Burst Balloons

  The Real World

  Sucking Chest Wound

  A Second Opinion

  Operation Neptune

  Pinned Down

  The Luckiest Soldier on Omaha Beach

  Say Hello

  The Dead and the Dying

  D. Kaufmann

  The Widerstandsnest

  Ghost Town

  Panzer

  Revenge

  Fwoosh

  Darkness

  Operation Bathing Suit

  I Will Wait

  Bonjour

  Busted

  The Prettiest Toilet You Ever Saw

  Warning: Mines

  Operation Neptune

  So Far to Go

  Allies

  Author’s Note

  Sneak Peek at Grenade

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alan Gratz

  Copyright

  Dee Carpenter’s foot slipped off the wet ladder and his stomach lurched into his throat. He scrabbled for a handhold, but the weight of his pack and his rifle dragged him down. At the same instant, a gap opened up between the huge transport ship he was leaving and the little motorboat he was supposed to be climbing into. Dee dropped like a stone toward the cold black water of the English Channel.

  A hand shot out and caught the pack on Dee’s back. Dee jolted, then swung into the side of the ship with a thump.

  “Grab on!” his friend Sid Jacobstein yelled.

  With shaking, frozen hands, Dee fumbled until he was clinging to the side of the ladder.

  “Legs up!” Sid told him. Dee pulled his feet up in time to keep them from getting crushed as the motorboat drifted back to clang against the side of the transport ship.

  Dee took a deep breath and closed his eyes in relief.

  “For crying out loud, Dee, you just about killed yourself before the Germans could do it for you,” Sid said.

  Sid had been right below Dee on the ladder, and now they were face-to-face. With his free hand, Dee grabbed Sid’s shoulder.

  “Thanks, Sid,” he said, still panting. “I owe you one.”

  “Private Carpenter! Private Jacobstein! If you two knuckleheads are done fooling around, we’ve got a boat to load,” Sergeant Taylor called from above.

  Dee and Sid helped each other climb into the small boat. They took their places halfway back, in a row of other soldiers wearing olive-green assault jackets and green metal helmets.

  Though they wore the same uniform, Dee and Sid couldn’t have resembled each other less. Dee was sixteen and looked even younger. He had spindly arms and legs, and he worried that his baggy green army trousers made him look like a child playing soldier. Sid was just a year older, but he was six feet, four inches tall and built like Hank Greenberg, the big power-hitting left fielder for the Detroit Tigers. He could have bent Dee into a pretzel if he’d wanted to. Sid had a long face, curly brown hair, tan skin, and stubble on his jaw. Dee was blond-haired and pale-skinned, and he couldn’t grow a mustache if his life depended on it.

  What had first united them was their shared hatred of the New York Yankees. Sid was a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, while Dee rooted for his hometown baseball team, the Philadelphia Athletics.

  “The Dodgers’ll be back in the World Series as soon as the war’s over. You’ll see,” Sid said to Dee, continuing a conversation that had begun on the troop transport ship. “Of course they had an off season last year. Half the team enlisted to fight.”

  Another soldier overheard him. “Are you kiddin’?” he said. His New York accent was even stronger than Sid’s. “The Yankees lost as many players—including Joe DiMaggio—and they won the pennant and the World Series!”

  How Sid or any of the rest of them could think about baseball right now—could think about anything besides their impending doom—astounded Dee. He staggered on the metal deck as the boat rocked from side to side on the waves, and Sid steadied him to keep him from falling.

  They were in one of the famous Higgins boats that Dee had heard about, but it wasn’t much to look at. It was basically a big metal bathtub with a motor at the back and a tall door at the front. But Dee knew that its flat bottom was what made the boat special; it allowed the boat to run right up onto a beach, drop the front door, deliver its forty passengers, then back out, reload, and make another run.

  It was this Higgins boat that would deliver Dee and Sid and the rest of their platoon to Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.

  The Allied invasion of Europe was about to begin.

  Since the war started five years ago, Nazi Germany had rolled across Europe, blitzing through Poland and the Netherlands and Belgium and France. Now the map that had hung in Dee’s high school history classroom back in Philadelphia was all wrong. Instead of a bunch of different-colored countries in Europe, there was just one big red blob—Germany—covering everything. And if Germany’s demented leader Adolf Hitler and his armies had their way, that big red blob would grow and grow and grow until it covered the whole world.

  Unless Dee and everyone else here put a stop to it.

  Dee couldn’t see over the top of the Higgins boat’s high walls, but he knew how many other ships were out there on the water. He’d seen them gathered last night, at what the British sailors on his transport ship had dubbed “Piccadilly Circus,” after a famous traffic intersection in London. Hundreds of ships. Thousands. Transport ships. Destroyers. Battleships as long as skyscrapers turned on their sides. Minesweepers dragging the sea for German mines. And more that Dee couldn’t even identify. Their lights had glittered like stars in the night.

  There at Piccadilly Circus, where the ships had all come together, Dee and Sid had been up on the top deck when they heard a Scottish soldier on a British ship belt out “The Road to the Isles” on his bagpipes. The piper got laughs and applause from all the other soldiers waiting on their transports, and more GIs on Dee’s ship came up from below to listen. Not to be outdone, a United States battleship broadcast “God Bless America” over its loudspeakers, and Dee and Sid and the boys around them whooped. A Free French ship played “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of the country they had lost and were going back to reclaim, and Dee got chills. Sailors on a Canadian ship joined in with “O Canada,” and some
Australian soldiers sang “Waltzing Matilda.” There were more songs too—songs in Polish and Norwegian and Dutch—so many that Dee couldn’t hear them all at once.

  An English ship had capped it all off by playing a recording of “A-Hunting We Will Go” and gotten the biggest cheer of them all.

  But nobody was cheering now, and no one was singing. Sid wasn’t even talking baseball anymore. They had all grown quiet as the remainder of their platoon climbed down from the transport ship into the Higgins boat. It was still dark out, and they couldn’t see France, couldn’t tell how far away they were from shore. But suddenly they were hit with the cold, hard reality that it was finally about to happen. After months of training, months of planning, months of waiting, Dee and Sid and everyone else—more than a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers—were about to be delivered right into the jaws of death.

  Today was D-Day. The most important day of the Second World War. Maybe the most important day in all of human history. Dee got goose bumps just thinking about it. Everything was riding on this day.

  If they screwed it up, the world would never be the same.

  The weight of the moment pushed down on Dee and the others. The dull, heavy sound of the small boat clanging against the side of the transport ship sounded like a church bell, tolling their deaths.

  “Word is, anywhere from a quarter of us to a half of us are gonna die before we ever get off the beach,” Sid said.

  Dee’s stomach tightened. They’d all heard those same odds. They all knew that when they landed on the beach, the German army would be waiting for them with machine guns and mortars and mines. Dee glanced around. Even the veterans among them—the guys in their twenties who had fought in Algeria and Italy and other places—even they were silent, sinking into whatever lonely thoughts a man thinks in the hours before he might die.

  A soldier behind Sid gave him a shove. “Not such a big man now, are you, yid?” he sneered.

  Dee felt Sid tense up beside him. Yid was a slur for a Jewish person, and Sid was the only Jewish guy in their platoon. The fact that his first name rhymed with yid had made it his nickname since boot camp.

  “You’d think he’d be happy,” another soldier said. “Always talking about killing Krauts.” Krauts, along with Jerries, was a word a lot of them used for the Germans. “But Sid the Yid’s just as scared as the rest of us.”

  Ever since he’d arrived at boot camp, if Sid wasn’t talking about the Dodgers, he was talking about killing Germans. Lots of soldiers were here because they’d been drafted. The guys who’d volunteered, they usually did it for things like patriotism, or glory, or to have a steady job. But Dee knew that, for Sid, the war in Germany was personal. For years now, the Nazis had been rounding up the Jews of Europe and taking everything they owned and making them into slaves.

  Sid was out for revenge.

  Dee turned to face the soldiers who were ragging on Sid. “Leave him alone,” Dee said.

  One of the soldiers laughed. “The yid can’t even fight his own fights!”

  Dee saw Sid’s fists clench. Sid was half a head taller than either of the other soldiers and had fifty pounds on each of them, but he didn’t take a swing. Sid and Dee both knew what happened when a Jewish guy punched somebody for insulting him. They’d seen it happen again and again in basic training. It was the Jew who got in trouble, not the other guy.

  “I’m saving it for the Krauts, fathead,” Sid said. “I’m gonna kill the first German I see, and then every single Kraut I meet from Normandy to Berlin.”

  The two soldiers shook their heads and looked away. Sid nodded his thanks to Dee for sticking up for him, but it didn’t make Dee feel better. In fact, it made him feel worse.

  Sid was Dee’s best friend in the army. His only friend. They knew almost everything there was to know about each other, except the one big, giant thing that Dee had hidden from Sid and the rest of the men in his platoon.

  Everybody called him “Dee” because that was the first letter of the name on his dog tags: D. Carpenter. Short for Douglas Carpenter. But what Sid and the others didn’t know—could never know—was that Douglas Carpenter wasn’t Dee’s real name at all.

  His real name was Dietrich Zimmermann, and he was German.

  The last of the soldiers climbed down into the Higgins boat, and the motor revved.

  “All right, you grunts!” Sergeant Taylor shouted from the front, over the noise of the motor. “Here we go!”

  Dee closed his eyes as the small boat moved away from the transport ship, and he remembered the day that his journey to this moment began.

  It was the summer of 1943. The Philadelphia Athletics were twenty-six games behind the Yankees. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor less than two years ago, Germany had declared war soon after, and the United States was in full-on battle mode. The Philadelphia Navy Yard was building battleships, Groucho Marx was on the radio telling everyone to buy war bonds, and Dietrich Zimmermann was about to become Douglas Carpenter.

  Dee sat in a creaky wooden chair in the office of a US Army recruiter in Philadelphia, wringing his hands in his lap. He wanted to throw up. It was over ninety degrees outside, and a rattling electric fan blew the hot air around the room. Sweat ran down Dee’s back and collected at his waistline. A poster on the wall with a picture of Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves for a fight read DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY! ENLIST NOW IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY!

  Dee wanted to do just that, but he was afraid he was going to be busted. Yes, he’d been born in Germany—but that wasn’t what he was trying to hide. It was right there on his birth certificate. He was an “enemy alien.” But there were plenty of foreign nationals fighting for the United States in the army. The real problem was, Dee was just sixteen.

  You could enlist in the United States Army on your own at eighteen, and with your parents’ permission at seventeen. To enlist at sixteen, you had to fudge your birth certificate and find a recruiter willing to look the other way. Otherwise, you could end up in jail for lying on your enlistment papers. But the US Army needed every able body they could get, and Dee knew two other boys from his class who’d been able to join up. He hoped the same would hold true for him.

  The recruitment officer was a short man with wide shoulders and a flat face. The nameplate on his desk said he was Captain Graham. Dee swallowed and sat up tall, trying to look bigger. Captain Graham studied Dee for a moment, then reached for his stamp. Thump-thump. Dee was officially 1-A: Available and fit for military service.

  Dee let out a breath. He was in the army!

  “Your parents’ status as political refugees means you’ll most likely be on a watch list in Germany,” the captain said. “I’ll put you in the Pacific, fighting Japan, so you’re not in danger of getting caught.”

  “No!” Dee said, louder and more forcefully than he’d meant to. He tried to calm down. “No, sir. I’d like to go back to Germany, sir. I want to beat Hitler.”

  Captain Graham nodded. “I get it, kid. I can send you there, get you in on a division likely to see action in France, when it comes. But maybe you don’t want to go back as Dietrich Zimmermann.”

  Dee didn’t understand.

  “We get lots of recruits the Germans don’t like,” said Captain Graham. “Poles, Czechs, Slavs, Austrians, French, Italians. Most of them are Jews, but a few of them are political enemies of Germany, like your family. In some cases, we change their names on their paperwork and their dog tags so the Germans won’t know who they are if they’re caught. So Dietrich becomes … say, Douglas. And your last name, Zimmermann, becomes—”

  “Carpenter,” Dee said. “That’s what Zimmermann means in German. Carpenter.”

  Which was how Douglas Carpenter was born.

  The US government knew Dee’s real name and where he was born, but no one else did. Not even his commanding officer. And especially not Sid.

  On the Higgins boat, Dee heard a soldier behind him throw up, and he was dragged revoltingly back to the here and now. Another soldier i
n front of Dee vomited into the inch of seawater that had already gathered at the bottom of the Higgins boat. The boat was rocking back and forth on the waves, and Dee could feel himself turning green with seasickness too. He instantly regretted the corned beef he’d eaten for breakfast. Sid gave him a reassuring smile and Dee fought down the bile in his throat.

  High up in the sky, Dee heard the drone of airplanes. Dozens of them. He looked up, but he couldn’t see anything for the clouds.

  “Bombers?” Dee asked Sid.

  Sid shook his head. “Paratroopers.”

  One of the vets in their row nodded. “Our part, Operation Neptune, storming the beach at Normandy,” he shouted, “that’s just one piece of the whole big Operation Overlord. There’s lots of other stuff going on right now, this very second. Other operations and missions. Gliders delivering guns and soldiers. Paratroopers capturing bridges and roads. French Resistance fighters taking out communications so the Nazis can’t call for reinforcements after we land. Any one of those operations fail, and it won’t matter which of us lives and which of us dies on those beaches.”

  Dee swallowed hard. They weren’t landing on the beach just yet, he reminded himself. They were still waiting for the hundreds of other Higgins boats to be loaded. Then they would all go in together at dawn.

  Overhead, clouds engulfed the full moon and a thick fog rolled in. Night and fog. With a shiver, Dee remembered something else. An older memory, from when he was a little boy in Germany.

  On a night just like this, when Dee was five years old, his uncle Otto had disappeared from his home and was never seen or heard from again. Otto had been a labor leader, helping factory workers come together as unions to demand better working conditions and better pay. But the Nazis didn’t like unions and liked union leaders even less. So the Nazis had come for Uncle Otto in the night and taken him. Nothing in his home had been touched or broken, and no authority claimed to know where he was. There was no one to complain to. No one to petition. To this day, Dee and his parents had no idea where Uncle Otto might be, if he was in a prison or a concentration camp, alive or dead. It was as though Uncle Otto had simply ceased to exist. The Nazis could do that: erase you from existence. The Germans had an expression for people disappearing at night into the fog of the Nazi political machine: Nacht und Nebel. Night and Fog.