IWW2 Dispatches

After the Black Smoke scare, the troops all started to get antsy. You can focus a man to a razor’s edge, but you can’t keep him like that for hours, much less days. After the first night came and went – we could still see the sky glow of Atlanta burning – someone up in the brass decided it was time for action. We needed facts.

On our way through Maryland, we’d picked up an elite cavalry company. Nowadays that would mean Zeds and PFs, but this was still the start of the war. Cavalry still meant horses. On the morning of July 9, the brass had them assemble for a reconnaissance in force. As it happened, the marshalling grounds wasn’t that far from where my spiderhole was. So, even though it wasn’t quite regulation, I got Deek to cover for me and I snuck back to watch them get ready. It was pretty stirring. I mean, I’ve seen troops on horses, but never more than a few at a time. The cavalry didn’t mix with us grunts, even during war games, and I hadn’t run across them before.

Now I watched, almost in awe, as the men in deep blue mounted up. They all wore a stern look on their face, a look of ages whether they were twenty or fifty years old. These were the best of the best and they knew it. They didn’t have time for the everyday. A bugle played a long, drawn-out tune, something with the pep of reveille but serious. The troop moved off, trotting in tight formation, not a single one looking back.

I scrambled back up to my little patch of Pike Hill. It was something, I told Deek. These guys meant business. As soon as they’d made contact with the enemy, we’d be in for it.

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Tags: Gwinnett, campaigns by dmacelroy
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You might be wondering how we knew to dig in where we did. After all, no one had ever sussed a pattern in the way the walkers dispersed from a cylinder. I don’t know the answer, but I’ve seen enough of the Army to puzzle out a theory. One, the cylinder that fell came down somewhere to the southwest of Atlanta proper. Two, walkers usually moved toward higher population density once they reconned the area. Three, walkers didn’t tend to stop or change direction once they’d gotten started, and Lord knows, nothing we could throw at them could dictate otherwise. So the smart money would bet that the walkers would get out of their cylinders – really, would have done it before we even reached Norcross – and then drift in the direction of Atlanta and keep moving through until they reached us.

But actually, I don’t think that was it. What I know of the service and of the politicos who control it, makes me think about point 4. Four, Pike Hill and environs were direct on the line linking Atlanta to Washington, and the very brass wanted to slow down anything headed toward the capital. If the walkers drifted the other way, well, that would be some ordinance Uncle Sam would save. Who the hell cares what happens to some farmer’s field in southwest Georgia? Officially, they couldn’t say that of course, but it isn’t too hard to read between the lines.

Over everything else, of course, you have to remember: As far as we knew at the time, the walkers had a week, maybe eight days before Grace would get ‘em. It wasn’t going to be no turkey shoot – if those walkers came across us, we were going to give them hell and probably still lose – but long term, the problem would solve itself.

Norcross was crowded with refugees when we arrived, but they’d already reached high tide. Anyone who could flee the city had done so; the stream of wretched people dwindled to a trickle even before we had unloaded the train. By the time we’d set up our defensive line on Pike Hill, there wasn’t anyone left to come. No refugees crossed that line. It was eerie, waiting inside our spiderholes, peering out in the direction of Atlanta. Nothing still – not people, not even wildlife. We could see the city burning. You couldn’t tell at this distance: Had someone just been careless in their evacuation? Or had Marty let fly with his heat ray and finished the job Sherman started? A pall of acrid smoke hung over the city and drifted over our line.

“Black Smoke!” someone cried and soon the dreaded words were flashing up and down the line, hopping about like the embers we could see through the binoculars.

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Tags: Black Smoke, Gwinnett, campaigns, weapons by dmacelroy
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So just about dawn on July 8, our troop train pulled into Norcross station. I call it a troop train only because I love my Uncle Sam and am inclined to generosity. You have to realize, we’d been at peace officially since the end of that Spanish thing a quarter-century before, and even counting the walkers, it’d been a dozen years since any American saw organized combat. Even the Indian Wars were over, more or less. And the American people, they don’t generally spend money on military maybes. The Army didn’t have any real troop trains. We rode in converted cattle cars – and barely converted, at that. Two and a half days in a rolling coffin stinking of manure made a man mad enough to take on anything, even the Martians, rather than spend another day cooped up.

We got off that train to thunderous applause. About the whole population of greater Atlanta was in Norcross station, hoping to be elsewhere. A few of the boys stood a bit straighter once they saw them Southern belles watching ‘em. Master Sergeant Donovan moved back and forth along the train, screaming at us. “You think these people are glad to see you get off this G*d d*mned train? Well, grunts, you’re right – ‘cause that makes room for them to run the hell away from this sorry burg. Every second you spend dying here is one more second they can run to Washington, or New York, or wherever the hell they think is safe.”

Once he saw we were all off the train, he put us right back on, this time unloading the heavy equipment. People had been talking about the mechanized army for a while, but it didn’t happen until after Foothold, when we had no logistical choice. Back in Gwinnett County, we still did things the old fashion way, getting the zap cannon and Streiburg guns into wooden caissons and hitching ‘em to horses. The zap cannon were surprisingly light for artillery, but of course, you had to drag along their generators and condensers, so it all came out in the wash anyway. The Georgia heat was already rising and it was a dirty dusty few hours before the train was completely unloaded and we could take a half-hour to recuperate. I don’t mind saying, my best memory of Gwinnett County is of the daughters of Atlanta moving up and down the line with fresh cold lemonade. Makes me regret us not saving much of the city, but of course, that was still a bit in the future.

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Tags: Gwinnett, campaigns by dmacelroy
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Not a one of us would’ve come back from Norcross if it hadn’t have been for the non-coms. The officers were all newly-minted brass. All of them were eager to prove they’d mastered the demands of being an officer. Most did it by giving back to the senior brass exactly what they wanted to hear – that is, exactly what the brass had already been saying. Those sorts were useless but had the advantage of getting themselves pretty dead pretty quickly. A lot more dangerous were the ones trying to prove their mettle by doing something new. I mean, you have to give them credit. They knew right away this was a different sort of war. But while they were experimenting, looking for the magic new tactic, us grunts were dying on the ground.

Like I said, anyone made it out of Gwinnett alive, he owes it to a non-com. In my case, it was Master Sergeant Donovan. Donovan came out of Five Points, the meanest rotten neighborhood on the whole island of Manhattan. You might think that, him and me being Irish, and him being from just across the river, that Donovan and I would be almost like family. Not to Donovan, though. To hear him tell it, being from Brooklyn was like being from Mars – no, worse. At least Marty didn’t root for the Dodgers. He gave me the most hell than anyone in the unit – more, even, than Jorgensen, the big dumb Swede from Wisconsin. Any son of Brooklyn was the spawn of the devil, he let me know. I hated him with all my heart, for three days.

Then we made contact with the walkers, and suddenly everything he’d been screaming came back to me, and saved my life.
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Tags: Gwinnett, campaigns by dmacelroy
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My unit pulled into Norcross on July 8. This was pretty good time, considering that no cylinder patrol had mobilized in a dozen years, not counting what was going on in Minnesota. There was a sense of urgency but not worry, not yet. The brass decided to stage out of Norcross ’cause it was the last stop on the Southern Railroad before you reached Atlanta. According to scuttlebutt, the governor of Georgia had appealed to the President direct that we roll into Atlanta and “save the city”. Lucky for us that Prescott had been a CP man back when that meant something. He knew better than to run headlong into those things, and that carried down the line.

Anyway, with all respect for the position of the governor, it wasn’t our city and we knew we had time on our side. It’d probably be bad in Atlanta, proper, but we could just wait it out, track the walkers while they scouted the area. Wait for Grace, just like the handbook said. We were about to discover, the handbook needed rewriting.

I’d only been in the Army for a little under a year, but I’d already done my share of walker drills. ‘Course, they were only drills. No one in the States had seen a walker in a dozen years, maybe more. We had it all down on paper, but it was a little comical, really. We go out to the corn fields or wherever and chase around a pickup truck with a telephone pole sticking straight up and a sign in red, “Walker”. The officers were always trying to innovate new tactics to go with the new weaponry that’s been developed, but we only practiced “live” once, and the gear hardly worked then. Sometimes we didn’t even get Springfields and practiced with broomsticks.

In the event, the one was about as useful as the other, compared to heat rays and black clouds.

Tags: Gwinnett, biography, campaigns by dmacelroy
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