Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) (24 page)

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Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson

BOOK: Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)
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Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, commander of the First Belorussian Front of the Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, flipped through the last few pages of the mammoth supply report and slammed the cover shut. “Good,” he said. His voice was deep and gruff. Zhukov was a short, square-built man with a high forehead. His rough demeanor and powerful stature gave him a bearlike appearance, appropriate to the Rodina he served. “Supplies and reinforcements are at their fullest levels. Unfortunately, the damned Germans are probably saying the same thing right now.”
“Those that aren’t being pounded into the dirt by American bombers,” Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev, commander of the First Ukranian Front, replied. The two Soviet marshals were meeting here, on the estate of a former Polish nobleman, to coordinate their planning work. Colonel Alyosha Krigoff stood among two score officers, including generals in command of entire armies, staff officers charged with coordination between fronts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and intelligence staffers who were responsible for assessing and reporting on the enemy’s capabilities. He was one of only a few colonels here, attending because General Yeremko was ill. General Petrovsky had grudgingly brought Krigoff in the veteran intelligence officer’s stead. Now the two of them, like all the others except the two esteemed front commanders, remained silent, listening attentively.
Soon, the mighty juggernaut of the Soviet Union would once again roll forward, crushing everything in its path. Neither marshal wanted to wait any longer, but the order from Moscow had not yet been received. Krigoff was surprised by how eager he himself was to see this great army hurl itself, once more, against the fascist foe.
Zhukov laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “You’re right. The Nazi bastards still have a war going on, and one of their own just turned chicken on them. That must be a kick in the pants for Himmler, don’t you think?”
Konev stood up and walked over to the samovar to draw himself another cup of tea. He took a heaping spoonful of strawberry preserves and stirred it in, then took a sip, taking a deep breath of the hot steam at the same time. “I’m surprised Rommel is the only one. The rest can’t be so stupid as to think they still have any sort of chance. Going over to the Americans and British is the
only way for most of them to save their own lives. Now that Hitler is dead and rotting in his grave, what else makes them hold on?”
Zhukov scratched his chest. “They’re soldiers, I guess. That makes them blind and stupid. They can’t imagine any alternatives except win or lose.”
Konev laughed. “I guess that makes us blind and stupid as well. We couldn’t imagine any alternatives, and our situation was nearly as bleak not that long ago.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. We’re all blind and stupid. Sometimes that makes us stronger.” Zhukov’s gaze roamed across the faces of the assembled staff officers, came to rest on Krigoff’s—at least, that’s how it seemed to the colonel. “Perhaps not all of us,” amended the general. “Some of us see more than others.”
“I despise that stubbornness in an enemy. It will make the Germans stronger when we push forward,” Konev remarked.
“I’m afraid it will,” Zhukov replied. “It won’t change the outcome, but it will affect how much more blood we shed for Mother Russia. Look at the maps our intelligence people have drawn up. The Germans have dug in all along the Oder. This will be a difficult river crossing to make.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” said Konev, “but there are days I miss Adolf Hitler.”
Krigoff’s eyes almost widened in surprise before he exerted his self-control to mask the reaction. Now
that
was a remark to remember; he went over it in his mind, so that he could jot it down verbatim after the meeting.
Zhukov chuckled in response. “I know what you mean. He’d give orders to keep his overwhelmed units from retreating and send orders to his generals to defend ‘fortresses’ that had no protection. There were times he was as much an ally as our good friend General Winter.” The cruel Russian winter, and the muddy season that preceded and followed it every year, had done a great deal to hamper the German war effort ever since Operation Barbarossa had bogged down on the approach to Moscow in late 1941.
The two generals looked up as a signals officer, himself a colonel, knocked on the door and hesitantly entered the room. “Comrade General?” he addressed Zhukov. “There is a communiqué from the Kremlin.”
The general snatched the missive without formality and eagerly read the page of text.
“Well, one more dead fascist is a good fascist,” replied Konev, taking his turn to look at the staff officers while his superior perused the missive. “Sometimes killing can make the world a better place.”
Did his attention linger on me? Was he speaking to me?
Krigoff couldn’t help wondering, and tried to suppress a stab of paranoid fear. “When all the fascists are dead, the world will be much improved,” concluded the front commander, as Zhukov put down the message, his face breaking into a broad grin.
“Then we’re going to have the chance to improve the world, quite a bit,” said the venerable general. “This is the order we have been waiting for.” He glanced at his watch. “Execute Operations Plan Alpha immediately. Air strikes against German positions will commence this afternoon, and I want a full-scale artillery bombardment going by dusk. The tanks will roll as soon as it is dark. Comrades, once again, we are at war.”
Rommel looked out the smeared-glass side window of the jeep, at the countryside that didn’t look so very different from the forests and swales of Belgium or France. But it was different—this was Germany.
This was home.
He pondered how, exactly, he returned here. Was it as a traitor? A liberator? Conqueror? All of the above, in some measure or another, he supposed. He did feel like a stranger, a foreigner in his own fatherland. And he came here, rode the wave of a whole tide of foreigners, these amazing and energetic Americans.
They were racing everywhere, it seemed. Throughout Belgium the roads had been jammed with columns of trucks, jeeps, tanks, and troops, all moving toward the front. The Westwall was breached in a gap a hundred miles wide, and all those men were flowing into Germany, surging toward the Rhine.
On a purely military basis, he remained amazed at how rapidly the American columns physically moved across the ground. The HQ unit that was his destination served as a prime example: there were hundreds of men, dozens of trucks full of equipment and supplies, and when it was up and running it was like a busy and crowded office building. Yet the staff could set up or tear down that office in about an hour, and load it up for transport in less time than that. With a roar of engines and cloud of dust, the HQ was a motorized column racing down the road to the next city, or the one after that.
There seemed to be plenty of gasoline for all of these vehicles, and ample food for the men, and even for POWs and displaced civilians. As to American equipment, he believed that the Yanks made up for in quantity what they might have lacked in quality. The Sherman tanks were light and undergunned by the standards of modern German armor, doomed in a face-to-face shootout with a Panther or Tiger. But at the same time Rommel acknowledged that they were fast and reliable, so nimble that they could move across all types of terrain, and light enough to cross rivers on bridges that would never support even a Panther tank, much less one of the gargantuan Tigers. Furthermore, there seemed to be hundreds of the things, everywhere he looked. Speidel had remarked earlier, only half in jest, that the Yankees must be growing their tanks on the vast steppes of the North American heartland. After his experiences in the past month, Rommel was forced to agree.
The Desert Fox had been driven to Trier in a closed jeep by an American driver, and as they made their way through the narrow streets, crowded with military traffic, he saw that this town—gateway to Germany going back to Roman times—had been given over, completely, to American control.
Third Army MPs were busy steering traffic through the town, all of it the olive drab of American military, and most of it heading east. Rommel’s driver apologized as they were halted for more than ten minutes, while an apparently endless column of Shermans rolled past on the main avenue through the city. The field marshal found it telling that, even as the great column rolled speedily along, there was enough traffic in the side streets that each of them became thronged with waiting vehicles. As the last of the M4s passed, each driver stepped on the gas, to be challenged by a chorus of MP whistles and shouts.
Only by jockeying through a tight turn, then dashing down an alley, did the jeep driver finally break free of the crush. He turned back onto the thoroughfare with a screech of tires, and then pulled into the elegant, semicircular driveway of the grand and venerable Hotel Trier.
“This is the HQ building, for today anyway, General,” the driver said in his passable German. Rommel ignored the mistake in rank, knowing that the Americans had no field marshal in their military hierarchy. “I’m supposed to drop you here.”
“Thank you,” Rommel replied, getting out of the small car and stretching. His back was sore and his legs stiff, but he shook off the travel kinks and entered the large lobby, returning the salute of the MP who stood outside the door. The room was a rather jarring contrast of military functionality and Baroque overindulgence. There were great, floor-to-ceiling mirrors along one lofty wall, with vivid tapestries framed by marble columns. In between were tangles of radio and power cables, plain tables, and functional folding chairs.
His arrival didn’t seem to cause much of a stir. That was interesting, he reflected—perhaps it might be possible for the Wehrmacht and the American army to work together after all. Instinctively he went to the table, where a large map—depicting Germany from the Westwall to the Rhine—was spread. Everything had an air of transience. Several tables were simply sheets of plywood laid across sawhorses, while the radio consoles across the room resembled a jungle of hastily laid wiring and cables. He knew that the HQ staff had moved in here a few hours ago; by tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, they would be back on the road.
He had hoped to find Patton here, but was informed that the Third Army commander had blown through the temporary headquarters like a winter squall. He was up at the front, supervising the fast-moving spearheads of his armor divisions. Rommel nodded in understanding, and in fact wished that he could be doing the same thing.
One of Third Army’s senior intelligence officers, a one-star, was emerging
from a small office adjacent to the lobby, and he greeted the field marshal warmly in German.
“General Patton asked me to show you every hospitality if you should visit. I am sorry not to have greeted you when you arrived, but I was just finishing up in the decoding room,” he said, with a glance at the door that had just closed behind him. “And I’ve got good news, Field Marshal! Frank Ballard of the Nineteenth is already twenty miles down the Moselle Valley. We have four more divisions through the Westwall, and they’re driving to the east and north. It looks like your Seventh Army is going along with the surrender. So our own Seventh—that’s General Patch—can move into the Palatinate south of here.”
“Good. I expected as much, in that arena. I have been in regular contact with General Brandenburger, and he has been willing to follow my orders,” Rommel declared. “What is the latest word on Sixth Panzerarmee?” While he greatly disliked asking that question of an American officer, no matter how polite, the current status of those forces was continuously on his mind.
Here the American general’s good cheer wavered slightly. “They’re giving First Army and the Brits a helluva tussle—they still hold the Westwall north of Dasburg, all the way to the sea. Our only breakthroughs are from here south.”
“So the valley of the Moselle is the best route, the only fast route, to the Rhine.”
“Right. The main threat seems to be here—” The general marked a line from Bitburg to Koblenz, which was a shorter distance than the Moselle Valley route. “There are several SS-kampfgruppe racing eastward. Panzer Lehr is in pursuit, but the Nazi panzers have slipped away for now. There’s a chance they could reach the Rhine before us, and if they do we won’t get the crossing without a nasty fight.”
“Big news, men!” This shout came from the radio room, where a colonel rushed into the room waving a piece of paper. He skidded to stop when he saw Rommel, then threw up a quick salute. “Hello, Field Marshal,” he said hastily. “Um, this can wait.”
“Spill it, Joe,” the general said quickly. “The field marshal is in this with us, remember?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied. He held up the paper. “Intelligence reports are in from some of the Polish resistance. They report that the Red Army has opened fire—a helluva bombardment, along a hundred miles of the Vistula. Looks like the Russians are getting back into the game.”
Rommel nodded, unsurprised. He saw the same kind of acceptance on the faces of the American staff officers all around him. Indeed, they had expected the attack for so long that it was almost a relief to know, at last, what Stalin was planning to do.
“Well, looks like the race is on,” the American said after a moment. “We’d better get busy.”
“I’ll head up to Panzer Lehr,” Rommel said. “It may be that I can help with logistics, up there. It’s important to get as many of your troops through the Westwall as possible—we need to reach the Rhine before the SS can blow bridges and form some kind of defensive front.”
“Right, sir. General Patton has already ordered the Nineteenth to aim for Koblenz, with Fourth Armored moving up right behind. You know what kind of speed they can maintain. We have two divisions driving north, moving up behind the Westwall, trying to roll up Dietrich’s flank. Unfortunately, the mobile SS elements seem to already have bugged out.”
Rommel nodded, concerned but hopeful. The day promised another clear sky, and he was learning to think of that as a
good
thing—the tactical air forces would have free rein, and that should only help the Shermans as they raced for the river.
This was a race, he knew, that the Americans—and his loyal Germans—very much had to win.

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