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Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson

BOOK: Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)
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Major Alexis Petrovich Krigoff felt a tingling of nervousness in his belly—not quite fear, but instead a clear understanding of the stakes involved in this imminent meeting with the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He had been summoned back to the Kremlin a few hours ago, with no indication of why he was to be here, and he knew that this could be either very good or very bad.
Only yesterday Krigoff had been a young lieutenant laboring anonymously in the bureaucracy of Red Army headquarters. A chance to carry a message to Chairman Stalin, combined with Krigoff’s quick-thinking interpretation and the audacious spin he had placed on that message, had resulted in a promotion, jumping over two grades. Then, today, after he had already returned to his plain room in the officers’ barracks near the Kremlin, had come the messenger with the invitation: Stalin wanted to see him again, tonight. Krigoff understood all too well that a single misstep could have placed him in the bowels of Lubyanka Square—as the headquarters of the NKVD, the Soviet security agency, was commonly referred to. But that was life at the apex of the Soviet Union—and a small price to pay for being at the glorious center of power.
The square-faced woman, a captain who had lost a foot at Stalingrad and
now served as Stalin’s appointment secretary, studied him dispassionately as he handed her the handwritten note.
“You may go into the anteroom, Comrade Major,” she said briskly. “The chairman will see you shortly.”
He entered the large chamber, with two bright hammer-and-sickle banners hanging from opposite walls, but he was too nervous to take a seat on any of the cushioned chairs placed around the fringes of the room. The tall windows were screened with blackout curtains, so he could not take the view—which in any event would have been minimal in this city darkened by war and winter’s night—so he merely strolled around, forcing his steps to slow. Pausing before a bust of the chairman, he admired the manly mustache, could even imagine the genial twinkle in those stony eyes.
The door behind him opened and he twitched nervously, then drew a breath and turned slowly. Emerging from the inner office was not the sturdy, masculine figure he had expected to see, but rather a woman in trousers and a plain jacket. Her raven hair was cut short, and the most dramatic feature about her appearance was the patch that covered her left eye. The visible eye was a very deep blue. Her face was free of cosmetics, but her skin was milky and soft. Her lips were full. The trousers and military-cut jacket made it difficult to tell what her figure was like, but she was tall and slim.
“Comrade Major,” she said politely. “I am to tell you that the chairman will summon you within a few minutes.”
“Thank you, Comrade,” he said, with a discreet nod of his head. He smiled his most charming smile.
She took a step toward the outer door, then stopped and turned to approach the marble bust. “It is a good likeness,” she suggested. “Though mere stone cannot capture his vitality, his spirit.”
Krigoff nodded again. “I was thinking much the same thing,” he said, but his eyes were on the woman. He was intrigued by this person, who wore civilian clothes but spoke with fond familiarity about their great national leader. “Have you met the chairman often?” he asked.
She shook her head, a shy smile curving her full lips. “Just today,” she said. She hesitated a moment, then held out her hand to show him the small silver medal. “I am honored to say that he awarded me with the People’s Medallion.”
Krigoff was impressed; the award was one of the highest nonmilitary medals in the Soviet hierarchy. “Congratulations,” he said sincerely. “You must have performed valiant service in the name of Mother Russia.” He took her open hand in his and lifted the medal up to get a better look at it. “What was the nature of your heroism, if I may ask?”
She shook her head dismissively, another gesture that he found appealing, but she didn’t pull her hand away. “It was a small thing, only—nothing
compared to the sacrifices made by the men and women who wear the uniform of the Red Army.”
Krigoff, who had never been within twenty miles of a front line, waved away the compliment even as he felt a flush of pride. “No, please, I would like to know,” he said encouragingly.
Her hand went to the patch over her eye, a self-conscious motion, as she drew a breath. “I was merely a camera operator—assigned to a documentary project. We were filming a movie called
One Day of War.
Many of my colleagues were killed as we tried to capture the heroism of the soldiers. I was wounded, but survived … . I accepted this medal on behalf of those who lost their lives.”
“The work of the film industry has been a great comfort and encouragement to our people during the Great Patriotic War,” Krigoff said in a sincere voice. “I have been privileged to see many of these great works. I am sorry to admit, though I have heard of
One Day of War
I have yet to see it. But I shall make it a point of doing so, especially because I will think of its camera operator.”
“You are too kind, Major,” she said with that shy smile.
Krigoff smiled in a self-deprecating manner. “There is a place in Gorky Park,” he noted. “A bluff above the River Moskva, from where one can see the towers of the Kremlin and so much of this great city. I go there often, to reflect upon the greatness of our people, and the immensity of the task before us. The next time I am there, I shall share a moment of reflection for those of you who have risked your lives to uplift the spirits of our great people.”
“Comrade Major, I would be honored if you did.” She straightened as if a soldier coming to attention.
“Please,” he said. “My name is Krigoff, Alexis Petrovich. Alyosha to friends, Comrade … ?”
“Mine is Koninin,” she replied. “Paulina Arkadyevna.”
Krigoff was eager to say something else, to continue this conversation, when the inner door of the waiting room was pulled open and he looked up to see the genial, avuncular face of the chairman himself. Immediately the woman was forgotten.
“Ah, Alexis Petrovich,” said Stalin, ignoring Paulina. “Please, come in!”
Krigoff hastened to obey, and moments later he was shaking the chairman’s strong hand, then stammering his acceptance to the glass of vodka that Stalin offered him, having poured two as soon as he had led his visitor into the spacious inner office.
“To the confusion of our enemies!” toasted the leader of the Soviet Union, his voice underlain by an easy chuckle.
Krigoff drank, and as the clear liquid ignited its fire over his tongue and down his throat he found that he was breathing a little easier. Stalin extended
the bottle and the major reflexively held up his glass for a refill, noting that the chairman had not yet touched his own glass.
“That was good insight you showed yesterday, when you perceived how Rommel’s surrender would play into the hands of my own policies,” remarked the chairman, idly waving his hand toward a seat. Alyosha sat across from the great desk, and watched as Stalin took a sip from his vodka and then took his own chair, setting the bottle on the wooden surface between them. Another sip of the vodka sent tongues of fire through Krigoff’s belly, and he allowed the compliment to warm him further.
“I have a question for you,” said Stalin, reaching across with the bottle to refill the glass that was, again, nearly empty. “Please, take your time—finish your drink!—and then give me your best reply.”
Alarms were going off in Krigoff’s subconscious, and he nervously quaffed the clear liquid, which barely even burned his throat anymore. An important question from Stalin would most certainly require a careful answer. The warmth was spreading through his belly, and into the fringes of his mind, and he squinted, focusing on what the great man was saying to him.
“What do you think the Nazi government will do now, in reaction to Rommel’s treachery?” asked Stalin.
Krigoff had no idea, but he knew he couldn’t admit this. Frantically he grasped at thoughts, whatever he knew of Nazis, and fascism, and Himmler. Somehow these threads wove themselves together, until there seemed to be only one logical answer.
“They will keep fighting, Comrade Chairman—at least, those Nazis in the SS and the other fanatical elements. Their strength will be weakened by the defection of Rommel’s troops, but not broken entirely.”
Stalin looked at him, his eyes twinkling merrily. Mutely he accepted another drink, as the chairman at last topped off his own glass, which was only half empty.
“I believe you are correct, Comrade Major. You display the kind of quick-thinking courage that I like to see in my officers, and most especially in my commissars. I commend you.”
“Th-Thank you, Comrade Chairman!” stammered Krigoff, flushing with pleasure.
“You will hear from me, or perhaps from Comrade Bulganin, regarding an assignment,” said Stalin, who was now walking the major to the door—though Krigoff couldn’t exactly remember standing up. “A man of your talents has clear uses to Mother Russia, and those uses will not be put to waste.” A strong hand came down on his shoulder, and the officer felt a squeezing pressure that seemed genuinely affectionate. “Good night, Alexis Petrovich—and thank you.”
“Thank
you,
Comrade Chairman!” declared the major. As he made his
way out of the anteroom, and through the wide halls of the Kremlin, it seemed as though his feet were some distance off the floor, and his head might be in danger of rising to the lofty ceilings.
Chuck Porter, Paris Bureau Chief for the Associated Press, ex-prisoner of war, and currently finishing a special role as Rommel’s personal translator, was an Underwood-typewriter man, and the German-made Olympia
Schreibmaschine
he’d been able to scrounge felt different, awkward. The umlaut key didn’t have a space advance, for instance. And while it was nice to type a real umlaut rather than backspace and put quote marks over the vowel, it wasn’t as if he could teletype an umlaut when sending the story over the wire.
He was just superstitious enough to want the very best typewriter to help him write what he knew was a sure Pulitzer story, the most important story of the war, the story of Rommel’s surrender—a story in which he’d actually played a part.
He had just finished reopening the AP Paris bureau, closed upon the German occupation of Paris, when he had driven north into Belgium to cover U.S. forces there. He’d started to staff up the office but didn’t have everyone he needed in place, so he used that as an excuse to get out of the office and do some reporting himself.
Captured during the opening days of the Fuchs am Rhein offensive, Porter was singled out by Oberst von Reinhardt for his reporter status and knowledge of the German language and transferred to Armeegruppe B headquarters. Upon the collapse of the final bridge at Dinant, he was a witness to Rommel’s portentous decision to surrender his army group to the Allies. In fact, he personally had made the telephone call to Nineteenth Armored Division HQ to put Rommel in touch with General Henry Wakefield, and shortly thereafter, with Patton himself. Reporters were supposed to cover news, not make it, but in this case it just worked out differently.
Porter rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and began pecking away, marshaling his thoughts as he strove to turn them into the right words for this incredible story. A neat sheaf of pages sat beside the typewriter—several different story pieces all ready for transmission, just as soon as he could arrange to get to a teletype.
The surrender conference at the Church of Notre Dame in Dinant, with Rommel on one side and Patton on the other, had lasted for several hours. The immediate act of surrender was easy enough, but it turned out that the mechanics of arranging the cease-fire, surrender, and turnover of forces and control were surprisingly complex—especially since Rommel was unable to guarantee that all the forces under his command would accept his order to surrender.
After all, Rommel’s surrender was not so much the act of a man who was completely defeated and without options, but rather a careful calculation of threats to his fatherland. One remark of Rommel’s had stuck in Porter’s mind. “The mark of command is not one’s ability to make good decisions, but rather one’s ability to make a decision in cases where all alternatives are unpleasant and dangerous.”
Porter was struggling with the comment when Patton’s translator, an American intelligence lieutenant colonel named Reid Sanger, injected his own translation. Patton had laughed heartily and knowingly at the remark. “Hell, that’s the truth,” he’d said. “Any jackass can make a good decision. Making the right bad decision—now, that’s an art!”
Seeing Patton and Rommel in their first face-to-face meeting was an interesting experience. Although sharing no common language and serving enemy governments, the two instantly seemed to relate on a deeper, personal level, one born of shared experience and shared passion. Patton did not treat Rommel as a defeated enemy, but rather as a business colleague engaged in a necessarily adversarial, but mutually respectful, transaction.
Yet the two could hardly have been more different in personal style and demeanor. The tall, loud Patton, very American in his personal style, was oddly matched against the stocky, somewhat reserved and analytical Rommel, scion of a long German military heritage.
One thing the two had in common was rapidity in their thinking. Not being a student of the military arts, Porter was quickly overmatched in trying to translate complex military terminology. Fortunately, Lieutenant Colonel Sanger was quick to interject when necessary, and the two commanding generals themselves had a rapport that seemed almost telepathic at moments. After a while, Porter found himself dismissed from the meeting, and had used his time to scrounge up a typewriter and get to work.
How to describe it all? Porter worked to find the perfect words to capture the moment and all its import: adversaries united in mutual respect, knights of the battlefield meeting on the field of honor, the culmination of the Second World War in a single meeting on the hallowed soil of a church.
Porter had no doubt that this meeting spelled the effective end of World War II. While Rommel’s army wasn’t the entire German army, it was a large enough section, especially as it had been heavily reinforced with troops from the Eastern Front, that its surrender effectively eliminated German ability to mass sufficient forces at the critical point.
And with Patton, whose concerns about the Soviets had been so loudly expressed, the idea of “unconditional surrender” had slipped into abeyance. Patton seemed to be forging a peace of his own design, not that of his government, as if he were channeling the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant to Rommel’s Robert E. Lee.
Porter stopped, typed a few lines. That would make a very interesting sidebar—how this surrender would stack up against the Allied declaration of intent, and whether Patton would find himself in trouble yet again for exceeding his mandate as a negotiator. He’d have to make a few calls as soon as he could get near a working civilian telephone.
Another sidebar that needed telling was the story of the near assassination of Rommel only hours before the surrender was to take place, and how it was narrowly foiled by a German supply officer, of all people—Müller, his name was. It was a narrow escape from disaster for everyone concerned; if it had gone just a hair differently, there was a good chance that Patton would be dead by the same hand right now. The German intelligence officer who had first taken Porter to his own headquarters instead of a POW camp had been shot by the same SS officer, as had Rommel’s personal driver. Porter made himself a note to find out whether those two had lived or not.
Porter continued to type, then paused as he realized that he probably would have been dead as well, shot at the hands of some Waffen-SS bastard just on general principles. The Nazis weren’t big on freedom of the press. At the start of the war, quite a few foreign correspondents had been rounded up, and some of AP’s German stringers had been arrested on loyalty charges. One American AP reporter, Joe Morton, was still in Nazi hands, in some kind of concentration camp. Porter hoped he was okay.
He looked down at what he’d written so far. Not bad, even for a long day’s work. The wastebasket next to the desk he’d commandeered had thirty or so wadded-up sheets of typing paper in it, but that was par for the course. The classic advice for new reporters was “Don’t try to put more fire in your work; put more of your work into the fire.” The ratio of trashed pages to finished pages was fairly reasonable.
Porter stood up, stretched, and decided to go in search of some coffee—or what passed for coffee around Rommel’s headquarters. He’d put in a long shift of work after a sleepless night; he deserved a break.
Porter pushed a hand through his thinning hair and patted his comfortably thick belly. He was wearing American military fatigues without any insignia, and thick, heavy boots fit for an infantryman but not for a primarily deskbound reporter and editor.
Rommel’s headquarters looked more or less the same as American headquarters he’d seen—it must be a function of how a military organization was run. Aside from the fact that most of the people wore Wehrmacht gray instead of American olive drab, it was pretty close. Clerks typed, officers scurried into and out of meetings, cigarettes were stubbed out into already overflowing ashtrays.
Which reminded him, so he lit up a Lucky Strike and took a big drag from it. He saw another flash of olive drab, and there was General Wakefield, CO of the Nineteenth Armored Division. Wakefield was a short, squat man, built a
little like the tanks he commanded. He took his ever-present cigar out of his mouth. “Porter—just the man I’m looking for.”
“I was just getting ready to scrounge a cup of coffee, General. What can I do for you?”
“I need a little translation support. You available?”
“Sure thing, General.”
“Good. Patton stole my translator, my G-2, Sanger.”
“I met him in the surrender talks. His German’s a lot better than mine,” Porter said.
“Parents are German. He was there before the war. Speaks like a native.”
“I spent a couple of years there before the war myself, but my German’s weak at best.”
Another grunt. “Best I’ve got right now. I need to talk to some of the Krauts as well as my own men. I could use your help.”
“Sure, General. I’m at your service.”
Porter followed Wakefield out of the headquarters, grabbing his field jacket from the back of his chair on the way. At the door, two German guards snapped to attention. Seeing two Americans, one with stars on his shoulders, confused them.
“Halt! Excuse me, sirs, you can’t leave this building without proper permission,” the guard said in German.
“This is an American general,” Porter replied, also in German. “He can go wherever he likes.”
The guards looked warily at each other. “We must have a pass before you can exit.”
Porter thought for a moment, then smiled. “One minute.” He pulled out his reporter’s notebook and scrawled a few words on it. “General, please sign here.”
“What’s this?” Wakefield growled.
“The Germans need a pass so they can let us through.”
“Hrrumph!” Wakefield snorted, but he signed the form.
The German guards looked carefully at the pass, then back at Porter and Wakefield. Porter said, in German, “He is the American general. He is able to issue any required pass or order.”
Finally, the guards decided that the pass was satisfactory, snapped back to attention, and opened the door.
The outdoor air cut through Porter’s jacket at once, making him shiver. Wakefield, no more warmly dressed, seemed not to notice. The smoke cloud from his cigar grew larger as he puffed; Porter’s cigarette made its own smoke cloud.
There were several jeeps parked outside Armeegruppe B headquarters,
one flying Patton’s three-star flag, another flying a single star. Wakefield got into the one-star jeep and started the engine; Porter climbed in beside him.
It seemed strange wending their way through German armor in an unarmed American jeep, but then nothing much seemed normal right now. Porter didn’t know if he should initiate a conversation, but Wakefield did it for him.
“Reporter, eh?” said Wakefield in his gruff voice.
“Bureau chief, actually,” Porter replied.
“German bureau?”
“No, sir. Paris.”
“Paris.” Wakefield put the cigar back in his mouth, puffed a cloud of blue smoke as he thought about it. “This ain’t Paris,” he observed.
“No, sir. But the Paris bureau covers a lot of territory, especially right now. It’s not like we can set up shop in Berlin, at least not yet.”
Wakefield grunted in response. “How’d you get here?”
Porter decided that short and quick was the best communication style for this man. “Captured.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Trying to get out of Stavelot when the Germans captured the fuel dump. I was there looking for a story.”
“Story’s simple. Hell of a lot of good men died, and it looks like it’s about over. That’s the story,” the general replied.
“Well, General, some of us get paid by the word, and I think I’d better find a few more to write down.”
Another grunt, and a nod, then silence.
They passed through the German cease-fire line into the part of Dinant that lay hard against the waterfront of the Meuse, quickly reaching the wreckage of the final bridge. Across the ruined span he could see tanks from Wakefield’s own division, CCA of the Nineteenth, lined up along the shore and covering approaches from the left and right. The onion-shaped tower of the Church of Notre Dame dominated the ruined town. Directly behind the church was a cliff face, and at the top of the cliff face was a huge medieval citadel dominating the view. Both the citadel and the church seemed oddly out of scale for the tiny city.
Wakefield stared across the frigid Meuse for a moment. “Find me a German officer,” he ordered.
Several curious Germans had followed the strange solitary Americans, and Porter picked out one with officer’s insignia, a major.
“Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte!”
he called out.
The officer responded.
“Jawohl, Herr …”
he replied, letting the sentence trail off.
“Ich bin Herr Porter. Dies hier ist Generalmajor Wakefield.”
A one-star
was a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, but a major general in the German Wehrmacht.
The German saluted and clicked his heels together.
“Herr Generalmajor!”

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