Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History)

by Alexander M. Grace

  Ridgway looked up and crooked a finger in Bentley’s direction.

  “Bill, get over here,” he growled over the din which still filtered in from outside as more planes came and went. He pressed the map flat with the palms of his hands and jabbed a finger at a spot he had circled in red. “Things have already started to go to Hell in a hand basket. The better part of two companies of the 325th Glider Infantry didn’t make it. Got misdirected somehow and ran low on fuel. Had to turn back. That leaves our left flank way too weak.”

  He pointed to the town of St. Etienne on the upper Loire River.

  “I’m going to have the bulk of the 325th hold the crossing at Le Puy-en-Velay after they drop the bridge there, but there won’t be enough of them to hold Yssingeaux as well. If the Germans make it to St. Etienne, they can either drive straight south to the Rhone to work downriver on the right bank, or they can go east to do an end run and get in behind the 325th and swing down here and tum our whole line. The ground’s pretty rough up there, so they’re going to be limited to the roads, but we’ve got to stop them.”

  “But what about the heavy stuff the 325th was bringing to stop the panzers? All my men have are bazookas and some 60mm mortars.”

  “What little they’ve got, they’ll need. The good news is that Colonel d’Ormeson here,” he gestured to the Frenchman who gave a crisp open palmed salute which Bentley returned casually, “says that their 92nd Infantry Regiment, more like one of our battalions really, and a battery of 75mm guns will be arriving at St. Etienne about now to back you up. They even have a couple of armored cars and an old tank or two that they had squirreled away in an old mine shaft for just such an occasion.”

  “Our tanks are hardly the last word in technology,” the Frenchman added in heavily accented English. “We have a couple of H-35s armed with machine guns and a Somua. At least they look like tanks, and our 75s, firing over open sights, are quite capable of dealing with a tank, if there are not too many of them.”

  “Glad to have you on the team, Colonel,” Bentley grinned. “But,” he continued, turning back to Ridgway, “we’re here at Valence, and this place must be forty miles away. I’d sure like to be there well before the Germans start to show up, but it looks like an awful long walk.”

  “The French also stashed a number of trucks and some gas. If you get your men mounted up PDQ, you can be up into the hills and trees before full daylight and in position before noon. The French will be blowing every bridge in the northern part of the Vichy zone about now, and the air force is plastering all the railroad marshalling yards and rolling stock they can find, so, even if the Germans move fast, we might have as much as a couple of days before we even see one of their coal scuttle helmets down here.”

  “Let’s hope so, General,” Bentley sighed. “Let’s hope so.”

  0300 HOURS, 19 DECEMBER 1942

  PARIS, FRANCE

  It was nearly dawn on the 13th of December, but Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, Director of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, was still poring over the stacks of agent reports which littered the desk of the office he had commandeered in the Gestapo headquarters on the Place de Ia Concorde in Paris. As was always the case with important intelligence discoveries, the information was of varying quality, limited detail, and often from questionable sources. To make matters worse, much of it was contradictory, and it would be vital for Canaris to sort through this muddle in order to present as clear a picture as possible to the Führer and the High Command. The only thing of which Canaris could be absolutely certain was that something big was happening, and decisive action would have to be taken soon if the Reich was not to face disaster.

  For weeks Canaris had been receiving reports from his network of spies in England and the United States of hurried mobilization of troops, the gathering of supplies, intensified amphibious training for infantry units, and a heightened level of security surrounding all military installations. That implied a major operation, but did not in itself indicate either timing or the target. Then he had received word that thousands of troops, mostly American, but also British, Polish, and Free French, had been loaded onto transports in England, the east coast of the United States, and in Egypt.

  Those men could not be kept at sea indefinitely, although they could simply be transferred from one area to another, and could even be disembarked at their ports of origin, but that hardly seemed likely with Montgomery in the midst of a continuing, if lethargic pursuit of Rommel in North Africa after the British victory at El Alamein. This was no time for pulling front line troops out of action for simple training.

  Then reports had started to come in from the garrisons along the Channel coast. Small-scale enemy commando raids were at an all-time high, attempting to destroy the coastal defense guns, blow up beach obstacles, or simply to gather intelligence about the still-weak fortifications going up all the way from Amsterdam to Brest.

  There were frequent shellings by British naval craft, and daily overflights by swarms of enemy reconnaissance aircraft, focusing on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy and on the Pas de Calais, the closest point of occupied France to England and the most likely for a cross Channel invasion. While the Führer was certain that any Allied offensive in the West would come at Calais, some of the freer thinkers on the general staff favored Normandy as an invasion site, precisely because Calais was already the most heavily fortified and the most obvious point of attack. The Allies had, after all, virtually total control of the seas now that the U-boats of Admiral Dönitz had been crippled in the Atlantic by improved enemy anti-submarine tactics, and they were hardly limited to making a mere 20-mile jump.

  But there were also disturbing reports coming from the extensive German network of informers within both the Vichy government and the resistance movement throughout France. These reports spoke of surreptitious meetings between senior French officials and the Americans, focusing on France possibly reentering the war on the Allied side. In themselves, such talks did not disturb Canaris unduly. Rumors of this sort had been rife since France’s surrender in 1940. What caught Canaris’ attention was the wide range of sources, from right-wing French Army officers to Gaullist rebels to Communist resistance fighters, and the consistency of their conclusion that some sort of arrangement had been made between Vichy and the West.

  Canaris had passed along these concerns to his superiors, but the Führer had tended to discount them. Hitler was convinced of his personal domination over key Vichy figures, notably Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Hitler had argued, or simply declared, since the Führer did not deign to argue with underlings, that he had the ultimate trump card over Vichy in the form of more than a million French prisoners of war still being held in Germany, to say nothing of Paris and half their national territory and population. Time and again the French had knuckled under to increasingly onerous and demeaning demands from Germany for the provision of raw materials, industrial goods, and what amounted to slave labor under the STO, Service de Travaille Obligatoire. As leverage, the Führer had either offered up the possibility of a release of prisoners or threatened to worsen their conditions. Hitler had also found it effective to threaten to install a gauleiter, or German military governor, for all of France, as he had done in Poland, thus ending the fiction of Vichy independence, and this had always struck home with Marshal Petain whenever it had proved necessary to tum the old warhorse away from a dangerous course of action. No, the Führer could not be persuaded that his Vichy puppets would ever tum against him.

  Canaris ultimately tended to agree with Hitler on this, even though he could not help but question the loyalty of a state which Germany continually humiliated. His faith lay instead with Admiral Jean François Darlan. As commander of the French Navy, Darlan had little cause to love the Allies, especially the British, after the massacre of French seamen at Mers-el-Kébir and the violent seizure of all French ships that found themselves in British ports at the time of France’s surrender. Like many French sailors, Darlan had seen the
British action not as one of desperation by the one power left facing the. armed might of victorious Germany, but one of arch betrayal Britain had left the French to do all of the fighting on land, then turned and stabbed her in the back just the way the Soviets had turned on the Poles. The attacks on Dakar and the French mandate in Lebanon and Syria had only reinforced this view. The British did not care what price France might have to pay as long as Britain had something to gain. Therefore, Darlan would never accede to any new alliance in which Britain was the senior partner, while the Americans, with no combat experience and relatively few troops yet available, could hardly aspire to leadership of the coalition at this point. And the French could not afford to bet everything, their very existence, on anything less than a certainty. If they threw in their lot with the Allies, and the Germans were then able to defeat a half-hearted effort to establish a foothold on the continent, France would be at Hitler’s mercy, and mercy was a commodity in very short supply in the Reich these days.

  That had been the dilemma of German intelligence over the past several weeks, but now, in the last few hours, alarming reports had begun to arrive of actual Allied landings. There had been sightings of large enemy convoys passing Gibraltar, entering the Mediterranean, but these could have been new shipments of supplies for Montgomery’s army in Egypt, like the 300 American tanks that had been delivered in one fell swoop the previous summer. Then a new report had arrived via radio from a clandestine transmitter in England. The informant there had confirmed the identity of the deceased colonel, right down to the date of his disappearance during a flight from England to Gibraltar, his post of assignment, even a good physical description. There had also been a subsequent report from Spain, in answer to a series of pointed questions he had personally drafted for Stohrer. An examination by a forensic pathologist had confirmed, as nearly as possible, that the deceased colonel had apparently died of exposure, probably after having survived the crash landing only to perish in the cold waters off the Bay of Biscay. Even his pockets had been searched and had produced a convincing pile of litter, all that remained of a human life, a pair of theater ticket stubs, an unpaid telephone bill, photographs of the colonel with his family, and a half-written letter to the lady who was now his widow, hardly the stuff of a fabrication by British intelligence. The key element was that chained to the colonel’s wrist was a briefcase containing detailed plans for a cross-Channel invasion at Calais.

  Now, taken with the evidence of the naval bombardment of the Channel coast, and reported enemy landings there, it was apparent that any action by the enemy in the Mediterranean was meant only as a diversion to the main act in the north. The captured plans were genuine, and the Germans now had a unique opportunity to make their own preparations in the sure knowledge of the enemy’s intentions.

  Canaris packed up his papers and dashed down the broad marble stairs of the building and across the cobblestone street to the headquarters of Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief West, which was located in the former French Ministry of the Navy. Even though he would not be out of sight of the heavily armed guards of the two headquarters buildings, Canaris took a long look up and down the street before rushing across. He was not concerned with traffic, which was light at the best of times in a city starved for gasoline, and non-existent at this pre-dawn hour. But there was no guarantee that a Gaullist or Communist assassin might not have been waiting for just such a chance to decapitate the German intelligence service, even at the cost of his own life.

  There was no wild-eyed terrorist on the comer, however, and Canaris barged past the Wehrmacht guards. He was not surprised to find the field marshal awake, poring over maps of France and the Mediterranean while a swarm of junior and senior staff officers buzzed about him, carrying messages, talking on telephones, and arguing quietly in the corners of the room. The interview took only a few minutes, since Canaris had been keeping Rundstedt apprised of his efforts to validate the Spanish lead for some time. In any event, the visit was mostly a courtesy, since the ultimate decision on releasing the armored reserves would have to be made by the Führer himself.

  The one thing that he did obtain from von Rundstedt was approval to go ahead with Operation RAVEN. Since it was apparent that the Allies were doing something big whether it proved to be in the north of France, the south, in North Africa, or a combination of the three, RAVEN would enhance Germany’s strategic position. What was more, it would have to be carried out in the next few hours, or the window of opportunity would close for good.

  Von Rundstedt growled at a young captain who quickly called for Canaris’ car to take him to the small Storch aircraft that awaited him at the airfield at Le Bourl northeast of the city. Before noon he would be in the Wolfschanze, the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s secret headquarters in East Prussia from which the entire war in Russia was being directed. They would now know where to move the panzer reserve now and would throw the attackers back into the sea just as easily as they had at Dieppe that past summer. If this landing was on as large a scale as it appeared, a resounding defeat for the Allies now might secure the coast from a new threat of invasion for years to come. This had been the best day’s work Canaris had done in a long while. Although the intelligence chief had begun to have serious doubts about whether the war could be won, ever since the failure of the Wehrmacht to take Moscow a year before, and although he had begun to pull together a small circle of officers with a view to removing Hitler from power and ultimately achieving a negotiated settlement with the Allies, Canaris had taken no overt steps as yet. If a major victory could be gained now, he would just swallow his pride and continue to bask in the sun of Nazi glory.

  It only remained that Admiral Darlan live up to his often-repeated promises to defend French territory from all comers. The Wehrmacht would take care of the landings in the north. Let Vichy’s French Army in Morocco and Algeria, and its navy, both of which had been left in much better fighting trim than the forces in metropolitan France, take on the burden of fighting any Allied incursions there. Win or lose, the bloodshed would stand to poison France’s relations with the Western Allies to the point that Petain might finally take the plunge and formally join the Axis as an active participant. Let the Allies have a few hundred miles of sand populated by camels and Arabs. Canaris would take the French fleet in exchange any day.

  Canaris had every reason to believe that a French alliance was in the offing. Following the French surrender in June 1940, the British Mediterranean Fleet had presented itself off the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kébir where the French fleet had taken refuge. As part of the ceasefire agreement with Germany, the French had removed their combat ships to the safety of North Africa but had promised to disarm and mothball them there. The British, however, were understandably concerned that, with over one million French prisoners of war as hostages, to say nothing of the population of Metropolitan France, the Germans might well alter the terms and demand surrender of the fleet to them. While the French fleet was small compared to Britain’s, if combined with the Italian and German navies, it might well enable the Axis to drive the British from the Mediterranean, and possibly even force a passage for the German Army across the English Channel. This could not be left to chance.

  Consequently, on orders from Churchill, the British demanded that the French fleet either come out and continue the war alongside the British, or scuttle itself then and there. The French commanders, again thinking of the millions of hostages in German hands, could not agree to violate their peace terms and refused. The British attacked. With aircraft and naval gunfire, they pounded the partially disarmed French ships, sinking most of them and killing nearly 1,300 French sailors. Several French cruisers and destroyers managed to escape to Toulon, and the French, for their part, refused to fire back at their erstwhile allies. Needless to say, the attitude in the Petain government was hardly sympathetic to the British from this point on.

  As commander-in-chief of the French Navy, and with this background, the Germans were confi
dent that Darlan would resist any inclination to side with the Allies as rumors began to accumulate that the Anglo-Americans were planning something big for the near future. The Gaullist officers within the Vichy military were also aware of this and of Darlan’s considerable influence over the actions of the aged Marshal Petain. Consequently, as part of their effort to lay the groundwork for the Allied plan, a conspiracy arose to remove Darlan from the equation.

  A young naval officer, Lieutenant Michel de Rostelon, was part of Darlan’s staff and had been an important source of information for the Gaullists on the inner workings of the Vichy military. He was now selected to deal with the Admiral. While physical security around Darlan was not particularly strict, it would have been highly risky for an assassin, even one with access, to simply carry in a weapon and use it. Since de Rostelon knew Darlan’s daily routine, however, he devised his own plan to take the Admiral outside his offices when he left the building to go home for lunch. The brisk day made wearing an overcoat unremarkable, and de Rostelon put his on, leaving his right arm, in which he held an automatic pistol, inside the coat while that sleeve was stuffed with rags, inserting the tip of the sleeve into the coat pocket, leaving his right arm free on the inside to grasp the weapon. He stood in the shadows of a doorway across the street from the side entrance to Darlan’s headquarters and waited.

  Shortly before dawn, Darlan emerged, accompanied by one of his aides. Darlan was a dapper little man, clean-shaven, with a crown of white hair under his naval cap. He had more of the look of a small town mayor than the most powerful man in Vichy France. He was talking jovially with his aide about something, and the smile on his face, when he had just ordered hundreds, if not thousands, of young Frenchmen to their deaths in the interests of his own personal power, by resisting the Allied landings, simply made de Rostelon all the more resolved on his course of action. He strode across the street, heading straight toward Darlan, who was waiting for his aide to open the door of his staff car. Darlan looked up and squinted in the dim light of the street lamp, then frowned at the sight of the young officer he knew should have been several miles away on a vital mission.