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

by Alexander M. Grace

  De Rostelon threw open his coat and fired a long burst from his MAT submachinegun at less than five yards range. The aide, who had his back to de Rostelon was hit in the shoulder, and another bullet shattered the window on the car door as the nervous assassin struggled to control his weapon, but Darlan took half a dozen rounds full in his chest. He staggered back, a look of astonished disbelief on his face as de Rostelon fired again, bowling the admiral over into the gutter. De Rostelon let the weapon clatter to the pavement and took a step forward to see if he could help the wounded aide, but the two tall spahis standing guard at the doorway did not wait to investigate, both firing their antiquated carbines from the hip as they charged down the stairs. The unfortunate aide was hit again, this time in the leg, as he tried to crawl into the car for safety, but de Rostelon was struck several times, any one of which would likely have proved fatal.

  No group took official credit for the assassination, but a subsequent search of de Rostelon’s quarters turned up copies of reports he had prepared for passage to the FTP. Darlan’s orders to the fleet were also recovered from the body and turned over to General Giraud, who had just been named commander-in-chief of the French Armed Forces. Giraud stored the document in his personal safe and told no one. He did, however, order trusted units of the gendarmerie to begin the round up of dozens of known Gaullist officers throughout Vichy territory in both metropolitan France and in North and West Africa. De Rostelon’s action had not only eliminated one of Giraud’s primary rivals for power, but had inadvertently given him a valuable weapon in his competition with another.

  0430 HOURS, 19 DECEMBER 1942

  LE MANS, FRANCE

  Jean Paul Belmont had been planning to move to the unoccupied zone of France for some time. He would then find a way to cross the border into Spain, thence to Portugal, and ultimately to get to a ship headed for England where he could finally join the Free French forces of General de Gaulle. Although Belmont had been a reservist in 1940, his unit had only just been called up when the Third Republic collapsed and the surrender was signed, so he had never fought for his country as he had longed to do. Since he was young and unmarried, Belmont had no strong ties to his hometown and no relatives on whom the Germans could take out their vengeance if he fled, so there seemed little reason for him to stay. However, his control officer in the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior, the Gaullist resistance, which he had joined almost as soon as it had been formed over a year ago, had prevailed upon him time and again to remain at his post, that of mechanic in the motor pool of the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division based in Le Mans. They had explained that the information he had been able to provide on the strength levels of this and other Wehrmacht divisions had been far more valuable than any contribution he could make as a simple rifleman in North Africa. Now, inexplicably, Belmont had been told that, in exchange for one final operational act, he would not only be allowed to leave, but the FFI would facilitate his escape to Vichy territory. When he learned what they wanted of him, it became apparent to Belmont that, once he had done the job, he would have no choice but to leave.

  At the end of his normal workday, at 1800 hours the previous evening, instead of joining the gaggle of lethargic French workers shuffling out the gates of the military base, Belmont had hidden in a storeroom behind one of the garages. The German guards were always scrupulous about checking the identity papers of all workers as they came to work in case some saboteur should attempt to enter with them, but they had never paid much attention to those leaving. He had made himself as comfortable as possible, peering out the grimy window of the room in the early winter darkness as the pace of activity at the base gradually diminished and the troops retired to their barracks. He pulled a small sandwich and half-bottle of rough red wine from his rucksack and fortified himself for the night’s work.

  At about 2200 hours, Belmont checked to see that he had the few items he required in his bag: an awl, a mallet, a small can of putty, a bag of sugar, a roll of electrical tape, and a pair of wire shears. Then he listened at the door of the room before slipping into the cavernous garage bay.

  The garage was crowded with trucks, half-tracks, tanks, and little kubel-wagons undergoing routine maintenance. He needed no light to find the gas tank of each vehicle. Then he used the awl and mallet to punch a small hole near the bottom of each tank, quickly stopping the leak with a wad of putty and moving on to the next. The gas containers of the Panzer IIIs and IVs were too sturdily constructed for him to penetrate without heavier tools, and make much too much noise, so he limited himself to unscrewing the gas cap and pouring a measure of sugar into each one. In terms of damage to the vehicles, it would have been preferable to do this to the trucks and half-tracks as well, but even the all-pervasive FFI had only so much influence, and they had been lucky to have been able to procure a single kilo of sugar in these hard times. As he moved from one vehicle to another, Belmont greedily licked the stray sugar crystals from his fingers like a guilty child.

  The division had over three hundred tanks and hundreds of other vehicles, so there was no way that Belmont could sabotage all of them, but he made certain to check the fender markings carefully and to hit a few vehicles from each battalion. He finished in the first garage, then moved on to another, carefully sticking to the shadows between the buildings. Most of the sentries were concentrated around the perimeter of the base and the level of alert was low, but he could never have explained his presence if he should happen to stumble across a stray officer or NCO running a late errand, and he had no illusions about the kind of treatment he would receive at the hands of the Gestapo if he were caught. He had heard stories of resistants being cooked alive, hung from meat hooks, or skinned by their German interrogators in basement dungeons. When he had done all that he could indoors, he moved through the ranks of the parked vehicles outside, crawling on his belly from one to the next.

  Now, after working for over six hours, he was done. If the division were mobilized and sent on a road march, the tank engines with sugared gas would seize up within a few hours, probably ruined for good. On the trucks and half-tracks, the putty would soon work itself out of the hole, and they would all begin to pour precious gasoline out onto the highway. It was very likely that many of them would simply be refilled when they ran low, wasting more fuel, before someone noticed a leak and then noticed how many of them there were. This would require a halt and some hasty repair work, as well as an inspection of all of the other vehicles, probably out on the road where they would be vulnerable to Allied air attack. Naturally, suspicion would fall on the French mechanics drafted into the German service, but Belmont would be long gone by then. In fact, this would undoubtedly help protect his fellow workers, as the finger would inevitably point at the missing man. This eased Belmont’s conscience somewhat, although there was still the distinct possibility that the Germans would take and shoot hostages when the guilty party was not found. They’d done this often enough before. He gritted his teeth and pulled the shears from his bag.

  Now came the truly difficult part. There was a broad open area on each side of the perimeter fence of the base. While this was hardly a prison camp, there were watchtowers at frequent intervals equipped with spotlights, and patrols, some of them equipped with machine guns. Belmont had no intention of making this a suicide mission, although he had accepted the possibility that he might well not survive. His main concern in getting away cleanly was to avoid falling alive into German hands where he had no doubt that the Gestapo interrogators would be able to extract from him any information about his own actions that day and anything else of value about the FFI. That must be avoided at all costs.

  Fortunately, unlike in a prison camp, the guards here were focused on keeping people from getting in not out, so their attention, assuming they were not asleep, would be toward the farthest treeline, not the interior of the base. Belmont had given this considerable thought over the past weeks, and he had identified a bit of dead ground near the base of one of the towers. He wa
ited until the searchlights were pointed elsewhere and briskly strolled up to the fence, then dropped to the ground. He cut the lower strands of wire with the snips he had carried in his pocket and crawled through. Again, he waited until the lights swung away and dashed for a small depression about twenty yards beyond the fence and threw himself flat. Again he waited, his heart pounding in his chest, but there were no shots, no cries of alarm. He now crawled on his belly, inch by inch along the depression, every moment expecting his back to be torn open by a bullet, until he finally reached the end of the cleared ground and dragged himself under the welcome cover of some bushes. He got up on one knee and peered over the bushes. The base was ablaze with lights, and he could see crowds of men pouring out of the barracks. The shouted orders of the sergeants came to him in scraps on the wind as the soldiers hastily formed into platoons and companies.

  His first thought was that his work had been discovered and that the entire division had been called out to search for him, but it soon became apparent that the perimeter guards were not part of this general alert. Men were forming human chains to load crates and jerry cans onto the vehicles, and the drivers were gunning their engines in preparation for departure. He had seen this often enough, when elements of the division moved out for field exercises, but never on this scale. No, it seemed as though the division was being mobilized and sent on a mission. This must have been why he had been ordered to act tonight, not yesterday, not tomorrow, not when he thought best, but absolutely tonight! The FFI had anticipated this move, and his action was meant to thwart it.

  Belmont’s breast began to swell with pride. Imagine! He had just crippled a Panzer Grenadier division all by himself! Of course, his sabotage could be fixed, and he had not reached even a third of the vehicles, but the Germans might be going into battle and would find, to their chagrin, that a large percentage of their fighting power was gone, to say nothing of their mobility. He was well aware that most of the transport for the German infantry divisions was provided by simple draft horses, just as it had been for centuries, and it was only the relatively few mechanized divisions, like this one, that gave the Wehrmacht its famed and feared armored fist. Well, it would be missing a finger this time, Belmont thought.

  He stood up erect and dug in his pocket for a cigarette. He lit it, contemptuous of the guard towers now and flicked the match in the direction of the base with a sneer, just before he slapped one palm down on the inner elbow of his opposite arm and raised his fist in an angry salute. He then slung his rucksack over his shoulder and sauntered off through the forest.

  0500 HOURS, 19 DECEMBER 1942

  NEAR CALVI, CORSICA

  Major General Pierre Koenig cupped his hand over his mouth as his stomach churned. After more than a year of fighting in the waterless wastes of the Western Desert, he was ill-equipped for riding the waves in a tossing LCI (Landing Craft, Infantry). The thought that the landings here on the northern tip of Corsica were not going anything like according to plan did little to settle his stomach. He craned his neck to peer over the gunwales of the small boat at the looming hills of the island and longed to have solid ground under his feet once more. Then everything else could be sorted out.

  Koenig was in nominal command of the invasion of Corsica, the only proper amphibious assault of a hostile shore involved in the entire HAYMAKER operation. The American and Canadian troops pouring ashore along the French Riviera and the British reinforcing the French garrisons in Tunisia would be welcomed in those places, the port facilities completely at their disposal. But Corsica had been occupied by the Italians after their cowardly entry into the war in June 1940, once the French Army had been thoroughly defeated by the Germans, and there were perhaps 80,000 Italian troops in several large concentrations around the island. Koenig had developed a measure of respect for the fighting qualities of the Italian troops he had encountered in Libya and Egypt, but those had been the elite of Mussolini’s army, not the third-rate coastal defense reservists that comprised most of the occupation forces here. Still, there were a lot of them, and they did have guns.

  Koenig’s invasion force, in fact, barely counted half as many men as the defenders. He had his own 1st Free French Division and Leclerc’s 2nd, but they suffered from the shortage of manpower that had plagued de Gaulle’s gallant little army since its inception and numbered barely 20,000 men between them. They were reinforced by the American 3rd Infantry Division, lavishly equipped and augmented by several independent battalions, and the Americans had been gracious enough to place the entire force under French command—his command. They would also be supported by considerable naval firepower from all five of the destroyers in de Gaulle’s tiny navy and at least one American heavy cruiser, and American carrier planes would be hitting points of resistance as soon as the sun came up. But it was going to be a near run thing, and de Gaulle had had to make a deal with the devil to improve their odds.

  Koenig had attended the clandestine meeting in a bunker deep under the “rock” of Gibraltar weeks before when de Gaulle had met with some “allies” of his own. The Union Corse was the rough equivalent of the Italian mafia, only with even less respect for the law, a much tighter organization, and a greater reputation for violence. Koenig had been called in to join de Gaulle and several of the capos, as these gangster chieftains were called, well after the discussions had begun. In fact, it had been apparent that the essence of the agreement for the capos’ support for the invasion had been reached discreetly without including Koenig or the other soldiers who entered with him. Koenig later learned that Corsican cooperation had been purchased at the expense of an agreement for their domination of the black market, smuggling, and prostitution all along the Riviera and on Corsica with minimal interference by the police, after the Liberation. Koenig thought that it was just as well that he would not have this on his conscience.

  He had not been overly impressed by these men, who had been described to him as something approaching heads of state. They were all typically swarthy Mediterranean types, short and stocky, and dressed in dark suits like those worn by peasants in southern France for going to Mass or a funeral. But they had impressed him with their knowledge of everything that took place on their island, the kind of intelligence generals dream of obtaining. Exact numbers and locations of all the defending forces, right down to the names of the Italian company commanders and the addresses of their local mistresses. One of the men turned out to be a veteran fisherman (read: smuggler) who knew every inch of the coast, every whim of the tides, and could tell him just where and when landings would be practicable.

  It was unfortunate, Koenig couldn’t help thinking, that the inexperienced American landing craft crews hadn’t been able to make full benefit of this information. Although the landing areas had been carefully selected and clandestinely surveyed, a number of the scout boats had been misplaced, sending landing craft to the wrong landfalls, and some of the boat crews had simply gone off course. Nearly half of the first wave had gone ashore miles from their intended targets, and a number of boats had piled up on easily avoidable rocks, damaged beyond repair and often dumping their loads of heavily burdened troops into the choppy waves to drown.

  Koenig’s boat, however, hit a firm shelf of sand, leaving him and his staff only a few yards of surf to wade through. He glanced upward at the cliffs which glowered over the narrow beach, their outlines just visible against the lightening sky. Had the enemy occupied them in force, it would have been a massacre. Unfortunately, the only really good landing beaches were on the island’s eastern side, which would have entailed the invasion fleet circling the island and conducting the assault with the hostile mainland at their backs.

  But the capos had been as good as their word, Koenig was to find, as a jeep rushed him to the command post which had been set up in the main post office in the town of Calvi overlooking the little harbor. Brothels located conveniently around the Italian barracks had offered special rates the night before, and literally hundreds of Italian officers and
men had awakened this morning in a drugged stupor, bound and gagged and naked, with alluring putains standing guard over them with their own weapons. The crews of a number of the most menacing coastal batteries had had even less luck. They had not awakened at all, their throats having been slit during the night by Corsican guerrillas wielding the knives for which they were justly famous. Koenig thought that the Italians should have taken note that the common term for the Resistance in France, the maquis, came from the name for the Corsican brush in which bandits and revolutionaries have hidden and fought for centuries. Koenig took the report from Leclerc, who had gone in with the first wave. The 225th Division, a low-grade reserve unit stationed at Calvi, stunned by the few 3-inch shells which dropped on the town, its baptism of fire, had surrendered en masse when the commander had found himself sandwiched between the French landing to the south and the Americans to the north. The 20th “Friuli” Division in Bastia, and the 44th “Cremona” in Ajaccio, both regular army units, had not folded, but they had pulled in their outposts and hunkered down within their fixed defenses. This left the invaders with complete control over nearly half of the island, almost without a shot being fired. The Italian port commander had even been kind enough to provide maps of the minefields covering the harbor at Calvi, enabling Koenig to radio the fleet to send in the follow-on forces directly to the docks and to come in and pick up the several thousand prisoners already on his hands.