Dönitz shook his head. “The Italian fleet got a drubbing at La Spezia, and they won’t show their faces again. The British and Americans made them cry like school girls.” This brought some gruff laughter from around the table. “And the French fleet just bombarded Genoa, sinking at least one Italian destroyer and several merchantmen. Our U-boats and some Italian submarines have had some success near Marseille, taking several American transports, but there is a heavy concentration of escorts and aircraft there, and we have also lost contact with U-235, feared sunk. I’m afraid the balance at sea has tipped decisively against us in the Mediterranean.
“But what about by air?” Hitler asked.
“We have nearly a division of German paratroopers and another of Italians on hand, but there is no way we could bring in armor or supplies by sea. They could prolong the battle, but they could not drive the Americans and French into the sea,” Kesselring concluded. “Corsica is lost, but it’s still not Italian territory. If we don’t hit the Allies hard on the continent, where it counts, they’ll be pushing along the coast into Italy proper soon enough, and then Mussolini will really have something to worry about.”
There was a long pause, and Hitler turned his back on the officers, facing a situation map of the Eastern Front without seeing it. “Then let it be so. Pull as many men out of North Africa as possible, Germans first of course. You can use them and the troops earmarked for Tunisia to mount your counter-offensive.”
“But that will take time, days at least,” von Rundstedt objected. “I’ve got the 26th Panzer and the 3rd and 29th Panzer Grenadier Divisions in France now. If you’ll release them from OKW reserve, my Führer, and return to us the 6th Panzer that we sent to Russia, we can drive right through the Americans now, before they dig in. They’ve never seen the likes of a panzer corps, and they’ll run like sheep. There will be British divisions in the follow-on shipments, and they are not likely to be as skittish. We need to hit them now if we are going to have any hope of success.”
Hitler smiled and shook his head as if dealing with a small child’s fears of the dark. Manstein is screaming for every man he can get to face a horde of Russians now, today, and he’s within his rights, trying to hold open a corridor so that Kleist can pull his army back from the Caucasus and punch through to rescue von Paulus in Stalingrad, so we can’t cut any corners on the support we’ve sent east. But you seem to be forgetting the British forces still sitting in England. What do you suppose they’re planning to do? I’ve said all along, and I’ll say again, that the only logical route from London to Berlin is through the Pas de Calais. The minute you strip the north of armor, it will be like an engraved invitation to the British to storm ashore and catch you between two fires. Will you be better off then?
Von Rundstedt opened his mouth to argue, but Hitler cut him off. “Of course not. You can have the 29th Panzer and 3rd Panzer Grenadier besides the available infantry and whatever troops Kesselring has at hand and can salvage from North Africa. That much I’ll give you. That should still be more than enough.” He turned to Kesselring. “Corsica is a lost cause, but I want Sardinia reinforced. It’s Italian soil, and we can’t let the Allies have it, or Sicily either. And I want to know why the Luftwaffe hasn’t closed the port of Marseille yet.”
He turned toward the bloated Goering, resplendent in his sky blue uniform encrusted with medals and ribbons, but the Reichsmarschal was lost in thought, and Hitler dismissed him with a snort and a wave of the hand.
“And I want the troops formed into a new army group with Rommel in command,” he added suddenly.
Rommel stood up straighter. “As my Führer wishes,” he snapped, ever the ambitious subordinate.
Canaris knew that Rommel suffered from a serious, if somewhat vague, medical problem and was supposed to be undergoing several months of rest and recuperation. While whatever the condition was would undoubtedly have been aggravated by the climate and rigors of campaigning in the desert, especially given Rommel’s style of tooling around in an open vehicle in search of adventure, a tough campaign in the dead of winter in the French Alps would not likely be what the doctors had in mind for him either. Canaris could not help being put in mind of Napoleon, who had abandoned his own army in Egypt when the going got tough and returned home, not to disgrace, but to more adulation, promotion, and eventually to total power. He could not help wondering whether Rommel might not harbor the same vision of himself. Canaris smirked as Hitler swept from the room, leaving an icy silence in his wake. So that was how you lost a war in one evening, he thought.
1400 HOURS, 23 DECEMBER 1942
NEAR THIERS, FRANCE
Captain Hans Essen stood on the seat of his half-track and scanned the tree-line with his field glasses. The long column of tanks and vehicles of the SS Lehr Sturm (assault training) Panzer Grenadier Brigade stretched for miles behind him in a throbbing, nervous line, and he could hear the raspy calls coming in on the radio from the brigade commander demanding to know why the advance had been halted. According to his map, they were just about to enter the last hilly, forested stretch before reaching the Loire River, and, up until now the progress of the brigade had been swift and without problems since crossing into what had been Vichy territory before dawn that morning. They had captured a bridge over the Allier River intact, cutting down a detachment of French Army engineers as they attempted to wire charges to drop the span, and there had been no further sign of resistance from either regular troops or guerrillas, until now.
The roadblock was not all that serious. A trench had been dug across the narrow country road the brigade was using at a low spot of what looked like marshy ground, making it problematical for heavy armored vehicles to maneuver around it. The ground was covered with a light dusting of snow, but it was not cold enough for a solid freeze to have set in, and there would likely be mines there as well. Behind the trench a tangle of felled trees and a couple of rusty farm vehicles formed an added hindrance, and Essen could see a telltale wire that implied that the entire structure was booby-trapped. Still, this was nothing that the combat engineers could not handle, and they were already scuttling forward, dodging from cover to cover. What concerned Essen was whether the obstruction might also be covered by fire from the woods, and he had deployed his reconnaissance troop in an arc facing the most likely ambush sites. Then, there it was.
A crackle of rifle fire echoed across the little valley, muffled by the still-falling snow, and he saw one of the engineers fall heavily as the others went to ground. The machine guns on several of the vehicles opened up, as did the 20mm gun on an armored car, raking the treeline, while a platoon of infantry in mottled gray and white camouflage smocks dismounted and rushed off to one flank. With a practiced ear, earned on the battlefields of France and Russia, Essen listened carefully. About a dozen rifles, old ones he estimated, and one machine gun was all that they were facing. It must be maquisards, the damned resistance fighters. Regular troops with that little firepower would have had the sense not to attract the attention of a full brigade, much less offer to fight.
Essen made a call on the radio and, within moments, mortar shells were dropping in the woods, smoke to shield his infantry and high explosives to cut up the defenders. It was like a particularly mundane training exercise, but it was taking precious time. They had to get across the Loire before the enemy could put up a meaningful defense. His brigade was acting as spearhead for a larger thrust by the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division, which would be following shortly. They would take St. Etienne and head southwest between the Loire and the Rhone, turning the line the French were trying to set up covering Lyon and the stronger one the Americans were forming at Valence. Then they would be out of the rough country and could drive right down to Avignon and on to Marseille at the head of the still larger force the newly promoted Field Marshal Rommel was forming at Dijon to split the Allied beachhead and end the invasion once and for all. But to do all of that, he had to get on to the Loire, and this pile of trash was in his way.
Essen thrust his arm out in a Nazi salute. “The road is clear, sir, and our patrols report no other obstacles this side of Montbrison,” he anticipated the general’s displeasure at the delay.
“Very well, Captain,” the general sniffed, obviously troubled by a head cold. “But we must teach the locals a lesson about such actions, or they will be back in half an hour shooting up our supply convoys.”
“Sir?” Essen asked, knowing what the general had in mind, but dreading it. He had certainly taken part in “pacification” operations in the Ukraine that summer, but those had been Slavs, after all, a different race, while the French were essentially Aryan, if misguided in their political attitudes.
The general rolled his eyes. “You know what to do, Captain. The 3rd Panzer Grenadier is being delayed because of sabotage to its vehicles and the destruction of two railway bridges between here and Le Mans. I will not have our advance held up by this constant sniping from the hedgerows. The next village you come to, set an example. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Essen snapped and gave another salute before waving an armored car into the lead.
They came to a small village, Claire-en-Bois, about two miles farther on, and Essen pulled a company of infantry out of the column. The cobblestone streets of the town were deserted and the shutters of the sturdy stone houses were closed tight, but Essen had his men kick in the doors and begin to drag people out into the little square with its obligatory Monument aux Morts to the dead of the last war. Essen had a moment to glance at the names engraved on plaques around the base of the monument, quite a few for such a small place, he thought.
A round little man in a dark suit seemed to be in charge and kept calling to Essen from behind a cordon of infantrymen in their coal scuttle helmets, but Essen ignored him for the moment. When it appeared that everyone, men, women, and children, had been collected, Essen walked up to the man he assumed was the mayor.
“Bandits attacked our column near your town,” Essen growled in his poor French. “We killed most of them but several escaped, and we have reason to believe that this band is either from this village or has received support from here. Tell us where the bandits are headquartered and where they hide their arms, or face the consequences.”
The little man sputtered apologies and claims of total innocence. He waved his arms about him to demonstrate that there were virtually no able bodied men in the village, as if this were proof of anything except the probability that the men were up in the hills with rifles. He even said something about turning over the town’s only Jewish family the year before to be sent to a concentration camp and smiled weakly.
“If that is all you have to say,” Essen cut him off, “then my course is clear.”
Essen barked an order to a sergeant, and the soldiers used their rifle butts to herd the crowd into the small stone church. He watched the faces of his own men carefully, looking for any sign of weakness, but three of their comrades had been killed at the ambush, and no one hesitated to do what needed to be done. When the last old woman had been shoved through the doorway and the heavy oak doors pulled shut behind her, men began hauling furniture from nearby houses, smashing it, and piling it up against the doors and windows on all sides. One squad had found a two-wheeled cart loaded with hay in a barn, and this was rolled under the eaves of the church as well. A sergeant fired a burst from his Schmeisser which shattered a stained glass window, and several men began lobbing incendiary grenades through the opening while others set fire to the piles of wood and debris.
A shout of protest went up from within the church, but this quickly turned into a collective shriek of terror from scores of throats, eighty-seven by the scrupulous count of the company clerk. Essen could hear a heavy thumping, and one of the side doors of the church burst open where the trapped villagers had used a wooden pew to batter their way through. A man charged through the burning wood piled in the doorway, but a machine gun set up nearby for just this purpose cut him down. A woman followed, clutching a bundle, or perhaps a small child, to her breast, and she, too was knocked back into the flames by the force of the bullets.
The ancient wood of the floors and roof and the tapestries hanging from the walls of the church caught easily, and soon the stone walls were a mere silhouette against the bright orange blaze which engulfed the church from one end to the other. The screaming had stopped now, and Essen jerked a thumb for his men to get back aboard their vehicles. He took one last look at the town as his half-track pulled back onto the road. It was not very different from the town he had come from in Bavaria, and he knew in his heart that, if he wanted to prevent some invader doing this very thing in his town, he had to take a firm stand here. Once the French understood that, they would simply get out of the way and avoid trouble.
Just inside a stand of trees half a mile from the village, a group of men struggled silently. There were six of them altogether, and four were wrestling with the remaining two, preventing them from charging across the open ground toward the burning pyre that was the church.
“My wife is in there,” one of the two hissed in a harsh whisper, “ and my little boy!”
“I know that, you fool,” one of the other men said, softly. “My mother was in the town too, but there is nothing we can do now but get killed ourselves.”
The two that were on the ground still writhed fitfully, tears streaming down their faces.
“But do not lose this feeling, Michel,” the second man continued. “Keep it within you, and use it when we get a chance to pay these pigs back in kind.”
1600 HOURS, 23 DECEMBER 1942
NEAR EPERNAY, FRANCE
Captain Woody Miles resented being used as a target. He understood, of course, that a successful bombing run on the German Panzer Division reported to be heading south toward the Allied landing area could have an important effect on the coming battle, but that job was much better suited to fighter bombers, not Flying Fortresses like the one he was piloting. He knew enough about the tactics used during the air war thus far to understand that what the brass really wanted was to use his bomber group as a magnet to draw as many Luftwaffe fighters as possible out of their camouflaged, fortified revetments where they could be destroyed in a “war of attrition.” The problem with attrition, as Miles had seen it at work over the several months since his arrival in England, was that it worked both ways.
The good news was that this raid would at least be within the range of friendly fighter cover, and two full squadrons of the new P-51s were riding herd on this bomber wing, which would certainly be a help. The B-17, of course, was not defenseless, bristling with guns and well armored, and the new tactics of flying in a “combat box” maximized the concentrated firepower of the formation while keeping one plane from blocking the fire of another. The “box” consisted of three flights of six bombers each. Each flight formed into two “vees” of three planes, one slightly ahead of the other. The three flights were then formed into “vees” as well, with one just behind, above, and to the right of the lead, the other below, behind, and to the left. The wing would have three such combat boxes similarly echeloned across the sky, presenting an intricate web of interlocking fire and virtually no blind spots the enemy fighters could exploit. Still, Miles could not help but feeling like an anvil on which the hammer of the P-51s hoped to pound the Luftwaffe into rubble, and he would much rather be a hammer than an anvil.
A flurry of chatter on the radio indicated that the “little
friends,” as the fighters were called, had spotted a large swarm of “bandits” and had pulled off to engage them. It had been learned that having the fighters hug the bomber formations too closely limited their usefulness and merely put them in the way of the guns of the bomber wing. But what if this were merely a decoy? Miles couldn’t help but wonder.
A moment later he had his answer. His ship was flying lead in the far left flight of the lead combat box, and when he checked the sky off to his left, he could see enemy fighters emerging from a cloud bank flying a parallel course with the bombers, just out of range of the B-17s’ guns. This was a tactic that drove Miles crazy. The fighters would pace the bombers for a time, letting the prey get a good long look without being able to do anything about it. Then they would gradually gain speed and climb out of sight, eventually turning to charge the bombers head on. Of course, the B-17 had impressive forward firepower that most bombers lacked, but the technique was still unnerving as hell. They were Bf-109s, and there were at least twenty of them. Then they entered another cloudbank and did not emerge from the other side. Oh, brother! Miles thought to himself.
When the attack came, it was terrifying. They were trying to pick off the bombers on the fringes of the formation, which unfortunately included Miles’ squadron. They dove in pairs at tremendous speed, their guns blazing. There were also heavier Me-110s out there somewhere, firing new anti-aircraft rockets from beyond effective machine-gun range. The rockets were not terribly accurate but had proximity fuses which detonated near the target plane, peppering it with shrapnel, and these fighters also carried 30mm cannon that could inflict far more damage than lighter machine guns. These “destroyers,” as they were called, were easy pickings for escorting fighters, but the P-51s were busy elsewhere.
The aircraft next to Miles began to lose altitude, smoke pouring from one of its engines, and he could see that the windscreen of the cockpit had been shot away. There was a chaos of voices coming over the radio, calling out enemy fighters, ordering everyone to tighten up the formation, or just cursing or praying out loud.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 12