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

by Alexander M. Grace

  At last the target was coming up, a railroad marshalling yard. Through the scattered clouds, Miles could make out the tracks, but the bombardier reported over the intercom that there was no sign of large numbers of flatcars that would indicate that the enemy division was present.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Miles shouted over the roar of the engines and the rattle of the crews’ machine guns. “The tracks don’t move. If they’ve already passed by, we can’t go looking for them, and if they haven’t arrived, then we’ll put a cork in this bottle and make them go somewhere else. That’s what we’re here for.”

  The bombers unloaded their tons of bombs in a broad pattern which obliterated the yards and at least two small bridges over canals in the area in addition to some rolling stock that happened to be in the target area. The formation made a leisurely turn for home, still harassed by enemy fighters, although not as many as before, and Miles could just concentrate on his flying now. He was worried about his radioman and one of the waist gunners, both of whom had been hit, and he didn’t know if they were alive or dead. They were being attended to, and the best he could do for them was to fly fast and straight for home.

  Just north of Epernay, troops of the 26th Panzer Division were jerked awake as they lay sprawled across their gear in the passenger cars of a train that was waved to a halt by a frantic railroad man with a red flag. A moment later they were jostled again, and curses filled the cars as the train began to reverse direction. This was the third time in eight hours that their route had been changed, and they were less than one hundred miles from their point of departure. At this rate it would take weeks to reach the area of Lyon where the battle was supposed to take place.

  2000 HOURS, 23 DECEMBER 1942

  BUERAT, TRIPOLITANIA

  Lieutenant Jonathan Penny, leader of a squad of Special Air Service (SAS) commandos, edged closer to the nearest building of the town, but there was no sign of activity. The unit’s mission had been to land by boat well west of Buerat with a view to moving inland and hitting a supply dump the German were known to have in the neighborhood. They would then commandeer transport and drive across country until they re-entered friendly lines. Penny had done this many times in the past year, and this mission seemed to be no different than the others.

  But this mission had turned out to be different, at least in that the enemy had failed to show up. The commandos had come ashore and shredded their rubber boats as usual before pushing inland. They had found the supply dump where aerial reconnaissance had pinpointed it, but there were no guards. Penny and his men had examined the stacks of crates, carefully stashed in bunkers and covered with camouflage netting, and there had been tons of ammunition, food, and water, but, oddly enough, no petrol at all. Not even the Arab scavengers had been by to pick over the booty.

  They had found the same thing in the town of Buerat itself, just behind the defensive line Rommel had set up to halt the British Eighth Army. Here at least there were some scattered Arab residents, and Penny had finally snatched one and had the team member who spoke a little Arabic interrogate him about the whereabouts of the Germans and Italians. All the man could say, or all the interpreter could understand was that they were gone. Many planes, the man had said, and many boats and trucks too, pointing north and west.

  Penny was tempted to search the buildings that had been used as headquarters by the enemy, but he had too much experience with the ingenious booby traps left by the Germans to be tempted now. The door of a house would be wired with grenades, or maybe there would be a pressure plate in the floor just inside a window, if you avoided the door. If you survived that, the keys on a typewriter would be wired, or the straightening of a crooked picture on the wall would set off a mine. That would have to be left for the engineers in daylight.

  Penny hastily detached a sergeant and a corporal to make their way back to British lines with the news, and he took the rest of the team on a trek in pursuit of Panzer Armee Afrika, a role that appealed to Penny, thinking that, at least for a moment, he and his six men had Rommel on the run all by themselves. They soon came across a light truck that had been abandoned by the side of the road, and one of his men was able to get it running, and they continued northwest toward Tripoli in high style, even though travel by truck opened up the danger of running into a minefield, but Penny’s mission was reconnaissance as much as demolition, and he had no good information yet. By dawn they were in sight of the town of Horns, the last community of any size before Tripoli itself, and still no sign of the enemy other than an increasing number of abandoned vehicles, which had allowed the team to trade up in their mode of transport twice and to replenish their fuel by draining the gas tanks of the other trucks they found. This struck Penny as odd, since petrol was more precious than gold in the desert, and to leave even a drop behind, even in a headlong retreat, made no sense at all. And the border of French Tunisia was barely one hundred and fifty miles away. Where could they be retreating to?

  They did not dare press on in daylight, as the first sign they would have that the Nazis had chosen to make a stand would be an “88” round in their teeth, so Penny and his men holed up for the day in a jumble of rocks not far from the road, eating rations they had salvaged along the way and watching for some sign of life from the enemy. There was none.

  As dusk fell, as it did so very quickly in the desert, they pressed on, making a wide circle around Horns, a small cluster of low white buildings in which no lights were burning, and no vehicle engines could be heard, and by the next morning they were approaching the outskirts of Tripoli itself. This was a proper city, of course, and here lights were burning and plenty of early morning activity could be seen around the town, in addition to massive fires blazing down near what must have been the port area.

  The patrol edged its way around the outskirts of the city, working toward the coast. They finally found a position on a small headland where a rise afforded them a view of the port area. Through his field glasses, Penny could see hundreds of small black figures clustered about the docks and several freighters tied up there amid a blaze of arc lights and the quavering light of enormous mounds of supplies that had been set afire. The decks of the boats were jammed with trucks, and the streets leading to the docks with the burned out carcasses of destroyed tanks and armored cars.

  “Bugger all!” a sergeant cursed. “The bastards are getting away!”

  “Not much we can do about it, mate,” Penny admitted. “If the RAF or the Navy don’t spot them and hit them before they get clear, the bleeding Eighth Army certainly ain’t in any position to catch them.”

  1000 HOURS, 24 DECEMBER 1942

  ROME, ITALY

  King Victor Emanuel III was visibly shaken as he presided over a meeting of his Grand Council. He was pale, and his eyes were puffy as if he had either not been to bed or had been crying, possibly both. The Grand Council was not an important body of men, just a collection of elderly men of good reputation who were used to acting as the figurehead for Mussolini’s ship of state, but today they had a grim, purposeful look about them as they sat around the long conference table. Also present were General Vittorio Abrosio, head of the Commando Supremo and Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio, former commander of the armed forces. The two men notably missing from the meeting were Mussolini, il Duce, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Supreme Commander, South, for the Wehrmacht and virtual viceroy of Italy for more than a year. It was an act approaching open treachery, at least in German eyes, for the Grand Council to meet without them, but it was a risk the men present felt necessary to take.

  “Well, now we know what the Ethiopians felt like,” Ambrosio was saying in a low growl. “Mussolini had sworn that the enemy would never touch Italy. We knew better after the British raid on Taranto, but no one had expected anything like this, even after the attacks on La Spezia and Genoa.”

  “Do we know how many dead yet?” the king asked tremulously.

  “At least two thousand, probably more,” Ambrosio responded. “
Both of the marshalling yards in Rome were hit by American B-17s flying out of southern France just after dawn. We had trains moving troops north toward the French border, and at least one was caught, fully loaded, at the center of a bombing pattern. It will take time to sort through the rubble, but I have just come from there, and I can tell you I never saw anything like it.”

  One of the council members spoke up. “It would seem that the Americans were very careful to avoid hitting the historical centers of the city.”

  Ambrosio snorted. “That just means that they can hit whatever they want. Next time they might intentionally flatten the Forum, and there’s little we can do about it.”

  “The Germans are moving more troops into the country to help defend against the Allies, they say,” Badoglio offered. “They are setting up more antiaircraft positions around the city and in the north as well and bringing in more fighters. You can’t count them out yet. The withdrawal from North Africa was probably the greatest evacuation in military history, much more than Dunkirk. Over 70,000 men and hundreds of vehicles pulled out right under Montgomery’s nose.”

  “We noticed that all of the Germans were loaded first, even though most of the ships were ours,” Ambrosio responded. “And they’re bringing in a lot more infantry, scattering it around the whole country. That’s not going to defend us against bombers. They’re not sure that we’re going to stick with them, and they want to be in a position to seize the country if we try to drop out.”

  “And are we going to stick with them?” the king asked as he looked longingly out the tall windows, now criss-crossed with tape against bomb blasts, as the city was awakening to the worst Christmas in recent memory.

  “We don’t have much choice at the moment, sire,” Badoglio said sadly. “The Allies haven’t set foot on Italian soil yet, and it would be dishonorable to seek a separate peace at this stage.”

  “That didn’t stop the Germans in the last war,” one of the councilmen argued.

  “No Allied troops had reached Germany then either. They fought, and made their allies fight, until they felt it was better to stop, and then they just stopped. Why should we be any different.”

  Ambrosio cleared his throat. “This must not leave this room, but it is not just a question of honor. We are dealing with an unscrupulous, vicious megalomaniac in Hitler, and he has the power to crush us if we stand against him alone. We have to wait until the Allies invade in force, not just to satisfy our honor, but to be able to take advantage of the protection of their armies when we do it. If we try to withdraw from the Axis now, and the Allies are defeated in France, the Germans will come in and obliterate us just as they did to the Poles. Now is the time to begin marshalling our forces for a possible showdown with the Germans while still defending our territory against the Allies.”

  Victor Emmanuel sighed and thought for a long moment. “I intend to ask Mussolini to consider resignation.” Several of the councilmen nodded gravely.

  “It will do no harm,” Badoglio said. “But it will do no good either. The only way that man will give up his power is when they carry him out feet first.”

  “We will have to consider that possibility as well,” the king said as he rose and walked slowly from the room.

  CHAPTER 4

  CONSOLIDATION

  1200 HOURS, 26 DECEMBER 1942

  NEAR ANNONAY, FRANCE

  IN THE AMERICAN Civil War they called a man’s first time in combat “seeing the elephant,” in reference to the experience of country boys going to the circus for the first time. The idea was that someone could describe an elephant to you until he was blue in the face, but you couldn’t really appreciate one until you had seen it for yourself. Well, Colonel William C. Bentley and the men of the 2nd Battalion, 509th Airborne Regiment, had seen the elephant, and the elephant had kicked their butts.

  After a death-defying race over icy roads in dilapidated trucks and even private cars from their initial landing site, the paratroopers had reached the town of St. Etienne only to wait for days before the first German showed up. They had not wasted the time, of course, digging in alongside the French 92nd Infantry Regiment under Colonel d’Ormesson. They had chipped away at the frozen ground with farm tools and even dynamite charges, establishing a strong line of infantry fighting positions in an arc around the northern approaches to the town, anchoring their left flank on the Loire River and their right in the rough hill country to the east. The road leading south along the river from Roanne was heavily mined, and the bridge upstream near Montbrison had been blown.

  They didn’t have much in the way of troops, and even less in terms of heavy weapons, perhaps 1,500 Americans and 2,000 French, not counting the several hundred civilians who had shown up begging for weapons, which were not available. At least they had served to help in the digging and as scouts to watch downriver for the approach of the enemy. The paratroopers’ mortars were emplaced to the rear, and half a dozen old French 75mm howitzers dug in and well camouflaged covering the road to act as direct fire antitank guns. A pair of sturdy Somua tanks were backing up the line, while several light tanks and a couple of armored cars were posted well forward as an outpost to engage the Germans and force them to deploy early.

  Word had come in a couple of days before about the massacre of a whole village less than a hundred miles away by a unit of the German SS, and Bentley had made sure that his men heard about it. There wasn’t much joking around after that, just a desire to get into the fight.

  But Bentley had been concerned about how the Allied offensive was going in general. From everything he had seen, the initial landings had gone off brilliantly. There had been no betrayal by the French, for one thing, and no huge ambush of the invasion fleet by German and Italian U-boats, although he had heard that a troop transport had been torpedoed coming into Toulon with the loss of over 500 men. The bombing campaign had apparently worked well up north, which explained why the Germans were so long in coming, and there had been no sign of the Luftwaffe whatsoever at St. Etienne, which implied that they had been given the drubbing the planners had counted on. But that was where things had stopped. Marshall had thrown this great army ashore with considerable vigor, but now it seemed to be wallowing there without any clear idea of what to do next, just waiting for the Germans to deliver the first blow, whenever and wherever they chose. Bentley had never considered himself a grand strategist, but he knew that this could not be a blueprint for victory.

  For one thing, there was still no armor or any other kind of reinforcement up here at the front, and Bentley had heard that there had been bitter wrangling between the American and the French generals about where to draw the line. The French wanted to hold onto Lyon, not surprisingly since it was France’s second largest city and a great industrial center, but at the same time they didn’t want to fight in Lyon and tum it into another Stalingrad. The Americans, also not surprisingly, did not feel they had the strength to cover so wide an area for their lodgment and wanted the main defensive line to start back around Valence, farther south. The same was true in the west, where the French wanted to defend Toulouse, and the Americans and Canadians insisted that the line be at a much narrower gap between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central at Carcassonne. The result was that two defensive belts had been created, with the weak French units strung out north of Lyon and west of Toulouse, hoping against hope that the Germans would not hit them too hard, and the Allies digging in miles to their rear. Bentley feared that the Germans would thus be able to defeat each in tum where the two armies together might stand at least a chance of success. And there was still no armor, nor any other kind of support coming forward to St. Etienne. The paras and the French were on their own.

  He did not have too long to brood over this tum of events, however, because at dawn on Christmas day, the Germans had arrived in force. There had been some patrolling before that, and the French outposts had fallen back, but now a full Panzer Grenadier brigade had shown up, and from the camouflaged uniforms worn by the obvio
usly experienced infantry, the French told him that these were Waffen SS, the best the Germans had to offer. The Germans were also lavishly provided with artillery, and shells began to come down all along line, terrifying the inexperienced Americans and French alike, the airbursts hitting in the trees and showering the troops below with deadly shrapnel and splinters. The Germans were equipped with a nasty little multiple mortar, called the nebelwerfer, which produced an effect not unlike high explosive rain. To this was added an attack by several Stuka dive bombers, with their screaming engines and direct fire from German anti-tank guns that the men dubbed “crash-booms” since, with their flat trajectory, you heard the explosion of the shell before the report of the gun itself. There was also the fire of deadly efficient snipers, and Bentley had lost half a dozen officers who had gotten a little too curious about things at the front or who thought war was like a field exercise at Fort Benning where they could walk up and down the line, invisible and invulnerable, supervising their men. But the line had been holding, at first.

  Then the Germans had pulled something no one had expected. Instead of charging straight ahead down the road from Roanne as the defenders had assumed they would, there was suddenly a flurry of firing coming from the rear, and the men in their isolated foxholes began to look nervously over their shoulders, a sure sign, Bentley learned, that an infantryman is thinking about running. The Germans had slipped a brigade of bicycle infantry upriver through the woods along the far shore of the Loire and, during the night, had sent an assault party across in rubber boats to establish a bridgehead. By dawn their combat engineers had set up a narrow pontoon bridge, and half the brigade had crossed over unnoticed and was now storming the town of St. Etienne itself, gunning down the clerks and supply troops of both the American and the French headquarters companies. At the same instant a long line of tanks, assault guns, and half tracks roared down the road, cannons and machine guns blazing, rolling right through corridors their engineers had apparently cleared in the Allied minefield during the night.