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

by Alexander M. Grace

  The few French tanks had gamely driven forward, taking up hull-down positions where a fold in the earth would provide added protection and still allow them to fire their turret guns. They got in a few shots, but their 47mm guns couldn’t penetrate the armor of most of the newer German tanks, so they only managed to call attention to themselves, and the German gunners knocked them out, one after another.

  That was plenty for the defenders. First singly, then in small groups, then by platoons, they started to run, officers and men together, through the woods to the southeast. In a matter of minutes, Bentley found himself with only the equivalent of a platoon of men left of his whole battalion. He led them in a rush toward the town in hopes of forting up in the stone houses and at least denying the Germans the use of the crucial crossroads for a short while, but he encountered Colonel d’Ormesson halfway there who informed him that the Germans were in possession of the entire town. There was nothing for it now but to join the retreat and hope to pull together the survivors into some kind of defensive line farther on.

  But several hours of crashing through the ice-covered underbrush brought no relief. The weather had closed in now, and there would be no hope of friendly air support. Meanwhile, the Germans had wasted no time in St. Etienne. Bentley and d’Ormesson were moving parallel to the road south toward Annonay, and he had gathered about them slightly more than one hundred Americans and perhaps twice as many French soldiers, but they had no heavy weapons, and some of the men lacked even their rifles. From deep within the woods they could see a powerful column of armored vehicles moving along the road, and they could hear the sound of heavy firing coming from the west.

  “That would be the SS attacking your glider troops at Le Puy-en-Velay in the flank,” d’Ormesson said when he saw Bentley listening intently with furrowed brow. “From the markings on the vehicles moving south, it looks like a fresh Panzer Grenadier Division that has charged through the gap and will hit your main line at Valence during the night.”

  “Because we opened the door for them,” Bentley hissed.

  “The Germans kicked in the door,” d’Ormesson corrected him. “‘We are just the splinters. You can take some solace in the fact that you are not the first to experience this. The Germans have become quite good at this with all the practice they get.”

  Bentley stopped suddenly and grabbed the Frenchman by the shoulder. “Listen! If all the Germans are on the move, maybe we could sneak back to St. Etienne and retake the place. They won’t be expecting that, and I’ll bet there are hundreds of our men being held prisoner there right now.”

  D’Ormesson shook his head. “Only the mobile troops will be moving. They will have at least one infantry division following up to garrison key points like St. Etienne. Even if only one battalion of the infantry they sent in behind us stayed in place, leaving the panzer grenadiers to continue the advance, they’d outnumber us two-to-one at least. It would be of no use, and we’d end up either dead or in the prisoner pens along with the others.”

  “There must be something we can do,” Bentley pleaded.

  “We can keep moving,” d’Ormesson growled. “We’ll have to wait until dark and cut across this road to continue southward through the rough country. The valley of the Rhone starts just a few miles below here, and there will be no cover for movement there. With luck, we’ll be able to link up with your forces at Le Puy-en-Velay, or whatever is left after the SS finishes with them. But we’ve got to get out of this pocket before the German infantry catches up and hunts us down like foxes.”

  Bentley swore and bashed his helmet against the trunk of a tree. Then he stalked over to where an American GI was taking a puff of a cigarette and snatched it out of his mouth.

  “Smoking is a filthy habit, son,” he said, “and it will get us all killed if the Germans see that red tip. Let’s bivouac here under cover until nightfall and then try to get out of this mess.”

  1300 HOURS, 27 DECEMBER 1942

  CARCASSONNE, FRANCE

  Captain Edward Bult-Francis of the 8th Reece Regiment, 2nd Canadian Division, sat in the turret of his Greyhound armored car, watching the main highway from Toulouse. The car was tucked well back in a wood to one side of the road in a dip in the ground that would protect the body of the vehicle but leave the turret guns free to fire. Infantry were dug in all around, with machine guns and anti-tank guns emplaced to provide interlocking fields of fire. After all the desperate rushing to get men and equipment unloaded at the small port of St. Cyprien, and the race inland to occupy this position blocking the gap between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central, they had been sitting here for days without a sign of the enemy. Typical of the army, hurry up and wait.

  Of course, it stood to reason that it would take the Germans some time to organize themselves, concentrate their forces, and then cover over one hundred and fifty miles from the old border between occupied France and Vichy territory. And every minute that the Allies had to prepare had been a help. Now the full Canadian I Corps was in position, 1st Division on the left, the 2nd on the right, with the 5th Armored in reserve, and the British 1st Airbourne Division up in the Massif Central to the northeast. Rumor had it that the British V Corps would be landing any day to flesh out the line and enable them to go over to the offensive and move on Toulouse.

  But the Germans were coming now, sure enough. A ragged column of French infantry was moving dejectedly but quickly along the road, heading southeast toward Montpelier. The French had put up their own line miles closer to the border, hoping to hold onto Toulouse, but General Marshall, supported by both his and the British general staffs, had refused to be spread so thin. The day before yesterday they had started hearing heavy guns, and in the evening the low clouds to the northwest were lit up by the flashes of the artillery. Bult-Francis knew that those weren’t French guns. They didn’t have any, so it was no surprise to see the remnants of their scant regiments now straggling back toward safety. They gave the Canadians accusing glances as they shuffled by, but none of them offered to stay and fight. There were French units on both flanks, but these would soon be pulled together in the rear and given new weapons and training and formed into proper divisions for the long war ahead.

  Eventually the flow of French turned into a trickle, then stopped completely, and Bult-Francis scanned the snow-covered fields to his front for the first signs of the enemy. He kept one hand on the hatch cover handle, ready to drop down inside and clang it shut when the inevitable artillery barrage should start. But he wouldn’t leave this spot. Too many of his comrades were lying dead in the shallows in front of Dieppe for him not to want a chance to pay the Jerrys back in kind. Most of the losses the division had suffered had been made good by now, but the wounds, even among the units like the 8th Reece that hadn’t gone ashore, were deep.

  He was surprised to see, not the bursts of artillery shells, but a cluster of motorcycles with sidecars motoring down the road. Not far behind them came several half-tracks and then regular lorries full of infantry.

  “Bloody cheek!” Bult-Francis snarled. “Don’t fire, wait for it!” he shouted to the infantrymen around him and repeated the same into the mouthpiece of his radio for the other cars in his troop. “The bastards think they can just drive right down to the seaside do they? I’ll bet anything they’ve outrun their artillery.” Some of the infantrymen began to fidget as the Germans drew closer, shifting their weapons. “Wait for it!” he repeated.

  Finally, when the lead motorcycle had reached within fifty yards of the point where the road cut through the woods, he screamed, “Fire, fire, fire!” and pulled the trigger of his own 37mm gun.

  The riders were cut down as if with a scythe, and the first several vehicles burst into flame almost simultaneously. The German infantrymen who escaped from their vehicles in the middle of the open area ran back toward their lines as fast as the ankle deep snow and their heavy greatcoats would allow, but the Canadian machine-gunners dropped them one by one with economical short bursts of fire while six-po
under anti-tank guns demolished each vehicle in turn. Bult-Francis could hear the rapid “crump” of their own field guns now, lobbing shells at pre-registered sites along the road out of their view such as crossroads and culverts while a small spotter plane buzzed overhead, calling in adjustments to their aim.

  Bult-Francis knew that this would not be the end of it. The Germans would be back in greater numbers and with artillery support, but the sight of the German bodies scattered in the field, like small piles of discarded clothing, gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. It didn’t quite settle accounts for Dieppe, but it was a down payment.

  1800 HOURS, 27 DECEMBER 1942

  DIJON, FRANCE

  Field Marshal Erwin Rommel could hardly believe his good fortune. When he had left North Africa, he had assumed his military career was over. The Führer was not one to forgive failure, and there was no other way to view the campaign in Egypt. To be sure, his defeat at the hands of Montgomery was due to the massive superiority in men and equipment enjoyed by the British by the fall of 1942, and it had been little short of miraculous that he had been able to lead the Panzer Armee Afrika, more than half of which was made up of under-armed, unenthusiastic Italians, over a thousand miles across the desert to the gates of Alexandria. But that carried little weight with Hitler. What he wanted was results, nothing less.

  Yet here he was, having not only avoided professional ostracism like that endured by Manstein, a genius of mythic proportions who had disagreed with the Führer once too often, but having been given a field marshal’s baton and one of the key commands in the field. He would now command Army Group West, covering most of France, and lead the assault against the Allied lodgment in the south. Kesselring, his former superior, had been relegated to continuing to deal with the obstreperous Italians, to fend off new attacks by the Allies in the Mediterranean and to shore up the defenses of Northern Italy.

  Even his health had miraculously improved. For months he had been plagued with nagging stomach trouble, dizziness, and general malaise. While these symptoms had no doubt been aggravated by the harsh climate of North Africa and his punishing work schedule, various doctors, including the Führer’s personal physician, Dr. Horster, had found little wrong with him clinically. Rommel had heard the vicious rumors, particularly those spread by his enemies at OKW, like Keitel, that this mysterious disease was an artful way for Rommel to get away from his defeated army. When Hitler had finally agreed to evacuate the Axis troops from Libya, Rommel had actually been in Germany on a “health cure” consisting mainly of imposed rest and carefully controlled diet. Now Rommel had begun to wonder if, perhaps, his critics hadn’t been at least partially right. He had had no time for a “cure” and yet he had never felt more fit.

  Rommel was delighted with his command, but less than impressed with the troops with which he was to exercise that command. His valiant armored warriors from the desert, the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, the 90th Light, and the 164th “Afrika” Divisions, plus Ramke’s Parachute Brigade, were all coming to him, those who had survived the meatgrinder of El Alamein, that is, and they were being fitted out with the latest tanks and weapons in Germany at this moment, but it would be some time before they reached the front. All he had to work with was a single Panzer Division, the 26th, and a Panzer Grenadier Division, the 3rd, and the newly formed Hermann Göring Division, a collection of Luftwaffe men retooled as panzer grenadiers, who had yet to prove themselves in combat. There were a handful of infantry divisions that had been released to him and a hodge-podge of independent regiments and brigades with which to take on perhaps a dozen enemy divisions, all fresh, if mostly inexperienced. But Rommel had faced greater foes with far less.

  He had sized up the situation with his typical decisiveness and determined that the key to the battle would be to defeat and humiliate the American forces in the center of the Allied line. Kesselring could hold the line of the Alps with little difficulty, and attacking the western rim of the Allied perimeter would involve hundreds of miles of travel for the reinforcements daily arriving from Germany, over rail and roads haunted by swarms of Allied fighter-bombers that the Luftwaffe had virtually given up challenging for control of the air. Rommel knew that the Americans, stiff-necked as they appeared to be, would insist on running their own front without support from the more experienced British. If he could rout them as he had done the British in the desert, before the British had learned his tricks, he could split the lodgment, capture Marseille, and drive the invaders into the sea.

  The initial moves that had been ordered by von Rundstedt, which conformed nicely with Rommel’s own plans, had gone very well. The LXIII Infantry Corps had smashed into the thin French line above Lyon and shattered it unceremoniously, driving the French before them as a mob of refugees, sewing consternation in the Allied ranks. Meanwhile, an armored thrust on the west side of the Rhone had knifed through the first defense line formed of French regiments and an American airborne division. It had not been expected that these lightly armed troops would be able to stand up to veteran armored forces, but the extent of the rout had been highly encouraging. The important crossroads of St. Etienne had fallen, and the panzers had then struck the flank of the Allied line, which included regular American armored and infantry units, not just paratroops, taking Valence-sur-Rhone early that morning and causing another shameful rout by both the Americans and the French. The German forces were now clear of the rough country of the Massif Central and could push along the right bank of the Rhone all the way down to the sea. The infantry could keep up the pressure on the left bank, moving on Grenoble and rolling up the Allied line along the Italian border in cooperation with pressure from Kesselring in Italy. Even the weather was cooperating, with heavy clouds and fog virtually eliminating Allied air missions and giving his reinforcements a chance to move forward without the harassment from the air that so hindered their mobility and giving the Luftwaffe time to recover from the devastating losses it had suffered over the previous week.

  Also, a battalion of the new super-heavy Tiger tanks had just arrived, their first deployment in combat. Designed to counter the powerful Soviet tanks the Germans had encountered on the Eastern Front, with the Tiger’s thick armor and 88mm gun, there was nothing in the Allied inventory that could stand up to it, even if the American tactics hadn’t been laughably obsolete.

  Rommel felt very much at home in his new headquarters in Dijon. The scenery was radically different from the endless expanses of the desert, much more like the forests and mountains of his native Swabia, and he had to keep reminding himself that his tactics would have to change as well. Fortunately, he was surrounded by Colonel Siegfried Westphal, his chief of operations, and General Alfred Gause, his chief of staff from North Africa, even his personal secretary, Corporal Alfred Bottcher. One of the first tasks he assigned his staff was to scour the parks of captured Allied equipment for another “Mammut,” one of the huge eight-wheeled British armored cars he had used as his mobile command post in the desert, and then his little world would be complete.

  True to form, once Rommel had gotten his headquarters staff emplaced in a small chateau on the outskirts of Dijon, he left Gause in charge and loaded up a convoy of radio vans and reconnaissance troops and headed off for the front to gauge the pace of the advance for himself. He was always amused by the bleating of his staff at how he would undoubtedly be out of communication, as had happened so often during the North African campaign. He had the utmost confidence in Westphal and Gause, however, and the orders for the division commanders should stand for some hours yet. In Rommel’s way of fighting, he could hardly be expected to give further coherent orders until he had seen the ground and been with the troops in the line. In a moment, he was off in a cloud of gravel kicked up by his tires, and the little column disappeared into the enshrouding fog.

  1400 HOURS, 28 DECEMBER 1942

  LE TEIL, FRANCE

  Patton was a man after Rommel’s heart. In fact, he had been quoted once as making a toast of, “To
Hell and damnation with any general ever found in his own command post!” He was an officer who preferred to lead from the front, but, more than that, he didn’t want to be around while Major General Lloyd R. Fredenhall vacated his headquarters for the II Corps at Avignon. Patton had been with Marshall in Algiers the day before and had witnessed one of the first outbursts of temper he had seen in the Allied Supreme Commander. Normally, one could gauge the level of Marshall’s ire by his complexion, which turned progressively redder the angrier he got, but he almost never raised his voice. When word of the collapse of part of II Corps had come in, Marshall had turned a bright magenta, but he had also ranted and raved loudly enough to send orderlies and staff officers scurrying for cover throughout the villa where he was in the process of setting up his new headquarters. He had ordered Fredenhall, commander of the corps, sacked on the spot, even though he and Eisenhower had both been high on the man and concurred in his original appointment. The story was that Fredenhall had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and had spent the battle cowering in a concrete bunker nearly one hundred miles from the scene of action.

  Patton had been incensed himself, especially after overhearing some British staff officers beginning to refer to the Americans as “our Italians” as well as having caught portions of a sarcastic song the British troops were signing entitled “How Green Was My Ally.” In all frankness, Patton had longed for the field assignment that Marshall had then bestowed on him, command over all Allied land forces involved in the invasion, the perfect culmination of all his months of planning alongside Eisenhower and his frustrating visit with the French before the invasion. Eventually, the disparate divisions that now comprised the invasion force would be organized into separate armies, and Patton would probably end up with command of one of them, but for the time being the whole show would be his. Even so, he had chosen to fly directly to the front, bypassing Avignon until after Fredenhall’s departure for a new and uninspiring posting in the States. The reports from the front had been fragmentary, and it was well known that the American troops had been in battle for the first time, and it was entirely possible that Fredenhall was not entirely to blame for the fiasco. On the other hand, it had been clear to Patton early on that Fredenhall had not taken command of his corps and had left the tactical planning to staff officers with even less experience than he had.