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

by Alexander M. Grace

  “Give me three flares on grid reference C, now,” he whispered into the radio, and he immediately heard the muffled whump as the mortar rounds left their tubes.

  The scene before him was immediately bathed in harsh white light, and he covered one eye to protect some of his night vision. Seemingly frozen in the quavering light of the descending flare, he could see several huge black shapes, interspersed with smaller ones. The squeal of the treads reached a higher pitch as the massive tanks picked up speed, and the enemy infantrymen scattered. Firing broke out all along the line from rifles and machine guns, and several M-10s and Stuarts opened up on the tanks. The rounds from the little Stuarts caromed off the massive steel beasts, which was to be expected, but so did 76mm shots from the M-10s, and when the attackers returned fire, their guns bellowed like nothing Abrams had heard before.

  “Shit!” the TD commander screamed. “We’re dead men!”

  A shell from one of the Tigers snatched the turret off a Stuart, tossing it into the air like a crumpled ball of paper. One of the behemoths had thrown a track when it passed over a mine, but even that one was still firing, and dozens of other rounds from the defenders had not so much as slowed the other attackers.

  “This isn’t working,” Abrams shouted into the radio. “I want the Grants to pull out of line now and swing around to the west. Our only chance is to get a flank or rear shot at these monsters or they’re going to have us for breakfast. Everyone else go for their infantry and any light vehicles you see.”

  For a few moments, the Tigers stopped where they were, content to pick off one defending tank after another, contemptuous of the shells which fell around them. Artillery fire from Abrams’ own guns and from division was plowing the field before them now, holding up the enemy infantry, and German mortar fire was coming down within the perimeter. Apparently the Tigers were reluctant to press forward without infantry support for fear that some enterprising foot soldier would sneak up and toss a satchel charge under their bellies, but they continued to move forward at a foot pace.

  Some of the defenders were starting to drift off to the rear, and Abrams ran up and down the line, grabbing men and physically shoving them back into position, and he found Bentley and d’Ormesson busy with the same task.

  “Give us ten minutes!” Abrams was shouting. “Just ten minutes. Keep their infantry back, and the Tigers won’t come on alone. And try to pick off the tank commanders.” He knew that this was wishful thinking, but he had to give the Grants a chance to get into position.

  He ran back up to the line and found the M-10 he had mounted before a burning pile of scrap metal. He climbed up on another and ordered the pullback.

  “I want the Stuarts and TDs to pull back fifty yards,” he shouted into the radio. “Wait for the Tigers to come up over the hills and go for a shot in the belly as they raise up.”

  This was a truly desperate measure, but there was nothing else to do. The defenders would have only a couple of seconds to fire as the enemy Tigers crested the ridge. If they missed, there was no cover at all in the center of the depression, and the Tigers would roll right through them. But the enemy was too close now for his men to get away. Better at least to be gunned down here than running. Naturally, as the Tigers came up, their turrets would clear the rise first, and they could just sit there, hull-down, and blaze away all day long. But if they had their blood up, maybe they’d just charge ahead without pausing and give his men at least a chance at a shot at their thin bottom armor.

  He clung on as the M-10 he rode lurched backward down the knoll and took up a position behind a low hedge. Abrams looked about him. There were plenty of fires now, along with the flares, for him to see that less than a dozen Stuarts and only a handful of M-10s survived, but a couple of the artillery’s 105s had pulled into the line, their gun tubes depressed. They weren’t meant to be anti-tank weapons, but a 105mm shell in your face could still get your attention. He had seen some of his men take to their heels, but when he looked about him at the gunners and infantrymen, Americans and Frenchmen, as they sighted their weapons and waited, a tear came to his eye, and he had to brush it roughly away. This would be good company to die in.

  After a long moment, the silhouette of a head, just a man’s head, appeared above the crest of the knoll, and a hundred rifles and machineguns opened fire. When they stopped, the head was gone, and Abrams always wondered if the poor bastard had survived. Then the massive turret of a Tiger appeared and was also greeted by a storm of fire, but its gun roared as soon as it came clear and quickly claimed a Stuart. Others were now breasting and rise and, as Abrams had hoped, most were not pausing to fire. His own M-10 and a Stuart fired almost simultaneously at the underside of a Tiger to their front and were rewarded with watching the turret hatch of the beast blow off and hearing a number of small explosions erupting from within the tank as the ammunition inside cooked off.

  But several Tigers had begun to roll down the slope and others were firing from cover. It was all over. Just then, however, one of the Tigers lurched sideways, and thick black smoke began to pour from its engine compartment. Abrams could now make out what sounded like sharp rifle cracks amid the deeper roar of the Tigers’ 88s, and he turned to see a line of Grants off to his left firing steadily into the flanks of the Tigers. What surprised him was that there were even more Grants than he had originally possessed.

  The Germans lost heart quickly at this reverse and pulled back at speed, trying to turn to face the new threat. Abrams was glad to let them go as artillery fire followed them back up the road toward Givors. A cheer went up all along the line.

  Abrams sat down heavily on the deck of the M-10, leaning against the turret, and a Grant pulled up next to him. General Harmon emerged from the turret, and Abrams tried clumsily to pull himself to his feet.

  “As you were, Abrams,” Harmon waved him back down. “I was monitoring your transmissions, so I thought you might like some company. I brought along a battalion of Grants and the recon company that weren’t really needed at St. Etienne.”

  “Never was so glad to see anybody in my life, sir,” Abrams admitted.

  Together they strolled up to where one of the disabled Tigers was still burning, the charred corpse of the driver hanging halfway out the hatch.

  “Jesus!” Harmon whistled. “I hope they don’t have too many more surprises like this up their sleeves.”

  “I guess they don’t have too many of these babies yet,” Abrams suggested. “First time we’ve seen them, and I don’t care if it’s the last.”

  “All the more reason for us to get this damn war over with in a hurry,” Harmon growled, and they both turned to watch as the American armor swept on toward the river.

  0600 HOURS, 1 JANUARY 1943

  GIVORS, FRANCE

  Rommel had never been one to accept responsibility for his own mistakes, or even to give credit for the efforts of his subordinates. This trait had irritated many of the senior officers who had served under him in the desert, and may have prompted General Wilhelm von Thoma, his replacement as commander of the Afrika Korps when Rommel moved up to head Panzer Armee Afrika, actually to defect to the Allies, although it was never proven that von Thoma had voluntarily gone over and not simply been captured. In any event, Rommel had not changed his ways, and ranted and raved about the command post when he had finally returned there half an hour before.

  With the counterattack by the paratroopers and the Tigers a failure, it was easy enough for Rommel to claim that he would have done things differently. General Gause knew that Rommel lacked in France a number of advantages he had enjoyed in North Africa. In the desert Rommel had possessed a brilliant intelligence unit that routinely broke Allied codes and passed vital information to him on British plans and intentions, including detailed reports from the American military attaché in Cairo on every aspect of the British war effort. He had also become intimately familiar with the terrain throughout Libya and western Egypt (and his only significant failures, the first battle o
f Tobruk and El Alamein, had occurred in areas which he was unfamiliar with at the time). Here he had none of those advantages and had stumbled accordingly, making assumptions about Allied dispositions and capabilities that had proven to be unfounded.

  But Rommel was at his best when dealing with adversity. He ordered the 113th Infantry Division out of Lyon, where the partisan attacks had never posed a serious threat to German control of the city, and reinforced it with a scratch force of odd tank battalions, engineer and anti-aircraft units, and rushed them south along the east bank of the Rhone to strike the American 9th Division, pushing its advanced elements back. This cleared the bridge over the Rhone, which was still miraculously standing despite artillery shelling and repeated air raids. He reinforced this with a flotilla of river ferries he slipped down from Lyon and was thus able to extricate virtually all of his armored forces from the Valence pocket. So, there would be no huge bag of German prisoners for the Allies to parade as the Russians were already doing in the East.

  Rommel then pulled his forces back into the loop of the Rhone south of Lyon, which would afford them some protection but would also serve as a bridgehead for a future advance. More units continued to pour into the line from Germany, and within 48 hours he could claim that at least the northern face of the Allied lodgment had been secured, enabling him to divert further reinforcements down toward the open territory west of the Massif Central and Bordeaux. Both sides then paused to lick their wounds.

  1200 HOURS, 1 JANUARY 1943

  MARSEILLE, FRANCE

  The American military policemen and engineers working on the railroad at Marseille were incensed at the sudden closing off of one platform and a westbound line from Toulon by the local French authorities. Inquiries up the chain of command produced no new information, and the French gendarmes politely, but very firmly blocked off the area, and it appeared that, short of open combat, there was nothing that could or would be done to budge them. Major General Mark Clark, who had been passed over for the assignment of command of Fifth Army in favor of Patton, was in a perpetual bad mood in his new post as coordinator of logistics for the lodgment area, and his humor did not improve when his queries to Giraud’s headquarters received only assurances of ignorance of the matter.

  Even with the full use of the port of Marseille as well as Toulon and a number of minor ports along the Mediterranean coast, Allied resources were strained for bringing in the unending flood of new divisions and the mountains of supplies and munitions they consumed daily, in addition to the hundreds of tanks, trucks, guns, planes, and other equipment destined for the new French Army. The Luftwaffe had been unable to close any of the ports, but determined air raids continued every day and night, in the face of mounting losses to the growing Allied fighter and anti-aircraft defenses, and there was always at least one thick column of black, greasy smoke rising up into the sky from the dock area or from the smoldering hulk of a merchantman that had been hit in the harbor. The road and rail lines leading north from the coast had also been pounded on a regular basis, and every square foot of cargo space in the rumbling truck convoys or the limited amount of French and now American rolling stock was crucial to the war effort. The sudden removal of a line from the supply net caused a domino effect that had quartermasters from Norfolk and Plymouth to Avignon tearing at their hair. But by the time General Clark had realized that only direct intervention would resolve the situation and prepared a motorcade to take him to the Gare St. Charles, the mystery had been solved, and the crisis had passed.

  Tension had been in the air in Marseille for days, and there was little celebration of the New Year in the port city. Refugees and not a few deserters from the fighting to the north and west had clogged the roads into the city, and their stories of defeat by the onrushing panzers put grim faces on the populace as they worried about the reprisals the Germans would take if the Allied armies were driven out. Those with the money or the connections were even taking the precaution of securing passage on merchant ships to escape to North Africa if that became necessary. On the morning of January 1, however, word began to spread of a major Allied victory along the Rhone, that the Germans had been driven back to Lyon, or even beyond, and that the danger was past. For a people who had been fed a steady diet of wartime propaganda for nearly three years, such rumors were taken with a large dose of salt, but the columns of refugees had thinned appreciably, and civilian truck drivers who had been conscripted into military service were being given loads with destinations farther and farther to the north, a good sign.

  The arrival of the train at Gare St. Charles at noon on the 1st had thus been timed with considerable political skill. The engine was festooned with tricolor banners as it made its regal way through the working class districts on the north and east of the city, and a flatcar located just behind the engine was crammed with a military band blaring out the “Marseillaise” over the chugging of the locomotive. Called out into the street by men and women who had, until a few weeks earlier been clandestine agents of the FFI resistance, crowds began to gather along the tracks, and they cheered themselves hoarse as they recognized the tall, angular figure of de Gaulle standing atop a platform mounted on another flatcar, practically engulfed by rows of French flags and surrounded by French generals and admirals, their uniforms encrusted with gold braid and medals.

  Orders had been issued from both Washington and London that de Gaulle was not to make such a procession, and it had been part of the discreet agreement with Giraud that he be kept off the mainland for the indefinite future. However, since de Gaulle had not bothered to ask anyone’s permission, and since the French military had connived at his being smuggled ashore, General Clark quickly and wisely decided that attempting to obstruct his entrance into the city would be both unsuccessful and potentially dangerous.

  De Gaulle gave a brief speech to the throngs that mobbed the train station, but his words were lost in the tumult of the departing and arriving trains and trucks. It hardly mattered. With a mixture of relief, pride, and joy at his mere presence among them, the French soldiers and civilians cheered him to the echo, and even the hundreds of American replacement troops (now officially called “reinforcements” for morale purposes) transiting the station joined in lustily. Then, with the gendarmes risking life and limb to form a human cordon out to the street against the pressing crowd, de Gaulle linked arms with the mayor of Marseille and a host of dark-suited, nameless civilian bureaucrats and began a march through the heart of the city to the Cathedral de la Major, with a solid phalanx of military officers, including Juin, Weygand, Koenig, and others just behind.

  The sidewalks were packed with delirious spectators, and men, women, and children dangled perilously from every window and balcony along the route. A Te Deum was sung at the cathedral, which was located hard by the docks. Afterward, de Gaulle made an impromptu swing along the quay, warmly shaking hands with the disembarking American, Canadian, British, Moroccan, and French colonial troops. He then strolled to the Hotel de Ville where he began the task of setting up his government. Giraud remained behind closed doors at his headquarters.

  Mark Clark later wrote that the entire spectacle was a wonderful piece of theater. “There was hardly a dry eye in the house.”

  The prophet had returned.

  1500 HOURS, 3 JANUARY 1943

  ST. ETIENNE, FRANCE

  Captain Hans Essen clutched his Schmeisser machine pistol to his chest and leaned against the firm stone wall of the house he was using as his command post. The body of his company clerk was sprawled on the floor, a neat round hole in his forehead, the price of having ventured too close to a window. It had taken the Americans some time to learn the tricks of street fighting. They had started by sending columns of men up the streets, only to be ground to dust by pre-sighted machine guns, but they had learned quickly enough. Now they knocked holes in the walls of adjacent houses for more secure movement and had learned how to clear a house, room by room, using grenades and automatic weapons. He also noticed that th
ey had appreciated the greatly superior firepower of the SS units, which often had three or four times as many automatic weapons as their US counterparts, and he had seen American soldiers sporting captured Schmeissers and even MG42 machineguns to augment their official issue. The Americans now used tanks and artillery to fire directly into difficult strongpoints, simply blowing out the ground floors of houses sheltering snipers or artillery observers, relying on the collapse of the building to deal with the problem. They had at first tried to avoid damaging “private property,” but were now leveling the city block by block as they drove the SS troopers inexorably northward, obviously less sensitive about the effect of their actions on property values.

  But Essen had shown them a few new wrinkles, such as using the city sewer system to slip raiding parties behind their lines, popping up in the dead of night to massacre a mortar crew or battalion staff, and then disappearing back into the rubble. The SS Lehr Sturm Brigade had orders to hold the city until a more secure defensive line could be established to the north, and other units had been fed into the battle to prevent the Americans and French from filtering around the flanks and to keep a supply line open toward Roanne. And now the time had come to move on.

  This was actually one of the most difficult of military maneuvers, breaking close contact with the enemy in a coherent fashion. One had to disguise the signs that a pullout was in progress to prevent the enemy from rushing forward and catching the retreating units exposed and on the move. At the same time one had to closely coordinate the move to make sure that no company or platoon would be left behind in an environment where radios were of little use amid the obstructions of the city and where messengers had a very short life expectancy.

  Essen would have much preferred to wait until dark, but reconnaissance reports indicated that the Americans were massing armor east of St. Etienne, probably for a push behind the city to the Loire, which would cut off all retreat. As a consequence, the German artillery had been dropping random patterns of smoke all along the front during the course of the day. Essen was now waiting for the thud of new rounds falling which would signal that this was his chance to move what was left of his company back. His escape route led through the large Cret de Roc cemetery, northeast across the rail line to the Pare des Expositions and on out of the city toward the new lines beyond.