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

by Alexander M. Grace

  He heard the first detonations and peeked quickly around the edge of a window frame. Large blooms of white smoke were appearing, mixing to form a solid wall of mist, and he noticed that the gunners were throwing in a few high explosive rounds as well, the better to keep the Americans’ heads down. He jumped to his feet and blew the long silver whistle he wore around his neck, as he had done during previous barrages, but a different series of blasts this time. He leapt down to the first floor of the building through a massive hole in the floor and skidded along a pile of smashed stone and bits of furniture and out the back door. Other men were cautiously emerging from other houses, doubled over but moving fast, their uniforms covered with plaster dust that at least served to make them harder to see.

  The cemetery, apart from being a little disconcerting, was actually the easiest portion of their escape route. It was a typical European graveyard, surrounded by high walls and crowded with sturdy headstones and crypts like miniature houses, all of solid marble, providing perfect cover. Bullets from snipers still pinged around the men as they slithered between the stones, but they all made it to the point where a shell had destroyed a twenty-meter stretch of the wall on the far side. Fortunately, snipers were not usually provided with radios for calling in artillery fire, and Essen hoped to be able to move quickly enough to stay ahead of any barrage the Americans might try to lay down.

  The most dangerous segment was crossing the railroad tracks, which ran at a diagonal behind the cemetery. The train station, the Gare de Chateaucreux, was barely three hundred meters away to the southeast and had been the focus of some of the fiercest fighting of the battle, changing hands several times. It had been reoccupied by the Germans during the night, but American paratroopers were all around it, and there was nearly fifty meters of open ground to cover, with the slightly raised roadbed of the tracks themselves in the middle. There was no cover, and the loose gravel of the roadbed would slow the running men down for what might be fatal seconds. Since the station house was a lynchpin of the German defense, it would be held until the last, but the Americans were pressed up around it on three sides and would have a clear field of fire up the tracks.

  Essen looked about him and saw that he only had about sixty men left of the more than one hundred and fifty with which he had originally crossed the demarcation line into Vichy territory, and many of these were sporting grimy bandages. He strung them out along a drainage ditch running parallel to the tracks, the last bit of usable cover. They would go over in one rush, lest sending men in small groups merely attract the attention of enemy gunners. He passed the word and each man braced himself in a low crouch. Then he blew his whistle.

  They scrambled up the steep, yielding bank of gravel, holding their weapons high and pumping with their arms for all they were worth. Essen heard the first rattle of a machinegun, and bullets began to kick up little geysers of dirt around the men. They were at the tracks now, bounding over them and glissading down the opposite side, but he could hear an occasional gasp or groan or simply the dull thud of a body hitting the ground, and he knew that they were taking losses. With a roar, Essen pumped his weary legs harder and rushed down a narrow street between two low buildings, followed by what was left of his company. They couldn’t afford to stop here, however. The enemy would be calling in artillery and mortars on this spot, and they had to get out of the kill zone as quickly as possible. Even as he thought this, the wall of a house on his side of the street exploded outward, burying one of his men under a pile of stones and shattered beams. But the barrage was mercifully short. Perhaps the Americans were running low on ammunition, but he was beyond caring. He ducked into an open garage and threw himself flat, his lungs screaming for air. He looked about him and counted, only about forty men left.

  0600 HOURS, 4 JANUARY 1943

  NEAR MARSEILLE, FRANCE

  Ensign Giovanni Labastida had always had a fear of enclosed spaces, which was why he had not volunteered for the submarine service. He had dreamt of a career in the navy, but he had imagined himself standing on the flying bridge of a cruiser or destroyer, the fresh sea breeze in his face, giving orders to the sweating gun crews as they pounded distant targets. Unfortunately, he had been a particularly strong swimmer, and on the basis of this had been selected to “volunteer” for special service. While he did not have the constricting hull of a submarine around him to give rise to his fears, he had never felt so confined, and he would have welcomed something between himself and the sea besides a rubber wet suit.

  He gingerly steered his human torpedo, a kind of underwater motorcycle on which two divers rode in tandem, weaving between the cables of mines anchored to the sea bed and around the contours of the torpedo nets strung across the harbor entrance. He disliked the metallic taste of the air.from the tanks on his back, and could barely make out anything in the murky water, only just illuminated by the downward tilted headlamp of his vehicle.

  Even though the navy had had a signal success in December 1941 against the British fleet in Alexandria using these “weapons,” certainly the lowest item on the military food chain, sinking two battleships and other vessels, this fact only caused Labastida to worry all the more. Certainly the Allies would be expecting this sort of attack, especially since the Italian surface fleet had now been crippled. Of course, there continued to be daily air raids by both the Italian and German air forces on the port and ships coming and going, and submarine captains were running suicidal risks to press home their own attacks, but the Allies seemed more than capable of absorbing the losses and continued to unload huge mountains of supplies and thousands of men for the front. Consequently, the Regia Marina had pulled the final trick out of its bag, Labastida and the dozen other men of his unit. They must really have been desperate, Labastida could not help thinking.

  He looked up toward the surface, which was glowing with a ghostly light, from the sweeping searchlights of the warships and the brightly lit quay, since the Allies apparently were willing to risk a night bombing raid by the Luftwaffe rather than stop their frantic unloading efforts. But directly above him was an immense shadow, the hull of a ship. It would be impossible to tell from below just which ship it might be, and it was far too risky to surface for a better look, but from the narrow, predatory bow, Labastida knew it must be a warship, too big for a destroyer, so at least a cruiser or even a battleship. It would have made more sense to Labastida to target a number of fat transports, crammed with munitions, fuel, or fighting men rather than a single combatant, and it would take all of the limpet mines carried by his unit to do any real damage to a thick-skinned battleship. There was no way in the world that the crippled Regia Marina could regain naval superiority against the combined fleets of France, Great Britain, and the United States, even if Labastida could sink every warship in Marseille, yet his orders were clear. Obviously the admirals were more interested in prestige targets than in actually affecting the course of the war.

  Labastida took out his flashlight and waggled it at the other frogmen and jerked his thumb upward. They left their torpedo craft resting on the bottom and swam upward, each man hauling a large round metal disk that they would attach with magnets to the ship’s hull. There was a forty-five minute delay on the fuses, hopefully enough time for the divers to get clear, as the concussion of the blast would crush every living thing for hundreds of yards in all directions under the water.

  Suddenly, Labastida heard a distinct plunk as something hit the water overhead. This was followed by another and another, and he caught a brief glimpse of a pointed object, about the length of his forearm, spiraling down slowly trailing a stream of bubbles. Bubbles, Labastida thought. They must have had lookouts on watch and spotted our bubbles, and these were mortar bombs. He only had time for the first few words of a prayer when a flash lit up the sea. The black and white underwater world suddenly turned red as the blood vessels around Labastida’s eyes exploded, and then everything went black.

  1100 HOURS, 7 JANUARY 1943

  ROME, ITALY
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  Field Marshal Albert Kesselring tossed another lengthy message from OKW onto the stack that teetered precariously on the corner of his desk. The young major who had brought it in imagined that he could see steam still rising from the missive as the High Command berated the Field Marshal for the loss of Nice the previous day. It was the first sizeable French city actually to be liberated from the Axis in battle, and the Führer was reported to be livid. But Kesselring had been a field commander for too long to waste time worrying about things he could not change.

  In the last war Kesselring had been an artillery officer and had been chosen for his brilliance to be one of the handful of key officers retained in the much-reduced Weimar army. He had then made the switch to the Luftwaffe and had been the mastermind behind the “flying artillery” that had smashed the defenses of Poland, the Low Countries, France, and finally Russia in the heyday of the blitzkrieg. He had then left the Eastern Front to take command of the Axis air forces in the Mediterranean Theater, but he had soon graduated to command of the entire war effort in the south, on land, sea, and in the air. And he had done a brilliant job. Without his superb staff work and the political muscle he exerted with the Führer, Rommel would never have had the men and the tanks to achieve his victories in the desert, and it had been Kesselring who had engineered the salvation of those troops after Rommel had left them to their fate.

  He was now left with one of the most thankless tasks in the war. Africa was gone, and with it the elite troops who had gone to join Rommel’s new command in France. Meanwhile, Kesselring was responsible for the bloody, hopeless counterinsurgency effort in Yugoslavia and Greece, tying up dozens of German, Italian, and Bulgarian divisions with no chance of victory. Worse yet, he had to safeguard the hundreds of miles of Italian coastline against Allied amphibious assault, and it was known that there were twenty or thirty British divisions that had not been committed to the battle yet—all of Montgomery’s 8th Army in Egypt and Libya and the British forces in England, and virtually all of the substantial number of landing craft the Allies had accumulated and not used to date.

  But the most urgent threat came from the American and French forces pushing eastward along the Mediterranean coast. Although the terrain was mountainous, the Axis forces could not hold any line anchored on the sea, as the huge Allied fleets could bombard the defenders with impunity anywhere within twenty miles of the shore, providing a wall of fire and steel behind which the American 36th Division had rolled into Nice in the face of crumbling Italian resistance.

  Yet, even this did not occupy Kesselring’s mind at the moment. It was unlikely that the Allies would attempt to advance any farther along the coast. Their progress had not been without cost thus far, and just as the Allied ships could reach inland, German and Italian artillery safely positioned in the Alps could harass supply convoys along the coastal highway from beyond the range of the naval guns. Also, the Italians had very substantial fortifications along their pre-war border, which would not be easily breached even with all the weight of shells the Allied navies could contribute.

  Kesselring’s key concern at the start of the second week in January was whether the Italians, who comprised the bulk of his forces, would continue in the fight, drop out of it and leave it to the Germans to defend Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, or even switch sides completely and leave Kesselring with hundreds of thousands of hostile, if indifferently armed, soldiers in his rear. It was his task at this moment to come up with a plan for dealing with either of the last two contingencies.

  Operation ALARIC had been discussed in German staff circles at least since the start of the Axis retreat from El Alamein. The panicked Italian reaction to the defeat, and the shrill charges that their units were being stripped of transport and fuel and left to their fate at the hands of the British so that the German Afrika Korps could make good its escape, had convinced Kesselring and Rommel that the alliance wouldn’t stand much more stress. Kesselring had been insulted by the insinuation, since it had been impossible to save much of the infantry, German or Italian, although a rational, objective analysis would have dictated the preservation of the skilled German tankers over the lackadaisical Italian conscripts.

  The concept of securing a potentially hostile Italy had to be kept secret from the Führer at first, of course. For reasons that Kesselring had trouble understanding, Hitler actually looked up to the strutting Mussolini as a kind of ideological forebear and his one true ally in Europe. Consequently, Jodl, Keitel, and the others of Hitler’s sycophantic “desk generals” had urged Kesselring not to dare suggest to the Führer that there might be any danger to the Reich from the south. Kesselring had argued with them that, throughout the war, despite the wartime alliance and the supposedly strong personal bond between the two leaders, construction had proceeded apace on fortifications on the Italian side of the Alpine passes separating the two countries, hundreds of miles from the nearest Allied soldier, hardly an expression of good faith.

  Then, at a meeting at Berchtesgaden just before Christmas, Hitler had astounded his entourage by launching into a tirade about how, while the Duce was unquestionably loyal and had surrounded himself with trustworthy fascist militants, the Italian royal family, the military, the business class, and of course, the Jews, held the real power in Italy and were decidedly hostile to the Reich. He had added that, while they were too cowardly to move openly against Germany on their own, now that Allied troops were at hand, they could mount a coup d’etat at any time against Mussolini, and it was Germany’s duty to protect her ally. With a shrug Kesselring had then been able to rattle off the gist of months of staff work as if off the top of his head, and the Führer had been delighted.

  Kesselring saw the key to the peninsula as control of the Alpine passes. If the Italians changed sides suddenly, any German troops caught south of the mountains would be lost unless those routes of communication could be held open. He suggested that Germany “offer” to emplace strong anti-aircraft defenses along the passes, each of which would actually be a fortified strong-point manned with special assault teams for seizing control of the tunnels and bridges that the Italians had gone to some effort to garrison and mine. When Hitler asked what they would do if the Italians declined the “offer,” Canaris suggested that false flag bombing raids could be conducted using captured British or Russian planes and bombs, and the Führer had chuckled his approval. Kesselring went on that he would keep powerful units poised to seize political and communications centers such as Rome, Milan, Venice, and Naples, and then rush in additional infantry units to garrison the rest of the country from a reserve to be built up in Austria from units withdrawn from the Eastern Front for rest and refit. He added that he would abandon Sardinia, which was untenable after the Allied capture of Corsica, but would hold Sicily as a shield for southern Italy. Meanwhile, he would push the Italian units under his overall command forward into as much combat as possible against the Allies to squeeze the maximum advantage out of them before any change of heart while allowing his German troops some respite.

  The memoirs of several of the attendees of this conference, including Kesselring and Jodl, agree that Hitler was more animated by this possibility than they had seen him for some time. The news from the battlefront had been uniformly dismal for weeks, and it now appeared that, although the front had stabilized, the Allied lodgment in southern France, which measured over one hundred miles deep and three times as wide, was not about to be extinguished. In the East, things were even worse, as the diversion of armored and infantry reinforcements as well as entire wings of Luftwaffe aircraft to deal with the Soviet breakthrough around Stalingrad had robbed Manstein’s counterstroke of any real punch. The defenders of Stalingrad continued to hold out, but the question was now whether the Germans could hold open the corridor at Rostov for the escape of 1st Panzer Army in the Caucasus, which was careening backward in a desperate race with the advancing Soviet columns.

  But now Hitler delved into the minutiae of planning for the lightning capture o
f Italy like a child with a new toy at Christmas. He squabbled with Kesselring and Jodl over the disposition of SS police units in Rome and Milan, and he pored over a detailed map of the Italian peninsula, plotting the best routes for the troops advancing across the River Po to the south. His main concern was that, should Mussolini not only be deposed by the traitors he knew abounded within the Italian government but be captured by them as well, it was imperative that the Duce be rescued and safeguarded by German troops until order could be reestablished. Kesselring hardly knew whether to be grateful that the expected confrontation with the Führer over the question of Italian reliability had been avoided or whether this tiresome addition to his “staff ” was even less welcome.

  CHAPTER 6

  SIDESHOW

  1400 HOURS, 29 JANUARY 1943

  CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

  AGREAT DEAL of thought had gone into the choice of Casablanca as the site for what would in future years be referred to as a summit meeting. While London or Washington would have been much more convenient in terms of facilities for accommodating Roosevelt and Churchill as well as the French, and their respective entourages, and would have had the advantage that at least one of the parties would not have had to make a long trip involving no little measure of danger, psychological considerations took precedence. The Allied leaders wanted to express to the world a sense of forward progress, of rolling the Axis back, and North Africa, newly rejoined to the Grand Alliance, seemed to fit the bill. It was out of bomber range of Axis territory, unlike Southern France or Corsica, and was sufficiently away from the main supply lines of the campaign so that the arrival and departure of the principals and their staffs would not disrupt more important military activities.