When he came to, Essen could not at first remember where he was. The scene around him did not look familiar, and he thought for a moment that he must have been hurled some distance by the blast. Instead of a wood, he was now in the middle of a moonscape of endless craters, as if a troubled sea had suddenly been frozen and turned into land. Only here and there were the shattered trunks of trees visible, and the occasional scorched stump. Among them were the still-burning clumps of metal that might have been trucks or tanks, and what looked like piles of dirty laundry that must have been men. At first he was surprised at the silence, but then he felt the warm liquid draining from his ears and saw on his fingertips that it was blood. A bomb splinter had also gashed his left forearm, making his hand look like a red mitten.
He staggered to his feet, and he could see several other men doing likewise, but just a few. One of them had his mouth open, and Essen imagined that he was screaming, blood from a cut on his forehead covering half of his face. It was like that painting, what was the artist’s name? But there was no sound, and for a moment that struck Essen as one of the funniest things he had ever seen in his life.
1200 HOURS, 31 MARCH 1943
LE PUY-EN-VELAY, FRANCE
Bentley and his men cheered as the American fighter-bombers swept in parallel to the Borne River, dropping bombs, firing rockets, or just raking the enemy with machine-gun fire. They had been doing this all morning and most of the day before, and their assistance had not come a moment too soon.
The defenders had been pushed back halfway through the city, with Bentley’s battalion having given up the church just before dawn the previous day and falling back to the Rocher Corneille, a rock outcropping over one hundred feet high rising just north of the town center. It was an excellent defensive position and its height allowed the Americans to call in artillery fire almost anywhere on the perimeter. But there was less and less artillery to call in. The Germans had encompassed the three landward sides of the city, and even the crossings over the River Loire to their backs were under constant enemy fire. The guns had almost run out of ammunition, except for one shipment floated down the river on a barge, the only one that had not been quickly sunk by the Germans, and most of the artillerymen had been pressed into service as common infantry, holding the ever-shrinking perimeter.
Then the skies had cleared somewhat and the planes began to arrive. At first both the Germans and the Americans had let an unspoken truce take effect while the infantrymen watched dozens of planes circling and diving as Luftwaffe fighters tried to beat off the Americans and British. Every now and then the white contrails would be punctuated with a ball of black smoke, that would mark the end of one of the aircraft as it began its final spiral to the earth. Betting had been heavy, and Bentley had been too exhausted to try to curtail the ghoulish sport.
For a moment, the skies had been vacant, as the outnumbered Germans had broken off the engagement, and plumes of ack-ack fire had begun to blossom in the sky, even before the men on the ground could hear the rumble of the bombers’ engines. The larger B-25s had begun hitting targets well north of the town, and then the new P-47s came roaring low over the city, dropping bombs on targets less than three hundred yards from the American positions. An Air Corps officer had swum the river several nights earlier and had been given one of the few functioning radio sets left in the city, and from a well-sandbagged position on Bentley’s rock he was calling in flight after flight of aircraft.
At first the Germans had seemed stunned, and the Americans took advantage of the lull to replenish their ammunition pouches, often by stripping the dead now, and even retaking a couple of nearby points that had fallen to the enemy, but then the SS troopers came on again. They had realized that their best defense against air attack was to cozy up to the Americans, and, while they had been more than aggressive enough for Bentley’s liking before, now they came on recklessly, often holding rooms in the same building half occupied by the defenders. Their armor, which had been reluctant to get into the street fighting, had come clattering down the narrow streets, preferring the odds against American mines and bazookas to those against dive-bombers on the outskirts of town.
Bentley had taken it as a good sign that the German paratroopers, who had made up most of the enemy’s infantry during the initial assault, had been replaced by SS panzer grenadiers, as the few prisoners they had taken proved. He calculated that, since the enemy paras would be of little use in a running fight on the roads, the only reason they would have been replaced in the slugging match for the town by the more mobile mechanized troops was that the paras had been used up.
Of course, Bentley’s own men had been pretty much used up as well. Out of nearly five hundred men available for duty at the start of the fighting in his battalion, there remained less than three hundred on the firing line, and most of those had one or more light wounds, wounds that would have seen them in a field hospital at any other time but now only rated a few minutes with a medic, a quick bandage, and a quick cup of coffee before returning to the fight. But there did seem to be fewer Germans now whenever they attacked, and almost no artillery support for them either, just their own mortars firing from close range. And, just before the first waves of bombers had come in after daybreak, Bentley had heard the distinct thud of artillery firing off to the south, not too far away. He couldn’t tell whether they were German or American guns, but the cannonade implied a battle, and, when the Americans had arrived at Le Puy, General Maxwell Taylor had made sure that each soldier understood that there were no other Allied troops on hand between them and the coast. Well, there was someone out there now, so maybe help was on the way.
0600 HOURS, 1 APRIL 1943
NORTH OF ST. ETIENNE, FRANCE
From the depths of despair, General Pierre Koenig had returned to the euphoria he had experienced when he first set foot on French soil in Corsica in December. For days, he had believed there to be a distinct possibility that the Allies would be hurled back into the sea, and he had vowed privately not to go with them. He would take to the hills with his men until the Germans were defeated or until he was hunted down and killed, but he would not endure exile again. He had long since grown accustomed to using a pseudonym to protect his family, still living, he hoped, somewhere in occupied France, but he resented the defeat that had made this necessary. Now, at last, he felt that he was within striking distance of ending the nightmare his country had lived through for nearly three long years.
The first of the British reinforcements had begun to arrive at the front, enabling the Canadian I Corps to take over the rest of the front east of the Rhone. Koenig had left a single division facing the half of Lyon that lay on the west bank of the Rhone, to take part in the liberation of France’s second city if that should become possible, but he had concentrated the rest of his own corps, heavily reinforced, north of St. Etienne for the first major French offensive of the war. The Canadian 5th Armored Division, reinforced with two armored and two artillery brigades and an engineer brigade, would force a crossing of the Loire near St. Etienne and drive northwest toward Thiers to link up with Patton’s forces that were already approaching Chamalières, about seventy miles to the west, cutting off the German salient. That had been the ultimate goal of the Allied counteroffensive, and French forces were to have played a key role in that maneuver until Koenig and Juin had “pitched” General Marshall with a new proposal just twenty-four hours ago.
The Allied air offensive had been so successful, both in crippling German front line units and in retarding the movement of their reinforcements, that there was no longer any threat to the lodgment. More precisely, all Rommel’s efforts now appeared to be directed at the saving of his precious armored units, still strung out around the fringes of the “bulge,” tens of miles into Allied territory and in imminent danger of being surrounded and destroyed. An achievement of that magnitude had originally been even more than the beleaguered Allied command might have hoped for in the early days of the German offensive, but it had o
ccurred to Koenig that the moment for audacity had arrived.
He had made little effort to conceal from the Germans that he could, and soon would, put a bridge across the Loire well north of Le Puy, where the SS Panzer Corps was already trying to disentangle itself from the defenses. With the German 2nd Parachute Division firmly dug in at Lyon itself, most of the other available German reserves had been pulled into the area between the Loire and the American front line running between Ussel and Murat in the west, hoping to hold back both the American and French jaws that were expected to snap shut on the over-extended armored troops in the “bulge.” Covering the thirty-mile gap between the Rhone and the Loire, however, Koenig’s advance troops were only detecting the single Hermann Göring Division and the scraps of some decimated infantry units. And behind that line, between it and the outskirts of Paris, there was, nothing! There were no mountains and no major rivers to cross, and almost nothing by way of German units.
It was a good three hundred miles from the current lines to Paris by road, obviously too far to make in a single leap, and the Allies had too few units to secure the flanks of an advance that ambitious; but a determined thrust through that gap, paralleling the course of the Loire northward until the great river began its westward bend, would unhinge the entire German defense in France. From a position that advanced, the Allies would have the choice to turn east through Dijon toward Germany itself or continue toward the French capital. The German forces that survived their own failed offensive would be too weak to counterattack, and all of Germany’s resources would have to be directed toward helping them escape, in the face of the relentless Allied air campaign that made every rail or road trip by Axis units an odyssey. They would have to abandon everything south of Dijon and west of Paris, if not all of France, or risk having their units cut up and defeated in detail.
Koenig did not have an innumerable host on hand for such an undertaking, but he believed that he had enough. The French 1st Armored Division had just joined the 2nd Armored, having been relieved of its role as a blocking force near Mende by the American 6th Armored. He also had the 3rd Algerian and 4th Moroccan Divisions, very experienced and fully motorized along American lines, nearly 80,000 men and over six hundred tanks, including various supporting units. He even had a Para Commando Regiment available to drop ahead of his columns as the Germans had been so handy at doing earlier in the war.
He kept reminding himself that he did not have, and did not need to have, the force necessary to reconquer the capital himself, not yet, but the vision burned itself into his mind. All he needed to do was make a breach in the dam, and the rest would take care of itself. They would call for a full uprising of the FFI throughout occupied France, and the British and Americans had been dropping thousands of weapons and tons of demolition gear for months, and the Germans would not be able to contain them. By the next day, he would have his men in position, and he would strike his blow. The Germans had made him take a false name, but it would be a name that would live forever in French history.
2000 HOURS, 1 APRIL 1943
NEAR MONTBRISON, FRANCE
Major Edward Bull-Francis, now commanding the 1st Canadian Reece Regiment attached to the 5th Armored Division, focused his attention on the shielded flashlights of the military policeman that guided the driver of his Greyhound armored car as it rolled down the steep embankment to the Bailey bridge over the Loire. It was full dark now, but the western horizon still glowed red from the fires in the town of Montbrison set by the Allied bombing late that afternoon, and he could still see the muzzle flashes of rifles and machine guns in a rough arc all around the landing site. The infantry had crossed over before nightfall behind a heavy artillery barrage and had only managed to push the Germans back a few hundred yards. They would need armor to make any more progress, and Bull-France’s battalion was the first unit to be thrown into the breach.
They had to advance cautiously as the floating bridge swayed under the pressure of the stream, while engineer motor boats nosed up against its downstream side, straining their engines to keep it in place. A column of infantry trotted gingerly along one side of the bridge, stooped under heavy packs as more men were fed into the battle. Bull-France felt a little embarrassed as he hunched low in his armored turret, knowing that the poor infantrymen had no cover whatsoever, and several times during the crossing he heard the distinct ping of rounds caroming off the sides of his vehicle.
As soon as the front wheels touched solid ground, the driver gunned the engine and steered through a shallow cut in the far bank that had been cut by the engineers and marked with luminescent tape. He paused at a tree line beyond the bank just long enough for the other vehicles of his lead company to come up on line, and then they simply charged forward toward the burning town. Bull-France turned and saw a line of dark forms of infantrymen rise up and come pounding after them, at least hoping to get the benefit of the cover of the bodies of the armored cars for part of the run across the open field, even if a battery of 88s might knock them all out in a matter of seconds.
Every gun on every vehicle was firing wildly at the flashes coming from the edge of town and several stone farmhouses on either side of it. There was no hope for surprise, cover, or concealment. Only speed and the distraction that their own firing might provide could get them across the killing zone and, hopefully, buy time for the tank company following hard on their heels. Bull-France didn’t much like the idea of being used as bait, but since the German guns could take apart a Sherman just as easily as an armored car, and since one hulking silhouette looked pretty much like another in the dark, the divisional commander had hoped that, if there were serious anti tank defenses before the town, they would “waste” their time blowing up Bull-France’s force and give away their positions in the bargain, allowing the tanks to have a decent chance of breaking through. Bull-France had been a soldier long enough not to be able to argue with the logic.
But only two or three of his vehicles were stopped, and those apparently by mines scattered hurriedly by the enemy, mines they probably would have spotted easily in daylight, and the rest of the 1st Squadron bowled past a rickety barricade of loose railroad ties that blocked a dirt farm road leading into the town. Bull-France had not seen the flash of anything heavier than a few panzerfausts, and those had been fired too early, probably by nervous new recruits, causing little, if any, damage. Even buttoned up, he could see Germans dodging up the streets, trying to avoid both the onrushing Canadians and the bright orange flames that erupted from the windows of almost every building in town. He sprayed long bursts of machine-gun fire after them, sweeping his turret from side to side, and he wondered in passing whether there had been many civilians still in the town when the Allied bombers struck.
0600 HOURS, 2 APRIL 1943
VICHY, FRANCE
General Gause didn’t care much for the town. It had an air of defeat about it, but Clermont-Ferrand had become untenable as a command center once Patton’s artillery came within range the day before. Even after several Allied bomber raids, Gause had insisted on remaining in the old command post in the hope that Rommel would return soon. The last that had been heard from the Field Marshal had been late on the afternoon of 31 March after he had personally led a counterattack by the 15th Panzer and the remnants of the 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions against the American 29th Division that had nearly resulted in the recapture of the town of Murat. At that time Rommel had been on the way back to Clermont, a trip that shouldn’t have taken more than a few hours, once it had gotten dark. Gause only hoped that Rommel had waited until it had gotten dark before risking the road.
In the meanwhile, everything was coming undone, but in slow motion. Dietrich’s panzers had done a masterful job pulling back from beyond the American bastion of Le Puy, although their columns had been badly mauled by enemy air attacks. The rest of the Afrika Korps had also broken contact with the French near Mende and were leap frogging back toward St. Flour at a good pace. But the 26th Panzer, which had been wit
hdrawn from the Lyon front to launch a spoiling attack against the American armored thrust coming from Ussel, had spent two full days on what should have been a rail trip of just over one hundred miles, perhaps four hours, and only some fifty of an original force of two hundred tanks had survived to detrain at Chamalières, thirty miles farther to the east, since the Americans had long since overrun the original staging area.
Now the Canadians had crossed the Loire and taken Montbrison. Fortunately, Dietrich’s troops were already almost that far north and had slipped across the Allier River to Brioude well to the west, leaving a screen of bedraggled infantry regiments to slow the Canadians’ progress. But there still remained at least 100,000 of Germany’s best armored troops west of the Allier and south of Clermont, with only a gap of perhaps twenty miles between Patton’s spearhead near Chamalières and the river. A steady stream of men and vehicles had funneled through the gap during the night, but it was almost daylight, and the enemy bombers would be out in force. Or, if the Canadians put on a sudden burst of speed, they could close up on the east bank of the Allier and cover the gap with their artillery. In either event, the cream of Army Group B would be destroyed, and there would be little hope of forming a viable defensive line this side of the German border. Rommel would know what to do. Where was he?
Just as Gause thought this, an aide came rushing into the former casino where he had set up army headquarters because of the many phone lines running into the building. The young lieutenant’s face was a pasty white, and his breath came in gasps.
“General,” he panted, “Field Marshal Rommel has just been brought into the mobile field hospital.”
“What happened?” Gause screamed, oblivious to the panic that had crept into his voice or the worried looks this caused among the staff.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 26