W E B Griffin - Men at War 3 - The Soldier Spies

by The Soldier Spies(Lit)

  KTHE Russians have stopped von Manstein," von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  On 23 November, the German Sixth Army, which had reached the suburbs of Stalingrad, had been encircled by the Russian 1st Guards and 61st Armies. On Goring's assurance that the Sixth Army could be supplied by air, Hitler had forbidden any attempt to break out of the encirclement.

  When it became apparent that the Luftwaffe could not supply the Sixth Army, Hitler had ordered General Erich von Manstein to assume command of Army Group Don at Rostov, and to break through the Russian forces.

  Von Manstein had attacked with an armored corps from Kotelnikovo on 12 December. After suffe ring severe losses, the German attack had been stopped twenty miles short of Stalingrad on 19 December.

  "Oh?" Muller responded, not very surprised. "Now what?"

  "Now nothing," von Heurten-Mitnitz said. "Von Manstein has nothing more with which to attempt a relief. Von Paulus is doomed." General Fredrich von Paulus was the Sixth Army's commander.

  "So there goes another quarter of a million men," Muxer said.

  "Yes, that's true, "von Heurten-Mitnitz said. It was almost a minute before he spoke again.

  "There is some good news," he said. "You may now call me sir. I have been appointed Brigadefuhrer (Brigadier General) in the SS reserve."

  "I saw your picture in Die Sturmer," Muller said dryly. KHOW did you manage to pull that off?"

  "Under the new compulsory service regulations, I was about to be ordered to join my regiment as Hauptmann von Heurten-Mitnitz."

  "You may wish you were a captain in the Pomeranian Infantry," Muller said.

  "I believe they are now part of Von Paulus's Sixth Army in Fortress Stalingrad," von Heurten-Mitnitz said, and then abruptly changed the subject, KWE have heard, I think, from our friend Eric."

  "What do you mean, think'?"

  "I have received a postcard from Bad Ems," von Heurten-Mitnitz said. "I want you to have a look at it and let me know what you make of it." Muller nodded his head and didn't say a word until, as he pulled to the curb before the small mansion in Zehlendorf, he said,

  "Bad Ems?

  What the hell is there in Bad Ems?"

  "It is argued by some historians that a telegram sent from Bad Ems triggered the Franco-Prussian War, "von Heurten-Mitnitz said. He handed Muller the postcard. "Here, you figure it out."

  "Why is it in this?" Muller asked, indicating a glassine envelope.

  "I thought perhaps there might be a fingerprint on it," von Heurtenmitnitz said. KOR am I letting my imagination run away with me?

  " Muller shrugged.

  Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz stepped out of the Opel Kapitan into the snow-covered street and walked up to the gate in the fence in front of his house. Inside, he told his housekeeper that he'd stepped into slush and soaked his feet. Then he changed his shoes and socks and went back to the car.

  " Wihi von K'?" Muller said as they drove off. "And you don't even know this is for you! The name got wet, all you can read is the street number." KERIC von Fulmar is the Baron Kolbe," von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  "That's reaching for it," Muxer said.

  "Not if you can find his fingerprint on it," von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  KHIS father, obviously, could be his father. Professor Dyer?

  Is there a Professor Dyer at Philips University in Marburg? Did Fulmar know him?"

  "I'm reasonably sure there's a set of Fulmar's prints in Berlin," Muller said. "I'm not sure I can get at them without raising questions."

  "I think we have to take that risk, "von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  "Okay. For the sake of argument, I dust this postcard, find a print, and match it with Fulmar. And it turns out there is a Professor Dyer at Marburg.

  Then what?"

  "Then we do what it says, "von Heurten-Mitnitz said. "We give his regards to his father and this Professor Dyer, presuming we can find him." KGERMANS," Muxer said, Kpeople I know, are freezing to death right now in Russia. And we're.."

  "We can't help the people in Russia, "von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  "The best we can hope for is to do what we can to end this insanity. I think of it as cutting off a gangrenous hand to save the arm."

  "You have the advantage on me," Muller said. "You can think of this in philosophical terms. I'm just a simple policeman. I think of it in terms of being hung on piano wire to strangle in the basement of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison."

  "I feel like saying I'm sorry," von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

  There was the sound of a police siren behind them. They were by then back on the Avus, a perfectly straight, four-lane Autobahn. Muxer looked down at his speedometer. He was well over the speed limit.

  He slowed enough for the motorcycle policeman to draw abreast.

  The policeman looked just long enough to see the unifortm cap with the death'shead insignia and the insignia of an Obersturmbannfuhrer on Muller's overcoat. Then the whooping of his siren died suddenly, and he fell behind.

  Their lunch at the Hotel Adlon was very nice. There was roast loin of boar as an off-the-ration bonus. Stapled to the menu was a card printed in gold saying the roast boar was provided through the courtesy of Master Hunter of the Reich Hermann Goring.

  It wasn't free, of course, but Goring wanted the upper class of Berlin to know that he was sharing the bounty of his East Prussian hunting grounds, not keeping it all for himself. lchom U. S. Army Air Corpn Baue Stosord-bire, Englond ao December It was Major Doug Douglass's prerogative as commanding officer to conduct the final briefing before his P-38s attacked the sub pens at Saint-Lazare, but he passed on that one. So the briefing was given by a light colonel from Eighth Air Force G3 (Plans and Training), the sonofabitch who had thought up the operation. The idiot was so happy with it that he actually had the balls to tell Douglass he wished he was checked out in P-38s so he could make the mission.

  The light bird was a pilot, but he was a bomber pilot. And now he had come up with an operation in which fighter planes were supposed to do what the bombers had been unable to do, take out the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare.

  There were a number of reasons the bombers had failed, including the Big One, Where the sub pens weren't under thirty feet of granite, they were under that much reinforced concrete. Conventional 500 pound aerial bombs chipped the granite and the concrete, but they didn't crack it, much less penetrate it.

  During his initial briefing, Douglass was told that super bombs--weighing up to ten tons--were "in development," and that they would certainly take out the pens. But the pens had to be taken out now, the subs they protected while they were being fueled and supplied were sinking an "unacceptable" amount of shipping tonnage.

  There were other reasons the B-17s and the B-24s had failed. The pens were ringed with 88mm Flakkanonen manned by the best gunners the Germans had available. These were effective at any altitude the B-17s could reach. And there were four fighter fields, capable of sending aloft as many squadrons of very capable pilots flying Messerschmidts.

  All these factors had been weighed, and a new tactic devised, No further attempt to destroy the pens through the roofs was going to be made. The bombs would be sent through the front door, so to speak.

  What that meant, Douglass quickly--if with a certain amount of incredulity-. _ came to understand, was that bombs would be thrown into the pen entrances from low-flying aircraft. And the low-flying aircraft picked for this task were the P-38Es of the 311th Fighter Group, USA AC, Major Peter Douglass, Jr. , commanding.

  Fohowing the law of physics that a body in motion tends to remain in motion until acted upon by outside forces, a 500-pound bomb dropped from the wing of a P-38 would continue for a time to move through the air at the same speed as the aircraft. Wind resistance would slow it down, of course, and gravity would pull it toward the earth, but for a certain brief period of time, it would proceed parallel to the ground.

  The idea was that it would be released at the precise moment when its trajectory would carry
it into the mouths of the sub pens.

  This new tactic, the bomber pilot turned strategy expert announced, would have several other desirable characteristics. The Germans, like the English, had a new radio device that bounced radio signals off objects in the sky. These signals returned to clever devices that could then determine the range of the object in the sky.

  The devices were not very effective, however, against objects that were just off the surface of the water.

  So, as the P-38Es approached the sub pens a hundred feet off the water, the altitude necessary to Kthrow" their bombs into the pens, they would arrive undetected. German ack-ack and fighters would not be waiting for them. And as soon as the P-38s dropped their bombs, they would, aerodynamically speaking, be clean fighter aircraft again and could very likely start making strafing runs on the German fighter bases before the Germans could get airborne.

  During the final briefing, Douglass could agree with only one thing that the light bird said, There was truly no need for extensive training for this operation. This was so because the fighter group had already trained in the States in low-level bombing attacks.

  The training, in fact, had been for the support of ground troops, but Doug knew the result was almost the same, His men knew how bombs behaved when they were dropped at low altitude.

  Further practice in England would almost certainly have alerted the Luftwaffe to what they were up to.

  They would leave Atcham, the briefing officer concluded, one hour before sunset. That would permit them to land at Ibsley, the closest P38 base to Saint-Lazare, by nightfall. During the night the aircraft would be fueled and the bombs loaded onto the wing racks. At first light they would take off.

  They could expect to be back in England before nine in the morning.

  Except for his professional officer's understanding that planners are not happy unless they can make the simple as complicated as possible, Douglass could see no reason for the overnight stop at Ibsley. But he also understood his was not to reason why. Into the valley of the sub pens would fly the 311th Fighter Group.

  He took twenty-nine P-38Es to Ibsley on the evening of December 19 and lost the first of them the next morning ten minutes into the mission, The pilot lost control on his takeoff roll, went off the runway, tipped up on one wing, and rolled over and over. The bombs didn't go off, but the avgas did, and there was an explosion.

  There were Messerschmidt ME109S waiting for them twenty-five miles from Saint-Lazare. If the German Radar hadn't worked, then something else had tipped them off about what was coming off.

  KTHIS is Dropsy Leader," Douglass said to his microphone.

  "Firewall it and follow me." The twenty-eight remaining P-38 pilots advanced their throttles to FULL EMERGENCY MILITARY POWER, which was both hell on the engines and caused fuel consumption to increase incredibly. But festooned with bombs the way they were, their only defense against the ME109ES was to get to the target and dump the bombs as quickly as they could. At about six miles a minute, it would take them about four minutes to reach the drop point, the engines would probably not collapse before then.

  Three of his P-38s, fohowing orders he had given them out of hearing of the strategic genius, dropped their bombs that instant and turned to take on the Messerschmidts. The three were in the rear. In case it got as far as an official inquiry, all the others could truthfully swear they hadn't seen anybody drop bombs in contravention of specific orders not to do so.

  That turned out to be a moot point anyway. There were forty-odd German fighters, and not one of the three P-38s who rose to meet them made it back to England.

  The Germans had cleverly designed their 88mm aircraft cannon so the muzzle could be depressed for use against tanks and other ground forces.

  Thus, when the sub pens came into view, they were partially obscured by the bursts of ack-ack shells.

  Six P-38s were shot down by antiaircraft fire. Three of them simply disappeared in a puff of smoke. These had obviously been hit by the 88s.

  There was no way to tell whether the other three were downed by 88s, 20mm Oerlikon automatic cannons, or machine-gun fire.

  Twenty-two P-38s successfully completed the bomb run. Of the forty four 500-pound bombs "thrown" toward the sub pen entrances, it was estimated that eighteen or twenty entered the sub pens. Aerial reconnaissance indicated that these had done little or no damage.

  Two P-38s were lost on the return leg of the flight, one of them to a Messerschmidt ME109E and the other to unknown causes. Possibly a wounded pilot lost consciousness. A final fatality occurred at Ibsley when a P-38 attempted a wheels-up landing and exploded on contact with the runway.

  A story circulated through the officers' messes of the Eighth Air Force that the group commander of the 311th Fighter Group--KTHOSE poor bastards who got the shit kicked out of them at Saint-Lazare sub pens"--committed a physical assault upon the Eighth Air Force Plans and Training officer whose idea the mission had been.

  According to the story, the assault had been hushed up. The Commander of the 311th was a West Pointer, for one thing, and he'd been a Flying Tiger with ten kills for another and for a third, his own P-38 had been shot up so badly they didn't even consider repairing it. They just hauled it off to the bone yard.

  TSREE] Froulzlurt os Illloin, Aermony As the Berlin-Frankfurt train backed into Frankfurt's Hauptbahnhof, Obersturmbannfuhrer Johann Muller stood in the aisle of the first-class coach looking out the window. The station platforms were covered by a glass-and steel arch, as if an enormous tube had been slit in half lengthwise and placed over the tracks. The framework of the arch remained intact, but many, perhaps most, of the glass windows had been blown out by bombing.

  Snow had come through these openings, leaving a soot-colored slush over most of the platform.

  Muxer's policeman's eye saw, too, the security in place. At the far end of the station, in order to make sure that no one left the platform by way of the yards, there stood two gray-uniformed members of the Feldgendarmerie (Military Police) and a civilian wearing an ankle-length leather overcoat and a gray snap-brim felt hat.

  In theory, the civilian was working in plainclothes to facilitate his efforts in defense of Reich security. In practice, since only persons with a special ration coupon had access to full-length leather coats, he might as well have worn a hatband with "Gestapo" printed on it.

  As a general rule of thumb, Obersturmbannfuhrer Muller did not have much respect for the Gestapo. There were some genuine detectives in its ranks, but the bullk of them were patrolman types promoted over their abilities. You didn't have to be much of a detective if you were armed with power to arrest without giving a reason, and could then conduct an "interrogation, "which generally began with stripping the suspect naked and beating him senseless before any questions were put to him.

  Near the station end of the platform were the checkpoints. One was manned by the Feldgendarmerie and the other by the Railway Police.

  The first checked the identity and travel documents of military personnel-Army, Navy, and Air Force--and the other checked everyone else. Two more men in leather overcoats and snap-brim caps stood where they could watch this procedure.

  Muller was a little surprised to see two black-uniformed men as well, an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) and an SS-Scharfuhrer (Staff Sergeant) standing to one side behind the Railway Police checkpoint.

  The SS-SD rarely wasted its time standing around railway platforms.

  When the train stopped, Muller took his leather suitcase from his compartment, stepped off the train, and walked the few steps to the checkpoints.

  Before he could take his credentials from his pocket, the Hauptsturmfuhrer, smiling, walked up to him, gave the stiff-armed salute, and barked, "Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer Muller?"

  "I'm Muller."

  "Heil Hitler!" the Hauptsturmfuhrer said, and then barked again, "Take the Obersturmbannfuhrer's luggage, Scharfuhrer!" The Scharfuhrer took Muller's suitcase from his hand.

  "Standartenfuhrer
Kramer sent us to meet you, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, the Hauptsturmfuhrer said. "He hopes that your schedule will permit you to call upon him, but if you are pressed for time, we are at your service to take you where you wish to go."

  "Very kind of the Standartenfuhrer," Muxer said. "I look forward to seeing him." Muxer knew Kramer slightly. He was the commanding officer of the Hessian region of the SS-SD. He was a jovial man, fat, a politician, a man who had become what he was because of who and not what he knew.

  Muxer wondered what the hell he wanted.

  An Opel Admiral, obviously Kramer's own official car, was parked outside the Hauptbahnhof. With the cooperation of the policeman on duty, it made an illegal U-turn and drove Muller to SS-SD headquarters for Hesse, a turn-of-the century villa across a wide lawn from the curved corporate headquarters of the I. G. Farben Chemical Company. On the way, they passed the Frankfurt office building of FEG, the Fulmar Elektrische Gesellschaft.