Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  Smiggy’s recon battalion was screening ahead of the advancing German Republican Army and the American Nineteenth Armored, making sure there weren’t any pockets of serious resistance left. So far, it had been a quiet night. “Let’s go,” he said to McConnell, and the jeep sped up again, leading his patrol deeper into the fog.

  KONZENTRATIONSLAGER BUCHENWALD, THÜRINGEN, GERMANY, 0330 HOURS GMT

  When you’re playing poker and you can’t spot the sucker, it’s you. Digger O’Dell was a serious poker player, but he was never the sucker, though people often assumed—until they lost enough money—that the tall, slow-talking North Carolina boy would be an easy mark. Digger had what poker players call alligator blood: When the pressure was on, he always stayed calm. Here in Hell, his alligator blood was all that was keeping him alive. Stay low, stay out of sight, stay out of trouble, stay alive. He watched everything through carefully expressionless eyes, and played every small angle he could get.

  A sudden shriek of wind from an opened door sliced through his thin blanket and woke him up. It was just the Russian prisoners on their morning rounds. They came early every morning to take away the dead. They stripped their clothes away to give to new inmates and wrote serial numbers on the corpses with black markers. Proper record keeping was necessary regardless of the circumstances.

  There were new dead every morning. Sometimes it was from injury, more often it was illness, but a good amount of the time it was just the endless cold. You could tell, a lot of the time, when someone had just plain given up and died. Death was the only sure escape from Hell.

  The door closed, cutting off the wind, but it was still nearly freezing inside. The cold had settled in for good, it seemed. Digger O’Dell wondered why everybody said Hell was hot. As far as he was concerned, it was cold. Cold was crueler. Digger knew that spring would eventually come and the cold would be banished, but it would come too late for him. A six-month veteran of the camp was already an old-timer; most of his colleagues would be long since dead. Digger was good at staying alive, but in Hell fate would always catch up with you sooner or later.

  The barracks nominally had heat—there was a camp furnace that doubled as a crematorium—but it was minimal and intermittent. The hut where the Allied prisoners lived had a small heater of its own, a big metal barrel with a fire in it, at least whenever they had a few sticks of wood. Some days there was wood and other days there was none. There had been a little wood last night, but it had burned itself out sometime during the darkness, and by now the only temperature difference between inside the hut and the camp outside was the wind.

  When Digger and Clausen were first turned over, he’d been surprised at first to find other Allied airmen in the camp, and asked why.

  “We’re terrorfliegers, haven’t you heard?” said the ranking Allied officer, Leftenant Kirby, an Australian Lancaster pilot with a thick accent. “We’re not honest soldiers; we’re fucking war criminals. POW status is too good for the likes of us, mate.” Most of the Allied inmates, all shot-down aviators, had made it to supposed safety with the French Resistance, but were caught in a massive roundup. A few more than 150 of them had been sent here so far. As far as they knew, they were all officially “missing and presumed dead.” The Geneva Convention didn’t apply in Hell.

  The Allies—mostly American, but British, Canadian, and Australian as well—tended to stick together, and were normally assigned to the same slave-labor details, sometimes to factories and sometimes to farms. They didn’t associate with the other inmates, but there wasn’t a lot of energy for socializing anyway. They all shuffled through their duties in the same sleepwalking style as the less-privileged inmates, and their life expectancy was only a little better.

  At first, the Allied prisoners had wanted to throw Carl-Heinz Clausen out of their barracks, but Digger held firm. “He’s a good guy. He saved my life.” So “Digger’s Nazi” was kept around. Clausen could only do a little work, but Digger with his gimp leg covered for both of them as best he could. About a week ago, Clausen had gotten pneumonia in his poorly healed lung, and it was clear to Digger that the stocky German sergeant was going to be another janitorial job for the Russians within a few days at the most. He was running a high, delirious fever, high enough that he warmed Digger at night more than did the pitifully small fire.

  If the Russians were here, roll call would be coming up soon. Digger hated to get up early—he’d miss the trumpet of doom if it came before ten o’clock—but with his still-aching leg he needed a good head start to end up in the relative safety of the middle of the pack. Besides, he had Clausen to worry about. The stocky feldwebel was still shivering as he’d done all night. Digger was half surprised he was still breathing. He slid his legs off the edge of the bunk he shared with four others, and started manhandling Clausen’s inert form to pull him out of bed.

  Roll call was hours of standing at attention outside in the frigid February weather, and God only knew what new fun and games the Nazis would introduce. Most prisoners would be sent on slave-labor details or to one of the subcamps—there were more than a hundred. The ones found “unsuitable for work” would be taken away for disposal, or often beaten to death on the spot. Daily there were executions or disciplinary whippings to witness, or maybe some casual brutality by some SS guard who just felt like it. Inmates would drop and fall from disease or exhaustion and then get beaten to death while the rest of them watched.

  Suddenly the door opened from the outside, letting in a new blast of frigid wind that made Digger’s teeth ache. The SS guards started screaming, “Heraus! Schnell! Schnell!” There were nearly nine hundred prisoners in the barracks, so there was always a jam at the door. Digger planned to be in the middle of the crowd; less chance of being randomly clubbed by a guard that way.

  “Come on,” Digger said urgently, shaking the feverish German. “Wake up. Roll call. Schnell!” Clausen’s eyes opened, but did not focus. Digger wasn’t sure Clausen even knew where he was anymore—not that that was necessarily a bad thing. But the German sergeant did get up. Digger held up Clausen with his arm and leaned against him with his bum leg, and they shuffled and hopped into the crowd squeezing through the door, successfully avoiding the guards.

  The wind outside the barracks whipped through the thin prison garments everyone wore. Even the SS guards in their heavy coats were cold, and that made Digger hope roll call wouldn’t be too terrible. If he watched carefully and kept moving, perhaps he and Clausen could dodge the work details for yet another day. They lined up, standing at attention, palms facing up—anything even slightly resembling a fist was punishable by death on the spot. Again, Digger had located a spot in the middle of the pack to minimize the chances of being singled out.

  Damn. The guards were thick on the ground this morning, even in the terrible weather, and they were doing a selection. Whatever they were selecting for, Digger knew it wasn’t anything he wanted part of. So far, they hadn’t used captured Allied airmen for anything except heavy-labor details, but Digger wasn’t counting on that being permanent policy.

  The pattern quickly became clear. It was the Jews again. They normally got the shittiest end of the shit stick—the worst jobs, worst punishments, worst food, worst barracks. For the last week or so, they’d been rounding up Jews, thousands of them, men, women, and even children—there were children even here in Hell—walking skeletons for the most part, herding them into boxcars to be taken somewhere else. Where else he didn’t know, and didn’t want to. He’d asked the Australian lieutenant if they were just being taken to a new slave-labor detail. The lieutenant had shaken his head slowly. Digger found it hard to believe that there were worse places than Buchenwald, but evidently that was the case.

  The daily pile of dead normally included large numbers of Jews. All the prisoners were being worked to death, but the Jews faster than the rest. A couple of camp epidemics combined with the weather had sent the death rate sky high; there were nearly a thousand frozen bodies—corpsicles, the Americans ca
lled them—stacked like cordwood outside the furnace building. The crematorium couldn’t keep up with demand.

  The one virtue of the bitter cold was that the corpses didn’t rot before they could be put into the furnace. The bodies were blue-gray and looked like mannequins.

  While most of the SS guards were herding Jews, others were moving down the roll-call ranks in Digger’s direction, closer and closer. Digger noticed the pattern—it was a sick-call selection. In most cases, sick call would be where he wanted to be, but here the best you could get was shoved into an infirmary barracks where you’d probably die sooner—no point in feeding the sick; they couldn’t work anyway. And he knew that both he and Clausen would be thrown in. Carefully, he looked from side to side, looking for any escape.

  The guards were about ten men away from him. One prisoner—Digger had seen him around, but didn’t know him—was shivering uncontrollably. A guard shouted at him. The prisoner didn’t respond quickly or fully enough, so the guard clubbed him in the head. He dropped to his knees. The prisoner tried weakly to fend off the blows, but the club hit again and again, cracking his skull so blood and brains were revealed, killing him. The blood began to well out, mixing with the mud, and then another prisoner—this one from the block next door, a German Communist—screamed and began running toward the fence.

  They called that “suicide by guards.” Two different guards fired submachine guns, stitching a line of bullet holes through the prison garment, sending the inmate sprawling facedown into the mud. Several other guards turned momentarily to watch, and Digger saw his opportunity. With alligator calm, he took a step backward, the dazed and feverish Clausen responsing automatically, like a dance partner, then slipped to the other side of the guards, before both returned to attention. Several of the prisoners looked at him, but Digger’s face continued expressionless and neutral. Soon enough everyone had returned to watching the selecting guards.

  They’d escaped the sort. He’d won one more day in Hell for himself and Clausen. It wasn’t much of a prize, but he wasn’t going to give up yet. There was another game tonight, and still another one tomorrow.

  GERMAN REPUBLICAN ARMY FORWARD HEADQUARTERS, NEAR ERFURT, THÜRINGEN, GERMANY, 0600 HOURS GMT

  “Guten Morgen, meine Herren,” said the Desert Fox with a cheerful grin, emerging from his office freshly dressed, washed, and shaved, and already at least two hours into his workday. “Glad you could make it on such a fine winter morning.” The regular daily staff meeting always started at 0600 promptly, and the assembled officers began moving into the conference room for the morning’s briefing. Rommel’s new chief of staff, General von Manteuffel, made sure that people were assembled, and that the meeting moved along. It was an efficient headquarters.

  Reid Sanger, not an early-morning riser by choice, slipped into the back of the conference room just as Rommel started the meeting and sat down next to his Nineteenth Armored compatriots Wakefield, Ballard, and Jackson. The three American officers now had their own translator, a sergeant, relieving Sanger of that extra duty.

  Sanger was embarrassed at trailing his colleagues into the conference room. For a while, he kept trying to get to his desk before Rommel arrived in the morning, but it was futile. He suspected that Rommel’s batman kept an eye on any challengers to “first in” status and woke the field marshal accordingly. Now, he had simply surrendered to the inevitable and contented himself by arriving at the morning meeting on time—or in this case, he amended silently, about a minute late.

  Although he was not technically under Rommel’s command, he caught the field marshal’s good eye looking at him. Rommel always knew who was in on time and who was not. Sanger felt any disapproval on Rommel’s part all too personally, so he quietly took his seat and flipped his notepad to the first blank page.

  The agenda for the day was the agenda for most of the last few weeks—how to keep the German Republican Army moving forward. Armies, like other massive objects, have inertia. Making an army move is all too similar to prodding a reluctant mule. Wheeled and tracked vehicles give the impression of instant mobility, but tracked vehicles notoriously break down and wheeled vehicles require daily loading and unloading. Massive troop movements demand rail, but there was little unwrecked rail to be had throughout Germany. The Desert Fox was used to leading from the front, but now his days were spent speeding from unit to unit, pushing, nagging, and yelling at the laggards to load up and move out, to hurry forward in a huge, snarled game of leapfrog across a Germany newly devoid of its defenders.

  Whether it was true relief at their liberation or merely cynical ingratiation with the new regime, wherever Rommel went he was greeted with crowds cheering, lining the streets, celebrating the New Germany and the new leader. While the motives of the “liberated” Germans were subject to question, the motive of Rommel was obvious: he was enjoying himself to the limit.

  Accompanied by his own personal motion-picture crew—a custom he had begun in North Africa—he was the daily star of his own newsreel. The running joke had it that he turned down the opportunity to be Chancellor of Germany because it was a demotion. That sort of popularity, Sanger observed, breeds enemies.

  Sanger, as military liaison officer, was often the contact point for people wanting to complain about the Desert Fox. Only two days ago, Omar Bradley himself had shown up to “have a friendly chat.” Nominally, the German Republican Army was an independent army-group command; in practice, they were moving on Third Army’s front and so took operational guidance as a part of Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group. The strange status of Rommel reflected itself in a confusing T/O.

  Bradley’s arrival had come as a surprise. The general, a quiet, homely man in a permanently wrinkled uniform, suddenly stuck his head into the office. “Sanger? Got a minute?”

  Sanger, startled, immediately stood and saluted. “Of course, General. Come in. Coffee?” Sanger made a mental note to tell Sergeant Wilson, his secretary, to do a better job of warning him when the big brass were around. Of course, most of the brass liked the pomp and circumstance of command, so he usually got plenty of warning. That gave him a chance to kill the fatted calf. But there were a few senior officers who liked to sneak around without their escorts—they thought it improved their influence.

  Bradley came in, sat down, waved off the offer of coffee, and lit up a cigarette. “How’s the liaison role coming along, Sanger?”

  “Great, sir, thank you. It’s challenging, but very, very educational.”

  Bradley smiled crookedly, and absentmindedly stuck a finger up his nose. “Got a good relationship with Rommel? Can you tell him things he doesn’t want to hear?”

  “Well, to some extent, I suppose,” Sanger said without strong assurance. If Rommel wanted to hear you, even a hint worked, but if he didn’t, it was difficult to get through.

  Bradley grinned and leaned forward. In a confidential tone, he said, “I bet it’s easier than telling Georgie something he doesn’t want to hear.”

  Sanger’s meetings with Patton had given him the same impression. “I suspect you’re right, sir. But is there something Rommel particularly needs to hear about?”

  Bradley took out his finger and wiped it on his pants. “His victory laps.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Victory laps. The way he shows up whenever we advance into a new town to catch all the glory before any of it escapes.”

  “Begging the general’s pardon, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that,” Sanger replied carefully. He understood the complaint; it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. Rommel was certainly human enough to welcome—even to solicit—publicity, but there was a lot more on his agenda.

  Bradley nodded. “Oh, I know. Get the people on the side of the new team and all that. He’s already started his campaign to be first elected postwar chancellor. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind him becoming chancellor; Germany could do a lot worse—hell, is doing a lot worse. But he’s forgetting that he was on the losing side and switched o
ver at the last minute. This isn’t his victory. It’s ours, and a lot of us generals are going to have to find real jobs pretty soon. That means a lot of people are looking for good press, and Rommel’s got the AP in his hip pocket.”

  “Chuck Porter does manage to pay us a visit fairly regularly,” replied Sanger. “But if I understand you correctly, sir, you really just want him to have a little lower profile.”

  “Right on the money, Sanger. Can you do it?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure, sir. I can broach the subject with him, but I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “Thought that might be the case,” replied Bradley. “Stubbornness seems to be a good part of what makes a general a general. Maybe I’ll stick my head in for a minute. If that’s all right with you—I don’t like making end runs around the chain of command unless it’s unavoidable.”

  “Of course, sir,” responded Sanger. “I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.”

  “Not a problem,” said Bradley, standing up and sticking out his hand. “Good to see you, Sanger.”

  “Good to see you, too, sir.” Sanger shook hands. “Drop by any time.”

  Sanger would have given his eyeteeth to know exactly how the Bradley-Rommel dialogue came out, but Bradley had taken along his own translator to avoid putting Sanger in an embarrassing position. There hadn’t been any evident fireworks, and Rommel appeared to be starting the morning in a good mood, so presumably the message had been received and understood. Whether it would be accepted, he’d find out shortly. Reporters flocked to Rommel like hungry pigeons to a peanut vendor, and they were difficult to shake loose. But perhaps the Desert Fox would invite a few American generals to accompany him on parade. Sharing the wealth a little bit would go a long way to quieting down the resentment, and Rommel’s underlying strategic objective would still be on track.