Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  143RD PANZER BATTALION, PANZER LEHR DIVISION, SPANDAU, GERMANY, 1422 HOURS GMT

  He might have been in Africa again, if not for the soggy mud and the gray skies. Those details didn’t matter, as the Desert Fox rode in his open staff car, his driver steering unerringly toward the sound of the guns. They were forced to detour, away from the route they had been using for the last few days, since that road was now under direct fire from Russian guns. As they circled down this secondary track, approaching the battalion from the rear, Rommel tried to evaluate what was happening.

  The Soviet attack was bad, he knew simply from the volume of the fire, and the fact that it was continuing to move westward. Soon he came to a couple of dazed panzergrenadiers, one supporting the other as they limped out of the underbrush and onto the roadway. The weaker man had a bloody gash in his left leg, and that half of his face was blackened with soot and, perhaps, burned skin.

  “Stop!” Rommel commanded, bracing himself as the driver braked hastily to bring the car to a halt beside the soldiers.

  The two men gaped up at him momentarily. The strongest one brought his hand up to his forehead in a salute. “H-Herr Generalfeldmarschall!” he stammered. “The Russians are attacking!”

  Rommel passed over the obvious truth. “I see you are with the Hundred-and-forty-third Battalion. What is your situation?”

  “We were shelled, sir, for an hour—they came down like rain, or hail! Half my platoon was killed. Then came the tanks, T-34s mostly but some big monsters in among them. We had two panzers left, and both were taken out immediately. Finally we ran … . Franz and I are the only two to make it out, I think.”

  The field marshal nodded, even as he looked around. There was a wooded area shrouded in smoke, to the east. This road was banked, a meter or more above the flat ground, and there were no visible obstacles for several kilometers to the west. “Stay here—move Franz into the ditch on the other side of the road. I’ll send a medic back for him, and try to get a few more troops to help you out. We can’t let the Russians past this road—understand?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!” If the man had any misgivings about holding, for the time being alone, a stretch of road against a Soviet tank division, he displayed none of them.

  “Good man,” said Rommel. “And good luck!”

  They were off in a roar, heading toward a small crossroads north of Oranienburg, where Panzer Lehr had its field headquarters. Within three kilometers, Rommel knew they would never make it. They had encountered more shell-shocked survivors, and the field marshal ordered all of them to set up a line based in the ditch to the west of this road. But by the time they crested a low hill, the smoke and noise of the battle had moved so far west that it blocked the path before them.

  Rommel stood in the car, his binoculars pressed to his eyes as he scanned the low ground before them. He saw tanks crossing the road, moving from his right to his left, and he could barely make out the red-star insignia on the turrets of the nearest. In the fields to his left he spotted several Tigers, awkwardly exposed on the flat ground—the few patches of brush only rose high enough to screen the tracks of the big tanks. These were firing steadily, and one after another of the Soviet T-34s burst into flame as they rolled down off the road and into the ditch. No less than a dozen were burning right before him, but that seemed to have no effect on the fifty or more that Rommel could see rolling into view.

  The enemy tanks were emerging from a massive bank of white smoke that billowed from the forested land to the east. The smokescreen all but obscured the edge of the forest, but Rommel could see the tiny figures of Red Army infantry emerging from the murk. There were waves of them, coming at a rapid trot, hastening to keep up with the first wave of tanks. More of the armored behemoths streamed into view as well, two files of them within his view. As they emerged into the clear terrain the tanks maneuvered like veterans, expanding from their road columns into lines of ten or twelve of them abreast. They rolled forward with guns blazing.

  The Desert Fox shifted his glasses to the west, bypassing the Tigers and seeking other points of resistance. He located a light antitank gun firing between two pine trees from the front yard of a small cottage. Here and there were small groups of panzergrenadiere, a machine gun nest set up in a barn, a couple of stone houses rendered into strong points. Even as he watched, two of the houses were blasted to pieces by the guns of Russian tanks, while the leading line of Soviet infantry swarmed across the road. A hundred men fell to the German machine gun, but the vast gap in the line was almost immediately filled by the next wave, who simply picked up the pace of their advance.

  “Sir—we need to get to cover!”

  Rommel glanced at the driver in irritation. The man was pointing at the sky, gesturing urgently. The field marshal nodded, seizing the bar before him with both hands. He would not sit down, though. Instead, he looked upward, wincing as he made out the specks of aircraft. More of the dreaded jabos, this time marked with the same red-star insignia as those tanks.

  The car squealed through a hard left turn, lurching down through the ditch, pulling back onto the road facing toward Berlin. “Wait!” ordered Rommel, still watching the action.

  The dive bombers were not coming toward him, he realized. There were hundreds of them, but they all seemed to be focused on the battle in the low valley. They roared lower, and bombs fell away, plummeting lethally into the ground and then erupting in fountains of dirt and smoke and debris. The two Tigers disappeared in the blasts, and for a short time the whole field was obscured. Some of the Soviets were blown apart by their own bombs; not even this seemed to give any pause to the advancing horde.

  As the wave of jabos passed, Rommel was amazed to see that one of the Tigers was still firing. The huge tank was almost invisible beneath a layer of mud, dirt cast by near-missing bombs, but its main gun blasted shot after shot toward the Russian T-34s.

  Until the field marshal heard the crack of a new gun, a sharp and gut-churning sound. The Tiger vanished in a blast of fire; when the smoke cleared, he could see that the turret had been blasted off with almost surgical precision. The killer tank rolled forward, dwarfing the T-34s, even looming higher and wider than the great Tiger.

  This was one of the mighty KV5 tanks, the Desert Fox realized. Disdained as too slow and heavy for the modern battlefield, they clearly had their place in a fight like this. Looking more closely, Rommel spotted several more of the giants among the swarm of enemy armor.

  “Drive,” he ordered. “We have to get down to the switchboard at Oranienburg and let General Patton know what’s happening.”

  Even then he didn’t sit. Instead, he twisted painfully around for another look at the field, now completely overrun. He remembered something about that big tank, the KV5.

  The Soviets called it the “Stalin.”

  SHAEF, REIMS, FRANCE, 1605 HOURS GMT

  Ike was pacing around in his office, corralled here because this was the place everyone brought information. That was the one thing he needed now, the only thing he could act on. Unfortunately, both information and opportunities for action seemed to be in very short supply.

  He crushed out his cigarette and looked up as his chief of staff came in.

  “What have you got for me, Beetle?”

  General Smith shook his head, and the Supreme Commander could not help grimacing.

  “They’re still limiting their attacks to the German units,” reported Beetle, handing over the latest dispatches. “But they’ve all but obliterated Panzer Lehr, and Rommel’s infantry is badly broken. Zhukov has closed Highway One-Thirty-Five to us, but we still have Number Twenty-Four and the autobahn.”

  “That’s a damned tenuous lifeline for a whole army,” Ike growled. “But they’re not close to Twenty-four yet, are they?”

  “No. And the British Sixth Airborne has set up a line south of Highway One-Thirty-Five. They won’t be enough to stop the Russians, if they continue on—but at least they’ll let us know if Stalin wa
nts to start a full-fledged war.”

  “Dammit!” snapped the Supreme Commander, the word sharp as a steel blade. He hated it when the other guy held all the decision-making cards. But that was the case, right now.

  “How long till Hodges and Simpson can get up there?” The American First and Ninth armies, now moving eastward from the Ruhr, were the only units in position to offer Patton any support.

  “A matter of three days, for Hodges to get there in strength. Simpson is a day or two behind him.”

  “Then we’ll just have to hope that Uncle Joe isn’t ready to go for the kill,” Ike declared, lighting another cigarette. He didn’t want to speak the rest of the thought, but he knew that, if Stalin wanted the kill, Patton and Rommel were dead.

  22 MARCH 1945

  FRITZ SCHLOSS PARK, BERLIN, 0932 HOURS GMT

  George Patton climbed out of his jeep, his throat tight with emotion. All around were the battered remnants of formations that had fought valiantly against an overwhelming storm of force. These men were German, not American, but they had fought as a part of Patton’s command, and his heart broke at the proof of their suffering.

  Some of them were still coming down the road from Oranienburg, limping, supporting their comrades. Others were collapsed in various stages of exhaustion. The seriously wounded had been moved into hospitals, but those with minor hurts waited here listlessly for their next assignment.

  Rommel was visible at the other side of the broad field, talking to a group of men, then moving on to another. Patton could see that the Desert Fox left his men standing a little taller, looking a little better, after just a few words.

  Finally the field marshal came over to the American general. Patton guessed that the Desert Fox had not been to sleep; he had heard that Rommel had been driving around, gathering the shattered elements of his three divisions, pulling them back to the northern environs of the city.

  “Zhukov has cut the highway, hasn’t he?” Rommel said; a young aide translated for him.

  “Yep. Got word before dawn. British Airborne troops have a line south of the road, and it looks like they’re stopping short of that.”

  The field marshal shook his head. His face was stained with soot and grime, and his injured eye was watering, seemed red and inflamed. Uncharacteristically, Rommel took off his hat and rubbed a hand over the sweaty strands of his thinning hair.

  “We still have the autobahn, and Highway Twenty-Four,” Patton said, going for the positive news. “The Russians are forty miles away from them.”

  “For now,” Rommel noted, and Patton felt the chill of that truth in his own gut.

  HEADQUARTERS, FIRST BELORUSSIAN FRONT, ORANIENBURG, GERMANY, 1622 HOURS GMT

  Krigoff put his arm around Paulina’s shoulders, thrilled to the touch as she melded close to him. The spring night had descended, bringing a blanket of moist and chilly air, but the young colonel felt only the heat of his personal, and political, passions.

  “It was a great victory,” she said, gesturing to the shattered, burned-out hulks of German tanks that dotted the ground. “But only against the Germans? Do we not dare to attack all of the capitalist lackeys?”

  Krigoff allowed himself a private chuckle. “Ah, do not judge prematurely,” he said. “I think you will see that, tomorrow, Comrade Marshal Zhukov has a little surprise planned for our former allies.”

  She pulled away from him. He wondered at first if it was a playful gesture, then saw that she was walking toward one of the burned-out panzers, apparently deep in thought. He followed, biting back his impatience, and was surprised when she spun suddenly to face him.

  “It is a parachute attack?” she asked bluntly.

  He was taken aback. “I—I am not at liberty to say!” He found the beginnings of outrage. “We shouldn’t even be having this discussion—”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I know some officers in the Fifty-second Parachute Battalion. They are mindful of security, but I could see that something is up.”

  Krigoff was torn between a stern sense of security, a desire to impress Paulina with his own knowledge, and a surprising, deep-seated storm of jealousy that had erupted when she mentioned the parachute officers. He tried to settle on a middle ground.

  “Of course, we all have to be aware of security considerations. But I can see that I am giving you no new information if I but confirm that your observations, your instincts, may well be correct. I trust that these parachute officers have been quarantined, if they are about to embark on a mission?”

  “Oh, quite,” she said, then surprised him again by leaning upward to kiss him, lightly, on the lips.

  23 MARCH 1945

  FORTY-FOURTH MOBILE RADAR STATION, TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, BERLIN, GERMANY, 0454 HOURS GMT

  “Captain! You’d better have a look at this!”

  Chuck Porter heard the alarm in the sergeant’s voice, and ambled over to the office door, trying to be unobtrusive as he listened. Fortunately, the men of the Eighty-second had accepted him as a regular feature around their HQ and other offices, so he had relatively free run of the great airport, which—now that the runways had been cleared—had been the landing point for a steady string of transport aircraft.

  “Whattya got, Mac?” asked the duty officer, ambling over to have a look. There was a low whistle of amazement. “What the hell is going on? There must be a thousand bogies, to make the screen wash out like that!” The captain swiveled, shouted across the large office, which was located atop the terminal at the airport. “Jake—what’s the weather? Anything funky going on east of here? Rainstorms? Big fronts? Anything?”

  “No, captain. Clear skies—can’t even see a cloud out there.”

  “Shit. Mac, what do you make of it?”

  The operator shook his head. “I don’t know, Captain. But if I had to guess, I’d say the Russians are putting a helluva lot of planes in the air. And they look to be coming this way.”

  “All right.” The captain was moving across the room now, but Porter could still hear him in his agitation. “Get me Third Army HQ on the horn!” he was shouting. “We’ve got a big problem over here … .”

  SHAEF, REIMS, FRANCE, 0620 HOURS GMT

  “They’re tracking the column. They have a count of more than a thousand multiengine aircraft, and at least that many fighters flying as escort. Right now, their course seems to be taking them south of Berlin, General,” Beetle Smith reported to the Supreme Commander.

  “What the hell are they up to?” Eisenhower fumed.

  American and British fighters had been scrambling in waves ever since the first reports had come in from Third Army. Naturally, they had first expected a bombing raid against the besieged cities, and there were some five hundred P-51s flying circles over the German capital right now, ready to start shooting if this proved to be a Russian air raid. But that, at least, seemed not to be the case.

  “Any visual confirmation yet?” Ike asked.

  “Reports are that a few pilots have started to close it, but they’ve been jockeyed aside by Russki fighters who get right in their path. Our boys have dived away, rather than risk the collisions.”

  “We need more information! In the meantime, get every fighter we have into the air. I want this formation shadowed every mile of their flight path. And try again to get through to Zhukov’s headquarters—and to our boys in London! See if they can learn anything out of the embassy in Moscow, anything at all about what’s happening.”

  The door opened. Kay Summersby came in with a sheet of paper. “Sorry to interrupt, General, but this looks important.”

  “Thanks, Irish,” Ike said, warming enough to offer a smile while he took the newest report.

  “Damn, this is a new wrinkle!” he declared, passing the page to Beetle Smith. “A couple of our flyboys threw caution to the winds and went flying right through the Russian formation.”

  “Transport planes? A thousand transports, in a sky train?” Smith looked puzzled. “And they’re not going to Ber
lin. Look at this position—they’re already west of the city.”

  “This has got to be an airborne operation,” Eisenhower said. “But what’s the objective?”

  Summersby was just leaving, but stepped aside to let another orderly come into the room, with yet another report.

  “What is it?” demanded Ike.

  “The Russian planes are turning north,” the sergeant reported, glancing over the text. “They’re west of Potsdam, but now changing course.”

  “They’re after Highway Twenty-Four!” the Supreme Commander deduced immediately. His heart sank at the thought of the quandary facing him: Surely those planes were filled with thousands of Russians soldiers, and they were relatively defenseless now. If the P-51s tore into them, who knew how many would die? Certainly the landing would be disrupted, and …

  And Zhukov would have the best excuse he could ask for to attack. He could claim that the Americans had fired the first shots—indeed, had massacred his airborne troops—and he could roll in, crush Third Army, and claim Berlin for his own.

  If the American fighters didn’t attack? Ike looked at the map. Clearly he stood to lose another of the roads leading into Berlin, leaving only the autobahn as a supply link. But still, there might not be a shooting war, not yet.

  “What are your orders, General?”

  He realized that Beetle Smith was watching him, and once again the Supreme Commander felt the ultimate loneliness of his position. He sighed, threw the dispatch onto the floor in disgust.

  “Keep an eye on the bastards, as close as possible without triggering accidents. But don’t start shooting yet. We’re going to see what Uncle Joe is up to.”