Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  “You are assigned to the headquarters staff, of course?” Müller asked Clausen, though he arched his eyebrows to look at Rommel.

  “Of course,” replied the field marshal. “In fact, for now you can go to the motor pool and get us a car. We have a meeting in thirty minutes.” He smiled at Carl-Heinz. “How would you like to see the inside of the Reichstag?”

  Colonel Reid Sanger had his new office in the great marbled halls of the building that had once been the center of power in the Third Reich and was now the headquarters for the Army of Berlin. He was reviewing the morning’s dispatches from SHAEF, followed by the intelligence assessments from the front line units—those Third Army formations that were arrayed around the fringes of Berlin, facing off against the massed armies of the Soviet First Belorussian and First Ukranian fronts.

  Through complex political face-saving arrangements, Patton was the actual commander of all SHAEF forces in Berlin, while Rommel, senior in rank, held a more advisory role as commander of the Army of Berlin. The arrangement worked well, because both men kept any arguments in private and presented a united front in public, and because Rommel understood the practical reality that Patton owned the vast majority of forces and the Americans controlled the supply line.

  As liaison officer, Sanger was now the daily point of contact between Rommel’s German Republican Army and all the other SHAEF forces in Berlin. In his spare time, he had another function—serving as jailer for one special prisoner of war who was being held in what was once the führer’s bunker in the Reichs Chancellery building.

  The Reichs Chancellery was serving as administrative headquarters for the airlift operation and for city management, both staff-intensive operations. The two underground German military headquarters—Maybach I and Maybach II—that had housed OKW and OKH, were also being used as staff headquarters, communications centers because of their advanced communications technologies, and as backup command centers in case the battle grew hot again.

  Sanger heard the distinctive squeak of Patton’s voice in the hall—the two men had their offices quite close together—and it was time to go. The American colonel left his office, saw the Desert Fox coming, then smiled broadly as he saw the loyal German driver just beyond. Carl-Heinz was being greeted by everyone on the HQ staff, and was clearly embarrassed by the attention, so Sanger fell in behind the field marshal and strode into the briefing room.

  The map on the wall depicted the same situation it had portrayed, with virtually no change, since the end of March. The Americans held the German capital, its suburbs, including Tempelhof, another major airport at Gatow, and several smaller landing strips. A small prong extended from the southwestern quadrant, where the Nineteenth Armored Division was holding the adjacent city of Potsdam, connecting to Berlin by a neck of land between two broad lakes. The Russians had the whole mess of them surrounded, with perhaps a mile-wide strip of unoccupied territory between them. In several locations, notably at Potsdam, and Spandau in the west, the Soviet positions thrust aggressively close, like hammerheads pointed into the heart of the great city.

  General Patton came in and everyone stood at attention until he took his place at the front of the room. “Let’s get started,” said the CO of Third Army and SHAEF commander in Berlin.

  General Zebediah Cook, Third Army’s chief of intelligence, took over. “The airlift went well for the last twenty-four hours. No accidents, no weather delays. That means, of course, that we are bringing in as much food as we are eating. As well as a few little odds and ends—another eight thousand pounds of petrol, and three hundred rounds for the 155s.”

  “What does that bring us, for capacity on the big guns?” asked Patton. The 155s were the largest guns in the Third Army artillery section. The shell and powder for each shot weighed more than a hundred pounds; and if the Russians attacked, these guns would see nearly constant action.

  “We could sustain intensive fire with all batteries for something like one day plus a couple of hours,” Cook replied, after double-checking one of his sheets. His aide, Sanger’s old nemesis Keegan, was serving as keeper of the files. Better yet, he was still only a major, which gave Sanger quite a bit of satisfaction. “After that, we’ll be throwing the crockery at them.”

  Nobody laughed.

  “What of the front line?” Patton interjected. “Another quiet night?”

  General Cook nodded at General Wakefield. “Henry—you had something on that?”

  The stocky general nodded, and pushed himself to his feet. “Probe in the Potsdam front last night. Good-sized commie patrol, ran into our pickets. Shots fired; ours and theirs. None of ours got hit; heard groans on their side. Found some blood when we checked it out this morning. Looks like the Reds took a few hits.”

  Patton grimaced, and gestured to the map. “I know you’re sticking out like a sore thumb down there, Henry, but we need you to stay in position. If we fall back from Potsdam, they could snatch Gatow airport with one quick thrust—and that would cut our supply route by forty percent!”

  “Got it. And so do my boys. They’re dug in pretty damned well.”

  “Ah yes, not like those heady days of mobile operations, is it?” asked the army commander rhetorically—and a little wistfully, Sanger thought, as he turned his attention to the supply situation.

  It was the middle of the afternoon by the time Henry Wakefield’s jeep pulled up to the headquarters of his Combat Command A, in Potsdam. Ballard had set up his post in a sturdy building of concrete and steel that had once been a slaughterhouse. Now it made for a solid pillbox, with a ring of small windows on the second floor providing a good view in all directions.

  “Any more trouble today?” the general asked Frank Ballard, finding the colonel at his desk—a long table that had once been used for dismembering pigs.

  “We saw a few of their boys poking around in no man’s land. Didn’t shoot, ’cuz they didn’t get too close. But I don’t like it general. They’ve got us hemmed in tight, with water on two sides.”

  “The water guards your flanks,” Wakefield grunted. “And Patton needs us here—this is one of the key places on the whole perimeter.”

  “We’ll stay put,” Ballard replied with a sigh. He saw Captain Smiggs enter the room, and remembered to add: “Say—do you have anything for the mail sack? Smiggy’s going to run the letters out to the airport, get the bag onto an evening flight.”

  Wakefield shook his head. “Thanks for asking.”

  Captain Smiggs had a driver, but he preferred to be at the wheel himself. He guided the jeep down the Potsdamer Strasse, glad that the engineers had finally bulldozed the last of the debris out of the way. Berlin had been plastered pretty well by the Allied bomber campaign, and many neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble. Surprisingly enough, other, large parts of the city looked relatively untouched by the war.

  So far, at least.

  There were times when Smiggs thought that these German bastards were getting off too easy. He remembered Buchenwald—he would remember it, vividly, until the day he died—and he couldn’t forget that these were the people, this was the society, that had allowed that to happen. Maybe they should let the Russians have them. He knew he wasn’t the only man who felt that way.

  But he still had a job to do. He turned at Schoneberg, made his way through the MP checkpoints as he approached Tempelhof. Weaving his jeep back and forth through traffic, he maneuvered around a long line of trucks, the big Dodges inching forward to collect precious supplies. There was a big gate at the far end of the line where the trucks rumbled through, carrying their cargo to various places in the city.

  Smiggs made his way to the mail terminal. Here he handed over his sack to the busy clerk, and went back outside. The summer night was warm and humid. He knew that he should probably get back to CCA right away, but he couldn’t make himself hurry, not on a night like this.

  Instead, he stood at the fence around the tarmac, watching the sky as, one by one, the big transports took off. They
flew with running lights, and he followed the diminishing brightness of the navigational beacons blinking, green and white, as the airplanes droned off toward the west.

  FÜHRER BUNKER, BERLIN, GERMANY, 2302 HOURS GMT

  The bunkers under the Reichs Chancellery had been prepared in 1944 for the führer and his closest associates so that they could survive and continue to command even when Berlin came under attack. The führer was in the bunker, but it was now being used as a prison, not as a command post. The military commander of Berlin was General George S. Patton, and his headquarters was in the Reichstag Building.

  The construction had been a hurried project, never quite completed. The walls were slabs of gray concrete; they were damp and smelled of mildew. The ventilation system was noisy. The single prisoner did not complain, though it would not have mattered. These were officially executive quarters, and they were certainly secure enough.

  Colonel Reid Sanger felt the best security was secrecy. The bunker’s occupancy was secret; the area was kept low profile at all times. There were guards—all American troops, all troops who had seen the horrors of Buchenwald—at the entrances, all around the Chancellery Building, in fact. He had no fear of the relatively puny Himmler forcing his way out; he had somewhat greater fear of Nazi loyalists attempting to rescue their man.

  Sanger had never thought of himself as suffering from claustrophobia, but the bunker was giving him a case of the fits. Forcing himself down the endless flights of concrete stairs became daily more difficult. He had difficulty breathing in the small conference room he used for his daily interrogation. But each day, accompanied by two guards, two secretaries, and a technician with a tape recorder, he interviewed Heinrich Himmler.

  Himmler was willing enough to talk; the man had a boundless ego and his biggest fear seemed to be that someone else might get the credit for something he believed was his own. To hear him talk, he was the brains behind Hitler’s throne, the source of inspiration, the builder that made ideas into cold, practical reality. He seemed to feed off Sanger’s revulsion, laughing at him and mocking at him for his little-boy sensitivity at the pain and suffering. “No, Sanger, don’t you understand? Women were even more important—after all, women breed, didn’t you realize that? If Jews are to be eliminated, the women are the ones that really have to be exterminated. Without them, the male problem will take care of itself.”

  From time to time, Himmler would ask to have parts of the tape played back, to see if anything required amplification. When his memory failed him, he would recommend places Sanger might look for more details. It was as if Sanger were his biographer rather than his interrogator.

  Sanger found himself spending more evenings at the O Club, with scotch his preferred choice of general anesthetic. As the siege grew longer, the club grew steadily better attended. Realizing that booze, however welcome, wasn’t quite enough, he went up the chain. The first man he went to see was Henry Wakefield.

  Wakefield listened passively, grunted, and said, “If it’s a contest between you and Mr. Small-Balls—” Wakefield referred to Himmler by his nickname from the “Colonel Bogey March” lyric. “—he wins, because he don’t care and you do. But if that’s what you kept him for, you screwed up. It’s his story you want, and it’s his story you’re getting. He may be proud of it, but you get to tell it. And you’re on the winning side.” He puffed on his cigar for a while, but that was all Sanger could get out of him.

  Rommel started pacing up and down as Sanger laid out his problem. “At times like these I think perhaps I should have stayed as a barracks orderly at Buchenwald. A military operation, no matter how bleak the odds, is something I know how to handle. A moral issue of this dimension is completely beyond my capabilities. One moment, I think I should walk with you to the bunker and put a bullet through Himmler’s head, and the next moment I think that is far too simple an answer for guilt that to some extent is shared by all of Germany. I do think you were right, back in the children’s barracks that night, when you said that the story must be told and the record must be established. I don’t believe that’s enough, but I believe it’s a necessary start. When this is over, we will need to have trials, I think—but we will also need something else, a truth court, whose job it will be to get everything on record.”

  “So much of the story, Field Marshal, is in the Soviet east now.”

  “Yes. Auschwitz. I’ve heard Buchenwald pales by comparison. I cannot imagine such a thing. I hate to admit it, but our Soviet enemies have justification. Great justification. We must stop them from taking over Germany, but at the same time, it may be that I must find a way to make a just peace with them, one that recognizes where the aggression began. Stalin is no saint, and the Soviet regime is not much improvement over the Nazis, but there is another of the problems that I must somehow attempt to solve.”

  “Not alone, Field Marshal. You have Americans and British, you have the Germans of the resistance, you have help.”

  Rommel stopped. “I’m not used to thinking in those terms. In the military sphere, my way of thinking is so unusual, I normally am all alone—I can give detailed orders, but the big picture resides in my head alone. I don’t have the big picture here. Maybe I need to think and operate differently. I do know that this must be the final world war for Germany’s sake. This nation will not survive another. I don’t know if the world will survive another, especially if the technology increases as much as it has done from the first to the second.”

  “It looks like winning the peace will be as big a challenge as winning the war,” Sanger said.

  HQ, FIRST BELORUSSIAN FRONT, ORANIENBURG, GERMANY, 2359 HOURS GMT

  Marshal Zhukov sat at his desk, the surface illuminated only by a single glaring lamp. His aide had just brought in the message, decoded less than ten minutes ago, and the marshal had sent the rest of his staff from the room. He would read this missive alone.

  When the door was shut behind the last of his generals, he looked around, making sure there was no one lurking in the shadows with one last request, one more pressing need for the great soldier’s time.

  But he was alone. He drew a deep breath, and slowly slid the sheet of paper out of its envelope. He let it rest on the desk under the glare of the light, not touching it as he read.

  FROM CHAIRMAN OF THE SUPREME SOVIET CONGRESS STALIN

  TO MARSHAL ZHUKOV, COMMANDING OFFICER, FIRST

  BELORUSSIAN FRONT

  30 JUNE 1945

  AMERICAN PRESIDENT REMAINS INTRACTABLE. NO MOVEMENT ON MATTERS OF NEGOTIATION, RE: BERLIN. SUGGEST TIME APPROACHES FOR OBJECT LESSON ON POWER OF RED ARMY. SUGGEST LESSON BE APPLIED IN POTSDAM AREA, WITH GOAL GAIN CONTROL OF GATOW AIRPORT. PREPARATIONS SHOULD COMMENCE AT ONCE. DO NOT—REPEAT, DO NOT—INITIATE ACTIVITIES UNTIL SPECIFIC GO ORDERS ARE RECEIVED.

  Zhukov looked around again—he was still alone—and snorted contemptuously. As usual, he had anticipated the chairman’s demands. He had an entire army, the Second Guards Tank Army, all but surrounding Potsdam. Just last night he had ordered a probe of the American positions. These were, as the marshal had expected, strong.

  But they were also within easy range of more than one thousand Russian guns, medium and heavy artillery batteries. The watery nature of the Potsdam area created some difficulties for deployment, but his generals had worked out a way to site all of these guns before the narrow isthmus held by one American armored division.

  Of course Zhukov would not act before the orders came from Moscow. He was not, after all, a fool, nor was he suicidal. But he was sure of many things, and one of them was this:

  When orders came to attack, the Red Army would be ready.

  1 JULY 1945

  SKY ABOVE POTSDAM, GERMANY, 1034 HOURS GMT

  Captain Frederick Douglass Robinson’s head swiveled constantly as he scanned the airspace around his P-51. The Mustang’s bubble canopy allowed for exceptional visibility, and the few clouds were of the white cotton ball variety, too small and insubstantial to conceal any serious
threat.

  Without breaking the rhythm of his scan, he grimaced at the cotton image—his grandfather and grandmother had worked themselves to death picking the stuff, and that legacy was a part of him, always lurking beneath the surface. His parents had made it out of Mississippi to Chicago, but how much better was that? His mother cleaned the houses of white women, and his father helped white men find comfortable seats on the Hiawatha Express train that ran up to Minneapolis and back.

  Wouldn’t they all be amazed if they could see him now? Even in the cockpit he sat ramrod straight, an unconscious effect of the self-discipline and pride that had brought him here.

  Frederick Robinson—his squadmates invariably called him “Frederick”—had been an instant success at the Tuskegee school for fliers, a natural in the cockpit. His knack for leadership had made him squadron commander. And his keen eye and steady hand had, in the skies over Italy and Germany, made him an ace. He had earned the respect of officers, even white officers, with his competence and determination.

  Most of his work had involved escorting American bombers into areas infested with enemy fighters. He had honed his eye on those flights, learned to spot the specks of dangerous attackers as they first came into view. He and his men would chase those attackers away, and—on a good day—send one or two of them flaming in. He took great pride in one fact: On all of those escort missions, they had never lost a single bomber.

  But this was a different kind of war. For the last three months, he had been flying alongside the stream of transport aircraft that were Berlin’s only lifeline. He had seen the Red fighters in great swarms, coming far closer to the transports than any German fighters had ever dared to approach Frederick Robinson’s bombers. The orders from SHAEF to the American fighter pilots on these escort missions were clear: Do not start the shooting, but defend yourselves—and those precious transports—if the Russkis make the first move to attack.