Second Front (Kirov Series Book 24)

by John Schettler

  “What’s in reserve?”

  “Only one regiment from 34th Infantry. The 168th RCT will be held in the Azores, a good position from which we could reinforce either landing in a pinch.”

  “So what do our Limey friends throw into this?” Smith set down his clipboard.

  “They’ll send the 6th Armored Division, 3rd and 43rd Infantry Divisions, and the 78th Infantry Division in reserve.”

  “Is that going to be enough armor?”

  “I suppose that’s why they asked for our 1st Armored Division, but my inclination is to be stingy there. I allocated CCA as a reserve for Portugal, but it won’t go ashore unless absolutely needed. We need a hammer in the tool box just in case one end of this offensive has difficulties—and it could be our end. I’ve communicated this to our friends, and so they’ve decided to make both their infantry divisions mixed, adding the 33rd Armored Brigade to one, and 34th Armored Brigade to the other.”

  “They have those new tanks?”

  Eisenhower was fishing about in a brief case. “Ah, here it is—the specs on that new heavy infantry tank. Maybe this is the mystery they were hiding over in Egypt and Libya. They’re calling it the Churchill.”

  “Buttering the old man’s bread, are they?”

  Eisenhower smiled. “Let’s see how flattering the Germans find it. It’s nearly 40 tons, and they’ve finally ditched that lousy 2 pounder gun for something better. This one has a 75mm quick firing main gun, and a pair of Besa 7.92mm machine guns. It was meant to replace their old Matildas and Valentines. It says here that they’ve sent some to Alexandria, and the brigades assigned for TORCH will fight right alongside their infantry.”

  “Forty tons… Now I see why they wanted Lisbon. They need a good port to get those things ashore. Maybe you’re correct and these are the tanks they field tested over in Libya.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Eisenhower. “Let’s just hope the Portuguese welcome them with open arms.” Ike walked to the window, looking out on the city, seeing the grey overcast sky, and equally grey men and women going about whatever business the war had put before them. London was still a dreary place, even in the summer this year, with the weather more austere than many could remember. Some said it all had to do with that big volcano that blew its top in the Pacific, but it would be the least of his worries.

  “Tomorrow we move to the Azores and get the forward HQ up and running. My God, Beetle, the thought that we’re going to try to move six divisions by sea still gives me the willies. There’s a thousand things that could go wrong. Hell, it’s taken us months just to modify the transports so they could be combat loaded. Then there’s the U-boat threat, the German Navy, the French Navy, the Luftwaffe.”

  “You’re an Army man,” said Smith, “But don’t forget there’s a US Navy out there too, and the Royal Navy right at our shoulder. That’s the opening round of this whole thing. We win that, and our boys will get to Casablanca alright.”

  “Burrough is leading the naval contingent,” said Clark, his mood darkening somewhat. “You know what he told me? He said he’d feel lucky if we got half the transports safely to their landing zones. And I’ve heard the same from a number of good men—they say we have a 50/50 chance in this.”

  What do they know?” said Eisenhower dismissively. “Gentlemen, let me tell you what our ground commander has been up to lately. He’s gotten religion. Patton is selling this operation like he was going to make a personal profit from the affair. In fact, the other day he came in and wanted to show me his first draft of a demand he’s planning to read the French commander—a demand for his immediate surrender! I like that man’s style. So God help the French when we do get there, because with Georgie out in front leading our boys in, the Frogs won’t have a chance.”

  He fished about in his pocket, producing a pair of cigars. “Gentlemen—to our last night in London!”

  * * *

  Americans had staked out a little patch of London since the time when John Adams had visited England in 1785. Grosvenor Square had been developed in 1721 by Sir Richard Grosvenor, 4th Baronet, a member of Parliament at the time and the ancestor of the Dukes of Westminster. There were elegant mansions, and a palatial estate that was later rebuilt with swank hotels. Eisenhower had followed in the footsteps of Adams when he set up his headquarters at Number 20 Grosvenor Square, to coordinate the planning for Torch. There, his meticulous aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Butcher, USN, had been keeping a diary of these events, noting all important discussions and decisions, but that morning, as they prepared to get down to the long line of cars waiting to take them to the airport, something was troubling Butcher.

  A former news man and broadcaster for CBS, Butcher was the perfect man to take on the role of journalist, documenting the doings of Eisenhower and his staff as they worked up to the brink of this momentous opening campaign. But something was wrong.

  “Harry?” said Ike, giving him a look. “You get a bad egg for breakfast?”

  “No sir… It’s very odd.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The War Diary. You know I’ve been keeping minutes of all the meetings, notating everything in a daily diary for the historical record. But this is strange. I went to make an entry this morning, and a page is missing—page 117.”

  “A page missing…” Eisenhower didn’t like the sound of that. “What was on that page?”

  Butcher swallowed. “Well sir… That was the day we finalized the objectives for TORCH. I had all those pages on my desk just last night before I bound them so I could pack them. I’m sorry sir, but I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Good Lord. Missing? It’s got to be somewhere close by. Look for it again, and by God, be careful. I had a loose lipped naval officer in here yesterday and I read him the riot act and sent the son-of-a-bitch home. This thing is about to get traction, and security is paramount.”

  They looked everywhere, high and low. Eisenhower went through his desk and personal office from top to bottom. They opened every attaché, every brief, any file box that might harbor the missing page. Then orders went out that a search was to be made of all baggage stored for shipment to the Azores. Nobody was going anywhere that morning, and a phone call was made to the airport to stand Eisenhower’s plane down. The page was never found.

  A hundred miles southeast of London, the B-Dienst station at Calais was very busy that morning. Unbeknownst to the Allies, the Abwehr had a witless collaborator inside the headquarters facility, just a cleaning woman, and with no real position in the echelon of agents and provocateurs Canaris employed. She had passed through Butcher’s office while carrying out a basket of trash the previous night, saw the page on the floor, and thinking it had been meant for a waste basket, she simply added it to the one she was carrying.

  That night a truck came by the dump bin for the facility, and two men got out, about to make off with an unscheduled rubbish haul. These men were not unwitting collaborators, but willful agents in the web Canaris had spun, and by 04:00 they had discovered the unshredded paper and could not believe their eyes. They immediately drove to a quiet hotel on the edge of the city, handing the find off to yet another man, who sent a coded message to B-Dienst.

  At dawn, the message was on the desk of Canaris, and he looked at it with a mixture of anticipation and fear in his eyes. There it was, chapter and verse, the landing sites, the units assigned, the list of objectives and expected times when they might be secured. He shook his head, realizing that something had slipped on the other side, a look approaching shock on his face. Only two other men could have seen the document, the signalmen who first received it.

  Canaris leaned back, thinking. Then he reached for a secure telephone and rang up Calais. He wanted those men in a car heading for Brussels immediately, and he made arrangements to go there himself. Then he took the message, folded it quietly, and lit a match beneath it over his waste basket. Later that day, the two signalmen would meet a most unexpected fate in Brussels. Canaris was
a very careful man, for one had to be very clever to lead the life he was living out at that moment.

  He was head of the Abwehr, all German intelligence gathering, and he had just told Keitel that, as far as he was concerned, the Allies still remained incapable of mounting any real offensive threat for 1942. There had not been a whisper or shred of evidence indicating otherwise, and all of his most reliable sources of information had dried up. That was the way he intended to keep things, nice and quiet, for Canaris was secretly in league with British MI-6, even while he also quietly organized a select group of men that would come to be known as the Schwartz Kapelle—the “Black Orchestra.” Together they had been working on a dark fugue in the chorus of the Nazi regime, intending to plot the eventual assassination of Hitler.

  Yet no matter how careful Canaris was, other men had looked on him with suspicion for some time. Goring and Raeder had hidden reservations about the man, but it was the sinister head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, that would soon be on his trail. That signal had also been received by the special SS listening post on the coast, and it had been routed to Himmler as well. The pallid faced bespeckled man pressed his lips together as he read it. Then he simply opened a briefcase and slipped it into a special folder, the one that held the transcripts of trans-Atlantic cable intercepts that not even Canaris had been privy to. Himmler had been quietly reading the transcripts of conversation between Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Churchill and others. He knew everything that was about to happen on the coasts of Spain and Morocco now, and he also knew that Canaris had received that same message, even while he had been insisting that no threat was imminent.

  He smiled, a dark cold smile that would have frozen the blood of a detention camp prisoner. It was going to be a very busy morning.

  Part VII

  Charlemagne’s Ghost

  “Take action! An inch of movement will bring you closer to your goals than a mile of intention.”

  ― Steve Maraboli

  Chapter 19

  Himmler had been very concerned with the German position in the West, and he had done several things to correct that perceived weakness. While all of his best divisions were with General Steiner in Russia, he had been feverishly working on establishing more forces that could be used in emergency situations which he clearly perceived on the near horizon. One of his pet projects in France was a unit he had formed that would later come to be called the 33rd Waffen SS Grenadier Division. Manpower was always an issue, for Halder was sweeping off all the best German troops to build more infantry divisions. But Himmler thought he could find a ready source of fighting men in France, and he knew exactly where he could start.

  When the Vichy Regime had taken nominal control after the armistice, and formally signed an accord with Germany, the nation had been torn by conflicting alliances for some time. De Gaulle had fled to claim he represented the real French government in exile, denouncing Vichy rule as traitorous. An underground resistance movement had cropped up in France, but the Vichy regime had created small paramilitary units to counter it called the Milice. In Fedorov’s history, these units had not really been formed until 1942, but the close cooperation of French and Germany had seen them come into being much earlier now.

  As his own SS had arisen from such units, Himmler was very interested in this development. He soon had the idea that he might recruit Frenchmen loyal to the Vichy regime, and to Germany, and use them as the building blocks for a stronger military formation. This was what he did, in the early spring of 1942 instead of doing it two years later in 1944, and the result was a mobile unit that he quietly called his “Charlemagne Brigade.” It was manned by 7,000 Frenchmen, with another 5000 good SS men leavening the dough.

  Himmler had formed the unit in mid March, and it had been involved with extensive training on battlefield deployment, tactics and also counterinsurgency operations. He had also commandeered transport, and even armored fighting vehicles and armored cars siphoned from the production lines in Germany. His personal authority went very far in that regard, and he could get most everything he wanted without anyone daring to make an objection, at least outside the shadowed halls of OKW itself. Six months later, the Charlemagne Brigade was very well equipped, and it would become feared by friend and foe alike.

  For the local Free French underground, it was feared even more than the Gestapo, for the men in the unit had knowledge of the language and culture that made them particularly effective in a counterinsurgency role. In many ways, they were harder on their own citizens than the Germans were, and this unit would remain fanatically loyal to Himmler’s SS, and by extension to Germany, throughout the war.

  Their emblem was a divided shield, with a fleurs-de-lys on the left side (dexter) representing France, and an Imperial Eagle on the right side (sinister) representing Germany. The actual unit emblem had the two symbols in reversed positions, until someone pointed out that France was in the west, and its symbol should be on the dexter side of the shield. Together the dual symbolism represented the new combined Franco-German state that Himmler envisioned after the war was won, and he had just created its first official military unit.

  Troops had been raised from French prisoners of war, the LVF, or Legion Volontaires Francais. Designated Infanterieregiment 638 by the Germans, it had fought with the 7th Infantry Division near Moscow, and was later returned to France for rehabilitation. Himmler seized upon it as a ready source of loyal, well trained combat veterans to throw into his stew. Another French regiment, La Légion Tricolore, was also incorporated.

  All these troops were soon formed into the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne,’ with two regiments, the 57th and 58th, consisting of two battalions each, and a third two battalion regiment raised from Himmler’s handpicked SS, known as the Sturmregiment, where most of the best equipment was concentrated. A full Assault Pioneer Battalion and a highly motorized Recon Battalion fleshed out the ground troops for the heavy brigade, and they were supported by a Panzerjager Battalion and an Artillery Battalion. The German born Gustav Krukenberg, fluent in French, was given overall command as Brigadeführer, also much earlier than in Fedorov’s history. He coordinated with Colonels Lacroix and Demessine who commanded the two French Regiments.

  The signal Himmler had received, and all he secretly had gleaned from those trans-Atlantic cable telephone conversations, led him to firmly believe the information was not a ruse, but real and credible evidence of an imminent Allied invasion operation.

  The Allies are finally kindling their torch, he thought. So we must have a ready bucket brigade waiting for them when they come to Spain. This is a perfect opportunity to utilize my new combined Franco-German unit—the ghosts of Charlemagne as they are sometimes called by the locals. I must get it moving at once, but in a way that may not cause undue alarm if the Allied reconnaissance sees the troops on the trains. So I will use my network to let it slip that a new Volunteer French unit is being sent to Tunisia. That would be on the back end of any Allied planning, and nothing they would concern themselves with for these initial landings.

  Yes, I will cut orders to have the unit move to Toulon, but at the last minute I will re-route the trains through Montpellier and then along the coast to Barcelona. That is a good port where they could embark for French North Africa, or I could also just continue along the Spanish coast to Valencia, Cartagena, Malaga and then to Gibraltar. The final destination will depend on the outcome of these Allied landings.

  So here was a unit raised like the ghosts they were named after, born of men from fallen France in league with their former enemies. It was not even on the radar screen as far as Allied intelligence went. The various battalions had been dispersed all over France, but now Himmler gave orders for them to concentrate in rail yards north of Paris, and begin their journey south. Then he also strongly suggested to Hube that he get his 16th Panzer Division across the border and on the trains to Madrid as soon as possible. When the chief of the SS gives you that kind of advice, you act on it, and even without
knowing the real reason for this move, Hube pushed his units along.

  Elsewhere in France, the Germans had Dollman’s 7th Army in the south and along the Brittany and Normandy regions. 25th Korps had the 17th Infantry and 6th Panzer rebuilding with new equipment after the disastrous winter campaign in Russia. Three more static divisions fleshed out this Korps, the 333rd, 335th and 709th. The 84th Korps had another three static divisions, the 319th, 320th, and 716th. There were also five Fortress Regiments working on the Atlantic Wall fortifications, the 14th, 19th, 9th, 11th, and 17th.

  Farther north, the 15th Army under General Haase had the 81st Korps with three static divisions, the 302nd, 332nd and 711th. The rest of his force was coastal artillery and the 21st Fortress Regiment. 82nd Korps had one mobile infantry division, the 106th, and three more static divisions, the 304th, 306th, and 321st, along with 12th and 21st Fortress Regiments. This force was mainly along the shores closest to England, covering the region from the Siene River at La Havre through Calais, Dunkirk and Ostend. It was supposed to have 10th Panzer Division as a strong mobile reserve, but that unit had been sent to Rommel early, along with the Hermann Goering Brigade.

  This meant that in addition to Hube’s 16th Panzer Division now entering Spain, there were another 15 German divisions in France, though only three had the transport assets required to move anywhere efficiently, and all these troops were stretched out along the entire French coast, from Ostend to Bayonne. One other division, the 7th Panzer, was now being withdrawn from Russia for a planned movement to France. If the British had been more flexible, seeing the way TORCH had ballooned to a six division assault at two widely separated locations, they might have also seen that the concentration of all six of these divisions at one point on the coast of France, as Marshall proposed, might have had a very good chance of making a successful landing. But that was not to be—at least not yet.