The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust

by DiLouie, Craig

  “Have you ever heard of Abrielle’s?”

  After Steiner gave him directions where the SS would find nothing but an empty, bombed-out tenement, Wolff asked, “Do you have any information about Operation Autumn Mist, Herr Leutnant?”

  “Surely, Oberfeldwebel, you already know it was a complete success. Our armies are advancing on Paris as we speak.”

  “Of course, but how was such a great victory accomplished?”

  “A new super weapon developed by our brilliant Führer.”

  Muller couldn’t guess what the weapon might be that could defeat the Allied armies so decisively. He’d all but given up hope of victory. Still skeptical, he wondered what this particular victory was going to cost Germany in the end.

  “So we’ll be heading to the Eastern Front.”

  “If at all,” Fuchs said. “The same weapon has been deployed against Ivan.”

  “This could be the end, Herr Leutnant?” Muller asked. “The war could be over?”

  Around the table, the paratroopers’ faces shined with hope. Muller would miss his chance to find himself in combat, but he couldn’t begrudge these men their longing for peace.

  The SS officer smiled. “The end is coming very soon, comrades.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ORDERS

  “Achtung,” Leutnant Klaus Reiser shouted. Attention! “The captain is about to call assembly. Schnell, schnell, you idiots.”

  The men groaned from their sleep sacks in the empty warehouse where the Army had billeted them. Most had slept in their uniforms, too drunk to undress.

  Otto Steiner rolled onto his side and smacked his lips. “Ja, schnell.” Hurrying up sounded good. He’d do it as soon as he finished his dream.

  Greta smiled and reached out to him—

  Reiser kicked him in the ribs. “Get up, pig-dog.”

  The gefreiter jumped to his feet and made a show of straightening his uniform. “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant. Einsatzbereit.” Yes, indeed, Lieutenant. Ready for action.

  Standing behind the lieutenant, Oberjäger Schulte eyed him with a slight smile, his handsome face glowing from his night of wild sex. Jäger Beck, the rifleman the squad had forgotten in the dance hall bathroom, had also managed to rise early.

  “Schnell, schnell, Steiner,” Schulte said as if saying, tsk, tsk.

  “Ja, Steiner,” Beck chimed in. “Schnell.”

  “I should have let you drown in shit in that bidet, Wolfgang.”

  “Schnell,” the lieutenant roared at them all.

  Reeling with hangover, the platoon flinched and hurried as the lieutenant commanded. Steiner took a swig from his water bottle and spat. Poured more into a tin and lathered his face for shaving.

  The last lieutenant had led the platoon in a counterattack among the rocks surrounding the monastery at Cassino. A tank shell punched his head clean off. Hunched over his MG42 machine-gun, Steiner had seen it all. One moment, the dashing young officer exhorted his men to glory. The next, the air vibrated around the space where his head had been.

  Steiner would never be able to erase that image from his mind. The headless body wobbling and still holding the upraised Luger, which fired once in final defiance before dropping. He remembered thinking: That’d look great on a propaganda poster. Fight to the death, comrades, and beyond!

  Reiser joined the platoon in Genoa and had been itching to get into combat ever since. He struck Steiner as a halsschmerzen, an itchy-necked commander out for glory so he could win the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross medal, the coveted tin necktie. A typical Prussian bastard who felt that anything worth doing was worth overdoing, and that not overdoing was the same as failing.

  Commanders like that took big risks in the field. As fanatic as the SS but for personal rather than national glory.

  Steiner turned from his mirror. “Any word on why the company is having an assembly, Herr Leutnant?”

  “Ja,” sneered Reiser. “We are going to England.”

  The paratroopers glanced at each other and smirked at the second-lieutenant’s attempt at humor.

  “Did you hear that, kid?” Steiner asked Muller as he finished his shave. “We’ll be drinking Schnapps in London!”

  The rifleman looked up from his kit. “What?”

  “Maybe the SS arschloch was right. Germany’s enemies all capitulated thanks to a magical weapon the Führer cooked up. Maybe we really are going home.”

  Muller nodded glumly, the poor romantic fool.

  Out in the courtyard, the band started playing the Horst Wessel Song. The company was mustering. Assembly had started.

  “Schnell, schnell,” Steiner said with a grin, wiping his face clean. “Hurry up and wait.” He opened his prized tin of Scho-Ka-Kola and ate a piece of the bittersweet dark chocolate as a make-do breakfast. Then he buttoned his tunic, pulled on his steel helmet, and followed his comrades outside.

  Eagle Company, 3rd FJR, mustered by platoon in a neat U-shaped formation as the band played its stirring march. A paratrooper regiment consisted of 2,600 men, comprised of three combat battalions of 850 men each plus battalion headquarters, communications platoon, and battalion supply train. Each combat platoon boasted a strength of forty men organized into three nine-man squads. Sixteen rifles, nine machine pistols, and six machine-guns.

  Of course, these numbers only existed on paper now. Combat, illness, and accident had reduced the regiment to just 800 men and Hauptmann Werner’s Eagle Company similarly to sixty combat effectives. These paratroopers stood at parade rest in the cold in their blue-gray Luftwaffe (Air Force) uniforms. Highly disciplined and well trained, they were the best and they knew it.

  Steiner thought it comical that he counted among them. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers to impress a girl back in his hometown. Greta Fischer, a big-breasted Aryan beauty who idolized the Führer. Her great bosom heaved and her cheeks blushed as she talked about German boys giving their lives in droves at the front. Steiner didn’t know if it was the mass death or the garish pageantry of it all that aroused Greta’s passion, he didn’t care. He just wanted in on it.

  Next thing he knew, he was living with men and getting shot at by gum-chewing Amis who’d come 5,000 miles just to kill him. Lice, dysentery, iron rations, cruel officers, and retreat. A year of savage fighting, and he barely remembered what Greta looked like, while he heard she’d married a Party official and was enthusiastically doing her part to make blue-eyed babies for the Reich.

  Steiner no longer fought to impress her. He didn’t fight for the Fatherland and its superior ideology and wounded pride. He didn’t fight for all the pageantry designed to exalt the ridiculous into something deadly serious. He fought just to survive, ripping bullets from his MG42 to make the goddamn Amis stop trying to kill him. Just twenty years old. He’d barely lived.

  For two years, his main concerns were staying dry, getting rid of body lice, thinking about women, bitching about officers, keeping his machine-gun working, sleep, scrounging food, writing letters, reading the same worn-out books, playing cards, and getting drunk whenever possible. He wanted to go home.

  As the band played on, Steiner stared at the helmeted figures facing him across the courtyard and wondered how many of them had joined to impress a girl. Most, probably. Only a maniac liked killing and was willing to die for it. The biggest fools were like Muller standing next to him, wishing he could make love to the war. No, the average paratrooper wanted to be a hero, and nobody wanted to do what it took to be a hero unless he thought it would get him the pick of girls. And here they were, all dressed up and without a girl in sight.

  Seeing the comedy of it all kept him sane, though the joke was also on him.

  “Brave Fallschirmjäger!” Hauptmann Werner shouted after the band stopped playing. Wearing his Iron Cross on his throat and a black patch over his scarred left eye, the grizzled captain addressed them from the head of the formation. “Heroes and defenders of the Reich! I stand before you at the threshold of victory. The Führer’s super weapo
n has defeated the Allies in France. Daily, State Radio declares our triumph. Hostilities with the Allies have ceased.”

  Werner glared at them all with his good eye, which gleamed a bright blue. “Generalmajor Schulz has issued orders.” Schulz commanded the 1st Fallschirm Division in the Adriatic Sector. “The 3rd Parachute Regiment is assembling. Transport has been organized to deliver us to the airfield. There, we will board planes and fly to England.”

  The stoic paratroopers stirred before resuming their rigid attention. Steiner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The lieutenant hadn’t been joking, he’d been serious. That or the captain was joking.

  “Our orders are to form a joint task force with our American and British counterparts,” Werner said. “We will train together. We will fight a common foe. The English and the Amis were once our enemies, but no longer. In fact, they are now our allies in the struggle to contain the Red menace in the East.”

  Werner nodded to Hauptfeldwebel Vogel, who barked, “Company dismissed!”

  Muller smiled. “The Russian Front!”

  “So much for going home,” Steiner said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AIRFIELD

  Oberfeldwebel Jurgen Wolff marched his squad back into the warehouse, where they fell out to collect their gear. Ungainly two-ton Opel Blitz trucks were already lining up in front of the ancient stone building, coughing acrid exhaust.

  “What do you think, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked him. “Our new orders?”

  “I’m a soldier,” Wolff said. “I don’t think. And I don’t engage in latrine talk. The only thing that matters is our orders.”

  But he was also a man, and men thought, and the orders didn’t make sense. Right now, he thought the entire operation was too strange to take seriously. A combined division made up of paratroopers from nations who just weeks ago had been bitter enemies?

  The Fallschirmjäger hated the British, though they respected their fighting ability. They didn’t hate the Americans, though they had little respect for them.

  A joint task force against the Soviets? This was going to be interesting.

  If the order hadn’t come through Hauptmann Werner, he wouldn’t have believed it. The captain had fought from the beginning of the war, one of the few survivors of the original regiment the man had trained with at Stendal. Wolff had seen a photo of him in Signal, which showed him charging during the invasion of Crete, the last big airborne operation of the war. The man was tough as nails and a genuine hero. His word commanded respect.

  Too bad the Waffen-SS lieutenant was wrong, and the Führer’s new super weapon hadn’t worked on the Russians. Wolff was tired of it all. During his two years with the regiment, he’d fought in Russia and Italy. He’d trained and lost his squad four times over to the meat grinder. He was tired of seeing cocky and scared German boys like Muller and Beck die one by one, so many he forgot their names.

  All he wanted now was to see these boys go home. He wanted it all to end.

  He packed his gear, taking special care with his jump smock and old triangular RZ36 parachute. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers in late 1942 and had undergone eight weeks of training at Stendal-Borstel airfield.

  Half basic training, half parachute instruction. All of it demanding. The paratroopers got the same training the infantry grunts got, only much harder. He remembered his first thirty-kilometer forced march. Brutal. Until he earned his parachute wings, he was nobody to the instructors, who never passed up an opportunity to demonstrate they were the best at everything.

  Weapons, demolitions, tactics. Ground rolls from a height of three meters. Unhitching a parachute while being dragged by wind created by airplane propellers. Live-fire exercises and jumps with a one-percent fatality rate being accepted. Then jumps from moving aircraft, Junkers and Heinkel He-111s.

  The drill instructors were tough and demanding, but their discipline wasn’t as harsh as with other unit types. They expected their boys to succeed based on inner strength. Many didn’t have it. Two of Wolff’s comrades committed suicide before their first jump out of fear of failure.

  Wolff didn’t give up. Indoctrination, high expectations, unit pride, and inner strength had driven him to succeed. After six successful jumps, he earned his parachute wings. He was Fallschirm for life. Still, he’d never made a combat jump himself. After Crete, few major operations had been undertaken.

  “What are the commies like, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller called out.

  “Hard men,” Wolff said. “And women, too. They fight like animals.”

  Reiser sneered. “Afraid, jägers? Three months of idleness, and you’ve all gone soft. Plenty of fat for Ivan to carve up.” The man seemed to run on schadenfreude—harm-joy, happiness at others’ misfortune. “Training in England will make you commandos again.”

  Reiser was showing them how not thinking was done. To him, orders followed an iron chain of command that led straight up to the Führer himself. Go to England and train with their enemies? Fine. If Hitler ordered him to jump in the nearest lake, he wouldn’t even ask how deep, and God help you if you tried to stop him.

  No matter that the lieutenant had never fought the Russians, while Wolff had. Reiser was an officer, an aristocrat in the least aristocratic branch of the Army, who saw the men under his command as a rabble requiring hard discipline and steady leadership to glory.

  The lieutenant berated his men until as they loaded their equipment and then piled themselves into the two-tons. Wolff’s squad sat on the opposing benches stony-faced with their weapons between their knees, enduring the steady stream of insults. Nobody cracked a joke about the lieutenant going on another tirade. Wolff didn’t tolerate disrespect of officers in his presence, even those that were jerks.

  The last stragglers loaded up. Strident calls sounded down the line. The convoy rolled out to join a line of vehicles rumbling toward the airfield. The entire regiment was on the move, undertaking an operation so important it warranted an extraordinary amount of vehicles and fuel.

  All for a plane ride to England.

  The United Kingdom. The great enemy fortress, the unsinkable aircraft carrier, home to men with stiff upper lips and tea and biscuits and the fat clown Winston Churchill. Just across the channel from Europe but as remote as the moon.

  It still felt to Wolff like he was dreaming.

  Distinguished by their steel gorgets hanging around their necks, Feldgendarmerie had cordoned off Genoa’s narrow streets and waved the trucks along. At an intersection, Wolff glimpsed the old terraced lighthouse, soaring over a hundred meters into the sky at the waterfront. The column was moving east. That meant no travel by flying boat, the water having served as Genoa’s airport since 1930. Instead, the jägers were going to the Luftwaffe airfield northeast of the city.

  The vehicles ground to a halt alongside the airstrip, where a large collection of old up-gunned Junkers 52 transport planes and a few decrepit Heinkel 111s lay parked. A handful of Focke-Wulf 190 and obsolete Stuka fighters circled the airfield, filling the air with propeller buzz.

  Werner’s Eagle Company would be the first to board the old transports. Reiser was already barking at the platoon to dismount the trucks and get moving. Wolff gripped his FG42, a semi-automatic rifle built specifically for Luftwaffe parachute units, and hopped down from the truck bed onto the cold dirt. The men began to load weapons containers onto their assigned plane. The Auntie Jus’ propellers cranked to life, the big transports straining against their wheel chocks.

  A motorcycle with a sidecar roared across the airfield and came to skidding halt. An SS grenadier and officer dismounted. The officer began to shout at one of the squads still sitting on the back of their assigned truck.

  “What is happening, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller shouted over the propeller hum.

  Wolff tapped his head. “Dachshaden.” Roof damage. In other words, in his view, the SS weren’t quite right in the head.

  He wouldn’t abide any criticism of the Fallschirmjä
ger. SS, however, were fair game in his book.

  Steiner said, “I should have given them the address of a real brothel.”

  The grenadier raised his StG 44, a big, ugly-looking rifle, and the paratroopers raised their hands in surrender.

  Wolff growled, “What the hell is this?”

  Leutnant Reiser marched over to the SS officer and started a screaming match.

  At the end of the airfield, more vehicles arrived loaded with SS troops. The grenadiers dismounted and aimed their weapons at the Battle Axe, the last company in line, veterans of Crete and the Gran Sasso raid.

  The rest of the squad gathered behind Wolff.

  “Is it me, or does this whole thing stink?” Weber said.

  “Like a shithouse, Kugelfest,” Schulte told him. “Obviously.”

  Wolff strained to listen but only caught snatches of the argument. The SS didn’t want the Fallschirm to board the planes and leave. Reiser intended to obey his orders unless an appropriate higher authority countermanded them.

  Gunfire popped along the edge of the airfield. The crackle quickened to a steady roar as Battle Axe and the SS blazed away at each other point blank with everything they had.

  Muller paled. “What’s going on, Herr Oberfeldwebel?”

  “Bürgerkrieg,” Schulte said. Civil war.

  Wolff looked to Reiser for orders. The lieutenant was still shouting at the hawk-faced SS officer while the grenadier aimed his StG 44 at the paras.

  Then Reiser ceased his gesticulating and went quiet as the gunfire rose in volume at the end of the airfield. The SS officer stopped shouting as well but kept talking, still making his case for the paratroopers to submit. He stabbed his finger at nearest plane and then swept his hand in a cutting gesture. Do not board the planes.

  Reiser nodded once, twice.

  Then he pulled out his Luger and shot the officer in the face with a loud bang. The grenadier wheeled in time to take three slugs in the chest.

  The two SS men crumpled to the airstrip at the same time.