Robert Conroy

by Red Inferno: 1945: A Novel

  Burke was stunned. Yet another reversal for the Allies, who had been in almost continuous retreat since the first week of May. It was now the end of June and it looked like the Allied defensive lines were beginning to crumble. He knew few Englishmen, but if the typical soldier was anything like Charles Godwin, he must be a truly formidable fighting man, and the British, too, were giving ground.

  “What happened to the idea that the Reds were too low on fuel for an attack against Montgomery?” Burke asked.

  Godwin laughed. “It appears there was sufficient for Rokossovsky to knock my beloved England out of the war with his sudden and unexpected attack.”

  “What shall we do?” Burke asked.

  “Well, since both of us are too unimportant to be involved in anything significant at this point, let us go and renew our acquaintance. I believe it is your turn to provide refreshments.”

  Burke chuckled. Perhaps it wasn’t the end of the world after all. “I managed to salvage some cognac on my travels. Had I not taken it, it might have fallen into evil and irresponsible hands. Will it be adequate?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Steven, although I will beg if I have to. Cognac sounds marvelous. Lead on, Colonel Burke, and I do hope it is a large bottle.”

  TONY LAY ON his belly in the tall grass and peered through his binoculars at their intended target. Joe Baker, the OSS man, was beside him with Vaslov and Anton waiting farther away at their camp.

  “What do you think?” Baker asked.

  Any sort of request for an opinion from Baker pleased Tony. The man obviously knew a lot about how to wage war on a small scale, and usually the shoe was on the other foot with Tony asking the questions. He also thought Joe was testing him. Tony refocused the binoculars. It was only one tanker truck, but it wasn’t very well guarded. One sentry outside and one in the cab who looked asleep. The outside sentry didn’t appear to be paying much attention to the world and stopped every now and then to take an unsteady sip from his canteen. Tony chuckled. It sure as hell wasn’t water.

  Tony looked around at the deepening shadows. It was getting darker with every moment. “Let’s go get it,” he said.

  “Look again, Tony.”

  “At what?” Tony was chagrined. He had missed something important and Joe was now going to tell him exactly what it was. He hated this part of their relationship, but it was making him a better soldier.

  “Look at the tires on the truck. What kind of shape are they in?”

  “They look fine to me, nice and round.”

  “That’s right, nice and round and full of air. If that tanker was full of fuel, don’t you think it would flatten out the tires just a little bit?”

  “Shit, Joe, that fucker’s empty.”

  “That’s right, and this place is a trap.”

  Tony swore silently. It had been his fault that the sentry had gotten away the other night. He could have sworn the man was dead. After all, his throat had been cut and he was bleeding like a pig the last time Tony saw him. Joe had sliced him, but it was Tony’s job to make sure that the man was dead and he had failed. There should have been two corpses in the burning cab that night, not just one. Now it looked like the Russians were on to them.

  “Sorry, Joe.”

  “Don’t worry. It was only a matter of time before they did something like this. Look, we still don’t know if the guy died and told them about the uniform. All that’s certain is that the Russians are getting tired of us blowing up their tanker trucks. That was bound to happen.”

  The comment made Tony feel a little better. “So what do we do now?”

  “Follow me.”

  Tony did as directed and the two men circled around the truck, always maintaining their distance from it. They quickly found three places where a full squad of Russians soldiers lay in wait. “Too dangerous,” Baker said in understatement, and Tony heartily concurred.

  It was now very dark and they had no difficulty exiting the area without being seen. “Well, what the hell do we do now?” Tony asked.

  “Are you up for some adventure?”

  What the hell have we been doing? he wanted to ask. “Sure.”

  It turned out that Joe Baker’s idea of adventure consisted of prowling through the Russian encampments and looking for targets of opportunity. With a dozen men waiting to ambush them at the truck, he concluded that the security might be lax elsewhere. He was right.

  As on the first night they had met, they located several small motor pools and truck parks and this night they entered them stealthily. Unwilling to risk an explosion, they satisfied themselves by pouring dirt in the gas tanks. Tony killed a Russian who, apparently drunk, had wandered into a grove of trees, while Joe sliced the throats of two men who had fallen asleep too far from their comrades.

  As Tony wiped the blood from his knife, it occurred to him that he was a far different animal than had lived in New Jersey. At first, he found that taking a life was awful. Now it was awful because it was so damned easy. He wanted to talk to someone, a priest, for instance. His big brother Sal was a priest. When he got back home he would have to talk to him and find out whether he was committing some sort of sin. In the meantime, killing Reds helped provide a slim chance that he would get home to go to Confession.

  If he didn’t stop thinking about home and stuff and stay alert, he reminded himself, he might not make it away from these Russians, much less home. Neither man had any doubt regarding their fate if the Russians should capture them. A quick death would be fortunate.

  It was the middle of the night before they called a halt and returned to where Vaslov and Anton waited. They quickly packed their gear, buried the uniform, and commenced to move. It was also time to get a long way from the Russians. Whoever had set the ambush at the truck would be very angry and just likely to start a manhunting sweep that would uncover them. Vaslov and Anton had told them just how ruthless the Russians could be when dealing with partisans or irregulars. Anyone they caught who might be a suspect, they would simply execute and hope they got the right person in the crowd of deaths. He realized their actions might cause innocent men to suffer if the Russians did start sweeping up people, but he couldn’t help that. He had a war to fight and war was hell.

  They would lie low and rest for a couple of days and start the process all over again.

  “Hey, Joe. Fourth of July’s comin’ up soon, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’ya say we set up for some special fireworks.”

  Joe laughed. “That, my friend, sounds like a marvelous idea.”

  Tony could have purred. Joe Baker had just called him his friend.

  CHAPTER 23

  Harry Truman glared at the two men sitting with him. He was still reeling in disbelief at the proposal put forward by Stimson and Marshall, both of whom he trusted, and concurred with by a man he trusted not at all, Winston Churchill.

  Churchill had telephoned his opinion earlier. He was back in England and trying desperately to hold on to his position as prime minister, which was in jeopardy following the debacle along the North Sea.

  Truman shook his head. “I cannot believe we are ready to countenance the use of Germans in our armies, however limited your proposal is. Yet we know that Churchill agrees with it and that this Miller fellow in Potsdam is already doing it. I can’t blame him there. He has a unique situation. But you’re telling me that the Russians are too?”

  Stimson answered. “Everything is true, sir. Miller began to use Germans to crew German antiaircraft weapons properly, and Ike would like to extend the practice to the rest of the army.”

  Truman turned to Marshall. “And you condoned this? Is there no way you could have stopped Miller?”

  “Sir,” Marshall responded, “Miller is the commander in the field and, as such, is given considerable latitude regarding decisions. The fact that he is surrounded and outnumbered by his enemies, and hundreds of miles from contact with the American armies, makes the situation both more complicated
and more desperate. Besides”—he smiled slightly at the memory—“Miller as much as told me we would have to come and get him if we wanted to court-martial him for disobeying orders.”

  Truman grunted. Sight unseen, he had to admire this General Miller. He must have a fine set of really brass balls. Not too many military men would have had the temerity to tell the army’s chief of staff where to get off. Truman had also been appalled to find that the Reds had drafted Germans to man the antiaircraft guns around Ploesti and other places. Worse, there appeared to be an effort to create a German Communist army out of the multitudes of prisoners of war the Russians held. Just how successful this would be remained to be seen. However, it was thought that many German prisoners would likely choose the opportunity to live as a soldier instead of starving in a POW camp or being worked to death in the gulag.

  “And now, gentlemen, you’re telling me that Ike wants to do the same thing?”

  Stimson sighed. They had already been over this. “That’s correct. Ike feels we are winning the air war, but that the Red air force is still a formidable adversary. Despite the fact that we are producing almost three times as many airplanes as the Reds, they still have a mighty host. We made a big mistake last year. Ike ordered the disbanding of a hundred battalions of antiaircraft guns because the Luftwaffe was such a weakened threat, and everyone concurred. Now these battalions have been reconstituted in light of the still dangerous strength of the Reds, and we need much more to protect our boys. Thus, Ike is proposing that we utilize German soldiers to man the antiaircraft guns and other weapons that we have captured in great abundance.”

  Truman did not respond. His expression was stern. Marshall took over from Stimson. “Sir, if you are concerned about our boys serving with any war criminals, I do not consider that likely. The antiaircraft guns and gunners were part of the Luftwaffe, their air force, and not the SS or even their regular army. Even if they were so inclined, I doubt that the gunners and others in the Luftwaffe would have had the opportunity to commit many war crimes.”

  Truman stood and looked out the window behind his desk. “And Churchill concurs after all the Germans did to England? Well, I suppose he would, considering the mess his army is in. Has it been confirmed that Montgomery has been replaced?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marshall answered. “By Alexander.”

  Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander had served with distinction in North Africa and Italy. Marshall had just received confirmation from the British chief of staff, Sir Alan Brooke. The choice did not displease the American high command. After first being almost insultingly critical of the American military, Alexander had proven quite easy to work with and had strengthened the alliance between Britain and the United States.

  The public had been told that Montgomery had been a casualty of the battle and had been evacuated to a hospital near York. Only a handful knew that he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

  Churchill had made the decision that the mauled remnants of the British Army would continue to remain in German-occupied lands and fight alongside their former enemies. Wounded were being picked up by the Royal Navy from a multitude of beaches and small fishing villages along the west coast of Denmark. The British had lost most of their armor and artillery and practically all of their supplies, which meant they would be relatively helpless for the foreseeable future.

  Marshall continued. “In a small way, using Germans in any capacity will help resolve the problem of numbers. We are still badly outnumbered at the point of battle.”

  “I know,” said Truman.

  In the nearly two months since the start of the war, the United States had managed to scrape together only a few new army divisions to throw at the Reds. Two each from Okinawa and the Philippines were en route to Europe. This did not mean that the four American divisions from the Pacific were in any shape to fight the Soviets. They’d been worn down by battle and disease. Physically, the soldiers were suffering from a score of ailments, and their equipment was shot and needed replacing.

  Then there was the problem of getting any of Clark’s already reduced Fifth Army across the Alps. The Swiss and their neutrality were a large roadblock. A trickle of Clark’s army had made it across from Italy into Austria, but the price had been high, too high. Others were wending their way around Switzerland by way of France, while a lucky few got to take ships from Italian ports and thence around Europe to Antwerp. Either way there was a dreadful delay and moving any of Clark’s troops meant ignoring the fact that they were in Italy to prevent a Communist-inspired civil war from breaking out there.

  “And what are the Russians doing?” Truman asked.

  Marshall stole a look at his notes. “Sir, our intelligence sources say that the Reds are stripping their other armies in Europe for the coming battles, which we all assume will be decisive. We have also confirmed that they are using Romanians and Bulgarians in some locations, although these cannot be the best soldiers in the world. We further believe they will be using those so-called German volunteers wherever they can as shock troops. That’s been their tradition. They’ve always utilized penal battalions and released prisoners for suicide attacks. The men actually do volunteer because they know they will definitely die as prisoners, while there is the small chance they will survive as soldiers.”

  Truman looked puzzled. “Under those circumstances, I would think a great number of them would desert. God only knows, I would.”

  It further boggled his mind that Stalin would take the Russian men released from German POW camps, hand them guns, and send them straight back to battle as poorly led, untrained, and half-starved mobs. He had to remind himself that Stalin, early in the war, had said that surrender was punishable by death. He was just enforcing his decree.

  “They might desert,” said Marshall, “we just don’t know how they would manage it. They would be closely watched and not have very many chances under any circumstances. We aren’t certain the German volunteers will be used against us. I consider it more likely they will be used as a police force to maintain order in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All of those countries are now in rebellion against the Russians. Thus, more armies can be taken from the forces occupying those countries and sent to the front. Further, the OSS reports that their operatives have sighted trainloads of soldiers coming back from the Far East.”

  “Makes sense,” Truman said. “How many men are we talking about?”

  Marshall again referred to his notes. “These are estimates, but at least half a million from Siberia and maybe another half million from other sources.”

  Truman groaned. Counting both the reinforcements from the Pacific and Clark’s army, if either got there in time to help in the next battle, they would total less than a fraction of what the Russians were bringing up. There had been some talk about lowering the draft age to seventeen and raising the upper end from its current high of thirty-five years of age to forty. The potential for the greatest numbers would come from the lower end, but, like Roosevelt before him, he was already catching hell because eighteen-year-olds were in combat. If seventeen-year-olds went to war, the political effects might destroy the entire war effort.

  At any rate, it wouldn’t work. First, as they had discussed before, there wasn’t enough time to draft and train large numbers of men. Second, the decision had been made to hold the size of the American military at a certain level in order to keep the economy going, and that made sense. What good did it do to put all these men in uniform if there were no weapons being produced for them to use? There were very real limits to what the Arsenal of Democracy could do.

  “Damn,” Truman muttered. “We can shoot down their planes and make more aircraft than they do, and we can make more tanks than they, but their tanks are much better. That pretty well evens out, doesn’t it?” Stimson and Marshall nodded. “Therefore, until and if we can get that bomb of Groves’s working, the difference in this war is numbers, isn’t it?”

  “That and supplies,” Marshall corrected. “If they
take Antwerp, our resupply effort will be crippled.”

  “Well,” said Truman, “we cannot speed up the ships bringing in the Pacific reinforcements and we cannot enlarge the army by changing the draft. If we could get at least some of the Fifth Army across the Alps, it might help take pressure off, wouldn’t it?”

  “A little,” Marshall admitted.

  There was a pause as a courier knocked and entered with a note from the secretary of state. Truman opened the envelope and read the one-page document quickly.

  “Well,” he said with a wide grin, “it would appear the British defeat has served one purpose, other than to get rid of Monty, that is.”

  “And what is that, sir?” Marshall asked. He declined to remind the president that the Fifth Army had been stripped to support the invasion into southern France.

  Truman handed him the note. “It seems to have scared the bejesus out of the Swiss. The idea of a possible Russian victory seems to have made them change their neutral little minds. They are going to let Clark’s boys transit through Switzerland in order to preserve their financial system. All right”—he chuckled—“if the British can decide to fight alongside the Germans, and the Swiss can give up their neutrality, you can use your Germans as antiaircraft gunners.”

  • • •

  TIBBETTS WATCHED AS the flight of three B-29s circled for a landing on the isolated air base outside Reykjavik. Once again, another flight had returned unharmed from the long sortie over Germany. After a couple of false starts, he had devised the tactic whereby each trio of bombers would fly over selected areas of Europe just after a major bombing raid had taken place, either there or nearby. Thus, they would usually catch the Reds on the ground refueling and rearming as the American bombers disappeared to safety. In the first few days of this effort, there had been some attempt by the Russians to attack the bombers. This had cost him two planes, but the attacks had ceased as the Reds realized the bombers weren’t bombing. He presumed the Russians thought they were out for photoreconnaissance purposes. It was as if they didn’t want to waste precious fuel on them. Well, he decided, who cared what they thought? It worked, didn’t it? Now they were over Europe each day. It was as if the planes of the 509th had been given safe-conduct passes.