Rhinelander (Kirov Series Book 40)

by Schettler, John

  “When does this operation launch?” asked von Rundstedt.

  “Not for some weeks,” said Guderian. “It will take at least two weeks to complete the concentration and deployment. The movement will only happen at night, with the troops under cover by dawn each day. I am considering a tentative date of September 1st, but that will be subject to the situation being faced on the front. How serious is the threat in the Stolberg Corridor?”

  Von Rundstedt leaned over the map. “In spite of the commitment of that new Panzer Brigade, they continue to make gains. A breakout toward Duren and the Roer is a real possibility. The Reichsführer Division had been putting out fires for weeks, but only so much can be expected of those troops.”

  “Even if they do break out, we must form a hedgehog position at Aachen, and force them to invest the city. They will not attempt to cross the Roer until they have taken the dams, because they surely must know we can flood that whole valley.”

  “Will they take the dams?” asked Manstein.”

  “Schmidt’s 275th is the only unit defending there,” said von Rundstedt, “and the 319th has just seen its right flank turned at Monschau.”

  “Don’t worry about that either,” said Guderian. “2nd Panzer is in that area. If the Americans get nosey, they will soon regret it.”

  “And when 2nd Panzer moves to the assembly area?”

  “9th Volksgrenadier Division is coming up now through the Eifel. True, they aren’t much, but our offensive will surely cancel any strong American advance in that area. That I can assure you. All they will be doing is wasting gasoline.”

  “Very well,” said Manstein. “I have looked over the maps for this offensive, and I have some concerns. First off, I do not think Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr can be ready for offensive operations by September 1st. The same can be said for Goring’s division. Those troops have been active from as far back as the Antwerp operation, and that after a long march from further south. I checked with the Army quartermaster, and he tells me that most of the tank deliveries have already been assigned to other divisions. More are coming, but it will need some time. Therefore, I think it best to leave Panzer Lehr and the Hermann Goring divisions in reserve behind the Rhine, instead of moving them south of Liege for this concentration.”

  “Those divisions will be sorely missed,” said Guderian. “However, with 2nd 7th and 116th, I believe 6th Panzer Army should be strong enough. The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division joins them, as well as two new brigades that have been in the works for some time. They would have been cancelled if not for this operation.”

  “New brigades?” asked von Rundstedt. “More Panzer brigades like the 105th?”

  “Stronger,” said Guderian, “and still bearing the names the Führer approved when they were proposed. I mentioned them earlier. One is the Führer Escort Brigade, the other the Führer Grenadier Brigade. Together they are as strong as any typical Panzer division, and they join the southern group of forces, along with KG Berg. With Lehr and Goring , we would have been an overwhelming force, but I will settle for formidable.” He smiled.

  “Formidable indeed,” said Manstein, “but this plays into my next concern. Do you actually think you can get over the Meuse west of Liege?”

  “We thought to cross between Huy and Liege,” said Guderian, “but the terrain in not suitable closer to Huy. Access to the river is difficult, and the north bank is backed by cliffs and hills. However, the eastern segment of that area is better, and there are also nine bridges between Herstal and Seraing.”

  “Yes, but to get to them you will first have to fight your way through Liege. Then, if you do get bridges and cross, you will still be facing house to house fighting to clear that side of the city. Frankly, I believe prospects for any significant penetration in the south that attempts to cross the Meuse will be very dim. That said, if the attack stays entirely east of the Meuse, and simply drives north along the river to Maastricht, I would say our chances of getting there are quite good. In my opinion, the main thrust of the attack should therefore be between Liege and Verviers, and not Liege and Huy.”

  “Agreed,” said von Rundstedt. “Any counterattack they make will run right up against the Meuse, and then they are the ones who must cross under our guns, and not the inverse.”

  “Exactly,” said Manstein. “However, the northern pincer will be much stronger with the five SS Panzer Divisions. There I think Steiner might send two divisions across the Meuse, perhaps Bitterich’s 9th and 10th. That will put the fear of the lord into them, and make them build up strength on that shoulder, but west of the Meuse. In effect, that attack is a red herring, and once Steiner gets moving, Bittrich will always be able to withdraw back over the Meuse, and follow behind him. Steiner thrusts down the east bank of the river. Gentlemen, this is a strong operation, yet it has much to do. Linking up near Maastricht is only the first task. Then we must be strong enough to contain what we have pocketed, and to repel their relief attempts. We did this time and again on the Ostfront , but this American Army is a different animal. Their infantry can be tenacious. Their artillery coordination and air support is superb. Their armor is fast and hits hard, and there will be several of those divisions in reserve. Make no mistake, this will be a difficult fight. It will al hinge on whether we can get to Maastricht before they put strong reserves across the Meuse to try and stop us.”

  “Well General?” Guderian looked at him. “Assuming we make adjustments in the south, will you approve of this operation?”

  “Jodl thinks we should wait, but that only cedes the initiative to them, and each day they take a little more from us. So yes, General, I will approve, but under one condition. Should we find that the enemy reaction is strong enough to get us into a grind we have no business courting here, then we must be ready and willing to call a halt to this operation, or to re-orient it as the situation may warrant. We must not accept a battle of attrition, so everything depends on reaching Maastricht and sealing off the Meuse before they get strong reinforcements across. That failing, then this operation stops, and we meet to consider what to do next. If that is acceptable, then complete your concentration, and then we will see if they discover the plan and react. At that time, the eleventh hour, we will meet to decide on whether or not to proceed.”

  “In the meantime,” said von Rundstedt, “what do I do about the Stolberg Corridor? If we hedgehog at Aachen, what holds the line behind it?”

  “I have sent the 18th and 187th Volksgrenadier Divisions to relieve Erdmann. He is moving south to Munchen-Gladbach, as his 6th Para Regiment is already on the line in the Aachen State Forest. So those troops will be available to help contain any impetuous activity in that sector.”

  “Impetuous activity?” von Rundstedt smiled at that. “Patton has been up to a good deal more than that these days. Very well, I will support the decision to go forward with Rhinelander, but with some reluctance. It is my belief that the Panzers should fight defensively, but I am willing to see if your plan can succeed. I suppose you had better begin your concentration, General Guderian.”

  “Forgive me if I seem forward, but I have already summoned the Gladiators. The order to begin preparations went out yesterday. You see, I had every confidence in the plan, and I was sure you would both see the prospects here are very good. I believe we will indeed break through and close the pincers at Maastricht as planned.”

  “Yes,” said von Rundstedt, “but you and I both know that things often happen that are not planned. Once the scope and scale of this attack is realized, they will move everything they have at hand to stop us. Patton will surely forsake his thrust into the Hurtgenwald and towards the Roer, and he will move his armor to intervene. If we are quick, and close the trap before he can do so, then we will still face his furious counterattack in an attempt to break out of the trap we have set for him, most likely in conjunction with a thrust from the west.”

  “Of course, they will do exactly that, but we will have the advantage.” Guderian remained confident. �
�Our Panzers will be fresh, Patton’s armored divisions fatigued after weeks of prosecuting his own offensive. We will have secure supply lines, he will be forced to rely on stocks he had east of the Meuse. Once we reoccupy that defensive front, any attack from the west will have to fight its way back across the rivers and canals to reach Patton. Gentlemen, if we pull this off, and defeat this brigand, then I think we can force them to the negotiation table. Frankly, this is our only hope, as I think you both well know. I want this attack here in September, because by November, you know damn well that Steiner will have to be in Russia, if not sooner. This is our one window of opportunity, and we must make the most of it.”

  Part III

  Prelude to Disaster

  “It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”

  —Kazuo Ishiguro

  Chapter 7

  Chateau de Ryuff ~ Welkenraedt, Belgium

  Staff HQ, II Armored Corps, U.S. 3rd Army

  Corporal Alphonso Romano was an amiable man, with a job that would have been the envy of any rifleman in Patton’s 3rd Army. “The Roman” as the men called him at times, was a signals intercept analyst, but not for wireless transmissions. At other times he was known as “Cheese Head” a play on his last name, but mostly the men just called him “Fonzi.” His small group of three men had a nice little wiretap into the telephone system the Germans had been using of late, with special cable strung all of five miles to the frontier where the line was tapped. Traffic had been relatively quiet, until that afternoon, when the Germans seemed to be talking a lot about the weather.

  “Damn if these Krauts can’t keep talking about the fog,” he said to his Sergeant. The Corporal was a fluent speaker of German, which is one reason why he wasn’t in a rifle company in the Hurtgenwald. Instead he was drinking a nice warm cup of coffee, listening to the BBC with one ear, and his headset with another. “Fog, fog, fog,” he said. “And they can’t even get the season right. They have some kind of screwed up calendar, Sarge?”

  “Beats me Fonzi. Just listen for the good stuff. You know the drill, unit designations, place names, officers names, the works.”

  “Nothing going there, Sarge. It’s just a lot of nonsense about birds and fog.”

  “Well keep at it. I’m going down to Corps Post to see if anyone’s got a care package.”

  The Sergeant put on his helmet and tramped out, grateful the rain had let up the previous night, with nice clear skies in every direction. “Fog, fog, fog,” he said to himself. The Roman was a good operator, with keen hearing and good language skills. But he often got himself lost in exactly that, the nonsense chatter that was all over the wires. That’s why they called him the Cheese Head. You had to know how to sort out the wheat from the chaff in this business, he thought. Fonzi ought to forget about the weather reports and find some real hard news, but there had been nothing substantial in many days.

  He walked into the post office, set up in an out building at the Chateau, which was an old castle of sorts, built in the early 1300’s. There was no news there either, so he shrugged and walked back outside, over to the great arched entrance to the estate. It was a fine day….

  A fine day indeed! He looked around again, noting the skies clean and clear, and hearing the friendly drone of P-47’s overhead. Something odd had struck him. What was Fonzi talking about? Fog? He walked back into the post, seeing Fonzi had his feet up on the desk again.

  “Fonz!” he shouted, so the man would hear him through the headset.

  “Sorry Sarge!” The Roman pulled his feet off the desk, and gave the Sergeant a sheepish smile. But Sergeant Jenks wasn’t worried about the desk. Something Fonzi said didn’t make any sense.

  “What’s that crap you said about the Germans and the weather?”

  “Yes, that’s all they seem to be talking about—the fog. I heard it three times in the last hour.”

  “Fog? Look out that window. You see any fog? It’s clear blue sky out there, and it’s been that way all morning.” He folded his arms, frowning. “What is it your hearing, exactly.”

  “Talk about the fog—Herbstnebel . It means Autumn fog, or Autumn mist. Heard it three times today.”

  “Well, there ain’t no goddamn fog,” scowled the Sergeant, “and this is still August.” The Sergeant suddenly remembered what the Roman had said about a screwball German calendar. “Right,” he said. “we’ve still got four or five weeks of summer left. Fonzi, I’ll bet you a case of beer that’s a goddamned codename. We might be on to something here. Keep listening, and let me know if you hear it again.”

  Sergeant Jenks was a very shrewd man. It wasn’t Autumn, and there was no fog to be talking about. So that meant the Germans were up to something, as far as he was concerned. He had, in fact, put the finger of his speculation squarely on the German code words for the assembly order for Operation Rhinelander , a label Guderian had decided to stick with. Herbstnebel was just the call to arms.

  * * *

  It often took the first man down, either dead or maimed for life with a leg blown off at the knee, before a platoon would realize they had stumbled into the edge of a German minefield. That was when the soldiers of the Big Red 1 would realize that the forest in front of them was no mere wood, the ridge line ahead not just another tree sewn rise they had to get over. The German Schrapnellmine , or simply the S-Mine, was a simple device shaped like a Campbell’s soup can, with a prominent metal stub crowned with three metal prongs on top. It would be buried in loose earth, and those prongs would set it off if stepped on, but this was no ordinary mine.

  The weapon would literally leap up from the earth to a height of three feet before it exploded, and it was packed with metal balls for shrapnel. The result was a man gutted by that hail, or more often maimed with a leg sheared off at the knee. The MG-42 you could see or hear. You could dive for cover against mortars and artillery, but the S-mine lurked in its shallow grave, waiting there unseen to take you down with it—the most feared weapon of the war by all reports made by the men in the field.

  1st Infantry had cleared Waldheimerwald, taken the town of Rott, and then pushed on into the Hurtgenwald. 26th Regiment was on the left, holding much of the shoulder of the penetration up the Stolberg Corridor, their lines extending as far north as Zweifall. 18th Regiment was in the center, advancing to clear the bunkers beyond Roetgen and moving into an area called Rotterwald. The men soon came to call it the “Rottenwald, for there was damp, marshy ground, the forest floor thick with rotting underduff that formed the perfect cover for those S-Mines. Soon the troops coined a name for them, the “Bouncing Betties.”

  That was what was so hellish about the Hurtgenwald. Death was everywhere. It lurked underfoot. It came at you from above when the artillery rounds would explode with shattering airbursts, sending showers of wood splinters down on you. Men who did the natural thing when the rounds whistled in, by diving prone to the ground for cover, got the worst of it. All they ended up doing was exposing their entire body to the lethal wood shrapnel, blown down with enough force to take off an arm. The troops soon learned that the best place to be under artillery was standing upright, hugging the trunk of one of those silent tree sentinels. That way, only your head and shoulders were really exposed, and at least you had a steel helmet for your head, and the thicker branches above to block the shrapnel. Yet the steel rain of artillery did not take long before it blew all that evergreen to hell.

  In time a contested section of the wood was transformed into a nightmarish wasteland of broken, blighted trees devastated by mortars and artillery fire. But these attacks from above and below were just a part of the terror. It often seemed that every nook and hollow of the woods would hide an enemy trench line, studded with a line of log roofed bunkers. The German soldiers in those rebuilt divisions, many of them convalescents, ailing, old, may not have been a match
for the strong young men of the Big Red 1, but all they had to do was sit in those earthen bunkers behind an MG-42, and shoot at anything that moved to their front.

  The attacker, if he wanted that ground, had to be fully exposed, to the Bouncing Betties, the shearing, rending wood splinters, the tangle of barbed wire, the grinding buzz saw of those German MGs. To get at the men in those bunkers, you had to get close enough to fire a bazooka round or heave a grenade, and getting that close cost lives and limbs—a lot of them. Historians have long lamented the meat grinder that the Hurtgenwald became, with some tabulating the casualties and counting them out against the yardage gained. In some places, two men died for every three feet of ground that was taken. That wasn’t even enough ground captured to bury the men who gave it to you.

  That was the cost in flesh and blood for the Hurtgen Forest, to say nothing of the many other sufferings endured by the troops. The sun never penetrated to the forest floor, and it was always wet and cold there. The men’s socks would literally rot in their boots as they struggled through mud. Trench foot was epidemic. Hot food was never seen. Air cover could never find you under those dark groves of pitiless pines. The enemy seemed to be everywhere, and friendly faces, men you joked with, fought with for months, soon wore masks of fear.

  As they died, the Smitty’s, Sams, Joes and all the rest, the camaraderie of the squads and platoons died with them. The men you hung those nicknames on were slowly disappearing. In their place were pallid faced new recruits—replacements—men you had never laid eyes on before. The price for that was paid in morale. You would see your friends and buddies maimed and bleeding, or dead on that cold forest floor, and in their place came the new replacements, gaunt as wraiths. They were inexperienced, and the NCOs would have to change the entire way they fought with their squads. The men they knew they could count on dwindled away, and in their place came the fresh raw meat.