Rhinelander (Kirov Series Book 40)

by Schettler, John

  Chapter 15

  All over the map, the pieces were moving toward a great confrontation in the center of the board. The German route from the south was becoming a kind of gauntlet, with heavy American guns, from the east, and also positioned west of the Meuse, able to pound the German columns as they advanced. Traffic jams on the narrow roads were a nightmare, and through it all, the rains got heavier.

  At noon, under dark skies, the worst of the rain seemed to pass, and Berg got information that there were strong armored forces mustering on his right flank. 116th Panzer was already fully engaged with Abrams’ Provisional Division. So the decision was made to try and slingshot 7th Panzer behind the lines of the 116th, to form a blocking position to cover the flank of the Führer Sturm Division . They would not wait, continuing north towards Maastricht, heedless of any risk.

  But by late afternoon on September 2nd, several stubborn facts were now becoming evident. Each pincer had been able to advance about 20 kilometers, but they needed to advance 30 each to close their trap. In that gap lay the hope of 3rd Army. The cross river operation in the north had disappointed, and had to be withdrawn. Manstein saw this as beneficial, saying the operation had done its job by putting the fear of an advance there into the minds of their opposing generals. But Guderian had hoped for a better outcome. Seeing his disappointment, Manstein pointed out that now the push south would be stronger than ever, but everyone at the briefing map knew they had suffered their first misstep.

  The second hard fact that could not be ignored was Verviers. The 8th infantry division, being flanked on two sides by Panzer divisions, had stubbornly held its ground. Then the arrival of Abrams’ division put an end to any hope the Germans had of pinching off that city as planned. 2nd Panzer had managed an advance of no more than five kilometers east of the city, and the 7th Panzer had now abandoned its effort to enfilade the city from the west, turning that front over to the 245th Infantry and moving north to support the main effort.

  That meant 2nd Panzer was going to be tied up east of Verviers, and effectively out of the assault. The same could be said of the 116th Panzer when it became heavily engaged with Abrams. Patton had decided to grapple with his enemy, using those combat commands pulled in from the east, and that strategy had worked. He had not been able to stop the push north, but he had the Hun by the leg, as he put it in Lucky Forward, and he wasn’t going to let him go. It meant that instead of five divisions pushing north from the south, there would now be only two, because 17th SS had to deploy all along the Meuse to guard the left flank.

  That situation was directly related to the fact that Guderian had been forced to commit the 319th Infantry Division to the defense of the lower Hurtgenwald. Had he not done so, the Americans would have swept right into the Eifel, but that was the infantry that he had hoped to use to watch that flank, and it was not to be.

  The third stubborn fact was that the Maeseyck Bridgehead had held long enough for help to arrive. 102nd Cavalry came up from Sittard and took up a blocking position astride the road to Maastricht. The stubborn, if costly battle fought by Colonel Saunders had bought just enough time for the 141st Regiment to get up through Sittard. Then Rose and his 3rd Armored Division came up on the right to challenge the flank of the SS drive south. That sent the whole of 2nd SS into a hard fought battle with Rose, and when Leibstandarte tried to brush aside the American cavalry, they fought like hellcats, imposing a four hour delay on the advance.

  These first three facts had led inevitably to the fourth—the Americans had reached Maastricht first , and in good strength. Now the attempt to close the pincers there would be vigorously opposed, a battle of attrition that might be won by the Germans, but only at great cost. Both Manstein and Guderian knew that debt could never be repaid easily, if ever. The Reich had strained to reequip these divisions, and there would be no more tanks to replace any that were lost for many months.

  The one wildcard in Steiner’s hand that had not yet been played was the 12th SS Hitlerjugend Division. It had been in column for a day and a half, trundling along behind the advance from the north, idling as much as moving. It was entirely fresh, never engaged, and Steiner was now counting on it to take over the point of his advance from 1st SS so he could rest that division briefly.

  When Pieper got that order, he was quite upset, attributing it to the delay that had been suffered in the battle with the American armored cavalry. His original intention had been to crush the Maeseyck Bridgehead, and eliminate that as a staging area for any enemy counterattack. Now, with 9th SS coming up along the river to cover that bridgehead, he decided to obey the spirit of Steiner’s order, but not the letter. Without even asking General Theo Wisch for permission, he veered west around the bridgehead, heading for the canal line that ran parallel to the Meuse.

  His excuse would be that he had to make room for 12th SS to advance up the main road, but his real reason was to find a way there to keep him in the vanguard of the attack. Call it bad luck, or call it fate, but that was where Colonel Saunders had moved his battered 102nd Cavalry Regiment, and he would soon have the devil to pay if he thought that would be safe ground to pull his ragged troops together.

  There were two bridges on the Meuse behind him. One was at Papenhoven, a little over three kilometers west of his left flank. It was a ferry site that had been bridged by US engineers, and further south they had also built another good bridge at Berg, which was due west of Sittard. Those two bridges would become very important, because 6th Armored Division was already approaching the bridge on the Albert Canal at Lanklaer, and from there the road would take them right on to Berg.

  Just south of the road from Berg to Sittard, there was a vast railroad Marshaling yard, one of three sites that had been used by 3rd Army to depot supplies. It was a prize the Germans would be most gratified to find, if they knew it was there, and one they surely would discover if their columns reached that rail yard. Today the Chemlot Plant sprawls throughout that area. In 1944, Patton had 400,000 gallons of gasoline there, and stacks of supply crates, with food, clothing, small arms and artillery shells twelve feet high. It was not a place for incoming artillery fires to be landing, for all that fuel and ammunition made the place very volatile. So any defense had to be mounted well forward of the area, otherwise that supply depot would have to be destroyed, and Patton could not afford that.

  Little towns were seeded throughout the area, Rosengarten, Sanderbout, Kleindorp north of the yards, Geleen, Krawinkel and Kerenscheid clustered around the main rail depot, which had row upon row of steel rail lines in parallel, and a great deal of rolling stock, train cars still loaded with supplies. Patton wanted, and very much needed that fuel and supply to keep fighting, so he was determined to stop the Germans well north of that site. That was the mission he now handed to Lightning Joe Collins.

  “Joe,” he told him. “You need to get both 6th and 7th Armored over the Meuse tonight, any way you can. Don’t try to use the ferries, but we threw up bridges at Papenhoven and Berg. Get to them as fast as you can.”

  “I’m one step ahead of you, General,” said Collins. “I’ve already crossed at Papenhoven with a good chunk of CCA from 6th Armored.”

  “Outstanding,” said Patton. “Get up north and relieve Saunders with the 102nd Cav. The Krauts damn near tore his regiment to pieces, but by God, he won’t throw in the towel. What about the Lucky Seventh?”

  “I’ll cross them at Berg, and move right up through Sittard. Don’t worry, we’ll stop them, or die trying.”

  Ike didn’t like the sound of that, but he appreciated Collins spirit. He was a fighter, the man Patton had relied on as much as Lucas and Truscott to bring them here, and Collins seldom failed in what he set out to do.

  “Sounds like Old Ironsides has a handful, and then some,” said Collins.

  There at Lucky Forward, they could already hear the fighting to stop the advance of the southern pincer. The Führer Sturm Division was just four kilometers south of the city, where General Prichard had thro
wn the whole of his heavy 1st Armored Division into a big attack on the German advance. Those two companies of M26 heavy tanks joined in, and every gun that could range on the Germans bellowed away with withering fire, some 18 artillery battalions. The low clouds were starting to break up, and through them came the P-47’s as Tac Air was called in to try and stop that pincer in one mighty effort. It was to be a devastating clash of armor, like two heavy knights lancing into one another while jousting.

  The Germans had Berg there on point with all his remaining Leopard II’s. Then they had 60 VK-90mm Lions from the Führer Begleit Brigade, another 36 Königslöwe King Lions with the 120mm main gun, and 27 of the super heavy tank killing Jagdtigers . Against this, Old Ironsides threw in seven companies of Shermans, two more with the new M26, two tank destroyer companies with 90m guns, and legions of armored infantry to match the German Panzergrenadiers.

  The fighting there was as heavy as it had been at Kursk, a thick concentration of several hundred tanks smashing into one another, with artillery rounds welling up all across the battlefield. 75mm shells careened off the heavy German armor, but some found tracks and other weak points on the mammoth enemy tanks, and scored kills—yet they were all too few. The Germans would find that they would lose 10 VK-90 Lions, and two each of the three heavier Panzers, including a pair of Berg’s Leopard II. They had been the victims of artillery and air strikes, and not any direct fire by the American tanks. The TAC-Air helped, swooping in with loads of 2000 pounds per strike that went up in massive broiling welters of smoke and fire that charred the skies under a blood red sun that was slowly dying on the horizon.

  Everyone in Maastricht could hear the thunder of that battle, and at Fort St. Pieter, just outside the city on the high ground to the south, Patton sat with Eisenhower, who had refused to leave the HQ, in spite of urging from his staff. They had argued that the Supreme Commander was now within the range of enemy artillery fire, but Ike would not budge.

  “That’s eight feet of concrete over my head in this damn fort, said Ike. “So here I stay. If they come at the place with flame throwers, I’ll reconsider. Until then, get busy assisting Patton’s staff.”

  There listening to the sound of that fighting, and hearing the sound of the men shouting orders and dying on the radio, the cold heartless fire of the war was brought home to Ike in a way he had never known before. It had been bad enough to hear the pleading calls of the 317th earlier, where the regiment was largely destroyed by the German breakthrough. Now he knew he would have many more letters to write, a stack of paper that would take him days to count the dead, each one a father, brother, son.

  Through it all, Patton remained the quintessential warrior. As darkness fell, he ordered the artillery to keep at the enemy all that night. “Stick it to them,” he ordered. “I want every gun firing until the barrels glow red or we run out of shells. Pound those Nazi sons-of bitches! Pound them all night!”

  Collins had his big guns off the trains and already in action, along with all of Gerow’s six V Corps battalions, two more from the 3rd Army pool, and every divisional battalion within range. The rain of steel would not let up, and at the big rail yards to the north, the trucks were loading up crates of artillery shells as a top priority, and then rushing south to Maastricht to keep feeding those guns.

  The day’s heavy fighting had not changed the overall shape of the battlefield, which now looked like a great donut, with the Aachen Pocket being the center. Perhaps a more fitting metaphor would have been to call it a hurricane, with that still calm eye centered over Aachen, and battle raging like the furious storm surge and winds on the outer edges as the storm was making landfall near Maastricht.

  That night Saunders took what was left of his 102nd Cav down towards the town of Berg, a beaten and bloodied remnant of his gallant regiment. There they saw that 6th Armored was already crossing the bridge, and off in the darkness to the east they learned that 7th Armored was coming up as well. Collins had his two armored divisions arriving in the nick of time as he had promised, and that had only been made possible because of the valor and sacrifice of Saunders and the 102nd. The entire unit would receive a Presidential Citation, and the Medals of Honor flowed freely, along with all to many Purple Hearts.

  The Lucky 7th had a combat command up that night to back up the lines of the 141st Regiment, and the forward elements of the Super 6th took over the watch that Saunders had been forced to give up near the canal line at the village of Buchten. The bridgehead at Maeseyck built by the 324th Regiment had held, though it was no longer as tactically important as before. As it turned out, neither of Collins’s divisions had used it, so it became a big red herring for the Germans, occupying both 1st and 9th SS all that afternoon and evening.

  Now the fate of Maastricht rested on the iron shoulders of old Ironsides south of the city. They had to hold, at least until dawn, when it was expected that the battalions of the 45th Infantry Division would begin arriving, flowing into the city from the west.

  At the HQ of the Führer Begleit Brigade , General Remer was listening to the pounding of the American artillery as he and his staff studied the map. Supremely confident, the report that he had lost only 16 of his 162 Panzers was most gratifying. Just as he was about to boast that the Americans could not have come off all that well in the armored duel, an artillery shell came right through the roof of the cottage where he had set up his HQ, and plopped right into the map table, smashing it to pieces—but it did not explode.

  The General and several officers were thrown to the floor, and as he groped about in the dust to get his bearings, Remer stared at the hissing, smoking shell now lodged in the floor. “Everybody out!” he shouted. “Raus! Raus!” It was a most humbling reminder that the American Army had more than their clunky Sherman tanks, as he often had called them.

  That was one map table the General would never use again, but back at OKW, the lights were burning late as Guderian, Manstein and other staff officers poured over their map. The hands of the clock swept through midnight.

  It was day three.

  Part VI

  Better Late Than Never

  “How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”

  —Dr. Seuss

  Chapter 16

  “The situation is not as promising as we had hoped,” said Manstein. While he had tried to buoy Guderian up earlier, as the reports came in that night the four stubborn facts began to weigh heavier in the equation. Manstein gestured to the map, his finger firmly on Maastricht.

  “We failed to reach that city before they could move substantial reinforcements across the Meuse, and that has changed everything. Our intelligence was not as good as we believed. Reports are that two additional armored divisions and another full infantry division have crossed. If that is so, then they had to be within 48 hours march of Maastricht. That is the corps of their General Collins, which our intelligence placed behind Brussels three days before Rhinelander launched.”

  “Well, Herr Feld Marshal,” said Jodl, “it obviously moved. Our security may not have been as tight as we wished, and they may have gotten wind of our plans.”

  “No,” said Guderian. “I am certain that no information concerning the actual plan could have come into their hands, but they have intelligence as well, and there were any number of messages in the tea leaves they could have read correctly to take a precautionary measure like the movement of their VII Corps. We moved only at night, and under the tightest security, but that does not mean our buildup could not have been detected. Yet all that is beside the point. We must look at the current situation and determine what to do.”

  “I believe Steiner has good prospects,” said Manstein. “But gentlemen, I am not certain we can close the bear trap, not tomorrow or even in another 48 hours. Manteuffel indicated that it is difficult to get supply north now on the few roads we control. Their artillery is on either side of
a very narrow corridor, and it is wreaking havoc. Kluge called an hour ago. He says that of those super heavy tanks he employed, only two have been put out of action, but most of the companies have already expended half their ammunition. One reports 15% supply.”

  “But the Americans will also have supply issues,” said Guderian, “particularly if we do get to Maastricht as planned. The southern pincer is so close, no more than four kilometers.”

  “They are going to reinforce both ends of that gateway again tonight,” said Manstein. “I have little doubt that even more reserves are moving toward Maastricht as we speak. Even if Manteuffel’s column should get through, we will be looking at house to house fighting. How long can he stay there? Do either of you believe that we are actually going to isolate and destroy Patton’s 3rd Army? Yes, we hoped to do exactly that, and if we were at Maastricht now, and with the three or four divisions that have crossed still held at bay west of the Meuse, then I might see the situation differently. As things stand, I do not think we will kill this bear we are hunting. In fact, I think we may have only angered him.”

  “Von Rundstedt warned us of this long ago,” said Jodl. “Only he saw Patton as a raging bull.”

  “Yes,” said Guderian. “This bull kicks, I remember it all too well, but all is not lost. Steiner has only just put 12th SS into the fight up north.”

  “Yet he is now over 20 kilometers from Maastricht. Did you read the reports? A single American armored cavalry group nearly sacrificed itself to a man to stop Pieper, and that they did, for over four hours. It was six hours before he finally bypassed the Maeseyck Bridgehead, which is now irrelevant, no more than a small burr in our side. The simple fact is this, they still have Maastricht, and they will reinforce it tonight. If they fight for that as they did against Pieper, then I think we all know what the outcome will be here.”