by Scott Palter
Ramcke would have preferred a more experienced officer leading the KG. Ramcke would have preferred they be his own well-trained but missing Battalions. Life in wartime is about what you will settle for. It’s a matter of making do and getting the job done. Ramcke shook Strauss’s hand, thanked him, and promised a 36-hour advance warning order. He figured he would need at least that long to get his own men ready.
1700 hours local; 1100 hours CET
5 November 1940
Philippine Brigade positions; northeast of Nanking, China
Ike could hear the guns of Admiral Richardson’s combined Yangtse Squadron and Asiatic Fleet firing from the river. The six 6” guns of the light cruiser Marblehead could easily reach ten miles inland, and the Communist New Fourth Army was trying the river route again. Ike had taken most of his brigade out to meet them. He had his four-battalion Philippine Regiment and two battalions of the American-cadred Christian Chinese ‘Warriors of God’ Regiment arrayed in good field positions. Mines, wire, bunkers, machine-guns, and mortars. In support he had three 75mm-artillery battalions manned by Freedom Brigaders, with security screening from a Provisional Marine Battalion and a battalion based on cadres of the Old China Hand Regular Army 15th Regiment.
The Communists had probed on a succession of compass headings for weeks. Right now they were coming from the east. They lacked the strength to take the city, but refused to stop trying these spoiling attacks. There would be probes until full dark, after which they would infiltrate his lines with sappers and grenade-armed light infantry. Come morning, Ike would clear his rear with the two battalions currently screening the artillery. It was a dance of death. Both sides were green and had over-expanded their forces. Too many green newbies and too few competent cadres. As a result, they did these actions to blood half-trained units as part of a tactical finishing school.
When the units learned enough to be really useful, they’d be stripped of cadres to form still more units. The verdant farm fields the Reds were advancing across stank of night soil fertilizer. His artillery would chew up half the crops, and the mines both sides left behind would render the rest too expensive in blood to harvest. That was a problem for the Reds, who lived on food from the peasants. The food that fed Ike’s troops, that fed the large Chinese garrison of the city, that fed the growing horde of refugees that clustered within the city walls, was grown in Iowa and Texas, not along the banks of the Yangtse.
Ike laughed to himself. His career had been under a cloud since World War 1 because he had never held a combat command. His war had been stateside, training and logistics. That problem was gone. He was commanding men in action. He even had a war wound. A team of Communist assassins had penetrated his headquarters two weeks ago. In the close-in fighting, Ike took a round through his shoulder and grenade shrapnel in his knee. He was reduced to using a walking stick, but he’d made the front page of the stateside papers when George Patton had pinned his Bronze Star on.
His Chinese-American driver maneuvered the Bantam BRC Pilot Model around the potholes while heading in the general direction of Philippine Regiment Headquarters. The army had shipped a few dozen hasty prototypes of the Bantam to China. The damned little four-wheel-drive reconnaissance cars were worth their weight in diamonds. Most Chinese roads were geared to oxcarts. The Bantams could cope. His staff had found a factory in Shanghai that could cobble together a version. It only needed the four-wheel drive train shipped from stateside.
The regiment commander, Colonel Ridgway, was waiting for Ike. It was the usual argument. “Ike, why do we have to sit here like lumps? Let me pitch into these dumb fucks. I know the training limits of my Filipinos, but the Commies are no better.”
“So you chase them five miles. Darkness comes. Then what? Their sappers, their light troops can maneuver in the dark in platoons. Can you? The Japanese tried it your way and got their heads handed to them more times than not. We fight using firepower and fixed positions. Just like Petain’s French taught us in the last war. Let them break their teeth again.”
“Ike, you don’t win wars defending.”
“We don’t win this war at all. That’s the job of the Chinese we are backing. Our job is to keep them from losing until they can train up a big enough army to do the job.”
“Never going to happen. You don’t win wars by defense.”
“Public back home didn’t sign up for millions of Americans in China. Limited war to safeguard Jesus and Capitalism. I got you this command. Only active combat the army has. You do the job my way, or the next guy will. Congress didn’t sign up for piles of US dead to conquer some Chinese town they cannot find on a map, a town that more likely than not we stop garrisoning in a month to go put out another fire caused by Japan pulling more divisions out for Manchuria.” Ike knew that Ridgway knew better. He felt the man’s frustration. He was not about to give in to it. If hell-for-leather George Patton could command a limited war, then so could safe, sensible Dwight Eisenhower.
0900 hours Eastern Standard Time; 1500 hours CET
5 November 1940
Ruppert Stadium, Newark, New Jersey
The rally at the the baseball stadium was in its second hour. Election day had dawned crisp but cold on the East Coast. The professional politicians agreed that it was good voting weather. Franklin Roosevelt hoped so. The pace of this campaign was killing him. He would never admit it to Harry Hopkins or the rest of the key people, but the chest pains were recurring. Damn, but reliable Harry had been right. This election was going to be a slog, not the triumphant crusade of 1936. FDR was used to being the charismatic center of the room. He might have brighter people in orbit around him, but they only functioned through his destiny-driven hold on mass opinion. Franklin had overcome polio and the Depression by strength of character, by his belief in his near-divine grace. This campaign was different. Was the public not responding because his body was failing? Or was the Third Term Rule an accurate reflection that after eight years, the public seeks change for change’s sake?
There were two more of these mass rallies today, one in Times Square in Manhattan and the other in downtown Brooklyn near the Long Island Railroad terminus. Huge crowds would line the motorcade routes between the three events. Franklin could keep his personal speeches short. There were enough hacks eager to get their twenty minutes at the podium. He mostly had to wave, smile, and look jaunty. He also had to not keel over from the explosions in his chest, or let the public see how light-headed and disoriented he really was.
Tonight he’d take the returns at his Hyde Park estate. He would have to show himself a bit to the lesser staff people, but if he told Harry or Eleanor a toned-down version of the truth they would shield him, let him rest. He had to live through the next four years. He would not be remembered in history as the man who made that provincial boor Truman president.
2000 hours local; 1900 hours CET
5 November 1940
German transport vessel in the Eastern Mediterranean
The ship was bobbing like a cork in a spring flood, while also rolling like a ball bearing on wet grass. From the time they had cleared the placid water of Bari’s harbor, near to all the passengers had been puking their guts out, getting more miserable by the hour. It was now the fourth day of what had been promised to be a two-and-a-half-day voyage to Libya. Only, they were not going to Libya any longer. They had been diverted to Egypt, to Alexandria to be precise.
The only passengers not feeding the fish with their last few day’s meals were Frauke Peters and that little witch Oriana Fallaci. Frauke felt her superiority was due to pure Aryan bloodlines, that the German whores and doctors were infected with Jew or Slav blood. Oriana’s strong constitution must be a Gothic ancestor somewhere in her family tree, or perhaps a more recent German traveler.
The crew coped with the deranged motions of the ship. They called it ‘having their sea legs’. Frauke accepted that one could become habituated to anything. The three Roma whores were proving that. Once the crew realized they had
working girls on board, lines started forming to buy their services. The German ladies of the night refused. In between barfs, all they wanted to do was huddle together and share their misery.
The three Roma girls showed their subhumanity. They could keep their legs spread and their hips pumping even while turning their heads to the side to puke into buckets that Oriana held for them. It was pure animal rutting instinct. Oriana also had somehow acquired the training to do the ‘short arm’ inspection of the customer’s organs before the money changed hands.
Frauke’s job was taking the money of those that passed the test, while administering beat-downs with a lead-core wooden club to fools who refused to take no for an answer. She had the strength to hit them hard enough to get past their rage and lust. She had the training not to damage them too badly. Besides, after having been forced into exile because she would not accommodate herself to unbridled male lusts at the Camp, this was delicious revenge on anything with a phallus.
2300 hours local; 2200 hours CET
5 November 1940
Partially damaged villa 50 kilometers east-southeast of Alexandria city limits
The villa had once been an elegant Victorian-era residence, the center of a complex of buildings that were the heart of a large agricultural estate. Half the windows were gone. The walls were pockmarked by bullet strikes. Some of the lesser buildings, starting with the stables, showed fire or smoke damage.
The siege of the complex by rebels had been broken by the arrival of Klaus with the augmented Falcons of Malta Battalion. This meeting engagement had chased off the enemy, but scarcely killed them all. As soon as the Germans pulled out, they would be back, attacking the hasty militia of Christians and farm workers thrown together by the lady of the house and two elderly retainers. One had been a Sergeant in the Sudanese Rifles and the other in a Bengali Regiment. The three had organized a makeshift defense with hunting rifles, shotguns, Molotov cocktails, and dynamite. After the first two rushes had been fought off, it had devolved into sniping and small raids.
The lady of the estate knew she needed a permanent garrison to survive. She had no wish to be a mostly-penniless refugee in the city, which was what the quite young German commander kept suggesting she do. Over the lavish welcome dinner she had her cooks prepare for the officers, she had pressed her case. He seemed to ignore her French, English, and Italian, answering in German through a boy aide, probably an officer cadet, who spoke to her in English. Logic and sentiment had failed. That left a woman’s obvious weapon.
Once he had gone to bed, she had arranged her hair and makeup to best advantage while changing into a bedtime outfit that left nothing to the imagination. At 41 she might be too old for him, although many men preferred an experienced mature woman whose bedroom skills would add to their pleasures, to the nubile bodies of maidens. In case his tastes ran more to youth, she also prepared her fourteen-year-old daughter and nineteen-year-old niece. Her daughter was quite terrified, as this would be her first time. Her minx of a niece had been all but throwing herself at the man over dinner. She wanted the thrill of bagging an important man her aunt could not.
She didn’t bother to knock on his door. She just entered, one young woman on each arm. Surely language wasn’t needed for this. The message was obvious in any language. What was a hero’s pleasure? One? Two? All three?
……….
Klaus had been sleeping lightly. The whole dinner had felt off to him. He had tried to be polite, but the silly woman wasn’t taking no for an answer. He saw how a garrison benefited her. He did not see how Gunter would find gain for Germany in a Platoon of Betar on an estate in the Nile Delta. He was also annoyed about her presumption that everyone of his rank spoke conversational French. Perhaps professional officers did. His trade school had taught French as part of the curriculum. His spoken French was good enough to say ‘the boss was running late’, and ask for beverage orders. He was a bit better with written French. Given his grammar book, a dictionary, and a book of verb conjugations, Klaus could send a business letter in stilted schoolboy French. Business letters have rigid forms and a fairly limited vocabulary. Klaus could write about delivery dates, payment terms, and technical specifications. He lacked the vocabulary, spoken or written, for sex. Yet sex was obviously what was being offered here. Klaus had no fantasy as to his charming personality or movie star good looks. This was a simple attempt to buy with sex what had been denied over dinner.
Klaus sat up, slid back into his uniform trousers, held up his right hand and clearly said “Non!”
The three ladies paused, more than a bit confused. This was not any of the expected male reactions. Neither was what Klaus bellowed next. “Bain!!!”
The young Gefreiter came running. He was less shocked than Klaus had been at what was occurring. His mother had been a concubine, and known girls in the cantonments who were little better than tarts. Bain had grown up on such gossip. Under Klaus’s direction, he sent off the two younger females and told the lady of the house to wrap Klaus’s blanket around herself. Having done so, she was instructed to sit in the arm chair. Klaus stayed seated on the bed.
“Madam, you will not get what you want by what you are offering. I am recently betrothed. My beloved more than sees to those needs. In any event, I am a patriotic German officer. I reject the garrison because I see no way that it serves German interests. It serves your personal interests, but that is not our concern.”
The woman was finding the idea that field officers were faithful, hard to grasp. She was the daughter, granddaughter, and wife of such men from the British, Egyptian, French, and Ottoman services. “Is this because my husband is a serving British officer?”
Klaus had guessed as much but been too polite to ask. “Our Führer has mandated proper treatment of the British. So far you have done nothing to be our enemy. As of last week the British ruled Egypt. What does Germany gain keeping this estate alive with a garrison? I can easily spare the Platoon, which is all you would need. What is the benefit?”
The lady had to think fast. She had come expecting sex, focused on what delights she could offer and what his tastes might be. He certainly hadn’t given any clues over dinner. “With two Platoons, so one could be out patrolling, you would have an island of stability to reclaim this district of the Delta. If you leave a radio as well, we could notify you of major concentrations of enemy forces. In addition, proof by this strong point you were here to stay, will cause many people to gravitate to your side. The rebels are a minority exploiting British weakness. The vast bulk of the people will defer to whoever seems to be the strong horse in this fight.”
Klaus pondered for a moment. “With this island, how much produce could you gather? We are especially interested in fruits, vegetables, and dairy products.”
She was nonplussed. “Why do you care?”
“These need refrigeration and thus are harder to ship by sea than grains, potatoes, cheeses, and canned meats. We have a city and an army to feed. Food from here means more space for ammunition and spare parts for our war machinery.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this over dinner?”
“You didn’t ask. I’m not a supply or transport officer. I only know these things in generalities. This is what my general seeks. Can your estate and your militia be of use? If so, I can radio my General about the garrison.”
“And this matters to you more than the sex?”
Klaus slowly shook his head. “I’m just a provincial German, not a sophisticate like you seem to be. To me marriage is between two people and for life. If my parents were more adventurous than that, they certainly didn’t show it to me or my siblings. However, I am curious about one thing – I could have taken the sex and still said no in the morning.”
“You knew the implied transaction. A gentleman would honor it.”
“A gentleman. How did you know I was such?”
“Civilized nations do not promote ordinary people from lesser families to field grade.”
“Our Nati
onal Socialist Germany promotes based on accomplishments. I have gone from Leutnant to Oberstleutnant based on field victories.” Klaus left off starting as a Gefreiter and how that was a step up from his HJ rank. “My General speaks English. Tomorrow morning I will get him on the radio and let you two discuss things.”
At last the lady smiled. She pointed towards the bed. Klaus again shook his head no. She offered the two younger women, at which point Klaus sent them all back to their rooms. Said they could discuss the situation over breakfast and then call the general. Klaus went back to sleep. Bain filed the story away. He would tell his mother … who would tell Frau Greta. The Oberstleutnant’s lady was to be their employer after the end of the war. Best to show they were loyal to her. Klaus had never considered any of this, but he was in many ways quite young.
0400 hours local; 0300 hours CET
6 November 1940
Gezira Country Club, Cairo, Egypt
The clubhouse dining room was standing room only and packed as badly as a commuter-hour bus on Cairo’s busy streets. Lieutenant Gamal Abdel Nasser was into the third hour of one of his interminable speeches. The multifactioned central committee for the New Egypt was mostly sitting spellbound before the flood of words. Nasser was a known orator whose flights of rhetorical fantasy were legendary among the many activists.