But it had not been enough. No matter how many he killed, in the end the Russians had been too many, and the rest of the Germans too weak, to achieve the victory that morality required--no, demanded.
He found himself in front of the operations building, and stumbled through the front door to find the clerks busily cramming papers into a metal stove. Flames crackled, hot and orange through the open door, and the office workers and a young lieutenant came to attention at the sight of the pilot.
“What’re you doing?” demanded Krueger.
“The Russians,” Leutnant Schimmer explained hastily. “They’ll be here within a few days--the colonel told us to start burning the documents.”
“The colonel is a coward and a fool!” snapped Krueger, infuriated at the defeatist attitude. He was about to lunge forward and push the clerks away from the stove when he was startled by a calm voice from the shadows in the far side of the office.
“Now, now, Paul... it’s no doubt remarks like those that explain why you’re still a lowly hauptmann, after all these years, all those kills.” The speaker drew deeply on a big cigar, the end glowing like a cherry of fire, and the drunken pilot was stunned by an instant recognition.
“Galland... is that you?” he asked, gaping stupidly.
“General Galland, if you please,” replied the other pilot, moving forward so that Krueger could get a good look at him. “My face has been rearranged a bit since the days of the Condor Legion, courtesy of a Messerschmidt instrument panel,” added the commander of all the Luftwaffe’s fighter forces, now acting head of the entire Luftwaffe following Göring’s death. He offered the stunned and drunken Krueger a cigar. “Perhaps you’d take a walk with me?” He gestured to the still-open door, and together the two aces strolled into the night.
They paused for a moment while Krueger lit his cigar and drew a deep, satisfying draft. “It has been long since I’ve tasted anything like that...it is a pleasure,” he admitted, vaguely aware that his foul mood had been whisked away like the smoke of the burning tobacco.
They resumed their measured strides, smoking companionably as they walked along the flight line, now the province of only a half dozen battered 109s.
“I came looking for you,” Adolf Galland remarked, after a few minutes. “Though I’d hoped to find you in better condition.”
“Why?” demanded Krueger, his old bitterness once again rising. “My plane is grounded, the engine useless. And now we have nothing left to fly for!”
“There I think you are wrong. Tell me, I remember from Spain that you were once a fine engineer... do you think you have retained your edge?”
The hauptmann shrugged. The fiery ember from his cigar cast an orange glow on his face. “I have been killing the enemies of the Reich for eight years. But yes, I think I still know how to use a slide rule.”
“I have a job for you, if you are willing... and it is something that might actually make a difference, for Germany, for ‘the Reich,’ “ Galland stated, allowing a trace of irony to bracket the last words. “I will need your engineering talents, but it is also a chance for you to fly--and to pilot an airplane the likes which neither you nor the rest of the world has ever seen.”
“One of the führer’s secret weapons?” asked Krueger. He knew about the Vengeance Weapon, the V-1 flying bomb that had just gone into operation. What else was in the arsenal? He felt immediately sobered, and his nearly broken heart was quickening in his breast.
“I will be visiting other bases on the eastern front,” the general of fighters said evasively, “gathering the best men I can find. But I want you to come to Landsberg airbase by August first. There you will learn more, all you want to know.”
“I will be there, mein General,” replied Krueger. Impulsively he snapped out his arm. “Heil Hitler!”
“Yes,” Galland replied, lifting his own cigar to the brim of his cap in a return salute. “Now finish smoking that, Paul... and try to get some sleep.”
Wehrmacht Hospital, Vesinet, France, 2150 hours GMT
He couldn’t sleep, not even with the drugs. He could feel everyone being quiet around him, but his mind kept circling in endless loops--the explosion, the roadside tree being blown apart, the car tumbling over and over. It was from the air, always from the air. And it was all his responsibility--his soldiers, his plans, his campaign failing, the forces of the Fatherland retreating, dying, defeated. He fought to concentrate, to focus his mind, and above all to keep himself from plunging down to utter despair.
The nurse in starched white, her voice barely a whisper, drew his attention to the door of the room.
“Herr Feldmarschall, Baron von Esebeck has been waiting outside for several hours... I told him that on doctor’s orders you were not well enough to have visitors, but he was most--” “Inform the doctor that I outrank him. And bring the baron in at once!”
Using his “general’s voice” strained his reserves of energy, but he was pleased that the nurse responded with obedience--and von Esebeck came through the door moments later. By that time the wounded man had pushed himself to a sitting position and shifted his legs off the side of his bed. He felt a wave of dizziness and planted both hands firmly on the mattress. Slowly his thoughts cleared, at least somewhat. He felt as if his head were stuffed with cotton, that everything was distant and moving just out of his mental grasp.
“My Field Marshal!” The war correspondent approached with a look of concern. “It’s splendid to see you so well--but surely you should lie down; I beg you not to exert yourself on my account!”
“I’m glad you came, my good man. Now, don’t make me regret the welcome by sounding like my surgeons!” Rommel smiled, though the twisting of his wounded face immediately distorted the expression into a grimace. “Truly, they’d have me seek permission before I so much as twitch an eyebrow.”
‘They tell me it’s a miracle--Professor Albrecht says he’ll have to revise all his lectures, that you shouldn’t be alive after such an attack.”
“Nonsense. The Allies will not remove me so easily. Now listen: nobody will give me any news around here. How do we stand in Normandy?” It was an effort to sound normal. He wondered what was behind the baron’s startled expression: am I sounding slow, stupid, an invalid?
Von Esebeck’s eyes widened. “You have heard nothing, these last days?”
“Of consequence? No. Just that drivel about me having no right to be alive.” Rommel remembered another question that had drifted through his mind these last days. “And Corporal Daniel, how is he doing?”
“I’m sorry, Field Marshal. Your driver was killed; regrettably, he died from his wounds the night after the attack.”
“Blast it all.” Another good man gone, and as always, no time for regret.
“Normandy... the line holds, as desperately as ever. We weathered a great attack from the British--they bombed a square mile of countryside into a waste, nothing but mounds of dirt...Von Esebeck was strangely hesitant. “That is, you have heard nothing about the führer?”
“What--no?” Rommel stiffened perceptibly, anticipating the news.
“Assassinated, by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Three days ago.”
Now the general leaned back onto the bed, enveloped in a wave of fatigue that was perhaps only shock in thin disguise. But truly, he was not shocked--he had known about Stauffenberg and some of the others, noble and honorable army officers who had considered and planned for this dire step. Now they had acted. And I was in my bed, he thought frustratingly.
Rommel had never been close to the führer. He had at one time admired and respected him, though he had little use for Nazis in general. Hitler had a magnetic personality, a remarkable memory for any book he’d ever read, and surprising physical courage. Rommel had commanded the escort battalion when the Germans entered Prague in 1938. He remembered that Hitler had asked him, “What would you do if you were in my place?” and Rommel replied, “I should get into an open car and drive through the streets without an
escort.” To everyone’s surprise--especially his guards--Hitler had taken Rommel’s advice.
It was after his return to Germany at the end of the North African campaign that his opinion of Hitler had turned increasingly negative. At first he’d believed Hitler to be a good man who inexplicably surrounded himself with sycophants, but his eyes slowly opened. He was one of the few who dared to argue with the führer directly, and when he saw that the führer himself was responsible for many of the decisions the Desert Fox thought were leading Germany to ruin and degradation, he was horrified.
Never a particularly political man, he had brooded over the matter for some months. He was aware that others shared his views, but he had made no effort to become involved with them. Instead, he’d turned himself back to his work, although with an increasing sense of futility and despair.
“Has the news been released--do the Allies know? Are talks under way toward an armistice?”
“Well... it has been announced to Germany and the world. Reichsführer Himmler made the declaration. The SS have backed him, of course, and the Wehrmacht... the Wehrmacht seems agreeable to the arrangement, for the time being.” Rommel shook his head, weary, fogged, but still able to see the overall picture from the correspondent’s carefully chosen words. “You are unusually circumspect, my good reporter. When we were together in Africa you had a better way with the truth, at least to my face. Surely you mean to say that Himmler controls the government, that he is our Hitler’s successor.”
Von Esebeck blanched, then shook his head with a wry chuckle. “The field marshal is refreshingly direct, as ever. But you should take it for a fact that things are very much as they were before.”
“Then the war is lost.” Rommel made the statement in a plain voice, though inside he felt another wave of the debilitating depression. “Our tanks are better than the Allies’, our soldiers more tenacious... but the war is lost because we lost the skies, and everything else lies under the skies. Well, what decisions have been taken? Perhaps with Hitler removed the ending may be brought about more swiftly.”
“Now I must insist you be discreet!” urged von Esebeck, his voice dropping. “Give no one a reason to accuse you of disloyalty. There have been no arrests yet, but everyone knows it’s only a matter of time. And when the Gestapo decides to act... well … “
“Ach, you’re right. I shouldn’t go looking for trouble when it will come and find me soon enough.”
“Now, please, I have disturbed you too much. I must beg that you seek some rest.”
“Surely, I will. But wait; I see you have your camera. Hand me my coat, there.”
Rommel struggled into the jacket, his field marshal’s tunic with medals and ribbons bright across the breast. He set his stiff-brimmed hat on his head and stood, trying desperately not to yield to a wave of nausea, waving away von Esebeck’s outstretched hand. Instead, the field marshal leaned against the window, looking across a lawn dotted by lofty oaks. One tree, a giant that had been splintered by the impact of a lightning bolt, loomed close before him, and he focused on the blackened wood until his weakness passed. Finally he stood tall, turned back to the correspondent.
“Now, take my picture... here, of my right profile, so you can’t see what happened to my face.”
The baron obliged, the pop of the flash lingering in the view of Rommel’s one good eye.
“Send that out as soon as you can,” he said with real satisfaction. “Get it to all the wires. I want the Allies to see that once again I have eluded them.” He sank wearily back into his bed.
Normandy, France, South of St-Lo-Periers Road, 26 July 1944, 1214 hours GMT
Carl-Heinz Clausen inspected the long track of rubber cleats and steel pins, once again making sure that the whole assembly was laid in a perfectly straight line across the tops of the road wheels and the left drive sprocket of his Panther tank. He inserted the last replacement pin, tossing the worn original onto the pile of its fellows. Carefully squeezing a daub of grease into the sockets, he rotated the pin a couple of times to make sure it was well lubricated.
“All set--we’re almost done!” he proclaimed, standing to admire the freshly repaired track.
“It’s about time,” grumbled Pfeiffer, groaning from the effort as he hoisted himself off of the grassy embankment that served to conceal the tank and its crew from the American troops poised barely a mile to the north. “Maybe then you’ll let me finish my nap.”
Carl-Heinz laughed. “You’ll thank me when our tracks stay on during the next battle, Ulrich. Now, get ready with the block and tackle--we’ll winch it tight. With any luck we’ll be ready to roll by the time the lieutenant gets back.”
As his crewmates pulled the track tight with the manual winch the stocky driver inserted the last shaft, then twisted the locking pin that turned the strip of track into a continuing loop around the Panther’s left-side wheels.
“Ah, my baby,” the driver said, giving the steel fender an affectionate pat. “How do you like your new shoes?”
Ulrich Pfeiffer snorted in amused disgust. “Did you treat your wife half as good as you treat your tank?”
“Always!” Carl-Heinz replied with a broad smile. “And she treated me well in return.”
“Why do you think he has five kids?” Fritzi noted helpfully. Leaning back against the hull, Carl-Heinz allowed his mind to drift back to Bavaria, to Yetta and the children he had seen only three times in the last five years. Ever since he had driven a Panzer Mark II into Poland during September of 1939, his life had been focused on these steel gray monsters of the Wehrmacht. He couldn’t entirely suppress a twinge of melancholy, but as always he reminded himself that treating his tank well gave him his best chance of eventually getting home.
The tank’s commander, Lieutenant Schroeder, came strolling back from the headquarters of the Panzer Lehr division, and Carl-Heinz joined his crewmates in greeting the young officer. Peltz, the loader, had been packing ordnance in the turret, and he scrambled out to gather with the others beside the tank.
“Did you see the general? Did you tell him about the noise that kept us up all night?” asked Fritzi.
“General Bayerlein has had reports of American armor all along the front, and he passed those reports along to Seventh Army HQ,” said Schroeder, meeting the eyes of each crewman as if to assess their reaction to the lofty company he had been keeping. “He told his officers that no less a personage than Field Marshal von Kluge himself has assured him that the attack will come from the Tommies, over in the Caen sector.”
“I’m glad we’re out of there!” Peltz exclaimed. The others nodded in casual agreement. In the weeks after the Normandy landings, Panzer Lehr had fought against an endless onslaught of British armor, Sherman and Cromwell tanks that had rolled from beyond the far horizon in a limitless stream. Lieutenant Schroeder’s tank had destroyed no less than fifteen of those, but the crew had all shared a feeling that their luck must inevitably run out. Thus, when the division had been transferred to the quieter American sector a few weeks earlier, they had all breathed a little easier.
“I still don’t like it,” Ulrich grumbled, after the lieutenant had gone to confer with the rest of the company’s officers and NCOs. “I’m sure those were tanks we heard last night. They’ll be coming this way any day now, mark my words.”
“You never like anything,” Carl-Heinz chided, clapping his friend on the shoulder. Sometimes the lugubrious crewmate was a real puzzle to him, for even now--when the weather was good and no battle lay in their immediate future--he seemed to spend his time worrying about bad things that were due to happen sooner or later. He was about to remark further on Ulrich’s pessimism when he noticed that the other man had his head cocked to the side, clearly listening for something. Knowing that Pfeiffer, the radioman, had the best ears among all the crew, Carl-Heinz felt a shiver of alarm. “What is it?”
“Aircraft... lots of them.”
“Jabos?” asked Fritzi, anxiously scanning the skies for a sign o
f the Allied single-engined fighters that had bombed and strafed the division so mercilessly for the last seven weeks.
“No.” Ulrich shook his head with certainty. “Heavies.”
By the time Lieutenant Schroeder had returned, all of them could hear the dull rumble of countless massive engines, a sound that merged into a droning basso that shivered the flesh in their bellies.
“Getting closer,” the lieutenant observed, unnecessarily. The rumble had swelled into a growl and threatened to become a thunder. “I see them,” Schroeder remarked calmly, inspecting the sky through his binoculars. “Let’s get ready to button up, just in case.”
In moments the men had picked up their few belongings--a teapot and cooking tins, a jug of water, and a few shirts that Peltz had washed that morning and left to dry in the sun--and stowed them in the Panther. They all stood on the hull, looking at the dots that now began to distinguish themselves as four-engined bombers, a whole stream of them, rumbling with stately dignity through the sky. And they were still advancing, on a bearing that would take them directly over the Panzer Lehr division.
“How many are there?” Fritzi asked, his voice unnaturally high. Carl-Heinz saw that all the color had drained from the young Saxon’s face.
With a great display of unconcern, the lieutenant shrugged, though his hands shook slightly as he continued to press the binoculars to his eyes.
“Too many,” Pfeiffer suggested, though by now his words were all but drowned out by the thunder of countless massive engines. Even as the leading bombers came almost directly overhead, the stream of aircraft extended to the far horizon, vanishing into tiny specks that continued to emerge from the distance.
Peltz crossed himself, and Carl-Heinz felt a cramp in the back of his neck as he craned to look upward. They were all watching for a telltale sign, a clue that they were desperately hoping not to see. “Please keep going,” the driver muttered to himself, feeling the churning deep in his belly and groin.
Fox On The Rhine Page 12
