Fox On The Rhine

by Douglas Niles

  “Yes, General?” Himmler’s narrow eyebrows were raised in inquiry. He nodded in dismissal to the radioman, who left before Bücher began to speak.

  “You may recall, mein Führer, that I spoke with Field Marshal Rommel a week ago. His convalescence seemed to be proceeding remarkably well. It may be that he will be able to assume his old command.”

  “Yes... that is indeed something to consider. But tell me, has there not been evidence against him regarding the plot against our late führer?”

  Bücher kept his own scarred face expressionless but couldn’t help noticing a touch of irony in the tone of Himmler’s voice when he spoke about their former dictator. The SS general shrugged in response to the question. “One word, apparently spoken by a man in the depths of torture, that indicated our esteemed field marshal’s name... I suggest that it need not preclude him from taking command in the field again.”

  “On its surface, no,” Himmler agreed. He thought for several moments of profound silence. “Very well, send the message... Field Marshal Rommel is reappointed to Wehrmacht command in the west, as soon as his health allows. But Bücher...”

  “Yes, mein Führer?”

  “I think I shall assign you to his staff. As admirably fitted as our bold Desert Fox may be for military command, it seems that his politics demand that he will bear watching.”

  “As you wish, mein Führer.” Bücher saluted crisply, maintaining his eyes on a spot above his leader’s head. With a precise pivot, he turned and marched from the office. He was pleased. Rommel was a fine man, a good German, even if his political reliability was questionable. He would enjoy working with such a fine man... though that would not preclude him from taking other actions if necessary.

  U.S. First Army HQ, Normandy, France, 11 August 1944, 0945 hours GMT

  “Goddamn! Look at this!” Eades was nearly out of breath. “Von Kluge is dead! We got him!”

  Sanger looked up eagerly. “No shit? Really? What happened?”

  “Just a little north of Paris, evidently. His staff car was hit by a Typhoon, blown to bits.”

  “How do you know it’s von Kluge?”

  “Intercepted German transmissions. It was radioed in the clear by the field soldiers who found him. After that, there was a lot of code churning the air. Can’t read it, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what it says.”

  “Yeah,” noted Sanger. ‘“Get us a confirmation. Are you sure? Details needed urgently. Are you really sure?”’

  Eades laughed. For all his certainty about a quick German collapse, and his conviction that Sanger was far too pessimistic, he was a good guy and an able analyst. “Yep. Just like what our commanders would send. So, now what? It went from Rommel to Runstead to von Kluge, so who’s next?”

  “Rommel to Runstead to Kluge. Sounds like Tinker to Evans to Chase,” observed Eades, referring to the famous Chicago Cubs baseball double play trio. Both men laughed.

  “Then who’s up next?” asked Sanger.

  “Hell, I dunno. Does it make a difference?”

  “It might. Guderian is available, I think.” The noted panzer general had angered Hitler, and as a result had been placed in a more or less ceremonial position as inspector of panzers. “Could be,” said Eades. “Or maybe Himmler will put in some SS flunky who’ll spend all his time trying to enforce ‘stand and die’ orders.”

  “That’s possible too,” said Sanger.

  There was one name that did not come up in that discussion, or in the intelligence meetings that followed, because he was a man everyone knew to be too wounded for the job.

  Rommel House, Herrlingen, Germany, 12 August 1944, 0900 hours GMT

  “Herr Feldmarschall! You are there!” The voice on the telephone, tinny and distant as usual, was nevertheless filled with unaccountable relief. “It has been quite difficult to find you after you left the hospital.”

  “Yes, I’ve been here for the last few days. If I had stayed in Vesinet, I would be a guest of the Americans by now. And who is this?”

  “Forgive me... this is Major Paulus, calling for Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Here is Field Marshal Keitel.”

  For several minutes Rommel listened. His heart started to pound with a beat that he hadn’t felt for weeks--for months, if he told the truth. Despite the fact that the situation in the west was terrible, that the Allies were advancing like an irresistible tide, he could not deny the allure that called him back to war.

  “Of course,” Keitel said in conclusion. “The führer was most clear that this appointment is contingent upon your health. But he wants you to know that, when you are feeling fit, the command in the west is yours once again.”

  “Thank you, Field Marshal,” Rommel said, before carefully setting the telephone back into its cradle.

  He took a few minutes to sit quietly and reflect upon this change of fortune. It was tragic, the fate that had met von Kluge--indeed, it was eerily similar to the death that had almost claimed the Desert Fox himself. They don’t understand--so long as the Allies control the skies, there is so very, very little that we can do on the ground!

  His head throbbed with the surging ache that was a constant part of his life, now. He felt the moistness under his eye patch, momentarily wondering if his left eye would ever see again, or if for the rest of his days his vision would consist of this curiously flat impression of the world. But then he remembered the tree that had been his inspiration outside of his hospital room... shortly before he had departed Vesinet, he had noticed sprigs of greenery sprouting from the blasted trunk.

  And finally he shook his head, dismissing such concerns as unimportant. There was a battle raging to the west, and German soldiers were dying in great numbers. Now he had a chance to again play a role in that fighting. He couldn’t win--no general could, given the constraints of Allied air superiority. Still, perhaps he could save some of those brave men. He remained too badly wounded to ride about in a car, to inspect and be seen by the troops as a proper general should. Yet perhaps there were some things he could do.

  Finally he reached for the phone. “Get me General Weise, Nineteenth Army Headquarters.”

  It took just a few sentences to inform the man that he had a new commanding general.

  “You are to commence a withdrawal north up the Rhone valley at the earliest possible moment,” he began. “My intentions are to have you set up a line in the Vosges Mountains, west of Strasbourg and the Rhine. The Americans won’t be there for several weeks, and when they arrive I want you to be ready for them.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Feldmarschall!” Weise hesitated for only a second. “That is, am I to understand that we are evacuating France?”

  “Indeed, my General... the time has come to make our stand at the borders of the Fatherland.”

  Rommel didn’t even put down the phone after breaking the connection. He spoke sternly to the operator, curtly informing her that he would accept no excuses for failure. He knew he asked her to perform a difficult task, to find a specific person amid the chaos of the disintegrating front in France. By the same token, it was something that had to be done.

  While he waited, he pulled out some of the maps that he had had delivered to his rooms. Lacking proper desk space, he spread them across his bed. What he saw confirmed his memories, and his impressions.

  Though his ear got sore from the waiting, he finally heard Speidel’s voice.

  “Hello, my General,” he said to the man who had performed so well for him in Normandy. “I am glad they found you!”

  “I don’t know how... we have a temporary Army Command Post in a chateau overlooking the Seine, but we barely installed the phone lines an hour ago.”

  “I was lucky enough to get a good operator,” Rommel observed.

  “And no doubt you put the fear of the devil into the poor thing,” Speidel added wryly. “But, to business: Surely you have heard about von Kluge?”

  “Indeed... in fact, I am his replacement.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve h
ad all summer. But your health...?”

  “Is of no matter. Tell me, how much of the army has reached the east bank of the Seine?”

  “Many men, though no one knows the exact number. Of course, we have left most of our guns and tanks behind... in a way it is like Dunkirk was for our British foes four years ago.”

  “An apt comparison,” the Desert Fox agreed. “Does it look as though you will be able to hold at the river?”

  “I am afraid we are already in full flight at least to the Somme,” Speidel said. “And there are still American spearheads, Patton’s men, who stand a chance of cutting off a good portion of our remaining strength.”

  “There must be an important crossing of the Somme,” Rommel said, returning to his map. “Here, at Abbeville?”

  ‘Two good bridges, yes, Field Marshal. It is perhaps the last bottleneck before we get into Belgium.”

  “And surely such panzers as remain to us are crossing there?”

  “Naturlich--though nothing like an intact division made it out of Normandy.”

  “Tell me, is Bayerlein there?”

  “Yes, right beside me.”

  “Put him on another line.”

  In moments, the former panzer leader of the Afrika Korps was speaking to his past, and now current, commander.

  “Fritz, I want you to go to Abbeville... gather all the tanks you can, put together as much of a force as possible.”

  “It will be difficult, Herr Feldmarschall, but perhaps not impossible. I assume that I should assemble them west of the river, the Somme?”

  “As always you understand me, Fritz. Jawohl, perhaps five miles west of the river. And a mile or two south of the main highway.”

  “I will assemble the panzers immediately. And I will be ready to move in twenty-four hours.”

  “Excellent, my General. And listen to me, for just another moment. I think it is again time for us to attack.”

  Beauvais, France, 18 August 1944, 1855 hours GMT

  “More prisoners, sir,” reported Captain Smiggs.

  Pulaski looked over the ragged catch, a hundred or more unkempt, unarmed Germans, and he could only laugh. “Smiggy, I never thought that my recon company would be winning all of our battles.”

  “Sorry, Colonel... they just seem to want to turn themselves in to the first Americans they see.”

  “Don’t apologize--we’re all thankful, or we should be,” the CO declared.

  “I see we can’t even refuel without filling our bag,” observed Frank Ballard, coming up to join them. The CCA infantry had taken over from the recon company and were marching the Germans into a semi-enclosed barnyard.

  “How long are we here?” Smiggs asked.

  “We’ll spend the night,” Pulaski announced. “Smiggy, can you get the lay of the land around here, see where we’ll need to put our pickets? It will take until dark to finish refueling, and we should try to get in touch with Army HQ, arrange to hand off the prisoners and set up our next depot.”

  “And if they can’t get somebody here by morning, what about the prisoners?” asked Lieutenant Colonel White, cocking an eyebrow at the CO. “Are you going to want me to leave a company behind again?”

  The colonel shook his head. “Then we just leave ’em here on the honor system and move on,” Pulaski replied. “It won’t be the first time--and I think we’ve got more important fish to fry.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” replied White, whose mechanized infantry had sometimes been forced into unwelcome duty as jailers.

  Pulaski looked around. Most of the half-tracks had already refueled, but all of Lieutenant Colonel Lorimar’s self-propelled artillery battalion was still waiting to drive into the depot yard. In addition to the eighteen Priests, the M7 howitzers that were Lorimar’s pride and joy, the battalion included a number of ammunition haulers, and numerous other trucks and bulldozers, all of which had a voracious appetite for fuel. As always, Pulaski found it frustrating to realize that his armor could drive a hundred miles in a matter of hours, but then needed to spend twice as much time just taking on gas and ammunition in preparation for the next headlong advance.

  During the last two weeks, Combat Command A had carved a swath through France and the crumbling Wehrmacht. They had captured thousands of Germans, destroyed a hundred trucks and dozens of tanks. They encircled strongpoints, cut off enemy communications and transport, blasted through hastily formed defensive positions. They always kept moving, through days of long, fast attacks followed by brief intervals when the combat command regrouped, performed field repairs, and took on additional fuel and ammo. For the most part it was a heady time, a whirlwind of victories that stacked up one after the other, steadily increasing the Americans’ levels of morale, experience, and skill.

  Once the German line had cracked, George Patton’s Third Army had been activated, with the Nineteenth Armored Division--and CCA in particular--as one of Patton’s forward spearheads. Pulaski knew that some of Third Army had turned west, and now had enemy garrisons trapped in Brest, St Nazaire, and several other key ports. Hopefully those cities and their harbors would be opened soon, for an advance like this was going to require solid bases of supply--and all those supplies had to come in over the waters of the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay. Other elements of Third Army had turned east and then curled north in an attempt to encircle the German line. And Pulaski’s men, and their counterparts in Bob Jackson’s CCB, had been turned loose to race eastward, and race they had done.

  The aggressive combat command charged out of Normandy as a pure, tactical descendent of the dashing cavalry of yore. Along the way CCA liberated countless French hamlets, villages, and towns. In each, the now-veteran tankers had been feted with many bottles--calvados brandy in Normandy, numerous vintages of wines as they moved through different regions. They had been festooned with colorful garlands, cheered by delirious Frenchmen, and mobbed by women who were almost frantically eager to bestow kisses and other favors upon their American liberators. Priests had come from the churches, and Pulaski had been blessed under the shadow of more cross-topped steeples than he could count.

  Pulaski had been briefed by General King as well as Colonel Grant, the division S-2. He knew that von Kluge’s replacement, whoever he was, had at last persuaded Himmler to authorize a withdrawal, and the bulk of the enemy forces had wheeled away from their entrenchments and raced eastward. Pulaski couldn’t help but chuckle when he’d heard American officers grousing that this retreat never would have happened if Hitler had still been in charge--but there was a germ of truth to the complaint. After all, under their new leadership, the Nazis had shown more flexibility in their defense, and a willingness to give up a position so that troops could get away to fight another day. Now a great retreat was under way, Germans fleeing for home, struggling to cross the great rivers of France. Already most had passed the Seine, and now the bulk of the enemy was retreating toward the Somme River and Belgium.

  Racing to the south of this massive movement, CCA had been the first American unit across the Seine, beating Jackson’s CCB by a day and a half. A day later they had learned that Paris had been liberated, taken first by General Leclerc’s Free French armored division under Patton’s command. Now the Third Army was pulling up to the Seine along two hundred miles of its length, and many American spearheads had joined Nineteenth Armored in crossing the river and continuing eastward. It was not hard to believe that the war was practically won.

  He remembered the festive party of just the previous night, when CCA rolled through another town only hours after the Germans had pulled up stakes. His men lingered for about an hour, accepting kisses and wine bottles from the populace in approximately equal numbers. But, as always, Pulaski had ordered them on, and his soldiers had responded with their usual alacrity. Being fast and first had become a matter of pride to the men of Combat Command A.

  “My battalion should be into the fueling yard within the hour,” Lorimar reported, breaking into Pulaski’s reminiscing. “A
re you going to try and move out tonight?”

  “No ... take your time about it, Lorri. We’ll get on the road first thing in the morning.”

  “Good news, that,” replied the genial artillery officer. “I got some thirsty Priests over there.”

  The others laughed. It was an old joke, but somehow the likable Lorimar made it funny every time he said it.

  The colonel noticed a jeep working its way through the controlled chaos of the field depot, and then recognized the dashing figure of his division CO.

  “General King!” he declared, joining his subordinates in saluting. “Welcome to our supply base--at least, it’s been our home away from home for two hours and has a whole night to go before we move on.”

  “Really letting the moss grow this time, eh Ski?” replied the general with a chuckle, returning a casual salute.

  “Just long enough to dig a swimming pool and roast a hog,” Lorimar interjected.

  “Good work, Ski, and all you men as well,” declared King sincerely.

  “Do we continue east, sir?” asked Pulaski.

  “Slight change in orders, from Georgie himself,” the general replied with a grim smile. “We’ve got another opportunity in front of us, and your boys, Ski, are in position to take advantage.”

  ‘Tell us what you need, General, and you’ve got it!” Pulaski was ready, and Lorimar, White, and Ballard leaned in as well.

  “The Krauts are pulling two armies out of Normandy, and we’ve got ’em closed down to one main road.” He gestured to the map on the hood of the jeep. “And it crosses the Somme River here, at Abbeville.”

  “That’s no more than fifty, sixty miles north of here, sir.” Pulaski grasped the possibilities immediately.

  “Exactly. Now, I’ve got CCB coming up behind you, but they’re a day away. You’ll be on your own, Jimmy, but if you can get to Abbeville, shut down that bridge, your boys would go a long way toward putting the whole German western front into the bag.”