Fox On The Rhine

by Douglas Niles

  “Impressive, don’t you think?” Rommel suggested from the backseat.

  “Indeed it is, Field Marshal!” the driver replied. “Very clever.” He admired mechanical creativity. It was the sort of idea that he had from time to time, though he’d never worked on a scale such as this.

  “It was suggested by some of the men who had fought on the Russian front... ‘artificial moonlight,’ they called it. It seems to turn a dark night into something much more visible.”

  Carl-Heinz agreed. He picked up speed with the rest of the column, finding that most of the tanks had now moved off of the road. They were rumbling forward, climbing the far slope of the ridge.

  “That’s the Schnee Eiffel,” Rommel explained helpfully. Carl-Heinz knew the Desert Fox sometimes liked a fresh audience to explain things to, as much to focus his own thoughts as to enlighten the listener. “There are Americans up there, all along the front.”

  “But not for long,” Speidel added, trying unsuccessfully for a light tone. It was clear to Carl-Heinz that the chief of staff preferred his charge to be back at headquarters.

  The artillery fire was closer now. Soon, they drove past the fortified revetments around a battery of heavy guns. For a few minutes the firing of the big cannon was deafening, crumps echoing through the air, followed by the tearing sound of shells blasting upward and out, toward distant and unseen targets.

  The lights continued to brighten the night, eerie and ghostly against the white sky. The fields of snow stood out in stark brilliance, and even the forests were arrayed in visible details, individual trees jutting from soft groves. Flashes of fire sparked here and there, marking the strikes of artillery shells.

  And they were still driving west.

  First Army Front Lines, Ardennes, France, 16 December 1944, 0130 hours GMT

  Private Billy Cooper was cold...more than that, he was damned cold. It made him feel a little better to use that word, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. It was a word that would have gotten him a whipping from his father as recently as a year ago, had he dared to use it on the family’s Iowa farm. He amplified his feelings by letting himself wish for a cigarette. Damn that sergeant, anyway, telling him he couldn’t smoke while he was on sentry duty. It wasn’t as though the Germans were going to be doing any attacking.

  Of course, he had heard the stories, always meant to scare newcomers like Billy. Some poor sap was stuck in the foxholes on the front lines, and when the relieving sentry had come the guy was found with his throat slit, grinning blood from a whole new mouth. In fact, the stories worked--they were scary. But that did nothing to ease his longing for a cigarette.

  Instead, all he could do was listen to the wind. It was wintertime, and the winter wind in these European woods sounded pretty much like the winter wind in an Iowa woods. He crunched his feet on the snow, and that, too, sounded a lot like footsteps in a Midwestern winter.

  Come to think of it, though, this sound was a little different. There was more of a moan to it, a faint rumble that was more suggestive of distant thunder than a winter wind. Of course, he knew there couldn’t be any thunder in winter, but still...

  The longing for a cigarette was forgotten as Billy strained to hear. That was thunder, but it wasn’t coming from any cloud.

  And then the night turned to day. At least, that was his first impression. The whole forest was illuminated by impressive brightness, soft, white light that outlined the nearby pine trees down to their individual needles and drooping, snow-laden limbs. Blinking in astonishment, Billy looked upward and saw that the layer of overcast was shining with the circles of bright lights--searchlights, he guessed, directed upward so that the light bounced back down across the snowy woods.

  The noise was even louder now, clearly mechanical in nature. The young private pushed through the fringe of evergreens that sheltered his foxhole, getting a look down the open slope into a floor of the snow-swept valley. The Germans were on the other side, he knew, and there shouldn’t be anything moving out in the open.

  But contrary to his expectations, there was movement out there, a lot of movement. He stared, wondering what he should do. There were machines crawling across the fields, rumbling from the forest on the other ridge through the valley bottom, crawling up the hill straight toward him. He saw great, armored monsters everywhere, tanks with wicked gun barrels pointed forward, lethally fixed on the American lines, many drawing a precise bead on Billy Cooper’s foxhole!

  And then he was running, tripping through his foxhole, scrambling along the path the sentries had trampled in the snowy woods, leading back to the company CP.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” The harsh voice broke from a thicket, and he knew he was almost there. There was a password, some phrase that was about as far from his mind right now as those fields in Iowa. Instead, he just shouted.

  “Sarge! There’s tanks out there! German tanks! More fuckin’ tanks than you’ve ever seen in your life!”

  Command Vehicle, First SS Panzer Division, Belgium, 0411 hours GMT

  Colonel Gunter von Reinhardt did not expect such a close correlation between war and skiing. He did not care for either activity.

  The December weather had turned to freezing drizzle for Operation Fuchs am Rhein, which was good on the one hand because it completely shut down air operations, but bad on the other hand for anyone who had to be exposed to the elements in a fast-moving vehicle.

  Another thump as the speeding half-track moved over a hillock and trundled across the field. His forehead cracked against the window, and his shoulder was bruised by a hard jolt on the armored door. “Watch it, Colonel!” shouted the driver above the roaring engine. “A man can get hurt all too easily in here!”

  “Here I am, wounded already, without ever coming under enemy fire,” Reinhardt chuckled ruefully, rubbing his shoulder.

  The driver was too busy trying to keep control of the halftrack. Freezing drizzle, Reinhardt had learned all too quickly, made traveling in armored vehicles an interesting experience. When he stood up to search the scene with binoculars, it coated the front of his field jacket with ice, numbed his fingers, and windburned his face---just like skiing, he thought. Sitting down again, the half-track lurched and the driver spun the wheel wildly; even on a field there was little or no traction because of the ice. Worse than the ice was the mud; in some places the ground was so bad Reinhardt had seen panzers mired in it, the crew cursing and digging to free it; once he had seen a panzer towing another out of the muck. In the past, these vehicles had been counters moving across a flat surface, and the greatest environmental hazard had been the headache he got from the cigarette smoke in the headquarters building.

  The beginning of the morning run had been spectacularly beautiful. The freezing rain had coated the trees in a jacket of ice, icicles frosted every surface from trees to houses to cliffs, hiding all the damage tanks and war had done to the European countryside. The headlights caught them in odd reflections, and Reinhardt wished he had time and a camera to record the beauty.

  Now gray muck illuminated the battlefield. The half-track lurched up out of the field and onto a road; another dizzying turn and then more speed, sliding alongside a column of panzers, rushing to the fore. And then a sound: crump! crump!--a flat-sounding noise, a muffled bass note, growing louder, then more in an irregular rhythm. Nearing a crossroads, Reinhardt got a glimpse of a sign: Bastogne, 8 km.

  That vital road junction was an early key to the success of Operation Fuchs am Rhein. It needed to be taken quickly and completely, a mere eyeblink in the campaign. And that was the sound ahead.

  Reinhardt tried to unfold his map on the bumping, swerving seat with only moderate success. His eyes were sharp, but the map became a shaking blur. He found St. Vith, key to Guderian’s advance and already captured by the German spearheads. But south of there, Manteuffel had hit a tough nut... there, in Bastogne. It was only a small dot on the map, but Bastogne was a place where several key roads came together. That could be a curse f
or a sleepy little town during a war.

  He glanced out the window. Beside the road he saw a column of disarmed, demoralized American soldiers marching toward a POW stockade under the watchful eyes of a volksgrenadier company. It was good duty for those men; useful without being too deadly... although in this weather simply being outside was the same as being in combat.

  The noise grew louder as the First SS Panzer Division advanced. They were nearing Bastogne, now. Reinhardt had learned from advance reports that many GIs had gathered there, infantry and armor and tank destroyers. They were proving stubborn and had already repulsed several attacks. If Rommel’s offensive was to have a chance of succeeding, Bastogne must be taken, and quickly--but at what cost and at what speed would yet be determined.

  His heart pounded with excitement, a different excitement than the intellectual challenge of pushing markers along a board. He was riding to the sound of the guns, moving into real combat rather than seeing the overview and sometimes the aftermath. It was confusing; he could not form a complete strategic overview of the situation. He was frustrated by the limitations of his senses, daunted by the physical discomfort. It would be easier to think, to understand, if he were looking down on a table, his map illuminated by good light and colorful markers.

  But these were real men and those were real cannon and Reinhardt’s planning effort had sentenced numerous men on both sides to death this day. He thought of the famous statement by the American general Robert E. Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible--we should grow too fond of it.”

  And in truth it was thrilling, exciting, terrifying, a rush of emotion, an exhilarating flood of feeling. He wanted to pound on the dash of the half-track, to shout “Faster! Faster!” to speed into the fray, into the very jaws of death. How unlike me, he thought, but that was a distant realization, for he was swallowed up in the feeling, in the moment, in the absence of perspective and strategic vision.

  Now there were flashes of light in the gray sky and the noise was louder, so loud and deep he could feel it as much as hear it. He was nearing the leading edge of the battle.

  Malmedy, Belgium, 17 December 1944, 0917 hours GMT

  “Schnell! Schnell!” The sharp-faced SS colonel fired several shots from his Luger into the air. His American prisoners, dirty and unshaved, moved faster, carrying the freshly captured jerry cans toward the waiting panzers.

  It had been a good morning for Colonel Jochem Peiper. Top priority for all leading-edge units was fuel--the Allied fuel depots were known to be in this area. And early in the morning his SS panzer unit had stumbled upon this depot, overruning it easily. The American soldiers never knew what hit them, and within minutes they had surrendered.

  “It’s good to have fuel, Colonel,” said his driver as yet another five-gallon can was poured into the tank. The huge beasts got only half a mile to the gallon; refueling was a constant problem.

  “Doch,” replied Peiper with a laugh. “And these new manservants--why, they’re better than Jews! Look at them run! They’ll make good slave workers when this campaign is finished.”

  “Colonel!” shouted one of his forward scouts as a fast car motored into the captured depot. “Americans on the move!”

  All the fuel had not yet been consumed, but his panzers had enough to keep going. The information about the dump had already been radioed to Army Group B headquarters; the rest of the fuel would be put to good use.

  “Who will take charge of the prisoners, Colonel?” asked a lieutenant who had been overseeing the refueling operation?

  It took Peiper only a moment to decide. “We have no time for prisoners and cannot spare the men. Kill them.”

  The roar of the panzer engines coming to life nearly drowned out the sound of bullets and screams as the prisoners were gunned down.

  Stavelot Fuel Depot, Belgium, 1117 hours GMT

  Chuck Porter’s reporter’s notebook was filled with crabbed writing. “Stavelot... largest filling station in Europe... over two and a half million gallons of gas, all in five-gallon cans... two million road maps of Europe... nobody to wash your windshields...”

  This was the sort of sight that made a good human-interest story. The roads in every direction were lined with can after can of fuel. All sorts of military vehicles, from tanks to trucks, from jeeps to ambulances, pulled up along the road, emptied cans into thirsty engines, tipped the cans on their sides, then drove off. Other soldiers picked up the empties and left full ones in their place. It was a zoo, a mammoth near traffic jam, and Porter couldn’t see for the life of him how people could get in or out in all the confusion.

  His jeep was moving toward the Ansleve River bridge, when suddenly he heard the sound of cannon fire, and then return fire. His driver, a corporal, said, “I think we’d better turn back, sir,” and started to do so.

  ‘Turn back? Hell, no--at least not yet. Let’s get over there. Now, corporal--I’m here for a story, and that looks like a story.”

  The corporal shrugged. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

  Porter patted his shoulder. “Hell, we’re not going there to fight, just to take a look. Then we’ll both bug out. I don’t have any intention of either of us getting killed. Okay?”

  The corporal smiled and sped up toward the sound of gunfire. “You got it, sir.”

  As they neared their objective, Porter saw a sheet of flame in front of the bridge, and to his horror, huge panzers emerging through waves of heat and oily smoke.

  “Goddamn!” shouted the corporal. “The Nazis are across the Ansleve River!” He slammed on the brakes.

  There were trucks filled with men--American soldiers--moving toward him, away from the bridge. Without waiting for orders, the corporal swung the jeep around and joined the retreating column.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” Chuck Porter demanded, shouting the question at one truckload of men after another. There was a story here, but he couldn’t find out enough to write it and he didn’t have a way to file it. Few of the vehicles were going slow enough for the passengers even to hear the question, but finally he got his answer.

  “It’s an SS panzer Unit, coming up from Malmedy! They overran a smaller fuel dump this morning, killed everyone. We filled a ditch with gas and set it on fire to try to slow them up, but those fucking panzers rolled right through! We don’t have much defense here--looks like the Nazis are gonna get themselves a gas station!”

  The reporter could see that this was a retreat and a big one--and a disaster for the Americans. The evidence was undeniable, in the wide stares of the drivers, the hunched, defeated posture of the men clustered in the backs of the crowded vehicles. The jeep sped around the line of trucks. Here and there a truck had broken down, and invariably the disabled vehicle was unceremoniously pushed into the ditch to clear the road for the rest of the disorganized column. When he looked closely, Porter saw the insignias of several divisions, most notably the 99th and 106th. These were intermingled without any pattern, further proof that this was a general rout.

  The corporal pulled up at the farmhouse that had been his bivouac, an artillery regiment CP, or command post. Porter got out, and the corporal sped off. The officers and staff were madly gathering maps and papers, burning some, jamming others into satchels, which were hastily tossed into jeeps and trucks.

  Of course, there had been the rumors last night: the Germans were attacking with tanks; the unit would be going into action in the next few days; this was a serious raid intended to break up First Army’s imminent drive through the Westwall and on to the Rhine. The artillery officers had laughed about the futility of the Nazi maneuvers as if anyone could stop this inexorable Allied advance.

  No one, Porter noticed, was laughing now.

  “Hey, where are the Krauts?” an American officer shouted as Porter entered the CP.

  “Cornin’ fast!” he replied. ‘Tiger tanks in the lead! They’ve crossed the Ansleve Bridge and are heading this way.”

  “Porter!” It was the regimental CO, s
houting to him as the driver overrevved his jeep. The other officers of the CP started scrambling into their vehicles, and engines were roaring into life all around. “Get in! We’re falling back before Jerry gets here!” Porter piled into the back of the jeep as the driver popped the clutch and tore away from the inn in a skidding frenzy of churning slush. Behind him, the German army was pulling into the biggest gas station in Europe.

  SHAEF Headquarters, Paris, France, 1540 hours GMT

  “What’s the word, Brad?” General Eisenhower asked, fixing his subordinate army group commander with a frank stare. “This isn’t any spoiling attack, is it?”

  “No, sir, it doesn’t seem so. But I’m confident First Army will be able to stop the Krauts before they do any real damage.”

  “Monty doesn’t think so.”

  “What does he have to say about it?” George Patton, uncharacteristically silent until now, spoke up with a belligerent glare.

  “He thinks this is a major offensive, and I happen to agree with him.”

  “What’s their objective?” challenged Patton. “Besides knocking First Army around and delaying the move against the Rhine? It’s not like they think they can kick us out of France any more! This is a desperation move. Rommel’s out of options, so he’s drawing to the inside straight.”

  “Nevertheless, the potential is serious. Intelligence has ID’d what? Some eight panzer divisions? Two panzer armies?” Ike retorted. “That’s one helluva punch, and if they cross the Meuse, they could do some real damage.”

  “They’ll never get that far!” Bradley insisted, though his voice lacked an element of conviction. “If nothing else, they don’t have the fuel.” Patton nodded in emphatic agreement, his cigar held tightly between his teeth.