The colonel pouted his lips, tucked the helmet under his arm, and walked back out into the street. He had seen enough.
To the north, just on the horizon, several columns of smoke were rising, white smoke, the kind used to mask troop movements. The Germans would be here in less than an hour. He walked over to the small garage where the engineers had set up their demolitions station. General de Lattre de Tassigny was there, and d’Ormesson walked in just in time to see the general pat the nervous young sapper on the shoulder. The sapper twisted and pushed down on a plunger, and a series of sharp explosions rattled the windows of the building. D’Ormesson knew that, if he had not taken out the German commando unit, the men in this room would have probably been dead by now.
“And the men up there, sir?” d’Ormesson asked as he saluted, at the same time jerking his chin to the north.
“There are few of them left, colonel,” the general replied. “There are a few boats left on the north bank to take off survivors, and the equipment we can always replace. We have a brigade from our own 1st Armored Division taking up position east of town and nearly a full infantry division digging in along the river bank, with three artillery regiments in position to cover the likely crossing spots. This is as far as the Germans will go for some time.”
“Let’s just hope that it’s enough, sir.”
1200 HOURS, 29 MARCH 1943
LE PUY-EN-VELAY, FRANCE
A battalion commander should not normally have to fire his personal weapon, but Bentley had already gone through five magazines of his Thompson submachine gun and was rummaging in his pockets for more.
The Germans had appeared just before dawn, and Bentley had had a front row view from the bell tower of the St. Laurent church. First, there had been a few scattered vehicles nosing their way down the highway from Clermont-Ferrand that were picked off at long range by anti-tank guns. Then the American artillery had plastered the woods farther up the highway, hoping to catch the Germans as they deployed. It had taken awhile for the German guns to respond, probably just coming into position off the march. Then came swarms of gray panzers, racing down the slope toward the narrow Borne River, and dozens of American tanks had emerged to challenge them. The Americans had fired a volley from cover, scoring only a few hits, and then dashed out to mix it up at close range, apparently hoping that this would compensate for their inferior armament.
The battle had raged for nearly two hours, with paras from another battalion of the 82nd rushing suicidally into the fray in the hope of getting a tail shot at one of the steel monsters with a bazooka and of preventing the German infantry from doing the same. The field had been littered with dozens of burning wrecks, but the Germans just kept coming. There had only been about sixty American tanks to start, and the Germans had over a hundred, and General Maxwell D. Taylor, commander of the 101st and the overall defense of Le Puy, ordered the bridges over the Borne blown. A few tanks had rattled back into the town just before then, some of them streaming smoke or with horrible gashes in their armor, their decks crowded with wounded paras, but any that survived after that were staying on the north side of the river, forever.
There had been hardly any respite before German parachute infantry in their mottled camouflage smocks had appeared at the river’s edge with rubber boats and pushed off for the southern bank covered by a hail of fire from tanks and half-tracks while their artillery dropped a curtain of smoke rounds to mask their movement. Bentley had gone down to the shore, crawling through the zigzag of shallow communications trenches through the park to where his men were firing furiously with every weapon that could be brought to bear. An American half-track mounting a quad-50 anti-aircraft system backed out of a narrow street and swept the far shore with thousands of rounds, blowing away the first wave of German paras and their boats, but a 75mm round from one of the Panthers quickly eliminated the American gun. The Germans had occupied two small islands in mid-river and set up more machine guns there to take the Americans under a point-blank fire. Finally, word came down the line that the Germans were across the stream both above and below them, and Bentley and the survivors of one company had to break and run for their second line of defense at the church.
From the church, the Americans were able to keep the Germans from advancing more than a few meters beyond the riverbank, and, once the German engineers had laid a temporary pontoon bridge, every panzer that crossed and attempted to climb the steep southern bank received a fatal shot through its weak bottom armor from a platoon of tank destroyers hidden inside the buildings facing the river. Finally, as darkness fell, and the only light was provided by the burning houses and vehicles scattered in an arc around the northern and western edge of the town, the Germans dug in to consolidate their gains and bring up reinforcements. The Americans just slumped down in their positions, praying for clear weather.
1800 HOURS, 29 MARCH 1943
NEAR USSEL, FRANCE
Abrams guided the driver of his Sherman around another burning wreck. At least this one was German, a Marder self-propelled gun. He understood that they were built from obsolete tank chassis and armed with Soviet-made 76mm anti-tank guns captured in the thousands in Russia in 1941. The 1st Armored Division had been paired with a tabor, a regiment, of Moroccan mountain infantry that had been flown up from North Africa that morning and rushed to the front. Over the past dozen miles, whenever the tanks had been blocked on the highway, the Moroccans would fan out into the surrounding hills and take the German lines from flank or rear. From the prisoners taken thus far, it seemed that a single German infantry division, already understrength, was trying to cover the entire twenty-mile gap between the Dordogne and Vézère Rivers, and they could do little more than set up roadblocks on the highway itself with no defense in depth or any line to the flanks. VII Corps was finding the same to be true on its front to the south, where they had advanced parallel to I Corps almost to the town of Murat.
The resistance had begun to stiffen as the day ended, however. Abrams had trouble thinking of this as good news, but it was an indication that the maneuver was having its desired strategic effect. VII Corps had taken prisoners from the 90th Panzer Grenadiers, an Afrika Korps unit, implying that they had been pulled away from the main German advance on that front. Abrams own advance was now meeting more armor and artillery, also implying that Rommel was concerned about his flank, having drawn these units from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division that had been previously reported on the Lyon front. The bad news was that the weather had continued foul, enabling the Germans to make this switch of reserves across considerable distances with no interference from Allied air power.
There was little comfort for the American tankers in the town of Ussel, a burned out shell that had fallen only after two hours of street fighting, but Abrams would hold his men up here until dawn. Then the relatively fresh 2nd Armored would pass through their lines and continue the advance toward Clermont-Ferrand. Abrams gave hurried orders to his executive officer to head back down the column to bring up fuel and ammunition vehicles to replenish the tanks; then he laid down on the back deck of his Sherman, still comfortably warm from the day’s driving, and fell instantly to sleep for the first time in nearly forty-eight hours.
0300 HOURS, 30 MARCH 1943
CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE
Colonel Siegfried Westphal had long experience as Rommel’s operations officer and had never known him willingly to take responsibility for any failure by his troops. He did not do so now. Rommel was just then screaming into a radio handset at General Cramer, commander of the Afrika Korps, for failing to press home his attack on Mende and then for detaching a division to cover his right flank against the American advance on Murat. Westphal noted the fact that the leading regiments of the corps had suffered over sixty per cent casualties, implying that they had indeed pressed home the attack. He also noted that if Cramer had not taken the initiative to block the American advance, Yankee troops could be on the outskirts of Clermont by now, although this did not impr
ess Rommel in the slightest.
Westphal understood only too well the kind of pressure that Rommel was under from OKH, having received all the resources he had demanded, and then some, and not having delivered the stunning victory he had promised. But there remained the fact that, to get the most out of his men, a commander had to give them credit for their achievements. Cramer’s men had battered their way forward nearly forty miles and were even now fighting to hold their third tenuous bridgehead over the Lot River, the previous two having been crushed by suicidal attacks by Algerian infantry and unexpectedly numerous French tanks.
Of course, Rommel did not spare Sepp Dietrich’s SS troops either. They had advanced barely half as far as Cramer’s men and had then been stopped cold by the Americans at Puy, a mere airborne division against a panzer corps. They too were seeking a way around, filtering units over back roads west of the town, but they had to take that important crossroads to be able to continue the offensive in any strength. It seemed that the Allies were using the tactic of blowing vital bridges as soon as the Germans threatened them, often abandoning their own blocking forces rather than holding them open until the last possible moment. It had been the tendency of both French and Russian commanders to save their bridges, either to rescue their own troops or in hope of using them in a future advance, that had worked so well for the Germans in 1940 and 1941. But they seemed to have learned their lesson.
Rommel’s plans were beginning to collapse. Already he had had to abandon any hope of a new offensive along the Rhone, as the arrival of fresh Canadian troops had strengthened that sector, and he had been obliged to pull one division already from the area to meet the American threat to his right flank. Now reports were coming in that two new American divisions had come into existence from what had appeared to be replacements units around Avignon, and elements of at least two British divisions were now unloading at Marseille and Toulon. If the attackers did not break out of the Massif Central within the next twenty-four hours, in Westphal’s estimation, the enemy defenses would be too strong to crack, and Rommel would find himself in possession of a thumb-shaped salient sixty miles deep, with strong enemy armored forces gnawing away at the base of the thumb.
Westphal was not surprised to see Rommel throw down the handset and storm out the door of the command post to his waiting Mammut, and this time not even General Gause dared try to stop him. If the battle were already lost, Rommel’s presence here would make no difference, and there was always the chance that his appearance at the key point of the struggle might steel his men enough to bring victory.
0500 HOURS, 30 MARCH 1943
AVIGNON, FRANCE
All things considered, Marshall thought that the conference with Montgomery at Ajaccio the day before had gone much better than he had expected. Of course, Marshall, Juin, and Eisenhower, who had flown over for the occasion, had been obliged to listen to a long monologue of how Monty “could have told them” that they’d run into this kind of trouble, but both of the Americans had bitten their lips and taken his scolding in good part. Then suddenly, Monty had, with a flick of the wrist, offered them up the very corps they had come to beg of him. He would send the three divisions ashore at Marseille, and they could be landing within two hours, with arrival in the field by late on the 30th if they had priority in the use of the docking facilities, which they would.
Then the bill arrived. Monty added, almost as an afterthought, that he would naturally want to retain command of the British troops. Eisenhower spluttered momentarily, but the Americans had no choice but to cave in when Montgomery threw back in their faces the old American argument of not wanting his nation’s troops being used as fillers in an army commanded by foreigners. He added that it seemed most expedient to him that the boundary between Patton’s 1st Army Group and his own 21st now be placed at the Rhone River, with everything east of it going to Monty, continuing the line for planning purposes up through Dijon and then roughly northeast through the heart of Germany for the remainder of the campaign.
Even before the Americans could reply, Montgomery added that he had been talking with Marshal Badoglio, and it seemed that the Italians were very much interested in getting back into the fight. Nearly a quarter of a million of their best troops had been stationed on Sardinia and Sicily at the time of the surrender, and two full divisions of Alpini troops had turned themselves over, en masse, to the British V Corps in southern France. Monty proposed going ahead with his second amphibious assault, using the British 46th Infantry and 1st Armored Divisions still waiting in North Africa, plus the British 1st Airborne from Corsica and four Italian divisions from Sicily. He would land at Salerno, near Naples, timed to coincide with a breakout from his Civitavecchia lodgment that was already bursting at the seams with troops and guns. This would also coincide with a push by British V Corps at rearmed Italian mountain troops to break through the last few kilometers of the Alps into the North Italian plain.
Marshall just shook his head ruefully and agreed. He was not in a position to bargain. Juin opened his mouth to protest but Montgomery forestalled him with a raised hand, adding that, for political reasons, he realized that it was necessary for French troops to effect the liberation of Lyon, and he would exclude that city from his sector and facilitate the French occupation of it as soon as it became practicable. The arrival of the British troops at Marseille would enable him to release the American 8th Infantry and 6th Armored immediately, even before the British were completely ashore, to rush north and plug the gap between Le Puy and Mende. The British, in turn, would be replaced by the French units arriving from North Africa and could head north to take over the Canadian sector, freeing all of the French and Canadian troops, at least eight good divisions, to drive west from St. Etienne to meet Patton and pinch off the German salient.
Montgomery acknowledged that he thought the plan to be “top drawer” with the proviso that, of course, the Canadians would be “returned” to his command once the crisis was past. He explained that this was merely to simplify logistical arrangements, since the American and French forces used exclusively U.S.-made equipment and munitions, while the Canadians used British gear. Marshall smiled and patted his pockets with a worried expression on his face. When Montgomery asked him what was the matter, he replied that he merely wanted to make sure that his wallet was still there.
Now, as Marshall watched in the cold predawn darkness, thousands of British troops were pouring off transports under the harsh yellow arc lights along the Marseille docks. He had just shared a cup of tea with the arriving commander of the Guards Division and the departing commander of the American 6th Armored and, for the first time in nearly a week, he felt that he had the situation once more under control.
0700 HOURS, 30 MARCH 1943
TEN MILES SOUTHWEST OF LE PUY-EN-VELAY, FRANCE
Captain Hans Essen screamed at the troopers of his company of the SS Lehr Sturm Brigade to move faster. The sun was full up now, and, while the sky was still largely covered with clouds, they were quite high, and patches of pale blue could clearly be seen in spots. This was not weather that would keep the enemy jabos, fighter bombers, on the ground, and he had little faith in the power of Göring’s Luftwaffe to keep them away. The men ran frantically from one vehicle to the next, pulling tattered camouflage netting over them, using tree branches to try to smooth away the deep ruts in the mud where they had pulled off the road into the trees, anything that would disguise their presence to the eyes of a pilot passing by at two hundred miles per hour.
As far as Essen was concerned, now was the time for Hitler to pull the rabbit out of his hat. Where were the secret weapons they had been hearing about for months, the super-fighters that would swat enemy bombers from the sky like flies, or the bombs that would hurl themselves across the Channel to punish the English and obliterate every enemy port? Because, if these weapons didn’t appear soon, how could they win? He looked at the faces of the replacements his own company had received over the past couple of months, and most of the
m were mere boys, and ill-fed boys at that, while there seemed to be no end to the supply of big, burly Americans, to say nothing of the French, who had been justly beaten and now were back in the field against them.
For an instant, as Essen glanced nervously again at the sky, he felt a surge of hope. Well, the weather may have cleared up here, but it might still be completely socked in over the Allied airfields, either in England or southern France. And any bombers coming from England would be heavies that would go after rail lines or entire cities, not tactical columns, since they were notoriously inaccurate. If they could just survive the next ten hours or so, the darkness would provide their protection again, and they could continue the drive south. Just a few more miles, and they would be in the open, so mixed up with the retreating enemy that air attacks would not be practical.
Even as he thought this, the ground under his feet began to tremble, and he had to lean on the side of his armored car to remain upright. Shouts went up along the column but they were almost immediately drowned in a dull roar that increased in volume until Essen could feel his eardrums rupturing. He dove into a shallow depression in the earth, but kept his head up. He could see fountains of dirt sprout up in a barren field off to one side of the road, converging into a wall of flying earth and rock that rushed toward the road like a tidal wave, then swept across it and into the woods where the column was sheltering. As he lost consciousness, Essen casually recalled that he had not heard the aircraft at all. They must have been heavy bombers, flying high, and a contrary wind thousands of feet above must have carried away the sound of their engines.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 25
