“His command car was strafed by a }abo this afternoon, sir. He was only just discovered. He is alive but has lost a great deal of blood and may lose his arm. The doctor sent me over to tell you and to say that the Field Marshal will not be fit for duty for weeks, if he lives at all.”
Gause’s shoulders slumped and he fell heavily into a gilded chair with frayed upholstery. Now what? he thought.
1200 HOURS, 3 APRIL 1943
CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE
Patton strolled about the underground bunker that Rommel had used as his headquarters. The military intelligence people had already been through, gleaning every scrap of paper that might have some value for the analysts, but there were plenty of touches that helped give Patton a flavor of his opponent. He often felt that he could communicate across the field of battle with Rommel, like spirits thinking like thoughts. But it was cold comfort to be served wine from Rommel’s own cellar with his lunch, knowing that most of Rommel’s army had escaped his grasp.
The “Clermont Gap” debate raged for years after the war, but it was largely the product of a combination of fortuitous events, the tactical skill of the Germans, and one conscious, calculated risk taken by the Allied command. The clear skies that had bedeviled the Germans for days gave way to a heavy downpour on the morning of the 2nd of April. This served both to slow the Allied advance and, of course, to eliminate the advantage of airpower they had enjoyed. The Germans, taking full benefit of this respite, piled their units onto the roads, ignoring any pretense at march security or unit spacing and rushed them through the gap in their thousands. While both the Canadians and American armor had been criticized for not pressing home the attack, their progress to date had had a great deal to do with the availability of the Air Corps’ “flying artillery” to blast the defenders out of each succeeding position. It should also be remembered that both arms of the pincers had advanced at a prodigious rate of 20-30 miles per day against stiff resistance. The troops were exhausted, the vehicles in bad need of maintenance, and supplies of fuel and ammunition had not been able to keep up with the spearheads.
The conscious decision was that of using the French for their own offensive to the north rather than for helping to close the trap on the Germans. However, had this not been the case, it is unlikely that the front east of the Rhone would have been left quite as bare as it was, and the French would probably have committed only marginally more troops to the drive west, with probably comparable results.
It should also be noted that, from a position where the defeat of the entire Allied effort in France had appeared in imminent jeopardy of destruction, the combined efforts of four Allied armies had procured a stunning victory. In the space of only a few months, the Americans had progressed from the status of untried rookies to a fearsome fighting force. Arguably, the individual German soldier never did meet his match in the war, and much of the German equipment was markedly superior to that of the Allies, but numbers will tell. Also, the Allies had made up in strategic concept what they may have lacked on the tactical level.
CHAPTER 8
TRIUMPHANT RETURN
0600 HOURS, 20 APRIL 1943
TROYES, FRANCE
EVEN BEFORE THE last of the German troops slipped north through the Clermont Gap, Marshall had ordered a general advance all along the Allied line. The German Army in the West had been decimated by the previous weeks of combat, and no less than forty thousand men taken prisoner and another twenty thousand killed in the “bulge” alone, to say nothing of the massive losses in weapons and materiel. The Polish and American troops in western France began a rapid advance along a broad front, meeting only indifferent resistance from the thinly spread German infantry divisions, starved of reinforcements and support by the demands of the frantic German efforts to rescue their forces in the “bulge.” In Italy, Montgomery had finally begun his “big push” with simultaneous thrusts from his lodgment at Civitavecchia and over the Alps from France and with landings at Salerno by British troops and at the toe of Italy by over 60,000 newly allied Italian troops. The German high command obviously saw their only chance of holding onto Kesselring’s fortified line across the Apennines in north central Italy was to keep the British V Corps out of the North Italian plain, and they quickly abandoned everything south of the British lodgment and devoted their strained resources to holding onto the shoulders of the Alps.
In short order, Allied troops in France were measuring their progress in tens of miles per day. Even the battle-weary forces that had participated in the reduction of the “bulge” had been given barely twenty-four hours to rest and replenish their supplies before they too were turned northward by a Patton still hungry for his fleeing prey. Along the coast the Poles had liberated La Rochelle and the Americans had Bourges, and both armies had crossed the Loire, with the Poles turning west to clear the Brittany peninsula, and the Americans driving on Orleans. The Canadians, now under Montgomery’s overall command per the agreement with Marshall, had taken Dijon and a British corps was sweeping along the Swiss border toward Germany itself. But it was in the French sector that the most dramatic advances had taken place.
Koenig’s two North African divisions had broken through the thin crust of the Hermann Göring Division, and his two armored divisions then rushed northward, taking Roanne while the Germans were still evacuating the “bulge.” Within three days they had overrun Autun, eighty miles to the northeast, and a week later they had reached Auxerre, then cut eastward to cross the upper Seine at Troyes. From this point there only remained barely one hundred miles to the outskirts of Paris, and no major rivers left to cross. They had outflanked any line the Germans might have intended to form along the Loire or Seine. In the last hundred miles Koenig’s vanguard had not encountered resistance from the Germans on more than a company level, and then only when a bottleneck in the transportation system had caused a delay in their evacuation. Aerial reconnaissance showed that every German unit that could was moving by train, canal, or road back to Germany or Belgium with no indication of attempting to make a stand this side of the French frontier.
But now Koenig faced two intertwined problems. The first was that his little army had overextended itself. He had dropped off his infantry divisions haphazardly to cover his right flank, in case the Germans should be able to mount a counterstroke from their homeland. Even these troops were too spread out to be able to do more than act as a tripwire in the face of a serious assault, and now they were used up. To advance any farther, his two armored divisions would have to simply ignore their flanks and rear, and there were still tens of thousands of armed Germans swarming over northern France, still in organized units, still capable of doing considerable damage if the German command could get a handle on the situation. Moreover, the French had outrun their supplies, relying primarily on captured German fuel stocks for days, and all the heavily motorized Allied units were burning gasoline at a prodigious rate, all clamoring for supplies from a logistical system that was stretched to the breaking point.
That would not have made much difference if Koenig had been in a position to consolidate his position, to hold where he was and allow the Americans and Canadians to come up to his mark and let his men rest and his vehicles receive supplies and maintenance. But Koenig did not have that luxury. In response to the desperate call of General de Gaulle in the dark days of the German offensive in the Massif, thousands of Frenchmen in the occupied zone had taken up arms and attacked the Germans in any way they could. They had been as effective as the Allied bombing campaign in crippling the German efforts at reinforcing their front line, more so during the long stretch of bad weather, and they had paid a heavy price as frustrated German troops took brutal reprisals in dozens of towns and cities. That had been expected, but the speed of the Allied advance and the apparent dissolution of the Wehrmacht, at least in the eyes of the French citizenry, had prompted a full scale uprising in Paris itself. For two days the French command had been receiving reports that large sections of the city had
actually been seized by armed partisans, that the police had gone over to the rebels, and that the freedom fighters were frantically calling for help.
The calls became more and more desperate because the German Army had not disintegrated. Paris, both for its political and strategic importance as the center of French communications and industry, was still garrisoned by two full infantry divisions, veterans of the Eastern Front, supported by SS police units, the Gestapo, and detachments of the pro-Nazi French milice. Because of its rail net, Paris was also the avenue of evacuation for most of the German combat units still working their way home from western France. The forces of the FFI, on the other hand, numbered no more than a few thousand men and women, armed with a hodge-podge of rifles, submachine guns, and pistols. In an open fight, it would only take the Germans a matter of a day or two to annihilate all resistance, and probably much of the civilian population in the process, to say nothing of the physical damage that would be done to the beautiful city.
Koenig would have been even more anxious had he known of the very specific orders that had been issued directly by Hitler to General Heinrich von Stulpnagel, commander of the Paris garrison. Hitler had ordered that, rather than let the city of light fall into the hands of the Allies, every bridge, every public building, every monument, should be wired for demolition and destroyed when the fall of the city appeared imminent. To make it more clear, he had explained that he wanted future archeologists to debate on which side of the Seine Paris had been located. Special engineer units had been dispatched, along with tons of explosives, to accomplish this task, and they had been hard at work since the collapse of Rommel’s offensive in the south.
It was with this background that Koenig was obliged to make his decision. The Americans had offered all the logistical support available, even to denying it to their own units. The Germans had thoroughly sabotaged all of the ports along the Atlantic and Channel coasts, so, even though small amounts of supplies could now be landed over the beaches for the westernmost Allied units, the bulk of the fuel and ammunition needed by the advancing armies still came up from Marseille and the other Mediterranean ports over a road and rail system devastated by months of intense combat and the most concentrated air offensive in history. Funneling supplies to Koenig’s vanguard would thus only exacerbate its exposed position as the other units fell behind. The Americans, therefore, urged caution.
Koenig was grateful that Giraud, who had largely been marginalized since the landings, had made the mistake of offering his resignation in a huff over some minor point of protocol, and de Gaulle had quickly accepted it. It was with some anticipation, therefore, that the general awaited the arrival of de Gaulle’s aircraft at the former Luftwaffe field outside of Troyes.
The two men who had fought side by side in the wilderness greeted each other warmly, and Koenig could not help but feel a certain stiffness on the part of General Juin, the former Vichy commander. Still, they had all worked together well over these past months, and the euphoria brought by the liberation of more than half their homeland had gone a long way toward smoothing over old rifts. Colonel Henri Navarre, the representative of military intelligence and Julien Leclerc, commander of the 2nd Armored Division, were also present at the meeting, which, in the interest of time, was held in the hall of the tiny airfield control tower.
Koenig described the tactical situation using a large map of northern France, and Juin announced that the British had informed him that they were planning another landing, this time on the Belgian or Dutch coast, probably during May or early June. For the purposes of this meeting, however, that would be far too late to be of significance. Navarre provided the latest reports from the resistance movement in Paris of fighting in the industrial belt around the city, long a hotbed of Communist labor unions, but of relative calm throughout most of the city. He then launched into a bizarre story of the work of a minor diplomat, the Swedish Chargé d’affaires, Raoul Nordling, who was conducting a one-man peace offensive, strictly on his own authority as a longtime resident and lover of the city of Paris. He had been engaged in intensive negotiations between various resistance leaders—some of whom did not necessarily recognize de Gaulle’s government as supreme authority in the land—and Navarre and General von Stulpnagel for a peaceful surrender of the city.
Nordling reported that he was convinced that von Stulpnagel, far from being a confirmed Nazi, was opposed to Hitler’s regime and eager to seek a negotiated settlement of the war, at least with the Western Allies. Nordling had apparently convinced the German that the wanton destruction of this symbol of Western civilization would be an act of such magnitude that Germany would become a pariah, not just to the French, but to the entire world. He said that von Stulpnagel had darkly hinted that Hitler had committed acts, and planned others, that would make the demolition of a single city pale by comparison, but Nordling had assumed that this was some kind of hyperbole.
In any event, von Stulpnagel’s only real concern, as a professional soldier, was the safe passage through Paris of thousands of escaping German troops. Since France’s rail net was arranged like a giant spider’s web radiating from Paris, it would be virtually impossible to evacuate those German forces still west of the city without the free use of that rail net. Secondly, von Stulpnagel had explained that, in the interests of his own personal safety and that of his family, he could only consider surrendering Paris to a major military force, not to the handful of partisans now in the streets, but to a ground combat unit conceivably capable of taking the city by assault. Nordling had added that it was his firm belief that von Stulpnagel had essentially promised to do just that, if such a force could present itself before the city.
Nordling had arranged a tenuous truce in which the rebels were left largely unchallenged in the buildings and arrondissements of the city that they controlled, as were the Germans, and clearly marked supply trucks were allowed to pass unmolested. The trains continued to run, with French railway-men shuttling the fleeing German troops eastward through the city, and the hospitals were sanctuaries where the wounded of both sides were treated. Since neither Stulpnagel nor the leaders of the resistance had absolute control over their armed men, occasional firefights would break out, but they remained localized and of short duration. Both sides were gingerly maneuvering for advantageous positions, but generally doing so in such a way as to avoid open confrontation with their opponents.
That was the crux of the matter. Was Nordling indulging in wishful thinking? Was Stulpnagel, an enemy general, to be trusted? The only way to test their word would be to place a unit at the gates of Paris, probably cut off from all support. If either man turned out to be worth less than his word, that unit could easily be sacrificed to no purpose.
All eyes turned to Leclerc, and he straightened, raising his chin. “Another Henri of Navarre, Henri IV, once said that Paris was worth a Mass. I would say that it is worth a division.” He shrugged, sticking out his lower lip and letting out a puff of air in the typical French expression of resignation.
0400 HOURS, 23 APRIL 1943
OVER THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE, FRANCE
Lieutenant Jean Marie Chaval leaned back against the ribbed fuselage of the heavy Horsa glider and raised his feet off the floor, although he doubted that this would help if the aircraft plowed directly into a tree or a bridge abutment. Only the dull red glow of the instrument panel of the pilots showed in the pitch darkness of the cargo bay, but he could sense the nervousness and tension among the thirty commandos of his platoon. He felt the nose of the aircraft dip, then rise slightly, then dip again, and he knew they were rushing earthward since the C-47 had loosed its tow line, and there was nothing for it now but to pray for a soft landing. There was no going back.
Not that Chaval wanted to go back. He and the other two thousand commandos of the 1st and 2nd Choc Brigades would be the first uniformed troops of a free France to enter the capital, and the honor was almost more than any of them could bear. Chaval was a pied noir, a Frenchman born in Algeria,
who had been serving in the marines when the Allies had arrived and had readily volunteered for the new commando units that the British had offered to train. At only twenty, he had been too young to have been in the service in 1940, and this would be his first experience of combat. He was terrified, and the only thing that kept him focused was the firm conviction that, as one of the first warriors of the liberation of Paris, he would not be a virgin much longer, in any sense of the word.
There was a sudden jolt, and Chaval’s forehead slammed forward painfully on his upraised knees. Then, still in the dark, there was a mad scramble of helmets, elbows, and flying feet as the men poured out of the rear of the aircraft. They were in one of the grassy fields of the Bois de Boulogne on the western fringe of Paris, and the area had been marked by huge bonfires around its perimeter. As he and his men dog trotted toward the trees, he could see a huge shadow detaching itself from the surrounding darkness and hear a hoarse roar as they were engulfed by a wave of cheering Parisians.
They were mostly women, children, and older men, and, while they had been yelling loudly enough to begin with, Chaval thought his eardrums would burst when they recognized the French flag on the shoulder patches of the commandos. Chaval made a feeble effort to call to his men to form up and look for the company commander, but it was useless. He actually began to fear being torn limb from limb as he and his men were carried bodily into the woods.
Chaval was concerned that his unit actually had a military mission to perform. The 2nd Choc was to capture the mairie of Neuilly, the western suburb of Paris, and then begin a drive straight down the Champs Elysées toward the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuilleries, and the Hotel de Ville. At the other end of town, the 1st Choc would be landing by glider in the Bois de Vincennes opening the way for the ground column that, hopefully, would be roaring up to the city gates at any moment. But, for the moment, that would have to wait. Chaval was put back on his feet, and a young woman immediately wrapped herself around him, arms, legs, and all, plastering her lips against his. Oh well, perhaps best to deal with the loss of one sort of virginity at a time.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 27
