Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History)

by Alexander M. Grace

  What ultimately made Stalin more flexible in his dealings with the West than he had ever been in the past, was his appreciation, based on very accurate reporting from the extensive Soviet spy ring within Germany, that the Reich was on its last legs. Despite the propaganda, and the apparent vitality of the German military in the first three years of the war, the Nazis had only really begun to mobilize the economic and human resources of both Germany and its conquered territories during 1942. Too many concessions had been made to local party bosses throughout Greater Germany early in the war, trying to keep the cost of the war from seeming too high when an easy victory seemed within their grasp. But just as the fat was beginning to be trimmed and all efforts turned toward the war effort, the Reich had suddenly been deprived of the resources of half a continent. German occupation of France, Belgium, and most of Italy had ended, as well as of the rich Ukraine, and access to raw materials from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa had been cut off. At the same time, virtually all German-controlled territory was now within reach of Allied bombers, with fighter escort and without a radar buffer, making defense almost hopeless. Just as Germany suffered its first major defeat on the Eastern Front, it had been handed another just as telling in the West, and there was no longer any “safe” sector from which reserves could be shifted. The Wehrmacht was simply being stretched in too many directions at once.

  The strategy agreed upon was hardly earthshaking in its originality. It was essentially to hit everywhere at once. The Allies had the resources to accomplish this, and the Germans could not long resist.

  The Russians would continue to press the Germans all along the front with the goal of clearing their national territory. Once this was accomplished, the main thrust would be in the center, towards Berlin.

  The British would carry the burden of the war in the Mediterranean, along with the newly allied Italians, and focus their efforts on driving the Germans out of northern Italy. At the same time, Montgomery had proposed landing a British mountain division and a parachute brigade in Yugoslavia to give Tito’s partisans some tangible support. Stalin groused at this obvious political ploy, but he was in no position to offer any troops of his own.

  On the central portion of the Western Front, there now existed two American armies, the 1st under Omar Bradley, facing northwest toward Holland, and Patton’s 5th facing toward Germany itself, with a total of twelve infantry and six armored divisions and a strength of over half a million men. The French Army of the Rhine under Juin covered much of the old Franco-German border and had been reinforced to nearly a quarter of a million men, to discourage the temptation for another German offensive in that sector. The British 3rd Army included only the large Canadian I Corps, and much smaller British V Corps, completing the line down to the Swiss border, with another British corps plus two Italian corps occupying a line through Turin in northern Italy, all under Montgomery’s overall command. The XVIII Airborne Corps and the Polish Corps were in strategic reserve, and between four and five divisions were still available from theater reserve in England.

  The main offensive would come from Patton’s 5th Army once more, as the most experienced and lavishly equipped of the Allied forces. The proposal by a junior staff officer to launch a series of airborne assaults to seize river crossings from the current Allied line through Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and ultimately Arnhem across the Rhine to open a route into Germany had been ridiculed as it justly deserved. Patton would drive across the Rhine north of the Ardennes, around Wesel, skirting the industrial zone of the Ruhr, although bringing it under close siege, even by artillery fire, and continue northeast toward Hamburg and the Kiel Canal. With any German forces remaining in Holland cut off and forced to surrender, Patton would be free to wheel to his right toward Berlin over the north German plain. With a little luck, the war might really be over by Christmas this time.

  The issue that would loom largest in the subsequent study of the Teheran Conference, however, was one that was not dealt with at all. The Atlantic Charter had laid a basic groundwork for the Western Allies in their pursuit of war aims, but there was no specific statement of goals for the Grand Alliance as a whole. During the course of 1942, there had been pressure on London and Washington to allay Stalin’s fears that the West might seek a separate peace with Germany, fears that were enhanced by the absence of a major ground front in the West. Some circles in both capitals had advocated a declared policy of demanding “unconditional surrender” by the Axis as a confidence building gesture directed at the Soviets, but professional diplomats were appalled by this proposal which would have eliminated all flexibility in any future negotiations with the Germans. They feared a repeat of the disaster of the publication of Allied demands on Germany at Versailles in 1919 that had locked the Allies into a harsher position than they might have ultimately taken, and fed the revanchist feeling in Germany that Hitler had used in his own rise to power. Fortunately, the landings in southern France had demonstrated an Allied commitment to the war far better than any statement of policy might have done, and Churchill and Roosevelt were able to make do with general statements about war goals being aimed at “complete victory.”

  Stalin had come to Teheran with the intention of demanding a declaration of seeking “unconditional surrender” on a formal basis. Now, Stalin placed little credence in the significance of public statements and would certainly not have felt bound by any he might make himself, but he understood perfectly that the leaders of the democracies could not play so fast and loose with public opinion in their countries. His reason for seeking such a statement was the growing tide of reports that secret negotiations were taking place in Switzerland between Nazi officials and the West, and the old fear of some sort of agreement being reached which would leave the German Army free to tum its full force on Russia.

  The rumors, of course, were quite true. Allen Dulles, the Geneva representative of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, had, in fact been conducting talks both with officials from Berlin and, unbeknownst to them, with officers from Kesselring’s headquarters in Italy as well. Although the contacts had not resulted in anything substantive as yet, hope existed of some kind of arrangement as long as the Allies had the freedom to accept something less than the kind of total oppression that Germany had dealt out to its victims in the war. It was significant that the various interlocutors for the Germans had made it clear that Hitler and his inner circle had no knowledge of the talks and would never agree to a negotiated peace.

  In any event, at Teheran the Western Allies now found themselves in a position of considerable diplomatic leverage. Although, in terms of pure numbers, the Red Army was still doing the majority of the fighting against the Germans, it was still the British, Americans, and French who were now poised to invade the Reich, with troops within a few miles of Germany’s industrial heartland and less than one third the distance from Berlin than the foremost Soviet units. Furthermore, after the brutality of the German occupation of much of European Russia, and the rising tide of Russian vengeance as the Red Army pushed westward, it was highly unlikely that even Stalin’s battered and cowed people would have stood still for a sudden shift in policy and peace with the hated enemy. Consequently, when Stalin raised the issue of how Germany might be dealt with after the ultimate Allied victory, Churchill and Roosevelt were able to stonewall and limit themselves to mouthing vague words about securing a lasting peace and permanently eliminating the threat to world peace that Germany had posed over the past several generations. Only de Gaulle supported Stalin on this subject, proposing that Germany be “pastoralized” and possibly carved up into a number of minor states as it had been during the 18th century, a formula that would have arguably ended the German threat and would conveniently have left France as the largest and most populous state in Western Europe. Again, Churchill and Roosevelt were able to shelve the proposal as “premature” without causing a major rift in the alliance, and this was to have considerable impact later in the war.


  1800 HOURS, 4 JULY 1943

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  It struck Admiral Canaris as somewhat ironic that the blow for the freedom of the German people had been launched on American Independence Day, and the events of that morning might well take on the aspect of a “shot heard ’round the world.” The reports of the shot would be muffled for some time, of course, by wartime censorship, but on the actions of a few determined men rode the fate of huge armies and entire nations.

  Among the plotters it had soon been agreed that the one target they absolutely needed to eliminate, in fact the only target of any value in this struggle, was the person of the Führer himself. Even outside of the fanatical members of the SS and the inner circle of the National Socialist Party, Hitler had too long been the very symbol of Germany in a war for the survival of the Fatherland. There would never be a chance of recruiting sufficient force to overcome the kind of resistance that would gather around the Führer. With Hitler out of the way, however, it would become an issue of who would lead the new government, party hacks like Himmler and Goebbels or sycophants like Keitel, Göring, and Jodl, or the real leaders of the armed forces like Rommel, Rundstedt, Manstein, and Kesselring. It would then be a battle between the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht, and, for all the favoritism shown to the SS in equipment and manpower, theirs was only a small fraction of the fighting strength of the Reich.

  It had not been particularly hard to recruit and organize the conspiracy, considering that they were operating in the ultimate evolution of the police state, Canaris mused. As chief of the Abwehr, Canaris had considerable information at his disposal about the inclinations of many senior army officers and had occasion to visit virtually any command in the Reich as well as every justification for speaking confidentially to those he selected. He used his deputy, General Hans Oster, as a stalking horse for this effort, and his network was now spread throughout Germany proper and now even included a shadow government with officials named to take power once Hitler had been dethroned. The field marshals had largely been bought off by Hitler with huge cash awards, extensive estates, and piles of medals, but Hitler’s habit of issuing impossible orders and then berating officers for failing to comply with them had alienated virtually the entire remainder of the officer corps.

  Germany was defeated. The officers knew this, since they had access to the facts, unadulterated by Goebbels’ propaganda, and there was a natural tendency to place the blame for this defeat on Hitler. Canaris had to recognize that Germany would never have come to this pass without the support of the armed forces, and all must share some responsibility for the war itself, a doomed venture pitting a few tens of millions of industrious and dedicated people against virtually the entire world. But Hitler had become less and less rational as events had turned against the Reich. In the early days, some of Hitler’s ravings had turned out surprisingly well, but it could now be seen that these had been flukes. The only idea Hitler seemed to have anymore was to issue orders to defend to the death, not to surrender an inch of ground, no matter what. Those orders had cost the lives of thousands of good troops, both in the East and West, when the ability to maneuver might have not only saved the men but brought victory in the bargain. It was true that no foreign soldier had set foot on historically German territory as yet, but that had been true at the end of the last war as well. Now was the time to make a negotiated peace, Canaris and his colleagues were saying, very quietly but more and more insistently, not when American paratroopers were dropping on Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin or Russian tanks driving under the Brandenburg Gate.

  A serious plot to replace Hitler organized by Wehrmacht officers had actually been afoot in 1938, but his bloodless victory at Munich had robbed this of steam and the Führer’s unbroken string of successes in the following three years forced such plans into abeyance. Murmuring had resumed in 1942 as victory eluded Hitler’s grasp in Russia and North Africa, and became all the more serious after the Allied landings in France. By 1943 the defection of Italy, the loss of France and Belgium and further defeats in the East had reinforced this movement. Surprisingly, it was the failure of the Germans to secure the person of the Pope when they evacuated Rome that proved the decisive blow. Without the pressure of the German military presence and with Mussolini sitting sullenly in his little republic in northern Italy, the Pontiff had become an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, and this had a profound effect on Catholics in Germany. Canaris had long believed that, while one often thought of Spain or Ireland as the most Catholic countries in Europe, in those places only old women and children regularly attended church, while Bavaria was a land alive with fervor for the One Church. It was among these disaffected zealots that the most dedicated of the new converts had been found.

  No fewer than six attempts had been made on the Führer’s life thus far in 1943, and the counterintelligence arm of the SS had proven so inept that they had not even noticed several of them. But they had all failed. Security around the Führer had become extremely tight, with even the most senior generals having to surrender their sidearms and submit to degrading personal searches before entering the august presence. But Canaris had to recognize that the early efforts had been rather amateurish, and it was only recently that he had been able to obtain the services of an expert in demolitions, an ardent Catholic and a veteran off the Eastern Front, to undertake the next attempt.

  The vehicle for this operation was to be Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic Catholic from southern Germany who had lost an eye, his right hand, and two fingers of his left in North Africa. He was now a colonel, chief of operations for the Ersatzheer, the Replacement Army, and frequently gave briefings to the Führer on the state of recruitment and training for the Wehrmacht. The plan was fairly simple, calling for von Stauffenberg to carry a briefcase of papers concealing a powerful explosive into the bunker used by Hitler in his East Prussian refuge, the Wolfschanze, from which the war in Russia was being directed. With a ten-minute delay fuse on the bomb, von Stauffenberg would have time to activate the device and then excuse himself to make a telephone call to Berlin from the communications room outside the bunker. On the morning of July 4th, von Stauffenberg accomplished this.

  Hitler survived the explosion, apparently shielded by the heavy map table over which he was leaning and the supporting table leg against which the briefcase had been inadvertently kicked. A number of staff officers had been killed and still more wounded, but Hitler, his right arm shattered and his face blackened with smoke, was helped out of the ruined conference room by Jodl as SS guards swarmed over the grounds. The second explosion, timed to go off fifteen minutes after the first, was even more powerful. The staff car von Stauffenberg had used to reach the meeting had been parked some fifty feet from the bunker, and every cavity in the body, inside the doors, under the seats, even the spare tire, had been filled with explosives, and a layer of carpenter’s nails had been embedded all around it. The force of the blast collapsed the roof of the bunker, but the real mayhem was caused by the nails and shrapnel from the body of the vehicle itself that sliced through the converging guards, and the emerging survivors from the first bomb who were then just staggering away from the site. If Hitler had managed to cover just another ten meters, he would have been shielded by a concrete retaining wall, but the fragments scythed through his body, killing him instantly along with nearly fifty of his guards and staff officers. The second bomb had been the suggestion of the unnamed demolitions expert who had counseled against ever trusting to a single mechanical device. He had calculated that, if the first bomb caused enough damage to require more than fifteen minutes to extract the Führer from the bunker, Hitler would certainly be dead, but that it would take some minutes to move a wounded Hitler to the door of the bunker, leaving him within the killing radius of the second explosion for a good five minutes more. Meanwhile, von Stauffenberg had been able, in the confusion of the first explosion, to bluff his way through three guard posts and to board a small plane for the flight to Berlin.<
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  Now the work of the other conspirators came into play. Von Stauffenberg’s immediate superior, General Friedrich Olbricht, had envisioned the Ersatzheer as the ideal tool for a coup d’etat. Besides having units scattered throughout the Reich, mostly the skeletons of battle-scarred regiments who were to form the cadres for incorporating new recruits into the Wehrmacht, the Replacement Army had the task of being always on the alert to counter any rising by the millions of slave laborers from the conquered lands who had been transported to Germany to work in the fields and factories. Olbricht had earned commendations from his superiors for his energetic program of lightning mobilization and deployment of these ersatz units to meet domestic threats to national security. He was thus able to conduct considerable coup training right under the noses of the Gestapo.