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

by Alexander M. Grace

  Anielewicz nodded to a young red-haired fighter hunching next to him in the second floor apartment he was using as his command post at the corner of Nalewki and Gensia, and the man shouldered his MG42 machine gun, letting a long burst rip into the advancing Germans. This was answered by a virtual storm of fire from both sides of the street and a hail of grenades, German potato mashers, and homemade Molotov cocktails that burst all around the armored cars, turning them both into bonfires. A few of the Germans, most actually shouting in Ukrainian, returned fire until they were cut down, but most turned and fled, despite the lashes of the leather whips carried by their SS sergeants. Over the roar of battle, Anielewicz could hear the sweetest words he had ever heard uttered in German, “Juden haben Waffen!” You bet your ass, Anielewicz thought grimly, the Jews do have weapons! A German ambulance attempted to drive up to recover the wounded, but it too was met with a murderous fire, since the young men and women who had seen their parents and younger siblings dragged off to death no longer subscribed to the chivalrous rules of war.

  As the firing died down, dozens of dark forms crept out from the basements of the houses along the street, quietly knifing the wounded, and stripping all of weapons and ammunition. Anielewicz was told later that a mortally wounded Jewish policeman had been heard thanking God that he had lived long enough to be killed by a bullet fired from a Jewish rifle.

  The Germans had been expecting some kind of resistance after the violence of January—perhaps pistols, knives, and pipe bombs—but they had obviously not been expecting anything on this scale. Now they pulled back both of their columns, and there was a long pause as reinforcements were brought up. Fortunately, the defenders knew that the Germans had very little armor in and around Warsaw, as most of it had been sucked into the offensive at Kursk and the subsequent withdrawals. But now came the sound that Anielewicz had been expecting, something like a freight train rattling by overhead followed by a dull crash as an artillery shell hit somewhere within the ghetto. The Germans would have no compunction about smashing the entire ghetto with high explosives, since there was nothing in it they needed and the only residents were men and women they wanted dead in any event. Besides, any “overs” would just land in some other part of Warsaw, and Poles stood very little higher on the German scale of humanity than Jews.

  The first shot was followed by another, and another, and the redhead with his machine gun looked toward Anielewicz, raising one eyebrow. Then the explosions stopped, and the sound was replaced by the muffled, staccato tapping of small arms fire and the crump of grenades. It was the Poles! The Home Army had promised to wait until German attention was focused on the ghetto and then hit the German support units throughout the city, including their artillery. Anielewicz smiled and raised the telephone receiver.

  “Cross over Jordan,” he said into the mouthpiece and hung up.

  He listened carefully and could distinctly pick out the thud of new explosions as gaps were blown in the wall at several points around the ghetto perimeter, permitting teams of Jewish fighters to move out into the city to link up with the Home Army and take the battle to the Germans.

  0500 HOURS, 2 AUGUST 1943

  CHLEMNO, POLAND

  At least he was out of France. And he had just made his first combat jump in the war, just as he had been trained to do. But never satisfied, Bentley could not help thinking that he would have liked to have jumped just a few miles behind enemy lines like the boys from the 101st and the British 6th Airborne, not nearly two hundred miles from the coast where Allied troops would hopefully be landing in a couple of hours, if they survived the trip by sea, weaving between islands controlled by the Germans, and a good eighty miles even from the main center of the Polish rising in Warsaw. He supposed that he would have to wait for the next war to get to do things by the book, just once.

  Word had come down that someone had talked very convincingly to President Roosevelt and Vice President Truman about the need to support the rising in central Poland to prevent the Germans from annihilating the freedom fighters before the main forces from the landings on the Baltic coast could come to the rescue. That had seemed logical enough, so General Marshall and the other Allied planners had diverted some of their precious C-47s to drop the Polish airborne brigade near the capital, apart from the main drop by the British and Americans. But then, one of these Washington lobbyists had also provided considerable detail about a story that, even now, Bentley had trouble believing in its full scope. Rumors had been coming out of the Reich for some time of Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews, which he had said all along that he would do, but everyone had more or less assumed that this meant treating them just a little worse than the other people he had enslaved, which was bad enough. Now, however, they were talking about some kind of “death factories,” concentration camps designed, not just for incarceration and slave labor, but the actual, mechanical destruction of people, like the big slaughterhouses around Chicago, but with trainloads of people being fed into them instead of cattle or hogs.

  Consequently it was decided that, if such camps existed, and there was a growing body of evidence that they did, the Germans would crank them up to maximum “production” as the Allied armies closed in. If this were the case, it behooved the Allies to do everything in their power to throw a monkey wrench into the German plans and to save as many innocent people as possible. Bentley, and the men of the 505th Airborne Regiment, which he now commanded, along with his old 509th Airborne Battalion, were to be that monkey wrench. He could not argue with the concept, it just seemed to him that the tool they had chosen was rather small for the job.

  The problem was the lack of air transport. The Allies were already dropping two full divisions closer to the coast, plus the Polish brigade at Warsaw, and the flight from forward airfields in Belgium and France was already near the limits of the C-47’s endurance, especially since they were taking a long dog leg to the north over German territory occupied by the Allies in order to avoid the flak. Presumably, those C-47s that survived the flight would be turned around and, tomorrow night, would bring in the rest of the 82nd Airborne to support Bentley, as well as a French airborne regiment to support the Poles in Warsaw, assuming that there was anyone left alive to support.

  The camp at Chelmno had been chosen by the planners because the other three “death camps,” as they were called, were well east of Warsaw, even farther from the Allied bases and relatively close to the advancing Russian lines, whereas Chelmno was almost due west of the capital. The plan was quite simple. Bentley’s men, supported by Polish partisans, would overcome the camp guards and secure a perimeter, then just try to keep the inmates alive until reinforced by air the next night and then relieved by the ground offensive in three or four days.

  The problem Bentley saw immediately when studying a large-scale map of central Poland was that it was a damn long way from either Warsaw or the beaches, and he suspected that the planners were being unduly optimistic about how fast German resistance would crumble. Furthermore, Chelmno had apparently been selected as a site for this “death camp” precisely because it was handy to a number of major rail lines running in from Germany and other points in Poland, so the Germans would have little trouble bringing in their own reinforcements. Of course, as had become the pattern for the war in the West, the Allied air forces would be prowling almost at will, making any movement for German forces a hell on earth. But, again, they would be operating at extreme range here, and most of the terribly efficient fighter bombers could not reach targets in Poland, only the heavy Fortresses and Wellingtons, which were much less effective in hitting tactical troop movements.

  But there was no point in worrying about that now. The landings had gone off reasonably well. The weather had held, and very few aircraft had been lost or forced to tum back on the run in. Neither had there been an appreciable German presence in the drop area, apart from scattered patrols that had been dealt with by the Polish partisans. However, Bentley began to appreciate just how fortunate
he was never to have had to conduct an airborne assault into a well-defended enemy position since, nearly two hours after the drop, he had only been able to collect about one company’s worth of paratroopers, and those from no less than three battalions of the 505th as well as a few men from the 509th. Time was of the essence, however, and Bentley soon had his meager force moving out in a skirmish line over the rolling hills in the direction of the Chelmno camp.

  As the sky grew brighter and the march progressed, Bentley began to notice a distinct odor in the air, a sickly sweet smell that he at first attributed to his imagination, but then he saw others of his men wrinkling their noses and looking around dubiously. When he asked one of his Polish guides, through an interpreter provided by the OSS, what the smell was, the man just frowned and pointed over the next ridge.

  From the crest, the camp appeared through Bentley’s field glasses much as it had in the aerial photographs he had studied, with rows of drab barracks-like sheds and several large buildings with tall smokestacks, all surrounded by double barbed wire fences with tall watch towers spaced around the perimeter. In the photographs the chimneys had been spewing thick, gray smoke, but now they stood inert, and there seemed to be no activity in the open areas of the camp. Only a large pile of yellowish lumber in one comer of a camp yard had not been present in the photos, and Bentley ordered his men, now grown to a battalion, to rush the nearest gate.

  The gates stood open, and bursts of fire from the paratroopers brought no response from the towers. Bentley trotted into the camp just behind the lead squads, and he could hear men calling out in German, Polish, and Yiddish to anyone present to come out with their hands up. He watched as one squad deployed around the closed door of one of the sheds, and a tall trooper kicked it in with one blow, diving into the room followed by his comrades. There was no shooting, but the Americans suddenly reappeared, backing out the door with looks of horror on their faces, and one man doubled over, retching in the dust.

  The Americans were followed by a ghost-like figure in striped pajamas, who shuffled to the door, blinking in the light, his dark eyes bulging out of a skull covered with almost translucent skin, tight against the bone. One of the OSS men, a Yiddish speaker, walked forward and talked to the man in a low voice for several minutes before a look of comprehension came over the dazed face, and the man pointed vaguely off to the West. Then the inmate took the American’s face in both his gnarled hands and began to pat his shoulders and arms until he found the American flag shoulder patch. The man touched the patch and brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them before collapsing in the soldier’s arms.

  “The guards all went away this morning,” the OSS man told Bentley as tears streamed down his own face.

  Bentley strode past them and peered through the doorway. Inside were rows of bunks, more like shelves, six or eight high, barely a foot apart, and from each shelf peered out several shaved heads with huge, dark eyes, indistinguishable from that of the man outside. He stared at them wordlessly for a moment, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Sir, I think you’d better see this,” a captain from the 509th said softly, pulling him by the arm.

  Bentley followed at a trot down one row of sheds and around the comer. There he stopped cold.

  Knots of paratroopers stood gawking at the pile of lumber Bentley had seen from the ridge. It was as tall as the sheds and nearly fifty feet long, but it wasn’t lumber.

  “I guess the incinerators got backed up,” the captain said in a flat tone.

  Bentley had heard the expression “bodies stacked like cordwood,” but he had never imagined such a sight. One row of skeletal corpses had its feet pointed toward him, the next was heads, then feet again, all very orderly. There was no way to tell whether they were men or women, and the children were only identifiable by their size, all looking as old and worn as the oldest grandfather. He now realized what the white dust was that covered the ground, the grass, everything for the past kilometer or more, and now his own uniform, and he felt his stomach lurch. Half the men in the yard were now vomiting copiously, and it took Bentley a moment before he could even focus his vision.

  “To think that human beings actually did this,” the captain growled.

  “Get the interpreters together and have them go from hut to hut,” Bentley hissed as he wiped his mouth. “Have them announce that the Americans are here, and that no one will harm them again. Then get all the medics together to start looking at these people and doing what they can. Every man has five days’ K-rations in his pack. I want three of those deposited with the XO and make a search of the guards’ quarters for more food, but have it distributed very carefully. A full meal will probably kill these poor souls off faster than a bullet.”

  The captain saluted and jogged off. Bentley took a pull of water from his canteen and spat it out, but the bitter taste remained. He no longer had any doubts about the need for this mission.

  1400 HOURS, 2 AUGUST 1943

  USTKA, POLAND

  Colonel Leon Mitkiewicz strode up the broad, pebbly beach a few yards, then knelt to cross himself and to kiss the soil of Poland. Up and down the strand thousands of other Polish soldiers had done or were doing the same as they poured out of the landing craft and rushed inland. Four years of exile was a long time.

  There had been very little trouble on the voyage in from France. Twice U-boats had attacked, but only one transport had been hit and the Polish destroyer Burza had sunk one of the attackers. From about 0200 hours that morning on, the American battleship Texas and the British Nelson, and the cruisers Tuscaloosa, Quincy, and Frobisher, and a swarm of destroyers had pounded the shore and every suspected enemy position within fifteen miles of the beach with guns from five inches up to sixteen. Then LCTs crammed with row upon row of rockets had added their banshee howl to the din. When the first wave had finally hit the beach shortly before sunrise, not a shot had been fired against them.

  Now, leading mechanized elements had raced over twenty miles inland and linked up with the American and British airborne, and the beachhead was secure with a width of over thirty miles and spearheads driving on the town of Bytów on the highway toward Warsaw. Several thousand dazed Germans had been rounded up as prisoners, and the roads were littered with the burned out hulks of trucks and tanks that had been caught in the open by Allied planes flying off the American aircraft carrier Ranger and several of their “jeep” escort carriers. The plan now was for two Polish infantry divisions, the 3rd and 4th, to dig in along parallel lines on each flank of the beachhead. The American and British airborne divisions would extend those lines farther inland, and the 1st Polish Armored Division, the 2nd Armored Brigade, and the 7th Light Infantry Division would drive down this corridor toward Warsaw.

  Obviously the flanking infantry divisions could only cover, perhaps, thirty or forty miles, and thinly held at that, beyond which the mechanized forces would be flying solo for some one hundred fifty miles, dropping off occasional units to garrison key crossroads. But achieving speed was worth the risk, and a measure of flank security could still be provided by airstrikes by Allied bombers and the bands of Polish partisans who infested the entire sector. Of these last, thousands had already turned up at the beachhead to receive weapons brought ashore for the purpose. Somewhere around Wloclawek, about two thirds of the way to Warsaw, the 2nd Armored Brigade would veer to the southwest to relieve the American paratroopers at Chelmno.

  Mitkiewicz was proud to be taking part in this glorious battle for his nation’s honor and survival, and he had pulled every string within reach to be released from the staff position he had held in London as liaison to the OSS and British intelligence to take up command of a battalion in the 2nd Armored. He retained the fatalistic sense, however, that it was useless to worry about what they would be doing a week from now, a hundred and fifty miles away. The bulk of the German Army was still just to the east, fighting for its life against the Russians, and the German homeland was just to the west, still probably fi
lled with reserves ready to be thrust into the battle, and now the Poles were stuck in the middle, the position they had been fated to by history. It was reassuring to have some Allied troops with them this time, on Polish soil, but Mitkiewicz was still certain that they would all be consumed by the fires of this terrible war. And he thanked God for the chance to play his part in it. Poland loves its dead heroes best of all.

  1700 HOURS, 4 AUGUST 1943

  WARSAW, POLAND

  General Bor-Komorowsky rubbed the stubble on his chin as he stood in the control tower of the Piastowa airfield southwest of Warsaw. The wrecks of a few Luftwaffe planes had been shoved onto the grass verge away from the runway, and now American transports were landing and taking off every few minutes, disgorging piles of supplies or files of troops, and a full squadron of Spitfires, piloted by Poles, was now stationed at the field. He had to shake his head in disbelief.

  The first twenty-four hours of the battle had been desperate, with the SS troops of the city garrison fighting to the death as they were assailed from front and rear. That had been expected. But other than small security detachments that drifted into the fighting from the immediate vicinity, no major German reinforcements had arrived, either from east or west. Naturally, he had hoped that Allied airpower and the attacks by the Home Army guerrilla units would slow them up, but he had never expected them simply not to appear.

  But that was exactly what was happening. Intelligence reports from Home Army units in eastern Poland indicated that the old regular Wehrmacht units, especially the armor, were slipping away from the front and racing westward, some of them shooting the gap between Warsaw and the Allied troops advancing to the south from the coast, but most swerving south of the capital, where the attentions of Allied bombers was less and the rail lines in better condition, but all of them heading for Germany, save for those troops now trapped in East Prussia. Their infantry was following as best it could. Only the SS units had been abandoned in the front lines, and the frantic radio transmissions, many of them now in the clear, revealed that the surrounded SS men had simply been left to the tender mercies of the Russians by their colleagues, who probably knew that the SS had no option to surrender to them.