Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  It was well known that Patton ached to be the first one to Berlin, an honor that was originally intended for the Soviet Army. After Stalin’s treacherous armistice, the plan had tentatively called for the British to take the northern path. With Montgomery’s death, however, and the continued resistance of the Germans in the north, the British looked to have some serious obstacles in their path. Naturally, there would be significant negotiation involved if Eisenhower took charge, so Patton hoped to present him with fait accompli.

  “George,” Ike said sternly. “I want you to remember that Berlin is not that important. We have military targets to deal with—hell, you know that liberating cities can be more trouble than it’s worth! We have Nazis to kill, and that is our top priority.”

  “Goddammit, Ike—let me go for it! We can get there before the Rooskies—it’s an historic opportunity! We have the tool in the right place for the job—for Christ’s sake, let’s use it! Hell, it’s like I’ve got my own personal can opener—and Germany is the can!”

  “Damn it, George, you will follow orders, or so help me God I will give your job to someone else who will!”

  Patton immediately backed down. “Sorry, Ike … I know, you’re the boss. But the Rhine—surely you can see how big it is to get across the river! Jeezus Christ, how often does somebody come in here with a prize like this?”

  “First, explain this all to me,” said Eisenhower, fixing Patton with a stern look. “You’ve promised Rommel that we’ll take over his country, and save it from the Soviets, eh?”

  “You’ve got to admit it’s a hell of an opportunity,” urged Patton as he sat down. “It’s the least we can do.”

  “I don’t know if we can do it at all. This doesn’t look too much like an unconditional surrender to me, and that’s still policy, Soviet dropout or not.”

  “Oh, the surrender was unconditional enough. Everything else was a request, not a condition.”

  “What about POW status? Those Germans are officially POWs, and you say they’re out there screening for you? Is Army Group B still performing military operations?”

  “Yeah, sure they are, but they’re working on our side now. They helped us shoot up an attacking column of SS panzers, trying to hit Dinant from the north. Rommel and I had an excellent meeting of the minds. He’s a class act, the Desert Fox. You’ll enjoy meeting him, Ike. You too, Brad,” he said, indicating his direct superior officer with a casual wave of the hand.

  “So let me get this straight. Instead of turning Rommel and his men into POWs the way it’s supposed to be, you’ve turned them into units of Third Army and sent them out unsupervised to perform military actions on behalf of the Allies?”

  “Yeah, well, sort of. But not unsupervised. The Nineteenth Armored is with them. Henry’s got things under control. Hell, they’ve already worked together to break up an SS attack.”

  Eisenhower blinked again. Patton enjoyed seeing the man nonplussed like this. Patton’s grin continued to widen, Cheshire-cat-style. “Look, Ike,” Patton said in a calmer tone of voice. “I really didn’t mean to go this far out on a limb without talking to you. But this was the sort of opportunity that comes only once. I had to act. Rommel decided to surrender when we blew the bridges and his attacking spearheads were cut off from supply. He called the Nineteenth Armored HQ in Givet, who were the closest unit to him. CCA of the Nineteenth cut the final bridge in Dinant, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Eisenhower. “Pulaski, right?”

  “Yep,” replied Patton. “He bought it in the attack.”

  “Too bad. The boy had promise,” said Eisenhower quietly.

  There was another brief pause, and then Patton continued. “I just happened to be at Nineteenth Armored HQ when the call came in. Otherwise, Henry Wakefield would have taken Rommel’s surrender all by his lonesome, because there just wouldn’t have been anyone else to do it.”

  “You’d have hated that, Georgie,” interjected Bradley, back on the sofa.

  Patton turned and regarded Bradley for a moment, then turned his attention back to Eisenhower. “So the call came in, and there I was. I didn’t have any choice.”

  “Did you consider that it might be a bluff? That I might be looking at two dead generals, including the head of Third Army, with no clue as to what was really going on?”

  “Well, I assumed you’d miss me most days, but some days you wouldn’t,” Patton observed.

  “You’re damned right some days I wouldn’t miss you,” growled Eisenhower. “But it would have been one hell of a mess.”

  Patton nodded in acknowledgment. “It might have been a trap, but I talked on the phone to Rommel and I was convinced it was real. So I hotfooted it into Dinant and we started palavering.” Patton decided that the story of Rommel’s near assassination would wait for a better time. “Like I said, we got into a little rough-and-tumble with some of our old friends in First SS Panzers, but between Henry Wakefield’s boys and Panzer Lehr, we saved the day.”

  “Henry Wakefield and Panzer Lehr fighting the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.” Eisenhower shook his head. Then, unable to help himself, he cracked a smile, and then began to guffaw. “And now you want to pop open Germany like it’s a big can of beer? Operation Can Opener, huh? God damn, George,” he said, laughing helplessly, “what the hell have you done?”

  “I won the war, Ike. Third Army has goddamn won the fucking war.” Patton found himself joining in the laughter, and even Bradley was swept up to the extent of cracking a smile on his schoolteacher’s face.

  NORTH OF BASTOGNE, BELGIUM, 1914 HOURS GMT

  “I’m tired,” whined the thirteen-year-old soldier. “I can’t keep marching like this.” He stopped dead in the middle of the road and dropped his backpack.

  “All right. Let’s stop for a minute,” Lukas Vogel announced. It was cold, too cold to stand around for long, but he himself could hardly walk another step along the snow-crusted road leading (he hoped) back toward the Westwall, back toward the Fatherland. He couldn’t expect his men to do any more.

  The others nodded or grunted their acknowledgment. They were tired, too. Lukas surveyed the faces of his small group of followers, mostly young like him. After he had left his tent, he circulated around the rest of the compound, listening to the arguments and discussions that raged back and forth. The surrender was on everybody’s mind. Most welcomed it, but some were like Lukas, prepared to continue the fight. Quietly, he recruited them into his own private Freikorps, committed to move north and east, to rejoin the German army and save the Fatherland. He had about twenty men with him now. The youngest was, he judged, about twelve years old; the oldest perhaps twenty. They all seemed willing to acknowledge him as leader, and he was proud of that.

  He knew he was a leader; he’d always been a leader from his first Hitlerjugend days on into the beginnings of the war. When he was twelve years old he’d been in charge of an antiaircraft gun outside Hannover, firing at the great waves of bombers that filled the skies, their evil drone sounding like a wave of horrible insects. Air-raid sirens wailed throughout the city, but they could not overpower the droning of the planes. Then the roar of his own big gun had answered the challenge, the sound blotting out all other noises at least for a moment, making him deaf for a time afterward so he couldn’t hear the bomber.

  He had cheered when he saw one of the bombers burst into flame, spiraling downward trailing smoke, but there were always more, far more, dropping strings of bombs like endless rain over the city. The explosions made the ground shake and replaced the droning engine noises with other, even more evil sounds, followed by smoke and fire that blotted out the sky itself.

  He had done what he could, but it was not enough. Finally he, along with most other children, were shipped off to the Kinderlandverschickung, the KLV camps, to protect them from the strategic bombing campaign. His camp, one of an uncounted number, had about three thousand boys in it. He protested—he was a soldier and he wanted to be in the war—but to no avail. Oh, they pre
tended to drill and practice, and there were classes in National Socialism to attend, but it was just a way to keep the kids out of the way, and he hated it. He hated the boredom and he hated the uselessness and he hated the bullies and the sexual predators and the hypocrisy he saw everywhere.

  And so he had escaped, run away, returned home to Hannover only to find that his family home was a crater. He assumed his mother was dead from the bombing; his father had gone east into Russia long before and Lukas had no idea whether he lived or not.

  He tried to enlist in the Waffen-SS but his records were still at the KLV camp, so he joined the Volksgrenadierien because all they cared about was that he was a warm body. But he was a soldier, a good soldier and a leader of men. And this band of men and boys following him here, tonight, proved it.

  The moon was nearly full, but hidden behind clouds so that only a dim glow illuminated the forested landscape. There were no stars visible. He shifted the position of his heavy duffel from one shoulder to another to relieve the pressure a little bit, and wriggled his numb toes in his boots to try to ward off frostbite. His nose was runny from the cold, and he wiped it on his coat sleeve.

  “It’s freezing here, and there’s no place to camp,” he said. “If we stand around too long we’ll freeze.”

  “I can’t, Lukas, I just can’t,” sniffed the boy who had dropped his pack. His name was Friedrich Gross, and he was a Grenadier, the lowest rank.

  Lukas walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “There isn’t a choice, Friedrich. We’ve got to keep going until we find someplace warm. As soon as we do, we’ll all rest. That’s a promise.” He looked over the boy with a critical eye. “Give me your pack.” Lukas hefted it, then slung it over his shoulder while picking up his own duffel.

  “Everybody ready?” he asked. “We can’t stop too long in this weather.” When he heard enough acknowledgment, he ordered, “Move out.” Then he trudged forward, his boots crunching in the leftover snow. More boots crunched behind him.

  He thought about his last encounter with his old unit. It made him angry that there were Germans who weren’t devoted to the cause. He wished he’d killed Bauer back in the tent, put a knife through his throat and shut him up once and for all. He was a better soldier than that ignorant dummkopf any day, even if he was technically still a kid. He should have put his knife through Obergefreiter Durr, too. The old fart might have meant well, but age had made him soft and weak. If he couldn’t help bring his fatherland to victory, then he was useless and ought to be dead so he didn’t consume any more precious supplies. The future belonged to the young, didn’t it? Not to patronizing old shits who mooned over their grandchildren and laughed and were happy about surrender.

  Lukas marched along under the weight of double packs for a while, but they slowed him down tremendously. He ached under the strain, but he knew that he couldn’t show weakness before his men. They looked up to him as their leader. And that thought made him fret. He wasn’t sure how much longer they would have to march, or what would happen if they were caught outdoors too long. He wanted to ask someone else what to do, but that also would be a sign of weakness. He shifted his duffel yet again. His toes were completely numb and so were his fingertips. There were the tingles that he knew were the first signs of frostbite. He had to do something, and soon.

  Then came a rumbling sound—it was an engine, a large one. “Everyone off the road,” he snapped, and his soldiers obeyed. Lukas stayed out in the open, looking carefully down the road they had traveled as the engine sound increased. Then there was a glimmer along the line of a hill, which grew brighter and suddenly turned into the blaze of headlights. It was a truck.

  “Men, cover me. We need this truck. If the driver doesn’t cooperate, be ready to attack on my signal,” he ordered. He heard the sounds of packs dropping, rounds clicking into the chambers of several carbines.

  Lukas stepped out into the road, leaving his packs behind him. He unslung his rifle and rested the butt on his boot so it wouldn’t end up in the snow and mud, and began waving his hand back and forth at the oncoming vehicle. As it drove closer, he heard the grinding sound of gears downshifting and the squeal of badly maintained brakes as the truck stopped. The headlights had completely blinded him; he blinked in the painful light.

  A head leaned out the window. “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”

  “I’m Obergefreiter Vogel. I’m heading for Sixth Panzer Army.”

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “I need a ride. It’s freezing out here.”

  “I’m heading in a different direction, kid. There’s no room.”

  “Are you heading for Sixth Panzer Army?”

  “No.”

  “How about the Westwall?

  “No.”

  “Are you going back to the Fatherland?”

  “Kid, what’s the matter with you? The war has ended. We lost and we’ve surrendered. Now get the hell out of my way.”

  Lukas made a hand signal, and his men rushed forward, pulled open the driver’s door, and pulled the driver out into the snow. His eyes now adjusting to the glare of the headlights, he walked over to the man. “I’m afraid we’re commandeering your truck.”

  “Wait, dammit, you can’t do that. Hey, you’re just a bunch of kids! What the hell do you mean—”

  Lukas gestured and two rifles were shoved into the driver’s face. “Shut up,” he said in a calm voice. Looking wildly around at his captors, the driver obeyed. Lukas looked up into the truck, seeing a second man there. He thought about his rifle, but instead pulled out his knife and leaned closer. The soldier’s eyes widened at the sight of the menacing steel blade. “Out,” ordered the young soldier.

  “No problems, kid,” the man in the truck said. “I’m coming, okay? I’m just along for the ride, you know?” He slid out of the truck and stood shivering in his uniform shirt and unbuttoned tunic. His coat was still in the truck. Lukas noticed that the man kept his hands clearly in view at all times.

  “What’s in the truck?” he asked.

  “Just some supplies, some food, some miscellaneous shit—nothing important,” the passenger said. “Hey, can I get my coat?”

  “Stay where you are,” Lukas ordered, then turned to another of his men, Hans Braun, another oberschütze. “Check in the back.”

  It was a flatbed truck with a rounded cloth cover, just the size for his unit. In a moment, Braun leaned out of the back of the truck. “Lukas, just supplies. Not enough room for the group. But there are a big stack of blankets.”

  “Good. What kind of supplies? Necessary, or can they be abandoned?” Braun ducked back into the truck. Lukas shifted from foot to foot to try to get sensation back into his toes as he waited.

  “Lukas, there’s something funny here,” Braun announced, sticking his head out. “It’s a lot of electronics, some tools, and a bag of money.”

  “Money? Are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. I haven’t ever seen so much money.”

  Lukas looked at the two men. The shivering passenger spoke first. “Hey, it was him, not me. He figured if we were going to surrender, we might as well take some of the good stuff ourselves instead of let it get into American hands, right? At least it would stay German.”

  Lukas nodded. “I see. You took the money and tools and equipment you could sell to keep it out of American hands and were heading home.”

  “Yeah, sure. You understand, don’t you?”

  “I do understand,” he said calmly. “And so I think I’ll follow in your footsteps. We’ll take the equipment you rescued from the Americans and put it back into the military when we reach Sixth Panzer Army. Hans,” he called out. “Let’s throw out anything we can so we’ve got enough room to get the boys in the truck, and then get everyone loaded up. I’ll drive.” He hoped that wasn’t a mistake. He had never driven a truck, but he could drive a car and he supposed the two weren’t that different.

  “Listen, we’ll go along with you, okay?”
said the passenger. “We won’t make any trouble at all. And we’ll give everything to the first officer we find, just like you want.”

  Lukas ignored them and issued the orders necessary to get his men on board, blankets wrapped over them. “Hans, you ride up front with me.”

  “Okay, Lukas,” replied Braun. “How about these two?”

  Lukas looked at them. “They want to get some stuff back to Germany and sell it for money, and that’s all right. Everything we dumped in the snow is theirs. So all they have to do is carry it to the nearest division. It shouldn’t be much more than about ten kilometers away.”

  “You can’t do that, kid!” pleaded the passenger. “Well freeze to death!”

  Lukas smiled. “That’s a definite possibility,” he said, and stepped up into the driver’s seat, passing his rifle over to Hans, who kept his own rifle trained on the two coatless men.

  The passenger continued to plead for help. “Hey, how about my coat, at least? Please, kid?”

  Finally, Lukas took the man’s coat and threw it out into the snow. “There you go,” he said.

  “But that’s just one coat, and there are two of us!” the passenger said.

  “That’s what you asked for,” said Lukas as he started the engine. With a tremendous sound of grinding gears, the truck lurched forward into the darkness. He could hear the loud sounds of argument fading out behind him.

  THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D.C., 2030 HOURS GMT

  Brigadier General Leslie Richard Groves, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, built the Pentagon in 1942. After that, they gave him a really big job. It wasn’t the job he wanted—he wanted to go overseas and get in the war—but he was a soldier. When they said frog, he jumped, just like the book said.

  Groves was a big man, nearly six feet tall, tipping the scales at just over three hundred pounds. He had curly dark brown hair and blue eyes. He was a tough son of a bitch they could trust to get the job done. He was loud, he had little tact, and his people mostly hated his guts. Not that he gave a rat’s ass. He wasn’t running a personality contest. And besides, the flakes and nuts that made up the brain trust of the Manhattan Project needed a firm hand to keep focused on the goal: the construction of a fission bomb—if such a thing was even possible, which nobody seemed to know for sure. He wasn’t the first man to compare his job to herding cats, but the comparison was apt, anyway.