Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  “Pull over here,” General Patton said, and Sergeant Mims turned the jeep into the stone-paved courtyard of a small inn. The standard of the Twelfth Infantry Division, one of Third Army’s veteran formations, was draped from the upper window, marking the building as the headquarters of the fast-moving unit—for today, at least.

  “Ten-hut!” shouted a sergeant on the headquarters staff as Patton stalked through the door. The general was pleased but unsurprised to see men hard at work throughout the great room of the inn. Maps were spread upon tables, and kerosene lanterns suspended from the rafters gave the place an uncanny brightness.

  “As you were,” Patton said, and the men quickly resumed their duties. He approached the table with the largest map, as two captains stood aside to give him room.

  “Welcome to the Twelfth, sir,” declared one. “General Hooper will be sorry he missed you—he’s up with the recon unit, checking out the road down into Dasburg.”

  “Good for him,” Patton said. That was the kind of thing he liked to hear. He fixed an eye upon the captain. “Tell me, what’s your situation?”

  “We’ve got a perimeter set up around Clervaux, General, and we have detachments moving off the road in both directions, getting set up on every piece of high ground between here and the German border. It’s going well—that is, we haven’t had any Krauts shooting at us for the last day, though there are plenty that seem willing to surrender.”

  “Good. Most of them know their war is over—at least, when it comes to fighting Uncle Sam. It’s the cocksucking SS bastards that are going to give us trouble, but I think they’re bugging out for the Westwall now. What do you hear from Fourth Armored?”

  That tank-heavy division had been ordered to secure the breach in the fortified border that was represented by the small city of Dasburg. Patton’s last report had indicated that CCB of the Fourth was moving into the burg, but he was anxious for further details.

  “It sounds good, General,” said the other captain. “They’ve pushed all the way through the town and across the river. They have the high ground on the far bank, and are ready to let the rest of us through.”

  “Excellent! If I remember right, Nineteenth Armored should be coming along in a day or so. I want the road held open—they have top transportation priority. As soon as they get into Germany, the rest of you wonderful boys are going to be right on their heels. We’ll spread out through the Rhineland, and make a run for the river with ten divisions. Those Nazi sons of bitches won’t know whether we’re going to punch them in the teeth or kick them in the ass!”

  He noted that the rest of the staff had stopped their work to listen, and this pleased him. He knew it was good for the morale of his army to see its general. More important, he tried very hard to make sure that these men understood the fighting mentality that lay at the heart of Third Army, and the need for speed that would see them succeed where no other force in the history of warfare would even dare to try.

  “We’re ready to move out, General!” said the first captain enthusiastically. “As soon as the Nineteenth Armored goes through, we’ll be right on their heels!”

  “Good, good,” said Patton, turning to leave. At the door he stopped, and favored the staff with a grin. “We’ll take a few bottles of Belgian beer with us—and by the time we’ve finished them, we’ll all be pissing into the Rhine!”

  5 JANUARY 1945

  KAMPFGRUPPE PEIPER, NORTHERN APPROACH TO DASBURG, GERMANY, 1553 HOURS GMT

  Jochen Peiper had found that he could use the pain from his facial wound, a constant searing fire that penetrated deep into his skull, as a focusing agent. For more than a day he had remained awake, guiding his racing column through the narrow, tree-flanked roads of the Ardennes as they raced out of Saint-Vith and back toward the German border. When fatigue threatened to drag him into sleep he simply slapped himself, right on the raw red wound. The blow inevitably provoked a fresh wave of pain along with an ooze of blood—and enough adrenaline to keep him going for another hour. He could see the medical disapproval in Dr. Schlüter’s eyes when he inspected the wound—underneath the naked fear, of course. The doctor would not trifle with him again.

  He had sent the last of his wounded away, and made certain that the traitorous driver and American terrorflieger had been shipped to Germany under an SS guard. Treating terrorfliegers as if they were common criminals was a good idea of the führer’s, Peiper thought. And sending Rommel’s driver along was a delightful bonus. Perhaps he would arrange to get a photograph of Clausen after he had been sufficiently chastised, and send it to the Desert Fox. Let him know there was a personal price for treason. Now, relieved of the need to carry along the added burden of noncombatants, he had ordered his fully mechanized column to race along at top speed.

  Finally they began to descend into the valley of the Our River, which here formed the border between Luxembourg and his native Deutschland. The kampfgruppe approached the city from the north, still on the east side of the river, while Peiper ordered his signalmen to try and get some information on the status of the city itself.

  When no radio reports were available, his motorcycle reconnaissance units raced toward the town while he ordered his panzergrenadiere to dismount from their trucks.

  “I want you to be ready to close off the east road, in case the Americans come that way. Alternately, you might have to fight your way into the city, if some of Rommel’s traitors are here before us,” he warned the oberst in charge of the battalion, a replacement Peiper had never met before.

  “Heil Himmler!” the man replied, snapping a salute before taking his place in the command armored car, a squat vehicle with bulging tires and an array of antennae. He headed down the river road with engine roaring, while the infantry advanced at a trot in the wake of the speeding motorcycles.

  While he waited for word from the scouts, Peiper walked along the line of tanks, barely noticed how all of them had pulled off of the road into the dense cover of the pine forest. These men were veterans; no one needed to remind them of the ever-present menace of Allied air power.

  It was a modest collection of armor: a dozen Panthers and about fifty Mark IVs. He was just as happy not to have any of the lumbering Tigers in his kampfgruppe—they slowed down the whole column, and were too damned big for most of the bridges in this hilly, gorge-crossed countryside. But he couldn’t help feeling that this force was too small for the task at hand—he should have had a full division, at least! Of course, Dietrich had informed him that even the SS divisions still loyal to the Fatherland numbered barely more than this in strength. Fortunately, one SS soldier was worth a dozen of any enemy.

  He was distracted by a racket of small-arms fire—carbines and the rip of an American BAR. Moments later a heavy machine gun, .50-caliber, started to chatter, and soon an entire cacophony of weapons crackled down the road.

  “Scheisse!” he snapped. Americans here, in Dasburg? He had anticipated encountering some treacherous Germans, probably a few old volksgrenadierie who had lost the will to fight, but this was an unpleasant surprise. Could the Yank bastards have really moved that fast?

  Any doubts were quickly buried as the distinctive, woofing blast of 75mm tank guns joined the fray. The Americans were here, with armor! All along the column his tankers were scrambling back into their panzers, while the infantry oberst was barking orders to his company commanders, sending more men to quickly reinforce the scouting patrols. Peiper stalked up to him, pleased that the man was taking aggressive action.

  “Send everyone you’ve got!” he ordered. “My tanks will follow. We have to breach this screen, get into the Westwall!”

  “Jawohl, Herr Obersturmbannführer!” declared the man; Peiper was racing away before the fellow could stiffen his arm into the reflexive salute.

  “Go! Go! Go!” barked the kampfgruppe commander, racing along the line of his tanks. Several panzers were already moving out, and his own driver rolled the Panther forward as he saw Peiper running up. He seized the rai
l and lifted himself on to the deck with an exertion that brought tears to his good eye; momentarily he wondered if he had torn the stitches in his face.

  But he had no time for self-pity. He slid through the hatch in the turret, sitting so that his head and shoulders emerged from the top of the tank. He was exposed here, but he needed to see, needed to understand what was happening.

  Fire blossomed in the road before him as a panzer exploded. The following vehicle advanced to press against the flaming hull. The engine growled as the driver gunned his throttle, shoving the burning hulk sideways until it toppled into the ditch. Then the makeshift bulldozer advanced quickly, snapping off a shot from its main gun, roaring downhill along the tree-shrouded road.

  Two seconds later that tank exploded, like the first hit by some as-yet-unseen gun. Peiper grimaced, suspecting that the Americans had placed some tank destroyers along the road. The situation called for patience, an envelopment—ideally, some air power—but all of those things called for, at the bare minimum, time. And that was one resource he did not possess.

  He slid down into the turret and picked up his microphone. “Go!” he shouted over the radio. “Find them—kill them!”

  His own gunner snapped off a shot, the turret echoing as the spent shell popped out of the chamber. Bullets clattered against the armored hull, the hail of battle rising to a deafening roar. Clasping his eye to the periscope, Peiper tried to see what was happening.

  At least six of his panzers were burning, the wrecks perched like hellish obstacles on the narrow road. The armored column still advanced by snaking around those destroyed tanks that could not be pushed out of the way. He heard his own men shooting back, saw a welcome burst of flame emerge from the woods up ahead—they had spotted one of the tank destroyers, exacted the first measure of vengeance!

  Small-arms fire crackled in the woods and he knew the panzergrenadiere were pressing forward. Another American tank exploded, and he saw more of the tank destroyers—they looked like Shermans, except the turrets were blocky and open on top—maneuvering in the cover of the trees.

  “There!” he barked, clapping his gunner on the shoulder. The man had an armor-piercing round loaded, and squinted into the shadows. He pulled the trigger and the Panther’s main gun barked; almost immediately, another billow of fire brightened the shadows in the tree-lined gorge.

  “The bastards are running!” Peiper crowed. He saw the German infantry rush forward, sweeping through the gorge where three American tank destroyers burned. A few GIs were there, holding up their hands—as if the SS had time for prisoners! By the time the command tank rolled past, their foolishness had been terminated by the bursts of a few Schmeissers.

  Now Peiper could see the road into the small city, with its precious bridges still intact, leading to the forested ridges across the valley and the solid fortifications of the Westwall. Perhaps it was not too late—perhaps they could reach that fortified border and hold those ramparts against the Americans.

  A shot banged off the turret in a clang that punched his ears with a physical blow. He screamed, deafened so that he couldn’t hear his gunner cry out behind him. A dim awareness: That was a dud shot; an explosion would have killed him.

  Others were not so lucky. He saw more of his panzers explode, including two of the precious Panthers. Only vaguely did he become aware that they were being fired on from the flanks.

  “Ambush! It’s a trap!” The words crackled over the radio as, all along the column, his tankers figured out the awful truth. They had pushed their way through an initial roadblock, but their headlong approach now brought them under the guns of the lethal American artillery, a dozen or more guns emplaced on the high ground to their flank. The enemy gunners were able to sight directly against the side of the column, sending powerful shells blasting into the panzers where the armor plate was thin.

  “Back—fall back!” Peiper shouted, hating the words but knowing there was no alternative—to press on was to lead his command into annihilation.

  The infantry screened the panzers like true veterans, as the armored behemoths backed up the narrow road, guns blazing as they again sought the shelter of the dense woods. Ten minutes later they were under cover, and though American shells continued to explode around them the enemy was using the much less accurate indirect fire now, no longer shooting straight at targets that the gunners could observe. Even so, the barrage was intense, and Peiper knew that he could not stay here for long.

  “Kraus!” he called, recognizing the captain from the reconnaissance company. “Where is the next bridge across the Our?”

  “Eight or ten kilometers north, sir—there is a span that will hold the weight of a Panther.”

  Peiper looked back down the road to Dasburg. The Americans were here, in strength, and that could only mean that they had already breached the Westwall. The change in tactics was as necessary as it was bitterly distasteful to him.

  “Very well—lead us there, at once.”

  As the column pulled further into the woods, sorting itself into a road march again, he was already pulling out the maps. The Westwall was lost, that was certain—for a line with a major breach in it was no line at all. Instead, he looked to the east, through the tangled terrain of Germany. The only tactic was obvious: They would have to race the Americans into the Fatherland, and then they would have to hold them at the Rhine.

  6 JANUARY 1945

  NEUE REICHSKANZLEI, BERLIN, 0700 HOURS GMT

  Berlin was dark outside, but it hardly mattered inside the tightly sealed inner office occupied by the führer. There, it was dark all the time, except for the single desk lamp that illuminated Heinrich Himmler’s work surface. As usual, there were endless reports to review, endless decisions to make—couldn’t his subordinates handle anything without his help? And then there were meetings. Paperwork and meetings, paperwork and meetings—the life of any leader.

  “Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, Generalfeldmarschall Mödel und Generaloberst Jodl, mein Führer,” announced his secretary.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Himmler said to his most senior Wehrmacht officers. “Do you bring me good news today for a change?”

  Keitel immediately started to stammer out an optimistic view of the current situation, but Mödel interrupted smoothly. “Führer, we bring you a realistic assessment that is not devoid of hope.”

  Himmler looked sharply at him. “Well, if that’s not code for more Wehrmacht pessimism and defeatism, then I’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “I don’t think it is,” interjected Jodl.

  “From you, I believe it,” said Himmler irritably. “Well, let’s hear this realistic assessment that contains hope.”

  “Very well,” Mödel replied. Moving to Himmler’s conference table, he unrolled a large map and placed weights on each corner. “The key strategic issue before us is time. The longer we delay, the greater the likelihood that the former allies of East and West will find cause to struggle among themselves, the greater the likelihood that a populace tired of war will settle for a negotiated peace. Even a peace under less than completely favorable conditions allows us time to rebuild. We are, after all, destined to be a Thousand-Year Reich. What is a matter of a generation or two to us? That is one of the greatest advantages we have over the Americans, in particular. They have no history to speak of.”

  “All right,” nodded Himmler. “Time. That was the motive behind our temporary peace with the Soviet Union. That time is about to expire. How do we get more?”

  Mödel made a short bow in the direction of the führer, acknowledging his observation. “We must first stabilize the Western Front, then strike back toward the east, forcing the Soviets to exhaust their supplies, then counterattack in the west once again. The perverse advantage of our setbacks in recent years is that our internal lines of mobility are much shorter. Although we must now move at night because of air-superiority issues, we can still move. Once we get past the current Soviet offensive period, we have an opportunity to force a
decent settlement in the west. The odds are not entirely in our favor, but the strategy, as I said earlier, is not without hope. That is what OKW proposes.”

  Himmler canvassed the two other senior officers with his eyes and saw their nods of agreement. Keitel’s opinion counted for little—the man would applaud anything once it was clear the führer wanted it. Jodl, on the other hand, combined patriotism and loyalty with a somewhat better sense of realism. And Mödel—well, the Führer’s Fireman was clearly the best man for this job. “Very well. I accept this plan, but with one important addition. I don’t see any plan for ensuring that forces on the Western Front don’t suddenly decide to join Rommel and the other traitors. Forces in the east, I think we can all agree, are unlikely to see switching sides as a practical option.” He smiled thinly at his own joke. Keitel chuckled in sycophantic chorus.

  Mödel looked at his map, his pointer touching the various military headquarters. “Each major unit has political officers appointed to it. All have exemplary Party credentials. I think we can rely on them taking direct action in the event of any threatened disloyalty.”

  “As Brigadeführer Bücher did?” Himmler replied in a silky voice.

  Mödel raised his eyebrows. “Sir, Brigadeführer Bücher was a brave man, but remember that what happened was then without precedent. Everyone knows what happened, which means everyone is far more prepared. It would be far more difficult for anyone else to do what Rommel did—it would take only one brave officer and a pistol to stop attempted treason, and no commander could be so secure as to believe all his officers would follow a surrender initiative without resistance.”

  Himmler considered this argument for a moment. Then he shook his head. “It’s not enough. Political officers are known. A treasonous commander would simply have political officers shot before any announcement took place. No, I’m afraid that the security of the Reich demands more. Much more.”