Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  “Go check on Wolfgang,” one suggested, pointing to a niche in the rubble.

  Lukas went to look and found a man with a ghastly wound in his leg and hip.

  “Wolfgang? How are you feeling?” he asked.

  The man grimaced, then lifted his gun. “I can still see, still shoot. I’m a good soldier.”

  “Yes, you are,” Lukas said, awed. “You can’t walk on that, can you?”

  “Don’t plan on going anywhere,” Wolfgang said, his next breath a gasp of sudden pain.

  “Well, when we pull back, we’re taking you with us,” Lukas promised. He saw that the man’s comrades had bandaged the wound as best they could, and the tough grenadier showed the officer that he had found a perch for his rifle. Lying prone, he was able to squeeze off a shot or two every time a target presented itself.

  One more of the men was curled up in his foxhole, and when Lukas asked him if he was hurt he began to cry, sobbing like a baby. The young officer tried cajoling and threatening, everything he could think of to get the fellow to come out, but the grenadier simply cradled his head in his hands and rocked back and forth, uttering long, agonized wails. Repressing an angry urge to simply shoot the man for cowardice, Lukas at last left him alone and went back to his own vantage, the brick pile that was near the center of his platoon’s little section of front.

  He took stock of the situation. They had eight fighting men left, plus himself—though one was wounded and immobile. All of the soldiers had carbines, and he had his machine pistol. These were good soldiers, and they could hold here for a long time, and kill a lot of Russians while they did it. That was the best he could hope for now.

  Another flare sparked in the air and he started to shoot, raking the stream of his bullets across the crests of the rough ground. The Panther fired again, and another Soviet tank burst into flames. Several return shots flew out of the darkness, armor piercing shells punching into the rocky walls around Peiper’s Panther. None of them seemed to do any damage.

  Lukas wiped the sweat from his eyes. It occurred to him that he should be getting hungry, but he wasn’t interested in food. Instead, he reached for another clip of ammunition, jammed it into the stock of his machine pistol, drew a deep breath, and waited for his next target to appear.

  HEADQUARTERS, SECOND GUARDS TANK ARMY, KÜSTRIN, GERMANY, 1917 HOURS GMT

  “Comrade General!” Colonel Krigoff spoke sharply, determined to make himself heard.

  A moment ago he had left Paulina outside the door flap of this tent that served as the headquarters conference room, where the army general was still poring over the map. A few of the army staff officers were present and they all watched as the colonel strode forward.

  Paulina, who had reloaded her camera, had told him that she would wait for him outside, but he rather wished she was here, to see him in action. He felt very brave, inflamed by the passion of his true belief.

  “I don’t have time for you now!” snapped General Petrovsky. He was meeting with his staff in the mess-hall tent, since no surviving building nearby was large enough to hold the group of two dozen officers. Maps were spread across the central dining table, illuminated by lanterns turned up to their full brightness. The lesser officers, a few generals and many colonels, watched warily as the army commander addressed his young colonel of intelligence. “Can’t you see I have a battle to win?”

  “Do you suppose you will win it by holding your tanks back here and letting the Germans die of old age?” retorted the colonel. “There is a bridge still standing across the Oder—I have seen it myself!” Alyosha felt good, proud and brave, about being able to make this honest declaration. He glared as the general snapped back at him.

  “Of course there’s a bridge there! Did it occur to you, supposedly an intelligence officer, that I have aircraft reconnaissance to tell me about little details like that? We’re doing everything we can to take it, but we lost forty tanks trying to bull through in the afternoon. There’s an entire panzer division dug in, right in our path—so now we’re trying to bomb the bastards off the face of the earth!”

  “The tanks pulled back too soon,” Krigoff charged. “How do you know they couldn’t have done it with another push? Now the Nazis will blow that bridge up any minute—you must get on with the attack!”

  “Dammit, Colonel—I have had enough out of you!” roared Petrovsky, his voice like the bellow of a furious bear. “You may have the ear of Comrade Chairman Stalin himself, but you are a menace on the battlefield! I could listen to you, and have a thousand more men that would never go home after the war, never see their women and their babies again!”

  Krigoff was about to snap back with a retort when the general waved a hand wildly, somehow stifling the words in the colonel’s throat. Petrovsky was gesturing to a picture on the table next to the map, and Alyosha saw a photograph there—the picture of Stalin he had given to his commander a few days before.

  “Do you think I don’t know that you had General Yeremko removed?” growled Petrovsky. “He was a good man, loyal to the state, and he had served with valor since Leningrad in ’41! He trusted you, and you betrayed him!”

  “He was old and sick, unable to do his job,” Krigoff retorted. “I merely—”

  “Leave me!” snapped the general. Alyosha was about to refuse when he realized that Petrovsky was talking to his staff officers, not to his colonel of intelligence. The other officers left and the army general fixed Krigoff with a murderous glare.

  “Old and sick, eh?” The voice was low, again like that angry bear. “You goddamned little peesa, you make me sick—toadies like you, all in service of the great man!” A peesa was a polite penis, all smooth surface just waiting to insert itself in any vacant hole. The general took up the picture of Stalin, looked straight at Krigoff, and spit right into the chairman’s face. “That’s what I think of you—and of him! And if you think you will tattle in Moscow of my feelings, you should know, Comrade Colonel Krigoff, that I have friends there too. And it may be that my word will be taken instead of yours, within those halls of power.”

  “Comrade General …” Krigoff didn’t know what to say. He was shocked by the man’s desecration of the symbol of state might, and he wondered if Petrovsky might be losing his mind. At the same time, the man had been shrewd enough to send his staff officers away, so that there were no witnesses to his political heresy.

  “Guards!” Petrovsky’s roar was a blast of sound, riding over the colonel’s arguments. Immediately four sergeants, each armed with a submachine gun, stepped into the tent. “Take the comrade colonel away, and lock him up in the prison truck! He is guilty of treason against the state. I will deal with him later!”

  “You will lose this battle!” shrieked Krigoff in disbelief. “This bridge will be destroyed, the advance to Berlin criminally delayed!”

  “Bah, we will cross on a bridge of our own making if the Germans destroy this one. Tomorrow, or the day after, we will have our victory.”

  “Tomorrow, Comrade General—” the colonel shouted as the guards took his arms and dragged him toward the door of the tent. “Tomorrow will be too late!”

  REICHS CHANCELLERY, BERLIN, GERMANY, 2309 HOURS GMT

  The five armored cars rumbled to a halt before the colonnaded façade of the great building, and a dozen SS guards spilled out, machine pistols at the ready. They formed a twin rank leading from the front entrance down the stairs to the lead vehicle, facing outward, weapons cocked and ready.

  The doors opened and a party of six men came out. Four of them were guards, armed and uniformed like the men who had arrived in the armored cars. The fifth was a nondescript man with round, wire-rimmed glasses and a nervous, pinched expression. The last was a tall, aristocratic officer in the gray uniform of a Wehrmacht colonel. He walked with a cane and leaned on the arm of one of the guards as the party made its way down the long flight of marble steps.

  “Hurry!” demanded Heinrich Himmler, turning to glare at von Reinhardt. “Get in the car!”


  For once, von Reinhardt seemed unable to muster a quote or a clever remark, the führer reflected with a sneer of disdain. Indeed, it seemed like all he could do just to keep his feet moving as the guards, none too gently, pulled him across the wide sidewalk and pushed him toward the door of the second car in line.

  “Wait! Search him again!” ordered the Reichsführer.

  The colonel stood listlessly as two guards patted him down thoroughly. “No weapon, not even a pencil or a pen,” one of them reported.

  “Very well—get in the car,” snapped Himmler.

  Von Reinhardt was pushed none too gently through the open door. Himmler and two of the guards followed, the four men sitting in the small compartment on two facing seats while another pair of guards entered the cab.

  “Macht schnell!” snapped Himmler, rapping on the panel that separated the back of the car from the driver’s compartment. He was rewarded with the roar of an engine, and in moments the car lurched away from the curb, following the lead car and trailed by three other vehicles as the convoy began to make its way southward through the dark, silent city.

  13 MARCH 1945

  SECOND SS PANZER DIVISION, KÜSTRIN, GERMANY, 0420 HOURS GMT

  Near midnight Lukas had realized that he was going through his ammunition very quickly, and he decided that he would have to be more careful in his selection of targets. An ordnance platoon had come around with a resupply earlier in the evening, but there was no guarantee that they would be back before dawn. And this battle, it seemed, would be resolved in the dark of the night.

  For a time there was a lull, and Lukas let his head fall forward onto his forearm. He almost fell asleep, then jerked upward with a start as a rattle of machine gun fire burst through the night. This was the coaxial gun on Peiper’s tank, chattering loudly as it sent a burst toward the no-man’s-land of the cratered landscape. Russians were moving there, hundreds of them charging forward, ignoring the dead who fell out of their ranks in ever increasing numbers.

  Lukas fired his Schmeisser, raking the enemy troops with a long burst until the last of his ammunition was exhausted. Finally he dropped the machine pistol, rolled down the ridge of his makeshift breastwork, and picked up the carbine that had been carried by his corporal. He crawled back up the pile of rubble and kept firing, taking care to aim with each shot, as he had been taught.

  The Panther, hull down in the rubble between two houses, fired round after round of armor-piercing ammo into the darkness. Somehow Peiper must have been able to see, because several of these shots found Russian tanks, setting off fiery explosions, leaving the T-34s as burning hulks spewing flames that brightened the battlefield for dozens of meters in every direction.

  Lukas saw an enemy soldier silhouetted against one of these ghastly flares. Even as the man dove for cover the young officer shot, saw his target flinch and roll over as the bullet struck home. But more tanks were visible now, at least a dozen illuminated by the fire. These opened up against his platoon, firing high explosive shells that blasted violently into the rubble, and sent shards of stone and steel zinging through the air.

  The Panther blasted away again and another Russian tank exploded, and then the night was full of sounds—gunfire and explosions, the curses of wounded and dying men, the bark of Lukas’ own rifle as he fired as fast as he could jack another bullet into the chamber. He heard a ghostly voice like something from a dream, as if his father was calling him in from the woods at the end of the day. It was a pleasant sound, and he concentrated on it, instead of the chaos of combat sounds. He fired again, loaded another clip, and still there was that distant voice.

  He was distracted when someone slapped his arm, and looked around to see that one of his men had crawled over to him and was trying to get his attention.

  “What is it?” asked the young officer.

  “There,” said the grenadier, pointing toward the hulking, battered Panther.

  “Vogel—come here!”

  The voice—it wasn’t a dream at all! Instead, it was Peiper calling to him from the hatch of the Panther. Staying low, Lukas scrambled over to the big panzer, coming up to the fender and looking apologetically upward. “I’m sorry, mein Standartenführer! I didn’t know—”

  Peiper waved his excuses away. “Listen, I have just talked to a runner from division HQ. The charges are taking longer than they anticipated, but they are going to try and blow the bridge just after dawn. I want you to take your platoon and bug out of here, do you understand? Get back across the bridge, and wait for me there!”

  “Leave you here, sir?” Lukas was surprised, and strangely reluctant to go.

  “Use the darkness, son! Remember, you are an officer—responsible for the lives of your men. Now get them together, and fall back. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” Lukas saluted.

  Peiper was right, of course—he, Lukas Vogel, Obersturmführer of the SS, was responsible for these men. He felt a flash of shame as he realized that he hadn’t even learned their names; now at least three of them were dead.

  His sense of shame grew as he jogged back to the position, and one by one collected the men from their foxholes. Two more had been killed in the firefight, but the survivors helped Wolfgang—the man whose leg had been shattered in the aerial bombardment—to rise up onto his good leg. With a comrade on each shoulder; he started hobbling back toward the bridge.

  Lukas waited until all of them had started to fall back, and then he came along behind—halting for a moment, then running back to retrieve the Schmeisser he had dropped after his ammo was exhausted. He jogged along, careful not to trip on the broken ground, trying to make out the road descending into the river valley, leading toward the bridge.

  He heard the crack of the Panther’s gun when he was just below the crest, and stopped to look back. He saw Peiper, tall above the turret hatch, holding binoculars to his eyes as he studied the enemy positions in the sporadic light of fire and flare. Those lights faded into darkness once again, and the SS colonel was gone.

  US ARMY AIR FORCE TRANSPORT COMMAND AIRFIELD, NEAR METZ, FRANCE, 0430 GMT

  Chuck Porter made his way from the briefing room, through the equipment hangar, and out onto the crushed-gravel surface of the taxiway. The sky was still dark, but all around him the great Allied air armada was thrumming and roaring with life, with energy, with barely restrained anticipation.

  He had learned in the briefing that this field was one of more than three dozen installations throughout England and France, each of which was a scene of similar controlled chaos on this chilly spring morning. Twin-engine Dakota transports were rumbling from their places along the flight line, while paratroopers were lined up just back from the runways, already organized into their single-plane “sticks.” One by one these files of men advanced to the doors in the C-47 fuselages. Each soldier was loaded with more than a hundred pounds of equipment, but they pulled themselves up and through the hatch with only a small assist from the jumpmaster—the NCO who was in charge of seeing the parachutists safely out the door over the jump zone.

  A captain was directing traffic as air crew and paratroopers were milling around near the hangars. Porter went up to the man and waited for him to finish directing a couple of lieutenants toward their unit.

  “Hello, Captain,” said the reporter. “Can you point me toward A Company, Captain Dickens’ plane?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Sorry—press, Chuck Porter with the AP.” He showed his pass, and the order sheet authorizing his passage on the transport.

  “Shit. Now we’re sending reporters along! You know you’re taking a place that could be used by a real fighting man?”

  “General Gavin assured me that he had enough transport for the Eighty-second Division, plus one reporter,” Porter said, hoping that the name of the division commander might carry a little weight with this pompous little martinet.

  It worked. The captain grimaced, but pointed. “Dickens is over there, second D
akota from the end of the line. Don’t get in the way.”

  “I won’t,” Porter promised, his muttered addendum—“jackass”—lost in the roar of powerful aircraft engines.

  He made his way to the transport, double-checked the number, and climbed aboard after the last of the paratroopers. The interior of the fuselage was a tangle of men and equipment, the soldiers sitting with their backs against the outer shell, their legs extending into the middle of the deck. Apologizing, and stepping carefully, Porter made his way to the front of the cabin, just behind the cockpit. He found Dickens seated there, poring over a map; the captain flashed him a grin as the reporter settled into the narrow gap beside him.

  “Ah, Porter. I was afraid you overslept, and were going to miss the ride.”

  “I wouldn’t miss this for the world, Captain,” Porter said. “Parachutes over Berlin—this might be the last big adventure of the war.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” the soldier, a veteran of landings in Sicily and Normandy, said. “Who knows what the Russians are going to think of this whole project?”

  “At least you guys will be on the ground before they hear about it,” Porter replied.

  He felt a little guilty. After all, he would be coming back here for a hot meal and a warm bed tonight, while the rest of these men would be on the ground in war-torn Berlin. Some of them would be wounded, others dead.

  “Well, do your best to make us look good,” Dickens said, as if reading the reporter’s mind. Porter laughed at the joke, not entirely sure if the paratrooper was kidding.

  The flight to Berlin would take a couple of hours. He had been briefed on the mission, knew that the All-Americans—the nickname of the Eighty-second Airborne Division—were charged with seizing Tempelhof airport, the largest network of airfields in the Berlin area. Other Allied airborne soldiers would try to capture other airports, a ring of them surrounding the German capital. Once the paratroops were on the ground and the airfields secured, a train of transport aircraft would begin to haul in supplies, weaponry, and reinforcements. By tomorrow night, Operation Eclipse would be over.