Rhinelander (Kirov Series Book 40)

by Schettler, John

  “Any movement reported in the Hurtgenwald?” asked Bradley.

  “No, they’re dug in deep, and I won’t waste good infantry in that fight. I’ll flank them through Julich. Abrams and Rose are in a dog fight up there with a couple German Panzer Divisions. Once I bust through, they’re finished. I’ll run their asses all the way to the Rhine.”

  It wouldn’t be quite that easy, but Patton had the right idea. The US 29th Infantry Division had pushed into the Hurtgenwald as far as the Todten Busch, a place called “Dead Man’s Moor.” It was only another couple kilometers, through Jagerhaus, the hunter’s cabin to Germeter, but Patton ordered the division to stand pat. Lines of bunkers stretched for miles on either side of the narrow forest road, and Paton thought they would soon be handed over free of charge if he turned the enemy flank at Julich. It was a decision that would prevent the gutting of one good US infantry division after another, to the great relief of the GI’s in the forest.

  Like the troops of the 352nd as they marched, the men of the 29th seemed uneasy under that dark, brooding forest canopy. Many of the trees had already been stripped bare of branches by mortar and artillery fire, but now stood like gaunt wraiths in the night. The men shirked from them, knowing that at any moment they might fling down a jagged limb to kill or maim. The woodland also seemed haunted by the dead from another time.

  So the breakthrough would not come in those woods, but farther north. Terry Allen’s Timberwolves joined with the 5th Infantry Division to take on the German 7th Panzer Division, and they were slowly stretching its lines to the breaking point. In Russia, the 7th Panzer might have easily foiled two Soviet rifle divisions, dancing about and slashing at the slower moving enemy. But here the Americans were so mobile that they could exploit any gap or weakness, and each infantry division had a full tank battalion and tank destroyer battalion attached. They were, in effect, all fast motorized divisions when they needed to be, and dogged veteran infantry when on foot.

  South of that action at Erklenz, the 6th Armored had challenged and prevailed over the Führer Grenadier Brigade . Now it was reinforced by the 4th Armored Cavalry to try and push towards Guddenrath or further east towards Grevenbroich. They slipped through the gap, and had the first objective in hand by noon on the 11th of October. And at Julich, Abrams was now being strongly reinforced by the 1st Armored Division.

  This intense pressure, with larger breakouts now seeming inevitable, would be prompt von Rundstedt and Guderian to put their plan for a general withdrawal behind the Rhine into motion. The north wing would fall back first, with troops withdrawing on Wesel, and through Kempen to Krefeld. Once that end of the front was safely back, then the forces arrayed for the defense of Munchen-Gladbach would slowly begin to pull back. This was mostly elements of the 59th, and 64th, 348th Divisions that had managed to escape east before the pocket trapped the rest just beyond the Elmpterwald forest.

  As these slower moving troops trudged east, the German mobile divisions struggled to hold the line south to Julich. In their turn, they would begin to fold back to stay abreast of the infantry to their north. Slowly, the Germans would make yet another well-coordinated withdrawal, all heading towards the last great defensive barrier in the west, the great flows of the River Rhine.

  Chapter 29

  The Soviet East Wind offensive against Ivan Volkov had been another iron steamroller, slowly closing in on two more great cities at the heart of Volkov’s empire. Volgograd, Saratov, and Samara on the Volga had been secured months ago, and the armies of Orenburg had been deliberately withdrawn to the east. Volkov’s strategy was to defend only the real core of his federation, cities like Uralsk, Magnitogorsk, Astrakhan, Baku, and of course, his capitol at Orenburg.

  Four armies cleared the whole of the Samara District, (7th Guards, 34th, 69th and 2nd Siberian), and those troops were soon pushing into the Orenburg District, where Volkov thought he would mount a stubborn defense. The ground was in his favor, as the Ural Mountains to the north, and the Ural River to the south, created a terrain funnel that narrowed as it approached the capitol. Trying to flank Orenburg to the north was almost impossible because of the Ural Mountains, and before it could be flanked to the south, the Soviets would have to deal with Uralsk, and force a crossing of the Ural River.

  Uralsk was his Metz, connected to Orenburg by road, river, and rail, and surrounded by numerous fortified positions. Trying to bypass it to the south meant movement through badlands, marshes, a major river crossing and then miles and miles of more wasteland with no roads whatsoever. The city was therefore invested on three sides by the 10th and 11th Guards, and the veteran Army of the Volga, which obtained a small bridgehead over the Ural.

  The massive 11th Guards Army attacked north of the city, with no less than nine Guards Rifle Divisions, four tank brigades, three breakthrough artillery divisions, and nine more regiments of rockets and other artillery. It was tailor made to reduce heavily defended positions, a pulverizing, grinding force that reduced the fortifications north of the city to utter ruins.

  Further south, at the mouth of the Volga, Volkov had retreated all the way to Astrakhan, where he ordered a defensive line about 30 kilometers west of the city. Like the defense in the north, as it fell back, the arms of the Volga would protect it on either side. Here the 4th Soviet Guards Army, and their 6th Army slowly pushed on that line, eventually grinding all the way to the city.

  In the Caucasus, two weaker Soviet armies, 37th and 57th, were enough to drive all the way to the Terek, where they waited for the bridging engineers to catch up so they could plan a crossing of that swift moving water barrier. The oil fields of Grozny would be their first objective, then they would drive to Makhachkala, and on to Baku. Here again, the terrain created a funnel, with the mountains on the left and the Caspian Sea on the right.

  So all of these final defensive areas were the best positions in Volkov’s entire empire, and he had planned to hold them for months while he tried to squeeze as much fissile material as possible out of his hidden centrifuge facilities, and make one last bomb.

  The loss of not only one, but two warheads in the disastrous airship adventures ordered by Himmler had enraged him. Himmler had been pressing him to deliver yet another warhead, wanting to use it to destroy Antwerp and deny that port to the Allies, and while he agreed in principle, he had no intention of ever giving the Germans as much as a rifle from this day forward.

  Then, when the Germans actually delivered on that promise, and struck at Antwerp with a warhead Volkov never believed they even possessed, he was again enraged.

  “They sit there acting like a starving man with a begging cup,” he said, “but all the while they have been stuffing their fat faces behind my back. I ask them for tanks and aircraft, and nothing comes. But yet Himmler had the nerve to ask me for another nice fat bomb. To hell with the Germans! I should have realized my position in the Axis was doomed all along. Now even the Japanese are putting out peace feelers, and if they collapse, I will soon have to deal with the Americans funneling tons of weapons, planes by the thousands, into the hands of that rascal Karpov.”

  “Nothing has been heard of him for a good long while,” said his intelligence chief, the latest in a series, as others had been summarily shot for incompetence in recent months.

  The enemy was upon Volkov, and every weapon he had would be used to fight the legions of Sergei Kirov. He planned to hold out at Orenburg to direct the defense of the capitol. Then he would repair to either Astrakhan or Baku, assuming either bastion was still controlled by his forces.

  In spite of every effort, the front could not hold back the vengeful red tide that Sergei Kirov unleased on Volkov. Orenburg was burned and destroyed by the Soviet Army on August 20 of 1944, and Astrakhan fell two weeks later in September. By September 15, the Soviets had taken Magnitogorsk, and were sending troops into the Urals to find Volkov’s secret caves hiding his enrichment facilities. There would be no more atomic bombs.

  Realizing his game was finally over
, Ivan Volkov himself had simply disappeared, but the Russians were avidly hunting for him, even as his once proud Orenburg Federation was reduced to smoking cinders by the Red Army. The last two weeks of September saw thirty divisions returning west to the German front, where a hundred more now sat waiting for Zhukov’s next great offensives. On October 5th, the war on the Orenburg front was declared over. Karpov’s Siberians shook hands with their Soviet Allies at the city of Orsk, and the month already fat with ample cause for celebration among the Soviets, was again an occasion to get the vodka flowing—another Red October.

  Some believed Volkov had fled across the Caspian on a dark, starry night, into the hinterland of his empire, the states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the vast plains of Kazakhstan. These places had long ago slipped from his iron grasp, and had not sent troops to serve Volkov for many long months. Somewhere in that wilderness, it was said he had a secret fortress or hidden hideaway, determined that Sergei Kirov would never take him captive and parade him through the war scarred streets of Moscow. Hitler was dead. Himmler was doomed, but Volkov would live, secretly plotting how he might again wrench the lines of fate to serve his dark will.

  Yet fate itself had other ideas for Volkov, and he would never again use his knowledge of a distant future time to cast a spell on the men of that age. What became of him was never clearly reported in the history of those days, as the shadows cast by this terribly long war lengthened over Germany and Japan.

  * * *

  The architect of the German defense in the east, the man who had ruled the south front for years, had finally risen to a higher post. Zeitzler’s heath had been failing, and he found the work on his shoulders too heavy to bear. In his last months at OKW, he had relied more on Manstein and Mödel for advice and support, instead of the other way around. On 1 July 1944, he asked Field Marshal Manstein to come to OKW, and there he convinced him to take over the reins of the entire army.

  So Germany’s master strategist, a man who would have been hounded from command by Hitler in March of 1944, was installed in the highest command of the Army. Mödel would continue as head of Armeegruppe Center, and for Armeegruppe South, Zeitzler had selected Generaloberst Johannes Friessner as his final act, and Manstein approved.

  The Field Marshal had engineered the defense behind the Dnieper, satisfied that the infantry was in well-fortified lines, and there were local reserves available. The drain on Panzer production sent to the West left the Ostfront with only a few formations, but they were veterans. Hermann Balck left 11th Panzer to take control of the 48th Panzerkorps, which would still retain his old division, along with 12th Panzer, and the Grossdeutschland Division. They were positioned behind Kiev, where a massive buildup had been detected. In the south Kirchner’s 57th Panzerkorps had 5th and 56th Panzer Divisions, and the 29th Motorized between Kremenchug and the Dnieper Bend. South of Zaporozhe, on the lower Wotan Line between that city and Melitopol on the Black Sea coast, there was 17th Panzer and 14th Motorized in reserve, with 22 Panzer available in Rumania.

  The line itself was held by 11 infantry korps fielding 40 divisions. That was a force almost equal to all the infantry formations left in the West Front, though there were far more mobile divisions there (14). This was but one segment of the long lines of battle in the east. Mödel commanded an army group on the same scale, another 43 divisions to the north of Kiev, and he was also now senior to Generaloberst Georg Lindemann, who had 14 more divisions on the line of the Neva River as Armeegruppe North.

  While it still seemed a strong and resilient force, it was about to be hit by a storm of epic proportions, beginning with a massive assault over the Dnieper. It was the first time the Soviets had tested that line in many months, and it came after exhaustive preparation, though it was now a full year late. It would be a battle that would dwarf the operations dreamed up by Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery and Bradley. Here Zhukov, Vasilevskiy and Konev would command all of 2.6 million men, along a front nearly 380 miles long, from Kiev to the Sea of Azov.

  Over 34,000 guns would be massed against 2,500 on the German side. 4000 tanks, most all newer T-34s and heavy SK-1 and SK-2 models amassed in 20 tank and mechanized corps would be pitted against six German Panzer and two motorized divisions fielding no more than 500 tanks and assault guns. In the skies, the Soviets would throw 4,800 planes against 600 for the Germans.

  It was sheer bludgeoning mass, on a scale never seen in the war before. It dwarfed every other offensive mounted to that time, and it would shatter the German front in so many places that it simply could not be held. Two weeks into the chaos of that action, OKW was desperately looking for any reserves they could get their hands on, and troops built and staged to the West would now all be pulled east in the wake of Steiner’s SS Panzerkorps.

  Unlike the real historical battle, the Germans had not anchored their divisions to a chain of fortified cities, so there was a much more flexible defense. Yet the Germans had been fooled by the opening of the attack all along the Dnieper. As mobile reserves were rushed south into the Ukraine, the main blow against Armeegruppe Center was waiting to be unleashed under the code name Bagration . It surged over the Germans front, isolating and destroying division after division, until entire Korps were simply erased from the orders of battle, and then entire armies. Attack was so strong that the only solution was to relinquish ground, trading for space for time.

  * * *

  In the old history, the business at hand now on the Ostfront was long ago resolved, but here the Soviet East Wind offensive had cost them many months. They were quick to catch up on that long delay, storming over the river in so many places that the German Panzer reserves could not stem the tide. The Panzers were pulled in to close the gaps, then they became the new line troops, until things would break again, and nothing was left to fill that new gap. It had happened that way time and time again in the West, and now it was happening here. There would be no more miraculous “Backhand Blows,” and no daring rescues by Steiner.

  So even as von Rundstedt and Guderian commiserated with one another, and mused over their possible retreat behind the Rhine, the Soviets had finished the final liberation of Ukraine and most of Belarus. They were now driving on the Polish frontier, and Manstein was off with his cadre of staff officers trying to stop them.

  The unfinished business in the Rhineland would be the last time the two sides would go at one another in earnest, a real “stand-up fight” as Patton would describe it. These were the last battles where the Germans had any chance of holding the line. If the Rhine was crossed in greater force, all odds would be on the swift moving Allied divisions.

  Orders went out to all division level commands to state the general strategy of OB West in the coming weeks.

  “The army will effect a gradual and carefully coordinated withdrawal from the Rhineland, and assume positions as ordered on the east bank of the Rhine, which will become the new main line of resistance. Every effort is therefore required to salvage all operational equipment, weapons, and transport. Bridgeheads west of the Rhine will be established in the following areas: Wesel, Köln and Bonn.”

  In the meantime, on the US side 10th Armored was pulled out of the Hurtgen sector and replaced by 5th Armored as the armored reserve there. The Tiger Division would roll north to join the unit that it had trained up with, the Thunderbolt 11th Armored Division. All of its new T26 Pershing tanks had arrived at Le Havre and it was coming north, with both divisions now designated III Armored Corps under General John Anderson. It would be assigned to Simpson’s 9th Army and mustered behind Goch to breathe fresh air into his push for the Rhine.

  Simpson had a lot on his list. He still had to take cities like Kevelaer, Geldern, Lintfort, Rheinberg in the north, pushing up to the Wesel area. In the south he needed to push through Kempen to Krefeld, and take the large city complex formed by Munchen-Gladbach and Rheydt. Securing the west bank of the Rhine from Dusseldorf north was his charge, and those two extra armored divisions were much needed.

 
; Patton would clear the west bank from Dusseldorf south all the way to Bonn and Remagen. He had already taken the great fortified zone around Aachen, but the Hurtgenwald still remained a stalwart defensive position for the enemy, and he would need both Julich and Duren before he could get at Köln. As the Allied armies continued their offensive, it soon became clear that the Germans were executing a phased and well planned withdrawal. They fell back, establishing their bridgeheads at Wesel, Koln and Bonn as planned, mainly to give the engineers all the time they needed to prepare the bridges for destruction along the Rhine.

  If Operation Bagration had not come when it did, the Western Allies would have had to fight until Christmas and beyond to push back the stubborn German defense and clear the west bank of the Rhine as Eisenhower wanted. Now, with all available Panzers forced to hold front line positions in the West, the order to retreat behind the Rhine was the only way to build a reserve there.

  Throughout its history, the Rhine had always been the great moat around Germany’s castle. After fighting for over two months for the forward defensive zones of the Siegfried Line west of that river, now the Germans were compelled to finally pull back across that moat. For the next two weeks, that carefully coordinated withdrawal would slowly yield the Rhineland to the Allies, and in the north, Student would abandon Apeldoorn and take his 1st Parachute Army behind the Ijssel.

  The days of October fell like the autumn leaves, the weather cooling as the last major withdrawal of the war would be staged by the Germans. The army was hard pressed, but still a proud and effective fighting force. It would only be the disaster in Russia that would finally destroy the Wehrmacht’s power to really wage war, and while Manstein and Mödel toiled to save what they could and rebuild the front along the Polish Frontier, von Rundstedt and Guderian settled the troops in behind the Rhine.