O’Connor was standing in the broken streets of Doesburg on the Ijssel, holding a long sturdy stick of wood he had taken in hand from a broken tree. He heard the artillery firing, the crack of the guns and the thump of the shells hitting the enemy positions. With each shellfall, he would bring that stick down in time, like a conductor leading a ghastly orchestra, and in his mind he was reading the score aloud to himself… pound them, pound them, pound them….
He had every confidence that he would break through, and was now moving up his last reserve, the 2nd Canadian Division. There was already a gap opening near the town of Noordink, east of Brummen, where the Guards, aided by 29th Armored Brigade, had smashed their way through elements of the 10th SS Division. Yet even as it yawned open, the 21st Panzergrenadier Regiment was coming up at dawn to seal it off, Bittrich’s last reserve.
The morning sun was blood red in the heavy smoke of the battle. As if shaken from the cold sky by the thunder of the British guns, a light snow began to fall… soft and slow. It was as if nature was trying to bandage up the bright red wound on the ground below, where so much blood was being shed that morning.
The Canadians crossed the Ijssel over six bridges near Brummen, and pressed on towards Noordink. They would be O’Connor’s Coup de Grâce, and hopefully it would be strong enough to reach a decisive end. Five companies, a mix from both British armored divisions, were already through the gap, and pushing east, while the bulk of those divisions lay heavily upon Bayerlein’s intrepid troops. He had been called upon, time and time again, to rush his men in to save one impossible situation after another.
O’Connor knew they were there, like Napoleon’s Grenadier Guards at Waterloo, the serried ranks tight and proud, the tall bearskins leaning into the shot and shell. He would do just what Wellington did on that fateful day, and put every gun to them, every cannon. That was the formula for victory—where the line was thin, it would be broken, where it was heavy, it would be relentlessly pounded by the artillery until it crumbled. The very fact that the Germans had to concentrate to be able to form a defense that could resist the onslaught, was in turn a liability when the artillery would fall so heavily on their lines.
Inevitably, this grind of attrition would give way to a strike-slip breakthrough, and then the battle would become one of maneuver again. That was something the Germans once excelled at, but there would be no reserves behind the line to answer the call this time. The breakthroughs that would be achieved on the second day would unanswerable, fatal, final. Both von Rundstedt and Guderian could see it, feel it coming, and as was the case in the old history, there was only one thing they could now contemplate doing.
“They will get through and gallop over the North German plain like a horde of barbarians,” said von Rundstedt. “We cannot hope to try and keep pace with them to fight a battle of maneuver, but if we move into the Ruhr, we have supplies, large urban zones with heavy concrete buildings, cellars, sewers, a veritable Volgograd, only on a scale many times larger.”
“Do that, and they will simply encircle us there,” said Guderian, and that will be the end—the largest pocket of the war.”
“Can you see anything else happening here? At least we could try and hold out there.”
“And negotiate surrender….” Guderian’s words were heavy with shame, but they both knew that was what things had come to now. All the many battles these Generals had fought now lay upon them like scars. A weariness settled over them both. There were no more expedient measures to be taken. There was nothing on the trains that could save them now, not even the Schwerepanzers of General Berg, which were on a train taking them somewhere else.
* * *
“Quite the history lesson,” said General Berg. He was sitting with the two men that had been with him when this incredible adventure had first begun for them, his Adjutant Neumann, and Leutnant Beyer. They had been following orders, as all good soldiers would, mustered on the eve of what threatened to become a very serious war in 2021. The Russians had been maneuvering for days, and Berg’s brigade of heavy Panzers had been ordered to a base near the Fulda Gap—but then strangely re-routed, to a time and place they had only known in the history books, or from the stories told to them by their great grandfathers. Now they knew it in a way that cut them all to the bone.
They had endured the madness, shaking their heads clear only to see the dream would not go away, or the nightmare, as it had become. In spite of the insanity of it all, they were soldiers, and they fought, in the Pas-de-Calais, north of the Loire, in the retreat to the Siene, and then in Operation Rhinelander . In all those battles, their ranks had thinned as their ammunition dwindled. The great unstoppable armor they had brought to their ancestors would soon be nothing more than heavy metal shells. Now they were enroute to what would surely be their last battle here, but Berg was worried, and the other two younger officers could see it in his face. The dark hair was not meticulously swept back as was his habit, and his blue eyes had a distant, almost vacant look in them.
“Yes sir, quite more than we ever expected,” said Leutnant Beyer.
“Those that are no longer with us paid the highest price,” said Berg, “and I know all of us were willing to risk that cost once we committed ourselves here. But it seems the weight of history is too much for us to move, even with those marvelous tanks back on the flatcars behind us.”
Stabhauptmann Neumann spoke up. “What happens to us if things turn out as they did in our history?” he asked.
“Oh, I think it is not a matter of if, but simply a matter of time,” said Berg, hearing the irony in his words even as he spoke them. “We may fight, and yes, more of our people may die in that effort, but hopefully, most will survive this last battle. Yet the thought of our vehicles and equipment being captured is somewhat troubling. You know what the Americans will do once they get their hands on it. They will spirit it away to the United States, and study it endlessly. But gentlemen, we must not allow that to happen. Not because I have any particular ill will toward the Americans, in spite of what they are doing to Germany now. But we are still in a test tube world here, insofar as electronics is concerned. Our vehicles are packed with solid state, military grade microelectronics, computers, touch screens, sensors. It will be like handing a monkey a loaded pistol.”
“You think they could discover how to engineer our electronics?”
“I doubt it, but consider the questions it will raise. It would be as though we stumbled upon a UFO crash site in our time, and recovered advanced alien technology. And there it will be, in the shape of these weapons of war. What I have seen here has been horrific beyond my imagining, but the war we were about to fight in our own time would have been even more terrible.”
“Everything seems to have slipped forward,” said Beyer. “This battle wasn’t fought until March of 1945.”
“Then this whole sad affair will come to an end all that much sooner,” said Berg, “and good riddance. Gentlemen, if we survive this, we will have hard lives ahead of us. We will know things that no one else on this earth is privy too, and that will be a hard burden to carry.”
“But sir,” said Beyer, “I will know what stocks to buy. It should not be difficult for us to build comfortable lives here, or even raise funds to help with the recovery of Germany.”
“Oh? There is something you may not have considered,” said Berg, his eyes dark and serious now.
Chapter 33
“First off, you forget the interrogations that are coming,” said Berg, “for all of us. They will want to know everything about us, and I think it may not be easy to slip from their grasp and ever lead those comfortable lives you speak of. We have been state secrets here all this time, moving in the dark, with heavy tarps always covering our vehicles on the trains. You see, even Feld Marshal Kluge seemed to immediately realize that the anomaly of our presence here was something that needed to be kept hidden as long as possible.”
“But the troops of this time have seen us fight. The Brandenburg
ers fought with us, hand in glove.”
“Yes, they’ve seen our marvelous tanks, but in their minds, they may have thought of them as the next Wunderwaffe coming out of the factories, a step up from the Königstigers . I am certain that is what they were most likely told.”
“It is still strange that this history is not one we could ever read about in our own books,” said Neumann. “Königstigers , these I know about, but they have Panzers here that were never even built in this war. The Königslöwe , and all that came before it in that line. This is also a complete aberration.”
“Yes,” said Berg, “it seems we have been in good company here, but there is another thing to realize. “I am 32 years old, born in the year 1989. I know it is 45 years from now, but I cannot help wondering what will happen on that day if I manage to survive here that long. I would be 77, but that is not the whole of it. My Parents were in their thirties when I was born, so you see they are not even on this earth yet. I believe my father was a man about my age when I was born, so that would mean he is born in the mid-1950’s. And as for his parents, my grandparents, well, they are out there somewhere now. I assume they survive, because I am here to pose this question, but all of this is most disconcerting.”
“Will you look for them, sir?” asked Beyer.
“That is a good question. I think I would be greatly tempted to do so, but yet, there is something about that which seems… dangerous. Of course, I could never tell them who I really was. You see, we will all have to face some rather thorny issues in our lives here. Our presence here is changing things. Who can say that matters in this topsy-turvy world, but it is a fact. Anything we might do in the days ahead will also change things, however subtly, and it would be impossible to predict the consequences. Every shot we have fired here that took a life, has made an unalterable change in this history. As to how it is so different from what we know, that remains a mystery.”
Newmann was quiet for some time. “Sir,” he finally said. “What if this happened to others?”
“What? You mean to say that others may have fallen into this same web? Well, since we can’t even say how this happened to us, I think we might never know.”
“But it could at least account for the changes we’ve seen,” said Neumann. “In fact, it might actually stand as good evidence that others have had this happen to them. Then they may have done things, just as you said, and that may be the reason we have this history turned on its ear.”
Berg would never know that an old friend of his had done exactly that, and was, at that very moment, leading the breakout effort with 6th Guards Armored Brigade near Emmerich. He had met then Lieutenant Reeves in Germany during NATO exercises, and knew him well, but never once imagined that Reeves, and his entire unit, had suffered the same strange fate as his own 21st Panzer Brigade.
They might have met each other in the heat of battle, and came close to doing so on more than one occasion. But somehow fate had conspired to avoid that encounter, for unfathomable reasons they would never comprehend. Sharing the madness with Reeves on the radio might have been a comfort to him, but then there they would be, two friends from a future time when England and Germany were good allies. There they would be, listening to one another across that deadly space between them, and knowing each one was there to kill the other. But it would never be.
“Perhaps Neumann, but don’t bother yourself trying to sort it all out. We have only to mind our own business here, our own fate. Yet I think these new orders we have from Kluge are part of this same discussion.”
“What do you mean, sir?” asked Beyer.
“We’re to go through Nuremburg to Munich. There is no battle there, so I think Kluge is thinking to get us out of the limelight. When I pressed him on this, he told me there were underground facilities south of Munich in the Alps. I think he wants to hide his new toys.”
“But we aren’t heading south sir,” said Neumann.
“True,” said Berg, “because the Allied bombers have been pounding Frankfurt, so they routed this train through Kassel. We will continue on down through Fulda, and on south through Schweinfurt and Nuremberg.”
“Interesting,” said Beyer. “That will take us the same way we first went before all this started, “at least as far as Schweinfurt.”
“Yes, I suppose it will. Well, get some sleep, and just hope the night fighters do not find our train. Who knows, we may just get through Munich before the Allies.”
He gave them a thin smile, but there was no comfort in it.
* * *
The snow that night was a blessing, for it kept the bombers away. They would ride on, lulled by the sound of the train, huddled behind the drawn blinds. Berg looked out for a brief time, gazing up at the silver bright stars through a clearing in the clouds, then he folded his arms and tried to return to a fitful sleep.
Some hours later, he awoke to find the car was in complete darkness. He could barely make out the shadowy forms of the other men. Then one moved, Beyer, leaning towards him from the opposite seat.
“Did it wake you sir?” he whispered. “Did you see it?”
“See it? What are you talking about, Beyer?”
“We went into the tunnel, sir—the very same one we went through near Schweinfurt. It was very strange.”
“Strange? In what way?”
“There were no lights at first. Everything was black, but then I began to perceive a dull glow. I looked out the window and it seemed the tracks themselves were all lit up behind us. Then it all faded away, just as we came out of the tunnel a moment ago.”
Neumann had gone off to the next car, but now he appeared at the far door, stumbling as he came. “Sir!” he said excitedly. “A message from Augustdorf—from division HQ!” He extended his cell phone to the General, an excited look on his face, eyes wide and bright in the glow from the phone. Most every cell phone would have long ago expended its battery power, but Neuman was one to always find a tank or vehicle to recharge. He had been idling the time away, playing games, looking at his old photos, and inwardly hoping for the thing that had just happened—contact with home!
Berg took the phone, certain it was a mistake, but sure enough, it had come in on the Army Staff network, and he saw the correct prefix code. That was something Neumann always minded for him.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “They got through to us—but how could the signal travel back in time like this?”
“Sir, maybe it didn’t,” said Neumann. “Maybe we went forward —listen!” He reached over, tapping an icon to get net-band radio, and it was there. A song was playing, and it was music made by an artist in their own time—2021.
“You are certain you are not just playing your own music?”
“Yes sir, that is a broadcast signal on the military net. See for yourself.”
Berg stared at the message again. HQ wanted to know why they were late, saying they had lost contact and could not raise the train on normal channels. They wouldn’t raise this one either, for it was an old relic from the past, a train from the Reichsbahn of WWII.
It was all a matter of time, thought Berg, remembering his words to the two young officers hours ago. Could it be true? Had they finally awakened from the nightmare? Were they indeed home in their own time?
“Neumann,” he said quickly. “Send a message back saying we were delayed at Schweinfurt—and a communications glitch took us off the network. I will make a full report later. My God, wake the men! Get some lights on. We have good news to share with them at last.”
Then Berg’s elation seemed to melt away. He had been worried about interrogations by the Allies after their inevitable capture in 1944, now he would have to answer some very difficult questions here. He was missing 15 tanks, and a good number of other vehicles, not to mention the 30% casualties his personnel had sustained. How in the world was he to ever answer for that?
They were approaching Schweinfurt now, and this time the dark horizon was warmly lit by the glow of the city lights. What in the
world had happened? He immediately sent orders forward to the engineer to halt the train. For the next hour, he would test the waters around him, listening to the news, and connecting the brigade back into the network, but what he heard there was not promising. He needed time with the troops, time to sort this through and get their bearings again. How could any of them ever explain what had happened to them?
He would not have long. Things in the long yearned for homeland of 2021 were not good. Tensions had been rising precipitously with the Eurasian Alliance. That was why they had been ordered to the training zone in the first place. Soon he would receive an ominous second message from Division HQ. The planned billet and training period at Hindenburg Kaserne near Wurzburg was cancelled. Instead the brigade was to re-route immediately through Bamberg, Bayreuth and then northeast to Dresden. They were headed for the Polish frontier….
* * *
There was a strange historical echo about it all, for even as Steiner arrived in Poland in late 1944 to confront the relentless Soviet advance, Berg and his cohorts soon learned that Russian military forces of 2021 had entered the republic of Belarus, and were now moving towards the Polish frontier. Apparently the old breakaway republic was renewing its love affair with Mother Russia. Putin had engineered treaties of cooperation with Belarus long ago, and it had been leaning closer and closer into the embrace of Russia ever since. Its six defense brigades were about to join hands with six more brigades of the Russian elite 1st Guards Army, and together, they had begun to assemble on the Polish frontier.
That nation had been invaded from two sides in 1939 to begin the great conflagration of WWII in Europe, and it was now seeing the same old foes mustering on its borders. Berg’s brigade was to join the remainder of 1st Panzer Division in Dresden. Germany’s other heavy division, the 10th Panzer, had been ordered to deploy east of Berlin. Together they would field eight brigades, and the only other division in the modern German Army was a light airmobile force called the Rapid Forces Division.
Rhinelander (Kirov Series Book 40) Page 27
