Rhinelander (Kirov Series Book 40)

by Schettler, John

  Kirov nodded heavily.

  “Very well, General Manstein. That is all acceptable to me. Forgive me, but before I celebrate, or order the churches of this broken city to ring their bells in jubilation, I must retire to my chambers with a good stiff drink… and weep….”

  Chapter 35

  And so it would end, with von Rundstedt standing in much the same way before Eisenhower, who asked that both Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel, and Gunther Kluge attend the meeting, and sit at the table opposite Patton, Bradley, O’Connor, Montgomery and many other Generals from every other nation that had answered Britain’s desperate call to arms in 1939. Among them was Admiral Döenitz for the Kriegsmarine, and Hermann Goring for the Luftwaffe. Heinrich Himmler would refuse to attend the meeting, and was immediately arrested by the German Military Police, along with men like Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and many others.

  That night, for the first time in so many years, no bombers took to the skies, and no fighters rose from the fields to seek their prey. The long barrels of a hundred thousand artillery pieces sat gaunt and grey as dusk came on the 1st of December, until that falling orb bathed them in a deep crimson and gold. The tanks and armored cars sat grim and silent, as if frozen, and down from the skies above, ‘silent, and soft, and slow,’ came the drift of white snow.

  Troops from divisions all across Europe sat in the cold, slowly receiving the news that their struggle was finally over. It was prefaced by stiff orders concerning the behavior and deportment of any soldier tasked as part of the occupation force of Germany. There would be no looting, no entry into the homes of any noncombatant, no summary judgment on the roadside with a pistol, under pain of severe penalties. Peace had to begin somewhere, and it would not begin here with the Allies kicking the enemy in the stomach while he was down. That small grace, undeserved but still given, did much to begin to heal the world that had been broken for so long by the scourge of war. Finally, after five years of destruction, murder, terror and severe privation, it was das ende….

  * * *

  In spite of every advantage the Germans had secured in those dangerous early years, taking Gibraltar, Malta, invading the Canary Islands, plunging into Syria and Iraq, it all came to naught. This was largely because Germany did not have the naval forces, even with the captured French ships, to control the Med. The Luftwaffe slowly was matched and then bested by the combined Allied air forces, and that fatal loss of sea and sky would soon doom the troops battling for control of the ground. Only a limited number of divisions could be sustained in North Africa and the Middle East, and it was a force the Allies could easily match and then overcome.

  Rommel once seemed invincible, until the coming of the British 7th Armored Brigade put a stop to his rampage at Bir el Khamsa. His subsequent stabs at Tobruk were also deflected, and his stubborn defense on the Gazala line was broken by the thunder of those heavy Challenger II Tanks. Kinlan’s brigade, save Reeves and his small detachment, met its fate at Tobruk, in an event that was never really understood or explained, and covered up, as many other things in this war were hidden away.

  After that it was all one long retreat for Rommel, to Mersa Brega, El Agheila, Tripoli, the Mareth Line and into Tunisia. The last German offensive there was met and defeated by General George Patton, who would then become the great nemesis of the Wehrmacht when the Allies first seized Sardinia and Sicily in 1943, and then stormed into Southern France on September 1st of that year.

  Rommel would face Patton there again, thinking to finally best him with one great offensive in Operation Valkyrie , but the dogged American General prevailed, and continued his relentless push north to the River Loire. The fighter attack that took Rommel out of the war was symbolic of all that would follow in France. Air superiority became air supremacy, and that would doom Germany, laying waste to one city after another. Not even the alarming early use of atomic weapons, this time by the Axis Powers, would have much real impact on the war.

  London was spared the scourge of atomic fire, largely due to the efforts of Argos Fire and her SM-3 Missiles, and New York City was spared by Karpov and Fedorov when the fought that unexpected duel with enemy airships over Greenland. While both Leningrad and Antwerp, not to mention Peenemünde, paid a heavy price, the introduction of atomic weapons had an effect that was more political than military on the actual course of the war. It sent the Russians east against Orenburg, buying Germany time to try and win a separate peace in the West, but it was not to be.

  As for the principle actors on the stage of this great war, General Eisenhower’s future fate was much like that in the old history. Political buttons labeled “I like Ike” would soon appear on the chests of thousands of voters in America, like medals awarded by the Supreme Commander himself. After presiding over the occupation of Germany as Military Governor of the US Zone, he would ably serve two terms as President of the United States. Ironically, after commanding so many armies, he ended his presidency with this dire warning: “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist ... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

  General George Patton avoided the auto accident that ended his life, served briefly in the occupation, but by 1946 was sidelined, along with most of the older senior officers that had led the US Armies into battle. Passed over by the appointment of Bradley as Chief of Staff, he retired in California, writing a detailed memoir of his campaigns and experiences with the deadly art of war that he so loved. Yet he ended by describing it all as a “great waste.”

  An Army man to the end, General Omar Bradley spent his last years of retirement in a special residence at Fort Bliss, Texas, dying at fate’s appointed date and time on the 8th of April 1981. He also posted a warning to future generations when he said: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

  On the British side, General Richard O’Connor eclipsed Montgomery and rose to first command the British Army of the Rhine, and then Chief of the General Staff. He would live to the ripe age of 92, dying just two months before Omar Bradley in June of 1981. As for Monty, he stayed in the army, but was shunted off to India like Wavell where he held two commands. After returning to England, he assumed the post of Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of Europe upon O’Connor’s retirement, a position he imagined himself to hold all throughout the actual war in his many sparring matches with Eisenhower.

  Admiral John Tovey’s fate was a mystery, and he was reported missing in late 1944, and never seen again. Another man who had conspired with him to first unravel the breadcrumb trail that led to the battlecruiser Kirov was also reported missing, one Alan Turing. Neither was ever seen again, and Tovey was acknowledged with a ceremonial burial at sea by the navy in 1945.

  Georgy Zhukov rose to the position of Minister of Defense under Kirov’s post-war regime until retirement and a stroke ended the General’s long military career in 1967. Sergei Kirov remained General Secretary of the Party until his assassination in December of 1951 under cloudy circumstances that were never adequately explained. After his death, a shadowy figure emerged from the ranks of the Politburo to eventually lead the Soviet Union into a long Cold War with the West.

  His name was Tyrenkov….

  After the demise of Tojo in Mid-1944, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto led the effort to seek a negotiated peace settlement in the Pacific War. The outcome of that end of the conflict still remained unsettled by VE-Day in Europe, which was finally declared on December 8, 1944. In the volumes ahead, Anton Fedorov will reveal what happened with that effort, and the fate of all those who fought there in 1945, including one Admiral Kita and the remainder of his task force, where we will visit again soon.

  We can say that Admiral Bull Halsey went on to become Admi
ral of the fleet, but did not attribute his successes in the war to his fast carriers, later claiming the war was really won by submarines, radar, planes, and bulldozers, in that order of importance. His senior officer, Chester Nimitz, went on as he did in the real history to command all Pacific Area Operations, and became Chief of all Naval Operations, where he was instrumental in advocating the conversion of all US submarines to nuclear power.

  In Germany, the senior officers were all rounded up, tried for accusations of war crimes, with some acquitted and some convicted, as in the real history. Heinrich Himmler escaped and tried to change his name to “Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger” to avoid recapture, but he was unmasked and subsequently killed himself with a cyanide pill as he had in the old history.

  General Heinz Guderian was released without charges in 1948, and later served as a military advisor for the organization of the new Bundeswehr before his death in May of 1954. Von Rundstedt found himself under a legal cloud after the war, but was never tried. Aging and in ill health, he was homeless and penniless after the war until West Germany finally granted him a military pension in 1951. He died two years later in February of 1953.

  Like von Rundstedt, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s reputation for fighting a clean war saved him from prosecution at Nuremberg. He wrote a long memoir of his war in the desert and also served as an honored advisor for the development of the new Bundeswehr. He would die in the year 1970, just one day before the birth of the man that had been his unseen nemesis in the desert, named Kinlan.

  Unlike Rommel, the Soviets has enough of a bone to pick with Manstein to see him serve six years in a Soviet prison, which was half the sentence he actually served. He was released in 1953 after Churchill advocated for clemency, where he wrote his memoir, famously titled “Lost Victories.”

  Goring, Jodl, Keitel, Ribbentrop and Bormann were convicted at Nuremberg and hanged, the latter not killed in any escape attempt in May of 1945. As for Gunther Kluge, having never been accused of any part of the plot to kill Hitler, he also served a six year prison term, and then sought retirement in the Bavarian Alps, where he would privately tell tales of the new Germany that would soon come. It was said that when he was told that the latest German tank was to be named the Leopard 1 in 1965, he simply smiled, and never said another word about the distant future he often talked about. He died, misty-eyed as he waited for that time, in 1973 at the age of 91—just sixteen years before the birth of a man who would later become Brigadier General Berg.

  * * *

  It had taken them 15 months to break the German defense in the West, three months longer than it did in the real history, even though this war would end before the new year would come. To beat back the iron of the German armed forces, the Western Allies would put 90 divisions into Europe, nearly 30,000 planes, 800,000 vehicles, with over 23,000 of them being tanks. They would expend over 40 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, half a billion machinegun rounds, and 25 million artillery rounds, getting deadlier than ever before by late 1944.

  That was just what the Western Allies fired off in those years. To that we must add all the millions of rounds fired by Sergei Kirov’s Soviets, by the Italians, Siberians, and of course by the Germans and Japanese. That was the way the modern powers threw stones at one another in the 1940’s, and millions died. All those rounds and shells reaped a terrible harvest, unlike any war to scourge the earth in human history. While it was clear that the war in the West could not have been won without the entry of the United States, it was the Soviet union that bore the greatest burden. Without Sergie Kirov’s survival and his continued crusade, Germany could have sent 90 more divisions to the West, and held Europe in its iron fist for decades after.

  The British Commonwealth nations raised nearly 18 million men under arms for all services. The United States then added another 16.3 million, making a total of 34.3 million. The Soviet Union raised that amount by itself, nearly 34.5 million under arms in all services, yet comparing the totals of missing and dead, we see where the greatest sacrifice was laid on the altars of war. The British Commonwealth totaled about 580,000 dead or missing, and the United States listed a little over 407,000, for a total under one million in the West. On the Ostfront , however, the losses piled up to a staggering 10,725,000 Soviet and Siberian dead or missing—ten times the death rate as the Western Allies.

  As for the Axis Powers, Germany would raise 18.2 million soldiers, and see nearly a third of them killed or missing, a brutal death rate of 30%, with another 33% wounded in action. Japan would raise 6.3 million and lose 1.3 million of those, a death rate of about 20%. Italy would raise a little over three million, but lose only 240,000 to the KIA category, about 8%. By comparison with the long war in Iraq, (8 years and 9 months), the United States sent about 150,000 troops there, and had 4,424 killed or missing, just under 3%.

  In the three years after the US joined the war in the West, the Allies liberated and occupied ten countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. To do so, they would engage and defeat a professional German army that had seemed unbeatable in the early years of the war. Consider that in light of the recent American war in a single Middle Eastern country, Iraq, which lasted three times longer, and ended with no clear American victory in hand, and an incipient “Islamic State” arising that would take another five years to beat down. Wars have been getting longer and far less decisive than in the time of WWII, but also far less costly in military deaths. As for civilian deaths, that misery we can seldom ever really measure.

  The statisticians would still be at work for several more months in the Pacific. After seeing the US occupy all three islands in the Marianas, Japan’s next big battle looked to be in the Philippines. The same debate over that would be waged again, with Nimitz thinking it unnecessary, but MacArthur insisting it was essential. Big Mac saw himself liberating his old adopted colony, and then leaping into Formosa. Nimitz wanted Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and then thought the Japanese mainland itself would be ripe for attack.

  Our history buff, Anton Fedorov, will see his curiosity about the war he was leaving behind lead us to what happened in those final months of the Pacific, but this narrative will not be going there in the labored detail the bulk of the war has been presented since we all found ourselves marooned in these Altered States.

  MacArthur leaves us well enough with this last epitaph: “Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain with death — the seas bear only commerce — men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world lies quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you… I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way…. Men since the beginning of time have sought peace… military alliances, balances of powers, leagues of nations, all in turn failed , leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”

  So ends this alternate history of the Second World War, and as we have seen, the more things change, the more they stay the same…. Now, we have other matters to attend to, the fate of all the main characters in the story as they each have a part to play in yet another war. They will all meet again, Fedorov, Karpov, Volsky, and the other officers aboard Kirov , Gromyko and his intrepid Kazan, Fairchild and Company aboard Argos Fire, Brigadiers Kinlan and Berg, all in the world they came from before their incredible journeys in time. There they will find that MacArthur’s plaintive and ominous warning on the deck of the ‘Mighty Mo’ when Japan finally surrendered, was not heeded.

  As this story now returns to the year 2021, we will all soon hear the bony knuckled knock of Armageddon on the door, and it will be up to our intrepid heroes to face, fight, win through or perish in that conflict, for that is where Fedorov and Karpov wi
ll now lead us with their convoluted scheme to try and prevent the ship from ever returning to the past.

  So now, without further delay, ‘let us go there, you and I, as the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient, etherized upon a table….’ [6]

  Chapter 36

  They had spent three weeks looking for that elusive storm, one that might be powerful enough to ride off to another time, but after several attempts, surfing the cold arctic winds, they still remained marooned in the past.

  Fedorov then thought they might look for a volcano, as that had been a means of being blown through time in their many exploits, but the odds of catching one while it was erupting were dismally small. It would not be wind or fire that would eventually send Tunguska on to the next adventure we will soon join, but something completely unexpected.

  “Why don’t we go back to Siberia,” Karpov suggested.

  “What?” Fedorov was surprised. “We are way beyond 1908-deep in the past. What would be the point? The Tunguska Event will not have happened yet. And if you’re thinking there’s a railway inn out there, cross that one off your list as well. That needed the Tunguska Event as a first cause. Besides, there is probably nothing at Ilanskiy but ice and snow.”