Fox On The Rhine (40 page)

His eyes focused on a ridge line, where lofty pines waved against the sky.

Rommel’s curiosity was piqued. This must be why Himmler had sent him here. Another of the Nazi “secret weapons”--but this man Galland thought he had something, and Galland did not seem the sort of man to be easily impressed.

The sound abruptly peaked at a piercing shriek, and at the same time a dozen streaking shapes exploded into view. These were aircraft, he knew, but like no other planes he had ever seen.

Holding a tight formation, flying at perhaps two hundred meters over the field, the twelve planes swept toward the airbase. In a blinding, deafening instant they were overhead, and then as quickly past, shrinking with impossible speed into the distance. Rommel watched in amazement as the formation scattered, four to left, four to the right, while the middle four to all appearances rocketed straight up into the air, shooting away from the ground in a gravity-defying ascent that seemed to defy all logic, everything the Desert Fox had come to understand about airplanes.

He looked more carefully as the formation reunited and made another pass, this time at more like six hundred meters of altitude. Now he could see that these were twin-engined craft, though there was none of the growling snarl that he associated with unmuffled gasoline engines and spinning propellers. Instead, there seemed to be trails of flame spilling from each engine, and these became visible as circles of incredible heat as the fighters gradually climbed into the sky.

“The world--and this includes the American Air Forces--has never seen anything like them before,” Galland said, with no attempt to conceal his extreme pride. “And we are keeping them secret, but only for a little while longer.”

“These are the Me-262 fighter aircraft,” Rommel said, certain of his judgment. He was aware of the development program in general terms, though he’d never seen one of the craft before.

“Indeed.”

“But will we have them in numbers, sufficient to make a difference?” he asked.

“That is part of my plan,” Galland replied. “We are holding them back, gathering a number of Gruppen--including a full Geschwader right here--at Luftwaffe bases throughout Germany. Soon, the time will be right. The Americans will send their bombers into the heart of our country and be met with quite a surprise... and once again we will have a realistic chance of gaining control of the sky. At least for a period of time. A long enough period of time for the Desert Fox to change a few things on the ground, hein?”

An hour later Rommel was sitting in the back of his command car, with Carl-Heinz driving him out of the airbase and onto the road leading into the Bavarian hills. The Desert Fox leaned back in the seat, thinking.

He was not certain of victory--he was far too much of a pragmatist for that. But, for the first time in years, since his magnificent panzerarmee had been shattered in the dust of the African desert, he allowed himself to believe that his country once again had a chance.

578 Squadron Base, Wendling, Norfolk, England

Staff Sgt. Frank “Digger” O’Dell
Wendling, Norfolk, England
October 5, 1944

Mrs. Lucy O’Dell
Roxboro, North Carolina

Dear Mama,

I’m sorry that it’s been a few weeks since I wrote last, but I’m well and everything is pretty good here. We’ve been flying a lot of missions lately, and in between we’ve been doing maintenance and other work. And--well, I’ve met someone.

We get some days off, because although there’s maintenance, between raids we’re really not all that busy, and Tony Hutt and I usually go into Wendling, and there’s a pub we like to go to, and that’s where I met Maura. She’s from Ireland, though her daddy lives in London, and when she heard my last name she at first thought I was from Ireland, and I told her that my family was.

Now I wish I’d listened harder to some of the stories that Grandpa and Granny told about the Old Country, because it would have helped me make conversation with her. Anyway, Maura works in a local dairy, and she’s a very nice girl. You’d like her, Mama.

The raids have been big business, and when a raid is on, there isn’t a lot of time for anything else. The battle order normally comes out at five o’clock in the evening, and then you know that you’re going to have to fly the next morning.

I usually don’t have a lot to do until we’re getting pretty deep into enemy territory, and then depending on the number of enemy fighters they send up sometimes I’m really busy and sometimes there isn’t a target for me to shoot at.

We did fly one raid to a town called Schafhausen, and we were attacked by twenty to thirty Me-109s with light-colored bellies, dark on top. Several of them were camouflaged with white stripes so they looked kind of like P-5 Is. I fired at one fighter and he broke away right under us. He came in right under my waist window and he obviously didn’t want to end up on the tail because the tail gunner has the best shot at any fighter because he doesn’t have to worry about any kind of deflection. This fellow broke away so close that I could see the pilot sitting in the cockpit. I had my gun shooting straight down at the time he was breaking away under us, trying to hit him. I fired at another fighter that trailed black smoke but there were no flames. I didn’t see any pieces flying off the aircraft but it was not unusual to see a German fighter trail black smoke even if you didn’t hit him.

The Germans are burning a synthetic fuel made from coal and God knows what else in their fighters.

When a fighter is coming in on you, you’re closing pretty fast. What they’re trying to do is get out about three or four thousand yards in front of you and a thousand feet above you and roll over and start firing. This way he flies what is called a Pursuit Curve and he always ends up on your tail unless he breaks away before he ends up back there.

Now when this fellow broke away under us, I could see him trailing black smoke. But when they start in on you, they throttle back so that they don’t close so fast and then when they start to break away they almost invariably trail black smoke because they hit the throttles and give it all the power they’ve got to break away fast when they’re in close.

That’s why I’m pretty sure I hit that fellow but I’m not at all sure whether I hit him enough to shoot him down, because you’d probably see the black smoke either way. Now, Harry Glass, the other waist gunner, did shoot down one airplane because I saw it explode in midair.

The strange thing is, right after that mission, the enemy fighters seem to have pretty much disappeared from the sky. I guess the truth is they weren’t hurting the raids that much, and even though it is hard to shoot them down, the Germans probably can’t stand to lose as much as we can. But it’s certainly made my job a little less exciting, although it is safer for everyone.

The Germans still have antiaircraft fire, though, so even though I don’t always have a lot to do, we still have a little excitement every once in a while. We’re getting a new airplane, because our old airplane P-Bar got pretty badly shot up over Kiel, which is in northern Germany on the Jutland Peninsula. The navigator, Booker, gave the heading to Sweden to our pilot, Lieutenant Russ, three or four times, but he didn’t take it. We flew on over the target pretty badly crippled, dropped the bombs and came out, and by then the rest of the group was pulling away and leaving us behind.

We flew out over the North Sea above an island called Heligoland and this thing was nothing but a big, stationary antiaircraft battery with I don’t know how many 88s and 105 and 155 millimeter guns on it. By the time we got over Heligoland, we were about twelve thousand feet and it looked to me like they were firing every gun on the island at us. We finally got away and flew on across the North Sea and landed at an emergency airfield in Scotland. Old P-Bar was in such bad shape I doubt it will ever fly again. They flew up from our group and picked us up and took us back the next day. When I last saw P-Bar they were just stripping the parts off it.

I hear we’re getting another airplane shortly, and so we’ll be going back to work in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’m getting to spend more time with Maura and I don’t have too much to do at the base, so I think I’ll enjoy it while I can. I’ll write soon, and you do too.

Love,
Your Son
Frank “Digger” O’Dell

Army Group B Headquarters, Trier, Germany, 7 October 1944, 2330 hours GMT

“Colonel von Reinhardt, could you remain for a few moments, please?” Rommel asked. It was well after midnight, and a marathon staff meeting was just breaking up.

Reinhardt cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Yes, of course, Field Marshal,” he replied as he gathered the papers from the briefing he’d delivered earlier. Rommel was deep in conversation with General Bayerlein, and Reinhardt knew that it could be some time before that conversation was finished.

For an invalid, the Desert Fox kept amazing hours. Up at four and to bed after midnight, always alert and sharp. Reinhardt had detected a significant mood change since his return from Berlin by way of Augsburg, and that mood change was having its effect on the other members of Rommel’s headquarters staff.

Müller was hungry, of course. It was their normal custom to find a midnight snack after the long meetings broke up; Rommel’s late hours meant that the kitchen staff knew to leave out bread and coffee at all hours. Reinhardt could tell that Müller was eager to get out of the room and get at the food, but didn’t want to seem unsympathetic to Reinhardt, who would be left behind.

“How did you know the Amis were going to make such a push at Aachen?” Müller asked. During the meeting, Rommel had congratulated his colonel of Intelligence on his accurate analysis of American intentions.

“Simple logic, really,” said Reinhardt with Sherlockian dismissal, although he was secretly quite proud of an insight that had escaped even the Desert Fox--though admittedly Rommel’s recent Berlin mission had kept him from focusing all his attention on the military situation. Nothing much escaped Rommel’s eye; Reinhardt wasn’t used to being around people whose analytical skills were as good or better than his own.

Reinhardt reviewed his analysis as much to confirm his own reasoning as to impress Müller. “One of the consequences of the so-called free press that the Americans pride themselves on is that military objectives must sometimes be subordinated to the need for propaganda, because the military and government cannot shape the propaganda message with full control. When there is little action or clear short-term gain, the press becomes anxious and wants to invent a story even if none exists. To gain significant morale and propaganda value, it was obvious that a good Allied move would be to capture a German city. As none of our other cities was even vulnerable at this stage of the war, the move against Aachen was therefore inevitable.”

Müller shook his head. “Gunter, I don’t know how you keep all this stuff straight. It’s like looking into echoing mirrors, the way you think. This is their point of view, therefore this would become our point of view, which modifies their point of view ... I have a headache that only a sandwich can cure.”

Reinhardt laughed. “I’m a little hungry myself. Why don’t you head for the mess hall, and I’ll come join you as soon as I have a chance to talk with the field marshal.”

That was all the encouragement Müller needed. “Okay, Gunter. Don’t worry--I’ll save you some würst.”

Reinhardt sat down at the long conference table, now littered with the detritus of a long meeting: paper, coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays. The dim electric bulbs had given him a headache. Now alone in the room, except for the Desert Fox and his general, he sat down, suddenly very tired. He looked at a long column of intelligence figures but couldn’t quite focus on it.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Colonel,” said Rommel, suddenly appearing over his shoulder.

Reinhardt snapped back to consciousness. “No problem, sir. How can I help the field marshal?”

“Come, I just wanted to talk with you for a few minutes.” Rommel led the way to his private office. Reinhardt noticed a slight limp, a slight droop of the shoulders. It was the first time he’d ever noticed any fatigue in the man, yet Rommel was still smiling, positive, cheerful.

“Here, sit down,” Rommel said, gesturing toward a chair. He sat himself in the high-backed wooden chair behind his desk, which was filled with papers and reports, the evidence of true command responsibility. “Good job with the intelligence briefing today. I liked the way you combined political insight with military judgment in figuring out that the Allies would move against Aachen. A rare combination in an intelligence officer. Most are more narrowly focused. They think about the battlefield of the ground, when there are other battlefields we must also consider.”

“‘War is the continuation of diplomacy by other means,”’ said Reinhardt, paraphrasing Clausewitz. He sat at attention, curious why Rommel wanted to see him, alert because he didn’t know everything that was going on around him.

“Of course, of course,” laughed Rommel. “But while everyone says it, few take the time to remember what it means. In any event, I wanted you to know that I’ve noticed your work and I’m quite impressed.”

“The field marshal is too kind,” Reinhardt said, though he was aware that the Desert Fox was not the kind of man to give idle praise.

“Not at all, not at all,” Rommel said. “Since you were assigned to me by Himmler’s staff, I wanted to learn a little more about you. I got some of the background on von Ribbentrop’s mission to Moscow. Evidently your political and military insight was quite useful to bringing back the treaty that took us at least temporarily from a two-front to a one-front war.”

“Thank you, sir. As you say, however, any success on that front is temporary.”

“Oh?” said Rommel. “Your fellow members of the mission and Himmler himself tend to think Stalin’s neutralized for good. In fact, General Bücher keeps reassuring me that I don’t have to worry at all about the east, now or in the future.”

“Highly unlikely, field marshal. We threw the wolf some food and that will keep him busy until he has time to digest it. Then he will look around for his next meal. The question is whether we will look like the most tempting entrée on the menu.”