Fox On The Rhine (41 page)

Rommel laughed. “A very good image. ‘Most tempting entrée.’ I like that. You have a way with words, Colonel.”

“Our success--rather, your success--in the west will help determine Stalin’s range of options. The big issue is whether the west will recognize the true threat to civilization in time to behave rationally. There is quite a lot of political pressure in favor of the ‘unconditional surrender’ goal, although perhaps that pressure is lessened since Stalin was one of its primary advocates.”

“I see we think alike in some respects,” Rommel mused. “I, too, worry more about the east than the west, at least in the long term. Though my command responsibilities are exclusively concerned with the west. Are you a member of the Party, colonel, if you don’t mind my asking?”

‘“When one comes to a strange city, one should worship by all means the gods of the place,”’ Reinhardt misquoted cautiously. He was a member of the Nazi Party, though not in fact a believer in much of Nazi ideology.

Rommel smiled slightly before replying. “On the other hand, ‘No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.’ That was by Roosevelt. Not the current one, but the other. The one with the mustache. I always liked that sentiment.”

Reinhardt was not used to being out-quoted by anybody. Like many smart and verbal people, he had grown to assume that other people tended to be ignorant. It embarrassed him to be caught short, and he very nearly blushed. Rommel, for all his military genius, was not known to be a scholarly man. In fact, rumor had it that he had never read a book outside the field of military arts. Reinhardt couldn’t quite believe that, but it was true that Rommel’s focus was in contrast to his own eclecticism.

“General Bücher is your friend, is he not?” asked Rommel.

“We went to university together,” replied Reinhardt noncommittally. “He’s a very talented swordsman.”

“Though I understand you gave him one of those scars?”

“Yes, sir. But that was the only time I beat him at fencing. Chess, though, is another matter.”

“Ah, chess,” sighed Rommel. “I miss playing. We must have a game sometime.”

“It would be my great pleasure, Field Marshal,” said Reinhardt.

There was a long pause, then Rommel picked up a folder on his desk. “I took the liberty of reviewing your personnel file.”

Reinhardt’s arched eyebrow was the only answer he gave. He sat with utter rigidity.

Rommel tapped the folder. “You’ve had a quite distinguished staff career, Colonel von Reinhardt. You’ve impressed several senior officers, and reading between the lines I would assume that in some cases their action was essentially your advice. You’ve impressed me, and that is not the easiest thing to accomplish. But what is missing here is as interesting as what is present”

“Sir?”

“There is an absence of direct line experience. You seem to have avoided combat altogether.” Rommel looked at Reinhardt directly, calmly.

The blush Reinhardt had been trying to suppress welled up in his face to his utter humiliation. Being shamed before this man he admired was a pain he would have done anything to avoid. “Sir--I have accepted every assignment and shirked no duty--I have not done anything to avoid danger--”

“Peace, peace,” said Rommel. “I am not accusing you of cowardice directly or indirectly. I believe that you have not worked to avoid personal danger. I merely note that you have not sought it out, volunteered for combat as many of your peers have done.”

“Sir--I believe I have served the Fatherland in the best way in which I am capable--”

Rommel waved his hand. “Please, I am not condemning you. I simply wanted to make an observation. Colonel von Reinhardt, you are a smart and capable man. I believe you are also a brave man, or at least that you will be when you face the time of trial. But you are a man who has built a wall of separation between you and the experience of life. You have developed the intellectual side of your inheritance, but that is not all there is in life. The problem with the other sides of life is that they are messy and imperfect, and I suspect that’s difficult for you. You have enormous gifts, and I would like to see them developed to the fullest extent for your sake. No, I don’t want to reassign you to a combat command right now. Frankly, I need you where you are. But I do want you to consider that your growth lies not in what you are already accomplished in, but in that which you have not yet pursued. Wasn’t it Goethe who said, ‘He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.’”

“Yes, it was, sir,” replied Reinhardt, almost absently. Another quote. And Rommel not a reader. But the sentiment could easily have come from Rommel’s own soul. Reinhardt wanted to respond, to defend himself somehow, but he felt exposed, vulnerable. He looked into the eyes of Rommel and saw his own reflection, but it was a shamed and small version of himself, not the sharp and distant intellectual he saw himself as being.

“Field Marshal, you have given me much food for thought. I will reflect on this. Thank you for your kind and thoughtful words, and for your consideration,” he said, the formal words barely coming out of his mouth. He wanted to defend himself, argue, change the reflection he saw in the eyes looking at him. He was in the presence of a mind greater than his own, and it was a horrible feeling. In the compartment in his mind that always stood outside himself, he suddenly realized,
This is how others sometimes feel when they are around me
. The irony kept him moving, helped him stand and salute.

Then he paused, and said again, “Thank you, Field Marshal.” This time it sounded completely different.

And Rommel smiled as he said, “You’re welcome.”

Dessau, Germany, 12 October 1944, 2000 hours GMT

Franz Steinberger was born in Germany, raised of German parents. He spoke German as his only language and had shared the misery and tragedy of 1918, and the resulting shame of Versailles, with the rest of the German people. He had attended a German
universitat
, and upon earning his degree in engineering had been determined to use that education for the betterment of Germany’s industry, economy, and world power.

And then, in 1933, he had learned that he wasn’t really a German after all.

He was merely a Jew.

Now, as he debarked from the crowded train, the packed compartment that always smelled of sweat, shit, and fear, he wondered how he could ever have considered himself a part of such a monstrous land. He looked around at this old Saxon city. With its homes and factories, gardens and parks, you wouldn’t know it was a part of a darkness so all-consuming that it gave a meaning on earth to the Christian concept of Hell.

And maybe those Christians were right, he thought--for if there was such as thing as Hell, he was living it.

Yesterday the Gestapo had shot Model Zweiss, for no other reason than that the day’s engine production had lagged slightly behind the ridiculous goals that had been established. Two more men had died during the train ride back to camp, from suffocation in the overcrowded cars, or perhaps merely from despair, and another had failed to awaken in the predawn hours of this morning, when the guards and their dogs had come to roust the slaves from their narrow, wooden bunks.

Now he shuffled in the crowded file from the train yard to the factory, eyes lowered in the long-practiced art of survival--you didn’t want to give the guards a single reason to notice you, for that reason, however trivial, could mean a sentence of death. His body was broken, his limbs frail and skeletal, and his strength was a mere shadow of his former robust health.

His spirit, too, was grievously wounded. It had been gashed beyond repair when he had watched his beloved Annie loaded onto a different train, a crowded car that would roll toward the east, carrying Jews to a fate that none could speak of, for none had returned. But by now they all had their guesses, and with those suspicions had come an end to all hope.

But Franz Steinberger, bereft of health and hope, of spirit and of future, had one thing left. It was a thing that allowed him to crawl out of the bunk in the morning, that gave him the strength to board the train, to make the long walk to the factory, and to labor over the jet engines as if he really wanted to live.

Franz Steinberger had rage. It was a fire of fury that burned deep within the wellspring of his life. It was a hatred for Nazis, for all things German, that would not allow him to surrender, to lay down and die.

Because he had been trained as an engineer, he understood the significance of these mysterious engines. He had seen them tested in the factory, knew the lengths to which the designers worked to keep the powerful turbines cool. He could guess at the difference they would make in a war fought in the sky, in the effort to stop the bombers that periodically, and inaccurately, tried to bomb this plant into oblivion.

Many times in the past his rage had given him the strength to act, and today he would act again.

Steinberger was assigned the task of driving in the screws that completed the housing encircling each turbine. The housing was an aluminum-coated shell of hollow steel, through which air had to pass in order to maintain the cooling of the engine. He did his work conscientiously, for the guards were everywhere and he had no wish to throw his life away.

But each day there came a time when the overseers’ attention was distracted--they were rebuking another worker, or laughing about some Jewess they had raped, or merely dull-eyed from fatigue and hangover. As he did each day, Franz waited for the right moment. He saw the guards look away.

And Steinberger took a strip of rag, the one accessory that the Gestapo did not inventory on a daily basis. He crumpled up the oily cloth, again looked to the guards--who were laughing, crowing like birds of prey he thought--and stuffed the rag into one small air passage. Quickly he dropped the last piece of the housing into place, and fastened the screws that meant that this engine was done.

The hooks came in, lifted the sleek turbine from the line, hauled it away for testing. It would fire, and it would run, and it would show no signs of malfunctions as the German engineers put it through its paces.

Only later, when it was run for a long time, hopefully when it was carrying a fighter plane and a Nazi pilot through the skies, would it begin to grow unusually hot.

Third Army HQ, West of Metz, France, 18 ... October 1944, 1723 hours GMT

“General, the Fifth Infantry has bogged down... they’ve been plastered all to hell, sir, and can’t get around that castle.” The operations colonel gave his report with just a hint of the exasperation that immediately welled up in the army commander.

“Son of a bitch!” Patton uttered the expletive out of a general sense of frustration. He knew that his boys were being killed on all sides of the well-fortified city of Metz, and it galled the hell out of him. Even worse, he didn’t know what to do about it. He had to have that city before Third Army could advance to the German border, and yet he had been feeding his divisions into that meat grinder for weeks, now, with no perceptible progress.

He paced around the office, bit down on his cigar, and made up his mind.

“Get me Twelfth Army Group CG on the line.”

Two minutes later he heard Omar Bradley’s voice through the hiss of the telephone receiver. “Brad? I’ve got troubles.”

“George, if you’re going to ask for more fuel, you know--”

“Now just a damn minute, Brad--no, that’s not the problem. But I need another division, something to give me a fresh punch against this goddamn Nazi rockpile.”

“No can do,” Bradley replied. “We’re stretched too thin down there as it is.”

Patton was looking at a map detailing the positions of Twelfth Army Group components, and he stabbed his finger at the icon for a tank unit. “What about Nineteenth Armored? They’re right on my flank as it is--and I hear they’re not on the front right now.”

The hesitation on Bradley’s end was palpable, but Patton utilized all of his patience to wait for his commander to talk. “Wakefield’s boys, you mean? You’re right, insofar as they haven’t brought the whole division into line.”

“Well, let me have ’em back, then!” Patton insisted. “They did good work for me in Normandy, and they need to get back into the field.”

“You’re all right with Hank, then?” Bradley sounded wary.

“Hell, Brad, like I told you before: he learned some things in Normandy, and maybe he’s the kind of driver that Pulaski and Jackson need to hold onto their leashes. Sure, I’m all right with him!”

“Well, we can do that, then... I’ll get in touch with Courtney Hodges at First Army, make sure the transfer won’t cause him more problems than he can handle. I expect you’ll have Nineteenth Armored under Third Army in another few days.”

“Thanks, Brad ... I mean that,” Patton said sincerely. The two generals broke the connection, and Patton’s eyes once again fell on his map, onto the city of forts and trenches and castles, the great roadblock that stood to block his manifest advance to Germany. One more division, three hundred more tanks, fourteen thousand men to make more grist for the mill of battle.

He only wondered if they would be enough.

Excerpt from
War’s Final Fury
, by Professor Jared Gruenwald

After the heady days of the breakout and the liberation of France, the stiffening German resistance of autumn struck the Allies as a cruel shock. The sweep out of Normandy had been a rush of speedy maneuver, highlighted by Patton’s daring thrusts, at least until the setback suffered by the Nineteenth Armored Division at Abbeville. The rest of the Anglo-American forces followed more slowly, but still inexorably, and the enemy was driven all the way to the borders of his homeland.

The setback at Abbeville notwithstanding, the circumstance that brought the offensive to a halt initially was not Nazi defenders so much as a shortage of fuel. Though Montgomery’s troops had swept through the great port of Antwerp in early September, the British field marshal’s attention was focused on the great prizes of the Rhine and Germany. As a consequence, he neglected to immediately clean out the enemy strongholds along the Scheldt River estuary, positions that controlled access to that key deep-water harbor. By the time the importance of these islands and swampy lowlands was appreciated, the Germans had firmly entrenched. As happened so often, it was Monty’s empire troops--in this case the doughty Canadians--who were left with the grim job of cleaning out the pockets of toughest resistance.