Fox On The Rhine (60 page)

“Excuse me, sir?” said a staff general hesitantly. “But is it wise to have yourself, the entire headquarters, here, so far ahead of our main body?”

“We must see the ground in order to make a plan,” replied the field marshal. “For it is here, tomorrow or the next day, that the issue will be decided.” He frowned, looked at a large map on what had once been a dining room table. “We’ve held at Namur, all the way to Liege. And still that crafty Desert Fox gets across the river, in the Yank’s sector of course.”

“Yes sir,” agreed an aide, opening a folder and laying out a series of aerial reconnaissance photos.

“Are these the most recent pictures?” Monty clucked in displeasure. “They were taken yesterday noon!”

“I’m afraid the blasted rocket-planes have cleared our fellows out of the sky, at least for the time being,” reported the RAF liaison officer. “We hope to get something fresh later today.”

The field marshal studied the pictures. “These show better than three divisions already across the Meuse, and turning this way. We know that Rommel can move quickly....” He stroked his chin pensively, toying with his thin mustache as he concentrated. “Yet there have been no reports from Charleroi. Can you ring them again?”

“The phone is still out,” replied the aide. “We’re working on restoring the line. Our radio calls have not been able to raise any reply.”

“Surely they’re not within twenty miles of here, not, yet,” suggested another staff officer, an older colonel.

“Surely.” Montgomery nodded decisively. Taking a deep, invigorating breath he turned to the window. “What an auspicious omen!” he declared, sweeping his hand over the vista of gentle green hills and small orchards. “A British army to gather once again on the fields of Waterloo--my opportunity to defeat Rommel for good, this time as decisively as Wellington did Napoleon!”

He stroked his long, thin nose thoughtfully. He still smarted at the criticism of his defeat of the Desert Fox in the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Claims that his pursuit of a broken enemy had been too slow, that a preponderance of Allied equipment and air power had made his victory inevitable. Rubbish! He had won a great victory, blast it all! Well, this time there would be no doubt. No doubt at all who was the supreme military genius of the war.

“When is General Horrocks going to get here?” he asked, checking his watch.

“Advance elements of Thirty Corps are less than an hour away, Field Marshal,” replied the aide. “And until then we have First Armored, now on the scene.”

“Splendid.” The field marshal nodded at the line of Sherman tanks rumbling through the valley road, a few hundred yards away. “I don’t see how the Jerries can get here before that!”

The fresh crump of gunfire, surprisingly close, broke through his reverie. Explosions burst among the British tanks on the road, while other blasts ripped through a nearby orchard. “What the devil is that?” he demanded, staring to the south. “How did they get here so fast?”

Montgomery did not panic--it was not in his nature. Instead, -he turned to give orders that would start to set things right, that would stop the enemy breakthrough in its tracks. He frowned, wishing he had a little more time. He saw racing vehicles coming over the horizon, British recon elements in a disorderly retreat from an enemy that must certainly be close behind.

He did not hear the whistling sound of the next artillery barrage, was not aware of the shell that tore through the roof of his headquarters. He would never know of the two panzer divisions that had raced north faster than any soldier had a right to expect, that even now commenced a surprise attack against a hastily raised British position.

And the explosion that tore through his body happened so quickly he never heard the sound.

Army Group B Field Headquarters, Dinant, Belgium, 26 December 1944, 0621 hours GMT

“Good news, Herr Feldmarschall.” Reinhardt maintained his even tone, but his eyes sparked with the portent. “Both the Second and the Twelfth panzer divisions are into Brussels.”

Müller added his own positive tidings. “The one hundred sixteenth is regrouping in the city. Unfortunately, we did not capture the fuel reserves there that we hoped to find. Still, we have that great depot in Stavelot as well as the reserves in Bastogne--so long as we hold the bridges here in Dinant, we have easily enough petrol to carry three divisions and more all the way to the coast.”

“Splendid. It would seem that Montgomery is no Wellington, eh?”

The staff officers shared a hearty laugh. It was Speidel who raised his coffee cup in a toast. “Rather, perhaps, Napoleon could have learned a thing or two from our Desert Fox.”

With a dry chuckle, Rommel turned his attention back to the map. He pictured the fields at Waterloo, now littered with the wrecked hulls of British armor. Like every European professional military man, he had visited them in his youth. Monty had tried to make his stand there, but the spearhead advancing from Dinant had made him too thoroughly outflanked. The lone British armored division on the scene had been overwhelmed at the crossroads north of La Belle Alliance, and the stone walls of Hougomont farm had given little pause to the guns of Rommel’s Tigers. Reinforcements, American armor and British infantry, had arrived at the field too late, for by then the road to the Belgian capital was firmly in German hands.

And now that Brussels had been taken, there remained no real obstacles between the panzer spearheads and the great Allied supply center at Antwerp. Rommel began to believe, to really believe, that the attack would succeed.

“What is the word from the south?” he asked Bücher, who had just been in contact with Manteuffel.

“Patton is bogged down south of Bastogne” said the SS officer. “It does not look like he will get into the city, or even within artillery range of the key roads.”

“Excellent.” Rommel paused to reflect, still studying the map. “Any threats from farther to the west?”

“It seems the Americans are stretched very thin there,” the SS officer continued. “We have several volksgrenadier divisions holding that front, and they report very little offensive pressure.”

“And we have room to fall back there,” the field marshal noted, thinking of the old men and youths making up the volksgrenadier, the “People’s Soldiers” who had recently been recruited from the Third Reich’s thin manpower reserves. Of course, many of these troops had fought for him at Normandy, and he knew they made staunch warriors--as, indeed, did all German men--but for now it would be enough for them to give ground slowly if pressed.

“Closer to home?” wondered Rommel, following the serpentine line of the Meuse south of Dinant. He stabbed at the city of Givet, just south of the place where the river flowed from France. “American armor was reported here, this morning... correct?”

“Yes, Herr Feldmarschall,” Bücher noted. “But there is no good road on this side of the river. And if they try to come up on the west, Ninth SS Panzer Division is in position to block them.” “And of course the enemy would know that Ninth Panzer has been bombed for two days. So perhaps they’ll try to come at us through the woods.”

“Perhaps.” Bücher nodded. “Though it’s unlikely they could get here before tomorrow.”

“Too close for comfort,” Rommel said, shaking his head. Again he studied the map, looking at the road leading into Dinant from the southeast. “Panzer Lehr is in convoy here, scheduled to reach the bridges by this evening, correct?” Though he made the remark as a question, he took no notice of his staff officers nodding their heads; he already knew the answer.

“When they cross they will give you six panzer divisions west of the river,” Speidel offered. “And we have captured fuel enough for all of them”

“I don’t want them to cross,” the Desert Fox stated. “We are vulnerable in only one place, along the river, and we know that enemy tanks might be moving in that direction. I want Panzer Lehr diverted off the highway. I need a screen of armor south of Dinant.”

Bücher turned to the switchboard to get the new order on the way to Manteuffel when the field telephone jangled in the background. The lieutenant at the microphone listened for a moment and then turned to Rommel.

“Herr Feldmarschall, we have reports of an American armored attack approaching Dinant from the south. They are five kilometers out, coming through the woods along the river.”

Southern Outskirts of Dinant, Belgium, 0642 hours GMT

Pulaski put his head down, clapped a hand over his helmet, and sprinted across the road toward the shelter of the low stone wall. He crawled and scraped across the hard-frozen ground with Sergeant Dawson right behind, and he felt his heart hammering as he leaned against the frost-limned rocks of the barrier. He noticed that he was in a cemetery, and hunched lower, using the granite bulk of an ornate cross for cover.

“No shooting that time,” he remarked, trying to sound droll. “Yes, sir,” Dawson replied, checking over the radio. “But don’t you think you should get back into the half-track?” Pulaski chuckled wryly. “Sounds good to me, but not until I see what’s holding Frank up.”

Crawling like men who knew that a mistake could get them killed, the two Americans made their way out of the cemetery and around a battered tavern. Beyond, the country road straightened to become a city street, but there were no Sherman tanks rolling down that beckoning avenue. Four or five of the M4s, however, were wrecked and burning at the near end of the road.

He found the commander of Task Force Ballard huddled with some of his officers in the shattered shell of a mill. Captain Zimmerman of the tank destroyer company was there as well, in this field headquarters of pockmarked walls and blasted, gaping roof. The officers had been trying unsuccessfully to get through to the Air Forces liaison, to call in a tactical bomber strike against the crossroads directly ahead of them.

“What’s the hold-up?” Pulaski asked.

“We count four Tigers, hull down, really well concealed on the far side of the street. Two have direct fire down the road, and one has a good enfilade from each side. They cooked off four Shermans inside of a minute,” Ballard reported tersely.

“Shit!” Pulaski kicked a shard of rock out of his way. He turned to Dawson. “Sarge, see if you can get through on your set”

While the sergeant ran up his battery and tried the call, the colonel went to the front of the mill and, crouching, looked out the empty socket of the front door. Smoke from the burning Shermans wafted past, and, while he couldn’t see the Tigers, he had a pretty good idea of where they must be hiding.

“What about flanking them?” he asked as Ballard joined him.

“They picked their place well. To our left there’s a little ravine with a stream at the bottom, too deep for tanks. To the right there’s a park, acres of open ground exposed to direct fire. The only way around is to back out of here and try to come into Dinant from a different road.”

“We don’t have time!” snapped the frustrated Pulaski, angry with himself. He turned to the sergeant, who was still repeating the call sign through the radio. “Any luck?” he asked unnecessarily.

Dawson only shook his head.

“I can hear the damn planes overhead. Why the hell can’t we get in touch with them?” demanded the colonel, as the steady droning of engines rose to a high-pitched whine. In the near distance, bombs--lots of them--crumped into the ground, reverberating through the pavement with tremors that brought trickles of dust from the sagging ceiling timbers of the ancient mill. Perhaps the bridges that were his objective were getting pasted by the air forces, but he couldn’t afford to take that chance. Combat Command A of the Nineteenth Armored had its own job to do.

Tensely he paced back to the door and looked down the street. Shifting his gaze, he could see the open field of parkland between the two shattered buildings across the way, then followed the view to the south where his men bunched in the fringe of rural woodlands.

“Can you get through to Bob Jackson?” he asked the sergeant.

Dawson nodded. A few moments later he had the commander of the Nineteenth Armored’s Combat Command B on the radiophone.

“How far south of town are you?” Pulaski asked. “We’re up against a nut here.”

“Ten klicks .., just passing the spot where you took out the first eighty-eight,” Jackson replied. “Call it two hours at the most.”

“Bring it on, then. I have a feeling we might be needing you,” Pulaski said. He signed off, then looked at Frank Ballard. “We’ll spread ’em out here, start a strong flank attack across the park, with the tank destroyers in support. A minute later we’ll send a swarm of Shermans down the road, and take the damn Krauts out with sheer numbers.”

The lieutenant colonel nodded. “I’d been thinking something like the same thing,” he admitted. “It’ll be tough at first, but it’s our best chance.”

“How many M4s with the 76-mm do you have?” Pulaski asked, again studying the cramped narrow, littered approach up the street.

“A good dozen,” Ballard answered. “They’re in the lead.”

“They’ll have to try for shots at the Tigers as they show,” the colonel ordered.

“And in the park?”

“We’ll put the rest of the armor there.” Pulaski turned to Zimmerman. “You have a few of the M36 Tank Destroyers, don’t you?”

“Three, still operational. Now that’s a tank killer.”

Pulaski nodded, even as he grimaced at the awareness that there were all too few of the lethal vehicles. The M36 carried a much more deadly weapon than the M10s that made up the majority of his tank division. It had a 90-mm gun, and it had proved to be the only American armored vehicle that could take out a Tiger with a single shot. Of course, they had the typical vulnerability of the tank destroyer: no roof on the turret. It would have been suicide to send the TDs between the wrecked buildings on the street, since German snipers could have picked off the gun crews with a few well-placed shots.

“Put them on the far right, screened by a few Shermans on the outside. They might be able to get a shot at that dug-in Tiger.” He left unspoken his second concern, that his own right flank was totally exposed as he made this rash attack. Once before Rommel had struck him in a vulnerable flank, breaking up an attack and shattering the combat command. The tank destroyers wouldn’t protect them against a serious threat, but they might give pause to any panzers leading the enemy attack. “I want Task Force Miller to follow Frank’s men up the street. Whitey, your boys will guard our right--but you’ll need to reinforce our progress once we make our way into the city.”