North Reich (38 page)

      
“What the devil are they?”

      
The lieutenant offered the binoculars to Guderian who declined.
 
The younger man’s eyes were doubtless sharper than his.

      
“General, the bombers are their B17s and the fighters are P47s and a handful of P51s.”

      
Guderian thanked him and walked away.
 
The American attack force was a relatively small one.
 
Soon, their response would become massive and overwhelming.
 
Von Arnim would be forced to use his planes to defend his position and they would be destroyed, leaving the army helpless.
 
The B17 was a long range heavy bomber and the Luftwaffe had no equivalent.
 
German bombers were defined as mediums at best.
 
The so-called Flying Fortress could carry up to four tons of bombs on short runs, and everything in and around Toronto was close to the border.
 
The American fighters were the equal of their German counterparts and the Germans would be outnumbered by thousands.

      
The North American Luftwaffe was doomed.

      
He laughed harshly.
 
So too was the entire Wehrmacht in North America unless something miraculous happened.
 
Hitler wanted to end the war once and for all this year of 1944.
 
Soon, massive German armies would cross the Volga and destroy what remained of the Red Army.
 
At least that was the plan.
 

      
Guderian had vehemently argued against continuing the war against the Soviets, but had been shouted down by Hitler and banished to Canada for his sins.
 
He wondered if von Arnim shared his doubts, or was he afraid of that Gestapo shit, Neumann?
 
He thought it likely that von Arnim shared his dismay at Hitler’s decisions and disgust with the coterie of asses who surrounded him.

      
In the distance, he heard he crump-crump of explosions.
 
The Americans had found a target.
 
He thought he would have to get used to both the fact and the sound.

      
A motorcycle with an empty sidecar roared up to him.
 
The driver looked hard at him.
 
“General Guderian?”

      
“Yes.”
 
Who the hell else could it be, you ass, he thought.

      
“The driver swallowed.
 
“Sir, General von Arnim requests your presence immediately.
 
It’s urgent.”

      
Guderian climbed awkwardly into the side car.
 
What the hell else had gone wrong?

Captain Tommy Jenks was in a roaring good mood and why not.
 
He was leading a dozen American tanks in pursuit of an enemy they’d handily defeated in and around Sarnia.
 
The Nazis were in full retreat and his orders were to keep them that way.
 
He was to chase them, catch them, and kill them.
 
Patton wanted tanks in the rear of the Germans and he wanted them there yesterday.
 
Patton was his kind of general, and, even though he’d never met the man, he liked his fire.
 

Jenks and his men had been working hard since their Indiana National Guard unit had been activated several months before.
 
They no longer considered themselves weekend warriors, a term they’d always considered an insult and cause for a fight in a bar down in Bloomington, Indiana.
 
They were well trained and loaded for bear and their M3 Grant tank, in their opinion, was the best tank in the world.
 
It had a crew of six and a big 75mm gun as its main weapon.

      
They’d all heard the rumors that the 30-ton beast was already obsolete but dismissed them.
 
They were confident that they could take on and smash any armor the Germans threw at them. Jenks considered the reports that the Germans made better tanks and guns to be so much bullshit.
 
Thanks to GM, Ford, Chrysler, Packard, Studebaker and others, the U.S. made the best vehicles in the world.
 
He’d heard that the Russians hadn’t wanted American tanks and thought that was dumb and probably why the krauts had kicked the crap out of them.
 
Someone even said that the fact that the hull was riveted made it dangerous.
 
If hit, the rivets would break loose and become lethal projectiles in the hull.
 
Jenks had an answer for that – don’t get hit!
 
Newer versions of the Grant were welded, not riveted, but that concerned him not at all.

      
Even though the tank was fairly spacious, the presence of six good sized men sweating and farting made for a need to open the hatches and air the thing out.

      
There was a small turret and a high velocity 37mm gun on top of the hull and that’s where Jenks liked to be.
 
High up and with the hatch open, he could see for a very long ways.
 
Some said that the tanks height was a disadvantage, but he didn’t see how. After all, he could see so much more from up there.
 

The big 75mm was mounted in what was called a sponson which meant it couldn’t traverse all the way like a turret could and Jenks did admit to that being a drawback.
 
A new tank, the M4 Sherman, was supposed to replace the M3s and he considered that a shame.
 
He liked the Grant.

Jenks opened the hatch and took a deep breath of good fresh air.
 
He looked around and saw upwards of forty American tanks rumbling across the Canadian landscape at ten plus miles an hour. Even though the ground was relatively flat, the tanks lurched and wallowed like drunken sailors and Jenks had to hang on to keep from getting hurt.
 
They were outdistancing their infantry support that was trying to follow along in trucks, but trucks didn’t travel cross-country very well.
 
Well, he thought, tough shit.
 
If they ran into Germans, they’d either kill them or hold them until the infantry arrived.

Neither Jenks nor the majority of his men had ever been to Canada and it had proven a surprising and pleasant experience.
 
The houses and farms were sturdy and neat and could have been anywhere in a prosperous agricultural section of the U.S.
 
Of course, a couple of idiots in his unit professed surprise that the Canadians spoke English.
 
He hoped they were kidding, but, considering the sources, decided they probably weren’t.

Jenks was about to comment on a particular farmhouse when the tank next to him exploded, sending a column of flaming gas and debris into the air.

“Ambush!” Jenks yelled and tried to see where the shot had come from.
 
Or maybe they’d run over a mine?
 
No, he saw a flash of light in the distance and a second tank shuddered to a halt with black smoke pouring from it.
 
He turned the tank in the direction of the flash, now wishing he’d had a turret instead of having to move the whole damn tank.

The Grant’s big gun fired and the shell hit well short of where Jenks thought the shot had come from.
 
A third tank was hit and started to burn, and then a fourth.
 
Up and down the line, tanks were burning.
 
Machine gun fire ripped through the American column.
 
Behind him, a truck full of infantry was hit and rolled over, spilling men onto the ground.
 
His tank’s 37mm gun shot in the general direction of the Germans who were now firing heavily and rapidly.
 
Worse, their fire was accurate and lethal.
 
The American armored column was being cut to pieces.

“Pull back,” he ordered to his driver who relayed the order to the surviving tanks.

Jenks was neither a coward nor a fool.
 
He knew he should be inside the tank with the hatch down, but he couldn’t see if he did that.
 
Some son of a bitch was killing his men and he needed to find him.

Black dots emerged from where they’d been hiding to his front.
 
They were German tanks, and they began shooting.

“We’re fucked,” Jenks yelled just as a shell slammed into his tank, hurling him from the turret and down to the ground, but not before smashing his legs.
 
As he lay there in agony so fierce he couldn’t scream, he could hear the rivets popping inside the hull and his men howling as they were torn to pieces by the red hot flying metal.
 
The tank continued to move of its own volition for a few feet before lurching to a halt.
 
Smoke and flames poured from the hull, but nobody else came out.
 

Jenks was numb with pain and anger.
 
He smelled something burning and realized that his broken legs were on fire.

Tinker and Lambert watched from the bushes as still more trucks moved inside the barbed wire fence.
 
The concentration camp that had once held Jews was filling up again.
 
This time the prison population consisted of anyone who had voiced opposition to the presence of German troops in Canada.
 
Few were Jews.
 
Most of them had long since departed south to the U.S. or west to the brand new Federation of West Canada.
 
There had been no attempts on the part of the Germans to delay their exodus.
 
The Gestapo had seemed to encourage it.

      
Lambert had to give the Germans their due.
 
It made no sense whatsoever to keep malcontents and potential leaders of an underground force around to cause mischief.
 
He just hoped that there would be no mass executions since deportation to Germany was no longer viable.

      
He laughed and wondered if his name was on the Nazi’s shit list.
 
A lot of people had heard him criticize the Germans and Hitler.

      
“What’s so funny?” asked Tinker.

      
“Just wondering how long before we’re in that camp or at that farm the Gestapo uses for interrogation.”

      
“Interrogation?
 
Is that what you call it?
 
Christ, you know bloody fucking well that the farm is used to torture and kill people.
 
Or have you forgotten what happened to that girl?”

 
“Nobody will ever forget what happened to Mary Bradford,” he said softly.

“Then what are we going to do about the people in the camp and the farm?
 
We just can’t leave them there.”

No we can’t, Lambert thought.
 
But what the hell else could they do?
 
The Americans weren’t anywhere near and, if German propaganda was true, the Yanks had just been given a bloody nose outside Windsor.
 
So, if they liberated the camp and farm, what would they do with the prisoners?
 
The krauts would hunt them down and kill them.
 
No, he decided reluctantly, the poor souls behind the wire were safer where they were.

Maybe, however, they could do something about the farm.

Lieutenant General George Patton was near tears as he reported to Eisenhower and Marshall at his headquarters in Detroit.
 
He could close his eyes and still see the burning American tanks and smell the stench of brutal death.
 
Worse were the looks on the faces of the wounded.
 
The wounded and the dead were heroes, but he felt that his lack of experience in command of an army had caused many of the casualties.
 
He also felt he’d been let down by others as well.
 

      
Patton put down his coffee cup.
 
It contained a couple of inches of brandy.
 
It was starting to calm him, but he still felt rage and guilt.

      
“Ike, General Marshall, they killed us.
 
I sent my men straight into an ambush and we lost almost a thousand casualties, and that includes several hundred missing.
 
I hope some of them show up, but I’m afraid that a lot of them are going to wind up in German prison camps and we’ll be seeing them in the newsreels when we go to the movies.”

      
Eisenhower and Marshall kept silent.
 
They would let Patton get the anger and frustration out of his system.
 
The commander of the Third Army had first won a brilliant victory by sneaking men across the St. Clair River and forcing the Germans from Sarnia and, very soon after, Windsor.
 
The guns that had been pounding American factories had been pulled back out of range and were no longer a factor.
 
The industrial complex could now be rebuilt and work was already commencing.
 
But neither Ike, Marshall nor Patton had thought the Germans would recover so quickly and decimate an American armored division that had been probing its way east.