Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) (25 page)
Read Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) Online
Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson
The battalion command post had been set up on a small yard, with a Panther tank parked nearby. The engine hatch was open, with a mechanic leaning in so far that his head and both arms were invisible inside of the compartment.
“Hauptsturmführer Friedrich?” Lukas Vogel asked, standing at attention as he reported to his new commander. He was an officer now, but the enlisted man’s reflexes were still with him—he felt a little bit awkward dealing with higher rank. The SS captain to whom he was reporting was scarred on one cheek, and his eyes were a watery clear blue. He was balding on top, and his uniform was dirty. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. Lukas ran his eyes over the man’s decorations. The Panzer Assault Badge with silver wreath signified twenty-five separate days of armor combat. That didn’t seem like a lot to Lukas. After twenty-five days of action, he would just be getting started. The captain also wore a silver Wound Badge, which meant he’d been wounded three times. He had obviously seen action, and seemed somewhat the worse for wear.
When I’ve seen that much action, I’ll still know how to keep my uniform pressed and look tike a German officer,
Lukas thought.
When I’ve seen that much action, I’ll still know how to keep my uniform pressed and look tike a German officer,
Lukas thought.
“Yes … Untersturmführer … ?” The panzer officer looked up from his map table with mild interest, eyebrows rising as he saw the second lieutenant’s badge newly pinned to the young man’s brand-new and ill-fitting uniform collar.
“Vogel, sir. I have been assigned to your battalion by Obersturmbannführer Schultz. That is, my men and I, sir. I was sent to the division by General Dietrich himself,” he added, reaching for the worn sheet of paper written by Dietrich’s aide-de-camp.
“Dietrich, eh?” Friedrich looked at the boy with slightly greater interest.
“Yes, sir.” Lukas waited for Friedrich to ask him how he knew the general, but instead Friedrich motioned toward a pile of papers and Lukas dropped his document on top of the pile. “All right, Vogel. I can use you.” He looked toward the street, where Hans Braun and the other boys were waiting outside the truck. “Do you come with that truck?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Lukas declared.
“Good. You will need it shortly. Do you have small arms?”
“Some, Hauptsturmführer. We have three carbines and a Schmeisser, also four grenades left. However, our ammunition for the carbines and the machine pistol is all gone.”
“Draw what you need from my quartermaster—you’ll find him in the stables behind that inn.” Friedrich pointed at a large stone building down the street. “And be ready to move out in an hour.”
“Yes sir! And, thank you, sir!” Lukas declared, stiffening his arm in a salute that Friedrich acknowledged with a flip of his hand.
Another officer who doesn’t give a shit any longer,
Lukas thought.
Another officer who doesn’t give a shit any longer,
Lukas thought.
“This is our new unit,” he reported to Hans as his sturmscharführer and the other boys gathered around him. “Fritzi, you bring the truck. The rest of you, come with me.”
As they walked down the narrow street Lukas noticed other panzers tucked into alcoves and sheds, always where they would be out of sight from the air. The tanks looked battered but serviceable, manned by hard-eyed young soldiers who watched the newcomers with expressions ranging from bored to skeptical. He saw only a few trucks, and one yard contained a dozen horses and some wooden wagons. He saw a tank with its track off, several men working to make the repair, while other men were carrying crates of heavy ammunition—rounds for the tanks’ main guns, he guessed. A welder’s torch flared brightly within the shadows of a large shed. There was an easy familiarity these men displayed toward their companions and their equipment, and this made Lukas feel woefully unprepared.
“Notice the age differences?” Hans said. “The officers and senior enlisted are all ancient—at least thirty years old!”
“Yeah,” replied Lukas. “I bet a lot of them are wounded or washed out, sent over here to let us do all the fighting.”
“Hey, at least we get into the war for real,” Hans replied, slapping his superior officer on the back. “You’ve brought us this far, mein Untersturmführer! We’ll go the rest of the way together.”
“Thanks, Hans” Lukas replied. “We’ll take care of our boys and win this war yet.”
They found the stables Friedrich had indicated, and Lukas approached an old, skinny man he assumed to be the quartermaster.
“Hauptsturmführer Friedrich sent me to get weapons and ammunition for my men,” Lukas explained.
“For your men, eh, Untersturmführer?” said the man, with a casual look at the group. “Are you sure you’re old enough to shoot them?” He grinned, showing missing teeth.
“We will fight for the Fatherland—and we will die, if necessary!” declared the young officer indignantly.
Old fart,
he thought. Then he realized that it
might not do to antagonize the quartermaster, so he adopted a slightly softer tone. “But we would do a better job of it if we were properly armed. Can you help us?”
Old fart,
he thought. Then he realized that it
might not do to antagonize the quartermaster, so he adopted a slightly softer tone. “But we would do a better job of it if we were properly armed. Can you help us?”
The old sergeant cracked a grin at that, and stepped aside to gesture toward a stack of crates within the stable. “Take what you need,” he said. “There’s plenty for everybody—just don’t load yourselves down so much that you can’t move.”
The young soldiers entered the building and looked around in awe, recognizing grenades, ammunition crates, and several different kinds of firearms. Lukas had a memory of Christmas morning, some years before, when his father had presented him with his first folding knife. Now he claimed a Schmeisser machine pistol for Hans and a Luger sidearm for himself. Fritzi came along with the truck, and as they were loading up boxes of ammo Lukas realized why there were so many extra guns: These had been gathered from dead soldiers.
After his detachment was fully armed, he found a kitchen and saw that the boys got some food: thin broth, brown bread, and—wonder of wonders!—fresh milk. By the time they were finished, Captain Friedrich came along and told them it was time to move. Lukas heard tank engines roaring to life, saw the horse-drawn wagons, each loaded with a dozen panzergrenadiere, rolling down the streets toward the east end of town. He and Hans loaded his boys onto the truck as Friedrich came over.
“We’ve been ordered to Koblenz,” the captain said, leaning in the driver’s window. He had bad breath.
“Koblenz?” Lukas was surprised; he knew that the Rhine city was far behind the front. He knew better than to question the order, but Friedrich smiled a cold smile and filled him in.
“It seems the Americans are on their way to the Rhine, and they aren’t wasting time—are you prepared to hurry?”
“Yes, Herr Hauptsturmführer—we will get to Koblenz before them!”
“Indeed, my boy, we have to—since once we get there, we will have to turn around and fight.”
“I am ready to do that, too,” promised the young untersturmführer.
“You’ve heard the tale of the little Dutch boy and the dike?” asked the captain. “The fellow had to stick his finger in the hole to keep the dam from washing away?”
Puzzled, Lukas answered in the affirmative.
“Well, good. Because right now, the Rhine is our dike. And you, my lad, you and the rest of the Hitlerjugend division, including me—”
“Yes, Hauptsturmführer?”
“Well, we are the finger.”
The Polish capital had absorbed a lot of punishment over the previous six years of war. First had come the German invasion of 1939, culminating in the battle for this city. This was followed by brutal Nazi repression of rebellion, first against the Jews in their squalid ghetto, then—just the previous summer—by the Poles who mistakenly viewed the Soviet advance, and the death of Adolf Hitler, as harbingers of freedom. Naturally, they had been crushed.
Just as well, thought Alyosha Krigoff. The last thing the Soviets wanted, in this city that would soon be part of the growing Soviet empire, was a bunch of freedom-minded Polish nationals expecting to control their own country. Of course, there would be Poles in charge of the Polish government, but they would be Party-member Poles selected by Chairman Stalin himself.
Now that decision loomed near. More than a thousand guns, a whole galaxy of artillery, pounded Warsaw into an even finer grade of rubble. Soviet engineers quickly laid bridges across the Vistula, and Marshal Zhukov sent his armored columns surging westward, around the city and toward the prize of Berlin and all the rest of Germany. Meanwhile, more tanks and a great wave of infantry moved into what was left of the historic city.
Krigoff had a box seat for this epic show. He rode in the observation seat of the small scout plane, watching the strings of ubiquitous T-34 tanks as the rumbling vehicles pushed through that moonscape of ruins like files of ants seeking food. Fires blossomed throughout the ruins, smoke billowing upward in black columns while buildings tumbled and streets vanished beneath ever-growing mountains of debris.
Even better, he had been able to secure a very special passenger for this dramatic view. Paulina Koninin had been working with the documentary crew attached to front headquarters, and when an influential colonel of intelligence—himself—had requested that she personally accompany him on this reconnaissance flight, her director had been only too thrilled to let her come along. He’d given Krigoff a knowing look, of course, but Krigoff didn’t mind. She sat in the second observer’s seat, behind Krigoff, and when he looked back he saw that she was busily snapping pictures of the vast sweep of destruction.
“Glorious, is it not?” he asked, grinning over his shoulder.
She heard him and lowered the camera long enough to favor him with a smile. “Yes, Comrade Colonel!” she replied with a nod.
The only failure, thus far, had been the rockets that had been designed from the German specifications. They had been used shortly after dawn, and Krigoff had watched in dismay as the strange, birdlike missiles had roared out of the eastern sky. He had spotted five of them, each trailing a plume of smoke. They had soared past at high speed, and he had seen the fire spewing from
their tails. But then one, and soon after a second, had flamed out, tumbling down before they even reached the target. The first had fallen with a fiery explosion right into the midst of a Soviet tank column, while the second had vanished with a pathetic splash into the Vistula.
their tails. But then one, and soon after a second, had flamed out, tumbling down before they even reached the target. The first had fallen with a fiery explosion right into the midst of a Soviet tank column, while the second had vanished with a pathetic splash into the Vistula.
He had watched the other three breathlessly, knowing they had been targeted against a large fortress near the southern edge of the city. Two had overshot the area completely, vanishing into the distance, while the third had plummeted to the ground at least a mile from the intended destination. The resulting explosion had been spectacular, but Krigoff could already see that the weapons lacked the accuracy to have much use on the battlefield.
Nevertheless, he was awed, and thrilled, to think of the destructive power that was now being brought to bear against the Nazi war machine. There could be no greater manifestation of might on the planet than the great tide now advancing westward. Tanks, hundreds of them within his own line of sight right now, rolled onward as armored testament to the might of Soviet industry. Vast flights of aircraft dove against the German positions, dropping bombs and strafing relentlessly, emblematic of the Soviet ruthlessness and resolve. And the men, more than a million of them fueling this great offensive, were the ultimate proof of communism’s manifest destiny. How could any force, any group of nations, stand against such a wave of historical inevitability?
In truth, they could not. With a tight, almost wolfish grin, Krigoff pressed his binoculars to his eyes and studied the city—or, more properly, the battlefield, he thought with a wry laugh. It was a city once, and might be a city again, but now it was only a killing ground.
He spotted a factory, the shell of a building standing as a makeshift fortress at the junction of the Vistula and a smaller tributary stream. Soviet tanks lined the perimeter of the location, firing at point-blank range with their guns. Krigoff knew the place could be plastered by artillery, and for a moment he longed for the authority to call in such a barrage. But his observations were in the service of a higher calling: He would report only to the chairman. Somewhere else, however, an artillery liaison officer did his job, and batteries arrayed on the east side of the river opened up a devastating barrage. He saw the muzzle flashes, knew instinctively that their target was below.
“Would you like a better look?” he asked Paulina.
She nodded, her one eye alive with the fire of battle; clearly she was enjoying this as much as Krigoff. Ah, she was a rare treasure, a Soviet gem! Paulina reached for the movie camera that she had brought along, and started winding the spring while Krigoff tapped the pilot on his shoulder. The colonel gestured when the man turned to look.
“Down there—fly closer,” Krigoff ordered.
If the flier had any reservations, he understood his role well enough to
conceal them. He merely nodded and put the plane, a small Piper provided by American Lend Lease, into a steep dive.
conceal them. He merely nodded and put the plane, a small Piper provided by American Lend Lease, into a steep dive.
Krigoff couldn’t suppress a giggle of sheer delight as they swept toward the factory and saw the place dissolve in a hail of high explosives. Fire ballooned upward, a great mushroom cloud, as some store of fuel or arms was ignited. The aircraft lurched to the side, the pilot cursing as he veered around the fireball, while Krigoff pressed his face to the glass window and stared in wonder and delight. His binoculars dangled from his neck, forgotten—at last he was close to the action, where he belonged. Once more he looked at Paulina, saw that her hands were steady, her attention rapt as she recorded a reel of movie film.
In another minute they were past the front and over the enemy positions. He saw a few gray vehicles, German panzers, moving away from the river, and watched with satisfaction as a pair of Sturmoviks, red stars bright on their wings, swept downward, releasing bombs that fell to earth like tiny eggs. Flame blossomed again, and he relished the sight of a tank upended, tossed like a child’s toy on a demolished street.
“Back,” he declared, sneering at the pilot’s expression of relief. “I will be speaking to the chairman personally, to let him know that the attack is progressing very well indeed.”
He watched, with no attempt to conceal his satisfaction, as the flier’s face drained of blood, leaving his expression as wan and pale as any sheet.
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