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Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson

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“Shoot, dammit!” shouted Lukas. He could see the American soldiers, scuttling low like bugs, darting across the railroad embankment, diving toward a drainage ditch where they disappeared from view. They were out of the effective range of Vogel’s Luger pistol, and it seemed like too many of his men—his boys—were hunkering under cover, unwilling to shoot their weapons.
He couldn’t blame them, really. They had been under attack for more than twenty-four hours straight, now. Not his little platoon, exactly—the Americans were just now coming in sight of the tanning factory—but they could feel the battle raging nearby. The firing had moved closer, the Germans slowly giving ground against the press of enemy attackers. The Americans had tanks coming from every direction, jabos that strafed and bombed the Germans wherever they tried to stand, a seemingly uncountable number of artillery pieces arrayed somewhere out of sight, capable of sending punishing barrages that landed with uncanny accuracy.
Yet still Lukas had kept his boys alive, most of them, anyway. He put his hand on the young soldier’s shoulder, forced him to meet his eyes. “Look, Fritzi. They’re coming to get us. There are lots of them, and if we don’t shoot at them, nothing is going to stop them. It’s not even us they want—it’s those bridges, that river—our fatherland!”
The boy, Fritzi, stared wide-eyed at his young lieutenant, his carbine clutched to his chest with white-knuckled fingers. Lukas cursed to himself, wanting to slap the fellow across his thin, pale face. Instead, he leaned close, spoke directly into Fritzi’s ear.
“Those Amis will kill you, sure enough, if you don’t start shooting.” He smacked the boy’s hands where they were wrapped around his rifle stock, tried to be reassuring. “You know how to use this thing. There they are; now pick it up and shoot!”
“O-Okay, Lukas,” stammered Fritzi, shaking his head as if to clear away a fog. He twisted on the floor and rose to a kneeling position so that he could sight the weapon out the second-floor window of the tanning factory, and squeezed off a shot.
“Good boy,” whispered Vogel, clapping the frightened youngster on the shoulder. “Keep shooting, and they’ll have to hide from you.”
Fritzi fired several more rounds in quick succession, and Lukas crawled on to inspect the rest of his makeshift platoon. They were not being pressed too hard, yet, thanks largely to the antitank gun and the Mark IV panzer positioned to either side of this battered factory. As to his own men, he had done the best he could. He wondered if that was good enough. He remembered what General Dietrich had told him, about his responsibility for “his boys.” He was beginning to understand what it meant to be in command.
He found Josef at another second-floor window, two dozen meters from Fritzi. One of the biggest boys in the platoon, Josef was full of bluster when he talked. Now he was showing that same spirit, rising to the window, squeezing off several rounds from his rifle, then dropping down out of sight for a few moments as American bullets plunked into the brick outer wall. Once in a while a slug would enter the open window, and Lukas could hear it zing around in the factory.
“Do you have enough ammo?” he asked Josef. The boy scowled, and clapped his large—and still stuffed—duffel, then pulled out another box of rounds.
“Enough for today,” he said, calmly feeding bullets into his magazine. “But you might check on Paulo; he wasn’t carrying so many.”
Paulo had the last window on the second floor, to the far right of the factory, and Lukas was going to do just that. Keeping low, he left the long room where Fritzi and Josef held down the fort, then hurried down the hallway to the small storage room where Paulo was.
He was approaching the door when a loud explosion shook the floor under his feet, sending him flying against the far wall. He tried to keep his balance, but his wobbling body fell to the floor anyway. Blinking, Lukas coughed on a cloud of dust, realized the debris—and the explosion—had originated in the room where he had left Paulo.
Forcing himself to his feet, balancing on shaking and unsteady legs, he stumbled into that room and tried to wave away the smoke and dust obscuring his vision. The first thing he saw was a large swath of brightness where the small window had been. A hole had been blasted in the wall, probably by a tank round. Grimacing and spitting out the dust that gritted in his teeth, he ducked low.
“Paulo!” he called, not really expecting an answer.
He found the boy, or rather, the boy’s legs, emerging from beneath a heavy shelf that had toppled over his body above the waist. A pool of red ran down beside the legs. Touching the still calf, shouting the name again, Lukas confirmed his fear: Paulo was dead. “Oh god,” he moaned. He had seen dead men before, but this was one of his. He felt sick. Then he felt mad.
“Fucking Americans!” Lukas cried. He peered out the irregular hole in the
wall, saw more Americans scuttling forward, using the oblong boxes of some large equipment for cover. They were still too far away to hit with his pistol, but he shot angrily at the moving figures. “Bastards! I’ll kill every fucking one of you!” He couldn’t help noticing that they were much closer than they had been only a few minutes before.
Grimly Lukas made his way back toward the stairs, stopping only to tell Josef what had happened, and to encourage Fritzi to keep shooting. Satisfied that they would do what they could, he descended the open stairway and went to the factory’s corner office, where Hans Braun was stationed.
The young sturmscharführer squeezed off a burst from his Schmeisser machine pistol, shooting out the window as Lukas came through the door. Hans pulled back from his firing portal as an answering burst of small-arms fire riddled the frame and the surrounding wall.
“I don’t know, Lukas,” Hans admitted, his face ashen. “There sure are a lot of them.”
“You know what Hauptsturmführer Friedrich said: We have to hold them here, so that General Dietrich can get the SS panzers across the river.”
“Yes, I know. And I’m trying!” Hans looked as though he was going to cry.
“I know you are—you’re a brave soldier,” Lukas said, giving him a pat on the shoulder. God, was this what being an officer was like? For the first time he thought of Friedrich’s Panzer Assault Badge. Twenty-five days of this? He didn’t want to stand up and look calm any longer; he felt just like Hans and wanted someone to console him. More bullets chattered through the window, leaving puffs of dust where they struck, and passed through the office walls. “Just keep shooting—I’m going to see what it looks like outside.”
“Okay, Lukas. Come and tell me what you see, won’t you?”
“Sure,” replied the young lieutenant.
He made his way to the side door of the factory, where he could see the panzer that was giving them flank protection. The armored vehicle looked tough, even indestructible, as it blazed away with its main gun, using the rubble of a knocked-down wall as protection for all but its squat turret. The corner of the tanning factory provided cover from the American tanks that were still trying to fight across the railroad embankment, and a large concrete blockhouse across the alley loomed like a mountain on the other side of the tank.
The panzer’s coaxial machine gun chattered, and Lukas leaned out far enough to see American GIs diving for cover; one of them twisted in the air and toppled, and the young officer choked out a quiet hurrah. One bastard down. When the gun ceased, however, he heard another sound, the wailing drone that he had come to recognize within his first few days near the front.
Jabos!
He looked up to see three or four dive bombers screaming toward him, daring to fly very low. They were so close that he could see the bomb
break free from the lead plane, seeming to plummet directly toward him. Lukas lurched away from the doorway, panic fueling his flight as he raced into the factory, then threw himself down behind a heavy tanning press.
The concussive blast outside the door was the loudest, most terrible thing he had ever experienced. Debris and shrapnel slashed through the air, much of it clattering against the metal press he hid behind. He was deafened, and looked up in the strange silence to see a dense cloud of smoke churning through the building. As that settled he saw that the doorway where he had been standing was gone, replaced by a gaping hole.
Stumbling over broken beams and shattered brick, he made his way to that entry, looking for the tank. His bearings were off and he wondered if he had gone to the wrong door, since he couldn’t even see the broken wall that had concealed the panzer. But there was the big concrete blockhouse, though a corner of it had been smashed away. Where the tank had been there was only a crater.
Now the American infantry advanced in a rush. Lukas drew his Luger and fired several shots, not sure if he hit anyone as the troops again ducked down. “Bastards!” he screamed again. A fusillade of gunfire spattered around the gaping hole where the door had been, but the young officer was already gone, stumbling through the factory, trying to get to the office where Hans Braun was fighting.
He heard shooting and realized that his hearing was coming back. Two boys, Fritzi and Josef, were tumbling down the stairs from the second floor. Shapes darkened the windows at the ground level, and he saw a fruit-shaped object come sailing into the big room.
“Grenade!” he shouted, throwing himself down again.
The missile exploded with a dull crack and then Fritzi was screaming, kneeling over Josef’s motionless body. The GIs wasted no time in following up the attack, tumbling through several windows at once, guns blazing. Fritzi went down, blood spurting from the ruin that was once his eye, his mouth still opened to utter a scream that would never emerge.
Hans appeared in the door of the office. One American spun around, his carbine raised, but Lukas got him with a shot from his pistol. Another grenade exploded and the young officer was down, felt something heavy crash on top of him. It was the lid from the big press, he realized, straining to breathe. He was momentarily pinned, although apparently uninjured.
He watched in horror as Hans dropped his machine pistol and raised his hands—not, not Hans! Not his sturmscharführer! But the Americans had him, were already herding him toward the gap where the bomb had blasted away the doorway. Hans was crying, and Lukas felt like doing the same thing. He had failed, he knew, failed Captain Friedrich and General Dietrich, failed his boys, failed his countrymen and failed his fatherland.
Still Lukas couldn’t move. His gun was somewhere nearby, but he couldn’t even shift enough to pick it up. He could only watch as Hans approached the ring of light outlining the door.
“Hey, Kraut—eat shit! You fuckers killed Joey!” snarled one of the Americans. He raised his carbine and cracked off a single shot, and Hans Braun toppled forward to lie motionless in the rubble of the alley.
Lukas lowered his head then, still unable to draw a full breath. “I’m sorry, Hans,” he whispered. He wanted to scream, but he knew that meant instant death. Instead, he focused every iota of his being on revenge. He would live, live to take revenge on everyone who killed his boys, everyone who invaded his fatherland, every enemy of Germany. He lay still in the battered factory, grieving in silent rage, as the troops, the battle, the war passed him by.
Frank Ballard looked down as the Sherman rolled through the last defensive position. The Rhine was visible, a shimmering band in the morning light, the goal of weeks of campaigning, and a day and a half of savage battle. Yet he felt no elation, just the weariness of one more battle finished, with who knew how many unknown challenges lying thick on the road ahead.
He passed a few prisoners, SS troops mustered out of a corner police station that had been turned into a makeshift blockhouse. Ballard was shocked to see that the Germans who had held them up for the last hour were nothing more than boys.
“Sergeant!” he shouted, as he saw a veteran NCO pushing several prisoners into an alley behind the building.
The man looked up, annoyance flashing in his eyes for a second before he straightened up and lifted his tommy gun to a semblance of port arms. “Sir?” he replied in a sharp bark.
“See that those prisoners make it to the marshaling yard. They have POW processing set up there, next to the stockade. Then get back to your unit!”
“Yessir, of course, sir!” replied the sergeant. He shoved one of the young men roughly in the back. “You there—move along, quick now!
Schnell,
see?”
Ballard hoped his order would be obeyed. It was common enough, he knew, for prisoners to get shot “accidentally” in the immediate aftermath of battle, especially when their captors had lost friends in the fight. The colonel himself had witnessed such acts, and he understood the motivations and had a hard time fastening blame. Still, when the enemy was a bunch of kids, it seemed even more wrong. He hoped that he might have put a stop, at least temporarily, to the practice.
For now, he had more important things demanding his attention. Already CCA infantry was crossing the Rhine on two bridges. Engineers were inspecting the spans, and reported that charges had not even been set. Obviously, the Americans had gotten here faster than any of the SS had expected. Idly it occurred to him that, once again, the Nineteenth Armored had scored an historic victory—the first Americans to cross the Rhine! He knew that Fourth Armored, on his right, and the Twelfth Infantry, on his left, would doubtless be pulling up to the water barrier within a day, perhaps even a matter of hours. Knowing Patton, he suspected that all of Third Army would be hurled across
the river within a few days, leaving the Seventh Army to the south and the First, in the north, to clean up the rest of the Krauts on this side of the Rhine. From the way things had gone during his race to the river, he suspected—and believed—that those men wouldn’t have a lot of bloody work in front of them.
An hour later Ballard’s own tank was rolling across the bridge. He sat high in the turret, looking at the deep waters rolling past below. The east bank drew closer, and already he could see his Shermans spreading out, establishing a bridgehead. They had beaten the Nazis in the most important race. It looked to Frank Ballard as though there was nothing standing in their way, nothing at all between here and Berlin.
Sturmbannführer Werner Potchke brought him the final bad news. “We can’t get forward, Obersturmbannführer. The Americans have cut the road to the bridges. We can see them sending their tanks across already.”
Jochen Peiper felt his ruined face twisting under the strain of this lost battle. He was close to his goal, close to crossing the Rhine with his kampfgruppe largely intact, in spite of all that the Allies and their pet traitor Rommel could throw at him. At that moment he hated Potschke for bringing him the bad news, hated every man in the kampfgruppe for failing the Reich, hated himself for not somehow triumphing over all odds.
He had begun this offensive with a task force of five thousand men and eight hundred vehicles, over one hundred of which were tanks. As the spearhead unit, his men had seen the toughest fighting, and with the attack on Dinant as well, his task force had suffered greatly. He now had around fifteen hundred men and twenty-eight tanks, as well as eighty or so additional vehicles. The Reich needed those tanks, and now it wouldn’t get them. What was left of his kampfgruppe would shortly be reduced to infantry.
From his command position atop his Panther, he looked at the bedraggled remnants of what had been the finest fighting force the Third Reich had ever put in the field. Many of the men wore warm boots, pants, and coats looted from dead and wounded American soldiers. They hadn’t taken clothes from prisoners—they hadn’t taken any prisoners. His men had better things to do.
At each stop, his headquarters team set up a small command post, which basically consisted of a tent mostly filled with radio equipment, a folding table, and chairs. Because of the bitter cold, they built a blazing fire with scavenged wood; even so, a man dared not go without gloves for long. “What have we got?” Peiper shouted down from his perch.
“The usual sets of orders,” came the reply. That meant one set of orders from General Dietrich and one set of orders from the fake Rommel government, still claiming command over all of Army Group B’s forces.
“Throw the Rommel shit into the fire! No, wait. Let me read it. Maybe it will tell me what those hurensohnnen are up to.” He jumped down from the tank.
There was nothing particularly revealing or insightful in the message originating with Rommel. Peiper wouldn’t mind reading all of Rommel’s message traffic, but his kampfgruppe didn’t have the organic intelligence capability necessary; that was at the division level, and with everyone on the move, good intelligence was hard to produce. He looked at the orders coming from Dietrich carefully. It had occurred to him almost immediately that sending orders purporting to be from the other side would be a good tactic; in the general chaos it seemed no one had had the initiative or focus to send out fake orders, but he wanted to take no chances.
Because everyone had the same authentication codes, he had to interpret the order in light of common sense, but this order posed no problem. He was directed to move his kampfgruppe across the Rhine, with his equipment if possible, without it if necessary, re-form with his division or else report to higher headquarters. Common sense. There was another order, this one to report to General Dietrich in person as soon as possible. Again, he planned to do that anyway, so fraud and communication sabotage was not an issue.
His problem was how to do it. The strategic situation looked bleak. He did not have enough military might to force an opposed crossing. He and some of his men might make it across the Rhine by abandoning their vehicles, but even then they would need a covering action.
His eyes fell on Major Potchke again. “Yes, sir?” Potchke said.
“Werner, the division has to get across the Rhine,” he said heavily.
Potchke’s face went wooden. “Yes, sir,” he replied.
“Our kampfgruppe was to blaze the way, but you tell me that we’re stopped here.”
“I’m afraid so,” Potchke replied.
“And the Allies are coming.”
“Yes.”
“On foot and in small bands most of us can cross the Rhine over the next few days. Vehicles and equipment must be abandoned and rendered useless to the enemy.”
“Yes, sir.”
Peiper paused. “We’re going to need a holding action to give the rest of us some breathing room and a head start.”
Potchke’s emotionless voice responded, “Yes, sir.”
“We need twenty-four hours. After that, everyone goes.” Both men knew that was a face-saving lie. There was virtually no chance that Werner Potchke could hold out that long. This was a stand and die order. “Decide what you need and who you need, Werner. All equipment and ammunition is yours. If
any of the other division elements reach here, they can reinforce you, but I suspect they will be abandoning vehicles short of here, because the enemy is closing in on all sides.”
“Yes, sir,” Potchke replied.
Peiper stood awkwardly for a minute. He had sent men to their deaths many times, but most often when the guns were blazing. In the incongruous snowy peace of this January morning, it seemed out of place. “I have orders from General Dietrich. I have to leave,” he said, and his voice was hollow. He was not afraid of death, but because he was not going to die here and now, he felt ashamed, embarrassed.
Soon his dwindled command was divided between Task Force Potchke, who would build a defense to draw in and slow down the attacking Americans, and Task Force Diefenthal, under Hauptsturmführer Josef Diefenthal, consisting of soldiers on foot who would make their way to the Rhine and cross as best they could.
As for Peiper, he had orders, and for the first time in years he would travel alone. He commandeered a motorcycle that belonged to one of his couriers, climbed aboard, and took a moment to refresh his memory of the controls. Satisfied, he gunned the throttle and felt the welcome rush of acceleration. It gave him pleasure to be moving with such speed, such freedom, to leave the chaos and failure of this terrible campaign behind.
He would find a bridge, somewhere north of Koblenz, and he would cross the river and travel east. Alone, on this fast machine, he would make good time. He would reunite with General Dietrich and take on a new mission. No matter what, he knew that when all others dropped away, he would remain faithful to the cause, to the passion that ruled his life. He had to get across the Rhine.
FLASH/BULLETIN
PARIS BUREAU, JANUARY 19, 1900 GMT
COPY 01 ALLIES CROSS THE RHINE
DISTRIBUTION: ALL STATIONS
 
PARIS, JANUARY 19, 1945 (AP) BY CHUCK PORTER
ALLIED FORCES TODAY PENETRATED THE FINAL BARRIER PROTECTING THE
GERMAN HEARTLAND! AS FORWARD ELEMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES
THIRD ARMY CROSSED THE RHINE RIVER AT KOBLENZ, GERMANY,
DEFEATING HEAVY OPPOSITION IN THE FORM OF THE NAZI 12TH SS PANZER
DIVISION, GENERAL OF THE ARMIES DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER DECLARED
TODAY “A WATERSHED DAY IN THE LIBERATION OF GERMANY FROM THE
YOKE OF ITS NAZI MASTERS.”
IN LONDON, PRIME MINISTER WINSTON CHURCHILL PRAISED THE COURAGE OF “THE BRAVE MEN OF OUR ALLIED ARMED FORCES, WHO, FROM THE BEACHES OF NORMANDY THROUGH THE FORESTS OF THE ARDENNES, AND NOW ACROSS THE RHINE RIVER ITSELF, HAVE WITH INDOMITABLE WILL SET A NEW COURSE FOR HUMAN DESTINY.”
IN TRIER, GERMANY, CHANCELLOR CARL GOERDELER OF THE PROVISIONAL GERMAN REPUBLIC GAVE THANKS TO THE ALLIES FOR THEIR BRAVE SERVICE IN THE LIBERATION OF HIS PEOPLE FROM THE NAZI TYRANNY, AND CALLED UPON THE GOVERNMENT IN BERLIN TO LAY DOWN ITS ARMS IN UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER AND AVOID SPILLING ANY MORE BLOOD IN A LOST CAUSE.
WHILE SCATTERED FIGHTING CONTINUES IN AND AROUND THE CITY OF KOBLENZ, UNITED STATES THIRD ARMY HEADQUARTERS REPORTS THAT THE OCCUPATION OF KOBLENZ IS SECURE, THE BRIDGES ARE CAPTURED, AND ALLIED FORCES, INCLUDING THE GERMAN REPUBLICAN ARMY UNDER FIELD MARSHAL ERWIN ROMMEL, WILL CROSS OVER BEGINNING TONIGHT AND CONTINUING FOR SEVERAL DAYS.
OTHER RHINE CROSSINGS ARE EXPECTED TO BE MADE IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS, EXPANDING THE NUMBER AND RANGE OF ALLIED FORCES PENETRATING THE GERMAN HEARTLAND.
 
MORE
 
AP PAR 333548 JF/011145
 
EXCERPT FROM
WAR’S FINAL FURY
,
BY PROFESSOR JARED GRUENWALD
 
The sweep through the Rhineland to a crossing of the great river itself by Patton’s Third Army, coupled with Rommel’s German Republican Army, broke the final defensive barrier on Himmler’s western flank with a brutal and decisive blow. The American armored divisions reached the river so quickly that the SS units simply could not react in time. When CCA of the 19th Armored Division crossed at Koblenz and, a day later, the 4th Armored crossed a few miles south to strike at Wiesbaden, the whole illusion of a defensible front was shattered.
The remnants of the SS units that survived the campaign were forced to make their own crossings of the wide river, often just ahead of the American units that were spreading out along the east bank. Although the positions north of the Ruhr Valley remained strong, holding the British and the northern half of Bradley’s army group in check, the breakthroughs in the south were too vast, too sweeping, to allow for any containment.
Eisenhower’s decision to strike out for the political prize of Berlin was audacious, and would fuel many of the events over the next months. It created a direct challenge to the Russians, who were no longer viewed as part of the Great Alliance, and this was a challenge that Stalin could not afford to ignore. Though the Western Allies were in total command of the air, and fully mechanized in all aspects of their land armies, they had barely a quarter as many men as the Red Army could bring to bear from the east. It was not a gamble that the Western governments would make lightly.
In his typical fashion, however, Patton was not concerned with such strategic details. Nor was he content to allow his units to simply consolidate the initial gains while the rest of the Allied forces came up in support. Sensing the crucial weakness of his enemy, he hurled his forces to the east and north in a broad hook that raced ever closer toward the prize of the German capital. Rommel’s German forces accompanied this advance, which of course would lead to the surprising developments in the Thuringer Wald.
But even before then, Himmler’s difficulties reached their crisis. With the renewal of the Soviet offensive in the east, Germany was once again trapped between the jaws of two implacable enemies—enemies that were not just focused on destroying Nazis, but were now engaged in a deadly race with each other.
Besides the now-dashed hope that Rommel’s western offensive would succeed, there were few other opportunities for Germany to exploit. However, there was some cause for hope. In the months of buildup to Operation Fuchs am Rhein, Field Marshals Alfred Jodl and Walther Mödel were busy rebuilding the shattered Eastern Front. Finally freed from the shackles of Adolf Hitler’s irrational demands, such as the infamous “fortress” order, the two field marshals were able to use the interval of peace to create new, fortified lines drawn on the basis of what was defensible—an “Eastwall” of sorts to parallel the Westwall that had successfully delayed the western Allied advance. Of course, the eastern line lacked the extensive fortifications and gun emplacements that characterized the “Siegfried Line” along Germany’s western border. The most significant work had been done in East Prussia, where the approaches to Konigsberg were now guarded by extensive and modern pillboxes, tank traps, and strong points.
Even so, the initial Soviet advances met with stunning success. The line of the Vistula was crossed in multiple places, and Warsaw was quickly gobbled up by the Red Army. They barely slowed their pace as they raced toward the west, crossing the prewar border between Poland and Germany and preparing to close in on Berlin itself … .
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