Himmler's War-ARC (12 page)

He also decided that London had the potential to be a lovely city if only someone would clean it up. He didn’t mean the sandbags piled many feet high around buildings to provide a little protection against German bombs and rockets. So far these had generally fallen on the West End and not that much on the center of London. They said that the Battle of Britain was over and that Nazi bombers were a thing of the past. He wasn’t so sure. The Nazis had begun launching their rockets at anything in or near London with utter disregard to where they landed. Regardless, when the war was over the sandbags would disappear quickly.

No, by cleaning up the city, he meant getting rid of the many centuries worth of soot caused by the hundreds of thousands of coal fires used to heat London’s homes and businesses. The city’s buildings were almost all a uniform gray-black and cried out for a good scrubbing.

“Uncle!”

He grinned and turned. The young woman ran into his arms and they hugged fiercely. He kissed her on the cheek. “My favorite niece in London. I don’t believe it.”

Jessica Granville laughed. She was his only niece. She was twenty-one, almost as tall as he and slender. Her brown hair was cut almost boyishly short and she wore an American dress that style-starved British women passing by stared at enviously. She was well-fed and ruddily healthy, which also bothered British women and caused the men to stare. So many Brits were pale and drab thanks to clothing and food shortages.

At first glance, many people thought Jessica was plain, but when she talked or laughed, they found her vivacious. “I see you got rid of Phips,” she said. He’d written her of life with the accidental hero. “Too bad, I wanted to meet him.”

He told her how so many British women had managed to meet him and she laughed again. “Phipsie? Good lord. At least his departure means I have a room for the short while.”

Tom had shamelessly used his influence and managed to change Phips’ room at the Claridge to Jessica’s name. She would be able to pay for it. Her allowance from her family was more than adequate. Must be nice to have money, he mused.

“So tell me again, what are you going to be doing here in London?”

She took his arm and they strolled down Haymarket in the general direction of the Thames. “I’m with the Red Cross. When we get to France, I’ll be working with refugees and those broadly being referred to as displaced persons. My job will be to try to unite them with their families.”

“Good luck. There are hordes of them already and I don’t think the real refugee crisis has even begun.”

They paused as a column of American trucks drove by. “And you didn’t want to join the WACs? With two years of college under your belt, I could have pulled some strings and gotten you into women’s OCS, or whatever they call it. At least you’d have a commission.”

She shook her head vehemently. “And then I’d be supervising either a bunch of typists or a gaggle of women drivers, all of whom would be working for lecherous colonels, present company excluded, of course.”

He laughed. “Certainly.”

She was absolutely correct. Regardless of her skills, she would wind up in some clerical capacity where her intellect and potential talents would be wasted. The Red Cross would use her far more effectively.

“Will you be going to France with Ike?”

“It’s supposed to be a military secret, Jessica, but yes. Ike isn’t there yet.” Not true. He’d crossed the Channel for good a couple of days earlier and set up a small headquarters in Normandy.

“I hope to see dear Cousin Jeb when I get there.”

Granville sighed. “Highly unlikely. He’s in an armored regiment and, well, close to the front. Please don’t tell me you’re still infatuated with him.”

“Oh God, no. We’re cousins, remember, and that infatuation occurred when we were kids.”

“You’re third cousins and much is permitted at that level.”

“But not by me, Uncle.”

However, she did recall a couple of times when Dear Cousin Jeb tried to get in her pants and one time when he very nearly succeeded. If he hadn’t been so drunk that he’d passed out, who knew what might have happened. She’d been under the influence as well, but had managed to stay awake and reasonably alert. Still, he was a genial rogue and she was very fond of him.

They heard an odd and ominous sound and looked up. It sounded like a cross between a roar and a whine. They stared as a strange craft flew overhead. It looked like two large pipes connected to each other, and it was making the noise. The roaring stopped and the craft began to plunge to the ground.

“Down!” yelled Tom and he grabbed her, slamming her to the sidewalk. Around them, others were doing the same thing, while a bemused few looked around to see what was happening. The explosion was deafening and debris flew down the streets, funneled by the buildings. Screams of pain and fear followed.

Jessica and her uncle got up, shaken. Many people were running away from the explosion, while others ran towards the source to help out if they could. Bloody walking wounded staggered from the bomb site.

“Uncle, what the hell was that?” She was badly shaken and gasping.

Tom Granville dusted himself off and tried to act nonchalant. “It’s one of the late Adolf Hitler’s V-1 rockets, Jessica. They’ve been falling indiscriminately for a few weeks now. Just like the Nazis. They kill innocent people, although they I don’t think they’ve ever hit anything of military significance.”

Jessica’s knee was bleeding from where she’d fallen and a trickle of blood was running down her leg and into her shoe. She wiped at it with a handkerchief. Ambulances raced by, their sirens making that funny squealing sound. The city of London had plenty of experience with tragedies like this. The two of them would be in the way at the bomb site.

She took his arm and squeezed it as they walked. She was shaken by her first experience with violence. She knew it wouldn’t be her last. This time they would go directly to her hotel. “I thought the Battle of Britain was over, Uncle?”

“So did everyone else.”

CHAPTER 6

THE PIPER CUB, nobody called it a Grasshopper, showed a lot of wear and tear. There were a number of patches to the wings and body that covered bullet holes. This did not sit well with Morgan as he flew two thousand feet above the ground looking for German activity below while simultaneously keeping an eye out for the Luftwaffe. The Germans weren’t supposed to have many planes left, but all he needed was to run into one of them in his helpless little plane.

He tried not to wonder what had happened to the man, or men, inside the tattered craft when it had been shot up, and whether or not the plane had been intended for the junk heap before it was borrowed by Levin and some others on Stoddard’s staff.

Still, with Corporal Leach seated behind him, and providing a second pair of eyes, he felt comfortable, even happy to be up in the air once again even if it was in a plane that was so ridiculously easy to fly. Someone had said if you could ride a bike, you could fly a Piper Cub.

Of course it wasn’t anywhere near that simple, and a mistake at several thousand feet in the air was likely to be deadly and not simply result in bruises.

The Cub was a durable tool. She had a service ceiling of more than eleven thousand feet, although Jack had no intention of coming even close to that height. First, it was already cold at two thousand and would be freezing at eleven. Second, the thin air would require oxygen and the plane wasn’t configured for it.

Her top speed was eighty-seven miles per hour and her cruising speed was a mere seventy-five. Under many circumstances, she couldn’t outrun a car. He grinned as he looked down. Several vehicles were on the two-lane road below him. He presumed they were German and he really wasn’t blowing past them. On the other hand, they weren’t shooting at him. He thought about calling in some artillery, but the targets were moving and would be difficult, if not impossible, to hit. This time the krauts were safe.

Nor had any other Germans really shot at him. He knew they were down there someplace and had to be watching him carefully. After his nosing around low to the ground in previous flights had resulted in tracer fire arcing up to him, he’d moved his show to a higher altitude and tried not to give the idea that he’d seen something.

Leach tapped him on the shoulder. “Looks like armor in that clump of woods.” A survey of the regiment had turned up several men who’d worked on airplanes and a couple, like Leach, who’d either taken lessons or actually flown one. Jack now had a dozen men led by Sergeant Major Rolfe who, it turned out, had worked on planes in his spare time as a hobby.

Jack took his Zeiss binoculars, a fine German pair taken from a prisoner, and looked where Leach directed. Yes, indeed, there were several tanks hidden in the woods. He called in the coordinates and pulled away. It was highly unlikely that he’d be hit by his own incoming artillery, but never take a chance.

A few moments later, the first shells hit near the hidden tanks, and Leach called in corrections.

Finally, shells hit the woods and shredded it. Trees and branches flew through the air as 105mm shells devastated the target. A few moments later, Jack got word that the barrage was over. He banked the plane and flew low to see the results, and what he saw puzzled him. Where were the burning hulks? What about ammunition exploding? What the hell? All he saw was splintered wood. And then it dawned on him, just as a line of tracers from a hidden machine gun leaped towards him.

“Shit,” both he and Leach said. It was another German ambush. Morgan put the plane in a series of maneuvers designed to either evade the enemy fire or tear the wings off the plane. Somebody down there was sick and tired of his snooping and had built some dummy tanks to lure him in, and damned if he hadn’t fallen for it. The plane shuddered and rocked. Morgan fought the controls and finally got them to obey him.

“You okay, Leach?”

“No,” came the muffled reply. “Jesus, it hurts, Captain.”

Jack flew low and fast towards American lines, trying to ignore Leach’s moaning. When he was over them, his next task was to find a place to land. The Piper didn’t need much room, or even the flattest ground, but he couldn’t land the thing on a dime or even on a tree-lined narrow French country road that was little more than a path. Her thirty-five-foot wingspan precluded that.

Finally, he spotted a landing site and put her down. A half dozen curious American soldiers looked at him, wondering why he’d landed in their field.

“Get me a medic!” he hollered and they were suddenly alert. Hands helped him get Leach, groaning and barely conscious, out of the plane. He’d been shot in the thigh and was bleeding profusely. His face was pale and his eyes were unfocused. A tourniquet was applied and the bleeding slowed to almost nothing. Jack jabbed him with some morphine from a first aid kit and marked the fact on Leach’s forehead. Leach smiled and quickly went into dreamland. A few moments later, a medic arrived and took over. Another few minutes and an ambulance pulled up and took Leach away.

Jack walked back to the little Piper. She now had another line of holes in her. And there were puddles of coagulating blood inside. “More patches,” Jack muttered grimly.

Stoddard walked over and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Colonel, I screwed up royally. There weren’t any tanks. What I saw were wooden dummies, mock-ups. We wasted a lot of ammunition and nearly got Leach and me killed in the process.”

Stoddard grimaced. “We learn something about the krauts, and then they try something new. All we can do is continue to learn from it, Morgan. This is going to be a helluva long war.”

* * *

General Dwight Eisenhower stared glumly at the mass of documents on his desk. He’d crossed the Channel with a small group of several hundred men who would be the core of his headquarters, while several thousand more SHAEF personnel awaited their turn in London. Most were visibly annoyed that they weren’t deemed important enough to go with the vanguard into the liberated portion of France.

Ike and the others were temporarily situated in the French town of Bayeux, the home of the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry was almost nine hundred years old and commemorated the Norman invasion and conquest of England in 1066. The irony was not lost on Ike. He’d just led a reverse invasion from England to Normandy.

He hadn’t planned on taking direct command so early, but he felt that his so-called Allies were acting like complete shits. It had seemed logical and politically correct to give early command of the invasion force to British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. However, the arrogant and insulting Monty had delusions of grandeur and wanted to continue as ground commander forever, even though that question had already been decided by FDR and Churchill. The Americans were providing the overwhelming majority of the men and the equipment; therefore, the Americans would command and the hell with Bernard Law Montgomery.

Worse, Monty suffered from what some Americans referred to as a case of the slows. He was a good enough general, but methodical to a fault. Ike and many American, even some British, generals were convinced that Monty had frittered away too many opportunities to grab the Germans by the throat because he wasn’t quite prepared to move. Hell, Ike thought, Monty would never be fully prepared and he was incapable of being flexible. Everything had to be just right before he’d move.

Even as he thought it, Ike knew the comment was unfair. Monty was trying to avoid the horrific losses suffered by England in the First World War by avoiding undue risks. England had lost nearly a full generation of her youth and the English people wanted nothing to do with bloodbaths and wars of attrition. America’s losses in that war had been minuscule by comparison. There was the real fear that the British people might force their government to settle for a negotiated peace if the blood price got too high.

And, when given the opportunity, Monty truly was the master of the well-planned set-piece battle. He’d proven it at El Alamein in North Africa, the battle that had stopped the Nazi advance to Alexandria, saved the Suez Canal, and sent Rommel packing.