North Reich (60 page)

      
The tank fired and the shell seemed to scream only feet above Grant.
 
There was a lull and Grant peered carefully over a low mound that had been sheltering him.
 
The German tank was burning and a crewman lay on the ground beside it.
 
His clothes and skin were smoldering.
 
He thought he could see other Germans heading inland and away.

      
Truscott staggered to his knees.
 
“I think this is as far as the Germans get.
 
Their high water mark, so to speak.”

“What do you see?” asked Guderian.
 
His voice was distorted and tinny over the radio.
 
Koenig could hear the anxiety in his voice.

      
“We have been stalled by the guns on the ships.
 
Our tanks are now shooting up the transports and a couple of them are already burning.
 
The Americans are fighting far more tenaciously than I thought, and our attacks are slowing down.
 
Send some more tanks, sir, and we can still pull it off.”

      
There was a pause and Koenig heard Guderian sigh.
 
“Thank you, but that will not happen.
 
I’m ordering a retreat before I lose the rest of the army?”

      
“But why, sir?
 
We’re so close.”

“But not close enough, captain, and don’t question me,” Guderian snapped.
 
“We are paying too high a price and the Americans have begun crossing the Niagara River to our south.
 
I’m afraid the Yanks have won this round.”

      
Koenig gave the radio back to his aide.
 
He looked to his rear and began to plot his retreat.
 
As a German soldier, he’d never had to retreat.
 
The Wehrmacht had only known victory.
 
Oh yes, there had been some minor reversals that had entailed strategic pullbacks, but Guderian was implying that Germany had lost this battle.
 
If the Americans were truly crossing the river, this withdrawal would likely be just the beginning.

      
He looked down and saw his shadow.
 
The sky was beginning to clear and that meant that the American planes would be on them like blood attracts sharks.

Chapter Twenty-one

Canfield lay low and hugged the mud at the bottom of his trench as the German armor again drove past.
 
One part of him said he should be shooting at them, while another part said that would be inviting retaliation and disaster.
 
This time there were fewer of the enemy and they were headed in the other direction.
 
The infantry among them were slumped over and in no way resembled Nazi supermen.
 
Wounded Germans were stretched out on tank hulls. He wanted to exult, but he had lost too many men in the fighting.
 
A rough count said fifty dead and two hundred wounded out of a battalion of eight hundred.
 

      
Dubinski rose up.
 
His face was contorted in anger.
 
He had his rifle and he was looking for a target.
 
Canfield grabbed his arm and winced.
 
His so-called flesh wound hurt like the devil.
 

      
“Let them go,” he said.
 
“Don’t give them an excuse to attack and kill the rest of us.”
 
Dubinski nodded glumly and knelt back down in the trench.
 
“Stay hidden,” Canfield added.
 
“We’ll get the bastards the next time.”

      
Less than an hour later and after a number of American tanks and infantry had followed the Germans, Truscott showed up.
 
He stared silently at the torn bodies and the ruined vehicles.
 
Medics had taken away the wounded, but the burned and mangled dead from both sides remained.
 
Graves Registration would collect them and give them a decent burial, probably in a nearby farm field.
 
Notification would be sent to their next of kin.
 
There would be a lot of grieving families in the U.S. as a result of the last couple of days.
 
Canfield wondered if the Germans would be buried in mass graves or individual ones and decided he didn’t much care.

“I hate this part,” Truscott said softly.

      
“Tell me about it, general,” Canfield whispered.

      
Grant looked about and shook his head sadly.
 
“It’s even worse the farther back you go.
 
We were packed in so closely in the rear it was almost impossible for German shells to miss hitting something.”

      
Truscott looked away and Grant said nothing more.
 
His comment was an implicit criticism of their previous commander.
 
In his consuming fear of a German counter assault, he had left them utterly unprepared for one when it occurred.
 
Nothing more, however, would be said about the past.
 
Truscott’s plans were for the future.

      
“How soon can your men begin moving out and attacking the krauts?” he asked Canfield who showed no surprise at the request.

      
“Anytime you want, general.
 
It would be nice if we got some food, ammunition, and some replacements.
 
I can do without the replacements but we are almost out of ammo and an army does move on its stomach.”

Truscott smiled.
 
He had been getting the same response from all his front line commanders.
 
The army was pissed off and wanted to strike back.
 
The battle had started poorly, but they had prevailed over the Germans and it felt good.

      
“You’ll get your supplies in the next couple of hours and you can move out then.
 
Slowly, of course, we don’t want anyone stepping into an ambush and, oh yeah, look out for mines.
 
The pricks have a million of them, or so we’ve heard.
 
We’ll start sending you replacements right off so you can start filtering them in.”

      
Grant looked away.
 
The new guys would have a hard time fitting in with a unit that had been intact for so long and had just been savaged.
 
Nobody would want to make friends with someone who might be dead in an instant.
 
Another face of war, he thought.
 
The Germans had to have been hit just as badly.
 
However, they didn’t have a deep well of reinforcements and replacements from which to draw, which was just too fucking bad, he thought.

“Can we contain them?” Guderian asked.

      
He was referring to the attempts by the U.S. Army to cross the Niagara to their south.

      
“So far, yes,” replied General Steiner, commander of the South Front.
 
He looked exhausted, as did Guderian.
 
“They have crossed at two points and are trying to build pontoon bridges.
 
As soon as one gets partly built, either our guns or our planes knock it down.
 
This cannot last forever.
 
They are wearing us down with their greater numbers of men, guns, and planes.
 
That and when their beachhead expands will force us to give up the defensive line along the Niagara River and retreat northward.
 
I would strongly recommend making plans to begin that phase of the battle as soon as possible.”

      
Guderian rubbed his eyes.
 
He would not have referred to a retreat as a ‘phase of the battle.’
 
They were planning to retreat, not only from the river, but from General Raus’s West Front as well.
 
Patton’s continuous pressure on German defenses was slowly destroying them.
 
Raus needed to pull his men back to shorter and more defensible positions.

      
Of course, the Fuhrer had expressly forbidden that.
 
His orders were that Fortress North Reich would remain intact and be defended to the last.
 
At least Berlin had stopped insulting him with promises of great numbers of reinforcements coming after the Kriegsmarine swept the seas of American and British ships.
 
The German navy would never defeat the Allies; that much was abundantly clear.

      
Guderian took a sip of schnapps that someone on his staff had liberated from a liquor outlet in St. Catharines.
 
He winced. It was inexpensive and probably locally made, nothing like what he’d enjoyed back in Germany.
 
He wondered if he would ever get to enjoy anything back in Germany.

      
He sensed someone in front of him and looked up.
 
“Koenig, you look like hell.”

      
“I feel that way, sir.
 
My car was strafed on the way back and my driver was killed.
 
He was also my radioman and that meant I couldn’t keep in touch.”

      
“Are you hurt?”

      
“Cuts and bruises, sir.
 
Nothing that a few months leave in Berlin or the south of France wouldn’t cure.”

      
Guderian laughed softly.
 
He would give a year’s pay to be back in Germany with his wife Margarete and their two sons, both of whom were in the army.
 
He hoped they were not fighting in that snake pit called Russia.

      
But seeing his family was not going to happen.
 
He was not going home anytime in the foreseeable future.
 
He had the North Reich to defend, and now had very little to defend it with.

General George C. Marshall dreaded his next appointment. If he could, he would have palmed the man off on one of his staffers, but one does not insult the Secretary of the Treasury.

      
Henry Morgenthau was a Jew, which was unusual as few Jews rose to positions of prominence in the federal government.
 
He’d been born in the U.S. and succeeded in the world of business.
 
He was also a friend and upper New York neighbor of FDR and that was another reason to see the man, even though the meeting was doubtless going to be fruitless and frustrating.
 
Morgenthau wanted that which did not and could not exist – safety and freedom for his fellow Jews in Europe.

      
From all that Marshall could ascertain, Morgenthau had worn the mantle of Jewishness lightly for almost all of his life.
 
Apparently he rarely, if ever, observed the Sabbath or went to a synagogue.
 
He’d been what some people referred to as an assimilated Jew, if, Marshall thought, any Jew could be assimilated in a mainly Protestant American environment.
 
He’d gone to excellent schools, and if his faith denied him entrance into certain clubs and neighborhoods, and even a number of restaurants, he didn’t seem at all bothered by the slights.
 
It was a small price to pay to participate in the American dream.
 

      
All of this changed when Morgenthau realized the full fury of the horror that was occurring in the Third Reich.
 
Like anyone with knowledge of the barbarism, he’d been sickened and stunned by the systematic slaughter of Jews under Hitler and Himmler.
 
It had changed him and he was now a rabid Zionist, and a man compelled to try and save what remained of the Jews of Europe.

      
Unfortunately, Morgenthau’s was a hopeless quest.

      
The two men shook hands and took seats.
 
No one else was present in the general’s office.
 
“I assume you know why I am here,” Morgenthau began without preamble.

      
“Of course.
 
You want me to somehow come up with a military solution to save the Jews of Europe.
 
My question has to be why haven’t you discussed this with the president?”

      
Morgenthau laughed bitterly.
 
“Because the president won’t speak of it.
 
He defers, delays, and obfuscates.
 
He will not give me an answer.”

      
Marshall fully understood.
 
He too had been the beneficiary of FDRs maddening habit of never giving a straight answer.
 
“Mr. Secretary, I will be blunt.
 
There is no military solution at this time, nor is there likely to be one for quite some time.
 
We know that the main death camp is called Birkenau and it is outside the city of Auschwitz.
 
Auschwitz itself is about fifty miles west of Krakow and very close to the old German border.
 
As you are doubtless aware, it used to be the Polish town of Oswiecim until it was annexed by Germany and re-named.
 
It is deep in the middle of Europe and untouchable.”