Germanica (21 page)

Hell erupted. Seemingly out of nowhere there were flashes of light and blasts of thunder as German guns opened fire on the tanks. The main German antitank weapon was the almost legendary 88mm antitank gun, which was capable of easily destroying an American Sherman, as it now began to prove. As they watched, two American tanks were struck and began to burn. One lone crewman emerged from a tank. A few seconds later a third tank was killed and then three more.

Occasionally, an American would manage to escape from the hell that was erupting inside a burning Sherman’s hull, but not too often. Even then, a number of the soldiers were wounded or on fire. One poor GI had lost his foot and hopped frantically towards the rear. Tanner urged him on, but to no avail. He collapsed and lay still. A medic finally got to him, checked him over, and left him. Tanner felt sickened.

The halftracks were within range of the German guns and it was their turn to begin to die. Adding to the horror were well hidden machine guns that raked the lightly armored vehicles. Men tumbled from them and tried to advance. When the bullets struck them, they went to ground and stayed there.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled General Evans. “Where the hell are our planes?”

On cue, P47 and P51 fighters began to strafe where spotters on the ground told them the Germans were hiding. The German guns kept firing, with some of them shooting at the planes, forcing them to jink and juke. One was hit. It cartwheeled into the ground and exploded. More planes dive-bombed, this time with napalm. Fires billowed, killing any life beneath or nearby.

“Why the hell didn’t we do that sooner?” asked Cullen.

“Probably against regulations,” Tanner answered. “Let the infantry suffer before doing anything that makes sense.” General Evans glared at him but did not disagree.

The attack was stalling. Even with the Germans pounded by planes and with searing flames from napalm leaping high, the American casualties were too many. The armor was the first to give up. The tanks moved in reverse to keep their more heavily armored front facing enemy fire. It was a vain hope, as three more tanks exploded. The remaining Shermans then simply turned and raced for safety. More 88mm shells followed and the Germans increased their range. Shells began to fall in and around the area where Tanner and the others now lay on the ground and tried to make themselves very small.

The earth shook and they cowered before they realized their best chance to survive was to get out of sight and far enough away to be out of range of the German guns. “Damn it, I thought we were safe,” said Cullen.

“The eighty-eights got a maximum range of nearly forty thousand feet and that’s damn near eight miles,” said Tanner. “If it can see us, it can kill us.”

“Now you tell me,” said Cullen as another shell shrieked overhead and smashed into the ground behind them.

General Evans had been quiet. All of the planning for the attack was down the drain. The area before the German lines was littered with smashed and burning vehicles and dead American soldiers. It was beginning to dawn on the American commanders that cracking through the Brenner Pass and connecting with Fifteenth Army Group soldiers fighting up from Italy was going to be a very tough and bloody proposition.

* * *

Schubert and Hummel had spent much of their day hiding and trying not to scream as American artillery shells pounded everything near them. Sometimes the concussions lifted them off the ground and sometimes they were deafened, if only temporarily. Debris rained down on the roof of their bunker like hail during a storm. They had heard that the Yanks had an overwhelming superiority in artillery and now they believed it. The German 88 might be a magnificent weapon but there were not enough of them. Worse, the Americans had artillery that was far larger than an 88-millimeter gun.

Earlier, American fighter-bombers had done their part, also proving that the Yanks ruled the skies. Luftwaffe? What Luftwaffe, they thought bitterly. Where the hell were the planes that fat Herman Goering had promised? Had he sold them all for drugs? And where was the Wehrmacht’s vaunted armor? Where were the Panthers and Tigers that had savaged the armored formations of Russia and the United States? Why, they were gone, they answered themselves bitterly, destroyed by the Allies’ overwhelming superiority in numbers. Now they didn’t even care if Lieutenant Pfister heard their complaints.

It was almost a relief when the assaults from the skies ended and the American tanks began to rumble forward. They shifted so they could see the approaching Shermans. “Remember,” said Hummel, “we don’t shoot at the tanks.”

“I’m not that stupid,” Schubert said, annoyed, “or as dumb as you look. Or did you get hit on the head?”

Halftracks filled with soldiers were moving behind the tanks, but the two Germans dared not open fire, at least not yet. Expose their positions to the Shermans and their stubby 75mm guns would be fired right down their throats. They would wait their turn.

Finally, scores of carefully hidden 88mm guns opened fire, devastating the coming tanks. Some stopped dead in their tracks while others exploded in billows of flame. Americans in the following halftracks tumbled out and began to move towards the German lines.

“Our turn,” said Hummel, almost laughing. It was a relief to be able to do something, to strike back at their tormentors. He began to fire short and well-aimed bursts at the Americans. Their MG42 made a sound like metal tearing when it was fired. Everyone hated the hideous noise the MG42 made, but Hummel and Schubert loved it. The magnificent weapon was keeping them alive.

Most German bullets missed their quickly moving targets, but many did not. American soldiers fell. Some lay still while others writhed on the ground. They were close enough to occasionally hear the cries and screams of the wounded.

Schubert kept feeding belts of ammunition. He too was grinning hugely as they hurt the Americans. The tanks were pulling back, leaving American infantry alone and exposed among the dead and burning tanks and their own dead and wounded. It was no time to show mercy. The man you allowed to live today might kill you tomorrow.

They had to pause as Schubert changed the almost red hot barrel. Regulations said they were to control the rate of fire and stick to short bursts so as to not get the barrel overheated, but people who wrote foolish regulations like that never had scores of American soldiers breathing down their necks.

“The hell with regulations,” Hummel said as he helped his partner.

The gun was soon ready and it again spouted bullets. This time they did keep the bursts to short ones. There was no longer a large number of Americans moving towards them. Now they came in small groups of two or three, sometimes only one soldier got up and raced a few feet towards them. Hummel’s aim was good as he picked off soldier after soldier and blew them away. Sometimes the Americans just fell like puppets whose strings had been cut, but sometimes they tried to crawl or run back to their own lines. Neither man was cruel. The wounded they let go back, but anyone who didn’t look wounded they killed.

Suddenly, Hummel’s eyes widened in horror. “Down,” he screamed. Seconds later, a napalm bomb exploded uncomfortably close to their bunker. They were lucky. None of the searing flames washed over them, although they could feel the heat that nearly sucked the air out of their lungs. For a few seconds it was uncomfortably hot and they both wondered what was happening to anyone closer to the explosion than they were. They were being fried to a crisp, was what they both thought.

The bombing was over. American infantry had taken advantage of it to withdraw. The two machine-gunners saw no reason to advertise the fact that they had survived and thus draw attention from the American planes, so they settled down and waited.

Shortly after sunset, their wait ended. A runner from Lieutenant Pfister told them to close up and pull back as soon as it was dark enough to be safe. When they asked why, the young private shrugged and said that the officers were afraid that the battle, although clearly won by the Germans, had enabled the Americans to pinpoint the locations of too many of the German defenses. American artillery could commence again at any time, but most likely at first light.

“Makes sense,” said Schubert as the two men prepared to move out. “It’s a shame since we definitely did win today. We shouldn’t have to retreat after a victory.”

“But what did we win,” asked Hummel, “besides the right to withdraw farther into the mountains? Someday we’ll wind up starving to death on some barren granite slope. As long as the Americans want to keep coming, we can never win.”

Schubert couldn’t help himself. He had to look around to see if anyone from the SS or Gestapo was listening in on them. No one was, of course. The only thing he could see in the fading light was the large numbers of craters left by countless bombs and shells. It was a stark and ugly moonscape, just like the pictures he’d seen on science fiction novels, only worse. Novels don’t smell of burned and exploded flesh along with gasoline and anything else that would burn. They were thankful that the darkness did not allow them to clearly see the debris around them.

“We’ll have to wait for an opportunity to give ourselves up.” Schubert said.

“If we wait too long,” Hummel said sadly, “we’ll all be dead.”

* * *

President Harry Truman looked at the report, shook his head glumly, and put it down on the table. “I thought we had won this war,” he said. “Yet this rump part of Nazi Germany continues to hold out and sends thousands of our boys to either the hospital or the graveyard. And I don’t care what some generals like to think, it was a defeat. General Marshall, about how much ground did we take?”

As usual, the Army’s chief of staff was expressionless. “On average we gained about half a mile.”

“Three divisions of infantry, reinforced by an armored division and an infantry division, tried to bull their way through the pass and made only half a mile. That might have been a major gain in the First War, but not this one. At this rate, Devers’ armies will meet up with Clark’s somewhere around summer of 1948. This first attack on the Brenner was not a victory, was not even a draw. We got our asses kicked.”

Marshall did not disagree. The two men were in a small office adjacent to the Oval Office in the West Wing. Truman had recently decided that he liked to use it for small groups. A movie screen had been set up on one wall and a very nervous Army captain had just shown them the latest unedited films from Germany.

“What we have just watched should not be made public for at least fifty years.” Truman said.

The debacle at the head of the Brenner had been filmed in glorious Technicolor. The flames were brilliant and bright, and the scenes showing the Shermans being blown up were dramatic and awful. Brave cameramen had gone in with the infantry and the graphic death scenes of American soldiers had shaken Truman to his core.

Marshall was not done. “I have other films for you to see, Mister President. They are from the last war and show the Austrians and the Italians in battle in the Alpine snows. It will give you some idea what we will face if the situation is not resolved before the next snows roll in.”

“I will see them, General, just not today. I have other problems. In just a few weeks I am supposed to meet Stalin and whoever will be prime minister of Great Britain in Potsdam, Germany. We will discuss the future of Europe. How the hell can we discuss that while this Alpine Redoubt still exists and while this asinine creation called Germanica thumbs its nose at us?”

“Are you having second thoughts about using the atomic bomb in Germany, sir?”

“I can’t begin to think about using something that hasn’t even worked yet, and God help us if the remote possibility that the Nazis have their
own
is true. Even if it does work and we use the damn thing to blast a path through the Brenner, it’s now very likely that residual radiation won’t let us use that path. Damn it to hell. Now it looks even more than likely that Churchill will be replaced by that dullard, Attlee. God help us, but the situation in Europe looks bleak.”

“And we still have Japan to defeat,” added Marshall. He was glad that the perpetually angry and volatile Admiral Ernest King was not present. He would have taken the last comment as an insult to his navy and exploded.

“But just like the Germans,” Truman said, “the Japanese have been defeated but just won’t admit it. The Nazi hierarchy knows that they will hang or be put in front of a firing squad if there isn’t a diplomatic solution that will allow them to escape punishment. The same holds true with the Japanese. The Japanese ruling council is a bunch of sadistic war criminals and Hirohito is the worst. I know that we might have to give in and let the four-eyed bastard remain on his damn throne, but I don’t have to like it. But there is no way that Josef Goebbels and his cohorts are going to escape punishment. Goebbels in particular is going to hang.”

“You know that the Russians are willing to help us,” said Marshall.

“Of course they will help us. I may have just become president, but I know that Stalin is a grasping, lying son of a bitch. We will likely need him to invade Manchuria and elsewhere in the Pacific to help finish off the Japs, but I do not want him to attack this Germanica and take any more of Europe then he now has. I’m catching hell from the Republicans in Congress because he’s now squatting in Poland and other countries and isn’t very likely to leave anytime this century.”

“Well sir, what do you suggest?”

Truman sagged. “Unless you or one of General Groves’ scientists comes up with a miracle, we can drop an atomic bomb or two on Japan, but not in Germany. There we’ll still have to slug it out with the Nazis.”

Or, the president thought, we might have to
deal
with the Nazis.

* * *

“You look as bad as I did,” Winnie said softly. She was smiling, but there was deep sadness in her eyes.

He started to rise, but she pushed him back and stroked his hair. “I leave you alone for just a little while and you manage to get into such trouble. When are you going to grow up?”