The crump of artillery was distant, but deep and resonant enough to indicate a truly massive bombardment. Reports started to filter into Third Army headquarters in the middle of the morning, and by the time, a few hours later, that General Patton came down the wide hall to the great conference room, there were dispatches arriving almost on a minute by minute basis.
“What’s the word?” asked the army commander, displaying a fierce scowl. His trousers were spattered with mud, from the personal reconnaissance he had performed for half the morning. He had been unable to confirm the full scope of the attack, so had returned to HQ for a full briefing. Most of his division commanders were here, as were Looie Brereton—overall commander of the Airborne Corps—and Max Taylor and Jim Gavin, the division COs of the 101st and Eighty-second Airborne, respectively. Von Manteuffel was here, too, representing the Germans; Patton knew that Rommel would be out in the field, checking firsthand on the situation as it developed.
“Well?” Patton snapped finally, his voice rising into an irritated squawk. “Who’s going to be first with the bad news—or is there anything good to report?”
“It’s a concentrated attack against Rommel’s men,” Reid Sanger told him bluntly.
General Patton looked at the map that had been hastily spread across the broad table. Sanger indicated the area directly north of the city. “Judging by the artillery concentration, they’re coming with at least an army. They have their guns lined up practically wheel to wheel for a twenty-mile front here. They have an aggressive combat air patrol up, and our recon aircraft have been reluctant to fly into that nest of Sturmoviks and MiGs. Not to mention some Curtises and a few other planes that came from the good ol’ USA.”
“Ah, Lend Lease,” Patton said sarcastically. “Kind of changes the tone of it, when that stuff is shooting at us now. But we have to sleep in the bed we’ve got.” He turned his attention back to the map.
“We need more protection on that flank,” he said curtly. He directed his remarks at General Brereton, who was in command of the Seventeenth Airborne Corps, including all of the parachute and glider troops that had dropped into the city. “Do you have the Hundred-and-first available, to move up to support Rommel?”
“Well, we’d leave a gap on the northwest quadrant. I can get them in motion, but you’ll need to bring someone else up to fill the gap.”
“Dammit!” snapped Patton. “We don’t have anyone else! Hell, there are a thousand Russian tanks just east of Berlin, and another thousand to the southeast. If we start jockeying our defenses around, we’ll just weaken another sector.”
The Third Army general gritted his teeth, and tried to swallow his immense frustration. This was not the kind of operation he favored: a relatively static defense against crushing attack. He wanted speed, maneuver, surprise! Yet none of those options was particularly useful in their present fix.
Brereton spoke up. “I know General Eisenhower was concerned that, if Zhukov attacked, we would have enough strength here to trip him up—at least until the rest of the army group can move up in support. Can we do that?”
Patton looked at the map again. “Max, if you can move a regiment up here, you can be in position to support if the Russkis break through Rommel and turn south.” The army general’s finger traced the line of the autobahn. “I have a feeling they’re after this road.”
“At least we still have this Highway Twenty-Four down here,” Sanger pointed out. “Even if they get the autobahn, they’re still forty miles away from each side of our supply line.”
The general studied that truth, as it was displayed on the map. “Yeah, they’d have to fight through Nineteenth Armored to get to Highway Twenty-Four. And with that distance, we’d have time to react, to give the bastards a real bloody nose. Any sign of trouble down there, to the south?”
“No sir,” General Wakefield said. “I talked to Ballard and Jackson both within the hour—so quiet you could hear a pin drop down there.”
“Well then,” Patton concluded, feeling a little better. He turned to von Manteuffel and spoke bluntly. “It’s a local attack, designed apparently to punish our German allies, and perhaps threaten part of our supply line. I think, for the time being, we will hope that Field Marshal Rommel is up to the challenge. Can you convey to him our best wishes for a dramatic victory—and ask him to tell me right away if he’s going to need more help.”
He might have been in Africa again, if not for the soggy mud and the gray skies. Those details didn’t matter, as the Desert Fox rode in his open staff car, his driver steering unerringly toward the sound of the guns. They were forced to detour, away from the route they had been using for the last few days, since that road was now under direct fire from Russian guns. As they circled down this secondary track, approaching the battalion from the rear, Rommel tried to evaluate what was happening.
The Soviet attack was bad, he knew simply from the volume of the fire, and the fact that it was continuing to move westward. Soon he came to a couple of dazed panzergrenadiers, one supporting the other as they limped out of the underbrush and onto the roadway. The weaker man had a bloody gash in his left leg, and that half of his face was blackened with soot and, perhaps, burned skin.
“Stop!” Rommel commanded, bracing himself as the driver braked hastily to bring the car to a halt beside the soldiers.
The two men gaped up at him momentarily. The strongest one brought his hand up to his forehead in a salute. “H-Herr Generalfeldmarschall!” he stammered. “The Russians are attacking!”
Rommel passed over the obvious truth. “I see you are with the Hundred-and-forty-third Battalion. What is your situation?”
“We were shelled, sir, for an hour—they came down like rain, or hail! Half my platoon was killed. Then came the tanks, T-34s mostly but some big monsters in among them. We had two panzers left, and both were taken out immediately. Finally we ran … . Franz and I are the only two to make it out, I think.”
The field marshal nodded, even as he looked around. There was a wooded area shrouded in smoke, to the east. This road was banked, a meter or more above the flat ground, and there were no visible obstacles for several kilometers to the west. “Stay here—move Franz into the ditch on the other side of the road. I’ll send a medic back for him, and try to get a few more troops to help you out. We can’t let the Russians past this road—understand?”
“Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!”
If the man had any misgivings about holding, for the time being alone, a stretch of road against a Soviet tank division, he displayed none of them.
“Good man,” said Rommel. “And good luck!”
They were off in a roar, heading toward a small crossroads north of Oranienburg, where Panzer Lehr had its field headquarters. Within three kilometers, Rommel knew they would never make it. They had encountered more shell-shocked survivors, and the field marshal ordered all of them to set up a line based in the ditch to the west of this road. But by the time they crested a low hill, the smoke and noise of the battle had moved so far west that it blocked the path before them.
Rommel stood in the car, his binoculars pressed to his eyes as he scanned the low ground before them. He saw tanks crossing the road, moving from his right to his left, and he could barely make out the red-star insignia on the turrets of the nearest. In the fields to his left he spotted several Tigers, awkwardly exposed on the flat ground—the few patches of brush only rose high enough to screen the tracks of the big tanks. These were firing steadily, and one after another of the Soviet T-34s burst into flame as they rolled down off the road
and into the ditch. No less than a dozen were burning right before him, but that seemed to have no effect on the fifty or more that Rommel could see rolling into view.
The enemy tanks were emerging from a massive bank of white smoke that billowed from the forested land to the east. The smokescreen all but obscured the edge of the forest, but Rommel could see the tiny figures of Red Army infantry emerging from the murk. There were waves of them, coming at a rapid trot, hastening to keep up with the first wave of tanks. More of the armored behemoths streamed into view as well, two files of them within his view. As they emerged into the clear terrain the tanks maneuvered like veterans, expanding from their road columns into lines of ten or twelve of them abreast. They rolled forward with guns blazing.
The Desert Fox shifted his glasses to the west, bypassing the Tigers and seeking other points of resistance. He located a light antitank gun firing between two pine trees from the front yard of a small cottage. Here and there were small groups of panzergrenadiere, a machine gun nest set up in a barn, a couple of stone houses rendered into strong points. Even as he watched, two of the houses were blasted to pieces by the guns of Russian tanks, while the leading line of Soviet infantry swarmed across the road. A hundred men fell to the German machine gun, but the vast gap in the line was almost immediately filled by the next wave, who simply picked up the pace of their advance.
“Sir—we need to get to cover!”
Rommel glanced at the driver in irritation. The man was pointing at the sky, gesturing urgently. The field marshal nodded, seizing the bar before him with both hands. He would not sit down, though. Instead, he looked upward, wincing as he made out the specks of aircraft. More of the dreaded jabos, this time marked with the same red-star insignia as those tanks.
The car squealed through a hard left turn, lurching down through the ditch, pulling back onto the road facing toward Berlin. “Wait!” ordered Rommel, still watching the action.
The dive bombers were not coming toward him, he realized. There were hundreds of them, but they all seemed to be focused on the battle in the low valley. They roared lower, and bombs fell away, plummeting lethally into the ground and then erupting in fountains of dirt and smoke and debris. The two Tigers disappeared in the blasts, and for a short time the whole field was obscured. Some of the Soviets were blown apart by their own bombs; not even this seemed to give any pause to the advancing horde.
As the wave of jabos passed, Rommel was amazed to see that one of the Tigers was still firing. The huge tank was almost invisible beneath a layer of mud, dirt cast by near-missing bombs, but its main gun blasted shot after shot toward the Russian T-34s.
Until the field marshal heard the crack of a new gun, a sharp and gut-churning sound. The Tiger vanished in a blast of fire; when the smoke cleared, he could see that the turret had been blasted off with almost surgical precision. The killer tank rolled forward, dwarfing the T-34s, even looming higher and wider than the great Tiger.
This was one of the mighty KV5 tanks, the Desert Fox realized. Disdained as too slow and heavy for the modern battlefield, they clearly had their place in a fight like this. Looking more closely, Rommel spotted several more of the giants among the swarm of enemy armor.
“Drive,” he ordered. “We have to get down to the switchboard at Oranienburg and let General Patton know what’s happening.”
Even then he didn’t sit. Instead, he twisted painfully around for another look at the field, now completely overrun. He remembered something about that big tank, the KV5.
The Soviets called it the “Stalin.”
Ike was pacing around in his office, corralled here because this was the place everyone brought information. That was the one thing he needed now, the only thing he could act on. Unfortunately, both information and opportunities for action seemed to be in very short supply.
He crushed out his cigarette and looked up as his chief of staff came in.
“What have you got for me, Beetle?”
General Smith shook his head, and the Supreme Commander could not help grimacing.
“They’re still limiting their attacks to the German units,” reported Beetle, handing over the latest dispatches. “But they’ve all but obliterated Panzer Lehr, and Rommel’s infantry is badly broken. Zhukov has closed Highway One-Thirty-Five to us, but we still have Number Twenty-Four and the autobahn.”
“That’s a damned tenuous lifeline for a whole army,” Ike growled. “But they’re not close to Twenty-four yet, are they?”
“No. And the British Sixth Airborne has set up a line south of Highway One-Thirty-Five. They won’t be enough to stop the Russians, if they continue on—but at least they’ll let us know if Stalin wants to start a full-fledged war.”
“Dammit!” snapped the Supreme Commander, the word sharp as a steel blade. He hated it when the other guy held all the decision-making cards. But that was the case, right now.
“How long till Hodges and Simpson can get up there?” The American First and Ninth armies, now moving eastward from the Ruhr, were the only units in position to offer Patton any support.
“A matter of three days, for Hodges to get there in strength. Simpson is a day or two behind him.”
“Then we’ll just have to hope that Uncle Joe isn’t ready to go for the kill,” Ike declared, lighting another cigarette. He didn’t want to speak the rest of the thought, but he knew that, if Stalin wanted the kill, Patton and Rommel were dead.