Gods & Snipers: A World War II Thriller

Chapter Two

Far behind the front lines, General Dwight D. Eisenhower lit another cigarette and studied the map spread on the wall at Supreme Allied Command headquarters. The situation changed daily, even hourly, and his aides struggled to keep up by moving paper icons around the map. The cardboard cutouts of planes, tanks, and soldiers resembled nothing so much as paper dolls and would have seemed outright silly if they had not represented the placement of battalions and bombing runs. The map represented where men lived and died on an hourly basis.

"What's on your mind, von Rundstedt?" Ike muttered to no one in particular.

"Sir?" an aide asked, hurrying over because he had heard Ike’s voice. "Did you need something?"

Ike shook his head and exhaled a stream of tobacco smoke. "Just thinking out loud," he said. "If you were the Germans, what would you do?"

"Sir, I'd give up."

Ike barked a laugh. "In that case, you have more sense than the entire German High Command, son."

Ike's smile faded as the aide moved away. Given that the Germans weren’t likely to surrender, what would Rundstedt do?

Currently, Rundstedt was the overall commander of German forces. The Germans had been through so many leaders in France that one almost needed notecards to keep up. First there had been Rommel, certainly a capable and competent soldier, but he had been badly wounded when Allied planes strafed his car. Next was Kluge, then Model, and finally Field Marshal von Rundstedt. Ike considered that it would be reassuring to think that the Germans were scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of commanders, but he knew better than to underestimate Runstedt. This last general, born in 1875 into a family of Prussian aristocrats, was practically a relic from another era, but in a sense, he was the last general standing after defeats, battlefield deaths, and the summertime plot against Hitler.

It was true that Runstedt had been dismissed from command after the failure to halt the Allied invasion of Normandy back in June. However, he had since been recalled to overall command of Wehrmacht forces in the West. Intelligence reports indicated that Hitler trusted Runstedt, implying that the general wouldn’t take much initiative but that he would follow Hitler’s orders.

Nonetheless, Ike definitely wanted to know what was on the field marshal's mind. And if Runstedt had been in the room with him, Ike would have asked him another question that echoed the one posed by his aide: "Why don't you just give up and save both sides a lot of lives and misery?”

Of course, Ike knew that decision wasn't Runstedt's to make. It was Adolf Hitler's. The German people called him Der Führer, which translated to English as, The Leader. At this point in the war, he had consolidated power to the point that he called all the shots on and off the battlefield.

There had been intelligence reports of a cabal that had attempted to kill Hitler with a bomb back in July. If only they had succeeded, Ike opined, peace talks would likely be underway. Alas, the assassination attempt had not been successful.

Since then, Hitler had wrested many command decisions away from his generals because he no longer trusted them. Several high-ranking officers had been arrested and killed. Others were forced to commit suicide, Kluge among them. Only the most loyal generals, such as von Runstedt, had survived the putsch.

Runstedt had refused to take part in the plot against The Leader. Perhaps like some, he had feared that Hitler's death would launch a civil war between the SS and the Wehrmacht at a time when Germany could ill afford it. He wasn't a terribly imaginative commander, but he was a capable organizer. Under his command, the German military continued to fight like a punch-drunk boxer.

Ike knew that Hitler would never surrender and that many more thousands of soldiers and civilians — perhaps tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands — would die before the war was over. The Leader encouraged every last German soldier to fight to the end for the Fatherland, and far too many had taken his wishes to heart. The savage fighting across Normandy had been testament to that.

Ike sighed and lit another cigarette. He now smoked more than two packs a day and lived off tobacco, coffee, hot dogs, and a nightly allotment of two fingers of bourbon.

As Allied Supreme Commander, the fifty-four-year-old commander was a gifted organizer, and often as much of a referee as a general. He managed to balance the demands of politicians with personalities no less forceful than FDR and Winston Churchill. Churchill, in particular, was an old soldier at heart who had his own ideas about how to win the war and how it should be fought, most of which were quite astute. The problem was that the goals of the fading British Empire did not always align with American ones. The resulting tensions provided Ike with many headaches.

Then there were the generals.

In all honesty, the generals were his most vexing problem. For starters, he had to juggle the disparate personalities of Omar Bradley and George Patton. Both were good generals with very different personalities and approaches. Neither man was necessarily fond of the other as a result. However, their disagreements were nothing compared to those with the British General, Montgomery. Monty was a prickly character and nobody's fool. Also, he saw the British as the ones who should take the lead role in the victory in Europe, not the Americans. Theoretically, at least, Ike could dismiss any general who got out of line, but finding replacements for the likes of those men would be impossible at this stage of the war. When God had made Patton, for example, he’d broken the mold.

Despite all of these challenges, slowly but surely it was all coming together for the Allies, but the war was far from won.

Still, Eisenhower was nothing if not an optimist at heart, and now, looking at the maps with its martial paper dolls, he could not help saying it aloud to himself, "By God, we've got them on the run."

A defensive war was not an approach that the Germans favored. Their early military success had been built around the concept of the Blitzkrieg or Lightning War intended to overwhelm an enemy's defenses. Their tactics included the concept of Schwerpunkt, or the point of main effort, which was where the main attack centered. Imagine the point of a spear and you got the idea of German strategy. For much of the war, the tip of the spear was all that Germany had needed.

Since this doctrine was not suited to defensive operations, German tactics changed. One thing about the German military was that it managed to be highly adaptable.

Confronted by defensive wars in the Eastern and Western Fronts, German tactics changed significantly during 1944 to something that might be called the rubber band defense, in that the front lines became very fluid. The front line became less important to hold. If the Allies overran the forward positions, the secondary line of defense would halt the enemy advance and the Germans would counterattack with a mobile force deployed just to the rear of the secondary line of defense. It wasn’t enough to completely stop the Allied advance, but it was an effective strategy to bleed the Allies dry.

There were some in the German high command who saw these tactics as shameful, considering that these were the tactics of retreat. But by 1944, with the notable exception of Hitler himself, most German officers knew that the military simply didn't have the men or materials for anything but this more elastic approach.

While the Germans faltered, the Allies pressed their advantage. Led by the Third Army under fiery General George Patton, American troops had dashed nearly 400 miles from the Normandy beaches and across France, culminating in the crushing blow to German forces at the Falaise Gap. D Day had been the foothold, but the fighting at Falaise had finally broken the German hold on Normandy.

In all honesty, Ike had not expected the Germans to collapse so quickly. Consequently, the Allied advance had outpaced its supply lines. The roads and bridges that the Air Corps had bombed so effectively to thwart the Germans now meant difficulties in transporting Allied supplies. The famed Red Ball Express had trucked supplies to keep up with the troops on the front, but it was not enough. Simply put, Allied forces were spread too thin.

In some sense, it was a good problem to have. Reluctantly, though, Ike had called for Patton to halt. Ike could not send Americans yet deeper into enemy country without fuel, ammunition, food, or adequate medical care. The situation left American troops too vulnerable to counter-attack if the enemy regrouped. The Germans were notoriously good at that.

German forces were quickly coming to what would become known as the West Wall. They had lost France at great cost. Between the D Day landing on June 6 and early September, it was not unreasonable to state that the Germans had lost more than 300,000 men. That was nearly half the 1944 population of Boston or the entire population of Columbus, Ohio.

While the human losses alone were hard to bear, the Germans also had lost hundreds of tanks and almost countless vehicles and horses, not to mention artillery captured or destroyed by the Allies. There were no replacements for those men or for that equipment. War was a meat grinder. Every man they lost, every tank destroyed, practically every shell fired, could not be replaced — or not replaced easily. The Allies were wearing down their enemy through sheer numbers and seemingly endless resources. In a single year, American factories produced thousands of Sherman tanks.

As for the Luftwaffe, it was now mostly like an eagle with clipped wings, having only about 650 serviceable planes of any kind. With the Luftwaffe outnumbered ten to one, the skies over Europe mostly belonged to the Allies.

But the numbers on paper did not tell the only story. Working in the Germans' favor was the fact that conditions by mid-September were not conducive to air operations. Rain, sleet, and heavy fog kept the planes grounded. The grounding of the planes enabled the Germans to re-organize. Just when it seemed that they were at their lowest point, when they must surely be beaten and the war must be over, they had a talent for managing to mount an active defense. Grudgingly, Ike also had to admit that the Germans made far fewer tactical mistakes than the Allied forces. But they had no cushion.

The Germans were far from beaten and the fighting was far from over. After the mostly flat countryside of coastal and central France, they were now in terrain that favored defense, with hills, forests, rivers, and even the old fortresses of the Siegfried Line. If Normandy had been the Atlantic Wall, then this was Germany's West Wall. Rather than giving up, as Ike had hoped, the enemy only seemed to be fighting harder.

The main goal of concern right now was not the Rhine, but one of its tributaries, the Moselle River. Currently, the bloodiest fighting of the autumn campaign was about to take place on the banks of the Moselle.

Both the Germans and the Americans needed to get across the waterway and then make their way to the Rhine. The Germans were mostly on the other side of the Moselle by now, which meant that they had destroyed or were trying to destroy the Moselle bridges. This meant that U.S. Forces must build pontoon bridges, which was a time-consuming task usually undertaken under fire.

The Supreme Allied Commander thought about all of the German tanks, artillery, and machine guns being brought to bear against Allied troops that the Germans now saw as invaders. With no way to go but forward, American troops would have to brave the maelstrom and ford the Moselle River as the first step toward invading Germany itself.

"God help them," Ike said.