Chapter Thirteen
Sergeant Major Farnum was his usual grim self. “Sir, I have information, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Try me,” said Grant.
He had sent Farnum to the State Department to check on the status of the detained German diplomats and other embassy personnel. After discussing what Alicia had thought she’d seen, he had sent Farnum instead of someone more senior so that nobody would be overly intrigued by the army’s concerns. The sergeant had been asked to get a list of all detainees so it could be checked against known German military personnel. It seemed reasonable and unthreatening, and it worked out that way.
“Sir, the kraut diplomats are being kept in a hotel in Virginia and it’s much nicer than they deserve. When I asked for a list, the State Department said they didn’t have one so I drove out to the hotel. At first both the State Department guys guarding the hotel and the krauts said they didn’t have a list, but one of the guards was a retired NCO I knew and he really cooperated. He even lined up the krauts so I could inspect them, which really pissed them off, but I figured tough shit. I told them the guards just wanted an excuse to beat the crap out of them and that made them decide to cooperate. I compared their IDs to a list of personnel State Department had suddenly discovered and found that three of the pricks were missing.”
“Was Stahl one of them?”
“Yes sir, so Alicia, I mean lieutenant Cutter, could easily have seen him. One of their people managed to whisper to me that he’d left during the bombing attack and hadn’t been seen since. The two other missing guys are low-level clerks and that same guy thinks they were in New York on some vacation and will probably show up. He also said the he thought the two guys were queer. My source seemed afraid of Stahl. Said he was dangerous.”
Dangerous and missing, thought Grant. What an unbeatable combination. He and Downing would dump the information upward to Truscott and the general would probably inform the FBI. Tom wondered if Stahl had specific instructions, or would he simply take on targets of opportunity. God only knew there were enough of them around.
General Heinz Guderian had to admire the way that von Arnim had distributed his forces and hid them from prying eyes, especially those looking down from the sky. He had done the same with his limited and dwindling Luftwaffe units. They were in bad shape after attempting to bomb American targets. At least twenty per cent of all German planes had been either shot down or had been damaged and were being repaired.
He also admired the way von Arnim had stood up to Hitler’s crony, Field Marshal Keitel. Keitel, as always, was Hitler’s mouthpiece. The order to hold the town of Windsor had been absurd and, if obeyed, would have meant that nearly forty thousand men would have been trapped and out of the war. It was about five hundred miles from Windsor to Toronto. The German army could trade for time and space and preserve lives until the relief force arrived from Europe.
What relief force, Guderian snorted. He really doubted that there would ever be a fucking relief force and he was reasonably confident that von Arnim knew that. Their job would be to delay and bleed the Americans as they advanced into Canada. But for how long could they do that? In order to relieve them, Germany would have to launch a number of protected convoys and send them to Halifax. Yet what would they protect the convoys with? The Kriegsmarine was a speck compared to the combined might of the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. Only in the area of submarines did the Reich have any advantage and he wondered just how long that would last. Messages from Germany to Halifax admitted to the loss of ten U-boats. If that’s what they admitted to, he thought wryly, what the hell were the real numbers?
Sirens went off, interrupting his thoughts. He did not think either he or anyone around this innocuous building was in any real danger. If bombers were indeed coming they would be heading for the army camps north of the city. Even those, however, were emptying as von Arnim moved troops, at night of course, south towards their fortified positions along the Niagara Line and west towards the city of London. How ironic, he thought. Germany controlled this small city of London in Ontario while the great one in England still held out. He wondered how much longer before one of Britain’s major food sources, Canada, was cut off. Or would von Arnim allow shipments to continue?
Someone yelled and pointed skyward. Yes, there they were. Guderian counted more than a hundred bombers in this flight and they were escorted by scores of fighters. He saw a young lieutenant with binoculars.
“What the devil are they?”
The lieutenant offered the binoculars to Guderian who declined. The younger man’s eyes were doubtless sharper than his.
“General, the bombers are their B17s and the fighters are P47s and a handful of P51s.”
Guderian thanked him and walked away. The American attack force was a relatively small one. Soon, their response would become massive and overwhelming. Von Arnim would be forced to use his planes to defend his position and they would be destroyed, leaving the army helpless. The B17 was a long range heavy bomber and the Luftwaffe had no equivalent. German bombers were defined as mediums at best. The so-called Flying Fortress could carry up to four tons of bombs on short runs, and everything in and around Toronto was close to the border. The American fighters were the equal of their German counterparts and the Germans would be outnumbered by thousands.
The North American Luftwaffe was doomed.
He laughed harshly. So too was the entire Wehrmacht in North America unless something miraculous happened. Hitler wanted to end the war once and for all this year of 1944. Soon, massive German armies would cross the Volga and destroy what remained of the Red Army. At least that was the plan.
Guderian had vehemently argued against continuing the war against the Soviets, but had been shouted down by Hitler and banished to Canada for his sins. He wondered if von Arnim shared his doubts, or was he afraid of that Gestapo shit, Neumann? He thought it likely that von Arnim shared his dismay at Hitler’s decisions and disgust with the coterie of asses who surrounded him.
In the distance, he heard he crump-crump of explosions. The Americans had found a target. He thought he would have to get used to both the fact and the sound.
A motorcycle with an empty sidecar roared up to him. The driver looked hard at him. “General Guderian?”
“Yes.” Who the hell else could it be, you ass, he thought.
“The driver swallowed. “Sir, General von Arnim requests your presence immediately. It’s urgent.”
Guderian climbed awkwardly into the side car. What the hell else had gone wrong?
Captain Tommy Jenks was in a roaring good mood and why not. He was leading a dozen American tanks in pursuit of an enemy they’d handily defeated in and around Sarnia. The Nazis were in full retreat and his orders were to keep them that way. He was to chase them, catch them, and kill them. Patton wanted tanks in the rear of the Germans and he wanted them there yesterday. Patton was his kind of general, and, even though he’d never met the man, he liked his fire.
Jenks and his men had been working hard since their Indiana National Guard unit had been activated several months before. They no longer considered themselves weekend warriors, a term they’d always considered an insult and cause for a fight in a bar down in Bloomington, Indiana. They were well trained and loaded for bear and their M3 Grant tank, in their opinion, was the best tank in the world. It had a crew of six and a big 75mm gun as its main weapon.
They’d all heard the rumors that the 30-ton beast was already obsolete but dismissed them. They were confident that they could take on and smash any armor the Germans threw at them. Jenks considered the reports that the Germans made better tanks and guns to be so much bullshit. Thanks to GM, Ford, Chrysler, Packard, Studebaker and others, the U.S. made the best vehicles in the world. He’d heard that the Russians hadn’t wanted American tanks and thought that was dumb and probably why the krauts had kicked the crap out of them. Someone even said that the fact that the hull was riveted made it dangerous. If hit, the rivets would break loose and become lethal projectiles in the hull. Jenks had an answer for that — don’t get hit! Newer versions of the Grant were welded, not riveted, but that concerned him not at all.