“And have my helicopter prepared,” Patton said. “I will go to the town in person.”
Brigade-Fuhrer Statler took a breath as the first Marines appeared at the docks, trying to land directly onto the Bergen harbour. An American destroyer – he’d been hoping for one of the irreplaceable British ships – was moving in behind them to provide fire support, unaware of his hidden guns, carefully concealed in the rubble. He might have lost touch with Oslo, but he was confident that a rescue mission would be mounted. The Fuhrer himself had promised.
“Closer, closer,” he muttered, as the Marines started to swarm up the beaches. They weren’t very experienced, even compared to the old-man battalions that were being raised from veterans of the Great War. They were acting like inexperienced troops; he had to remind himself that that was what they were. “Fire!”
Seventeen smaller field guns fired as one, accompanied by several machine guns. The marines fell to the ground as the machine guns swept across them, slaughtering them, while the destroyer was hit several times. On fire, it tried to escape from the fjord, but it was too late. With a thunderous explosion, the destroyer sank in the fjord.
Cheers rose up from the Germans, but Statler heard a noise and his heart sank as a strange black aircraft roared up the fjord. A single bomb fell… and Statler’s life vanished in tearing fire.
The wave of heat from the FAE bomb could be felt from half a mile away, or perhaps they were imagining it. The pile-up of shipping had saved their lives; Private Max Shepherd gasped as he saw the inferno. The flames had spread out over a good portion of an already ruined town.
“Burn, baby, burn,” someone shouted. Shepherd chuckled; their exposure to British culture, though its movies, had only confused everyone because half of the movies were American from the future.
“Bet they hate us in the future,” Private Manlito said wryly, as Bergen burned down. “Between us and Jerry, we’ve made one hell of a mess of their town.”
“Advance,” Captain Caddell shouted, leading the charge. Shepherd let out a rebel yell and ran behind him, ducking and turning sharply to avoid being shot. German resistance was furious, but uncoordinated; dimly, he realised that their commander must have been killed. He plunged into a maelstrom of fire and blood and sweat… and then there was no time left at all, for anything, but killing.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Cornered Animal
Führerbunker
Undisclosed Location, Berlin
25th May 1941
The German High Command had been amused when the British had deployed a radio-jamming weapon against the Russians, watching the chaos though the lives of their attached officers with interest. Russian attacks had simply stalled when they lost contact with the commanding officers, who had howled and shrieked about the unfairness of it all with commissioners looking over their shoulders. It hadn’t taken long for the Germans to realise, however, that the same technique could be used against them, perhaps to even greater effect.
Under Speer’s pressure and Kesselring’s urging, the Germans had spent six months carefully laying out thousands of miles worth of landlines, leading all over the Reich. In a display of German thoroughness that would have surprised – and horrified – the British intelligence services, they had created a multiple-redundancy network that would have survived anything up to a nuclear attack, providing communications without relying on the radio. Still, it was only through the landline to Sweden that the German High Command first realised that the attack had begun… and by then it was too late.
Himmler moved as calmly as he could into the Fuhrer’s meeting room. Hitler’s behaviour had become more and more erratic as the year passed, ranging from supporting entirely sensible and prudent plans from the Wehrmacht to proposing and insisting upon monstrous plans that could not have hoped to work, even under pre-Transition conditions. His focus on Stalin’s threat – a threat that had not yet materialized – was proving a detriment to the German war effort; his insistence on preparing a two million man army in Poland was drawing strength away from the Middle East front.
Himmler smiled to himself and took a little pleasure in seeing how some of the senior Wehrmacht and Luffwaffe officers quailed. It didn’t matter about Goring still being the Fuhrer’s chosen successor, or how Rudolf Hess had proven so unreliable; Himmler was the second most powerful man in the Reich, almost a demigod. He grinned to himself; there was only one god in the Reich.
Hitler’s voice was sharp and questioning. He hadn’t been quite the same since the quack Doctor Theodore Morell had started to prescribe future medicines for him, although even Himmler was unable to say if they were genuine. He didn’t believe it; one of the few details he agreed with Goring on was that Morell was untrustworthy and probably a Jew.
“Well?”
There was a brief embarrassed silence. “Mien Fuhrer,” Kesselring said carefully, “the Americans have invaded Norway.”
“How dare they?” Hitler screamed. “The mountains of Norway will eat them alive!”
Himmler made a mental note to have Morell assassinated. “Have everything moved up to Norway at once,” Hitler bellowed. “Panzers, guns, men, submarines, move them all up!”
There was a second uncomfortable pause. “Mien Fuhrer, we lost most of our transport capability at Malta,” Kesselring said, and flinched as Hitler rounded on him. The Fuhrer hadn’t taken that news very well at all. “We can only hope to fly in a handful of troops.”
“We spent millions on those transports,” Hitler erupted. “You assured me that they were necessary.”
Himmler took a breath. Kesselring was needed in the war cabinet. “Mien Fuhrer, we have other options,” he said. “We have to punish the British for their imprudence, by using the new terror weapons.”
“Excellent,” Hitler proclaimed. “The new weapons will bring us victory!” He smiled around the room. “However, we need something else. I want the special weapon readied for use in Norway if necessary.”
“It will be done,” Himmler assured him. The special weapon could be prepared at once. “I’ll see to it at once.”
Information came in to the bunker in fits and patches as landline operators strove to reconnect the Reich together. Cruise missiles, unstoppable and highly dangerous, had struck at targets all across northern Germany, as well as several locations in Denmark. The new and terrifying British weapon, the firebomb, had been deployed; the British had used it against Luffwaffe bases in Germany and France.
The news from Norway, relayed through Sweden, wasn’t good. Himmler expected that the Swedes would switch sides as soon as they were convinced that the Anglo-Americans were unstoppable; they hadn’t been happy about working with the Germans in the first place. Only the dread of a Soviet invasion had forced them into Germany’s arms.
He watched silently as the master strategists put the new information on the map. He scowled, for the first time appreciating the sheer distance of the Reich; units on the map might well have been destroyed by now. Narvik had fallen silent; had they been attacked or were the communication cables simply destroyed? He almost wished that he were ignorant; the known landing sites were intimidating enough, even to him. A major American force had come ashore at Bergen, another near Trondheim. He glared at the map; whatever forces remained near Narvik had been cut off.