Craig DiLouie with David Moody and Timothy W. Long
THE FRONT
EPISODE 3: BERLIN OR BUST
FALLSCHIMJÄGER RANKS
MENTIONED IN THE 3RD FALLSCHIRMJÄGER (PARATROOPER) REGIMENT (3FJR)
Jäger: Private or paratrooper, derived from word, “hunter”
Oberjäger: Private first class
Gefreiter: Corporal
Feldwebel: Sergeant, commands squad
Oberfeldwebel: Master sergeant or sergeant first class, commands squad
Leutnant: Second lieutenant, commands platoon
Oberleutnant: Lieutenant, commands platoon
Hauptfeldwebeclass="underline" Company sergeant major
Hauptmann: Captain, commands company
Oberst: Colonel, commands regiment
Generalmajor: Major general, commands division
PROLOGUE
NIGHTMARE
The front dissolved under the onslaught.
The great German winter offensive, involving half a million fighting men, died and rose again to fight the living. Hordes of dark figures materialized from the fog. Pickets sounded the alarm. Machine-guns rattled. The gunfire rose to a constant rolling roar. Officers shouted, Hold the line! Pour it on, boys! Keep it hot!
They had no idea what they were fighting.
The dead staggered under the gunfire, shrugged at the impacts of dozens of rounds, and kept coming. Grenades tossed them like ragdolls. They got back up smoking. As they neared their prey, they broke into a lurching jog.
Swarms overran the trenches at a dozen points. Grinning under their steel helmets, they poured through the gaps. The survivors fell back, fighting as they moved. One by one, the guns fell silent. The retreat became a rout.
The roads choked with panicked soldiers and screaming civilians. Vehicles moved at a crawl in the endless jam. The dead right behind, never tiring, never stopping. The rout became a slaughter.
At his Verdun HQ, Eisenhower and his top generals watched grainy recon films in a dead-quiet, smoke-filled room. Men running across the snowpack, the dead loping behind. A soldier firing wildly as a mob of uniformed figures brought him down. Somebody gasped at the sight of American soldiers tearing their countrymen to shreds. The screen turned white as the last film stopped.
Somebody switched on the lights. Nobody spoke for a while. The war had changed, but nobody understood what it meant.
Hitler’s desperate gamble had come close to whipping them, but the Twelfth Army Group had hung on while Montgomery and his Twenty-first Army Group still held in the north. Now this. This impossible horror. They had to stop the advancing undead at all costs before the front was lost and with it, all Europe.
Eisenhower unleashed Patton and his Third Army. Patton had three armored divisions pointed east, which he said he could swing north in two days. He promised to send the Boche to the infernal regions even if his boys had to kill them three times. Ike said that was fine, but the juggernaut had to be stopped. If not stopped, delayed long enough to organize a new line of defense at the Meuse.
Patton marshaled his divisions and got them moving. A major feat, wheeling an army of 100,000 men and heavy vehicles across narrow roads in snow, rain, and fog. Third Army covered 100 miles of ground in two days and made contact with the vanguard of the undead horde in a dismal sleet.
The tanks plunged into the shambles of a vast convoy. Abandoned tanks and five-tons, equipment and luggage. The heavy beasts shouldered aside vehicles and ground everything else to shreds beneath their shrieking treads. Soon, they were flinging shells into the trees in a constant barrage.
The undead crumpled under the withering fire. The tankers felt confident, shooting at somebody who rarely shot back. Patton pushed them forward. He held a fierce belief in the doctrine of mobile warfare. To him, territory meant nothing. Victory depended on finding the enemy and crushing him.
As his divisions struggled through sleet and mud toward Bastogne, the crowds of undead thickened into armies. They poured out of the dense forest on all sides, drove the infantry back, and covered the tanks in writhing carpets of bodies.
Patton ordered his men to push harder, resulting in a bloody battle of attrition that lasted four days before cold, exhaustion, constant losses, and depleted ammunition took their final toll. The dead didn’t sleep. They didn’t tire. After Patton’s HQ was overrun, the Americans broke and ran, leaving behind equipment and blinded tanks that became tombs after draining the last of their fuel.
Of the 100,000 men who drove north toward Bastogne, four out of ten did not return. Demoralized, isolated units streamed west. Ike rallied them at the River Meuse, where a thin green line prepared its last stand. A pell-mell of mixed units, green replacements, and rear-echelon cooks and clerks.
They had clear lanes of fire here. If the weather improved, they could finally bring their airpower to bear. Artillery officers set up killing zones with their howitzers. They dug in and waited. Here, just 100 miles from Paris, they’d hold.
They had no choice. If they didn’t, they couldn’t retreat fast enough to escape the undead tide.
Thousands of shell-shocked soldiers and civilians still crowded the roads, fleeing the undead advance. They warned the defenders the hordes were close behind, too many to count. Military police directed them to hastily thrown together field hospitals and refugee camps in Reims, Verdun, and Metz. These survivors brought infection with them.
The camps all reported outbreaks behind the American line as the first of the dead marched out of the Ardennes Forest, a gaunt SS officer in a leather greatcoat. A vast mass of half-frozen, rotting figures followed, lurching eagerly across the snowy fields toward the American trenches.
Christmas, 1944.
Along the line, the giant field guns opened fire on the horde.
CHAPTER ONE
WORK FOR VICTORY
Jäger Yohann Muller and Gefreiter Otto Steiner hauled the groaning rifleman across the tiled floor.
“Victory at all costs,” the rifleman said and vomited.
They heaved the man the last two meters until they were able to position his head over the bidet.
“Christ, Wolfgang,” Steiner said. “You vomit as accurately as you shoot.”
“Work for victory.” The rifleman coughed a stream of bile.
Muller had joined the Fallschirmjäger because they were the best, and he wanted to be the best. He’d survived the hard training and was now one of the elite paratroopers. Three months in Genoa, though, and still he hadn’t seen combat. The regiment had fought the Allies from Sicily to Cassino and stopped them there, at the Gustav Line, until the Amis flanked them. After five months of brutal fighting, the paratroopers withdrew to Genoa to lick their wounds and refit.
Now they celebrated because of the armistice, which had arrived like a second Christmas.
Just weeks ago, the situation seemed bleak. The Allies had thrown the Germans out of Africa and then Sicily, rolling up the Italian peninsula until stopped first at the Gustav Line and then at the Green Line farther north. The enemy had landed in Normandy and pushed across France almost to the German border. In the East, the Russian juggernaut swept through the Balkans.
One disaster after another. Hell, the way Muller’s comrades told it, it had stopped being a real war. They were fighting just to survive.