“Hell yeah, but ain’t no sense rocking the boat no more. I reckon the captain done made it clear that he wants me to have this here grease gun," Cole said. The firing in the distance tapered off, so he lowered the grease gun and spat. "Fine weapon that it is."
"You'll get your rifle back," Vaccaro said, although he didn't sound convinced. “Give it some time.”
Cole said, "One thing about me, I ain't nothin' but patient."
Vaccaro shook his head. Sure, Cole was patient when he was behind a rifle scope. But at other moments, he was impulsive. And he was vindictive pretty much all of the time. Cole got even, no matter what, and no matter how long it took. A story had gone around that in boot camp, Cole had put up with a bully just long enough to jump him one night and damn near beat him to death with a can of beans stuck inside a sock. You were better off staying on Cole’s good side.
"It's the part about you being patient that's got me worried," Vaccaro said.
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.