Himmler's War (ARC)

334 Pages·2011·1.46 MB·English

by  Conroy Robert

HIMMLER’S
WAR-ARC
ROBERT
CONROY
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
HIMMLER’S WAR
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Robert Conroy
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3761-8
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First printing, December 2011
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
tk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To humanity’s dismay and grief, Adolf Hitler lived a charmed life. He could have died
of wounds suffered in the First World War, yet lived on to establish the ghastly Third
Reich, create the Holocaust, and initiate World War II, which then resulted in the Cold
War and so much tragedy for the world. There were more than forty attempts on his life,
some absurd and some very near misses, and yet he survived them all.
The most famous attempt was the conspiracy involving Claus von Stauffenberg on
July 20, 1944, and this attempt arguably came closest to succeeding. However, a badly
injured Hitler lived on, dragging out the war in an orgy of killing until committing
suicide in a dank bunker in Berlin in April, 1945.
But what if Hitler had been killed not by an assassin but in an act of war? And what if
that act was largely unexpected and accidental? It would have resulted in enormous
unanticipated consequences. With Hitler gone, what would have happened to the Allies’
policy of unconditional surrender? Without Hitler’s nearly insane interference, would
the German generals have fought a more intelligent war; thus causing massive and
potentially unendurable Allied casualties?
This, of course is the premise of Himmler’s War. Instead of his committing suicide in
the spring of 1945, my novel has Hitler dying a messy death in the summer of 1944, a
full month before von Stauffenberg’s conspirators would have been in place to effect a
coup.
As chaos reigns, a new leader has to step forward in Germany and, in this novel, it is
the murderous and sinister Heinrich Himmler. Also, with Hitler dead, this has the
potential to devastate political alliances. The impact of Hitler’s premature death would
have had huge repercussions, and this is the story of that particular “what if.”
* * *
To reduce any confusion, I have almost entirely used American equivalent ranks when
discussing the German military. Aside from being difficult to spell and pronounce, the
various military entities, the Waffen SS, the Volkssturm, and the regular army (the
Heer), all had their own terminologies for the same ranks. The word Wehrmacht has
been generally but incorrectly identified with the army. Wehrmacht is the umbrella term
for all three services: the Luftwaffe (Air Force), the Kriegsmarine (Navy), and the Heer
(Army). Also, to the best of my knowledge, no such unit as the Seventy-Fourth
Armored Regiment existed in the U.S. Army during World War II.
—Robert Conroy, June 2011
CHAPTER 1
THE B17G BOMBER was almost universally referred to as the “Flying Fortress,” and
for good reason. Painted olive drab on top to blend with the ground below, and with a
sky blue belly for camouflage from enemies looking skyward, the bombers weighed
more than thirty tons and bristled with .50 caliber machine guns. The designers at
Boeing originally felt that each bomber would be able to defend itself against attacks by
enemy fighters, and still deliver up to three tons of bombs far into Germany. She could
speed over Europe at nearly three hundred miles an hour, had a range of nearly two
thousand miles, and could fly at an altitude of more than thirty-five thousand feet.
Everyone felt it was a helluva plane.
Like many well-laid plans, it didn’t work out that way. Despite all her weapons, the
bomber was vulnerable to attacks by German fighters, in particular the swift and deadly
Messerschmitt 109G, a sleek single-engine fighter that savaged the formations when the
bombers were required to fly without escorts. Since American fighters had much shorter
ranges than the bombers, Nazi fighters often waited until escorts ran short of fuel and
had to depart. The drop tank on the American P51 fighter was supposed to stop that
and, in large part it did. Range was extended and bombers were better protected.
But everything had gone wrong this otherwise bright and sunny day in mid June 1944.
The small flight of eighteen bombers was supposed to meet up with the escorting
fighters, but the P51’s never showed. Some snafu? Very likely, the angry bomber crews
thought, but what the hell else was new. The flight’s commander, an ambitious major
who wanted to make colonel before the war ended, determined to soldier on. The
fighters would either meet him or they would not. It didn’t matter—he had a target to
bomb and a promotion to earn. And, since the D-Day invasion at Normandy had been
successful, it was thought that collapse of Nazi Germany was imminent, certainly by the
end of 1944. Ergo, the major didn’t have time to waste. His career was at stake.
Their target was not a high priority one. It was a factory complex near the city of
Landsberg, which was north and east of Berlin. There were fewer and fewer German
interceptors in the air and the major felt that this small group of bombers was unlikely
to attract attention. Even though their attack would take them well into the Third Reich,
it was considered little more than a training run.
Several of the eighteen bomber crews were on their first combat flight, and that
included the men of the Mother’s Milk. The name had been chosen while several of the
crew had been drunk on English beer, and they compounded their mistake by hiring an
artist of dubious talent who painted a farm girl on the fuselage. She wore a halter top,
extremely short shorts that showed much of her cheeks, and a toothy smile. And she had
grotesquely enormous boobs that other crews considered laughable, which pissed off
the Milk’s rookie crew who were further teased by being called “Milkmen.” They
accepted the nickname and used it among themselves.
Twenty-four-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Phips was her commander and he was
scared to death as well as freezing his ass off. He was not a warrior. Small of stature and
slight of build, he reminded people of a Midwestern grocery clerk, not a bomber pilot.
The truth was not that far off. He’d been in his first year as a high school teacher in
Iowa when the draft grabbed him, and he still had no idea how he’d passed flight
school.
This run had been their initial exposure to possible combat and that had caused more
than enough stress. The more experienced crews had teased them, calling them Virgins
or Cherries, and saying they’d shit their pants the first time they were shot at, all of
which didn’t help the crew’s fragile morale.
As always, they were cold, despite the fact that they were wearing multiple layers of
clothing. The wind whipped through the bomber, and their heavy flight suits, even
though they were plugged into the plane like electric blankets, didn’t do much. The fear
and the cold sapped their resolve and the Milkmen wondered just why they had become
bomber crewmen.
Before they dropped their bombs, disaster struck. They’d been jumped by a dozen or
more of the allegedly nonexistent ME109’s that knifed down from above and shot down
or damaged several bombers before anyone could even notice. So much for don’t worry
about German planes, Phips and his crew thought as they maneuvered wildly to evade
their swift enemy.
Their flight commander’s plane was one of the first destroyed, which rendered the
remaining crews leaderless. As the fight became a mindless brawl, Phips had made a
major mistake. He’d run. Instead of staying with the survivors and forming up
defensively, Phips sent his plane lower in altitude and flown to the west in the hope that
he could escape the attacking German sharks.
Instead, two of the MEs had stayed with him, chasing the bomber and dogging it.
Phips swore that they were taunting him as he gradually gained control over the bomber
and his fears.
“What the hell do we do now, Skipper?” asked his copilot, Second Lieutenant Bill
Stover. The sarcastic tone of voice was not lost on Phips, who was well aware that he’d
panicked and screwed up royally.
Stover continued, “In case you haven’t noticed, they’re chasing us south and west. In a
while we’ll run out of gas and have to bail out even if they don’t manage to shoot us
down first.”
“I know,” Phips muttered. Despite the cold, he was sweating profusely.
The tail gunner, Sergeant Ballard, broke in. At thirty, he was the old man and his deep
voice had a calming effect. “Skipper, it looks like one of them is pulling back. Maybe
he’s running out of fuel.”
Phips prayed it was so. The ME only had a range of about three hundred miles and
must have used up a lot of gas chasing the bombers around the sky. Maybe the second
one would have the same problem.
No such luck. As time dragged on, the lone ME stayed behind them, darting in and
out, firing an occasional burst, and looking for an opportunity to make a kill. The
German respected the bomber’s many guns, which fired short bursts every time he got
within range. It looked like an impasse but it wasn’t. As long as he had fuel, the German
held all the trump cards. At least they were low enough that the men of Mother’s Milk
didn’t need oxygen to breathe.
“Skipper, will you take a suggestion from your beloved navigator?”
Phips managed a weak smile. “Yes, Mr. Kent.”
“We are getting farther and farther away from Mother England. If you want me to find
our way home, we’ve got to stop this running shit and head back.”
Damn it, Phips thought. It was time to make up for his mistake. “Okay, we turn and
attack the bastard.”
The German must have thought that the plane’s sudden and sharp banking to the right
was an indication of damage and he dashed in for the kill with his machine guns and
20mm cannon blazing. Pieces flew off the bomber, and Phips heard shouting through
his headset. Loose items caromed off the inside of the hull.
“Carson’s hit!” someone yelled. Christ, Phips thought. One of the waist gunners was
down. “Oh, Jesus, he’s bleeding all over the place.” The wounded man’s screams
carried up to Phips, who felt nauseated as the bomber continued its stately turn.
Suddenly, the German fighter pilot found himself facing an array of .50 caliber
machine guns from the side, top, and belly that spewed torrents of bullets in his
direction. Now it was the German’s turn to panic and he tried to escape. As he did so, he
exposed the belly of his plane for just an instant. A handful of bullets ripped through his
engine. It started to smoke and the ME began to fall back.
“Christ almighty,” yelled Stover. “We got us a kill.”
The German pilot fell from the plane and a parachute opened. The ME was gone, but
the pilot would live to fight another day. Now the Mother’s Milk had to do the same
damn thing—live to fight another day.
“How’s Carson?” Phips asked.
“Dead, sir.”
Phips sagged over the controls. His first mission and not only had he disobeyed orders
to keep formation, but he’d gotten lost, and a crewman, one of the guys he’d been with
for six months, had been killed. Now he had to make sure this miserable situation didn’t
get any worse.
“Navigator,” said Phips. “Where are we?”
“Over Germany, Skipper.”
Damn smart aleck, Phips thought. “Can you possible narrow that down, Kent?”
“Seriously Skipper, I’m trying, but we were all over the sky for a little while and I
need a frame of reference. I think we’re over East Prussia and now we are heading
towards Russia. I suggest we turn north and west and hope to God we find something
that makes sense, like the Baltic Sea. I also suggest we lighten our load. We’ve got a
few tons of bombs doing nothing but weighing us down and using up our fuel.”
Stover turned toward Phips, his expression still unforgiving. “We can go north to
Sweden if we have to, bail out, and be interned. That assumes, of course, that we can
even find Sweden.”
“Yeah,” Phips responded angrily, “and we’d be interned for the duration of the war
and who knows how long that’ll be. The experts say it’ll be over in a few months, but
with our luck it might just be decades. It also presumes that the Swedes won’t turn us
over to the Nazis. I hear the Swedes spend a lot of time kissing Hitler’s ass since the
krauts are right next door to them. And, oh yeah, we might just accidentally bail out
over Nazi-occupied Norway or over those nice people in Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
It was common knowledge that Russia had interned some American and British fliers
and wasn’t keen on returning them. Winding up chopping frozen rocks in Siberia was
not a pleasant option.
Kent chimed in. “Again, I suggest we turn north and west in hopes of finding the
Baltic. At that point, I further suggest we stay over the water until we hit Denmark, and
I mean that figuratively and not literally.”
“Good.” agreed Phips. “And then we can cut the angle by flying over Denmark. I
don’t think the krauts will waste sending fighters after one lousy lost bomber.” Of
course, he thought, nobody thought their little flight of eighteen bombers would have
been attacked by so many German fighters.
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” Kent said, and Stover sullenly nodded agreement.
“But when are you going to dump the bombs? We will need that fuel if we’re going to
make it back.”
“I don’t have a target,” Phips said.
Stover shook his head in disbelief. “Christ, Chief, we’re only a couple of thousand feet
over Germany. The whole fucking country’s a target. Just drop the damn things.”
Phips thought for a second and decided he agreed. Finally he felt he was doing the
right thing. Maybe he could recover from this nightmarish day. Back in England, he’d
be criticized for his mistakes and the loss of Carson, but maybe, just maybe, he’d be
allowed to learn from those mistakes and fly again. Regardless, his first job was to get
his crew home.
“Just for the record,” he said, “does anybody see anything that even remotely looks
like it could use a good bombing?”
Stover’s eyes were the sharpest. “Looks like a cluster of buildings coming up in the
woods to our right front. And I don’t see any red crosses or anything.”
“Got it,” said Cullen, the combination nose gunner and bombardier. “We’ll use the
Norden and drop bombs in their helmets.”
It was a feeble attempt at a joke. The super-secret Norden bomb-sight was better than
what anybody’d had before, but it was far from precise. Even at their low altitude,
they’d be lucky to hit the compound.
“What the hell?” Phips said in surprise. Antiaircraft guns had opened up at the last
second and black puffs of flak were exploding well above them. Whoever was down
there was as surprised as he was. At least their shooting was off.
The bomb bay doors opened and more cold wind whipped through the plane. They
might be closer to the ground and it might be the middle of summer, but it was still like
being in a savage winter storm. A few seconds later, the bombs fell, and Mother’s Milk,
freed from their weight, lifted. Now Phips and the Milkmen really began to feel that
they might just make it back to England.
“Anybody see if we hit anything?” Phips asked.
The only one with a view of the target was Ballard, the tail gunner. “Well, sir, we did
hit the ground. Seriously, some of the bombs did fall in that cluster of buildings. Not a
clue as to what kind of damage we might have caused. Looks like we’ve outrun the
flak, though.”
And we’ll probably never know what we hit, Phips thought. An unwanted realization
popped into his head. If they did make it back, he’d have to write a letter to Carson’s
family explaining how he’d died heroically and painlessly when the poor guy had really
died screaming and bleeding all over the plane like a stuck pig.
A few hours later they had crossed Denmark and were again over water. They sighted
a gray smudge on the horizon. Kent assured Phips it was England, Mother England, and
they all breathed a sigh of relief. They were very low on fuel. A pair of British
Hurricanes flew by and took up position on either side. They were used to nursing
cripples and would guide Mother’s Milk back to an airfield. They’d be on fumes when
they landed, but they had made it. It was the middle of June 1944. Allies had landed in
Normandy and the men of the Mother’s Milk were still part of the war.
Finally, Phips could relax. He did wonder just what they had managed to bomb on
their first and so far only run over Germany. He hoped to God it wasn’t a girls’ school
or an orphanage. But then, how many girls schools were protected by antiaircraft guns?
* * *
Colonel Ernst Varner walked away from the undistinguished one-story wood building
that was jammed with the military hierarchy of the Third Reich. For the moment it was
the site of the OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the headquarters of the
German military. The Wehrmacht controlled the regular army, the Heer; the navy, the
Kriegsmarine; and the air force, the Luftwaffe. A walk in the surrounding woods was
what Varner needed to clear his head. The air within the building was stale in more
ways than one.
Varner had been inside a few moments earlier and had actually heard Adolf Hitler
speak emotionally and illogically about solutions to the military dilemma confronting
Germany. And, the more he heard his Fuhrer pontificate, the more he realized the little
man with the mustache was delusional at best.
Varner hadn’t always felt that way about his Fuhrer. As a younger man he’d been an
ardent supporter of Hitler and an early member of the Nazi Party, which had, in part,
helped him reach his current rank at the age of thirty-eight. Of course, being a
legitimate hero and combat veteran who’d seen action in both France and Russia hadn’t
hurt, either. His wounds suffered fighting the Russians were still healing and it was
decided that he would serve better as a staff officer and aide to Field Marshal Wilhelm
Keitel, the army’s Chief of Staff and a man Varner had come to realize was little more
than a spineless toady. Keitel would not question Hitler’s orders no matter how
preposterous they were. And many of them were well beyond preposterous. The chief
of operations, General Alfred Jodl, was even worse. Both would simply nod and send
men out to die.
Varner had been told he’d soon be promoted to general, but now wondered if it was
worth it if he had to suffer working for fools like Keitel and Jodl.
Varner reached for a cigarette and recalled that he had given up smoking at the
insistence of his wife, Magda, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Margarete. They said
it was a disgusting habit. Varner agreed, especially since the only cigarettes available in
wartime Germany were absolute shit rolled in paper. He’d picked up the smoking habit
to contain stress while fighting the Red Army outside Stalingrad. Now he needed to
combat the stress of listening to Hitler.
“Here,” said a voice from behind.
Varner laughed and took a cigarette from a fellow staffer, Colonel Claus von
Stauffenberg. They had met in the hospital while being treated for their respective
wounds. The darkly handsome Stauffenberg had lost his left eye, right hand, and two
fingers on his left hand when his vehicle had been strafed in North Africa. Varner had
been wounded in his upper left arm and shoulder, and doctors were still trying to
remove shrapnel that moved and sometimes caused him great pain. Varner was shorter
than the lean and aristocratic Stauffenberg. He was stocky, like a tank. This was
serendipitous since Varner’s specialty was armor. His dark hair was thinning and he was
thankful that Margarete got her pixy looks from Magda, a woman he thought was far
above him. Varner would never be mistaken for a blond and blue-eyed Aryan superman.
Between the two of them, they managed to light up. As always, the cigarettes were
awful.
“Why aren’t you in there with the others?” Varner asked.
Stauffenberg almost snorted. “Because it’s too crowded and they don’t need me to
help them make their mistakes. I think it’s incredible that there’s still doubt as to
whether the Allied landings in Normandy are the real thing or are just a feint. The
Fuhrer does seem to be coming around, however, and no longer insists that Pas de
Calais is the eventual main target instead of Normandy. However, the decision has come
too late to throw the Allies out.”
Varner was surprised at the other man’s candor. Stauffenberg’s comments were
dangerously close to a criticism of Hitler, which was not a wise thing to do, especially
for a relatively low-ranking staff officer, hero or not. Disagreements had a nasty habit of
being interpreted as treason. Some very high-ranking generals had argued with the
Fuhrer and were now languishing in obscurity.
He and Stauffenberg, while friendly and cordial, were not close enough to share
intimate thoughts, and Varner wondered just what the other colonel was thinking. Was
he being sounded out, and if so for what purpose? Rumor had it that Stauffenberg was
not an enthusiastic supporter of either Hitler or the Nazi Party. Well, Varner now had his
own doubts.
Varner decided to make light of it. “I left because it was obvious I wasn’t important
enough to stay.”
Stauffenberg laughed. “Perhaps being unimportant is a good thing. If you’re careful,
you can become invisible.”
Casually, they walked farther from the building where the meeting was taking place. It
was in the headquarters complex and command center near the Prussian city of
Rastenberg. Hitler liked to come there to be away from Berlin, a city he heartily
detested because of its perceived decadence. Hitler had few vices. He rarely drank and
ate sparingly. Varner thought Hitler had a mistress, a plump blonde named Eva, but no
one was certain. Varner decided he didn’t care.
Berliners returned the favor and did not appear to love Hitler as much as other parts of
Germany did. Most of the field marshals and generals vastly preferred the luxuries and
flesh pots of Berlin. Varner would have preferred being in Berlin, but only because his
small family was there.
Sirens went off and antiaircraft guns began to fire.