Eine Geschichte des Grossdeutsches Reich - Germany/Road to Doom's Day

2. The Invasion of the United States of America

The destruction of the American blockade squadron at Bermuda prompted two responses. The American response, given the lack of attention to the United States Navy in the 1950s, was to prepare a phased defense, with the first phase in the far-easternAtlantic and Mediterranean. The Reichsfuehrer's response was simpler: the troops which had been assembled in the Low Countries were embarked and launched westward with their goal as the seizure of the critical American watershed at Hampton Roads.

Langsdorff's far-west Bermuda squadron provided the main coverage for this move; however, most of the United States Navy was already concentrated in the eastern Atlantic, with the misguided belief that the Reich's main naval force was contained in the Mediterranean. This failure in intelligence was compounded by the difficulty of the American Commander-In-Chief, Atlantic Fleet maintaining contact with his forces; with Bermuda a British possession, the Azores on permanent lease to Germany, and the Canarias and North African Coast also in German hands, American communications were limited to tropospheric scatter radio communications, which Admiral Thomas Moorer correctly feared had been penetrated; while the Reich had no direct concept of the contents of Moorer's communications, their frequency and timing were easily understood . As a result, command of the United States Navy force in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean devolved on officers using overtaxed communication systems and outdated technology.

Because the Reich had complete control of the Mediterranean, the Mittelmeerflotte was, compared to the Hochseeflotte, greatly understrength. However, much of the Unterseeflotte was permanently stationed in the Mediterranean, and the reaction to the American move was thus to deploy the Luftwaffe to locate and harass the American fleet, then, once they were located, send in the U-boats to wreck them. As a final stage to the plan, and as a test of the vessels' combat-worthiness, the nuclear-powered Guderian battlecruisers were dispatched from Antwerp to consolidate the victory.

Grossadmiral Otto Kretschmer was the overall German submarine commander in the Mediterranean; both his official war records and his memoirs provide a fascinating description of the difference in capabilities between the United States Navy and the Kriegsmarine. Unhindered by the need to surface, Kretschmer's submarines shadowed the United States fleet from several hundred meters below the surface. They assumed that anything above a depth of four hundred meters was an American ship, and listened for the inevitable signals of air attack. When the Luftwaffe began its operations, they attacked. The Battle of the Mediterranean lasted three days, from the twelfth to the fourteenth of January, 1965; however, by sunset on the twelfth, it had obviously degenerated into a pursuit. The American fleet fled from just off Salerno to Gibraltar, a hopeless flight given that Gibraltar was German-held, but the only choice they had. At Gibraltar, under the threat of missile batteries ashore and the low gray shapes of the line of battlecruisers in the Atlantic, the United States Navy Atlantic Fleet surrendered, sending into captivity some eighty thousand American sailors, added to which were a similar number of dead. Kretschmer inspected the remains of the American fleet in disgust and ordered the entire lot scrapped.

News of the destruction of the Atlantic Fleet did not reach the United States in time to register significantly, though Admiral Moorer acknowledged the surrender in shock and transmitted it to President Kennedy. It meant the complete failure of the American defense-in-depth doctrine at sea, as there was no way that the few American ships remaining in the Atlantic could provide adequate reconnaissance, let alone gather to stop the Hochseeflotte. A handful of American pickets were watching Ireland and the Channel; these were swept away at the same time as events in the Mediterranean, and the invasion fleet crossed the Atlantic unmolested by storm or resistance.

They arrived off Hampton Roads on the day of the inauguration, 20 January 1965, where they were spotted by high-altitude patrol craft. The United States Army Air Corps made an effort to resist, but was held at bay by the fleet carriers, and the invasion of the United States began. The immediate operational commander was Generalfeldmarschall Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, selected because of his extremely wide variety of service, with the armored commander the son of Reichsmarschall Guderian, Generalleutnant Heinz-Guenther Guderian. The younger Guderian's Panzertruppen landed at Virginia Beach and, in two days of sharp house-to-house fighting, secured the vital American installations on the southeastern approach to Hampton Roads. This opened the way for a land assault on Norfolk. At the same time, an amphibious assault on the American Fortress Monroe resulted in the sealing of the York-James estuary and made American movement in Chesapeake Bay impossible.

The American reaction was slow; the Americans were in the midst of mobilizing their few in-country reserves and the National Guard, the American equivalent of the Landwehr. Much of the defense outside of the capital itself was provided by police and hastily-mobilized militia units with no formal organization or control. Within days of landing, organization began to stiffen, but by that point, Ramcke had landed a third force on the eastern Chesapeake shore, bringing the total number of men committed in North America to twelve divisions and approximately one hundred and fifty thousand men.

It would have been difficult for Guderian the elder to have picked a better invasion front for the armored forces; with the notable exceptions of heavily wooded and densely overgrown swamps and several large parks that were choked with brush, the so-called Tidewater region had excellent roads and large open spaces for maneuver. 16. Panzerdivision and its sister division, 16. Panzergrenadier, entered Norfolk on 24 January 1965, in the midst of the worst snow of the 1960s. Twenty-five centimeters of snow fell on them during the advance, but compared to maneuver in central Germany or Russia, it was easily manageable. The garrisons of the several naval facilities put up a stiff resistance, and for the first time in the campaign the Reich experienced significant losses, with seven hundred men dead or wounded in the capture of the Portsmouth Naval Yard. Ramcke himself ordered that the handful of surviving sailors, grease-streaked and shattered, be allowed to march into captivity with their colors after witnessing their fanatical defense of the facility. The yards themselves were completely ruined, however, and fall-back plans had to be realized to develop a series of artificial harbors.

On the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, conditions were similar, but there was less room for maneuver. Nevertheless, by the time the snow crossed Chesapeake Bay, artillery rounds were falling on Annapolis, Maryland. The United States Army's 29th Division, of the collective National Guard of several states in the region, began to prepare a defense of the ring of cities around Washington, DC, as reinforcements began to stream in from across the country. At the same time, the second wave of soldiers began to arrive from Europe, including the elite airborne formations, and the Luftwaffe began to work to put the several military fields under Reich control back into full operation. A week and a half after the initial landings, the Reich controlled an area of the United States roughly the size of the Netherlands, and the battle for Washington, DC commenced in earnest.

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Posting from tablet, graphics support difficult. Have battle for DC mapped out; honestly, invading up the Chesapeake reminds me of Market-Garden.

J.J.Jameson said:

Like Sodom and Gamora, Washington falls

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Well, not QUITE that simple, but close enough.

Nathan Madien said:

Except you'll actually win. It's a foregone conclusion, really.

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Perhaps a better description would be a crossbreed between Market-Garden and the Ia Drang, with Jochen Peiper as Hal Moore. However, there are a number of factors that make the advance from Hampton Roads northward more difficult:

* A distance roughly the same as Brussels-Paris
* Multiple river crossings
* Urban congestion - though not as bad in alt-65 as now, it's still one very densely populated area
* A network of fixed and improvised defenses stretching back in some places as far as 1809 (Fort Monroe) - and before you scoff at that, remember that the Yorktown entrenchments were used not only to beat Cornwallis, but also McClellan

Similar conditions obtain on the east bank of the Chesapeake, only even more congested and with even less maneuver room. To frustrate things further, there's Barry Sadler, recuperating at Ft. Bragg from a wound sustained during training operations with the Venezuelan military, and his cohorts...

Thank you, and welcome aboard. I'm hoping to get this in for an Iron HeAARt this year, which seems reasonable given it's been going since 2009.

3. The Battle of Washington DC

Generalfeldmarschall Ramcke faced a difficult situation at the beginning of February 1965. The southern advance into Virginia, along the James, had reached a stage where an assault on Richmond would allow the linkage with the central landing along the York-James peninsula. These two regions were held by 16. Panzerkorps under Generalleutnant Guderian, and 1. Marinekorps under Generalleutnant Henningsen, whose marines had recently been reinforced by the arrival of Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland under General der Panzertruppen von Kleist. However, the capture of Richmond, while it would signify the opening of the campaign to the foothills of the Appalachians, would do little to harm the United States as a nation. That was the sole province of the SS forces in Maryland, consolidated now as part of SS-Panzerarmee "Hohenstaufen" under Hauptgruppenfuehrer Wilhelm Bittrich. Bittrich had arrived a week after the invasion began as part of the second wave, with two additional SS-Panzerkorps to round out the east-bank force. He was pessimistic about the difficulties of breaching first Annapolis, then Baltimore, to open the American Military District of Washington to invasion. His reasons were simple enough - the highly urban combat zone, the extensive nature of the American defenses, which he described as "like an overgrown Verdun, if they just knock the weeds off," and the fact that American reinforcements were starting to flood the capital zone. What was currently held by reservists of the American 29th Division in a thin crust would soon be vastly reinforced.

Thus, the only hope that Ramcke saw was a rapid strike to secure the city itself and hopefully hold out long enough for the armored columns to converge from the south and east. The spur for this plan was provided by Obergruppenfuehrer Joachim Peiper of 38. SS-Luftsturmdivision "Nibelungen." Peiper was a veteran of the extensive pacification operations in the East, and had been part of the "helicopter revolution" of the late 1950s. No operation on this scale had been developed, a divisional air assault on a defended objective. Peiper's concept was a rapid overwater thrust up the Chesapeake to secure an airhead wherever opportunity presented - though the large open space of Arlington cemetery was initially selected - into which the precious Luftwaffe airborne divisions would be committed as a follow-on. This included Ramcke's own favorite division, 1. Fallschirmdivision, with which he had served from its formation to his promotion from its ranks. Ramcke had deep reservations, especially the commitment of vital airfield facilities at the former American bases of Langley and Oceania, which would otherwise be used for continuing the tactical contest over the American capital. A compromise was agreed upon with the Luftwaffe, allowing aerial combat to be controlled by a combination of Bermuda-based aircraft and carrier aviation, for the two weeks which all agreed were the outside for Operation Nibelungen's success.

Two weeks was indeed the very outside: Ramcke knew, from satellite images provided by the security services, that an armored column had mobilized from the American armored warfare center at Fort Knox, and was even now streaming northeast to travel up the Shenandoah Valley and engage the Reich's invasion forces between the Potomac and the Rapidan, in works already being poured by American military engineers. The American commander was a specially promoted major general: George S. Patton IV, formerly deputy director of the American armored center. It was suggested that Patton's promotion was self-inflicted, but his father had won a reputation in a series of raids on the Atlantic coast during the war, and just as the German command was largely a mix of veterans of the war, and their sons, Patton's father's reputation was enough. Patton was, in fact, at Lexington, Virginia, riding ahead of his command to visit the grave of the American Civil War general Thomas Jackson, whom his father had cited as an influence.

Other American forces, too, were flowing towards Washington: the two American airborne divisions, primed for seventy-two-hour readiness, had already linked together at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, outside Fayetteville and on Guderian's south flank. With German aerial domination of the area making an airborne operation impossible, Guderian dismissed them as an offensive force, but dreaded prying them loose from the increasingly rugged uplands where they would likely operate. Operating in conjunction with them, but under technically separate command, was the American 1st Marine Division, staging from the Carolina coast. Perhaps more worrisome were the other forces that routinely trained at Fort Bragg, the American Special Forces, and the handful of specialized raiding forces called Ranger battalions maintained by the United States. The American 7th Special Forces Group, which specialized in operation in Spanish-speaking countries, was the most combat-experienced unit available in the United States, and its focus of unconventional warfare and partisan operations gave it a unique ability to slow and damage the German advance.

Beyond this, reservists and forces farther afield were streaming toward that locus, and Ramcke made the decision on the third of February to execute Peiper's plan. In support, Bittrich, von Kleist, and Guderian were ordered to strike toward Washington at the exact same moment as Peiper's rapier thrust. From the beginning, the plan ran into difficulties: Bittrich's SS-Panzertruppen launched their bombardment and assault into Annapolis two hours before the official zero hour, because of a radio operator's error in Ramcke's headquarters. The city's defenses were conducted by police, firefighters, private citizens, and midshipmen of the naval academy who had refused to evacuate into the capital in defense of their school. They were dispersed, and attacked the armored columns with bottles of petrol and rags, demolishing bridges and collapsing buildings. It took four hard days of fighting, and more civilian casualties than either American or Reich authorities were able to tabulate, but the road to Baltimore and Peiper was finally open.

Peiper, meanwhile, had done his job, his helicopters roaring over Bittrich's men's heads as Annapolis came under assault. They swarmed up the Potomac under naval air cover to land at Arlington. The cemetery was in German hands by dawn of the fourth, and Peiper's men lashed out beyond the landing zone. The defense of Washington was in the hands of several ceremonial units and a collection of clerks and staffers, hurriedly issued rifles and turned forth from the American military headquarters at the Pentagon, immediately to the southeast of Peiper's new-seized airhead. Peiper had three objectives now: seize the Arlington bridge into the capital proper, capture the Pentagon, and hold his airhead until the parachutists began to arrive. The first of these was achieved by an extremely capable Orpo officer and reservist, Obersturmbannfuehrer Ulrich Wegener, one of the cadre of highly irregular officers who gravitated to Peiper. Wegener's specially-trained assault battalion seized the bridge and held its north end against repeated District police counterattacks while the majority of Peiper's command fought on the river's south bank.

The Nibelungen troopers advanced on the Pentagon and the Fort Myer cantonment area at roughly the same time, striking southeast and due west. At Fort Myer, the defense was conducted heroically by the United States 3rd Infantry Regiment, a largely ceremonial unit that had more in common with King Frederick's Potsdam Giants than with the assault troops facing them. Drawn from their barracks by the helicopters, and hardly a combat formation, their elan, and their willingness to defend Arlington, were insufficient to stop Peiper. Within twelve hours of landing, Generals' Row of Fort Myer was in German hands. At the same time, the battle of the Pentagon continued, with Peiper devoting his gunships, his mortars, and his rapidly organized artillery park against the concrete structure, breaching each ring in turn and spreading inward. After eighteen hours of constant combat, Peiper's men, worn but elated, pulled down the garrison flag from the Pentagon, presented it to Peiper, and raised the Reichsbanner over the American headquarters.

That morning, President Kennedy was evacuated to the northwest, and the Luftwaffe parachutists began to flutter down among the gravestones of Arlington. The additional forces allowed Peiper to seize Washington National Airport and consolidate the airhead, and to stab across the river to begin fighting the 29th Divison on the National Mall. The 29th Division had one key advantage over Peiper: the Americans' superb artillery. These stopped the SS advance in the rubble of the Lincoln Memorial, and the battle entered a stage of rapid advances and sniping along both flanks of the Reflecting Pool. The SS men stormed from building to building in the Smithsonian complex, fighting room by room across the remains of the original Star-Spangled Banner. By the evening of the seventh, they were on the White House lawn.

The southern assault under Guderian and von Kleist was focused on Richmond. Eight divisions, four infantry and four armored, attacked the city from south and east, breaking its very weak defenses and pouring northward. The first signs of trouble with the advance were the demolition of the newly reactivated fuel port in Portsmouth and a string of ambushes conducted against supply units between Richmond and Virginia Beach. The American special forces were in play. Ramcke, frustrated, called for the realignment of the marines southward, and the deployment of police brigades in the occupied areas. It would be several weeks before they arrived, however, and the marines were a week out of position to begin the cleansing of North Carolina.

At the same time, with von Kleist in Fredericksburg and pressing hard toward Peiper, Guderian wheeled west to confront Patton before the American armored force reached the capital. He established his headquarters at Charlottesville, and threw his four divisions into the Piedmont to hit Patton's column in its widespread flank as Patton traversed up the Shenandoah Valley. It was an unequal contest made more equal only by the terrain of the Valley, which favored the defense by provoking very short-range engagements where even the inferior American tanks could surprise the German armor, and shooting first often meant being the only one to shoot. Patton conducted a skillful fighting retreat, carefully disengaging his southern flank and shifting his troops to the valley's west rim while still conducting his way northward to the relief of the capital. So long as there was a land road open from the west of Washington, DC, Patton believed he had a chance to intervene against the soft targets inside the Military District of Washington.

On the very last day of the two weeks allotted by Ramcke, Patton reached Winchester, and received word that he was too late: von Kleist had breached the so-called Stonewall Line at Manassas, and Panzergrenadierdivision Brandenburg was on the western approach to the American capital. Bittrich had forced his way to the north of Baltimore, isolating that city and fighting in between it and the capital, and spread his SS-Panzertruppen through the Pennsylvania farmland to the north. The American flag was hauled down for the last time over the Capitol Building with the surrender of the city at noon, local time, on the seventeenth of February, 1965. Now Ramcke began to examine the options for expanding the American beachhead, and plans for secondary landings were enacted by Reichsmarschall Hausser. However, Peiper's air cavalry and the airborne forces who had fought beside them would not participate: they had sustained more than one-third casualties, with disproportionately high fatalities from the bitter contest to take the American capital. For all that, Peiper had followed the Reichsfuehrer's order to raise the Reichsbanner on the Washington Monument.

The battle of Washington was at an end, and the first-wave soldiers looked forward to being pulled back for a breather. They had not counted on Bernhard Ramcke.

Nathan Madien said:

And so the adventure continues...



Just out of curiosity, how do they do that?

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With a helicopter.

Nonsense, Stalin didn't require Photoshop to take people out of pictures, why would Heydrich need it to add things in?

Slightly ambitious plan: To celebrate the Fourth, in my own weird way, I'm going to try to burn through as much of the Third Great War (1914-1918, 1940-1948, 1965-1966) by then as I can. I am slightly handicapped in this by my wife's birthday being the third.

It's now weird writing this on a full-size keyboard that doesn't suddenly change locations in the frame...

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4. Operation Palmetto

The situation facing Ramcke's rather large beachhead one month after landing was roughly as follows: Bittrich and SS-Panzerarmee Hohenstaufen had occupied Maryland and Delaware, and were finally able to operate more or less as the armored forces had been intended in southern Pennsylvania. However, because of problems putting ports into full operation, they were strictly limited in fuel consumption. This gave the Americans the opportunity to entrench southwest of Philadelphia on the so-called Franklin Line. They had scraped together sufficient forces that the Franklin Line was held by three infantry divisions, one of them the sole mountain division in the United States Army, the 10th Mountain Division. This formation, though out of place for its specialized training, formed the anchor for this section of the American line, and with good reason: the division had been reactivated only three years earlier based on experiences in South America, and for an American formation, it had a surprising number of combat veterans in its leadership. These did not include Lieutenant General Westmoreland, the corps commander.

There was a gap in the American defenses west of Harrisburg, which von Kleist and Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland planned to exploit. Von Kleist had in fact drawn up an ambitious plan to cut into the Alleghenies and to the shore of Lake Erie. Ramcke vetoed this plan out of hand, as it would complicate the supply issues facing the armored forces even more, and would not solve the one great problem that faced the American invasion, the mountain range running roughly parallel to the coast four hundred kilometers inland. This range's northern end produced a series of ridges west of Harrisburg that were a potential deathtrap for von Kleist's troops, and Ramcke constantly kept Guderian the elder's maxim in mind: Boot them, don't spatter them! With no strategic objectives readily available in the region north and west of the captured capital except Pittsburgh and the steel mills at Youngstown, Ramcke saw no need to rush for the Great Lakes, which would have required breaking contact with both Bittrich to the east, and Guderian the younger to the west - a recipe for disaster even in a defensive vacuum such as this.

Guderian the younger faced the Patton Line, named appropriately enough after the general who threw it together, drawn roughly along the border between Virginia and West Virginia. The Patton Line was perhaps the most formidable natural defensive position facing the invasion force, and General Patton proved to be a competent armored commander, fighting a so-called "tripwire" defense, where he kept his armored force out of contact until it was needed, then striking at the decisive point. He was hampered in doing so by the Luftwaffe, finally returned, to Reichsmarschall Rudel's great relief, to its normal duties of suppressing ground forces. For this reason, Guderian and XVI. Panzerkorps began probing southwest, to flank the Patton Line. They ran into an unexpected source of resistance: a division thrown together from the combined cadet brigades of the Virginia Military Institute and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, reinforced by militia units from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. These cadet brigades had formed a position they called the "Marshall Line," after the American general who had been driven from service in disgrace fifteen years prior.

The marine forces under Henningsen had perhaps the simplest task, for they were nowhere near as fuel-dependent as the armored forces to their north, and the mixture of swampy coastal plain and rugged, wooded hills in North Carolina were suited to their training. However, they faced perhaps the three best-trained divisions in the United States military, the 82nd and 101st Airborne and the 1st Marine Divisions, who, unlike the "lines" that dominated the northern two-thirds of the salient, did not choose to make anything like a static defense but instead stayed highly mobile despite their lack of organic transport. It proved impossible for the Luftwaffe to locate their positions with anything close to certainty; it became a rather bitter joke among the air support forces assigned to North Carolina that if two trees were within a kilometer of each other, they held Americans. In the area close to the coast, it was assumed that only one tree was needed. Much of this was due to the unofficial leadership of a retired marine general named Lewis Puller who pulled off an unlikely escape from central Virginia across Grossdeutschland's advance and through Henningsen's lines.

Thus, Ramcke saw little chance of advancing any great distance until the facilities along the Chesapeake were brought to full operation and the fuel supply of his armored and air forces could be guaranteed. In the meantime, some of the supplies brought in by air were converted to jellied petrol and defoliants for use in the Carolinas, and Peiper was given a chance to rebuild his fractured but victorious division. Ramcke needed a diversion, and proposed exactly what he saw as his best chance to the Reichsführer when Heydrich visited upon the surrender of the American capital. Little effort was made to disguise the plan, instead relying on frantic staffwork and speed to execute before the Americans might become suspicious of his intent.

With the majority of American military attention focused on the arc Philadelphia-Raleigh, Ramcke thought that the best option was to begin a secondary landing elsewhere. Speed, surprise, and violence had been sufficient to take Washington, and he believed that the same could be repeated elsewhere. Thus, Ramcke called for another amphibious landing at Charleston, to the south of the American main resistance, with the hope of trapping the elite American infantry between the two landings. The Reichsführer listened, raising objections as he saw them - first, that amphibious landings were risky, and Charleston was notoriously difficult to capture against even token defense, because the terrain was soft and would easily bog down even infantry in ankle-deep mud and sand. Second, a successful landing would merely open a second line of supply and could potentially thin out the fuel supplies for the starving armored forces to the north. Third, as with von Kleist's proposed breakout, there was no great gain to be had by taking Charleston itself. Ramcke answered with his own analysis: Multiple amphibious landings, supplied from the sea, were difficult but not impossible; conditions on the coast were no more arduous than the Baltic beaches on which many of the troops trained; because of the horrendous terrain difficulties inland that had bedeviled every landing from the British to the present here, only light infantry were to be used, better not to bog down; and finally, the capture of Charleston would force the Americans in the Carolinas into fighting on two fronts, which would hopefully grind them into oblivion.

At the same time, Bittrich, rather than investing and bombarding Philadelphia, would thrust in an arc through Reading toward Allentown, Pennsylvania, while von Kleist to his west was to hold his position pending the arrival of mountain units that would be better suited to fighting their way across the ridges to his front. The mountain divisions were in such high demand that Guderian was simply to make do with what he had on hand and finish cleaning Patton out of the Shenandoah Valley. Ramcke went so far as to promise Guderian "If you can reach Buffalo Gap, I'll hang the swords on you myself." He had been awarded the oak leaves to his Knight's Cross for the first round of fighting in the Shenandoah; he looked to expand the award by finishing it. Henningsen and the marines merely kept up the same pressures which they had kept up the whole time, fighting battles of companies and platoons in a grinding advance through the North Carolina forests.

The assault on Charleston was planned fundamentally differently from the landings at Virginia Beach, which had been well-suited for armor across the beaches, and against an unprepared enemy. The first wave of landings were to be in company strength, aimed at seizing critical points and disabling the harbor defenses rapidly. Once enough of the initial landings were reported successful, the follow-on waves would come, with the goal of a series of pinpricks rapidly expanding and coalescing. Ramcke considered and rejected using the converted helicopter carriers based on the success of Peiper's landing. He rejected them because the helicopters required fuel, and Ramcke adamantly refused to divert fuel from the armored force to the north.

The Charleston landing was more than lavishly supported by the Kriegsmarine; the great battleships, which had had little to do thus far, provided artillery, and a submarine detached from the Gulf of Mexico blockade, UA-119, conducted the initial reconnaissance. UA-119 was fitted with mine-clearing equipment, and spent the third week of February 1965 covertly clearing a route into Charleston harbor. This required the greatest discretion, and her commander, future SKL chief Dieter Braun, was perhaps the best of a new generation of U-boat commanders for the mission. Braun deliberately avoided engagement with the few American naval vessels left in the region, which considered Charleston too vital a port to leave unprotected after the loss of Norfolk.

Landing itself was the responsibility of one of the few postwar SS units to have survived the "rationalizing" and the establishment of the Treaty Forces in the 1950s, 40. SS-Marinedivision "Deutscher Orden," commanded by Obergruppenfuehrer Günther Degen. Final preparations were completed by 21 February 1965, and Ramcke gave the go-ahead just before midnight. The first assault boats, guided in by UA-119, nosed ashore at roughly four in the morning local time, beginning the arduous task of securing the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Offshore, the battleship Hindenburg awaited the first requests for fire. They were not long in coming.

Both sides of Charleston harbor were lined by a mix of houses and very soft beaches, interspersed with mud flats where the city's several rivers formed their estuaries. The landing marines swarmed ashore and began to establish battalion-strength beachheads; compared to the onetime invasion of England, their radios were far superior, allowing greater dispersal of landing areas without dispersing control, and allowing the same forces to coalesce as rapidly as foot movement would allow. This was fortunate: as the Reich was discovering throughout America, recreational hunting seemed to be the primary occupation of many of the inhabitants, and houses that could have been invested simply in any previous contest had to be fought through room by room, even though they were private residences. Thus, by noon, Sullivan's Island on the northeast shoulder of the harbor was in German hands, but on the southwest side, troops were delayed enough that, as in Virginia, the cadets of the Military College of South Carolina were rushed in to meet the invaders. A mixture of cadets, marines, and sailors resisted the landing, slowing down one flank of the assault until Degen got his divisional artillery organized at Fort Sumter, a former American coastal fortification that dominated the mouth of Charleston harbor. The combination of naval and shore guns allowed the southern forces to break out to the bridges leading into Charleston proper, and the two pincers converged on the city.

Ramcke's plan backfired; he had expected Charleston to be taken quickly, but Charleston was simply too large an objective for a single division. General Puller's American marines turned southward, leaving most of North Carolina to the airborne forces under Lieutenant General Hamilton Howze. Additionally, the defenses of Charleston were reinforced by the fully mustered 48th Armored Division, of the Georgia militia, and the 3rd Infantry Division, a mechanized force kept in readiness for overseas deployment. Ramcke was unwilling to relinquish what he saw as a vital beachhead, and shunted Gebirgskorps Dietl south rather than sending them to assist von Kleist in a breakout across the Alleghenies. The addition of these three mountain divisions to the fighting around Charleston meant that the city itself was finally taken, and a perimeter established, but at terrible cost in terms both of manpower and operational momentum. The only bright side from the capture of the city, in fact, was the thinning of the American forces in North Carolina. Acting as hammer and anvil, Guderian and Henningsen managed to capture the inland cities of Danville and of Greensboro, and Henningsen's forces began to try to pin the American parachutists back against the Atlantic.

In the north, Bittrich succeeded in turning the Franklin Line, transforming it from a relatively straight position between Philadelphia and Reading to an arc around Philadelphia, now weakly anchored at Trenton, New Jersey. Von Kleist received the news of the mountaineers' diversion from the old American cavalry barracks at Carlisle, and was absolutely furious, beginning a feud with Ramcke that would not end until the latter's death in 1968. There now began a period of painful advance through the Alleghenies, where the previous pace of as much as thirty kilometers a day was reduced to ten a week in good conditions, with each individual regiment of Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland fighting essentially independently of the others.

Guderian's continuing fight with Patton had pushed the latter back out of the Shenandoah into the first ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, leaving the only portions of the state of Virginia under American control in the far west of the state, where mountains made armored warfare near impossible. Unlike von Kleist, who had been promised the use of the mountain troops to arrange his breakout, the younger Guderian knew the resources available to him, and chose instead to halt his forces, recover their organization, and support Henningsen to the south when needed while he sought an opportunity to break Patton completely. True to his word, Ramcke arranged for Guderian's receipt both of promotion to General der Panzertruppen and the Swords to his Knight's Cross, and requested further resources from Reichsmarschall Hausser.

The invasion of the United States was showing one of the critical weaknesses of the Reich's military. Having largely evolved during the Sowjet war, the Reich focused very heavily on forces capable of rapid maneuver over large distances on relatively flat terrain. Faced with a continuous barrier like the mountains that ran essentially from the St. Laurence in Canada to central Alabama in the American south, they were powerless. The Appalachians formed a natural defensive line that Ramcke could neither easily breach with the resources on hand, nor turn, since the southern coast of the United States was shielded from invasion by the American allies of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The plan to create a second landing and draw forces away from the Virginia front had failed, or at least stalled, and South Carolina's lowlands were as unforgiving for armored warfare as the mountains now confronting the Virginia forces. There were large, superbly trained light infantry forces - the Reich boasted fifteen parachute divisions, three of them SS formations, twelve mountain divisions, again, three of them SS formations, and six marine divisions, of which the sole SS division was committed to Charleston. Beyond this, there were treaty divisions - the three Highlander divisions stood out specifically - and highly motivated light infantry forces belonging to Reichsmarschall Manstein's Südafrikanisches Freikorps, referred to by themselves as the "Impi." However, the main striking power of the Reich remained with the armored, mechanized, and motorized forces, which had been expected to be enough.

As February ended, March brought at least one piece of good news: the engineers had brought the port complex of Norfolk and Portsmouth back into full operation. The precious fuel supplies needed by Bittrich, von Kleist, and Guderian were finally flowing. Ramcke was frustrated and momentarily out of ideas save to request more from Hausser, who reluctantly committed both the Highlanders and the elite SS-Panzerarmee "Das Reich" and "Wiking," "Das Reich" to the north, "Wiking" to Charleston. The addition of two more very large armored formations was hoped to break the threatening stalemate, but Hausser recognized they would strain the existing fuel supply even further.

At a conference in Richmond, where Ramcke had made his headquarters, the full measure of how far his stock had fallen in theater was on display. Wilhelm Bittrich, commanding SS-Panzerarmee "Hohenstaufen," had begun operating on his own initiative. Fearing the arrival of Oberstgruppenführer Kreutz of "Das Reich" and the co-opting of his role in the region, Bittrich had decided on an objective that would seal his place in history: the capture of New York City.