59. Over the Border
3. Panzerkorps Area of Operations
West of Leeuwarden, Occupied Netherlands
6 August 1941
Walther von Brauchitsch and Fedor von Bock agreed on most things, though Brauchitsch was more inclined to the rapier thrust than the broad-front advance that Bock embraced. One thing they agreed on was that there would be absolutely no glory attached to the conquest of the Low Countries; it was simply an unpleasant chore that must be done to open the door to France. Thus, the two of them commanded the field forces on this extreme right end of the German line; even Rundstedt to the south had a more glorious assignment than them, acting as the shield in case the French decided to cross the Rhine.
Brauchitsch commanded the seaward wing, entrusted with the capture of Groningen. Slightly inland, Bock was moving for Eindhoven, with the two armies set to converge on Amsterdam. Brauchitsch had the one armored corps not allocated to the Belgian thrust, Rommel's corps, and he used it to good effect. Within minutes of receiving the formal order from Berlin, and knowing that no such word had yet reached Amsterdam, he had been on the radio with Rommel and the armor had been moving over the border. Rommel had contacted him at six in the morning to inform him that his headquarters was in Groningen and he was continuing the advance to the IJsselmeer. Brauchitsch could hear the ambitious Rommel's unspoken thoughts: if he advanced quickly enough, he could seize the Afsluitdijk and race into Amsterdam ahead of any other German elements. Brauchitsch, still recovering from a heart attack over the summer, lacked the energy to restrain Rommel, and besides, if it worked, everyone benefited.
Rommel's relentless drive, outside the scale provided for in the operation order, drove his chief of staff, Fritz Bayerlein, insane, and snarled units all along the front line. Organization was breaking down as columns attempted to use the network of dikes to advance, only to bump headlong into each other. Thus, Johann Volkmann's introduction to the western war was as a traffic-control officer. He took mulishly to this, at first waving traffic through himself, then grabbing platoons from divisional police companies to do it for him. After three days, he finally got far enough forward to see what the corps had actually accomplished, looking out at the great man-made lake of the IJsselmeer at a point significantly south of the long dike that enclosed it, Rommel's objective. He looked incredulously at the area the general had told them to expect to attack - a four-lane road stretching twenty-odd kilometers, an obvious chokepoint, and the kind of killing field normally avoided by the German armor. All it would take was one Dutchman with a detonator and the will to undo the work of the past couple decades, and the IJsselmeer would be open to the sea once more, the dike breached, and the corps stymied.
When he reported this back to Bayerlein, the general nodded tiredly. "Been telling him that since he thought of it," he said wryly. "No changing his mind, he's convinced the Dutch will never expect us to move that fast. And he's right. Prisoner bag, as of this morning, is forty-five thousand. Forty-five thousand prisoners in two days!" Bayerlein shook his head, standing and stretching before staring moodily out the window of the old royal residence Rommel had adopted as his momentary headquarters. "It won't work, Volkmann. It would require Winkelman to be an idiot. A blind idiot." He sighed. "Well. Thanks for your report. Tea?"
Johann nodded. "Yes, please, sir." Bayerlein nodded to an orderly and sat down behind a desk that doubtless dated back past Bonaparte. "Well. Here's the rub, Volkmann. There's a position at Kornwerderzand. I think it's probably another Westerplatte. You know, Dutch dug in ears-deep, machine-guns everywhere, and no choice to dig 'em out but the bayonet, and we're damn short on bayonets in this corps." The tea arrived, they nodded, and a moment of silence followed as they drank. "Here, look," Bayerlein continued, gesturing at a map on the desk. "This position controls the north end of the dike. If we can't break it, we can't advance, so what I want from you... I want you to take a platoon from one of the divisional scout battalions and investigate it. Funck's got the Seventh over there, he's already been told to cut you a platoon and, if he can spare it, a couple Stugs to support you."
Johann looked at the map. The likely emplacements were on the south side of the causeway, and did indeed pose a threat to advancing across the dike. The problem with this damned country was that everything was flat - there was no way to conceal an approach march, and if they dug in, chances are their emplacements were flush with the ground or hidden behind one of the interminable series of dikes that they seemed to think were a substitute for roads. There was no way to finesse an operation like this; brute force really would have to do. "Just a platoon, sir?" he asked, glancing over at Bayerlein, who shrugged. "I doubt he can spare much more, we're still feeling out to the sea along the front, but His Eminence wants this taken care of quickly." Bayerlein looked Johann square in the eye. "Frankly, Volkmann, if you can map it out, chances are you'll have an armored battalion on your tail immediately to punch through."
He nodded, lost in thought before he straightened. "All right, sir, I'll grab my glasses and head out."
The battalion in question turned out to be considerably closer than expected. Oberstleutnant von Manteuffel had brought a mechanized battalion almost to the causeway in expectation of precisely the same operation Rommel had in mind, and was in the back of a halftrack, arguing on the radio with one of his company commanders, when Johann arrived. Johann waited patiently for him to finish the argument, then Manteuffel looked up at him impatiently. "General Bayerlein have something for us?" Manteuffel asked, tearing a hunk of bread and eating as he did, glancing apologetically at Johann before offering him part. "No, thank you, sir, ate at headquarters."
"Probably better'n we're eating, I bet." Manteuffel grinned. "So the General give word to break across the causeway yet?"
"No, sir. General Bayerlein thinks... and I agree, sir... that there's a rat's nest on the south side." Manteuffel nodded, turning to yell out of the halftrack. "Schacht! Post!" A Hauptmann came running, submachine gun cradled lightly in his arms. Volkmann recognized the type - he
was the type, one of the new breed of officer commissioned in the last few years. He even vaguely recalled him, a rifle platoon leader in Poland. "Schacht, your company's attached to Hauptmann Volkmann here for the afternoon. Says there's a position next to the causeway. Want you to clear it out. Once you've done so, get on the horn and we'll roll. Got it?" Manteuffel glanced at Johann, who began to protest that his mission was reconnaissance, then shut his mouth. "Anything more to add, Volkmann?"
"No, sir." He hesitated, then corrected himself. "Ah, sir, if you could keep your mortars available, I'd greatly appreciate it." Manteuffel nodded once, then swigged from his canteen. "Good luck, gentlemen, see you in Amsterdam."
The company moved out; Johann was unused to riding in a halftrack to get to the battlefield, the unique swaying motion different from a tank's. Schacht noticed, grinning. "They say it's like a camel," he yelled over the engine, eyes scanning the flat land ahead of them. They both rode standing, and Johann noticed Schacht always kept one hand locked on the bar around the halftrack's open top. "I can imagine," he replied, not bothering to turn to face Schacht but scanning ahead of them with his field glasses. He saw no telltales that would give away the Dutch position, and they were within eight hundred meters of where it was supposed to be.
Two halftracks back, a vehicle suddenly exploded. "
Alle raus!" bellowed Schacht, and Johann joined the general rush to dismount. The halftracks were immediately caught in a hail of machine-gun fire, and they threw themselves flat pell-mell behind the vehicles. Schacht, to his credit, was definitely a fighting soldier, crawling forward and yelling for the company to organize by squad, find a target, and start suppressing. Johann shimmied along beside him, out of his element, the MP38 cradled in his arms unfamiliar. If it had been a tank, he would have swept this field, but as it was, all he could do was look around.
He saw a puff of smoke to their left, and he jerked Schacht's elbow and pointed at it. Schacht nodded, cupped his hands, and yelled, "That's great, but there's fuck-all we can do unless we can get moving!" Two more halftracks went up, and Schacht waved at them, gesturing them back. Johann knew how painful that must be - to send their only vehicle support away - and inwardly cringed. He was not a rifleman, he was a tanker, damn it!
Schacht shimmied forward, toe and elbow propelling him below a low undulation in the till. "Pedersen! Get your platoon on line, lay down fire. Asser, your platoon, ready to bound on my order. Eugen, line with Pedersen!" Johann was in awe - how Schacht could lay there, rolling side-to-side, yelling and gesticulating in apparent calm, was totally beyond him as the bullets whipped overhead and kicked up dirt around them. The mid-sized guns - five-centimeters, he guessed by the sound - had fallen silent with the halftracks' precipitate retreat... complete with their radios, he realized belatedly. If these fortifications were to be cleared, they would
have to be cleared by the infantry.
Schacht ignored Volkmann's apparent panic and rolled to one elbow. "Asser! Forward!" Obediently, a ragged line of men half-rose and stumbled forward a handful of steps before flinging themselves down again. Some of them would never rise, the machine-guns sweeping their position ensured that, but bound by painful bound, the company moved forward a few meters at a time. It took them a nightmarish half-hour, but they began to close with the Dutch defensive positions. Johann Volkmann took stock of what remained, and was astounded to realize that of the men who had exited the halftrack, four out of five had actually made it this far.
They saw the first bunker finally, a casemate dug out of the till and reinforced with concrete. It was closed, but the trenches between the positions, Johann saw after popping his head up for a moment, were uncovered, timber-lined. Schacht smiled grimly, glancing over at him and half-yelling. "We can get in that trench, we've got 'em," he yelled, no one speaking at less than a bellow after half an hour under fire. Johann nodded mutely, watching Schacht fumble with a grenade. "Asser! Grenades and charge!" he roared, and reared back, sidearming the stick grenade forward. Johann watched it skip across the dirt before tipping over into the trench, and heard panicked shouts from within. Along Asser's section of line, two dozen grenades went forward. The ground shook, tilting sixty degrees to Johann's view as the grenades went off in a chorus of cracking explosions. Moments after the explosion, a ragged, cheering line of men came to their feet, sprinting forward and diving into the trench line.
They made the trenches, and it became a far more even fight: the grenades had done no damage to the defenses, but instinct was to shy away from the explosions, and they had given the infantry time to close with their opponents. In the close confines of the trenches, the fixed defenses were useless, while the quick-firing new rifles proved a decisive advantage at this range. It had been expected to come down to the bayonet. Fortunately for all concerned, it did not. The Dutch retreated southward along the trench line, fighting stubbornly, but outnumbered two-to-one as Schacht's other platoons were able to advance. Even reinforcements from another trench line to the west, facing the water, were unable to stop the advance.
Hauptmann Schacht did not live to see his victory. Leading from the front as always, he was one of the first into the central casemates, with the five-centimeter guns. The defenders were loath to part with their artillery, and at this one point in the line, it did degenerate into hand-to-hand combat. When Volkmann found him, the popular, ambitious young officer was thrown half-back over one of the guns, his head an open mess that had scattered all over the polished concrete floor. A Dutch gunner was slumped against the wall opposite him, gray loops of intestine in his lap and blood dribbling from his lip, apparently bayoneted a half-dozen times.
It was Leutnant Asser who broke Johann's reverie. "Sir?" the platoon leader asked nervously. "What do we do now?" Johann looked up from the mess on the floor. "Only one thing we can do, Leutnant. Signal battalion, get the tracks up here. Detail a couple men... lay out the bodies." He closed Schacht's eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "Least we can do is get 'em ready for the burial detachment."
All along the German line, disaster befell the Western powers. Within seventy-two hours of the war's breakout, the main German armored force punched through to link up with the small, specially-trained glider force at Eben-Emael, splitting around Brussels to plunge through the Flemish coastal plain and engage the French on French soil. Five days after the declaration of war, the French were in retreat at Calais, the British Expeditionary Force still hastily organizing in London, and Brauchitsch fighting at the southern end of the Afsluitdijk against still resistance. On the morning of the ninth, the Interior Ministry radio station triumphantly announced the accession of the Duchy of Luxembourg as a member-state of the Reich. That afternoon, Marshal Bock himself arrived to take possession of the Huis van Doorn, the Kaiser's onetime residence in exile, and lay a wreath at its door.
The fate of the Low Countries was sealed; it was now only a matter of time before France itself felt the full strength of the Kaiser's army. In Paris, posters went up in every arrondissement, proclaiming "
La Patrie en danger!" Old men, the memories of the Great War rising in their minds, rushed to volunteer stations, and boys whose autumn should have been occupied with school instead begged to be allowed into the fight before it should end.