8. Unternehmen Serpent - Concept of Operation
At midsummer of 1965, the Reich's American invasion force was trapped by the Appalachian Mountains. While the American coastal plan was in German hands, these mountains balked their attempts to reach the industrial heartland on the shores of the Great Lakes, or the vast grain fields of the Great Plains, or the all-important petroleum reserves of Texas. Some of these advantages could be denied to the Americans by the Luftwaffe, but Rudel's pilots could not be everywhere at once, and when local commanders were constantly demanding close support, strategic bombing suffered. Therefore, a five-pronged strategly evolved, more or less of necessity.
Some of this strategy was the natural outgrowth of conditions on the ground. The centrally directed campaign that Ramcke had attempted had failed because of the distances involved, and the simple impossibility of units in Virginia supporting units in South Carolina. Autonomous operations had therefore governed much of the initial landing, and the commanders who had survived or thrived in that environment did not care to give up that autonomy. This produced a "war of personalities," where each army became somewhat a faction under its commander in addition to a fighting unit. Ramcke's replacement would be less the commander of an army than the conductor of an orchestra, keeping all of the instruments functioning with minimal internal conflict. The Reichsführer's reorganization in June had also made this quite clear, creating four separate American armies with fairly loose links to each other.
Some of it was driven by geography. With the barrier of the Appalachians before them, the Reichswehr consciously adopted what came to be called a "trickle approach," with the goal of breaching the American defenses in the mountains wherever the breach happened, rather than focusing on massive spearheads. In the central front, this was restricted to a handful of points; in New England, it became a broad, constant push; in the south, a situation evolved between Abrams and Steiner that mirrored the Great War "race to the sea."
The remainder of the strategy was consciously developed in Richmond, which had become the headquarters for the Reichswehr in America. The Luftwaffe chief in the Americas, Generaloberst Steinhoff, recognized the problems created by indiscriminate dispersal of tactical air assets, and ordered the withholding of tactical air support from routine operations, while at the same time escalating the strategic bombing of Detroit and the American heartland. It became routine for bomber pilots to fly three missions a day, bombing the American industrial base around the clock. This produced terriffic wear on the pilots, and Steinhoff had to ensure sufficient replacements for them. Instead, Steinhoff told the regional army commanders that he would only authorize tactical air support "at the decisive point," and it was up to them to determine where that point was rather than frittering away the Reich's air superiority. He would leave multi-role squadrons airborne where they could either fight the few American aircraft, or intervene in support of units in the field, but the spring months, when Galland said it seemed that every commander had hot and cold running bombers on tap, were over.
Steinhoff also had one more card up his sleeve: the airborne divisions, even the SS-Fallschirmdivisionen. Since he controlled the transport aircraft, he controlled their deployment, and he began to ask the army commanders where they would do the most good. In addition to the helicopter-borne 22. Luftlandungsdivision, he had twelve parachute divisions to commit - three full-strength corps, plus a reserve - so when the time came, he could be liberal with their deployment. The first commander to reply with a possible plan was Guderian, who had spent the previous months studying both the land to his front, and American history, and knew that there was one certain way to breach the Appalachians and get into the rolling, forested lands behind: the Cumberland Gap.
Guderian proposed a very ambitious operation to seize this strategic pass. First, the Luftwaffe would perform a large-scale version of an old-fashioned artillery box barrage, cutting access to the north end of the pass, then the airborne troops would land at the northwest end of the pass, and finally, the grenadiers would fight their way up the pass to their relief. It was ambitious because the ground was difficult, making airborne operations very risky, but it promised the best route into the bluegrass country beyond the Gap, and the road from the Gap to the Ohio River had been in use for almost two hundred years. It also had the advantage that there was already a major highway running through the Gap, providing a supply route once the breach had been established. Steinhoff was intrigued, and forwarded the plan to Rudel, whom one aide claimed ordered them to "bathe Kentucky in fire."
The Cumberland Gap would provide one hole in the Appalachian wall; one hole could be easily sealed, and Guderian and Kleist were already friendly rivals. Kleist had finally gotten tired of waiting for his mountaineers and organized an ad-hoc division which Heydrich had eventually blessed as Gebirgsdivision Grossdeutschland, which had finally been reinforced by three more of the alpine divisions in June. He did not appeal to Steinhoff for close air support, but instead for a deliberate effort to isolate Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania, and thereby to cut the most direct route for reinforcements not only of himself, but of the Waffen-SS forces in New England. Rather than the spearhead concept which Guderian had proposed, Kleist adopted the "trickle" approach across his whole front, moving forward wherever he could, and had achieved remarkable success thus far by doing so. Until he reached open ground and could fight his divisions as he felt they were meant to fight, he proposed to continue doing exactly as he had done thus far.
New England, the third leg of this five-legged table, was potentially the most dramatic, because President Kennedy had retreated to Boston, and had called for "Fortress Boston" to resist to the bitter end. He faced the combined weight of SS-Panzerarmee "Das Reich" and SS-Panzerarmee "Hohenstaufen," both highly professional formations whose leadership were among the best in the Reichswehr, either army or SS, as Bittrich had shown at New York. Bittrich had spent the early summer rolling up the states of Connecticut - spared by the actions of Prescott Bush - and Rhode Island, and was eyeing the coastal hook of Massachussetts Bay. Massachussetts was divided roughly into two halves, a heavily populated coastal plain, and a more sparsely populated upland region of rolling hills and farmland. When asked whether the SS mountain divisions would be needed in the area, Bittrich had been positively baffled at the thought, and ordered that they be held in reserve. The terrain of this portion of New England simply did not justify deploying specialized formations; they might, he suggested, be needed for the critical battle for Quebec, and thus, should be held back for now. Thus, three divisions of SS mountain troops spent the summer of 1965 in routine police duties.
Bittrich assumed command of this northern wing by virtue of his recent successes, and arrayed Das Reich to the west, with the goal of flanking Boston and eventually isolating the city. He hoped for a repeat of his New York operation, with more troops and a goal for the outer ring of his encirclement once it was complete: the reduction of New England and the invasion of Quebec. Because of his own feud with Rudel, Bittrich received even less than the designated on-station close air support: Luftwaffe units over SS territory in New England were ordered to engage ground targets only if fired upon. Steinhoff personally found this tremendously awkward, but Bittrich cheerfully told him that he had managed thus far without air superiority; if Steinhoff could just guarantee parity, he would ask no more of him. Since the US Army Air Corps had been broken completely by now, this was almost carte blanche to transfer air assets elsewhere.
"Elsewhere," in this case, meant Steiner in the south. The ambitious, hard-driving young Steiner of the 1940s had given way to a deeply ill man whose staff, loyal to a fault, had concealed his ill health both from his soldiers and his superiors, and to all the world, Felix Steiner was as hard-charging an officer as he had ever been. The Appalachians at Steiner's end of the line were not nearly as formidable a barrier as they were a very short distance to the north, in Guderian's territory, and indeed could be bypassed if one was comfortable with a long exposed flank, by the simple measure of a drive along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Steiner was an unorthodox officer, but not so unorthodox that he was comfortable with such exposure. His proposal for how to use the airborne forces shows just how unorthodox he was, however, since he did not brief Steinhoff on his complete plan - Steinhoff would doubtless have refused, had he done so.
What Steinhoff heard, and agreed to, was a deployment of airborne troops to secure the Chickamauga-Chattanooga valley, flanked by Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. This was potentially as difficult an operation as Cumberland Gap; both prominences were steep, treacherous, and heavily wooded, ideal defensive terrain where Creighton Abrams had dug in for the past month. Steiner was to launch an armored offensive from the Johns Mountain area at the same time, committing his full force thus to a direct battle against Abrams. The tipping point that was supposed to transform this from another Atlanta was the Luftwaffe. Steiner had the skies; Abrams did not, and would be pinned in place while the Reich destroyed him.
What Steiner actually planned with his staff was radically different, one of the most risky operations in the history of a risky war. He detached one battered armored corps, the marines, and the mountaineers that had been sent to relieve the marines to support the landings at Chickamauga-Chattanooga, and threw the remainder of his armored force at Columbus, Georgia, and beyond it, Montgomery. He launched two simultaneous offensives at perpendicular angles to each other. It was apparently madness, because it left a joint between the two forces, but Steiner was gambling now. There was nothing to suggest that the United States had a coherent force in position to exploit this gap.
These were four components of what became known as "Serpent;" the fifth was a touch added by the hand of Otto Skorzeny himself. The main objection to bypassing the Appalachians by landing on the amphibious-friendly beaches of the Gulf Coast was that the Caribbean was an American lake, save for Jamaica. Skorzeny had already shown that Jamaica was an adequate springboard, as shall be shown in discussion of Unternehmen Nebenattraktion in Panama. He therefore proposed an invasion of the island of Cuba, sufficient at least to secure its southern tip with the American naval base at Guantanamo, and the addition of yet another front to the American war. It is still unclear whether Skorzeny planned on expanding operations to include landings at Gulfport and Galveston, or if it was initially a matter of applying pressure.
All of these plans, with the exception of Steiner's sleight-of-hand, were collated in Richmond and Berlin, and the United States braced for the worst.