Himmler's war Read online

  Himmler's war

  Robert Conroy

  Himmler's war

  Robert Conroy

  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.