Fox On The Rhine Read Free

continued to reinforce their beachhead in Normandy, which was now six weeks old. The German defenders held their positions with heroic courage, but the Wehrmacht commander in the west, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had just been critically injured by an Allied air attack. The report sent by his replacement, von Kluge, indicated that his troops were stretched to the breaking point, that the defensive shell must soon crack.
    Meanwhile the heavy bombers kept coming, day and night, raining death on Germany’s cities and destruction upon the Third Reich’s industrial capabilities. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s representative reluctantly admitted that the Luftwaffe was horribly depleted, critically short of spare parts, barely able to scrape together enough fighters to harass the thundering fleets of enemy bombers.
    Hitler’s eyes again flashed. “And the rigging of the jet bombers? How fares that?”
    The unfortunate Luftwaffe officer paused awkwardly. Like every other former combat pilot, he undoubtedly realized the potential of the rocket-fast plane designed by Willy Messerschmidt--the Me-262. Certainly it was glaringly obvious to him, and to everyone else in the Luftwaffe, that the short-ranged aircraft would make a magnificent fighter. Still, Hitler felt a passionate need to strike back at the enemy homeland in revenge for the bombing of Germany, and to that end he had insisted that the aircraft be rigged to carry bombs--a task for which the plane was patently unfit. Thus, the development of a premier weapon had been placed indefinitely on hold. Brandt, an army man more familiar with diplomacy than air power, nevertheless felt sympathy for the flying officer who was now forced to confront his ruler’s irrationality.
    The man would never formulate his reply.
    The explosion ripped through the confined space with the deafening power of thunder, a blaze of fiery light and a shock-wave that twisted the ground itself. An eruption of smoke and debris choked Brandt, who suddenly found himself lying on his back, staring up at the tattered remnants of the ceiling’s crude wooden paneling. Patches of sky showed through the lumber, a fact that struck him as bizarre.
    What had happened? The colonel couldn’t fully grasp the situation. Looking around, blinking the dust of the explosion from his eyes, he saw Field Marshal Keitel stagger past. The tall man’s hair stood on end, and his face was plastered with soot as he knelt beside a shapeless form to Brandt’s left. Other officers groaned or cried for help while two stenographers stumbled toward the door, which hung limply by a single hinge.
    Idly, with a sense of curious detachment, Colonel Brandt dropped a hand below his own waist, noticing that his legs were gone. He was dying, he realized, though it was a distant thought. The horrific wound didn’t seem to hurt, a fact that surprised him. He noticed a leather shred, the same color as the heavy briefcase, fluttering in the ruins of the smoke-filled room.
    Then he saw Keitel lurch to his feet, the field marshal’s face distorted with a grief so strong that it penetrated even Brandt’s mortal haze. Rubbing a hand across the blasted skin of his face, the chief of staff tried unsuccessfully to conceal his profound distress. His jaw stretched tight by emotion, the field marshal’s words caught in his throat. He looked down again, as if to deny some madness that afflicted his mind. Finally, haltingly, he spoke.
    “Der führer ist tot,” Keitel declared, his voice as dull as the echoes of the assassin’s bomb.
     
    General Erich Fellgiebel, standing outside the Speer Barracks, spun around in alarm as the sound of the explosion echoed through the Wolf’s Lair. For a moment his mind froze in awful, incomprehensible fear. What have we done? The question resounded through his mind until he roughly pushed it aside. We have taken back the Fatherland!
    The older general’s mind still churned with the conflict between his military