Opening Moves

Taking his treasured Walther P38 pistol from his holster, he looked skywards to a hot sun obscured by the products of his ruined heavy tank regiment, aiming his final words at a god he hated beyond measure and put a bullet in his brain.

“B’lyad.”

The casualty figures were disproportionate.

In all the combat that morning the 27th Guards Tank Regiment ceased to exist, solely one running heavy tank to its name, supported by twelve shattered and traumatised survivors. All but two of the other tank crew remained permanently on the field.

285th Rifle Division was removed from the Soviet order of battle, its artillery, mortars, and support services absorbed into the Army reserves, the three rifle regiments formed into one shocked battalion and sent rearward for security duties.

Each of the three regiments had sported over two thousand men before the commencement on the 6th. A few had fallen along the way but Malkendorf had been a slaughter akin to the early days of 1941. German civilians pressed into action to help clear the field four days later insisted that over three and a half thousand bodies were recovered and interred in five mass graves west of Horsdorf.

A day later, Colonel Leonid Borissovich Shvpaghin was buried by his friend Alexander Bissanov, adjacent to the bridge north of Horsdorf, and alongside his long time comrade Major Alexei Vassilevich Banov, occupying the southern bank directly opposite the burial place of their German adversaries.

The Malkendorf Kommando, as they called themselves, suffered twenty-three dead and an equal number wounded. They had been buried next to the bridge they had defended so valiantly.

The Horsdorf group suffered grievous losses, mainly in the hand to hand fighting at the north end of the bridge. Seven men were left standing, none unwounded. The Rifle Brigade helped them bury these brave men on the evening of the battle, similarly adjacent to their last post.

One Achilles had suffered a hit. Lightly armoured, a 122mm shell was always going to be the winner and the five crewmembers were buried in a hasty ceremony in the convenient hole created by the short drop in the churchyard.

Along with them went the padre, eleven members of the Northumberland Fusiliers, one unlucky tanker from the 3rd RTR who broke his neck falling off his tank and twenty-seven riflemen from the 8th Battalion.

The last body laid reverently in the grave was that of Lieutenant Colonel Fairbairn-Banks, his life extinguished by a mortar shell, heart stilled by the smallest piece of hot metal slicing through his aorta.

Contrary to his gleeful statements in life, the grave was long enough.

1028 hrs Thursday 9th August 1945, Headquarters of the French First Army, Baden-Baden.

Eisenhower’s urgent phone call overrode the instruction not to be disturbed, as issued by the Commander of the First French Army to his Aide.

The Colonel begged forgiveness and informed his commander of the urgency of the situation.

Général d’Armée Jean de Lattre de Tassigny accepted the man’s nervous interruption and dismissed him, then apologised to his guests as he picked up the simple bakelite phone and had his world turned upside down by the American General.

The men watched him closely; the woman poured a second glass of Perrier and flexed her wounded muscles, left shoulder, and arm bandaged as a result of fragments from a grenade. Nothing serious but very painful.

The phone call was already coming to an end, with everyone by now aware that something had gone badly wrong.

De Lattre replaced the receiver carefully, his own shrapnel wounds stiffening his right arm, and addressed the group, favouring the most senior man.

Outlining the details of the 14th Infantry disaster and the moves made by Eisenhower, he begged the group’s indulgence and picked up the phone once more, instructing the 2nd Armoured Division forward as requested.

That done he sat back in his chair, ready to hear the rest of what De Walle had to say and, more to the point, what De Gaulle’s reaction was going to be to it.

Even with them in the room and the extremely pretty agent Valois to examine at length, exceptionally attractive despite not wearing any make-up whatsoever, her charms not obstructed by the bandages and scratches on her face, De Lattre spent more time looking at the fourth person opposite him.

Such was the presence of Ernst-August Knocke.

1215 hrs Thursday 9th August 1945, Headquarters of the French First Army, Baden-Baden.

The meeting concluded shortly after midday, and De Lattre had secured the full support of De Gaulle for the proposal brought to him by De Walle and Knocke. In the way that adversity sometimes assists in the plans of men, Eisenhower’s information about the 14th Division’s collapse solved one major hurdle of the plan, and De Lattre would address that when the time was right.

De Gaulle left the Baden-Baden headquarters openly and with his normal flourishes.