 1st Edition cover | |
| Author | Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Tony Greco |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternate history, war novel |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | November 2003 (hardback) June 2004 (paperback) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 672 pp |
| ISBN | 0-7653-4399-1 |
| OCLC | 52268942 |
| Preceded by | Fox on the Rhine |
Fox at the Front is a 2003 alternate history novel written by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson. It is a sequel to the 2000 novel Fox on the Rhine .
The story picks up on December 27, 1944, just minutes after the climax to Fox on the Rhine . Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has introduced himself to George Patton and offers to surrender Army Group B to him. Both generals agree that the Soviet Union is a greater threat than all of the German forces under Heinrich Himmler, who has considered him a traitor. Rommel instructs Hasso von Manteuffel's Fifth Panzer Army and Heinz Guderian's Sixth Panzer Army to surrender their units at the first Allied unit they encounter. However, the large concentration of Waffen-SS forces in the Sixth Panzer Army makes Himmler order Jochen Peiper to take over the unit at its headquarters in Namur, which kills Heinz Guderian in the process, and to counterattack the Allies. After a US infantry force, which was sent to accept Guderian's surrender, is ambushed, Peiper marshals a small kampfgruppe from the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to attack Rommel's Dinant headquarters, but he is forced to withdraw by heavy US and German resistance. He also collects wounded German forces along the way during the trip back to the Rhine. Patton's liberation of Bastogne and the cooperation of Rommel's forces allows Third Army to race to the Rhine faster than the rest of the Allies by early January 1945. It captures a bridge in Koblenz and tries to cut off as many SS units as they can.
Some SS forces, including Peiper, make it across the Rhine. After he arrives in Berlin, Himmler puts Peiper in charge of the Das Reich division.
Rommel also faces tension on the German side, as he is being eyed to head the government-in-exile of the so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR), but he decides to stay firm and commands the Wehrmacht survivors from Army Group B, now called the German Republican Army (GRA). Having crossed the Rhine, the GRA and the Third Army keep pushing deep into the interior. All the while, Himmler orders Field Marshal Walter Model to reassign all Wehrmacht officers randomly to prevent any conspiracies to defect, especially after US forces co-ordinate with General Kurt Student in overseeing the surrender of Army Group H in Frankfurt.
Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union resumes its offensive across Poland, as Stalin assigns the political officer Alexis Krigoff to keep tabs on the attack. The zampolit also reports to the NKVD about generals who are too cautious in their attacks. Das Reich and the Sixth Panzer Army are sent to the Eastwall, a copy of the Westwall, to help to defend the front.
On February 18, a reconnaissance team from the US 19th Armored Division ambushes a train leaving of Ettersburg. Upon derailing the train, the group discovers thousands of corpses and few survivors for whom they provide medical assistance. Rommel is alerted and goes down to Ettersburg to see the situation. He discovers that the train came from the Buchenwald concentration camp and organises an assault under the cover of a snowstorm, with German troops in the lead. The camp is liberated, and the prisoners are taken care of by Allied medical units. Rommel is horrified at the depths to which the Nazi Party reached in Germany's name, and he nearly kills some camp guards in anger. Although he leads the way in the cleanup, the Allied and the GDR leaderships convince Rommel to let the proper medical authorities handle the workload at Buchenwald and to concentrate on capturing Berlin, ahead of the Soviets, who have stumbled upon the Auschwitz camp as well.
On March 13, while the Sixth Panzer Army tries to blunt the Soviet advance, the Allies execute Operation Eclipse, an airborne drop and ground assault on Berlin, where Dietrich surrenders all German forces in the city. A US commando raid also captures Himmler as he tries to escape to Czechoslovakia in a convoy. Enraged at having been beaten to Berlin, Stalin orders Georgy Zhukov to encircle the capital by sending his forces to the Elbe and by cutting off Third Army and the GRA from the rest of the Allied forces, which are still to the west. Zhukov also uses the opportunity to cripple the GRA forces in the northern outskirts heavily while the encirclement continues. The Allied troops in the city are ordered not to attack the Soviets for fear that they will become provoked to unleash their firepower on Berlin. Peiper, who was cut off during the retreat of Das Reich' from Kustrin, is captured and sent to a re-education camp in Siberia.
Over the next few months, the Allies carry out a massive airlift operation into Berlin, which provides reinforcements and supplies while evacuating civilians. The Soviets also use the time to bring more ground forces into the blockade.
The uneasy calm is broken on July 1, when a US transport crashing on the Soviet lines after a major dogfight is interpreted on the ground as an Allied air attack. The Soviets attack all points throughout the blockade, with the main thrust being directed against the 19th Armored Division at Potsdam. However, Zhukov discovers that Krigoff was behind the assumption since he convinced the commander of the 2nd Guards Tank Army to press the attack with the intent of capturing Gatow and Tempelhof airports. The attack bogs down because of Allied airstrikes, but Patton believes that the next Soviet attack will break through the US lines. The determined Soviet assault forces the Manhattan Project to bring the atomic bomb, which was supposed to be used for the Trinity test, to be deployed in Berlin.
On the morning of July 8, General Groves oversees the drop of the Fat Man bomb aboard the Enola Gay with the Soviet artillery and armored concentration in Potsdam as the target. Although there are persistent doubts as to whether the bomb will work, the explosion erases them altogether as it obliterates Potsdam, where Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Konev's headquarters is located. The shock value from the event also forces the other Soviet attacks to stop.
In the aftermath of the bombing, Stalin agrees to withdraw all Red Army forces to the Polish side of the Oder River but leaves behind a small force on the German side to fortify the area. The British spy Kim Philby, who has spent the past few months digging for information on the atomic bomb, is killed by British intelligence as he attempts to alert the Soviets that the Berlin bomb was the only working copy; he was tricked by a fake stockpile several days earlier. Krigoff, who was sent to Lubyanka Prison after the siege, narrates his part of the story to Stalin before he is killed in his cell. The United Nations also convenes a war crimes tribunal to try all Nazis, but Himmler does not make it to the courtroom, as the US soldiers who discovered Buchenwald leave him to die in a camp with Jews and other inmates.
Other subplots in Fox at the Front include the struggle of a B-24 Liberator crewmember who crashed in Fox on the Rhine and his stay in Buchenwald alongside Rommel's personal driver, a teenage Volksgrenadier soldier who is later fielded into the Hitlerjugend and Das Reich divisions, and the exploits of the Fox on the Rhine character Gunther von Reinhardt who negotiates for a peaceful solution with Himmler. Like in the previous novel, the fictional history book War's Final Fury by Professor Jared Gruenwald provides further insights into the novel's events.
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Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt was a German field marshal in the Heer (Army) of Nazi Germany during World War II. Born into a Prussian family with a long military tradition, von Rundstedt entered the Prussian Army in 1892. During World War I, he served mainly as a staff officer. In the inter-war years, he continued his military career, reaching the rank of Colonel General before retiring in 1938.
Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was a German general during World War II who, after the war, became a successful memoirist. An early pioneer and advocate of the "blitzkrieg" approach, he played a central role in the development of the panzer division concept. In 1936, he became the Inspector of Motorized Troops.
Joachim Peiper was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and war criminal convicted for the Malmedy massacre of U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs). During the Second World War in Europe, Peiper served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, and as a tank commander in the Waffen-SS. Peiper personified Nazi ideology as a purportedly ruthless glory-hound commander who was indifferent to the combat casualties of Battle Group Peiper, and who encouraged, expected, and tolerated war crimes by his Waffen-SS soldiers.
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Günther Adolf Ferdinand von Kluge was a German field marshal during World War II who held commands on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. He commanded the 4th Army of the Wehrmacht during the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Battle of France in 1940, earning a promotion to Generalfeldmarschall. Kluge went on to command the 4th Army in Operation Barbarossa and the Battle for Moscow in 1941.
Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky was a Soviet and Polish officer who became a Marshal of the Soviet Union, a Marshal of Poland, and served as Poland's Defence Minister from 1949 until his removal in 1956 during the Polish October. He became one of the most prominent Red Army commanders of World War II.
Walther Wenck was a German officer and industrialist. He was the youngest General of the branch in the German Army and a staff officer during World War II. At the end of the war, he commanded the German Twelfth Army that took part in the Battle of Berlin. Wenck left the military after surrendering to the Allies. He was asked to become Inspector General of the Bundeswehr as West Germany was re-arming in 1957, but declined to take the post when conditions he set were not met, such as the Inspector General being the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, not just an administrative leader.
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Fritz Hermann Michael Bayerlein was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II. He initially served as a staff officer, including with Erwin Rommel in the Afrika Korps. He then commanded the 3rd Panzer Division, the Panzer Lehr Division and LIII Army Corps in the European theatre. Bayerlein was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.
The Vistula–Oder offensive was a Red Army operation on the Eastern Front in the European theatre of World War II in January 1945. The army made a major advance into German-held territory, capturing Kraków, Warsaw and Poznań. The Red Army had built up their strength around a number of key bridgeheads, with two fronts commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Konev. Against them, the German Army Group A, led by Colonel-General Josef Harpe, was outnumbered five to one. Within days, German commandants evacuated the concentration camps, sending the prisoners on their death marches to the west, where ethnic Germans also started fleeing. In a little over two weeks, the Red Army had advanced 480 kilometres (300 mi) from the Vistula to the Oder, only 69 kilometres (43 mi) from Berlin, which was undefended. However, Zhukov called a halt, owing to continued German resistance on his northern flank (Pomerania), and the advance on Berlin had to be delayed until April.
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Army Group Vistula was an Army Group of the Wehrmacht, formed on 24 January 1945. It lasted for 105 days, having been put together from elements of Army Group A, Army Group Centre, and a variety of new or ad hoc formations. It was formed to protect Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River.
Georg Stumme was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during the Second World War who briefly commanded the Axis forces at the beginning of the Second Battle of El Alamein, and died during the Defence of Outpost Snipe. He had taken part in the Battle of France, the invasion of Yugoslavia and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the highest award in the military and paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany during the war.
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Fox on the Rhine is a 2000 alternate history novel written by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson. It details a course of events over late 1944 that resulted from Adolf Hitler's death in the July 20 plot and from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's survival of the crackdown.
Operation Solstice, also known as Unternehmen Husarenritt or the Stargard tank battle, was one of the last German armoured offensive operations on the Eastern Front in World War II.
This is a timeline of events that occurred during World War II in 1943.
The Wehrmacht forces for the Ardennes Offensive were the product of a German recruitment effort targeting German males between the ages of 16 and 60, to replace troops lost during the past five months of fighting the Western Allies on the Western Front. Although the Wehrmacht was keeping the Allied forces contained along the Siegfried Line, the campaign had cost the Wehrmacht nearly 750,000 casualties, mostly irreplaceable. However, the rapid advance of the Allied armies in August and September after Operation Overlord had created a supply problem for the Allies. By October, the progress of the Western Allies' three army groups had slowed considerably, allowing the Germans to partly rebuild their strength and prepare for the defense of Germany itself. Adolf Hitler decided that the only way to reverse his fortunes would be to launch a counter-offensive on the Western Front, forcing both the United States and Great Britain to an early peace, and allowing the Wehrmacht to shift its forces to the Eastern Front, where it could defeat the much larger Soviet Red Army.