Summary:

In the previous eighteen episodes of this series we traced Adolf Hitler’s conversion to Marxism and his rise to the leadership of the German People’s Republic; his launching of the Second World War; the outbreak of hostilities between the United States and the German People’s Republic; the first deployments of U.S. combat troops to Italy; and the opening phases of the Allied assault on Volksarmee occupation forces in southern France in early 1942. In this chapter we’ll review the initial German counterattack against the Allies’ main front along the Franco-Italian border.

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The Volksarmee had a reputation during the Second World War for being vicious fighters when forced to take the defensive, and they’d live up to that reputation with a vengeance when the Allied armies in Italy launched their first assault against German occupation forces in southern France in January of 1942. Men on both sides of the front line who survived the battle would remember to their dying day the ferocity of German resistance to the Allied invasion; in the early 1960s a group of modern art paintings inspired by the fighting would draw thousands of visits to London’s National Gallery.

It was early on the afternoon of January 13th, 1942 when German troops on the Franco-Italian border initiated their counterassault on the invading Anglo-American forces. While the center of the main Allied battle line held up against the first wave of the counterattack, it was seriously strained by the Volksarmee blow and additional American and British troops had to be rushed to the center of the line in order to keep it intact against the expected second wave. Allied air units too had their hands full fending off attacks from Volksluftkorps fighters and dive bombers operating out of airfields seized from the French back in 1940.

One of the deadliest of the Volksluftkorps squadrons the Allied pilots had to go up against during this time was the “Grunherz”(green hearts) squadron, so dubbed because of the green heart icons painted on the fuselages of their planes. In their hands the Messerschmitt 109, an incredibly lethal fighter aircraft to begin with, turned into a nearly apocalyptic instrument of destruction; Free French pilots serving with the British or American air forces nicknamed the Grunherz “the Devil’s mosquitoes”. And few flyers on either side of the battle were inclined to dispute that the Grunherz were mean customers-- especially when put on the defensive. One American fighter pilot would later tell the New York Post that engaging in air combat with the Grunherz was like “being mauled by a pack of coyotes carrying razor blades”.

The ferocity of the Grunherz in resisting Allied air strikes on the German lines was one of the most important factors, if not the most important one, in enabling German ground forces to make as much headway as they did against Allied invasion troops. By noon on January 17th, nearly four days after the Allied assault on Communist-occupied France began, the Volksarmee had succeeded in pushing the Allied front lines back to the Franco-Italian border; some German advance units had even succeeded in penetrating into Allied territory. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler boasted that the German People’s Republic was on the verge of a great final victory over the “decadent” Anglo-American coalition in the struggle for control of France.

But on January 19th the German Communist leader got a rude awakening as an Allied armored thrust directed at the weakest points of the right flank of the Communist lines achieved a massive breakthrough, permitting British, American, and Italian ground forces to drive across the French border on a wider front and forcing the Volksarmee into retreat. By the afternoon of January 22nd Allied advance units were nearly 35 miles into French territory; one British mechanized infantry unit had succeeded in penetrating fifty miles behind the German lines. Rather than admit that he had miscalculated in his judgment of the Allies’ offensive strategy, Hitler chose to sack six of the Volksarmee’s senior field commanders in France and demote two others. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, third in the overall chain of command for the German Communist occupation forces in France, bitterly protested this decision only to find himself menaced with the prospect of a court-martial for insubordination if he disputed Hitler’s instructions on this matter any futher.

Events would soon vindicate von Rundstedt’s concern on this point, however; by January 28th the Allied invasion force had advanced more than eighty miles inside French territory, and in the first week of February two full divisions of the Volksarmee armored corps were encircled by U.S. troops and artillery. By February 8th Allied warplanes were bombing key Communist military and industrial targets along France’s Mediterranean coast and agents of Britain’s SOE secret service were ferrying arms and supplies to anti-Communist guerrillas in Marseilles. Hitler raged even hotter at this turn of events, threatening to have the entire Volksarmee and Volksluftkorps general staffs executed if something wasn’t done and soon.

Around Valentine’s Day agents of the Stasi and the Milice Nationale, the official secret police force of the puppet regime installed in power in Paris by the German Communists after France fell, went into Marseilles to initiate what Hitler thought would be a devastating crackdown on anti- Communist resistance forces there. But things didn’t exactly go according to plan when the Stasi and Milice officers arrived in the port city. Not only did they have to contend with anti-Communist resistance forces, but the notorious street gangs which had ruled the Marseilles underworld back in the days before the Communist invasion were reasserting themselves in an attempt to grab power from the German authorities and establish their own outlaw kingdom within Marseilles’ city limits. In what has since been dubbed “le temps sauvage”(the savage time) by modern French historians, a two-week battle ensued between the Stasi and Milice Nationale forces and the anti-Communist elements in Marseilles in which both sides sustained shockingly high casualties and the city itself was nearly blasted into a heap of rubble; the fighting was so vicious that, as Joseph Goebbels was later to note in his diary, “it was a great wonder there was so much as a doghouse left standing when it was over”. By the time resistance finally ceased on March 2nd, ninety percent of the buildings in Marseille had been destroyed and less than ten percent of the city’s civilian population was left alive.

The Communist propaganda machine hailed the grisly engagement as “a triumph for the peace-loving socialist nations of the world”, but for a majority of the agents who’d survived the ordeal it felt like at beat a Pyrrhic victory. Not only had they lost staggering numbers of men as a direct result of the Marseilles confrontation, but Allied psychological warfare teams were quick to exploit the carnage as a weapon with which to encourage anti-Communist sentiment throughout the world. Not that it needed much encouragement: by the time the Marseilles uprising happened Communism was the most despised political ideology on Earth, and Marxist factions in every corner of the globe outside Germany, the Soviet Union, or the Communist-occupied sections of Europe had either been disbanded as threats to their nations’ internal security or had remade themselves into social democratic organizations that might be at least marginally more acceptable.

Of course, no Stasi or Milice agent who valued his job-- or his life --would openly admit to having doubts regarding the morality of the measures the Communists took to quash the Marseilles uprising. But that didn’t stop a handful of men inside the Stasi section of the German occupation forces’ headquarters in Paris from hatching a plan to blow a hole in the façade of Marxist unity regarding the Marseilles massacre. Code-named “der Gross-Paris Kapelle”(the Greater Paris Orchestra), they served a dual purpose: not only were they secretly working to expose the dirty truth behind Goebbels’ overwrought paeans to the “heroic defenders of socialism and justice”, as he laughably described them, but they were providing valuable intelligence to the Allies regarding Volksarmee troop strengths and unit dispositions. Working at the risk of imprisonment or even death, the Kapelle’s agents provided a treasure trove of information to Allied commanders about Communist military operations as well as war crimes committed by the Stasi and Milice against French civilians.

While the Gross-Paris Kapelle was doing its dangerous and critical work, another group of intelligence agents-- this one attached to the Allied supreme command headquarters in London --was engaged in highly significant activity of its own. These agents’ task was to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Volksarmee coastal defenses on the English Channel and present those assessments to the top Allied generals as an early step towards preparing an eventual invasion of northern France...

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