Chapter 35: Mar 1943 Germans Withdraw From Africa

“I thought of a remark ... that the United States is like a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

― Winston S. Churchill

All of a sudden, the Yanks were everywhere. They were all over North Africa. They were driving up and down the British country roads in their jeeps and tanks and even training on the beaches in Scotland and England. It wasn’t just the sheer numbers, it was the vitality and the confidence they exuded that was contagious to the British populace about the eventual defeat of Hitler and his Nazi goons. They hated it, but they still loved it because it was so different to the doom and gloom that had existed prior to December 7th, 1941.

The French knew the Americans were coming once again and a glimmer of hope was ignited in the hearts of the French people in occupied France and the beginnings of a sense of fear was instilled in the minds of the Vichy bureaucrats of the government of Vichy France that a day of reckoning was coming and it was coming faster than the Blitzkrieg that had jolted them into joining with their Gestapo masters.

The minds and hearts of the German people were equally divided because they were more fearful of being captured by the Russian barbarians from the east rather than the far more preferable Americans with their nylons and chocolate candy bars. Still, the Wehrmacht was the Wehrmacht and they did their level best to make do with what they had and make their defeat a long, hard grind. It was not out of meanness or spite but it was their spirit of superiority that drove them to fight to the bitter end.

The beginning of the end for the Axis forces in North Africa started in October of 1942 when British General Montgomery defeated the Rommel-led Afrika Korps during the climatic Second Battle of El Alamein and forced him to retreat into Tunisia. With the introduction of American troops into the mix during their landings in Operation Torch in November of that year, the Allies surrounded the several hundred thousand German and Italian soldiers remaining in Tunisia and ultimately forced their surrender in May 1943.

Almost a quarter of a million members of the Afrika Korps were captured at that time and it was regarded as a huge defeat for the Axis forces. In addition to the defeat in North Africa, the soldiers of the Third Reich were being hammered at Stalingrad by the unrelenting Russian Army due to the fact that their logistical support was being used to supply Rommel’s trapped army instead of supplying the encircled German forces at Stalingrad. This double blow against the German Wehrmacht was truly the turning point in the war and it was difficult to find a German general officer with any thought of finding a path to ultimate victory after those crushing defeats.

I sat on the top of a half barrel in the back kitchen of my landlady’s house watching my new close acquaintance Francine cook some eggs freshly collected from the chickens in her grandmother’s barn that were well kept survivors of the war and producing without a worry in their head about what came tomorrow. It was impossible for me to drag my eyes from her shifting buttocks under her thin fabric summer dress that showed off her heart-shaped bottom to absolute perfection. I remembered with a sense of guilt her squirming under the weight of my body as I tried my best to find her special trigger to send her into those convulsions that made me get my own special tingle that seemed so sweet just thinking about it. She looked back at me with a smile on her face as if she knew exactly what I was thinking and winked at me with that same attitude that had already made me her willing accomplice in any form of carnal lust she wanted.

Her grandmother was reporting to us that the Gestapo was having a meeting of their main collaborators in the courthouse this morning and that there was a new huge roundup of Jews and other targets of their orders from their headquarters in Berlin. She had a friend on the courthouse staff that would let us know if her address was on their orders so that she would know if it was time to head to her sister’s house outside the city limits until things quieted down.

Francine and I sat on stools just outside the tiny coffee shop across from the courthouse sipping our cappuccinos and doing our very best to blend into the background. Of course, that was a lot easier for me as I was used to being a bland and uninteresting person most of my adult life. However for Francine, it was almost impossible because she was not wearing a bra and her skirt was so short that her gorgeous thighs were on full view to all passersby on the street. She was tabulating in her little notebook descriptions of the supposed informants walking in to the courthouse like they were nothing other than innocent civilians doing business with the bureaucrats. I was surprised that there was as many females as males and I guess I had forgotten that sometimes a female is a better undercover operative than a male when it comes to getting a bounty for dirty work.

I stayed there on my stool when Francine went inside to make contact with her grandmother’s confidante with the latest news on the list for the targeted addresses for the Gestapo to hit the following morning. I knew she was up for it because she showed not fear and only a heightened sense of adventure about her assignment. I watched vanish inside and I felt certain she could handle the situation without my assistance. I continued to write down the details about the informants to be passed to the local resistance group that was operating well undercover and tending to such matter as countering the collaborators amongst us with a firm hand and a one way trip to the cemetery down by the shoreline without any mourners to be found anywhere.