Fox at the Front

Fox at the Front
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.

Plot summary

The story picks up on December 27, 1944, just minutes after the climax to

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
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
Westwall
, to help to defend the front.
On February 18, a reconnaissance team from the US
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
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
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
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.

Subplots

Other subplots in Fox at the Front include the struggle of a
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.

Historical characters

Germans

Heinrich Himmler – formerly Reichsführer-SS, now Führer
Erwin Rommel – Wehrmacht field marshal, commander of German Republican Army
Joachim Peiper – Waffen-SS officer
Sepp Dietrich – Waffen-SS general
Hans Speidel – Rommel's chief of staff who is appointed as the German government-in-exile's defense minister
Heinz Guderian – Wehrmacht general
Carl Goerdeler
– German government-in-exile chancellor

Allies

Franklin D. Roosevelt – US president
Lewis Brereton – commander, First Allied Airborne Army
Leslie Groves – US general in charge of Manhattan Project
US Third Army
US First Army
Dwight D. Eisenhower – Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe
W. Averell Harriman – US Ambassador to the Soviet Union
Paul Tibbets – captain of the B-29 Enola Gay (renamed Mickey Mouse Express by Groves)

Soviets

Joseph Stalin – dictator
Georgy Zhukov – marshal and commander 1st Belorussian Front
Nikolai Bulganin – politician
Lavrentiy Beria – chief of NKVD

External links

Official page at Macmillan Publishers