Perfect strangers are going to great lengths to kill you; if they succeed, far from being punished for taking life, they will be rewarded, honored, celebrated. In combat, men stay underground in daylight and do their work in the dark. Good health is a curse; trench foot, pneumonia, severe uncontrollable diarrhea, a broken leg are priceless gifts. There is a limit to how long a man can function effectively in this topsy-turvy world. For some, mental breakdown comes early; Army psychiatrists found that in Normandy between 10 and 20 percent of the men in rifle companies suffered some form of mental disorder during the first week, and either fled or had to be taken out of the line (many, of course, returned to their units later). For others, visible breakdown never occurs, but nevertheless effectiveness breaks down. The experiences of men in combat produce emotions stronger than civilians can know-emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness-and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability. "There is no such thing as "getting used to combat," "
156 the army psychiatrists stated in an official report on combat exhaustion. "Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure . . . psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare. . . .Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless."
But what could Eisenhower do? If he pulled his veterans out of the line, his rookies would take heavier losses for less gain. This was because for sure Hitler wasn"t pulling back or giving his veterans a well-deserved rest. What Eisenhower saw was a German army that still had a fighting quality to it, supported by a steady flow of new and excellent equipment from the German industrial heartland along the Rhine River. At the end of January, Eisenhower told Marshall that "there is a noticeable and fanatical zeal on the part of nearly all German fighting men as well as the whole nation of 85 million people, successfully united by terror from within and fear of consequences from without."
He had it right and put it perfectly. The Germans knew what they had done as the conquerors and occupiers of Europe, and thus what they could expect when it was their turn to be conquered and occupied. As to terror, deserters could expect to be hanged and their families sent to concentration camps. The n.a.z.i Party was still feared and obeyed. So long as. .h.i.tler was alive, it would be. Until then, the Germans would fight.
Eisenhower preferred to fight them west of the Rhine, and to close to the river from the Swiss border to Arnhem. At that point he could pull twenty divisions out of the line to create a reserve force that would then be capable of exploiting any opportunity that came along. "If we jam our head up against a concentrated defense at a selected spot," he said, "we must be able to go forward elsewhere. Flexibility requires reserves." By this stage of the war, flexibility was Eisenhower"s outstanding tactical quality.
What he had learned in the preceding twenty-eight months of combat was to expect to be surprised and to be ready to seize opportunities.
Conditions in the February fighting were different from January, yet just as miserable in their own way. A battalion surgeon in the 90th Division described them: "It was cold, but not quite cold enough to freeze, this February in 1945. Rain fell continually and things were in a muddy mess. Most of us were mud from head to foot, unshaven, tired and plagued by recurrent epidemic severe diarrhea. . . . It was miserable to have to jump from one"s blankets three or four times a night, hastily put on boots, run outside into the cold and rain and wade through the mud in the dark to the straddle pit. As likely as not the enemy would be sh.e.l.ling the area, and that did not help." He noted that the diarrhea was accompanied by severe abdominal cramps, vomiting, and fever. "As usual, it was the infantrymen who really suffered in the nasty fighting. Cold, wetness, mud and hunger day after day; vicious attack and counterattack; sleepless nights in muddy foxholes; and the unending rain made their life a special h.e.l.l." They were hungry because, much of the time, supply trucks could not get to them. Between heavy army traffic and the rain, the roads were impa.s.sable. The engineers worked feverishly day and night throwing rocks and logs into the mora.s.ses, but it was a losing battle. On February 2, General Patton, plagued by impossible roads, ordered dogsled teams flown in from Labrador. His idea was to use them to evacuate wounded in the snow. By the time the first team arrived, however, the snow had melted, so the dogs were never used.
What was unendurable, the GIs endured. What had been true on June 6, 1944, and every day thereafter was still true: the quickest route to the most desirable place in the world-Home!-led to the east. So they sucked it up and stayed with it and were rightly proud of themselves for so doing. Pvt. Jim Underkofler, a former ASTPer, was in the 104th Division. Its CO was the legendary Gen. Terry Allen; its nickname was the Timberwolf Division; its motto was "Nothing in h.e.l.l will stop the Timberwolves."
157 "That might sound corny," Underkofler said in a 1996 interview, "but it was sort of a symbolic expression of att.i.tude. Morale was extremely important. I mean, man alive, the conditions were often so deplorable that we had nothing else to go on, but your own morale. You know you"re sitting there in a foxhole rubbing your buddy"s feet, and he"s rubbing yours so you don"t get trench foot. That"s only an example of the kind of relationship and camaraderie we had." The straight line between Aachen and Cologne ran through Duren, on the east bank of the Roer River. But rather than going directly, Bradley ordered the main effort made with the veterans from Elsenborn Ridge and the Battle of the Bulge, through a corridor some seventeen kilometers wide south of the dreaded Hurtgen Forest. By so doing, the Americans would arrive at the Roer upstream from the dams and thus, once across the river, be free to advance over the Cologne Plain to the Rhine without danger of controlled flooding. The first task was to get through the Siegfried Line, still a formidable obstacle although in many places devoid of troops to utilize it. And every veteran in an ETO combat unit was well aware that this was where the Germans had stopped them in September 1944. The generals were enthusiastic for this one. Gen. Walter Lauer, commanding the 99th Division, paid a pre-attack call on Sgt. Oakley Honey"s C Company, 395th Regiment. Honey recalled that Lauer stood on the hood of a jeep, had the men gather around him, and gave a speech, saying, "We had fought the Krauts in the woods and the mountains and had beaten them.
Now we were going to get a chance to fight them in the open." Honey commented, "Whoopee!
Everyone was overjoyed." He added sarcastically, "You could tell by the long faces." Lauer went on: "We are in for a lot of new experiences and we are happy-happy because we are, at long last, to go on the offensive." Sgt. Vernon Swanson"s comment: "How can a man be happier than that?"
On February 4, C Company pushed off, into the Siegfried Line. Swanson remembered that "our visibility was severely limited because it began snowing and shortly the heavy winds caused the snow storm to reach blizzard proportions. The order then came to fix bayonets." Honey recalled "charging into a snow storm with fixed bayonets and the wind blowing right into our faces. After moving through the initial line of dragon"s teeth we began encountering deserted pillboxes. At one command post out came ten Germans with hands in the air offering no resistance."
Pvt. Irv Mark of C Company said, "I remember taking one pillbox, and this stands out in my memory.
The Krauts were waiting to surrender and the one in charge seemingly berated us for taking so long to come and get them. He said,"Nicht etwas zu essen" (nothing to eat). Strange we didn"t feel one bit sorry for them." Swanson noted that "none of our company can recall any direct fire during our advance through the West Wall, although artillery sh.e.l.ls dropped on us. We suffered no combat casualties possibly because we were much smarter than we had been six weeks earlier, particularly about b.o.o.by traps and land mines." Few companies were that lucky. Sgt. Clinton Riddle of the 82nd Airborne was in B Company, 325th Glider Infantry. At 0200, February 2, he accompanied the company commander on a patrol. "We walked to within sight of the dragon teeth of the Siegfried Line. We walked parallel with the line quite some distance. We could barely make out the pillbox on either side of the road that led through the dragon teeth. The teeth were laid out in five double rows, staggered. The Krauts had emplacements dotting the hill-sides, so arranged as to cover each other with cross fire, and all zeroed in on the road where it pa.s.sed through the teeth." Returning from the patrol, the captain ordered an attack.
"It was cold and the snow was deep," Riddle recalled. A company went first. It was met by small arms and mortar fire and was quickly driven to the ground. "There was more fire from the emplacements than I ever dreamed there could be," Riddle remarked, an indication of how well concealed many German fortifications were. "Men were falling in the snow all around me. That was an attack made on the belly.
We crawled through most of the morning." Using standard fire-and-movement tactics, the Americans managed to drive the Germans beyond the ridge and over the road. "When we reached the road leading through the teeth," Riddle said, "the captain looked back over his shoulder and said, "Come on, let"s go!"
Those were the last words he ever said, because the Germans had that road covered and when he was halfway across he got hit right between the eyes. There was only three of us in our company still on our feet that we could account for when it was over." Another twenty-five men turned up and the new CO, a 158 lieutenant, began employing fire-and-movement to attack the pillboxes on either side of the road. But the Germans had been through enough. After their CO ordered the initial resistance, and then fired the shot that killed the American captain, his men shot him and prepared to surrender. So, Riddle related, "When we reached the pillboxes, the Germans came out, calling out"Kamerad." We should have shot them on the spot. They had their dress uniforms on, with their shining boots. We had been crawling in the snow, wet, cold, hungry, sleepy, tired, mad because they had killed so many of our boys." They were through the initial defenses of the Siegfried Line, and that was enough for the moment.
The 90th Division reached the Siegfried Line at exactly the spot where the 106th Division had been hit and decimated on December 16. Pvt. Jack Ammons spent the night of February 5-6, 1945, in a bombed-out building on the edge of the line. "The village was eerie," he remembered. "It looked like a million ghosts of previous campaigns had pa.s.sed through it." At 0400, February 6, the 359th Regiment of the 90th picked its way undetected through the dragon"s teeth, minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes in the outer ring of the fortifications. Shortly after dawn, pillboxes that had gone unnoticed came to life, pouring fire into the tanks and reinforcements following the infantry, stopping the advance. A week-long fight ensued.
The Germans employed a new tactic to confound the Americans. Captain Colby explained it: "Whole platoons of infantrymen disappeared as a result of the German tactic of giving up a pillbox easily, then subjecting it to pre-sighted artillery and mortar fire, forcing the attackers inside the shelter. Then they covered the doorway with fire, surrounding the pillbox after dark, and blowing it in. The men soon learned it was safer outside the fortifications than inside."
On February 9 regimental chaplain Father Donald Murphy noted a variation of the tactic in his diary: "K Company was in a pillbox. The GI outpost fell asleep and Jerries captured all of them, including Lts.
Franklin and Osborne. The pillboxes are really death traps. You are helpless when you get in them."
Patton inspected a command pillbox: "It consisted of a three-story submerged barracks with toilets, shower baths, a hospital, laundry, kitchen, storerooms, and every conceivable convenience plus an enormous telephone installation. Electricity and heat were produced by a pair of diesel engines with generators. Yet the whole offensive capacity of this installation consisted of two machine guns operating from steep cupolas which worked up and down by means of hydraulic lifts. As in all cases, this particular pillbox was taken by a dynamite charge against the back door. We found marks on the cupolas where 90 mm sh.e.l.ls, fired at a range of two hundred yards, had simply bounced." To Patton, this was yet another proof of "the utter futility of fixed defenses. . . . In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it." Captain Colby gives a vivid snapshot of American artillery in action: "We were looking at a day"s a.s.signment of about a dozen pillboxes. We were on a slightly higher ground and could see them plainly. As we studied the prospect with sinking feelings, a self-propelled 155 mm gun chugged and clanked up to us. A lieutenant dismounted and walked over.
" "I hear you could use some fire," he said.
"We did everything but hug him. We told him to pick out a pillbox and let fly. "The lieutenant pointed to a pillbox. The gunner lowered the muzzle of the howitzer, opened the gun"s breech-block, and peered through the barrel at the target. Satisfied with his aim, he told the loaders to stuff in a round." A 155 mm sh.e.l.l weighed 100 pounds. It took two men to put it on a carrier equipped with handles like a litter, two others to pick up the carrier and hold the sh.e.l.l to the chamber of the gun. A fifth man shoved it in and stuffed in the bags of gunpowder. When the breech was closed and all was ready, the gunner yanked the lanyard.
The tremendous roar was, Colby said, "thrilling to an infantryman." He noted that the .30 caliber bullets 159 he was shooting were 0.3 inch in diameter, while the 155 sh.e.l.l was 6.1 inches.
"The sh.e.l.l struck the pillbox and covered it with a sheet of flame from the explosive charge it carried. A perfect smoke ring popped out of an air vent in the top."
"Scratch one pillbox," the lieutenant said.
"It is still standing," Colby retorted.
"Yep. But there ain"t anyone left alive inside. If there is, his brains are scrambled."
Colby felt that having revealed their position, they should take cover before the Germans started their counterfire. "Aw, h.e.l.l," the lieutenant said, "let"s blast some more before the fun starts. You wanta fire one?" How could Colby resist? After another line-of-sight aim through the open bore, the gun was loaded and Colby gave a jerk on the lanyard. Scratch another pillbox. The lieutenant told Colby to get behind the gun where it next fired, saying he could watch the sh.e.l.l all the way to the target. "He zeroed in on another pillbox. Sure enough, when the gun fired I could see a black dot arc swiftly toward the target.
Again, there was a flash that covered the whole target. They fired a round or two at each pillbox out in front of us, then folded their equipment and clanked away to another scene. When we moved up, we found only dead or dazed men inside the pillboxes." Colby"s final comment was, "No matter how many pillboxes or bunkers there might be, the fact was that man had built them and man was tearing them down. The elaborate system of "Dragon"s Teeth" proved to be worthless and brought from us exclamations of amazement at the labor the Germans had expended." That point was equally true when applied to the Atlantic Wall. At the Siegfried Line in February, as at the Atlantic Wall in June 1944, the Germans got precious little return on their big investment in poured concrete. By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery"s Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked-electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. They had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles of cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week.
That was not to be. Having reached the river, K Company along with the rest of Ninth Army would stay in place until Montgomery had everything ready for Operation Plunder. The troops badly needed the rest. The night after taking Hardt, Pvt. Strawberry Craft was so totally exhausted that after getting into his foxhole he told the sergeant he was going to sleep that night. The sergeant warned him, "You might wake up dead." Craft replied, "I"ll just have to wake up dead." Decades later he still remembered the exchange, and explained, "I needed the sleep, and I got it, too."
That kind of exhaustion was becoming endemic. Sgt. Joe Skocz of the 103rd Division was out on a night patrol. His lead scout was a veteran of sixty-five days of combat and had always done his duty. Suddenly the patrol stopped. Skocz went forward to see what was up. The scout, crouching behind a tree, pointed ahead and said, "There"s people out there. They"re waiting to nail us." "They"re not moving," Skocz pointed out.
"Neither are we."
Skocz ordered the scout to go forward and see what he could see. And as Skocz remembered it, "He leans up real close to my head and he says, "f.u.c.k you, Sergeant. You wanta find out, go up yourself." "
160 Skocz did and discovered there was nothing out there. "When we got back, I told him I never wanted to see him on the front lines again."
Sgt. William Faust of the 1st Division had been in combat in two continents and six countries. By March 1945, he said, "Those of us still remaining of the "Big Red One" of 1942 had lost the desire to pursue; the enthusiasm we had for this sort of thing in Africa, Sicily, France, Luxembourg and Belgium was no longer with us."
On March 15, Pvt. Martin Duus of the 103rd Division, who had been in combat since the previous December, got hit in the neck. The bullet exited through his right shoulder. "My whole right arm was dead. I couldn"t move it. I thought I"d lost it. I couldn"t look." He never used it again; it was paralyzed.
But his reaction belied the seriousness of the wound, while it spoke eloquently of the state of the old hands: "I was d.a.m.n glad I was. .h.i.t and could get out of there. Absolutely. My fear was I"d get well enough to go back." On March 7 Patton"s forces were still fighting west of the Rhine, trying to close to the river from Koblenz south to Mainz and in the process trap further German forces facing the U.S.
Seventh Army. Patton was having divisions stolen from him, to dispatch south to help Seventh Army get through the Siegfried Line east of Saarbrucken. That made him furious, but he calmed down when Bradley agreed to move the boundary between 1Third and Seventh Armies some twenty kilometers south of Mainz. That put the best stretch of river for crossing south of Cologne in his sector. He was thinking of crossing on the run, and hoping he could do it before Montgomery"s elephantine Operation Plunder even got started, and before Hodges, too, if possible.
But his men were exhausted. "Signs of the prolonged strain had begun to appear," one regimental history explained. "Slower reactions in the individual; a marked increase in cases of battle fatigue, and a lower standard of battle efficiency-all showed quite clearly that the limit was fast approaching." G Company, 328th Infantry Regiment, was typical. It consisted of veterans whose bone-weariness was so deep they were indifferent, or on the edge of battle fatigue, plus raw recruits. Still it had the necessary handful of leaders, and superb communications with the artillery, as demonstrated by Lieutenant Otts in the second week in March, during Third Army"s drive toward the Rhine. Pvt. George Idelson described it in a 1988 letter to Otts: "My last memory of you-and it is a vivid one-is of you standing in a fierce mortar and artillery barrage, totally without protection, calling in enemy coordinates. I know what guts it took to do that. I can still hear those d.a.m.n things exploding in the trees. I lost one foxhole buddy to shrapnel in that barrage, and then his replacement. I don"t know who was looking after me."
On the morning of March 7, Lt. Harold La.r.s.en of the 9th Division was flying in a Piper Cub, looking for targets of opportunity. To his astonishment, he saw the great Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen still standing.
He radioed the news back to Gen. William Hoge, who immediately sent orders to the units nearest Remagen to take the bridge before the Germans could blow it. The closest unit was A Company, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion. Its CO had been put out of action the previous day; Lt. Karl Timmermann, twenty-two years old, had replaced him. Timmermann fought his way to the approaches to the bridge.
His battalion commander ordered him to get across.
"What if the bridge blows up in my face?" Timmermann asked. The battalion commander turned and walked away without a word. Timmermann called to his squad leaders, "All right, we"re going across."
There was a huge explosion. It shook Remagen and sent a volcano of stones and earth erupting from the west end of the bridge. The Germans had detonated a cratering charge that gouged a deep hole in the earthen causeway joining the main road and the bridge platform. The crater made it impossible for vehicles to get onto the bridge-but not infantry.
Timmermann called out, "Now, we"re going to cross this bridge before-" At that instant, there was another deafening rumble and roar. The Germans had set off an emergency demolition two-thirds of the 161 way across the bridge. Awestruck, the men of A Company watched as the huge structure lifted up, and steel, timbers, dust, and thick black smoke mixed in the air. Many of the men threw themselves on the ground.
Ken Hechler, inThe Bridge at Remagen, one of the best of all accounts of the U.S. Army in action in World War II, and a model for all oral history, describes what happened next: "Everybody waited for Timmermann"s reaction. "Thank G.o.d, now we won"t have to cross that d.a.m.ned thing," Sgt. Mike Chinchar said fervently, trying to rea.s.sure himself.
"Pvt. Johnny Ayres fingered the two grenades hooked onto the rings of his pack suspenders, and nodded his head: "We wouldn"t have had a chance." "But Timmermann, who had been trying to make out what was left of the bridge through the thick haze, yelled: " "Look-she"s still standing."
"Most of the smoke and dust had cleared away, and the men followed their commander"s gaze. The sight of the bridge still spanning the Rhine brought no cheers from the men. It was like an unwelcome specter. The suicide mission was on again."
Timmermann could see German engineers at the east end of the bridge working frantically to try again to blow the bridge. He waved his arm overhead in the "Follow me" gesture. Machine-gun fire from one of the bridge towers made him duck. One of A Company"s tanks pulled up to the edge of the crater and blasted the tower. The German fire let up.
"Get going," Timmermann yelled. Maj. Murray Deevers called out, "I"ll see you on the other side and we"ll all have a chicken dinner." "Chicken dinner, my foot, I"m all chicken right now," one of the men in the first platoon protested. Deevers flushed. "Move on across," he ordered. "I tell you, I"m not going out there and get blown up," the GI answered. "No sir, Major, you can court-martial and shoot me, but I ain"t going out there on that bridge."
Timmerman was shouting, "Get going, you guys, get going." He set the example, moving onto the bridge himself. That did it. The lead platoon followed, crouching, running, dodging, watching for holes in the bridge planking that covered the railroad tracks (put down by the Germans so that their vehicles could retreat over the bridge) but always moving in the direction of the Germans on the far sh.o.r.e.
Sgt. Joe DeLisio led the first squad. Sgts. Joe Petrencsik and Alex Drabik led the second. In the face of more machine-gun and 20mm anti-aircraft fire they dashed forward. "Get going," Timmermann yelled.
The men took up the cry. "Get going," they shouted at one another. "Get going." Engineers were right behind them, searching for demolitions and tearing out electrical wires. The names were Chinchar, Samele, Ma.s.sie, Wegener, Jensen. They were Italian, Czech, Norwegian, German, Russian. They were children of European immigrants, come back to the old country to liberate and redeem it.
On the far side, at the entrance to the tunnel, they could see a German engineer pushing on a plunger.
There was nothing for it but to keep going. And nothing happened-apparently a stray bullet or sh.e.l.l had cut the wire leading to the demolition charges. Halfway across the bridge, three men found four packages of TNT weighing thirty pounds each, tied to I-beams under the decking. Using wire cutters, they worked on the demolitions until they splashed into the river. DeLisio got to the towers, ran up the circular staircase of the one to his right, where the firing was coming from, and on the fourth level found three German machine gunners, firing at the bridge.
"Hande hoch!"DeLisio commanded. They gave up; he picked up the gun they had been using and hurled 162 it out the aperture. Men on the bridge saw it and were greatly encouraged. Drabik came running on at top speed. He pa.s.sed the towers and got to the east bank. He was the first GI to cross the Rhine. Others were on his heels. They quickly made the German engineers in the tunnel prisoners. Timmermann sent Lt.
Emmet "Jim" Burrows and his platoon up the Erpeler Ley, saying, "You know, Jim, the old Fort Benning stuff; take the high ground and hold it." Burrows later said, "Taking Remagen and crossing the bridge were a breeze compared with climbing that hill." He took casualties, but he got to the top, where he saw far too many German men and vehicles spread out before him to even contemplate attacking them. He hung on at the edge of the summit. But he had the high ground, and the Americans were over the Rhine.
Sixteen-year-old Pvt. Heinz Schwarz, who came from a village only a short distance upstream on the east bank of the Rhine from Remagen, was in the tunnel. "We were all still kids," he recalled. "The older soldiers in our unit stayed in the tunnel, but the rest of us were curious and went up to the bridge tower to get a better look." He heard the order ring out: "Everybody down! We"re blowing the bridge!" He heard the explosion and saw the bridge rise up. "We thought it had been destroyed, and we were saved." But as the smoke cleared, he saw Timmermann and his men coming on. He ran down the circular stairs and got to the entrance to the tunnel just as DeLisio got to the tower. "I knew I had to somehow get myself out through the rear entrance of the tunnel and run home to my mother as fast as I could." He did. Fifteen years later he was a member of the Bundestag. At a ceremony on March 7, 1960, he met DeLisio. They swapped stories.
As the word of Timmermann"s toehold spread up the chain of command, to regiment, division, corps, and army, each general responded by ordering men on the scene to get over the bridge, for engineers to repair it, for units in the area to change direction and head for Remagen. Bradley was the most enthusiastic of all. He had been fearful of a secondary role in the final campaign, but with Hodges over the river he decided immediately to get First Army so fully involved that Eisenhower would have to support the bridge-head. First, however, Bradley had to get by Gen. Harold "Pinky" Bull, operations officer at SHAEF. The SHAEF G-3 was with Bradley when the word arrived. When Bradley outlined his plan, he related, Bull "looked at me as though I were a heretic. He scoffed: "You"re not going anywhere down there at Remagen. You"ve got a bridge, but it"s in the wrong place. It just doesn"t fit the plan." "I demanded, "What in the h.e.l.l do you want us to do, pull back and blow it up?"
Bradley got on the phone to Eisenhower. When he heard the news, Eisenhower was ecstatic. He said, "Brad, that"s wonderful." Bradley said he wanted to push everything across he could. "Sure,"
Eisenhower responded, "get right on across with everything you"ve got. It"s the best break we"ve had."
Bradley felt it necessary to point out that Bull disagreed. "To h.e.l.l with the planners," Eisenhower said.
"Sure, go on, Brad, and I"ll give you everything we got to hold that bridgehead. We"ll make good use of it even if the terrain isn"t too good." The next morning Eisenhower informed the CCS that he was rushing troops to Remagen "with the idea that this will const.i.tute greatest possible threat" to the Germans.
Because he had insisted on closing to the Rhine, SHAEF had sufficient divisions in reserve for Eisenhower to exercise flexibility and exploit the opportunity. Over the following two weeks he sent troops to Hodges, who used them to extend the bridgehead. The Germans made determined efforts to wreck the bridge, using air attacks, constant artillery fire, V-2 missiles, floating mines, and frogmen, but Hodges"s defenses thwarted their efforts. By the time the big railroad bridge finally collapsed, the bridgehead was twenty miles long and eight miles deep, with six pontoon bridges across the river. It const.i.tuted a threat to the entire German defense of the Rhine. To the north, meanwhile, Montgomery was preparing his crossing, as was Patton to the south. Ike told Mamie, "Our attacks have been going well . . . The enemy becomes more and more stretched . . ." Unfortunately, "he shows no signs of quitting. He is fighting hard. . . . I never count my Germans until they"re in our cages, or are buried!"
163 Eisenhower spent the evening of March 16 with Patton and his staff. Patton was in a fine mood and set out to kid and flatter Eisenhower. He said that some of the Third Army units were disappointed because they had not had an opportunity to see the Supreme Commander. "h.e.l.l, George," Eisenhower replied, "I didn"t think the American GI would give a d.a.m.n even if the Lord Himself came to inspect them."
Patton smiled. "Well," he said, "I hesitate to say which of you would rank, sir!" The banter went on through the evening. Patton noted in his diary, "General E stated that not only was I a good general but also a lucky general, and Napoleon preferred luck to greatness. I told him this was the first time he had ever complimented me in 2 years we had served together." Historian Michael Doubler rightly judges that everything came together at Remagen. All that General Marshall had worked for and hoped for and built for in creating this citizen army, happened. It was one of the great victories in the army"s history. The credit goes to the men-Timmermann, DeLisio, Drabik, through Hoge, Bradley, and Ike-and to the system the U.S. Army had developed in Europe, which bound these men together into a team that featured intiative at the bottom and a cold-blooded determination and competency at the top. Up north, Montgomery"s preparations for Operation Plunder continued. Down south, Patton"s Third Army cleared the Saarland and the Palatinate in a spectacular campaign. As his divisions approached the Rhine, Patton had 500 a.s.sault boats, plus LCVPs and DUKWs, brought forward, along with 7,500 engineers, but with no fanfare, no fuss, no publicity, in deliberate contrast to Montgomery and so as to not alert the Germans. On the night of March 22-23 the 5th Division began to cross the river at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. The Germans were unprepared; by midnight the entire 11th Regiment had crossed by boat with only twenty casualties. Well before dawn the whole of the 5th and a part of the 90th Divisions were across. The Germans launched a counterattack against the 5th Division, using students from an officer candidate school at nearby Wiesbaden. They were good soldiers, and managed to infiltrate the American positions, but after a busy night and part of the next morning they were dead or prisoners. At dawn German artillery began to fire, and the Luftwaffe sent twelve planes to bomb and strafe. The Americans pushed east anyway. By the afternooon the whole of the 90th Division was on the far side, along with the 4th Armored. Patton called Bradley: "Brad, don"t tell anyone but I"m across." "Well, I"ll be d.a.m.ned-you mean across the Rhine?"
"Sure am, I sneaked a division over last night." A little later, at the Twelfth Army Group morning briefing, the Third Army reported: "Without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation, and airborne a.s.sistance, the Third Army at 2200 hours, March 22, crossed the Rhine River."
The following day Patton walked across a pontoon bridge built by his engineers. He stopped in the middle. While every GI in the immediate area who had a camera took his picture, he urinated into the Rhine-a long, high, steady stream. As he b.u.t.toned up, Patton said, "I"ve waited a long time to do that. I didn"t even p.i.s.s this morning when I got up so I would have a really full load. Yes, sir, the pause that refreshes."
By the first week of spring 1945, Eisenhower"s armies had done what he had been planning for since the beginning of the year. Montgomery"s elaborate crossing of the Rhine in Operation Plunder, featuring the largest airdrop in the history of war, had been successful. To the south, First and Third Armies were across. The time for exploitation had arrived. Some of the Allied infantry and armored divisions faced stiff resistance, others only sporadic resistance, others none at all. Whatever was in front of them-rough terrain, enemy strong points, more rivers to cross-their generals were as one in taking up the phrase Lieutenant Timmermann had used at the Remagen bridge-"Get going!" The 90th Division, on Patton"s left flank, headed east toward Hanau on the Main River. It crossed in a.s.sault boats on the night of March 28.
Maj. John Cochran"s battalion ran into a battalion of Hitler Youth officer candidates, teenage Germans who were eager to fight. They set up a roadblock in a village. As Cochran"s men advanced toward it, the German boys let go with their machine gun, killing one American. Cochran put some artillery fire on the 164 roadblock and destroyed it, killing three. "One youth, perhaps aged 16, held up his hands," Cochran recalled. "I was very emotional over the loss of a good soldier and I grabbed the kid and took off my cartridge belt. "I asked him if there were more like him in the town. He gave me a stare and said, "I"d rather die than tell you anything." I told him to pray, because he was going to die. I hit him across the face with my thick, heavy belt. I was about to strike him again when I was grabbed from behind by Chaplain Kerns. He said, "Don"t!" Then he took that crying child away. The Chaplain had intervened not only to save a life but to prevent me from committing a murder. Had it not been for the Chaplain, I would have."
From the crossing of the Rhine to the end of the war, every man who died, died needlessly. It was that feeling that almost turned Major Cochran into a murderer. On the last day of March, Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd had a particularly gruesome experience that almost broke him. His squad was advancing, supported by a tank. Six troopers were riding on the tank, while he and five others were following in its tracks, which freed them from worry about mines. A hidden 88 fired. The sh.e.l.l hit the gun turret, blowing off the troopers, killing two and wounding the other four. "The force of the blast blew them to the rear of the tank near me," Schlemmer recalled. "They lay as they fell. A second round then came screaming in, this time to ricochet off the front of the tank. The tank reversed gears and backed up over three of our wounded, crushing them to death. I could only sit down and bawl, whether out of frustration of being unable to help them, whether from the futility of the whole d.a.m.n war, or whether from hatred of the Germans for causing it all, I"ve never been able to understand."
That same day Cpl. James Pemberton, a 1942 high school graduate who went into ASTP and then to the 103rd Division as a replacement, was also following a tank. "My guys started wandering and drifting a bit, and I yelled at them to get in the tank tracks to avoid the mines. They did and we followed. The tank was rolling over Schu [anti-personnel] mines like crazy. I could see them popping left and right like popcorn." Pemberton had an eighteen-year-old replacement in the squad; he told him to hop up and ride on the tank, thinking he would be out of the way up there. An 88 fired. The replacement fell off. The tank went into reverse and backed over him, crushing him from the waist down. "There was one scream, and some mortars. .h.i.t the Kraut 88 and our tank went forward again. To me, it was one of the worst things I went through. This poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d had graduated from high school in June, was drafted, took basic training, shipped overseas, had thirty seconds of combat, and was killed." Pemberton"s unit kept advancing. "The Krauts always shot up all their ammo and then surrendered," he remembered. Hoping to avoid such nonsense, in one village the CO sent a Jewish private who spoke German forward with a white flag, calling out to the German boys to surrender. "They shot him up so bad that after it was over the medics had to slide a blanket under his body to take him away." Then the Germans started waving their own white flag. Single file, eight of them emerged from a building, hands up. "They were very c.o.c.ky.
They were about 20 feet from me when I saw the leader suddenly realize he still had a pistol in his shoulder holster. He reached into his jacket with two fingers to pull it out and throw it away.
"One of our guys yelled, "Watch it! He"s got a gun!" and came running up shooting and there were eight Krauts on the ground shot up but not dead. They wanted water but no one gave them any. I never felt bad about it although I"m sure civilians would be horrified. But these guys asked for it. If we had not been so tired and frustrated and keyed up and mad about our boys they shot up, it never would have happened. But a lot of things happen in war and both sides know the penalties."
Hitler and the n.a.z.is had poisoned the minds of the boys Germany was throwing into the battle. Capt. F.
W. Norris of the 90th Division ran into a roadblock. His company took some casualties, then blasted away, wounding many. "The most seriously wounded was a young SS sergeant who looked just like one of Hitler"s supermen. He had led the attack. He was bleeding copiously and badly needed some plasma."
One of Norris"s medics started giving him a transfusion. The wounded German, who spoke excellent English, demanded to know if there was any Jewish blood in the plasma. The medic said d.a.m.ned if he knew, in the United States people didn"t make such a distinction. The German said if he couldn"t have a 165 guarantee that there was no Jewish blood he would refuse treatment. "I had been listening and had heard enough," Norris remembered. "I turned to this SS guy and in very positive terms I told him I really didn"t care whether he lived or not, but if he did not take the plasma he would certainly die. He looked at me calmly and said, "I would rather die than have any Jewish blood in me."
"So he died."
18 - Overrunning Germany
THE STANDARD STORY of how the American GI reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of World War II runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, lying, stealing, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were lying, stealing, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average GI never was in Holland, only the airborne). The story ends up thus: Wonder of wonders, the average GI found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-cla.s.s in their tastes and life-styles (many GIs noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as "just like us."
Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st hated the n.a.z.is and wished more of the German villages would be destroyed, so that the Germans would suffer as the French and Belgians and Italians had suffered, and thus learn not to start wars. But despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. "The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people," he wrote his parents on April 14.
They were regular churchgoers. "In Germany everybody goes out and works. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French."
With a growing area of western and central Germany under American occupation, the high command ordered a policy of non-fraternization. GIs were told they could not talk toany German, even small children, except on official business. This absurd order, which flew in the face of human nature in so obvious a way, was impossible to enforce. Still some tried. Webster recalled a replacement lieutenant who "became such a fiend on the non-fraternization policy that he ordered all b.u.t.ts field-stripped [torn apart and scattered] so that the Germans might derive no pleasure from American tobacco." In some cases the GIs mistreated the civilian population, and they engaged in widespread looting, especially of wine, jewelry, n.a.z.i memorabilia, and other portable items. Combat veterans insist that the worst of this sort of thing was carried out by replacements who had arrived too late to see any action. These American teenagers could be especially brutal in their treatment of German POWs. There were some rapes, not many because the army"s policy was to identify, try, and, if found guilty, execute rapists (forty-nine GIs were shot for rape or murder). Overall, it is simple fact to state that the American and British occupying armies, in comparison to the other conquering armies in World War II, acted correctly and honorably. As a single example, a German woman in Konigsberg when it was occupied by the Red Army recalled how, after she and her friends had been repeatedly raped, "we often asked the soldiers to shoot us, but they always answered: "Russian soldiers do not shoot women, only German soldiers do 166 that." " Webster told a story that speaks to the point. "Reese, who was more intent on finding women than in trading for eggs, and I made another expedition a mile west to a larger village where there were no G.I.s. Like McCreary, Reese tended to show an impatience with hens and a strong interest in skirts; regardless of age or appearance, he"d tell me, "There"s a nice one. Boy that"s a honey. Speak to her Web, G.o.dd.a.m.n!" Since I was shy, however, and those females invariably looked about as sociable as a fresh iceberg, I ignored his panting plaints. Besides, the Fraus weren"t apt to be friendly in public, where the neighbors could see them. Maybe indoors or at night. Finally we came to a farm where a buxom peasant la.s.s greeted us. Reese smiled. After I had gotten some eggs, Reese, who kept winking at her, gave her a cigarette and a chocolate bar, and, as love bloomed in the garden of D ration [a newly issued food package] and Chelseas, I backed out the door and waited in the sun. No dice, Reese later reported. I returned home with a helmetful of eggs, Reese with a broken heart. But it was, as he said, "good fratranizin" territory." He tried again that night before the six o"clock curfew went into effect. No luck." Had Reese been a Soviet, German, or j.a.panese soldier, this little nonincident probably would have turned out differently.
So the Germans in areas occupied by the Americans were lucky, and they knew it. They did their best, most of them, to please the Americans, with considerable success. There was something approaching mutual admiration. That caused the GIs to wonder about what they had heard about the Germans. Glenn Gray spoke to the point: "The enemy could not have changed so quickly from a beast to a likable human being. Thus, the conclusion is nearly forced upon the GIs that they have been previously blinded by fear and hatred and the propaganda of their own government." The theme of German-American relations in the first week of April 1945 was harmony.
It helped immeasurably that the Germans were no longer putting up much of a fight. The 101st Airborne, for example, was headed southeast through Bavaria on its way to Austria. Contact with the enemy picked up as the convoy moved southeast, but not in the sense of combat. The men began to see German soldiers in small groups, trying to surrender. Then larger groups. Finally, more field gray uniforms than anyone could have imagined existed. Easy Company was in the midst of a German army in disintegration. The supply system lay in ruins. All the German soldiers wanted was a safe entry into a POW cage. "I couldn"t get over the sensation of having the Germans, who only a short time ago had been so difficult to capture, come in from the hills like sheep and surrender," Webster wrote. When the convoy reached the autobahn leading east to Munich, the road was reserved for Allied military traffic, the median for Germans marching west to captivity. Gordon Carson recalled that "as far as you could see in the median were German prisoners, fully armed. No one would stop to take their surrender. We just waved."
Webster called the sight of the Germans in the median, "a tingling spectacle." They came on "in huge blocks. We saw the unbelieveable spectacle of two G.I.s keeping watch on some 2,500 enemy." At that moment the men of the company realized that the German collapse was complete, that there would be no recovery this spring as there had been last fall.
There was still some scattered, sporadic resistance. Every single bridge was destroyed by German engineers as the Allies approached. Occasionally a fanatic SS unit would fire from its side of the stream.
It was more an irritant than a threat or danger. The Americans would bring forward some light artillery, drive the SS troops away, and wait for the engineers to repair the old or make a new bridge.
Major Winters was struck by the German fanaticism, the discipline that led German engineers to blow their own bridges when the uselessness of the destruction was clear to any idiot, and "the total futility of the war. Here was a German army trying to surrender and walking north along the autobahn, while at the same time another group was blowing out the bridges to slow down the surrender."
167 On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg.
Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands; corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds. Winters found stacks of huge wheels of cheese in the cellar of a building he was using for the battalion CP and ordered it distributed to the inmates. He radioed to regiment to describe the situation and ask for help. The company stayed in Buchloe for two nights. Thus it was present in the morning when the people of Landsberg turned out, carrying rakes, brooms, shovels, and marched off to the camp. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, it turned out, had been so incensed by the sight that he had declared martial law and ordered everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age to be rounded up and sent to the camp, to bury the bodies and clean up the place. That evening the crew came back down the road from the camp. Some were still vomiting.
"The memory of starved, dazed men," Winters wrote, "who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, "Now I know why I am here!" " Eisenhower was free to send his armies wherever he chose. Montgomery wanted him to give First Army to Twenty-first Army Group and let it join Ninth Army for a drive on to Berlin-under his command. Hodges wanted Berlin, as did Simpson, Patton, Brooke, and Churchill. But Bradley didn"t and neither did Eisenhower.
Partly their reason was political. At the Yalta conference the Big Three had agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation, and Berlin into sectors. In central Germany, the Elbe River was the boundary.
If Simpson"s Ninth or Hodges"s First Army fought its way across the Elbe and on to Berlin, they would be taking territory that would have to be turned over to the Soviet occupation forces; if they fought their way into Berlin they would have to give up more than half the city to the Red Army. Eisenhower asked Bradley for an estimate on the cost of taking Berlin. About 100,000 casualties, Bradley replied, and added that was "a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we"ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take over."