FROM THE HIGH COMMAND down to the lowliest private, the Americans in Normandy applied everything they had learned to the mounting of Operation Cobra, including a ma.s.sive air bombardment, forward observers in small planes and at the front lines calling in artillery fire, tanks slicing through hedgerows with their rhinos, and infantry moving forward before the smoke cleared, not pausing to help a wounded buddy or ducking behind a bit of shelter and letting the others go ahead. The shock of the bombardment and the elan of the infantry were sufficient to drive the Germans from their positions. The breakthrough was a great feat of arms. First Army had accomplished something that had been nearly impossible in 1914-1918, and not achieved by the British in front of Caen in June-July 1944. First Army had accomplished something that it had not been trained or equipped to do, in the process developing an air-ground team unmatched in the world. Now, along with Third Army, it was finally going to get into a campaign for which it had been trained and equipped. The dean of American military historians, Russell Weigley, referring to the flow of GIs that poured around the German open flank, writes in his cla.s.sic study Eisenhower"s Lieutenants, "This virtual road march was war such as the American army was designed for, especially the American armored divisions. Appealing also to the pa.s.sion for moving on that is so much a part of the American character and heritage, it brought out the best in the troops, their energy and mechanical resourcefulness. . . .
"Now that Cobra had achieved the breakout, the most mobile army in the world for the first time since D-Day could capitalize on its mobility." Weigley further notes that with the hard-won mobility, "the issues confronting the army became for the first time in Europe strategic rather than tactical. The soldiers" battle of Normandy was about to become the generals" battle of France." With the German left flank in the air, and the Allies facing an open road to Paris, Patton was activated and all his pent-up energy turned loose.
He had come over in time for Cobra, to familiarize himself with the situation and to set up Third Army headquarters. He took command of one of the corps already in Normandy and had other divisions coming in from England.* By August 1, he had divisions attacking in four directions. Meanwhile First Army pressed forward to the south as German resistance collapsed.
When Third Army was activated, Gen. Courtney Hodges succeeded Bradley as First Army commander while Bradley moved up to command Twelfth Army Group (First and Third Armies).
As the general German retreat began, the American air-ground team pounded the enemy. The Wehrmacht was out of the hedgerows, out in the open, trying desperately to move by day to get away.
Patton"s tanks mauled them, the Jabos (the German term for the Allied fighter-bombers) terrorized them.
"I had seen the first retreat from Moscow," Sgt. Helmut Gunther of the 17th Panzer Grenadiers recalled, 108 "which was terrible enough, but at least units were still intact. Here, we had become a cl.u.s.ter of individuals. We were not a battleworthy company any longer. All that we had going for us was that we knew each other very well."
The P-47s responded to calls from the tankers and infantry over the radio, descended on their targets, and hit them with napalm, 500-pound bombs, rockets, and .50-caliber machine-gun fire. Destroyed German tanks, trucks, scout cars, wagons, and artillery pieces, along with dead and wounded horses and men, covered the landscape.
Capt. Belton Cooper described the Allied teamwork. When two Panther tanks threatened his maintenance company from across a hedgerow, the liaison officer in a Sherman got on its radio to give the coordinates to any Jabos in the area. "Within less than 45 seconds, two P-47"s appeared right over the tree tops traveling like h.e.l.l at 300 feet." They let go their bombs a thousand feet short of Cooper"s location: "It seemed like the bombs were going to land square in the middle of our area." He and his men dove into their foxholes. The bombs went screaming over. The P-47s came screaming in right behind them, firing their eight .50-caliber machine guns. The bombs. .h.i.t a German ammunition dump. "The blast was awesome; flames and debris shot some 500 ft. into the air. There were bogie wheels, tank tracks, helmets, backpacks and rifles flying in all directions. The hedgerow between us and the German tanks protected us from the major direct effects of the blast, however, the tops of trees were sheared off and a tremendous amount of debris came down on us." "I have been to two church socials and a county fair,"
said one P-47 pilot, "but I never saw anything like this before!"
The Jabos were merciless. The constant attacks inevitably broke up German units, which had a terrible effect on morale. A theme that always comes up when interviewing German veterans is comradeship. So, too, with American veterans, of course, but there is an intensity about the Germans on the subject that is unique. One reason is that generally German squads were made up of men from the same town or region, so the men had known each other as children. Another is the experience of being caught in a debacle-Jabos overhead, artillery raining down, tanks firing from the rear.
Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division spoke to the point: "The worst thing that could happen to a soldier was to be thrown into some group in which he knew no one. In our unit, we would never abandon each other. We had fought in Russia together. We were comrades, and always came to the rescue. We protected our comrades so they could go home to their wives, children, and parents.
That was our motivation. The idea that we would conquer the world had fallen long ago."
Lt. Walter Padberg of Grenadier Regiment 959 was appalled: "Everything was chaos. Allied artillery and airplanes were everywhere." Then, the worst possible happened: "I did not know any of the people around me." Padberg continued fleeing, essentially on his own even though in the midst of others. The retreat was turning into a rout.
A historic opportunity presented itself. As the British and Canadians picked up the attack on their front, Patton had open roads ahead of him, inviting his fast-moving armored columns to cut across the rear of the Germans-whose horse-drawn artillery and transport precluded rapid movement-encircle them and destroy the German army in France, then end the war with a triumphal unopposed march across the Rhine and on to Berlin.
Patton l.u.s.ted to seize that opportunity. He had trained and equipped Third Army for just this moment.
Straight east to Paris, then northwest along the Seine to seize the crossings, and the Allies would complete an encirclement that would lead to a bag of prisoners bigger than North Africa or Stalingrad.
More important, it would leave the Germans defenseless in the west because Patton could cut off the German divisions in northern France, Belgium, and Holland as he drove for the Rhine.
109 That was the big solution. Obviously risky, if successful it promised the kind of big encirclements the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940 in France and 1941 in the Soviet Union. But neither Eisenhower nor Bradley was bold enough to take it. They worried about Patton"s flanks-he insisted that the Jabos could protect them. They worried about Patton"s fuel and other supply-he insisted that in an emergency they could be airlifted to him.
Arguing over the merits of different generals is a favorite pastime of many military history buffs. It is harmless and often instructive. And we all have the right to pa.s.s judgment; that right comes from the act of partic.i.p.ation. The American people had provided Generals Eisenhower and Bradley with a fabulous amount of weaponry and equipment, and some two million of their young men. There has to be an accounting of how well they used these a.s.sets to bring about the common goal. And how well means, Did they achieve the victory at the lowest cost in the shortest time? Were they prudent where prudence was appropriate? More important, given their superiority over the enemy, did they take appropriate risks that utilized the greatest a.s.sets their country had given them, air power and mobility?
In Normandy, in August, the answer is no. Ike and Bradley picked the safer alternative, the small solution. Thus was a great opportunity missed. But of course we know now that the risk was worth taking because we know the cost of finally overrunning Germany; in July 1944, Eisenhower and Bradley didn"t. They were also responding to their obsession with ports. They wanted the small ports of Brittany, such as St.-Malo, and the one big port, Brest. So they insisted that Patton stay with the pre-D-Day plan, with modifications. It had called for Patton to turn the whole of Third Army into Brittany; when he protested that being wedded to plans was a mistake and insisted that he wanted to attack toward Germany, not away from it, Eisenhower and Bradley relented to the extent that they gave him permission to reduce the Brittany attack to one corps, leaving two corps to head east.
Eisenhower had often said that in war, plans are everything before the battle begins, but once the shooting started plans were worthless. And back in 1926, when he had graduated first in his cla.s.s at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Patton had written to congratulate him, then to warn him to put all that Leavenworth stuff out of his mind from now on. "Victory in the next war," Patton had declared, "will depend on EXECUTION not PLANS." To Patton, it was outrageous that his superiors wouldn"t turn him loose. "I am so nauseated," he grumbled, "by the fact that Hodges and Bradley state that all human virtue depends on knowing infantry tactics." Patton thought that "Omar the tent maker," as he called Bradley, was never audacious enough. "Bradley and Hodges are such nothings," he wrote. "Their one virtue is that they get along by doing nothing. . . . They try to push all along the front and have no power anywhere."
Monty agreed with Patton. He, too, wanted to abandon the plan to overrun Brittany. He pointed out the obvious: "The main business lies to the East." He pointed out the not-so-obvious: if the Allies seized the opportunity before them, Brest and St.-Malo would not be needed. And indeed, in the event, St.-Malo held out to the end of the war-Hitler"s orders-and Brest until late September. German destruction of the port facilities was so effective that it never made a significant contribution to the supply situation. An entire corps of well-trained, well-equipped tankers, infantrymen, and artillery had been wasted at a critical moment. In the boxing a.n.a.logy, Patton wanted to throw a roundhouse right and get the bout over; his superiors ordered him to throw a short right hook to knock the enemy off balance. But the enemy already was staggering. He should have been knocked out. Instead of allowing Patton to go for the big solution, Eisenhower had him turn away from Paris and toward Falaise, where he wanted U.S. Third Army to join with the Canadians coming from Caen to encircle the German army in Normandy. This was accomplished, and although many thousands of individual Germans escaped, hardly any of them had any equipment or got out as part of an organized unit. Meanwhile the American and Canadian artillery and infantry and the Allied air force pounded the Germans inside the pocket.
110 For sheer ghastliness in World War II, nothing exceeded the experience of the Germans caught in the Falaise gap. Feelings of helplessness waved over them. They were in a state of total fear day and night.
They seldom slept. They dodged from bomb crater to bomb crater. "It was complete chaos," Pvt.
Herbert Meier remembered. "That"s when I thought, This is the end of the world." The word "chaos"
was used by every survivor of the retreat interviewed forCitizen Soldiers . German army, corps, and division headquarters got out first and were on the far side of the Seine, headed toward the Siegfried Line. In the pocket, most junior officers felt like the enlisted men, it was every man for himself.
The farmhouses were abandoned; rations consisted of what ever one could find in the cellars. "It was terrible," Lt. Gunter Materne recalled, "especially for those lying there in pain. It was terrible to see men screaming, "Mother!" or "Take me with you, don"t leave me here! I have a wife and child at home. I"m bleeding to death!" " Lieutenant Padberg explained: "Honestly said, you did not stop to consider whether you could help this person when you were running for your life. One thought only of oneself."
Private Meier recalled "one of the officers from the occupation, who had had a nice life in France, tried to get through in a troop truck filled with goodies and his French girlfriend. With wounded men lying right there. So we stopped him, threw him and his girlfriend out, along with all of their things, and laid the wounded in the truck.
"It was terrible," Meier went on. "I began to think everyone was crazy. I came across an airfield, the Luftwaffe had long since gone, all of the ground troops there were drunk."
"All shared a single idea," according to Corporal Bertenrath: "Out! Out! Out!" All this time the 1,000-pound bombs, the 500-pound bombs, the rockets, the 105s and the 155s, the 75s on the Shermans, the mortars, and the .50-caliber machine-gun fire came down on the Germans. Along the roads and in the fields, dead cows, horses, and soldiers swelled in the hot August sun, their mouths agape, filled with flies. Maggots crawled through their wounds. Tanks drove over men in the way-dead or alive. Human and animal intestines made the roads slippery. Maj. William Falvey of the 90th Division recalled seeing "six horses. .h.i.tched to a large artillery gun. Four horse were dead and two were still alive.
The driver was dead but still had the reins in his hands." Those few men, German or American, who had not thrown away their gas masks had them on, to the envy of all the others. The stench was such that even pilots in the Piper Cubs threw up. Lt. George Wilson of the 4th Division saw "dead German soldiers and dead and wounded horses and wrecked wagons scattered all along the road." He was astonished to discover that the Wehrmacht was a horse-drawn army, but impressed by the equipment.
He had been raised on a farm and "I was amazed at such superb draft horses and accouterments. The harness work was by far the finest I had ever seen. The leather was highly polished, and all the bra.s.s rivets and hardware shone brightly. The horses had been groomed, with tails bobbed, as though for a parade." His men mercifully shot the wounded animals. By August 18, a week after the lead American elements had reached Argentan, the 1st Polish Armored Division moved south, almost to the point of linking up with the U.S. 90th Division, finally released for a northward drive to close the gap. Still Germans escaped. One of them was Maj. Heinz Guderian, who recalled driving past the Poles, only a hundred meters away, in the rain, in the night, out of the pocket. He and his driver would go for two or three minutes, then stop for ten to listen. They made it out.
Lieutenant Padberg did, too. "When we made it out of the pocket," he recalled, "we were of the opinion that we had left h.e.l.l behind us." He quickly discovered that the boundaries of h.e.l.l were not so constricted. Once beyond the gap, Padberg ran into an SS colonel.
"Line up!" he bellowed. "Everyone is now under my command! We are going to launch a counterattack." There were twenty or so men in the area, none known to Padberg. He had a pistol only.
111 The others shuffled into something like a line, Padberg said, "but unfortunately, I had to go behind a bush to relieve myself and missed joining the group behind the colonel." Lt. Walter Kaspers got out, thanks to some unexpected help. "I moved only at night," he remembered. "By myself. I became dog tired. I came to a small farmhouse. I knocked and asked the girl if I could sleep in the barn. I pointed to the east and said that I was heading that way. She told me not to worry, allowed me to stay and even brought me a jug of milk and a few pieces of bread. I thanked her and pushed on the next day."
After telling the little story, Lieutenant Kaspers smiled and added, "Women are always better in these situations in war. They have a feeling for people in need."
Three German soldiers who got out had similar experiences. French farm wives fed them. In each case, the women explained that their sons were POWs in Germany and that they hoped some German mother was feeding their boys. Even in the b.l.o.o.d.y chaos of Falaise, a humane spirit could come over these young men so far from home. Lt. Hans-Heinrich Dibbern, of Panzer Grenadier Regiment 902, set up a roadblock outside Argentan. "From the direction of the American line came an ambulance driving toward us," he remembered. "The driver was obviously lost. When he noticed that he was behind German lines, he slammed on the brakes." Dibbern went to the ambulance. "The driver"s face was completely white.
He had wounded men he was responsible for. But we told him, "Back out of here and get going-we don"t attack the Red Cross." He quickly disappeared." An hour or so later, "here comes another Red Cross truck. It pulls up right in front of us. The driver got out, opened the back, and took out a crate. He set it down on the street and drove away. We feared a bomb, but nothing happened and we were curious. We opened the box and it was filled with Chesterfield cigarettes."
The Battle of Normandy was over. It had lasted seventy-five days. It had cost the Allies 209,672 casualties, 39,976 dead. Two-thirds of the losses were American. It cost the Germans around 450,000 men, 240,000 of them killed or wounded. Of the approximately 1,500 tanks committed to Normandy by the Wehrmacht, a total of sixty-seven got out, and only twenty-four of these got across the Seine. The Germans left behind 3,500 artillery pieces and 20,000 vehicles.
But between 20,000 and 40,000 Wehrmacht and SS soldiers got out. They had but a single thought: get home. Home meant Germany, prepared defensive positions in the Siegfried Line, fresh supplies, reinforcements, a chance to sort out the badly mixed troops into fighting units. They had taken a terrible pounding, but they were not as sure as SHAEF G-2 that they had "had it." The German rout was so complete that not only did the retreating troops not carry supplies out with them, they didn"t even take the time to destroy the supply dumps. Elements of Patton"s Third Army captured tons of grain, flour, sugar, and rice, along with hundreds of carloads of coal, all of which the GIs distributed to the French civilian population. At another dump Patton"s men captured 2.6 million pounds of frozen beef and 500,000 pounds of canned beef, which were distributed to the troops.
The GIs were getting all mixed up in their pell-mell pursuit. Sgt. Buddy Gianelloni remembered trucks going up and down the road, jeeps, tanks, half-tracks, and other combat vehicles headed toward the front. He came up on a battalion of African-American soldiers. "What outfit are you?" he asked.
"Artillery," was the reply. "What outfit are you guys?"
"The 79th Infantry."
According to Gianelloni, "This black guy, he almost turned white. He said, "The boss done f.u.c.ked up, he has got us here ahead of the infantry." They had so many artillery battalions lined up there they was gun to gun." In the 4th Infantry Division, Lt. George Wilson felt he was engaging in "a wild, mad, exciting race to see which army could gain the most ground in a single day." To the men of the 743rd Tank Battalion, 2nd Armored Division, it was "holiday warfare." There was a little shooting at occasional 112 crossroads, but no casualties. Mainly this was because they had warning of trouble ahead-if the villages were bedecked with flowers and the people were lining the streets, holding out food and bottles of wine, the Germans had pulled out; if there was no reception committee, the Germans were still there. At dusk on September 2, Shermans from the 743rd got to the crest of a hill overlooking Tournai, Belgium. They sat there looking, instead of moving down to be the first to cross the border, because they were out of gasoline. More Shermans came up; they had just enough fuel to get into town. Then they too were immobilized. The great supply crisis in ETO had hit the 743rd. The crisis was inevitable. It had been foreseen. It could not have been avoided. Too many vehicles were driving too far away from the ports and beaches. The Red Ball Express, an improvised truck transport system that got started in late August, made every effort to get the fuel, food, and ammunition to the front lines. Drivers, mainly blacks in the Service of Supply, were on the road twenty hours a day, driving without lights at night. The deuce-and-a-half trucks were b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper on the one-way roads. Between August 29 and September 15, 6,000 trucks carried 135,000 tons of supplies on two highways running from St.-Lo to a supply dump near Chartres. At the dump the supplies were picked up by other drivers and taken to the front. But the front line continued to move east and north, and the system just couldn"t keep up. From Le Havre and the Normandy beaches it was getting close to five hundred kilometers to the front. It took a lot of gasoline just to get the trucks back and forth.
To ease the burden, SHAEF was putting into place an extension onto PLUTO ("pipe line under the ocean," running from England to Omaha Beach), to move gasoline forward by pipe to Chartres. But it didn"t get into operation until September 13. Even then it didn"t help much. At Chartres, gasoline was put into jerry cans, which were loaded onto trucks that carried the fuel forward to the front-line vehicles. But among other crises in supply, ETO was short on the five-gallon jerry cans because so many GIs just threw them away after filling their tanks instead of putting them back on the truck.*
All across France today, those jerry cans are still there, serving innumerable purposes.
In the case of the 743rd, the battalion stayed in Tournai for four days, waiting for fuel. On September 7 the battalion filled its vehicles and took off. In one day it made 105 kilometers. On September 9, a day-long pause to wait for fuel. On September 10, another leap forward, to Fort Eben Emael close to the Dutch border. According to the battalion history, "it was a swashbuckling, almost skylarking campaign. There was no fighting and the job was to keep moving, looking for a fight."
The GIs got a wild welcome in the Belgian villages. "They cheered, and waved, and risked their lives to crowd up to the tanks in motion and in all the demonstrative ways of a happy people they showed their enthusiastic thanks." On September 12 the leading platoon of Charlie Company in the 743rd crossed the border into Holland, the first Americans to reach that country. The German border was but a few kilometers away.
Now there was opposition. German artillery boomed. Panzerfaust sh.e.l.ls disabled a couple of Shermans.
The other Shermans could still fire, but not move. Their fuel tanks were empty. And the Germans had gotten into the Siegfried Line. They had fuel problems, too, but as they were on the defensive they could 113 dig their tanks in and use them as fortified batteries. Their supply lines had grown shorter-Aachen was just to the south, Dusseldorf and Cologne were just to the east.
They had reached home. Men who saw no point to fighting to retain Hitler"s conquests in France were ready to fight to defend the homeland. The German officer corps began taking the terrified survivors of the rout in France and organizing them into squads, platoons, companies, battalions, divisions-and suddenly what had been a chaotic mob became an army again. Slave labor, meanwhile, worked on improving the neglected Siegfried Line. The Germans later called the transformation in their army and in the defensive works the Miracle of the West.
On August 19 Eisenhower told Montgomery and Bradley that it was his intention to take personal control of the land battle as soon as SHAEF could set up in France a forward command post with adequate communication facilities. He also outlined a plan of campaign that would send 21st Army Group northeast, toward Antwerp and the Ruhr, with 12th Army Group heading straight east from Paris toward Metz. Now it was Montgomery"s turn for anger. On August 22 he sent his chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, to see Eisenhower and protest against both decisions. Montgomery argued that the quickest way to end the war was to hold Patton in Paris, give control of U.S. First Army and all incoming supplies to 21st Army Group, and send it to Antwerp and beyond to the Ruhr. This force had to operate as a single unit under single control, which was "a WHOLE TIME job for one man." Montgomery warned that "to change the system of command now, after having won a great victory, would be to prolong the war." De Guingand pressed these points in a two-hour meeting with Eisenhower, but Eisenhower refused to change his mind. Montgomery then invited Eisenhower to come to his tactical headquarters at Conde for lunch the next day, August 23, to discuss future operations.
Eisenhower drove to Conde for the meeting. His chief of staff, Walter Smith, was with him, but when they arrived Montgomery abruptly announced that he wanted to see Eisenhower alone and thus Smith would have to stay outside. Eisenhower meekly accepted Montgomery"s really quite insulting demand that Smith be locked out, even though de Guingand was with Montgomery. Once inside the trailer, Montgomery tried his best to be tactful, but his idea of tact was to deliver a patronizing lecture on elementary strategy that a Sandhurst or West Point cadet would have found insulting. Standing before the map, his feet spread, hands behind his back, head up, eyes darting about, Montgomery outlined the situation, said the immediate need was for a firm plan, discussed logistics, told Eisenhower what the plans should be (a single thrust to the Ruhr by 21st Army Group, with First Army in support), declared that if Eisenhower"s plan was followed the result would be failure, and told Eisenhower that he "should not descend into the land battle and become a ground C-in-C." He said that the Supreme Commander "must sit on a very lofty perch in order to be able to take a detached view of the whole intricate problem" and that someone must run the land battle for him. Eisenhower replied that he would not change his mind and intended to take control on September 1. Unable to move Eisenhower on the question of command, Montgomery shifted to the real issue, the nature of the advance into Germany. He wanted Patton stopped where he was; he wanted the Airborne Army and First Army a.s.signed to him; he wanted all available supplies; he wanted a directive that would send him through the Pas de Calais, on to Antwerp and Brussels, and beyond to the Ruhr. Eisenhower, after an hour"s argument, made some concessions, of which the most important were to give Montgomery control of the Airborne Army and the "authority to effect the necessary operational coordination" between the right flank of 21st Army Group and Bradley"s left (i.e., First Army). In addition, 21st Army Group would have "priority" in supplies. Still, Eisenhower insisted, to Montgomery"s dissatisfaction, "on building up . . . the necessary strength to advance eastward from Paris toward Metz." After the meeting Montgomery reported to Brooke that "it has been a very exhausting day," but overall he was pleased, as he felt he had won the main points, "operational control"
over the Airborne and the First Armies, plus priority in supplies. Eisenhower"s attempt to appease Montgomery made both Bradley and Patton furious. The two American generals met; Patton recorded in his diary that Bradley "feels that Ike won"t go against Monty . . . Bradley was madder than I have ever 114 seen him and wondered aloud "what the Supreme Commander amounted to." " Patton felt that the southern advance offered much better tank terrain than the water-logged country to the north, but noted in disgust that Montgomery "has some way of talking Ike into his own way of thinking." He suggested to Bradley that they threaten to resign. "I feel that in such a showdown we would win, as Ike would not dare to relieve us."
Bradley would not go so far, but he did spend two days with Eisenhower, arguing against giving First Army to Montgomery. Tedder agreed with Bradley, as did Eisenhower"s operations officer (G-3), Maj.
Gen. Harold Bull, and his G-2, Gen. Kenneth Strong. Eisenhower yielded to their pressure. When he issued his directive, on August 29, he did not give operational control of First Army to Montgomery; instead, Montgomery was only "authorized to effect"-through Bradley-"any necessary coordination between his own forces" and First Army. That decision, and its sequel, strengthened Montgomery"s and Brooke"s-and Bradley"s and Patton"s-conviction that Eisenhower always agreed with the last man he talked to.
It was a most serious charge, but a bit off the mark. Montgomery tended to hear what he wanted to hear, read what he wanted to read; Eisenhower tended to seek out words or phrases that would appease. There was, consequently, a consistent misunderstanding between the two men. Nevertheless, Eisenhower never yielded on the two main points, command and single thrust, not in August and September 1944, nor again when they were raised in January and March 1945. He took-and kept-control of the land battle, just as he said he would. And he never wavered, from the moment he first saw the SHAEF plans for a two-front advance into Germany to the last month of the war, on the question of the so-called broad front.
He did waver, sometimes badly, on some important issues, primarily the relative importance of Arnhem and Antwerp, and the meaning of the word "priority." But he never told Montgomery anything that a reasonable man could have construed as a promise that Patton would be stopped in Paris and 21st Army Group be sent on to Berlin. Nor did he ever encourage Patton to believe that he would be sent to Berlin alone. He always insisted on invading Germany from both north and south of the Ardennes.
His reasons were manifold. His a.n.a.lysis of German morale and geography played a large role. Even after the Allies got through the West Wall, there was still a major barrier between them and the German heartland, the Rhine River. A single thrust, especially beyond the Rhine, would be subject to counterattacks on the flanks. Eisenhower believed that the counterattacks might be powerful enough to sever the supply lines and then destroy the leading armies. Currently, with the Allies" limited port capacity, the Allies could not bring forward adequate supplies to sustain an army beyond the Rhine.
Every mile that the advancing troops moved away from the Normandy ports added to the problems. For example, forward airfields had to be constructed to provide fighter support for the troops. But to construct them it was necessary to move engineers and building materials forward at the expense of weapons and gasoline. One senior engineer involved pointed out that if Patton had gone across the Rhine in September, he would have done so without any logistical or air support at all. "A good task force of panzerfaust, manned by Hitler Youth, could have finished them off before they reached Ka.s.sel."
As for 21st Army Group, de Guingand pointed out that when (and if ) it reached the Rhine, bridging material would have to be brought forward, at the expense of other supplies. Like Eisenhower, de Guingand doubted that there would be a collapse of German morale; he expected the enemy to fight to the bitter end. As, of course, the Germans did; it took the combined efforts of 160 Russian divisionsand the entire AEFand Gen. Harold Alexander"s Italian offensiveand eight additional months of devastating air attack to force a German capitulation. After the war de Guingand remarked, a bit dryly, that he had to doubt that Montgomery could have brought about the same result with 21st Army Group alone. "My conclusion, is, therefore," de Guingand wrote, "that Eisenhower was right."
115 The personality and political factors in Eisenhower"s decision are obvious: Patton pulling one way, Montgomery the other; each man insistent; each certain of his own military genius; each accustomed to having his own way. Behind them, there were the adulating publics, who had made Patton and Montgomery into symbols of their nation"s military prowess. In Eisenhower"s view, to give one or the other the glory would have serious repercussions, not just the howls of agony from the press and public of the nation left behind, but in the very fabric of the Alliance itself. Eisenhower feared it could not survive the resulting uproar. It was too big a chance to take, especially on such a risky operation. Eisenhower never considered taking it. Montgomery and Patton showed no appreciation of the pressures on Eisenhower when they argued so persistently for their plans, but then Eisenhower"s worries were not their responsibility. Montgomery wanted a quick end to the war, he wanted the British to bring it about, and he wanted to lead the charge into Berlin personally. Patton would have given anything to beat him to it. Had Eisenhower been in their positions, he almost surely would have felt as they did, and he wanted his subordinates to be aggressive and to believe in themselves and their troops.
Eisenhower"s great weakness in this situation was not that he wavered on the broad-front question, but rather his eagerness to be well liked, coupled with his desire to keep everyone happy. Because of these characteristics, he would not end a meeting until at least verbal agreement had been found. Thus he appeared to be always shifting, "inclining first one way, then the other," according to the views and wishes of the last man with whom he had talked. Eisenhower, as Brooke put it, seemed to be "an arbiter balancing the requirements of competing allies and subordinates rather than a master of the field making a decisive choice." Everyone who talked to him left the meeting feeling that Eisenhower had agreed with him, only to find out later that he had not. Thus Montgomery, Bradley, and Patton filled their diaries and letters and conversations with denunciations of Eisenhower (Bradley less so than the others).
The real price that had to be paid for Eisenhower"s desire to be well liked was not, however, animosity toward him from Montgomery and Patton. It was, rather, on the battlefield. In his attempts to appease Montgomery and Patton, Eisenhower gave them great tactical leeway, to the point of allowing them to choose their own objectives. The result was one of the great mistakes of the war, the failure to take and open Antwerp promptly, which represented the only real chance the Allies had to end the war in 1944.
The man both immediately and ultimately responsible for that failure was Eisenhower.
From the Rhone to the Channel, the armies of the AEF were coming to a halt. On September 2, Third Army requested 750,000 gallons of gasoline and got 25,390. The next day, it was 590,000 with 49,930 received. For the following two days Patton got about half the quant.i.ty he demanded; after September 7 he got a trickle only. A handful of advance patrols had gotten across the Moselle River north and south of Nancy, but Third Army was caught up in a terrible battle for the ancient fortresses of Metz, which were practically impervious to artillery sh.e.l.ls or bombs. Patton"s men were still far short of the Rhine River and the Siegfried Line protecting it.
On September 12 the 4th Division, First Army, to the north, managed to get through the Siegfried Line.
Lt. George Wilson led a reconnaissance platoon into the defenses. He saw a German soldier emerge from a mound of earth not a hundred meters away. "I got a slight chill as I realized I might well be the first American to set eyes on a pillbox in the famous Siegfried Line." He was east of St.-Vith in the Ardennes.
13 - At the German Border
CAPT. JOSEPH DAWSON, G Company, 16th Infantry, 1st Division, had been the first company commander to get his men up the bluff at Omaha on D-Day. By mid-September he had been in battle for a hundred days. He had learned to fight in the hedgerows, how to work with tanks and planes in the attack on St.-Lo, how to pursue a defeated enemy in the dash across France. He was thirty-one years old, son of a Waco, Texas, Baptist preacher. He had lost twenty-five pounds off his already thin six-foot-two-inch frame.
On September 14 Dawson led his company into the border town of Eilendorf, southeast of Aachen.
Although it was inside the Siegfried Line, the town was deserted, the fortifications unoccupied. The town was on a ridge, 300 meters high, 130 meters long, which gave it excellent observation to the east and north. Dawson"s company was on the far side of a railroad embankment that divided the town, with access only through a tunnel under the railroad. Dawson had his men dig in and mount outposts. The expected German counterattack came after midnight and was repulsed.
In the morning Dawson looked east. He could see Germans moving up in the woods in one direction, in an orchard in another, and digging in. In the afternoon a sh.e.l.ling from artillery and mortars. .h.i.t G Company, followed by a two-company attack. "The intensity of the attack carried the enemy into my positions," Dawson later told reporter W. C. Heinz of the New York Sun . "I lost men. They weren"t wounded. They weren"t taken prisoners. They were killed. But we piled up the Krauts."
But it was the Germans who were attacking, the Americans who were dug in. Dawson was short on ammunition, out of food. His supporting tanks were out of gasoline. The artillery behind him was limited to a few sh.e.l.ls a day. If he was going to go anywhere, it would be to the rear. The U.S. Army"s days of all-out pursuit were over.
There was one more punch left to the Allies, the Airborne Army, consisting of the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne, which had been refitting and recuperating in England since early July. From Eisenhower on down, everyone had been eager to use this a.s.set, but although a number of operations were laid on, the troops on the ground always overran the drop zones before the operations could be mounted. In early September, however, Montgomery came up with a daring plan that called for dropping the paratroopers along the main north-south road through Belgium, to seize the bridges and thus open a way through the Netherlands for the British Second Army. The final objective was Arnhem. Once across the bridge there, the British would be beyond the Rhine River, with open country between them and Berlin. Code name for the operation was Market-Garden.
September 17 was a beautiful end-of-summer day, with a bright blue sky and no wind. No resident of the British Isles who was below the line of flight of the hundreds of C-47s carrying three divisions into combat ever forgot the sight. Nor did the paratroopers. Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd was jumpmaster for his stick; he stood in the open door as his plane formed up and headed east. "In spite of my anxiety about the jump and subsequent danger," he recalled, "it was exhilarating to see thousands of people on the ground waving to us as we flew over the British villages and towns." It was even more rea.s.suring to see the fighter planes join the formation.
When the air armada got over Holland, Schultz could see a tranquil countryside. It was Sunday. Not many people were on the roads. Cows grazed in the fields. The Luftwaffe wasn"t to be seen. There was some anti-aircraft fire, which intensified five minutes from the DZ (Drop Zone), but there was no breaking 117 of formation or evasive action by the pilots as there had been over Normandy. The jump was a dream. A sunny midday. Little or no opposition on the ground. Plowed fields that were "soft as a mattress."
Gen. James Gavin led the way for the 82nd. His landing wasn"t so soft; he hit a pavement and damaged his back. Some days later a doctor checked him out, looked Gavin in the eye, and said, "There is nothing wrong with your back." Five years later at Walter Reed Hospital, Gavin was told that he had two broken disks. It was too late to do anything; Gavin"s comment was, "Now I have one heel higher than the other to account for the curvation in my back." To indulge in a generalization, one based on four decades of interviewing former GIs but supported by no statistical data, Jim Gavin was the most beloved division commander in ETO. Some veterans can"t remember their division commanders" names because there were so many of them, or because they never saw them; others don"t want to remember. But veterans of the 82nd get tongue-tied when I ask them how they feel about General Gavin, then burst into a torrent of words-bold, courageous, fair, smart as h.e.l.l, a man"s man, trusted, a leader, beloved.
Gavin (USMA 1929) was thirty-seven years old, the youngest general in the U.S. Army since George Custer"s day. His athletic grace and build combined with his boyish looks to earn him the affectionate nickname of "Slim Jim." Dutch Schultz wasn"t necessarily the best soldier in the 82nd, but he was one of the most insightful. After landing in Holland, Schultz saw Gavin come down, struggle to his feet in obvious pain, sling his M-1, and move out for his command post. "From my perspective," Schultz wrote, "it was crucial to my development as a combat soldier seeing my Commanding General carrying his rifle right up on the front line. This concept of leadership was displayed by our regiment, battalion, and company grade officers so often that we normally expected this hands-on leadership from all our officers. It not only inspired us but saved many lives."
There were but a handful of enemy troops in the DZ area. Lt. James Coyle recalled, "I saw a single German soldier on the spot where I thought I was going to land. I drew my .45 pistol and tried to get a shot at him but my parachute was oscillating. I was aiming at the sky as often as I was aiming at the ground. When I landed I struggled to my knees and aimed my pistol. The German was no more than 15 feet away, running. Just as I was about to shoot him he threw away his rifle, then his helmet and I saw he was a kid of about seventeen years old, and completely panicked. He just ran past me without looking at me. I didn"t have the heart to shoot him."
Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd had developed a "soft spot in my heart" for the cows of Normandy because whenever he saw them grazing in a hedgerow-enclosed field, he knew there were no land mines in it. In Holland, he had another bovine experience. His landing was good, right where he wanted to be.
He gathered up his men and after recovering the 81mm mortars, ammunition, and equipment, set out for his objective in Nijmegen. He spotted two cows. He had plenty of rope. So "we commandeered the cows and hung our mortars and equipment on them. They were very docile and plodded right along with us. "As we neared Nijmegen, the Dutch people welcomed us. But while pleased and happy to be liberated, they were quite shocked to see paratroopers leading two cows. The first questions were, "Where are your tanks?" We were not their idea of American military invincibility, mobility and power.
We could only tell them, "The tanks are coming." We hoped it was true."
The Germans had been caught by surprise, but were waking up. They got units to the various bridges, to defend them or blow them if necessary. The GIs, moving into Nijmegen and Eindhoven and their other objectives, started taking casualties.
Sgt. Ben Popilski of Coyle"s platoon, who had just lost his British girlfriend, was shot in the head. A trooper reported it to Sgt. Otis Sampson. "I just happened to be looking his way," the trooper told Sampson. "He turned white before he was. .h.i.t, as if he knew it was coming." Sampson recalled Popilski"s last words back in England, "I hope this jump straightens it all out," and thought, He got his wish.
118 As the troopers moved toward their a.s.signed objectives, gliders bearing soldiers and equipment began coming into the DZs.
One crash-landed on the edge of a wooded area and was under German small-arms fire coming from the tree line. Capt. Anthony Stefanich (Captain Stef to the men) called out to Private Schultz and others to follow him, and headed toward the German positions.
Stefanich was one of those officers brought up by General Gavin. Schultz remembered him as a man "who led through example rather than virtue of rank. He was what I wanted to be when I finally grew up." Stefanich got hit in the upper torso by rifle fire, which set afire a smoke grenade he was carrying. Lt.
Gerald Johnson jumped on him to put the fire out, then carried the wounded captain back to the a.s.sembly point, where an aid station had been set up. As he bent over his captain, Schultz"s mind went back to his mother. She had taught him that if he said three Hail Marys daily he would never go to h.e.l.l.
Then he thought of his teachers, all nuns, "who taught me about the power of the rosary, and that if I really wanted something from Jesus Christ I should use our Blessed Mother as my emissary. That made sense, because more than once I had used my mother as an intermediary in trying to get my Dad to change his mind."
So he prayed to the Blessed Mother for Captain Stef"s life. But it was too late. Just before he died, Stefanich whispered to Lieutenant Johnson, "We have come a long way-tell the boys to do a good job."
The medic, a Polish boy from Chicago, stood up beside the body. He was crying and calling out, "He"s gone, he"s gone. I couldn"t help him." It was, Schultz said, "a devastating loss. It was the only time in combat that I broke down and wept." On September 19, Lt. Waverly Wray, the man who had broken up the German counterattack on the morning of June 7 at Ste.-Mere-Eglise, and killed ten Germans with a single shot to the head of each, led an a.s.sault on the bridge. "The last I saw of him," one trooper reported, "he was headed for the Germans with a grenade in one hand and a tommy gun in the other." As Wray raised his head over the railroad track embankment, a German sniper firing from a signal tower killed him with a single shot in the middle of his head. On the afternoon of September 19, Gavin met with Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commanding the Guards Armored Division. Horrocks said he could provide tank support for an attack on the Nijmegen bridges, and that he could have trucks bring forward a.s.sault boats for a crossing of the river downstream from the bridges. Gavin decided to hit the western ends with Lt. Col. Ben Vandervoort"s 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, and to give the task of crossing the river in the boats to Maj. Julian Cook"s 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR. Cook wanted to cross under cover of darkness, but he was helpless until the trucks carrying the boats came up. They were promised for late that afternoon, but were delayed because the Germans were putting heavy fire on the single road running back to the start point in Belgium. So effective were these attacks that the GIs were calling the road "h.e.l.l"s Highway." Bulldozers and tanks were a.s.signed to roam its length, pushing wrecks out of the way.
Traffic jams ran for miles and took hours to unsnag. Hitler authorized one of the Luftwaffe"s final ma.s.s raids on the clogged road-two hundred bombers. .h.i.t Eindhoven, while another two hundred fighter-bombers went after the troops and vehicles jamming h.e.l.l"s Highway-Jabos in reverse.
At 1530 of September 19, Gavin flung Vandervoort"s battalion at the bridges. The boats had not come up, but Gavin hoped the combination of British tanks (all Shermans) and parachute infantry could break through Nijmegen and take the bridges.
Vandervoort"s men rode into the attack on the backs of more than forty British armored vehicles. They got to the center of the city without much difficulty. There Vandervoort split the regiment, sending half for the railroad bridge and the other half for the highway span. Both attacks met fierce opposition from 88s, self-propelled guns, mortars, and well-placed machine guns. Lieutenant Coyle and Sergeant Sampson"s platoon led the a.s.sault. "On approaching the last houses before the open area in front of the railway 119 bridge," Coyle recalled, "the lead tank began firing its cannon. The roar was deafening. I was moving up alongside the third tank in the column. When I cleared the last house and could see the bridge, I got quite a shock. I didn"t expect it to be so large. I learnt after the war that it was the largest single-span bridge in Europe."
As the two Shermans in front of Coyle moved across the traffic circle, two hidden 57mm ant.i.tank guns fired. The tanks shook, stopped, began to flare up. The tank beside Coyle went into reverse and backed into a street leading to the traffic circle. Coyle had his platoon retreat into houses on the outer ring, then take up positions on the second floor.