Armageddon (70 page)

Godau’s unit profited from the fact that the Waffen SS was always first in line for whatever weapons and ammunition were available. In the Wehrmacht shells were in chronic short supply. Germany’s only dubious advantage was that of diminishing lines of communications. Despite the best efforts of the Allied air forces, rail links across the Reich were somehow kept open until the very end. But traffic flow was vastly reduced, and troop movements which should have taken hours required days amid diversions and persistent disruption. Panzer Lehr Division found itself stranded at Mönchengladbach for lack of fuel. The only way the formation could move to the front was to load every one of its vehicles on to railway flatcars, a desperately time-consuming process. A sergeant-major of 12th SS Panzer was appalled when his unit took delivery of brand-new tanks at Memmingen, to discover that there was no fuel with which to drive them into battle: “We had to blow them up without firing a shot.” The Germans were so starved of means of mobility that sometimes one tank towed another. Units found themselves forced to move into battle with a hotch-potch of commandeered transport, charcoal-fuelled vehicles, horse-drawn carts and—more often than not—men’s own two feet.

“It was ‘subsistence warfare,’ ” said Sergeant George Schwemmer of 10th SS Panzer. “Scrounging for ammunition and weapons. We were very, very envious of the Americans’ plenty.” Increasingly desperate measures were adopted to urge on Germany’s despondent defenders. Model promised extra rations for any unit which shot down a ground-attack aircraft, and ten days’ special leave for any man who accomplished such a feat with small arms. The reverse of the coin was reflected in a warning by the commander of 7th Parachute Division on 14 February: “The sternest measures will be taken against any further unauthorized rearward movements by individual soldiers or small units, of the kind that have been seen during the past two days.”

Sergeant Schwemmer took part in one of innumerable hopeless counter-attacks at the end of January on the U.S. Third Army’s front. His men left their carefully camouflaged foxholes with the deepest regret and began to advance across open ground. Devastating American automatic-weapons fire swept their ranks. “This is suicidal,” said the company commander, an amiable man who was the son of an Austrian hotel owner. He was killed minutes later. Schwemmer took over. He rallied the survivors and took shelter for a time in a shell hole. Then there was a lull in the firing, and they began to pull back. Heavy American shelling descended again. They sank into what cover they could find. The cold was terrible. When darkness fell, they stumbled towards the rear, only to be checked by a major who fiercely ordered them forward again. All night, they struggled to gain ground, until they lapsed shivering into a ditch, where they remained until dawn. Schwemmer spent the next month hospitalized with acute frostbite.

To launch the Ardennes offensive, Hitler had temporarily transferred forces from east to west while the Russians were comparatively passive. This process had been reversed when Stalin struck on the Vistula. German formations were hastening eastwards. “It is essential that the change in our priorities should be concealed from the enemy for as long as possible,” Keitel signalled to von Rundstedt on 22 January. “Every day is vital. OKW has available a range of options for feints and diversions to give the enemy the impression that the forces removed [notably Sixth SS Panzer Army] will be redeployed in Holland.” In reality of course, Ultra intelligence swiftly conveyed news of the German redeployment to American and British commanders.

A deserter from 12th SS Panzer told his captors on 16 January: “You could walk through to Cologne if you wanted. There is nobody to stop you.” Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt wrote of returning from leave in January: “When I reported back to my commander in the Eifel, it was plain to everybody that the end of the war was approaching. I said: ‘
Hauptmann,
it would make more sense for us to shift everything east against the Russians, and let the Americans keep coming here in the West.’ He answered: ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’ We scarcely knew each other, but not every officer was a Nazi, and he didn’t report me.” U.S. Ninth Army captured a report on two enemy sentries condemned to death
in absentia,
having disappeared from their posts and presumably deserted. The men were also sentenced to dismissal from the Wehrmacht and loss of their civil rights. “Sentence will be carried out,” declared German Fifteenth Army optimistically, “as soon as the two deserters return from captivity.” Patton interviewed a captured German commander, General Graf von Rothkirch, commanding the LIII Corps. The American asked the familiar question: why did the Wehrmacht continue to fight? He received the familiar answer: “We are under the orders of the High Command, and must carry on as soldiers in spite of personal opinions and beliefs.” A German staff officer from 331st Volksgrenadier Division told his American captors with some disdain that his comrades expected the Allies merely to continue to grind down German resistance through overwhelming firepower, “rather than attempt any bold and brilliant tactical stroke.”

To many men of the Allied armies, it seemed increasingly painful to risk their lives in the final stages. Lieutenant Howard Randall joined the U.S. 76th Division as a replacement platoon commander late in January. His first experience of bloodshed was prompted by a man who shot himself in the leg one night, to avoid attacking at dawn. “My flashlight revealed his greatly swollen calf with a gaping hole in it filled with bloody hamburger and bits of shiny bone. I could see steam rising from the wound as the brightened blood rushed through the hole . . . I stood up and found that my knees were weak. I thought to myself—Lord, if a little wound like that has such an effect on me, how will I stand up when blood is the order of the day?” Yet Lieutenant Tony Moody of the 28th Division marvelled at the courage with which some men endured horrifying wounds. On a night patrol in Colmar, a recently arrived replacement, a nineteen-year-old from Michigan named Dennis Wills, trod on a mine. He never screamed, nor indeed made a sound, while they laid him in a shelter half and struggled through the snow back to the American lines. He simply said resignedly: “I guess I’ll never jitterbug again.”

In a monastery on the edge of Eindhoven, a British maxillo-facial unit, known to its staff as the “Max Factors,” addressed the wounds inflicted by shrapnel, burns, blast. “The casualties themselves were uncomplaining beyond belief,” wrote Sister Brenda McBryde.

Those who were unable to speak, like the Guardsman who was being kept alive on eggnogs poured down his nasal tube, would hand me little notes: “Steak and chips tonight, Sis? Or shall we try the duck à l’orange?’ . . . One day a sergeant of the 51st Highland Division was carried in, propped upright on a stretcher by rolled blankets. “Let him fall back and he’s a goner,” the M.O. had warned the bearers. A flying chunk of mortar had carried his lower jaw clean away, and an emergency tracheotomy had been carried out. After resuscitation, he was on the operating table for two and a half hours while the surgeons removed the earth and grit of the ditch and shreds of khaki cloth from the pulpy mess which was all that remained below the sergeant’s upper lip.

As Sister McBryde dressed the man’s wounds later, she noticed by his bedside “a photograph of a good-looking young soldier in Scottish dress with his arm about the waist of a smiling girl . . . if this was our sergeant, his girlfriend was in for a shock.”

I
N THE
F
EBRUARY
drive to the Rhine, Allied forces were to advance across a front of some 250 miles. From Strasbourg south to the Swiss border, French divisions would hold firm in their positions on the upper Rhine. Further north the forces of Bradley and Montgomery, together with Patch’s Seventh Army, would close up to the Rhine through a series of river assaults and exploitations. Patton’s Third Army had furthest to go—some eighty miles. Simpson and Hodges, together with the British and Canadians, faced an advance of just over thirty miles. They knew it was overwhelmingly likely that the Germans would destroy all the Rhine bridges, but cherished hopes of a lucky break, a chance to seize at least one intact crossing which would enable them to push on across Germany without a pause.

Following the Bulge operations, twenty-one of the forty-seven U.S. divisions deployed on the Western Front were concentrated between the Hürtgen Forest and the Moselle. First Army began its attack on a front some ten miles wide, south of the Hürtgen and the Roer dams. Its units faced hard going through the thick woodlands of the Eifel before reaching open ground. On the eve of the new offensive, Bradley had to repulse a rash last-minute proposal from Eisenhower, to transfer several divisions southwards to finish off the Colmar Pocket. The German toehold there looked messy on the map, but was strategically irrelevant. Bradley lost his temper with SHAEF when this plan was telephoned to him during a meeting with Hodges and Patton. Patton said: “Tell them to go to hell and all three of us will resign. I will lead the procession.” Eisenhower backed off. The French, with American armoured support, finally closed the Colmar Pocket on 9 February.

Bradley’s attack began well, despite freezing weather. It was led by Ridgway’s airborne divisions, who showed all the dash in attack for which they were famous. By 4 February, the Americans were well inside the first defences of the West Wall. On the right, the U.S. VIII Corps at first made less headway against 9th Panzer Division before eventually gaining momentum. German counter-attacks delayed the advance, but lacked the punch to stop it. By 12 February the Americans had taken the town of Prüm, and closed up to the Prüm river.

The assault crossing of the Sauer river, which began on the night of 6 February, proved a painful experience. The same early thaw which so cheered the Germans on the Oder swelled the modest Sauer into a fast, treacherous fifty-yard-wide torrent. Under fierce German fire, assault boats drifted out of control or sank, troops were lost, engineers struggled to create pontoons. A dozen American-built bridges were broken. Private Charles Felix was at a battalion headquarters with his colonel, whom he much admired, on the night of 6 February, when VII Corps began its crossing. A signaller, Felix recorded the CO’s radio conversation with one of his platoon commanders as they confronted the difficulties of launching boats under German mortaring:

“Lieutenant, are you across yet?”

“We had to turn back. We were under heavy fire.”

“Where are you now?”

“We’re in the woods.”

“Lieutenant, you’ve got to get those men moving. You’re holding up the advance.”

“These men have had it, sir! They won’t budge for me or anybody else! I’ve tried everything! They won’t move!”

“Lieutenant, I know it’s tough up there, but you’re going to have to go over right now. The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be . . . quit screwing around.”

After a further altercation, the reluctant platoon set off. But it was a night of disasters across the whole front of the advance. Felix’s Colonel Rudd was enraged to discover that men were seizing litter handles to provide themselves with an excuse to get to the rear by carrying casualties. Rudd barred all riflemen from litter-bearing. He demanded court-martials for three men suspected of incurring self-inflicted wounds, and fumed when their company commander reported that since there had been no witnesses there was no evidence on which to charge them. The same company commander complained about the behaviour of his replacement riflemen: “They keep their heads down and won’t look up. They think if they just lie there, the krauts can’t see them. They’re getting killed without firing a shot.” In Private George Sheppard’s company of the 319th Infantry, one man killed himself to escape from the attack. “He overdid it,” said Sheppard laconically. “Some guys actually thought it was easier to die than to go on.” Patton delivered a personal reprimand to the commanding general of the 94th Division after its initial failure to cross the Sauer, remarking scathingly on the fact that his units had reported more non-combat than combat casualties.

Major William DuPuy personally briefed every platoon and squad commander of his battalion of the 357th Infantry for the Sauer crossing. DuPuy had inherited command a few weeks earlier, when his predecessor walked into the CP and announced that he couldn’t take it any longer. As H-Hour approached, DuPuy checked every sub-unit: “A few of the men we had to put into the boats at pistol-point. I suppose that is not an approved leadership technique.” When the boats reached the other side after taking the first wave across the river, “a lot of the engineers simply abandoned them and wouldn’t go across again. So my guys had to scarf up the boats and drag them right up the bank right across from the pillboxes, in the middle of the night. Those engineers were not brilliant. They probably thought they were in with a bunch of madmen.”

Yet it is important to match tales of men who gave way to fear with those of others who pressed on. Lieutenant William Devitt of the 330th Infantry saw his own sergeant spin and fall after a German machine-gun burst caught him. To the officer’s amazement, the sergeant then got up, held up his helmet in surprise to reveal two holes in it and ran on forward. Devitt reflected that not a man in the platoon would have held it against the NCO if he had said: “That’s enough. I quit. I’m leaving. I’ll see ya after this war’s over.”

Sergeant Tony Carullo’s company of 2nd Infantry got across the Sauer intact, but then ran into trouble among the German positions on the far side. They were pinned down when Carullo’s platoon commander, a Californian named Marvin Shipp, crawled over and said: “Come on, get up, we’re going to make it to the rail tracks.” The men reluctantly followed, but Lieutenant Shipp was shot a few minutes later. “He never even knew he’d just made it to captain,” said Carullo sadly. His platoon was enraged. They shouted at the German position: “
Kommen sie hierher! Hände hoch!
” When a German cautiously showed himself, a Pennsylvanian named Johnny Komer shot him at once: “We were all so mad because they’d killed our lieutenant.”