The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (31 page)

‘Who are you to tell me that?’ Michel demanded angrily, rising from his chair. ‘How dare you! What the hell did you do for the liberation of France? Where were you? I want to know before I allow you to talk to me like that.’ Michel pulled rank he did not have and made threats he could not fulfil, and the judge began to move uneasily behind his desk. ‘We’re still fighting in France! I’m going to be parachuted behind German lines, and you’re refusing to release a woman who worked with the Résistance from the very beginning! I’m here to investigate this case on behalf of CIC and the Deuxième Bureau. I want to know why the hell she is in jail. I want to look at the record.’

The judge quickly decided to modify his position and offered to cut through the bureaucracy and take a personal interest in the case. He explained that Suzanne had been arrested by Résistance fighters, who suspected her of working with the Germans.

‘What does this prove?’ Michel demanded. ‘This woman works for Allied intelligence and I want to know more. Before I leave Nice I want her out, unless you can give me valid reasons to keep her in jail.’

The judge promised, after Michel’s assurances, that Suzanne would be freed. Michel remained in Nice until he was certain the judge had honoured his word. Extraordinarily, both the money and the jewellery were returned to her. ‘And then I left. I did not want to be present when she came out of jail. I didn’t want to be in the position of receiving thanks from her.’

Michel drove on to Besançon, where he was expected to begin training with the Special Forces of the French Army. He was put through a course in radio communications, parachute jumping and commando combat. Throughout this he asked questions about preparations for his original plan, but seemed always to be put off. Finally, in a top-secret briefing, he was told there was to be an interim mission. It was dangerous, politically delicate and highly classified, and, far from having a military objective, it was connected with industrial espionage. The intention was not to damage the German war machine but to beat the Americans, British and Russians to the spoils of war. Men undertaking the mission were promised both financial reward and even property. ‘I considered I was being offered a bribe to undertake something that had nothing whatever to do with the war. I was insulted.’

Disillusioned, Michel asked to be reassigned to the Thunderbirds - the Okie division fighting without financial incentive in a foreign land far from home. He rejoined them after they had moved into combat in Alsace. He was welcomed back by his tough, laconic comrades-in-arms with grins and jokes and the occasional affectionate slap on the back. It was good to be home.

The thing that every GI on the front remembers about the winter of 1944 is the cold. As the days grew shorter, troops forever on the move faced a new enemy in the weather. The only compensation was the knowledge that the Germans were similarly afflicted as they retreated. They had suffered a terrible toll in killed and wounded and were said to be thoroughly dispirited. Their defeat was certain.

The division pushed forward in knee-deep mud lashed by cold drizzle driven by raw, biting wind. Fog clung until late morning. The men cast a wistful glance in the direction of the troops on their left flank manning the eighty-five-mile Ghost Front of the Ardennes Forest, a quiet, empty area considered something of a rest camp. It was held by only three American infantry divisions and a single armoured division. And even this small force was not up to much. Two of the three infantry divisions had suffered nine thousand casualties in combat and been sent to the area to recuperate, while the third was entirely new to battle. The 9th Armoured Division was also inexperienced. The Ghost Front was a place where the artillery was fired for the sole purpose of keeping the men in practice, and patrols probed enemy lines without much danger.

As the Thunderbirds pushed deeper into Alsace they broke German Résistance at Mutzig, one of the most heavily defended positions facing the Maginot Line, and set up defensive perimeters to stem an expected German counterattack aimed at taking Strasbourg. Once they crossed the Maginot Line every town had to be fought for street by street.

Elements of the division entered Germany on 15 December. Despite the terrible weather, there was a feeling that the war was won, and morale was boosted as the Thunderbirds stepped on to the enemy’s own soil. It meant another combat Christmas away from home, but no one believed the war could go on for much longer.

But all along the Ghost Front the enemy was invisibly massing in preparation for one last, great military gamble. Incredibly, almost two thousand pieces of heavy artillery, a thousand tanks and assault guns, and a quarter of a million troops moved by stealth into attack positions. Camouflage officers had been assigned to every village, strict radio silence prevailed, and truckloads of straw had been laid on the roads to deaden the sound of tanks on the move. To keep the movement of traffic to a minimum, every shell for the opening barrage was moved to the front by hand. Soldiers faced endless roll calls to prevent desertion and were issued with charcoal in order not to reveal their presence by the smoke from ordinary fires.

The objective of the German attack - code-named Autumn Mist - was to go on the offensive out of the Ardennes and smash through
Blitzkrieg
-style to take Antwerp. This was the major port of supply for the Allied offensive into Germany. Its loss would set the Allied attack back months, split the British and Canadian armies from the Americans, and allow both to be encircled and destroyed. The plan, masterminded by Hitler himself, was a bold gamble that caught the Allies completely by surprise.

‘This battle is to decide whether we shall live or die,’ Hitler declared. ‘I want all my soldiers to fight hard and without pity. The battle must be fought with brutality and all Résistance must be broken in a wave of terror. In this most serious hour of the Fatherland, I expect every one of my soldiers to be courageous, and again courageous. The enemy must be beaten - now or never! Thus lives our Germany!’

But the plan was a fantasy. One of the commanders of the two German armies committed to the operation articulated the military obstacles. ‘All Hitler wants me to do is to cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take Antwerp. And all this in the worst time of the year through the Ardennes when the snow is waist deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armoured divisions. When it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four with re-formed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men - and at Christmas.’

The Germans also had only a quarter of the fuel needed; forward units were expected to capture supplies from the Americans as they advanced. At dawn on 16 December, the Panzer armies attacked the weakly defended Ghost Front, which now became the worst place on earth. The eighty-five-mile line erupted into flame as mortars, rockets and heavy artillery launched the opening barrage. American soldiers on the receiving end cowered in their foxholes and wondered how they could survive such a bombardment. Thick fog and lack of communication led each unit to believe it was the victim of a heavy local attack.

When the guns stopped, giant searchlights cut through the fog like great swathes of artificial moonlight. Waves of tanks ground along the roads and infantry clad in white combat gear, looking like ghosts, moved across the snow fourteen abreast. The new Messerschmitt 262 jets, one of Hitler’s promised ‘miracle weapons’, screamed overhead carrying thousand-pound bombs. As Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt told the troops as he sent them into attack: ‘We gamble everything!’

One American division was quickly overrun, and elements of another surrounded and cut off. Denied aerial reconnaissance because of the terrible weather, the Allied High Command failed to appreciate the magnitude of the attack, and responded to the full-scale assault as if it were a local diversion. The combat soon became a nasty, no-quarter conflict on both sides, especially after unarmed American POWs were killed in what became known as the Malmédy Massacre. As news of the massacre reached American GIs, the response from their combat commanders was immediate: Take no prisoners! The order was occasionally even put in writing: ‘No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner, but will be shot on sight.’
[131]

For the next eleven days the Battle of the Bulge, as Churchill dubbed it because of its appearance on the map, involved a million men. In the first days of the offensive, panic spread through the civilian population of Belgium and the Allied military were thoroughly shaken. History was repeating itself, for by relegating the Ardennes to the status of a poorly manned second front, Hitler was able to exploit the same weak point where he had attacked France four years earlier.

The campaign in the Ardennes siphoned off troops from the Seventh Army and the Thunderbirds found themselves hard-pressed on their section of the front. Four platoons were cut off for six days in one town before they were relieved. SS troops separated battalions from their regiments, one of which failed in an attempt to fight its way out. Only two men survived. At the beginning of January the division fell back to the Maginot Line and went on the defensive for the first time since Anzio.

By Boxing Day, however, the German advance had begun to slow. American armoured reinforcements blocked the enemy’s Panzers and prevented them from seizing massive stockpiles of fuel. The United States 101st Airborne Division raced to Bastogne by truck, an essential road centre. Although ill-equipped to battle tanks and surrounded by the enemy, the division denied the Panzers access to the town and blocked the advance. American and British counterattacks forced the retreat of four leading Panzer divisions, and by 16 January the front was restored.

The United States had suffered nineteen thousand fatalities and had had a further fifteen thousand men taken prisoner. The losses were heavy, but could be made good, while German losses of one hundred thousand men killed, wounded or captured were irreplaceable. They had also lost a crucial eight hundred tanks and a thousand planes. Autumn Mist had shaken the Allies, and caused a brief delay, but at the high cost to the Germans of denying men and equipment to the eastern campaign against the Red Army.

The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler’s last gamble, and he had lost.
[132]

The Thunderbirds were taken off the line on 18 February, after eighty-six days of combat in Alsace and Germany. It fell back to the region around Epinal to rest and resupply. Stories circulated throughout the division about the wholesale massacre by the SS of unarmed American POWs at Malmédy. When the division went back into battle after a month, attitudes had hardened.

The 180th Infantry crossed the Blies river on 15 March, and the following day the Thunderbirds reached the Siegfried Line, which crumbled before its assault. Six days later the infantry crossed the Rhine. Once inside Germany, Michel was transferred to the Counter Intelligence Corps because of his fluent German and interrogation skills. This operated on a divisional rather than a regimental level, and gave him enormous freedom of action. He became famous for running a one-man intelligence organisation within the organisation. However, it was stressed that no one outside CIC should be informed that Michel was not an American citizen, and that his reports should be signed by his senior officers.
[133]

After crossing the Main river, an eight-kilometre front just south of Aschaffenburg was established. The battle for the city exemplified the type of suicidal, last-ditch defensive action the German Army was still prepared to undertake. Wounded German soldiers from five military hospitals in the region were ordered from their beds for the final battle. Aschaffenburg had a fanatical SS major as commander who organised old men, women and even children into defence squads, and ordered the hanging of those officers who suggested surrender. Their bodies were still swinging from the lamp-posts when the Thunderbirds entered the town. One young German lieutenant had a sign attached to his body: COWARDS AND TRAITORS HANG!
[134]
As the GIs moved from street to street, fighting in the blistering heat of burning buildings, teenage girls lobbed grenades from rooftops.

In retaliation, the Allied command ordered that the garrison be annihilated and the heavily fortified city wiped from the face of the map. Artillerymen poured shells into the city and Thunderbolt pilots from the 1st Tactical Air Force rained down bombs until there was nothing left but a smoking ruin. At the end of a week of battle the German commander did what he had executed his officers for suggesting, and came out with a white flag and surrendered. It was the division’s toughest fight inside Germany, in which fifteen hundred Germans were killed and another three thousand captured.
[135]

‘After the fighting I got into what was left of the city hall. There was all this German money in one of the offices in what was part walk-in closet, part safe. Oh God, a lot of money! Wads and wads of it. Of course, the Germans wouldn’t take it and the Americans couldn’t use it. It was worthless. I had the idea as a joke of wallpapering a room with it, and filled a suitcase. I called it my wallpaper money.’ The GIs with him threw wads of cash into a fire to keep warm, and lit cigarettes with high-denomination notes. We also discovered a cave full of thousands of bottles of French wine and cognac. It was put under guard and requisitioned. It was not left behind.’

As the US Army moved from town to town, a system developed. Towns that were directly on the front line were evacuated, while others cleared of the enemy had a strict curfew imposed upon them. No unauthorised person could be out on the streets after dark, and it was ordered that buildings and streetlights should be blacked out.