The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (30 page)

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 class 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 analogy, 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.

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. Günter 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 hitched 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 brass 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 hell behind us.” He quickly discovered that the boundaries of hell 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. 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 bloody 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 fucked 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 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 bumper-to-bumper 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.-Lô 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.