The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (42 page)

Individual movement by day was dangerous. At night trucks rolled up, on both sides, bringing ammunition and food, carrying out wounded. The houses, public buildings, and the church were in ruins. The dead, including some hundred civilians, lay in the streets. There was hand-to-hand fighting with knives, room-to-room fighting with pistols, rifles, and bazookas. Attacks and counterattacks took place regularly.

On January 21, Seventh Army ordered the much depleted 79th and 14th Armored Divisions to retreat from Rittershoffen. The Americans abandoned the Maginot Line and fell back on new positions along the Moder River. Luck only realized they had gone in the morning. He walked around the village, unbelieving. At the church, he crawled through the wreckage to the altar, which lay in ruins. But in its place behind the altar, the organ was undamaged. Luck directed one of his men to tread the bellows, sat down at the organ, and played Bach’s choraleDanket Alle Gott . The sound resounded through the village. German soldiers and the civilians of Rittershoffen gathered, knelt, prayed, sang.  Fifty years later I was in Rittershoffen with Luck and a half-dozen of his men, along with some American veterans of the battle. The mayor invited Luck to the new church, sat him down at the organ, and once again he played Bach.  Overall, the Northwind offensive was a failure. The Germans never got near Strasbourg, nor could they cut American supply lines. It was costly to both sides: Seventh Army’s losses in January were 11,609 battle casualties plus 2,836 cases of trench foot. German losses were around 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing (Seventh Army processed some 5,985 German POWs).  For the front-line infantry, armor, and artillery of U.S. First and Third Armies, it was one of the most god-awful offensives of this or any other war.  All but forgotten today, the battle that raged through January was for the GIs among the worst of the war, if possible even more miserable than Hurtgen or Metz. There was no glamour, little drama, zero maneuver. It was just straight-ahead attack, designed to eliminate the Bulge and then return to the German border. It was fought in conditions so terrible that they can only be marveled at, not really imagined. Only those who were there can know. More than once in interviewing veterans of the January fighting, when I ask them to describe the cold, men have involuntarily shivered.  These were the combat soldiers of ETO. At this time they numbered about 300,000.  Perhaps half the enlisted were veterans, including replacements or men in divisions who had come into the battle in November or December and many who had been wounded once or twice. In the junior officer ranks, the turnover had been even greater, almost three-quarters. Still there was a corps of veterans in most of the divisions, including junior officers who had won battlefield promotions-the highest honor a soldier can receive, and the source of outstanding junior officers-and sergeants, most of whom by this stage were the privates of Normandy, St.-Lô, Falaise, Holland, and the Bulge, survivors who had moved up when the original NCOs were killed or wounded. These newly made lieutenants and sergeants, some of them teenage boys, most of them in their early twenties, provided the core leadership that got the U.S. Army through that terrible January.

Two themes dominate the memories of the men who fought these battles: the cold and American artillery. Every veteran I’ve ever interviewed, from whatever side, agrees that this was the coldest they had ever been, but disagrees on firepower:

Each man insists that the other guy had more artillery. GIs can remember shellings that never seemed to have an end; so can the British troops. The GIs and their division, army, and army group commanders complained of a shortage of artillery shells (to which complaint the War Department answered, you are shooting too often), but in fact the Americans had twice as much and more artillery ammunition than the Germans.

This was a triumph of American industry and of the American way of war. This battle was raging along Germany’s border. German shells had to travel from a hundred to only a couple of dozen kilometers to reach German guns on the front line. American shells had to travel thousands of kilometers to get there. But such was American productivity, many more American than German shells were arriving. The German attempt to cut Allied supply lines with their submarines had failed; the Allied attempt to cut German supply lines with their Jabos had great success. So the Americans banged away, confident that more shells were on the way. The Germans husbanded their shells, uncertain if any more would ever arrive.

As to the cold, all suffered equally. How cold was it? So cold that if a man didn’t do his business in a hurry he risked a frostbitten penis. So cold that Pvt. Don Schoo, an anti-aircraft gunner attached to the 4th Armored Division, recalled, “I was due on guard and went out to my half track to relieve the man on guard. He couldn’t get out of the gun turret. His overcoat was wet when he got in and it froze so he couldn’t get out.” It was so cold the oil in the engines froze. Weapons froze. Men pissed on them to get them working again, a good temporary solution but one that played hell with the weapon.  Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd Airborne wore layers of wool sweaters and overcoats and cut holes in his mummy-type sleeping bag so he could wear that, too. He had modified his wool gloves by slitting the fingers and sewing them together, except for the thumb and trigger finger, thus making them modified mittens. “Even with all this damn clothing, I never was warm,” he recalled. Good luck: He acquired a long-haired German dog from a company of German soldiers his platoon had ambushed in a railroad cut. Schlemmer named the dog Adolph. He was Schlemmer’s sleeping companion: “We’d curl up against each other wherever we could find a place to sleep.”

Nights ranged from zero degrees Fahrenheit to minus ten and lower. Men without shelter-other than a foxhole-or heat either stayed awake, stomping their feet, through the fourteen-hour night, or they froze. Maj. John Harrison had as one of his most vivid memories of that January the sight of GIs pressed against the hot stones of the walls of burning houses, as flames came out of the roof and windows. They were not hiding from Germans; they were trying to get warm for a minute or two.

The GIs, and the Germans opposite them, went through worse physical misery than the men of Valley Forge. Washington’s troops had tents, some huts, fires to warm by and provide hot food. They were not involved in continuous battle. By contrast, the conditions in Northwest Europe in January 1945 were as brutal as any in history, including the French and the German retreats from Moscow in midwinter, 1812 and 1941.

Another characteristic of the January fighting was the horror created by a high incidence of bodies crushed by tanks. Men slipped, tanks skidded. The wounded couldn’t get out of the way. Twenty-year-old Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 82nd Airborne saw a fellow paratrooper who had been run over by a tank. “If it hadn’t been for the two pair of legs and boots sticking out of all the gore, it would have been hard to tell what it was. I looked away and thought for sure that I was going to vomit. I just wanted to throw my weapon away and tell them I quit.  No more, I just can’t take no more.”

There was an awfulness about the fighting on the Western Front in 1945 that cannot be exaggerated. For the Germans, old men and boys mostly, it made no sense to be fighting the Americans while the Red Army invaded their homeland from the east. For the Americans, it was obvious that they had won the war, except that the damned Krauts kept fighting. For the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, it seemed unfair that after having stopped the Germans cold it fell to them to undertake offensive action to finish the job. When replacements arrived at his company CP, bringing it up to strength in preparation for an attack, Sgt. John Martin of the 101st confessed, “I could not believe it. I could not believe that they were going to give us replacements and put us on the attack. I figured, Jesus, they’ll take us out of here and give us some clothes or something. But, no, they get you some replacements and ‘Come on boys, let’s go.’ And then that’s when we start attacking.”

It was the policy of the U.S. Army to keep its rifle companies on the line for long periods, continuously in the case of the companies in infantry divisions, making up losses by individual replacement. This meant the veteran could look forward to a release from the dangers threatening him only through death or serious wound. This created a situation of endlessness and hopelessness.  Combat is a topsy-turvy world. Perfect strangers are going to great lengths to kill you; if they succeed, far from being punished for taking life, they will be rewarded, honored, celebrated. In combat, men stay underground in daylight and do their work in the dark. Good health is a curse; trench foot, pneumonia, severe uncontrollable diarrhea, a broken leg are priceless gifts.  There is a limit to how long a man can function effectively in this topsy-turvy world. For some, mental breakdown comes early; Army psychiatrists found that in Normandy between 10 and 20 percent of the men in rifle companies suffered some form of mental disorder during the first week, and either fled or had to be taken out of the line (many, of course, returned to their units later). For others, visible breakdown never occurs, but nevertheless effectiveness breaks down. The experiences of men in combat produce emotions stronger than civilians can know-emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness-and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability.  “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat,’ “ the army psychiatrists stated in an official report on combat exhaustion. “Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure . . . psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare. . . .Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless.”

But what could Eisenhower do? If he pulled his veterans out of the line, his rookies would take heavier losses for less gain. This was because for sure Hitler wasn’t pulling back or giving his veterans a well-deserved rest. What Eisenhower saw was a German army that still had a fighting quality to it, supported by a steady flow of new and excellent equipment from the German industrial heartland along the Rhine River. At the end of January, Eisenhower told Marshall that “there is a noticeable and fanatical zeal on the part of nearly all German fighting men as well as the whole nation of 85 million people, successfully united by terror from within and fear of consequences from without.”

He had it right and put it perfectly. The Germans knew what they had done as the conquerors and occupiers of Europe, and thus what they could expect when it was their turn to be conquered and occupied. As to terror, deserters could expect to be hanged and their families sent to concentration camps. The Nazi Party was still feared and obeyed. So long as Hitler was alive, it would be. Until then, the Germans would fight.

Eisenhower preferred to fight them west of the Rhine, and to close to the river from the Swiss border to Arnhem. At that point he could pull twenty divisions out of the line to create a reserve force that would then be capable of exploiting any opportunity that came along. “If we jam our head up against a concentrated defense at a selected spot,” he said, “we must be able to go forward elsewhere. Flexibility requires reserves.” By this stage of the war, flexibility was Eisenhower’s outstanding tactical quality. What he had learned in the preceding twenty-eight months of combat was to expect to be surprised and to be ready to seize opportunities.

Conditions in the February fighting were different from January, yet just as miserable in their own way. A battalion surgeon in the 90th Division described them: “It was cold, but not quite cold enough to freeze, this February in 1945.  Rain fell continually and things were in a muddy mess. Most of us were mud from head to foot, unshaven, tired and plagued by recurrent epidemic severe diarrhea.  . . . It was miserable to have to jump from one’s blankets three or four times a night, hastily put on boots, run outside into the cold and rain and wade through the mud in the dark to the straddle pit. As likely as not the enemy would be shelling the area, and that did not help.” He noted that the diarrhea was accompanied by severe abdominal cramps, vomiting, and fever.  “As usual, it was the infantrymen who really suffered in the nasty fighting.  Cold, wetness, mud and hunger day after day; vicious attack and counterattack; sleepless nights in muddy foxholes; and the unending rain made their life a special hell.” They were hungry because, much of the time, supply trucks could not get to them. Between heavy army traffic and the rain, the roads were impassable. The engineers worked feverishly day and night throwing rocks and logs into the morasses, but it was a losing battle.  On February 2, General Patton, plagued by impossible roads, ordered dogsled teams flown in from Labrador. His idea was to use them to evacuate wounded in the snow. By the time the first team arrived, however, the snow had melted, so the dogs were never used.

What was unendurable, the GIs endured. What had been true on June 6, 1944, and every day thereafter was still true: the quickest route to the most desirable place in the world-Home!-led to the east. So they sucked it up and stayed with it and were rightly proud of themselves for so doing. Pvt. Jim Underkofler, a former ASTPer, was in the 104th Division. Its CO was the legendary Gen. Terry Allen; its nickname was the Timberwolf Division; its motto was “Nothing in Hell will stop the Timberwolves.”

“That might sound corny,” Underkofler said in a 1996 interview, “but it was sort of a symbolic expression of attitude. Morale was extremely important. I mean, man alive, the conditions were often so deplorable that we had nothing else to go on, but your own morale. You know you’re sitting there in a foxhole rubbing your buddy’s feet, and he’s rubbing yours so you don’t get trench foot. That’s only an example of the kind of relationship and camaraderie we had.” The straight line between Aachen and Cologne ran through Düren, on the east bank of the Roer River. But rather than going directly, Bradley ordered the main effort made with the veterans from Elsenborn Ridge and the Battle of the Bulge, through a corridor some seventeen kilometers wide south of the dreaded Hurtgen Forest. By so doing, the Americans would arrive at the Roer upstream from the dams and thus, once across the river, be free to advance over the Cologne Plain to the Rhine without danger of controlled flooding. The first task was to get through the Siegfried Line, still a formidable obstacle although in many places devoid of troops to utilize it. And every veteran in an ETO combat unit was well aware that this was where the Germans had stopped them in September 1944.  The generals were enthusiastic for this one. Gen. Walter Lauer, commanding the 99th Division, paid a pre-attack call on Sgt. Oakley Honey’s C Company, 395th Regiment. Honey recalled that Lauer stood on the hood of a jeep, had the men gather around him, and gave a speech, saying, “We had fought the Krauts in the woods and the mountains and had beaten them. Now we were going to get a chance to fight them in the open.” Honey commented, “Whoopee! Everyone was overjoyed.” He added sarcastically, “You could tell by the long faces.” Lauer went on: “We are in for a lot of new experiences and we are happy-happy because we are, at long last, to go on the offensive.” Sgt. Vernon Swanson’s comment: “How can a man be happier than that?”