“I have a hunch,” wrote Ernie Pyle, “that July 25 of the year 1944 will be one of the great historic pinnacles of this war.” Like so many of Pyle’s hunches, this was right. For that was the day of the great break-through that opened the road to Paris—and beyond to the Rhine.
When Cherbourg and the Cotetin Peninsula had been won, the American armies turned south, broke through the German left flank at Avranches, drove into Brittany, swung around and outflanked Paris from the South. Two weeks of savage fighting had won Saint Lo, on July 18, opening the way to a breach of the German lines. The break-through began with a tremendous bombardment by 3,000 planes and a sustained artillery bombardment west of Saint Lo. Ernie Pyle tells of that stupendous bombardment, and one of its tragic aspects:
Surely history will give a name to the battle that sent us boiling out of Normandy, some name comparable with Saint-Mihiel or Meuse-Argonne of the last war. But to us there on the spot at the time it was known simply as the “break-through. . . .” One evening Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, commanding all American troops in France, came to our camp and briefed us on the coming operation. It would start, he said, on the first day we had three hours of good flying weather in the forenoon. . . .
The general told us the attack would cover a segment of the German line west of Saint Lo, about five miles wide. In that narrow segment we would have three infantry divisions, side by side. Right behind them would be another infantry and two armored divisions. Once a hole was broken, the armored divisions would slam through several miles beyond, then turn right toward the sea behind the Germans in that sector in the hope of cutting them off and trapping them. The remainder of our line on both sides of the attack would keep the pressure on to hold the Germans in front of them so they couldn’t send reinforcements against our main push.
The attack was to open with a gigantic two-hour air bombardment by 1,800 planes—the biggest ever attempted by air in direct support of ground troops. It would start with dive bombers, then great four-motored heavies would come, and then mediums, then dive bombers again, and then the ground troops would kick off, with air fighters continuing to work ahead of them. It was a thrilling plan to listen to. General Bradley didn’t tell us that it was the big thing, but other officers gave us the word. They said, “This is no limited objective drive. This is it. This is the big breakthrough. . . .”
The attack was on. It was July 25.
If you don’t have July 25 pasted in your hat I would advise you to put it there immediately. At least paste it in your mind. For I have a hunch that July 25 of the year 1944 will be one of the great historic pinnacles of this war. It was the day we began a mighty surge out of our confined Normandy spaces, the day we stopped calling our area the beachhead and knew we were fighting a war across the whole expanse of France. From that day onward all dread possibilities and fears for disaster to our invasion were behind us. No longer was there any possibility of our getting kicked
Off. No longer would it be possible for fate, or weather, or enemy to wound us fatally; from that day onward the future could hold nothing for us but growing strength and eventual victory. . . .
By field telephone, radio, and liaison men, word was passed down to the very smallest unit of troops that the attack was on. There was still an hour before the bombers, and three hours before the infantry were to move. There was nothing for the infantry to do but dig a little deeper and wait. A cessation of motion seemed to come over the countryside and all its brown-clad inhabitants, a sense of last-minute sitting in silence before the holocaust.
The first planes of the mass onslaught came over a little before 10 a. m. They were the fighters and dive bombers. The main road, running crosswise in front of us, was their bomb line. They were to bomb only on the far side of that road. Our kickoff infantry had been pulled back a few hundred yards from the near side of the road. Everyone in the area had been given the strictest orders to be in foxholes, for high-level bombers can, and do quite excusably, make mistakes. . . .
Our front lines were marked by long strips of colored cloth laid on the ground, and with colored smoke to guide our airmen during the mass bombing. Dive bombers hit it just right. We stood and watched them barrel nearly straight down out of the sky. They were bombing about half a mile ahead of where we stood. They came in groups, diving from every direction, perfectly timed, one right after another. Everywhere we looked separate groups of planes were on the way down, or on the way back up, or slanting over for a dive, or circling, circling, circling over our heads, waiting for their turn.
The air was full of sharp and distinct sounds of cracking bombs and the heavy rips of the planes’ machine guns and the splitting screams of diving wings. It was all fast and furious, yet distinct. And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears, a sound deep and all-encompassing with no notes in it—just a gigantic faraway surge of doomlike sound. It was the heavies. They came from directly behind us. At first they were the merest dots in the sky. We could see clots of them against the far heavens, too tiny to count individually. They came on with a terrible slowness. They came in flights of twelve, three flights to a group and in groups stretched out across the sky. They came in “families” of about seventy planes each. Maybe those gigantic waves were two miles apart, maybe they were ten miles, I don’t know. But I do know they came in a constant procession and I thought it would never end. What the Germans must have thought is beyond comprehension.
The flight across the sky was slow and studied. I’ve never known a storm, or a machine, or any resolve of man that had about it the aura of such a ghastly relentlessness. I had the feeling that even had God appeared beseechingly before them in the sky, with palms outstretched to persuade them back, they would not have had within them the power to turn from their irresistible course. . . .
The Germans began to shoot heavy, high ack-ack. Great black puffs of it by the score speckled the sky until it was hard to distinguish smoke puffs from planes. And then someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched
Straight for a mile behind one of them. And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves, this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz. Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward, steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth—a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation—and disappeared behind the treetops. But before it was down there were more cries of, “There’s another one smoking—and there’s a third one now.” Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.
And all that time the great flat ceiling of the sky was roofed by all the other planes that didn’t go down, plowing their way forward as if there were no turmoil in the world. Nothing deviated them by the slightest. They stalked on, slowly and with a dreadful pall of sound, as though they were seeing only something at a great distance and nothing existed between. God, how we admired those men up there and sickened for the ones who fell.
It is possible to become so enthralled by some of the spectacles of war that a man is momentarily captivated away from his own danger. That’s what happened to our little group of soldiers as we stood watching the mighty bombing. But that benign state didn’t last long. As we watched, there crept into our consciousness a realization that the windrows of exploding bombs were easing back toward us, flight by flight, instead of gradually forward, as the plan called for. Then we were horrified by the suspicion that those machines, high in the sky and completely detached from us, were aiming their bombs at the smoke line on the ground—and a gentle breeze was drifting the smoke line back over us! . . . And then all of an instant the universe became filled with a gigantic rattling as of huge ripe seeds in a mammoth dry gourd. I doubt that any of us had ever heard that sound before, but instinct told us what it was. It was bombs by the hundred, hurtling down through the air above us.
Many times I’ve heard bombs whistle or swish or rustle, but never before had I heard bombs rattle. I still don’t know the explanation of it. But it is an awful sound. We dived. Some got into a dugout. Others made foxholes and ditches and some got behind a garden wall—although which side would be “behind” was anybody’s guess. I was too late for the dugout. The nearest place was a wagon shed which formed one end of the stone house. The rattle was right down upon us. I remember hitting the ground flat, all spread out like the cartoons of people flattened by steam rollers, and then squirming like an eel to get under one of the heavy wagons in the shed.
An officer whom I didn’t know was wriggling beside me. We stopped at the same time, simultaneously feeling it was hopeless to move farther. The bombs were already crashing around us. We lay with our heads slightly up—like two snakes—staring at each other. I know it was in both our minds and in our eyes, asking each other what to do. Neither of us knew.
We said nothing. We just lay sprawled, gaping at each other in a futile appeal, our faces about a foot apart, until it was over.
There is no description of the sound and fury of those bombs except to say it was chaos, and a waiting for darkness. The feeling of the blast was sensational. The air struck us in hundreds of continuing flutters. Our ears drummed and rang. We could feel quick little waves of concussion on the chest and in the eyes.
At last the sound died down and we looked at each other in disbelief. Gradually we left the foxholes and sprawling places and came out to see what the sky had in store for us. As far as we could see other waves were approaching from behind. When a wave would pass a little to the side of us we were garrulously grateful, for most of them flew directly overhead. Time and again the rattle came down over us. Bombs struck in the orchard to our left. They struck in orchards ahead of us. They struck as far as half a mile behind us. Everything about us was shaken, but our group came through unhurt. . . .
When we came out of our ignominious sprawling and stood up again to watch, we knew that the error had been caught and checked. The bombs again were falling where they were intended, a mile or so ahead. Even at a mile away a thousand bombs hitting within a few seconds can shake the earth and shatter the air. There was still a dread in our hearts, but it gradually eased as the tumult and destruction moved slowly forward.
Long before, the German ack-ack guns had gone out of existence. The ack-ack gunners either took to their holes or were annihilated. How many waves of heavy bombers we put over I have no idea. There were supposed to be 1,800 planes that day, and I believe it was announced later that there were more than 3,000. It seems incredible to me that any German could have come out of that bombardment with his sanity. When it was over I was grateful, in a chastened way that I had never before experienced, for just being alive.
I thought an attack by our troops was impossible then, for it is an unnerving thing to be bombed by your own planes. During the bad part a colonel I had known a long time was walking up and down behind the farmhouse, snapping his fingers and saying over and over to himself, “Goddammit, goddammit!” As he passed me once he stopped and stared and said, “Goddammit!”
And I said, “There can’t be any attack now, can there?” and he said, “No,” and began walking again, snapping his fingers and tossing his arm as though he were throwing rocks at the ground.
The leading company of our battalion was to spearhead the attack forty minutes after our heavy bombing ceased. The company had been hit directly by our bombs. Their casualties, including casualties in shock, were heavy. Men went to pieces and had to be sent back. The company was shattered and shaken. And yet Company B attacked—and on time, to the minute! They attacked, and within an hour they sent word back that they had advanced 800 yards through German territory and were still going. Around our farmhouse men with stars on their shoulders almost wept when the word came over the portable radio. The American soldier can be majestic when he needs to be.
I’m sure that back in England that night other men—bomber crews—
Almost wept, and maybe they did really, in the awful knowledge that they had killed our own American troops. But the chaos and the bitterness there in the orchards and between the hedgerows that afternoon soon passed. After the bitterness came the remembrance that the Air Force was the strong right arm in front of us. Not only at the beginning, but ceaselessly and everlastingly, every moment of the faintest daylight, the Air Force was up there banging away ahead of us.
Anybody makes mistakes. The enemy made them just the same as we did. The smoke and confusion of battle bewildered us on the ground as well as in the air. And in this case the percentage of error was really very small compared with the colossal storm of bombs that fell upon the enemy. The Air Force was wonderful throughout the invasion, and the men on the ground appreciated it.®
During this aerial bombardment the Eighth Air Force dropped 3,400 tons of bombs in a single hour; the Ninth followed with another 1,000 tons. Then came a tremendous artillery barrage. When this lifted, the infantry-tank attack was launched. Everett Hollis describes it:
They bounded over the hedgerows, pulled by bull-dozers, or they cut straight through the hedgerows by means of a device invented by Sergeant Curtis G. Colin of Cranford, N. J., who hit upon the idea of taking the tetrahedrons of angle-iron which the Germans had installed on the Normandy beaches and transforming them into cutting blades. Four of these blades, jutting out in front of a tank, were enough to cut through a goodsized hedgerow. The tanks equipped with Colin’s contrivance were known as “rhino tanks,” and came to be an accepted item of army ordnance.
Infantrymen rode into the attack atop the tanks, and behind them came more trucks and half-tracks laden with more infantry. The whole idea was to cram as many men and tanks as possible through the German “crust.” It worked, and the tanks, after breaking through into the open country, fanned out in every direction—to the west toward Coutances to slam some seven German divisions up against the western wall of the Normandy peninsula, and to the south and east where a 20-mile bulge was driven into the enemy positions. Over to the east, meanwhile. General Montgomery sent his British crashing against the stout German defenses south and west of Caen, mainly to the south toward Falaise. This was an important contribution to the grand success of Bradley’s offensive, for it served to tie down the major part of the Germans’ strength, including six of the eight Panzer divisions then on the Normandy front.
The Germans held on just outside Saint Lo for almost a week, wrecking what was left of the town with their mortars and artillery, but the momentum of the Americans could not be broken and it finally carried across the Saint Lo-Periers road and took a firm hold on the middle base of the peninsula. On July 31 the Americans were at Avranches, leaving Normandy behind and entering Brittany.®
“We’ve really broken the bottleneck on the beachhead,” said a commentator, and so it seemed. For, as Everett Hollis added:
The advance shot across French soil like a thunderbolt. This was the kind of an attack that destroys armies and wins wars, not just battles. From Avranches, the American tanks raced across the 100-mile base of the Brittany peninsula and down to the Bay of Biscay in less than a week and approached the port of Saint Nazaire. All of Brittany was sealed off, with its great ports of Brest, Lorient, Saint Malo, Nantes and their German garrisons. Some thirteen German divisions were either trapped or decimated, and, in the two weeks after Bradley’s rocket shot out from Saint Lo, the Wehrmacht lost some 250,000 men, including prisoners.
Tank spearheads reached out toward Saint Nazaire and up through the middle of the Brittany peninsula toward Brest. They sent word back asking for instructions to their objectives.
“To hell with objectives, keep going!” was the answer that came from one American commander.
And while Bradley sent his tanks racing up into Brittany and down to the Loire River, another column cut eastward in a bold drive pointed directly at Paris. Le Mans was the immediate goal; an important railroad hub, its lines led straight to Paris 110 miles further on. The Germans were fighting to escape annihilation in a triangle that had as its base the line across Brittany, as its sides the Seine and the Loire, and its apex—Paris.
It was at this crucial point that General Eisenhower and General Bradley hit upon an idea that was sternly criticized on many sides at the time, but which turned out to be one of those bold and brilliant strokes that thrusts its authors into the ranks of the masters of warfare.
The Third Army had bumped up against stubborn German resistance around the Breton ports—this was not Nazi fanaticism but part of a shrewd German plan that was to give us plenty of trouble for months to come— and to overcome this resistance might require weeks of valuable time and large forces of men. The Germans defending the ports were hopelessly cut off and so Eisenhower, after talking it over with Bradley and Montgomery, decided to contain the ports with relatively small forces while he turned his main strength eastward to smash the already disorganized German Seventy Army and encircle Paris.
Not many generals would have given up the prospect of securing the big new ports, which the Allies needed so desperately at that moment for supplies, and chosen to gamble on a drive way across France with only the still crippled port of Cherbourg and the beaches to rely upon.*®
The Germans, threatened with an unexpected attack from the south and—when the British broke through—ultimate encirclement, struck back. They tried to cut the American corridor to Avranches. They did succeed in penetrating it, but not in cutting it: even had they done so their position would not have been substantially improved. For four days German armor
Thrust at the American lines, while American planes and artillery subjected them to incessant bombardment. Then, even as this German counterattack was going on, the British and Canadians broke through at Falaise to meet Americans coming up from Argentan and close a trap upon the German Seventh Army. In four days, August 19-23, the remnants of the Seventh Army were destroyed.
Now the road to Paris was open.
The Liberation of Paris
After the destruction of the German Seventh Army, Patton’s forces swept forward on a broad front towards the Seine. By the 19th two columns had reached that river north of Paris; another column swung toward the great city from the south through Chartres in time to save the glorious cathedral there from irreparable damage; still another spearheaded to the south through Orleans and the Loire Valley. By the 20th American soldiers could see the beckoning spire of the Eiffel Tower.
With liberation so near, the Parisians rose:
Fragmentary broadcasts came out of Paris those first few days of hysteria, but none was more eloquent than one caught by the CBS short wave Listening Post at 6:03 p. m. EWT on August 24. You had to put on stethoscope headphones to hear it:
A voice on Radio France, inside the city, seems to announce the evening program. It blurs. Then you hear “We will use our last energies for the final struggle.” Again a blur: then—“It is the duty of all Frenchmen to participate in the fight against the Germans.”
Someone says something about one Georges Bidault, president of the French National Resistance Council. . . and he says: “Paris is liberated. It has liberated itself.”
And suddenly over his voice you hear the machine guns. He resumes: “The Parisians have risen in irresistible spirit. The shame and treason are over. ... I address, by radio, France, and the world.” Then you hear the heavy guns.
At 6:20 the voice fades under a German voice—the Boche is jamming the wave-length. Presently another French voice says “the engineer is going to work.” He apparently did, for at 6:38 Radio France is back on the air, saying “The street does not belong tonight to the joy of the people, but to the fighters. . . nearby barricades...” then WHAM—shooting, very nearby. Then: “. . . the morale is excellent, the people are confident, they have erected barricades. We will give you the news as soon as we get it.” Then somebody quotes from a play about the French Revolution, the voice fades, and you hear music: Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre, and Aupres de ma blonde. The silence.
Next day at 2 p. m. General Leclerc announced the surrender of the Germans in Paris in a scrubby baggage room at the Gare Montparnasse.
“Paris,” said Larry Lesueur, “is certainly the happiest city in the world tonight.” Unrestrained even by snipers’ bullets, the celebrations continued for three days, reaching a delirious climax as General Eisenhower reviewed French, British, and American troops marching through the Arc de Triomphe. That joy was shared, too, by people everywhere in the world. Writing from London that shrewd observer, Raymond Daniell, interpreted the significance of the liberation:
Paris is... a token of a great nation freed and risen. . . but it is also a symbol of the resurgence in the minds of men in Europe of the spirit of liberty. Surrendered undefended to the Germans four years ago Paris was a warning of an impending defeat for freedom everywhere. Liberated now with the help of her own people, this French city on the Seine, where the dream of the dignity of man reached its first flowering, is a portent of Allied victory in the global war to free mankind from the new tyranny of authoritarianism.
The political, psychological and military value of Paris cannot be overestimated. But there is a liability as well. Having wrested the French capital from the Germans we must feed its more than 2,000,000 people hungry after weeks of siege. That, added to the task of keeping our fast-moving armies supplied with food, gasoline and ammunition, will not be an easy task. But it is one that must be done and done well if we are to retain the confidence of the French that we have today.
The exigencies of war and our strategy have been combined at present to give us credit for very gracious behavior. It suited our military ends to allow the French to assert themselves, and for that the people of France and all the little countries who were concerned about the motives of the big powers are grateful and relieved.
And it was a gesture that will not soon be forgotten in France that the first troops to go to the rescue of the underground forces who had tried to break the Germans hold on their beloved city were soldiers of France who had followed Brig. Gen. Jacques-Philippe Leclerc from Chadec in Africa to the final rescue of Paris.
Invasion from the South
Even as the Germans were fighting desperately to extricate their battered armies from Normandy and trying to pull out of Paris, they were confronted with new difficulties. On August 15 a powerful Allied army landed on the coast of southern France and swept swiftly inland to effect a Juncture with the armies of the north.
All through the first two weeks of August bombers from Italy and Corsica had hammered on the French coast, while another great fleet gathered in Mediterranean waters to escort an invasion army. Then on the night and early morning of August 15 came a tremendous air and naval bombardment.
The landing was “the war’s worst kept secret” but opposition was slight. Paratroopers who had been dropped inland to seize roads and bridges and disorganize enemy counter-measures, found little to do.
Prime Minister Churchill, sitting on the bridge of the Kimberley, watched the invasion with satisfaction. Only two weak divisions were encountered by the Seventh Army, and these were promptly gobbled up. Leaving the reduction of the great ports of Marseilles and Toulon to the FFI, which here performed its most effective service. General Patch’s men swept forward with spectacular speed. Within two weeks they had occupied the great industrial city of Lyon, and were pushing on to the Belfort Gap, gateway to southern Germany. As the FFI rose, the Germans were cleared out of all France south of the Loire except in some of the great ports like Bordeaux and St. Nazaire.
Into Germany
In the north the Allied armies had swept forward almost unopposed from the Seine to the Somme, the Marne and the Belgian border, through territory famous from the first World War. Third Army spearheads reached the historic Marne on August 28, drove through Chateau-Thierry, took Soissons and Rheims and the great fortress city of Verdun. To the north the First Army took Sedan at the Belgian border, and still farther north the British and Canadian armies of General Montgomery raced along the coast through Lille, into Belgium and to the Dutch border. The Battle for France was over; the Battle for Germany was about to begin.
On September II, as Roosevelt and Churchill conferred in the ancient city where Montcalm and Wolfe had once fought, the American First Army freed Luxembourg and pushed into the “sacred soil” of Germany. The British advanced into the Netherlands. Just one hundred days after the landings on Normandy, Allied armies along a 250-mile line from Os-tend to the Swiss border were poised for the invasion. To the German people General Eisenhower proclaimed:
We come as conquerors but not as oppressors. . . . We shall overthrow the Nazi rule, dissolve the Nazi party and abolish the cruel, oppressive and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created. We shall eradicate that German militarism which has so often disrupted the peace of the world.
There was hard fighting ahead before German militarism would be eradicated. In front of the Allied forces was the Siegfried Line, defended by an army probably as large, if not as well equipped, as Eisenhower’s. A frontal assault would be bloody. The High Command decided to make a bold attempt to outflank the Siegfried Line, just as the Germans had outflanked the Maginot Line in 1940. On September 17 came the spectacular air-borne invasion of Holland—a gamble which, if successful, might end the war. In the greatest operation of its kind in history the U. S. 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British 1st Airborne Divisions flew from bases in Britain.
The 82nd and 101st Divisions captured Eindhoven and key bridges across the Meuse and the Waal Rivers, but the British 1st Division, landing
Near Arnhem, were surrounded and overwhelmed. Everett Hollis tells of the paratroop landings and the fighting that followed:
Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton’s Anglo-American air army was dropped on three principal objectives. The first was around Eindhoven where American and Polish sky troops seized the main communications and joined up with General Dempsey’s force after diverting the Germans’ attention and enabling the Second Army to get across the Dutch border. The second point of landing was at Nijmegen where the Waal was broad and swift and spanned by a massive new steel and concrete bridge that was needed for the Allied heavy tanks. When the Americans landed on the south bank of the river, close by the tree-lined Hunerpark, they found themselves fully exposed to the raking fire of German anti-tank guns and snipers using the doors and windows of old Fort Belvedere, a pile of stone left over from Charlemagne’s reign. Assault on the fortress was impossible, so the Americans crouched behind whatever cover they could find until three British tanks tore up the road from Eindhoven, 20 miles to the south, and knocked out Belvedere’s guns. Then, in 26 rubber assault boats, they began crossing the river. By this time, a few pieces of British artillery had arrived from Eindhoven up through a perilously thin corridor under constant German fire, and began shelling the Germans on the north bank.
Each of the 26 rubber boats carried a dozen men, but after the first trip only 13 boats returned for more paratroopers. Some of the men paddled, others bailed with their canteen cups as German machine-gun bullets spat into the boats. The second time eight boats returned, one with three dead Americans and four wounded. After the third trip only five boats were left; they kept going.
Finally the American flag appeared at the northern end of the bridge, and the rest of the infantry stormed across, followed by tanks. There were several awful minutes, as the first tanks rumbled across, while the men waited to see whether German demolition charges would send tanks and steel girders flying into the air. But a young Dutch lieutenant, parachuting in with the first Americans, had telephoned to patriot friends inside Nijmegen (on a pay-station telephone). The patriots, who had waited through four years of slavery for just such a chance, quickly removed the detonators of the explosives strapped to the underspans.
Nijmegen went off like a dream, but at Arnhem on the Neder Rhine, 10 miles further north, the whole operation became a tragic nightmare.
The “Red Devils” of the First British Air-Borne division, carrying out the toughest of the three assignments because they would have the longest wait for the ground forces to catch up with them, came down just north of Arnhem. There were eight thousand of them, in bright red berets, led by Major General Robert Eliot Urquhart, a cheerful moustached Scot and at 42 one of the British army’s youngest generals.
The job of the British was to hold a bridgehead there across the Neder Rhine until the British Second Army came up overland. But the army never got there in any strength. It was stopped two miles beyond Nijmegen when the Germans, slashing in at the thin corridor from both sides, re-
Peatedly cut General Dempsey’s tenuous line of supply and communication. Only two regiments got through to the Neder Rhine, not enough to turn the battle.
Urquhart and his “Red Devils” ran into trouble before they could reach the bridge across the Neder Rhine. The Germans pressed them into a “little patch of hell,” about nine miles by five miles, and turned a concentrated, murderous fire of artillery, mortars and machine guns upon them. A few were able to take shelter in the ruins of houses, but most of the British had nothing more than open slit trenches. Tiger tanks drove at them from all sides; German flame-throwers cremated living men.
It lasted for nine days and nights, and all the time the “Red Devils” were being cut up into smaller groups, in packed patches of screeching shells, fire-spouting tanks, strafing planes, sleepless nights, foodless days. The food allotment was cut to one-sixth. Ammunition was rationed. The men had almost nothing left with which to fight. Finally they were shooting their pistols at German tanks. . . .
The Allied command gave the “Red Devils” what reinforcement it could, but it was pitifully inadequate. After the third day some Polish air-borne troops arrived. Transport planes from England flew in food and ammunition, dropping the supplies by parachute. Sometimes the planes were set afire by German ack-ack fire, but they flew in anyway. Then the weather turned so bad that few planes could get through.
On Monday, September 25, Urquhart passed the word among the bedraggled, bloody remnants of his men to destroy their equipment. They would try to escape that night. When darkness came the survivors, including wounded who were barely able to walk but determined not to be left behind and be captured, tied strips of blanket around their shoes so their footsteps would be silent. They formed an Indian file, each man clutching the coat-tail of the man ahead, and shuffled past the Germans’ guns still firing at the spot they had just left. Sometimes the tracer bullets almost scorched their ears. When they reached the river they lined up silently and waited their turns to cross in the few little assault boats sent over by the two second army battalions which had succeeded in reaching the southern shore of the Neder Rhine.
With their heads between their knees, ducking bullets, they rode across the river, gulped down some hot tea in a barn and walked all the rest of the night back to the stronger British positions outside Nijmegen. Several hundred of the men lined up along the north bank never got across. Daylight came, the Germans discovered what was going on and they were taken prisoners. One brigade lost its way to the river and was never heard from again. Another was macerated when it ran into a German column in the pitch-black night. All of the wounded who couldn’t make it to the river afoot had to be left behind, to fall into the Germans’ hands.
Eight thousand “Red Devils” came down at Arnhem; 2,000 of them came out alive. They had been through as much concentrated hell as any Allied soldier had had to face on the Western Front.
General Montgomery paid tribute to the handful of survivors: “There can be few episodes more glorious than this epic. ... In years to come it will be a great thing for a man to say, ‘I fought at Arnhem.’ ”
As the effort to turn the Siegfried Line failed, it was necessary to storm it by frontal assault. The first major attack was on Aachen, which most Americans knew as Aix-la-Chapelle, where more than a thousand years ago Charlemagne had been crowned. The attack launched on October 2 encountered savage resistance, and it took three weeks of air and artillery pounding and street-by-street fighting to force the decimated German garrison to surrender. It was the first major German city to fall.
To the north General Montgomery opened an offensive designed to free the great port of Antwerp. Amphibious landings on Walcheren Island cleared the Scheldt estuary, and the supply lines were open, though from then on the city was subjected to ceaseless buzz-bomb attacks. Then from Arnhem to Metz the war settled down to a slugging match: at the great Roer River dams, before Duren, in the Hurtgen forest, at the approaches to Cologne, at Echternach, and in the Saar. And in the last weeks of November and early December the Allies built up for an advance that should carry them across the Rhine.
The Battle of the Bulge
The Allies were prepared for a major attack. So, too, were the Germans. On December 15 General von Rundstedt issued an order of the day: “Soldiers of the West Front, your great hour has struck. Everything is at stake.” The next morning a tremendous artillery bombardment announced the most threatening German offensive of the war in the West.
The attack came through the rugged forests of the Ardennes. For von Rundstedt it was to be a repeat performance. Back in May, 1940, he had led his armored divisions through this country which the French had thought so unsuitable for armor that they left it practically defenseless. In three days he had reached the Meuse, crossed it, and broken through to the Channel coast. Now, again, German Intelligence found this area but lightly held. Three German armies were concentrated along the 90-mile front from Aachen to Echternach and all the planes the Luftwaffe could spare put at von Rundstedt’s disposal. A break-through here offered dazzling possibilities: the capture of Sedan to the south, of Namur and Liege to the north; even the capture of Brussels and Antwerp, which would split the Allied armies, was not beyond hope.
In 1940, in a similar situation, the French had retired. The Americans, confronted with an offensive of comparable magnitude, stood their ground and fought back. The German operation had been skillfully conceived and planned: in “Operation Greif’ German soldiers dressed as civilians, or in American army uniforms, dropped behind the American lines to carry out sabotage and to demoralize the defense. The saboteurs were rounded up, the defense was not demoralized.
The German offensive drove in three directions: the major attack was to the north through St. Vith to Liege and Antwerp; an attack on the center towards Bastogne, and an attack at the south from Enternach to-
Wards Sedan. The southern attack was stopped cold. To the north, in front of St. Vith, the Germans chewed up the green 106th Division, but were held up by a heroic defense of St. Vith. Progress in the center was most rapid. The 28th Division was sent reeling back on Bastogne and the Germans pushed confidently on toward the Meuse.
At Allied Headquarters the reaction was instantaneous. Reinforcements were rushed to the north, and the lines held. The famous 101st Airborne Division, then at a rest center behind the lines, was ordered to Bastogne to reinforce elements of the 9th and 10th Armored. General Patton swung his Third Army to the north, and sent the 4th Armored Division racing through Luxembourg and Arlon to Bastogne.
Bastogne, commanding a network of roads, was the key to the southern Ardennes. Without it the offensive in the center could not proceed. By December 19 the Germans had cut off the town from south and north, by the 22nd it was encircled. To a demand for surrender, Brigadier-General Anthony McAuliffe replied simply “nuts.” Gollie Small celebrates the epic of Bastogne:
The terrific momentum of Rundstedt’s attack carried fourteen miles the first day. Out on the network of roads to the east of Bastogne, the gray-green avalanche rolled toward its key objective. Infantry and armor tried desperately to hold, but the German tidal wave flowed over them and around them. One regiment of the 28th Division was cut off five times in three days. One by one, isolated units disappeared in the maelstrom. From one company command post somewhere out in the snowy forests, a radio operator reported that an enemy half-track had moved up alongside his building. . . .
Combat Command B [of the 10th Armored Division] tanks entered Bastogne at dusk. The big Shermans lumbered through the empty cobblestone streets and, without even pausing in the city, turned east to meet three elite German spearhead divisions driving toward Bastogne. In fog and darkness at 5:45 a. m. Combat Command B smashed into the enemy. The battle began on the roads with furious tank duels, and then fanned out into the fields and forests. Trading lives for time, the men of the heroic task force fought for thirty-six hours along a slowly bending arc stretched over three main roads, while the 101st Division slipped into Bastogne from the west.
The battle for Bastogne, which began on the roads to the east, spread from spoke to spoke in the Bastogne wheel. Balked in his attempt to storm the city frontally, von Rundstedt sent columns to the north and south of the town in a pincers movement. A regimental combat team, first unit of the 101st to arrive in Bastogne, raced out from the city to help the 10th Armored screen, while the rest of the airborne division moved into the town. . . .
By afternoon, the entire 101st Division was in position in and around Bastogne, dictating anchor points in the battle line by frequent jabs that forced the enemy to stop and hold at those points.
Five miles north of Bastogne, in the dead village of Noville, the 506th
Regiment of the 101st closed with a platoon of tank destroyers and other armored units to hold the town. German artillery was slamming into Noville with terrible precision. . . .
The night in Noville was eerie. The town was burning, and the men inside the village moved stealthily through the gutted buildings because of silhouettes against the dancing flames. Enemy troops moved around the town on three sides, and the sounds of movement carried on the cold night air until the doughboys inside the town were almost completely unnerved by the suspense.
At dawn, the German tanks attacked. Three Mark IV’s slipped into Noville through the fog. A Sherman completely out of armor-piercing shells stuck its snout out around the corner of a building and opened fire with high explosives. The Sherman rained shells on the hulls of the enemy tanks as fast as it could shoot, but each explosion on the thick German armor plate only served to knock the tank back a few feet. . . .
Like the curtain on a winter snow scene, the fog lifted with startling suddenness. There, deployed in an open field on the edge of Noville, sat six more German tanks. Three American tank destroyers opened fire. The enemy tanks tried to scoot over the brow of a near-by hill, but the unerring tank destroyers picked them off one by one, like ducks in a shooting gallery. . . .
Finally, the German ring around Bastogne was joined. The 101st, with elements of the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions and a small group of stragglers, was completely cut off.
The 101st had not fallen into a trap. General McAuliffe’s mission was to defend Bastogne. The encirclement was simply an occupational hazard.
A battering ram of tanks and infantry dispatched by General Patton broke through the encircling Germans. But the battle for the Ardennes was by no means over: indeed losses after Bastogne was relieved were heavier even than for the preceding ten days. The German advance was halted four miles east of the Meuse; during January the Germans were pushed steadily back, and by the end of the month all the ground lost in the offensive had been regained. The battle for the Ardennes, which had held out such promise for the Wehrmacht, was a costly failure. But it had done one thing: it had given Germany a breathing spell in which to reorganize her defenses.
Across the Rhine
“It is certain,” said Prime Minister Churchill in an address to the Commons on June 20, 1944, “that the whole eastern and western fronts and the long front in Italy. . . will now be kept henceforward in constant flame until the final climax is reached.” Already the Red Army was hammering on the Oder River front and flanking Germany from the south, and General Alexander’s armies swarming into the Po Valley. The air offensive, calculated to reduce every German city to rubble, was stepped up: in a single week in February, 17,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany—
More than twice the total tonnage dropped by the Luftwaffe in the whole blitz on Britain.
While the armies, east, west, and south, were getting ready for the kill, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta, in the Crimea, to draw up plans for the final offensive, reiterate demands for unconditional surrender, and formulate terms for the control of Germany. The communique said in part:
We have agreed on common policies and plans for enforcing the Unconditional Surrender terms which we will impose upon Germany. Those terms will not be made known until the final defeat of Germany has been accomplished. . . . The German people will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance. . . .
The forces of the three powers will each occupy a separate zone. Coordinated administration and control has been provided for. . . through a central control commission consisting of the supreme commanders of the three powers with headquarters in Berlin. . . . France will be invited by the three powers, if she should so desire, to take over a zone of occupation and to participate as a fourth member of the control commission.
By late February the pace of the Allied armies had quickened. On the 21st of that month the whole western transportation system of Germany was shattered by a gigantic bombing from no less than 7,000 planes. The next night the Allies crossed the Roer River, last water barrier before the Rhine. “The attacks we are seeing now,” said General Eisenhower, “should mark the beginning of the destruction of the German forces west of the Rhine.”
At midnight February 27 the assault on Cologne, already in ruins from repeated aerial poundings, began. On March 7 the city was in Allied hands. A task force of the 9th Armored Division moved up the left bank of the Rhine through the old university town of Bonn to the little town of Remagen—and found the bridge intact. Everett Hollis tells with what energy the Americans acted:
Lt. Col. Leonard Engemann of Minneapolis, in command of the reconnaissance party, was determined to save this bridge if it was at all possible. So, at 3:50 o’clock, a platoon led by Lieut. Emmett Burrows of New York City sped down slope to the bridge entrance. ... Just as they stepped on the span, an explosion occurred three-quarters of the way down the bridge. The Germans were setting off demolition charges, and the men thought surely their chance was gone. But no, only slight damage was done. They raced on. . . . Soon the bridge was swarming with Americans, while Mitchell, joined now by other engineers, cut and jerked out wires leading to dynamite charges. Gingerly they detached detonators and lifted boxes of explosives from the piers.
Later, from prisoners, the Americans learned that the Germans had planned to blow up the span at precisely four o’clock. But the German officer assigned to the demolition job was drunk when the American tanks reached Remagen. This officer, a lieutenant, had gone into the town of Erpel as the Yanks approached and spread the word boastfully that “the bridge goes up at four o’clock this afternoon.”
German soldiers and civilians, gathering from miles around, were sitting in “grandstand seats” at every vantage point on the east bank, waiting for the spectacular event to come off, when Burrows’ patrol ran onto the bridge—ten minutes before the hour fixed for its destruction. The German lieutenant signalled the plunger down. Two small explosions occurred, but the bridge only shuddered and remained standing. Several of the fuses had been faulty.
The men of the Ninth Armored Division had forced a fantastic break in the fortunes of war. They had seized a Rhine bridge intact.
The prompt exploitation of this opportunity was a tribute to the initiative as well as to the courage of the American soldier. Once across the Rhine, the First Army fanned out, seizing the superhighway running south to Munich, and threatening to drive north and take the Ruhr from the south and east. As the Germans hurried up reinforcements to plug the gap, they weakened their defenses elsewhere along the Rhine. Plans for a large-scale crossing of the Rhine further downstream were already completed, the landing barges that had seen service on D-Day in Normandy were ready. The big jump came on March 24 when four armies hurdled the Rhine and two paratroop divisions were dropped five miles inland at Wesel.
With six armies now across the Rhine, the crust of German resistance was broken. Now only 250 miles separated the Allied armies in the west from the Red Army in the east.
There was savage fighting ahead, but only one great battle—the battle of the Ruhr. This greatest industrial region in Europe, was the major prize of western Germany: with the Russians controlling Silesia and the Allies the Ruhr, Germany would be paralyzed. The campaign for the Ruhr was brilliantly conceived and executed. The whole area was encircled, then split in two, and the German armies systematically mopped up: over 300,000 prisoners fell into our hands. It was indeed, as General Eisenhower called it, a “victory offensive.”
Thereafter the drive became a pursuit. Montgomery’s armies liberated most of Holland and drove into Bremen and Hamburg. The U. S. First and Ninth Armies drove straight ahead towards the Elbe. The Third Army, with units of the French army, sped into Baden, Wuerttemberg, and Bavaria—towards Hitler’s last “redoubt” in the Alps.
The news from Germany brought exultation to the peoples of the Allied countries: it brought, too, indignation and horror. For as the armies drove into the interior, they came on one prison camp after another, and what they reported confirmed all the atrocity stories that had come out of Russia and Poland. A Congressional Committee reported
On conditions at Buchenwald, under whose beeches Goethe once had walked:
This camp was founded when the Nazi Party first came into power in 1933 and has been in continuous operation since that time, although its largest population dates from the beginning of the present war. . . .
The mission of these camps was an extermination factory and the means of extermination was starvation, beatings, tortures, incredibly crowded sleeping conditions, and sickness. The effectiveness of these measures was enhanced by the requirement that the prisoners work in an adjacent armament factory for the manufacture of machine guns, small arms, ammunition, and other materiel for the German Army. The factory operated 24 hours a day, using two 12-hour shifts of prisoners. . . .
The main elements of Buchenwald included the “Little Camp,” the regular barracks and the hospital, the medical experimentation building, the body-disposal plant, and the ammunition factory.
The prisoners in this camp slept on triple-decked shelves, the clearance between the shelves being little more than 2 feet. They were so crowded into these shelves that the cubic content figured out to be about 35 cubic feet per man, as against the minimum for health of 600 cubic feet prescribed by United States Army Regulations. We were informed that after arriving new prisoners were initiated by spending at least 6 weeks here before being “graduated” to the regular barracks. During this initiation prisoners were expected to lose about 40 percent in weight. Jews, however, seldom, if ever, graduated to the regular barracks. Camp disciplinary measures included transferring recalcitrant prisoners back to the “Little Camp.” As persons became too feeble to work, they were also sent back to the “Little Camp” or to the hospital. Rations were less than at the regular barracks and the death rate in the “Little Camp” was very high, recently about 50 per day. . . .
[The hospital] was a building where moribund persons were sent to die. No medicines were available, and, hence, no therapy was possible. Typhus and tuberculosis were rampant in the camp. About half of the wards of the hospital were about 15 feet deep and 51/2 feet wide, with one window on the outside end. From 6 to 9 patients occupied each ward, lying crosswise on the floor shoulder to shoulder. The room was too narrow for most of them to extend their legs. The death rate in the hospital was from 5 to 20 persons per day.
Block No. 41 in the camp was used for medical experiments and vivisections with prisoners as guinea pigs. Medical scientists came from Berlin periodically to reinforce the experimental staff. In particular, new toxins and anti-toxins were tried out on prisoners. Few prisoners who entered this experimental building ever emerged alive. Prisoners were induced to volunteer for experimentation on the representation that living quarters provided there were far superior to those in the barracks and that their rations were far superior to those received by ordinary prisoners. . . .
The method of collecting bodies was as follows: . . . After roll call, a motor truck drove around the camp, picked up the bodies, and was driven to the front yard of the incinerator plant to await the next day’s operation.
But this was not the only source of bodies. Emaciated prisoners who had been around too long, or who had committed infractions of discipline, or who knew too much, or who had refused to be broken in mind were arbitrarily condemned to death. For instance, in the little camp, where prisoners slept 16 to a shelf, an infraction of discipline—particularly an attempt to escape—not infrequently resulted in all 16 being condemned. Such persons were immediately marched on foot to a small door in the fence of the back yard at a point immediately adjacent to the incinerator building. This door opened inward until it hit a doorstop which held it in a position parallel to the building’s wall, thus creating a corridor 4 feet wide and 3 feet deep. At the far end was an opening about 4 feet by 4 feet, flush with the ground, the head of a concrete shaft, about 13 feet deep, the bottom floor of which was a continuation of the concrete floor of the room at the front end of the basement. The condemned prisoners, on being hurried and pushed through the door in the fence, inevitably fell into this shaft and crashed 13 feet down to the cement cellar floor. This room, on the floor at one end of which they now found themselves, was the strangling room. As they hit the floor they were garrotted with a short doubleend noose by S. S. guards and hung on hooks along the side walls, about 6 V2 feet above the floor, the row of hooks being 45 or 50 in number. At the time of our visit all of the hooks except 5 had been removed, but we could observe the holes where the other hooks had previously been. When a consignment had been hung up, any who were still struggling were stunned by a wooden mallet, which was exhibited to us in the chamber, still bearing stains of blood. The bodies were left on the hooks until called for by the incinerator crew. An electric elevator, with an estimated capacity for 18 bodies, ran up to the incinerator room, which was on the floor above the strangling room. The day’s quota of approximately 200 bodies was made up of from 120 to 140 prisoners who had died (mostly in the “hospital,” the medical experimental building, or the “Little Camp”), and from 60 to 80 were supplied by the strangulation room.
I Have Finished the Course. . .
As the war in Europe was drawing to its close, the civilized world was plunged into mourning by the news that its greatest leader was dead. Death came to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at 5:50 p. m., April 12, at Warm Springs, Georgia.
The next day newspapers carried this notice:
TODAY’S ARMY-NAVY CASUALTY LIST
WASHINGTON, Apr. 13.—Following are the latest casualties in the military services, including next-of-kin.
ARMY-NAVY DEAD
ROOSEVELT, Franklin D., Commander-in-Chief, wife, Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the White House.
Sorrow entered every home and every heart and even his bitterest political opponents stood abashed and humble. Americans of every creed
And faith crowded into churches where memorial services were read for the lost leader. The funeral services on the estate at Hyde Park which he had loved were simple:
As President Truman looked on with a face frozen in grief, Franklin D. Roosevelt was committed today to the warm brown earth of his native soil.
Under a cloudless, spring sky, the body of the late Chief Executive was lowered solemnly into a grave in the flower garden of his family estate.
Watching with strained faces were members of the family, dignitaries of government and little sad-faced groups of plain people—the employees on the place and neighbors from the countryside.
A detail of gray-clad cadets from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point fired a volley of three farewell salutes. A bugler played “Taps,” its sweet but still sad notes echoing through the wooden estate.
Soldiers, sailors and marines, who had held an American flag over the casket, folded it and handed it to Mrs. Roosevelt.
The garden where Mr. Roosevelt rests lies between the family home where he was born sixty-three years ago and the library which houses his state papers and the gifts of a world which recognized him as one of its pre-eminent leaders.
It was exactly 10 a. m. when the first gun of a presidential salute was fired from a battery in the library grounds to the east of the quarter-acre garden. They boomed at solemnly spaced intervals.
An honor guard lining the hemlock hedge around the garden stood at attention.
A few moments later, the distant melody of a bugle came to those within the garden. A flight of bombers and another of training planes droned overhead.
The beat of muffled drums in slow cadence rolled through the wooded hills above the Hudson. In the distance, gradually drawing nearer, a band played a funeral dirge.
Promptly at 10:30 a. m., the National Anthem sounded and, as the wheels of the caisson noisily ground the gravel of the roadway, the notes of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” were played softly. Through a passageway at one corner, the elderly, gray-bearded rector of the President’s Episcopal Church at Hyde Park walked across the newly clipped grass toward the grave.
The Rev. George W. Anthony was wearing the black and white surplice and stole of the clergy. He removed a black velvet skull-cap and took his position at the head of the grave, toward the west.
“All that the father giveth me shall come to me,” the Rev. Mr. Anthony said.
A lone plane circling above almost drowned his words as he declared that unto Almighty God “we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
There was a stirring in the crowd.
“Blessed are the dead who lie in the Lord,” the rector intoned. “Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us.”
The pastor repeated the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Elliott’s lips moved with him.
The services followed the ordinary Episcopal burial rites for the dead. There were no words of eulogy, only the word of God.
Near its conclusion the Rev. Mr. Anthony recited the poem written by John Ellerton in 1870: “Now the laborer’s task is o’er; now the battle-day is past.”
“Father, in Thy gracious keeping we now leave Thy servant sleeping,” the rector continued.
The services were brief. They were over by 10:45. The flag which Mrs. Roosevelt clutched tightly was handed to Elliott, and the family filed out.*®
Not only Americans grieved, but people everywhere in the world who had fought to make men free. In Britain, especially, the sorrow was universal and profound. Winston Churchill cabled to Mrs. Roosevelt:
I send my most profound sympathy in your grievous loss. It is also the loss of the British nation and the cause of freedom in every land. I feel so deeply for you all.
As for myself, I have lost a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fires of war. I trust you may find consolation in the glory of his name and the magnitude of his work.
And to a hushed House of Commons he said: “There died the greatest American friend we have ever known and the greatest champion of human freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.”
The Memorial Service at St. Paul’s Cathedral was typical of those held throughout the United Kingdom:
London, Tuesday—In St. Paul’s Cathedral, so miraculously preserved in the burnt and devastated City of London, Britain gave national expression to-day of her admiration and respect and her mourning for President Roosevelt by a memorial service attended by the King and Queen and Princess Elizabeth, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dominion leaders, and representatives of every section of our national life. Diplomatists of the Allied countries were there, including Mr. Winant, the American Ambassador, who from the reading-desk spoke the lesson from Revelation:
After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne. . . and palms in their hands.
We who represent the two great English-speaking peoples are specially bound to pray that through our co-operation one with another the great cause for which Franklin Delano Roosevelt laboured may be brought to fruition for the lasting benefit of all the nations of the world.
These words read by the Dean reverberated from the dome which was there when the two nations were one. The Prime Minister, sad and slumped in his seat, seemed far away in his thoughts.
The service began with the sentences “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” followed by the Introduction.
Brethren, we are gathered together in the presence of God to commemorate the life and work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second President of the United States of America, and to render thanks to Almighty God for the services which he gave to the welfare and peace not only of his own people but of all the peoples of the world.
World History
