The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (115 page)

Hour after hour, day after day, shipping containers were unloaded from rail freight cars onto a receiving dock and then hoisted by elevator to the depot’s tenth floor. Here with assembly-line efficiency the containers traveled by conveyor belt from station to station down to the seventh floor as inspectors pawed through the crates to extract classified documents, pornography, ammunition, and perhaps amorous letters from a girlfriend that would further grieve a grieving widow. The prevailing rule on Hardesty Avenue was said to be “Remove anything you would not want returned to your family if
you
were the soldier.” Workers used grinding stones and dentist drills to remove corrosion and blood from helmets and web gear; laundresses took pains to scrub bloodstains out of field jackets and uniform blouses. A detailed inventory was pinned to each repacked container before it was stacked in a storage bin. And all the while banks of typists in an adjacent room hammered out correspondence to the next of kin, up to seventy thousand letters a month, asking where the soldier’s last possessions should be sent.

Over the years, Effects Bureau inspectors had found tapestries, enemy swords, a German machine gun, an Italian accordion, a tobacco sack full of diamonds, walrus tusks, a shrunken head, a Japanese life raft. Among thousands of diaries also received in Kansas City was a small notebook that had belonged to Lieutenant Hershel G. Horton, a twenty-nine-year-old Army officer from Aurora, Illinois. Shot in the right leg and hip during a firefight with the Japanese in New Guinea, Horton had dragged himself into a grass shanty and, over the several days that it took for him to die, he had scribbled a final letter in the notebook. “My dear, sweet father, mother, and sister,” he wrote. “I lay here in this terrible place, wondering not why God has forsaken me, but rather why He is making me suffer.”

*   *   *

This, the profoundest of all mysteries, would be left for the living to ponder. Soldiers who survived also would struggle to reconcile the greatest catastrophe in human history with what the philosopher and Army officer J. Glenn Gray called “the one great lyric passage in their lives.” The war’s intensity, camaraderie, and sense of high purpose left many with “a deplorable nostalgia,” in the phrase of A. J. Liebling. “The times were full of certainty,” Liebling later wrote. “I have seldom been sure I was right since.” An AAF crewman who completed fifty bomber missions observed, “Never did I feel so much alive. Never did the earth and all of the surroundings look so bright and sharp.” And a combat engineer mused, “What we had together was something awfully damned good, something I don’t think we’ll ever have again as long as we live.”

They had been annealed, touched with fire. “We are certainly no smaller men than our forefathers,” Gavin wrote his daughter. Alan Moorehead, who watched the scarlet calamity from beginning to end, believed that “here and there a man found greatness in himself.”

The anti-aircraft gunner in a raid and the boy in a landing barge really did feel at moments that the thing they were doing was a clear and definite good, the best they could do. And at those moments there was a surpassing satisfaction, a sense of exactly and entirely fulfilling one’s life.… This thing, the brief ennoblement, kept recurring again and again up to the end, and it refreshed and lighted the whole heroic and sordid story.

In Moorehead’s view, the soldier to whom this grace was granted became, “for a moment, a complete man, and he had his sublimity in him.” For those destined to outlive the war and die abed as old men half a century hence, the din of battle grew fainter without ever fading entirely. They knew, as Osmar White knew, that “the living have the cause of the dead in trust.” This too was part of the sublimity.

“No war is really over until the last veteran is dead,” a rifleman in the 26th Division would conclude. Of the 16,112,566 Americans in uniform during the Second World War, the number still living was expected to decline to one million by late 2014, and, a decade later, in 2024, to dip below a hundred thousand. By the year 2036, U.S. government demographers estimated, fewer than four hundred veterans would remain alive, less than half the strength of an infantry battalion.

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

N
OTES

The following abbreviations appear in the endnotes and bibliography. Some stack locations and box numbers change as archivists reconfigure their collections. A list of additional manuscripts, monographs, and unpublished documents used in this book appears online at
www.liberationtrilogy.com
.

a.p.
author’s possession

AAAD
Rick Atkinson,
An Army at Dawn

AAF
Army Air Forces

AAFinWWII
W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds.,
The Army Air Forces in World War II
, vol. 3

AAR
after action report

AB
After the Battle

AB Div
airborne division

AD
armored division

admin
administration

AF
air force

AFHQ micro
Allied Forces Headquarters microfilm, NARA RG 331

AFHRA
Air Force Historical Research Agency

AFIA
American Forces in Action publications and background papers

AG
Army Group

ag
adjutant general

AGF
Army Ground Forces

ALH
Howard L. Gleck et al., “The Administrative and Logistical History of the ETO,” part 5, WD, May 1946, a.p.

ALM
Audie Leon Murphy papers, USMA Special Collections, West Point, N.Y.

ANSCOL
Army-Navy Staff College Collection, NWC Lib, U.S. National Archives

AR
action report

Ardennes
Hugh M. Cole,
The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge, USAWWII

AS
Armored School

ASEQ
Army Service Experiences Questionnaire, MHI

ASF
Army Service Forces

AU
Air University

bde
brigade

Beck
Alfred M. Beck et al.,
The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany, USAWWII

BLM
Bernard Law Montgomery

bn
battalion

BP
Martin Blumenson,
Breakout and Pursuit, USAWWII

CARL
Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

CBH
Chester B. Hansen, including papers, diary, MHI

CBM
Charles B. MacDonald, including papers, MHI

CCA
Gordon A. Harrison,
Cross-Channel Attack, USAWWII

CCS
Combined Chiefs of Staff

CE
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

CEOH
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History

Chandler
Alfred Chandler, ed.,
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years

CI
Combat Interview, ETO

CINCLANT
Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet

CJB
Clay and Joan Blair collection, MHI

CJR
Cornelius J. Ryan, including papers, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

CMH
U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.

CNO
Chief of Naval Operations

co
company

Coakley
Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton,
Global Logistics and Strategy 1943–1945, USAWWII

COHQ
Combined Operations Headquarters, U.K.

Col U OHRO
Columbia University Oral History Research Office, N.Y.

corr
correspondence

COS
chief of staff

CSI
U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

DA
Department of the Army

Danchev
Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds.,
War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke

DDE
Dwight David Eisenhower

DDE Lib
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kans.

diss
dissertation

div
division

DOB
Rick Atkinson,
The Day of Battle

DTL
Donovan Technical Library, Fort Benning, Ga.

E
entry

ET
Exercise Tiger collection, MHI

ETO
European Theater of Operations

FA
field artillery

FAJ
Field Artillery Journal

FCP
Forrest C. Pogue, including background material for
The Supreme Command
, MHI

FDR Lib
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

FMS
Foreign Military Studies

FOIA
Freedom of Information Act

FRUS
Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta

Ft. K
Ft. Knox, Ky.

Ft. L
Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.

FUSA
First U.S. Army

GCM Lib
George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Va.

Germany VII
Horst Boog et al.,
Germany and the Second World War
, vol. 7,
The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943–1944/45

Germany IX
Ralf Blank et al.,
Germany and the Second World War
, vol. 9, part 1,
German Wartime Society, 1939–1945

GS
V
John Ehrman,
Grand Strategy
, vol. 5

GS
VI
John Ehrman,
Grand Strategy
, vol. 6

GSP
George S. Patton, Jr., including papers, Library of Congress

HCB
Harry C. Butcher, including papers

HD
Historical Division

HI
“Hospital Interviews,” NARA RG 407 E 427, ML #2233

HIA
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.

Hinsley
F. H. Hinsley,
British Intelligence in the Second World War
, abridged

HKH
Henry Kent Hewitt papers

Hq
headquarters

ID
infantry division

IFG
Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944–1945

IG
inspector general

IJ
Infantry Journal

inf
infantry

intel
intelligence

IS
Infantry School, Ft. Benning, Ga.

IWM
Imperial War Museum, London

JAG
U.S. Army judge advocate general

JB
Joseph Balkoski

JCS
Joint Chiefs of Staff

JLC
J. Lawton Collins

JLD
Jacob L. Devers, including papers

JMG
James M. Gavin, including papers

JMH
Journal of Military History

JT
John Toland, including papers

LC
Hugh M. Cole,
The Lorraine Campaign, USAWWII

LHC
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London

LHD
John Toland,
The Last Hundred Days

lib
library

LKT Jr.
Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., including papers

LO
Charles B. MacDonald,
The Last Offensive, USAWWII

LOC MS Div
Library of Congress Manuscript Division

LSA
Roland G. Ruppenthal,
Logistical Support of the Armies
, vols. 1 and 2,
USAWWII

MB
Martin Blumenson

MBR
Matthew B. Ridgway

MEB
Magna E. Bauer

MHI
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.

MHUC
Medical Historical Unit Collection, MHI

micro
microfilm

ML
miscellaneous AG records, ETO

MMB
Mark M. Boatner III,
The Biographical Dictionary of World War II

MMD
29th Infantry Division Archives, Maryland Military Department, Fifth Regiment Armory, Baltimore

MP
military police

MRC FDM
McCormick Research Center, First Division Museum, Cantigny, Ill.

msg
message

mss
manuscript

MTOUSA
Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army

n.d.
no date

NARA
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

NATOUSA
North African Theater of Operations, United States Army

Naval Guns
Morton L. Deyo, “Naval Guns at Normandy,” ts, n.d., SEM, NHHC, box 87

NHHC
Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C.

NSA
National Security Agency

NWC Lib
National War College Library

NWWIIM
National World War II Museum archives, New Orleans

NYT
New York Times

obit
obituary