The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (40 page)

Then the ground shifted. Far from this battlefield, Eisenhower struggled to control an Allied host that stretched from the North Sea to the Côte d’Azur. Prepossessed by the two army groups commanded by Montgomery and Bradley, he devoted little attention and less creative thought to the armies in the south, which now fell under SHAEF. The
DRAGOON
force he personally had insisted upon now seemed like an awkward appendage, bulling toward what he considered a topographical dead end in the Vosges and the Black Forest. The supreme commander in mid-September told Bradley that he would subordinate Seventh Army to the 12th Army Group but for the political necessity of keeping American suzerainty in the south: De Gaulle surely would demand overall French command of the remaining forces there if Patch was seconded to Bradley. At a minimum, Eisenhower promised, Seventh Army would always support Bradley’s larger maneuvers to the north. For that reason, VI Corps and other American forces were to be consolidated, cheek by jowl, with Patton’s Third Army, making the U.S. armies contiguous and giving De Lattre the extreme right wing of the Allied line, including the Belfort Gap.

Of these rarefied machinations, Truscott knew nothing. On Thursday, September 14, Patch’s Field Order No. 5 arrived at the VI Corps command post. The corps was to pivot northeast, attacking through the Vosges toward Strasbourg. Truscott was “both surprised and disappointed,” his headquarters war diary recorded, the “plan being entirely contrary to his conversation with Gen. Patch on [September] 12th.” Bedeviled by an abscessed tooth and seething with grievances, Truscott stewed for an evening, nipping from a bottle of “medicinal bourbon.” The next morning he composed a letter to Patch that ranged in tone from prickly to impudent.

“The assault on the Belfort Gap should begin at the earliest possible moment,” Truscott wrote, before Blaskowitz stiffened his defenses. De Lattre would not be ready until early October, but one French and three American divisions could attack immediately. To fight in the Vosges, as Seventh Army now proposed, would waste “the three most veteran divisions in the American Army.… As demonstrated in Italy during last winter in less rugged terrain, the Boche can limit progress to a snail’s pace.” If Patch did not want VI Corps to force the Belfort Gap, Truscott proposed packing up his divisions for an assault on Genoa to help Fifth Army in Italy. Unaware that the army commander was heeding a SHAEF directive, he closed by asking Patch to refer the matter up the chain of command for adjudication.

Truscott sent the note to the Seventh Army command post, now in a French barracks at Lons-le-Saunier, where Napoléon had persuaded Marshal Ney—“the bravest of the brave”—to rejoin him during the Hundred Days.

Patch phoned at 6:30
P.M.
on Saturday, September 16.

Patch:
I don’t think that letter of yours was advisable. A less sensitive man than I—and I’m not sensitive at all—would see the lack of confidence shown in your leaders.

Truscott:
I wrote the letter only because it was something I believe in.

Patch:
When I have something on my chest I just have to say it to that person.

Truscott:
You have my complete and wholehearted support, once the decision is made. If you think someone else can do the job better, it’s all right with me. But I don’t think you can find one.

Patch:
I know that.

So ended
DRAGOON
, in bickering frustration.

Truscott’s pluck notwithstanding, his ability to force the Belfort Gap and jump the Rhine was dubious at best. With frayed logistical lines stretching three hundred miles, a senior officer observed, VI Corps was “living with just one day’s supplies ahead of the game.” Blaskowitz on September 19 reported to the German high command that his residual armies were forming a defensive bulwark west of the Vosges, “still able to fight, although much weakened.” His greatest fear—a flanking attack southeast toward Belfort by Patton’s Third Army—had not come to pass. Of the Army Group G troops who decamped from southern France, more than 130,000 had escaped, although Nineteenth Army salvaged only 165 of 1,600 artillery pieces, and 11th Panzer had barely two dozen tanks left. For his troubles, Blaskowitz was sacked that very day; infuriated by the retreat and by reports of German straggling, Hitler summoned a panzer army commander from Russia to replace him. Blaskowitz soon returned to Dresden. “Hans is now home,” his wife wrote her relatives, “planting cabbage.”

On the same Tuesday that Blaskowitz was relieved, Truscott received his third star. He, Patch, De Lattre, and their men had reason for pride: in barely a month, they had hastened the German eviction from France, opened new ports and airfields, started the rehabilitation of French industry and commerce from Bordeaux to Burgundy, and demolished two enemy armies by killing, wounding, capturing, or marooning 158,000 Germans.

But ahead lay the granite and gneiss uplands of the Vosges, a primordial badland of cairns, moors, peat bogs, and hogback ridges rising above four thousand feet. Freezing autumn rains had begun here already, Sevareid noted, causing GIs to recall “the Italian winter and to long again for home.” The VI Corps war diary recorded, “Looking for skis.” In a letter home, Truscott wrote, “I dread the approaching wet and cold and snow and tedious mountain work. The skies weep continuously now.” Patrols creeping along the dark flanks of the Vosges could hear the plink of picks and shovels as German sappers burrowed into the hillsides. “There are indications,” Truscott told Sarah, “that the beast has every intention of continuing the fight right to the bitter end.”

“Harden the Heart and Let Fly”

A
WORLD
away, although barely two hundred crow-flying miles distant, the Allied cavalcade that had burst from Normandy now spilled across the continental crown, down pilgrim paths and drove roads, through fields of wheat stubble and ripening beets, greeted by pealing church bells and farmers who waved with one hand while tossing buckets of water on their burning crofts with the other.

By the end of August the front stretched from Abbeville on the Somme to Commercy on the Meuse, where a bridge was seized intact on the morning of the thirty-first. A great crescent, extending from Brest nearly to Belgium, was packed with more than two million Allied soldiers and 438,000 vehicles—a two-to-one edge in combat troops over German forces in the west and a twenty-to-one advantage in tanks. The AAF and RAF together massed 7,500 bombers and 4,300 fighters. Montgomery’s fifteen divisions in 21st Army Group filled a fast-moving front sixty miles wide across the hedgeless fields between the Seine and the Somme, overrunning or isolating the Rocket Gun Coast. The last of eight thousand V-1s was fired from France on the night of September 1, as launch battalions fled for Holland or Germany; twelve hundred more would be dropped from Luftwaffe aircraft in coming months, but to small effect. “The battle of London is won,” Britain’s home secretary declared. (Churchill privately proposed that all V-1 equipment and German fortifications along the Channel coast be destroyed to prevent future use by the French, “if they fall out of temper with us.”)

In 12th Army Group, Bradley commanded twenty-one divisions, with three more soon to arrive. The First Army zone now spanned sixty-five miles, plated on both flanks by armored divisions, while Patton’s Third Army braced the right wing with two corps abreast. The U.S. Ninth Army was created in early September with orders to finish reducing Brest and to contain the enemy garrisons in other Breton ports; the German commander in Brest soon buckled, emerging from the rubble with his Irish setter, a ton of personal luggage, and his fishing tackle. “I deserve a rest,” he told his captors. Four Allied airborne divisions also had regrouped in England to await another summons of the trumpet.

Under this onslaught the Wehrmacht stumbled eastward in “a planless flight,” as one German general acknowledged. OB West listed eighteen divisions as “completely fit” for combat, while twenty-one others were “totally unfit,” sixteen were “partially fit,” seven had been “dissolved,” and nine were “rebuilding.” Flyers signed by Field Marshal Model and passed out along the retreat routes advised, “We have lost a battle, but I tell you we will still win this war!” A proposed defensive line on the Somme never congealed, however, and German soldiers streamed toward the German frontier through Picardy and Belgium, Lorraine and the Ardennes, bellowing, “The Americans will be here in twenty minutes!” Some jumpy demolitionists misplaced their explosives so that trees to be felled as obstructions instead toppled away from the road. In what the OB West war diary called an “ignominious rout,” Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.

On came the avenging armies—perhaps not twenty minutes behind German heels, but close enough. “Any Boches today?” an ancient Frenchman was asked near the front at Guise. “Ah, yes, the brutes,” he replied, spitting in the road and pointing in all directions. “There, and there, and there, and there.” By truck and by foot the pursuers pursued; a battalion from the 1st Division, which covered 272 miles in the last week of August, rode twenty-two miles on August 29 and walked another eight after the trucks circled back for another load of troops. The British 11th Armored Division drove through the entire rainy night of August 30, drivers snoozing during each brief halt. Gun flashes limned the skyline like heat lightning, and shell craters were edged with the gray lace of burned powder until military traffic pounded them smooth. Fleeing German dray horses were cut down by the thousands; they were among a half-million killed in August, always to the regret of Allied cavalrymen. “There was nothing for it,” a British trooper said, “but to harden the heart and let fly.”

No sentimentality obtained for enemy soldiers. “We blew up everything that didn’t look right,” a lieutenant in the 60th Infantry told his diary, “especially little haystacks out in the fields, a good place for German snipers.” At Braine, near Reims, Patton’s vanguard caught two trains with seventy railcars carrying troops and loot from Paris; tank and tank destroyer fire slapped the engines, then automatic weapons stitched the carriages, killing fifty before five hundred others surrendered. A witness with Third Army described “the long ecstatic agony of serving machine guns on living targets,” and the pleasure that tank gunners felt in fingering their Sherman triggers, which they called “tits.” “The whole west front has collapsed,” a German regimental commander wrote on August 31, “and the other side is marching about at will.”

Not quite. Fuel shortages, nettlesome since early August, had become grievous as the Allied armies raced eastward. Daily fuel consumption had tripled from six gallons per vehicle in late July to eighteen; a single armored division now burned 100,000 gallons in each day of cross-country fighting. The five-gallon can remained the primary delivery means, and SHAEF logisticians were so desperate that consideration was given to using battleships to haul jerricans of gas to the French beaches. A Canadian corps was immobilized for several days; two of eight divisions in the British Second Army remained on the Seine to allow the other six to move on. A corps in the U.S. First Army stalled for four days, and corps commanders cadged cans of gasoline to keep their staff cars running. Nowhere did the need pinch more than in Third Army. Of seventeen tanks sent to capture a Meuse bridge in Verdun on August 31, all but three ran out of gas en route. Patton’s fuel dumps the previous day had received 32,000 gallons, less than one-tenth of Third Army’s requirement. His G-4, the army logistician, rated the supply of motor fuel as “extremely critical.” “Damn it, Brad,” Patton told Bradley, “just give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I’ll put you inside Germany in two days.”

Onward they pushed, on foot when necessary, through villages displaying homemade American flags, crayoned on paper or pillowcases with polka-dot stars. “Vote for Dewey,” mischievous GIs yelled, to be answered by cheering, agreeable Frenchmen, “Vote for Dew-ee.” An observant soldier told his parents that the locals numbered their building floors beginning above the ground level. “If that was the only mistake the French ever made,” he added, “we wouldn’t be here today.”

Giddy rumors swirled, including a Swiss claim that Hitler had fled to Spain. An intercepted German radio report of insurrection in Cologne stirred great excitement until U.S. analysts realized that the news was disinformation from an Allied psychological operations team. Still, optimism ran rife. Bradley on September 1 predicted that he would reach the Rhine by Sunday, September 10, and staff officers selected half a dozen river crossing sites. Bradley’s aide jotted in a diary, “Everything we talk about now is qualified by the phrase, ‘If the war lasts that long.’”

“End the war in ’44,” soldiers chanted.
Time
reported that officials from New York to Seattle had begun planning Victory-in-Europe celebrations; a man in Santa Fe had offered $10 “to the first newsboy to reach him with the
New Mexican
announcing the fall of Germany.” With the European war seemingly winding down, Churchill’s War Office asked Montgomery whether he could spare an extra army headquarters staff for Burma. The Pentagon drafted plans to leave one-fifth of all ordnance stocks in Europe with a postwar occupation force, while one-fifth would be sent to the Pacific and three-fifths shipped home.