The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (66 page)

Base 901, the French supply organization, in late fall consisted of twelve hundred men with two hundred vehicles. American logisticians calculated that an eight-division army should have more than 100,000 support troops, but De Lattre would never have even a third of that number. Consequently he relied on the Americans—with all of the pathologies that dependency engendered—for everything from the one-third liter of wine included in French rations to the ten pounds of crushed oats, fourteen pounds of hay, and two ounces of salt needed each day for a mountain mule. For every French soldier in Europe, the U.S. Army billed De Gaulle $6.67 per day in support costs.

Franco-American frictions intensified as winter approached. When only 25,000 uniforms could be found for French troops, in a Canadian warehouse in Algiers, De Lattre announced that unless his men received wool clothing he would be “forced to withdraw them from combat.” To the 6th Army Group headquarters, he wrote: “This army has been discriminated against … in a way seriously prejudicial to its life and to its capabilities for action.” The French First Army, he charged, received less than a third of the ammunition, fuel, and rations provided Seventh Army, causing an “asphyxiation of the front line.” U.S. quartermasters bitterly denied the allegation and countered that reckless French troops had ruined three thousand pyramidal tents at a time when canvas was “extremely critical.” An American general wrote of De Lattre, “He goes into these tirades at least twice a week, at which time he seems to lose his balance.” One ill-advised tantrum, launched in the presence of a visiting George Marshall, included allegations that Truscott’s VI Corps had pilfered gasoline allocated to the French. The chief of staff walked out. Later, he rounded on De Lattre with pale fury. “You celebrated all the way up the road. You were late on every damn thing. And you were critical of Truscott, who is a fighter and not a talker,” Marshall said. The chief finished with the worst epithet he could conjure: “
You
are a politico.”

“It was our duty,” De Lattre subsequently explained, “to be dissatisfied.”

Now Truscott was gone, initially summoned by Eisenhower to organize the new Fifteenth Army as an occupation force—“You won’t like it,” the supreme commander warned—but then just as abruptly dispatched instead to command Fifth Army in Italy, after General Mark W. Clark took over all Allied forces there. At a farewell ceremony in the Vosges, a band crashed through “The Dogface Soldier” as tears streamed down Truscott’s rough cheeks. His successor as commander of VI Corps was Major General Edward H. Brooks, a New Englander who had commanded both the 11th and 2nd Armored Divisions.

With Truscott’s departure, the dominant figure on the southern front was the officer who would orchestrate the offensive to breach the Vosges: Lieutenant General Jacob Loucks Devers, the 6th Army Group commander. Now fifty-seven, Devers was the grandson of a blacksmith and son of a jeweler in York, Pennsylvania. There young Jake had climbed a ladder every Sunday with his father to make sure the courthouse clock on East Market Street was correct to the second. A classmate of Patton’s at West Point, he played baseball, basketball, and lacrosse, later returning to teach mathematics; the academy yearbook described him as “clever”—always suspect in the Army—and as “an exceedingly earnest youth with rather Puritanical views.” A gifted artilleryman and administrator, Devers, like De Lattre, was among the youngest officers in his army to become a general, jumping over nearly five hundred more senior colonels to win his first star in 1940. As chief of the armored force for two years, he helped modernize a tank arm rife with traditionalists nostalgic for the horse. (“I made a lot of mistakes today,” he would tell subordinates during maneuvers. “So did you.”) With Marshall and McNair as patrons, in May 1943 he became commander of U.S. forces in Europe until Eisenhower’s return to London for
OVERLORD
, whereupon Devers was bundled off to the Mediterranean as the eventual commander of the forces that now formed the right wing of the Allied armies in northwestern Europe.

Capable and decisive, he had a knack for provoking the enmity of his peers. Perhaps it was his brazen ambition—it was said that when Marshall appointed him to a committee to recommend general officers worthy of further promotion, Devers listed himself first. Perhaps it was his overeager smile, the mien “of a boy who hasn’t grown up,” as one British general said. He and Mark Clark detested each other to the point of not speaking, and Devers’s classmate Patton considered him “a very small caliber man.” In Beetle Smith’s assessment, “Devers talks too much and doesn’t care what he says.” Bradley condemned him, with both barrels, as “overly garrulous … egotistical, shallow, intolerant, not very smart, and much too inclined to rush off half-cocked.”

Worse yet, according to a recent entry in Patton’s diary after a conference in Paris, “Ike hates him.” The supreme commander evidently nursed old resentments: Devers’s reluctance in 1943 to shift bomber squadrons from England to North Africa had displeased Eisenhower, as did his refusal a year later to release Truscott from the Mediterranean for
OVERLORD
. “E. says that [Devers] talks a lot but never gets down to facts,” Kay Summersby told her diary. Devers brought out the conniver in E., who told Marshall, “I have nothing in the world against General Devers,” but allowed that he had previously harbored an “uneasy feeling” about him. When Marshall asked Eisenhower to assess thirty-eight senior American generals in Europe, Devers ranked twenty-fourth on the supreme commander’s list and elicited the only pejorative comments of the lot:

Enthusiastic but often inaccurate in statements and evaluations; loyal and energetic.… He has not, so far, produced among the seniors of the American organization here that feeling of trust and confidence that is so necessary to continued success.

Eisenhower sold Devers short. The top U.S. airman in the Mediterranean, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, considered him “the ablest commander I saw in the war.” Among other skills, Devers was second only to Eisenhower in his ability to reconcile national differences and forge an effective Allied military coalition. While acknowledging in his diary that De Lattre “is a very difficult man to handle, hears only the things he wants to hear [and is] a temperamental personality who causes more trouble within his own staff and troops than he does with us,” Devers showed a sure touch in dealing with a warrior he recognized as “a great inspirational leader”—even if “I never did learn to pronounce that name.” De Lattre spoke no English, and French had been Devers’s worst subject at West Point, but they shared what Devers called “that common language—the gesture and the smile.” More practically, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a former U.S. senator who had been schooled in France and now wore a lieutenant colonel’s uniform, served as an able liaison between the two.

As for his compatriots, Devers displayed more than a little naiveté. To his diary in November he described Bradley as “the same fine character as always”; in fact, Devers had modeled his headquarters after that of 12th Army Group, which he admired. Though he brooded, in a letter to his wife, about possible “enemies” at SHAEF and “the undercutting that goes on,” he believed Eisenhower and Smith to be friendly, “in their way.” But even the bouncy sangfroid and the too-ready smile sometimes slipped a bit as his troops prepared to fling themselves into the Vosges. “Nobody but an utter fool would do what I’m about to do,” he told subordinates. “That’s the reason why we’ll take them by surprise—they won’t be expecting us.” A staff officer close to Devers concluded, “He’s lonely as the devil.”

*   *   *

SHAEF’s orders called for 6th Army Group to shield Bradley’s southern flank, destroy the enemy in Alsace west of the Rhine, breach the Siegfried Line, and secure river crossings near Karlsruhe and Mannheim, respectively forty and seventy miles northeast of Strasbourg—all in service of Eisenhower’s plan to cleanse the Rhine’s left bank from Switzerland to Nijmegen before pushing across Germany in 1945. Privately the planners in Versailles expected little from the southern front, given the difficulties of the past six weeks. New, unblooded units now weighted the American force, including the 100th and 103rd Infantry Divisions and the 14th Armored Division, not to mention those callow amateurs flocking to De Lattre’s flag.

Devers had grander ambitions. German forces along the Vosges were believed to have a strength equivalent to no more than four infantry and two panzer divisions. The general calculated that an offensive launched in mid-November ought to break onto the Alsatian plain and reach the Rhine in two weeks, before swinging north to isolate the Saar. A vengeful urgency now gripped the French: the Germans had begun scorched-earth reprisals, dragging many able-bodied Alsatians between sixteen and sixty across the Rhine as forced laborers, while SS brigands burned farms, villages, and towns rather than cede winter shelter to the Allies. “Don’t get stuck in those mountains,” Devers warned his subordinates. “You’ll never get out.”

De Lattre made the first move, attacking on Tuesday, November 14, after heavy snow created what he described as “a Scandinavian landscape.” Various deceptions—including phony command posts and an announcement that French troops would begin holiday leave in mid-November—suggested that the army either had designs on the High Vosges to the north or was moving into winter quarters. Instead, De Lattre sent blacked-out convoys bearing his I Corps along the Doubs River near the Swiss frontier. A two-hour artillery barrage caught the Germans unawares, and French infantrymen surged forward at noon. Two divisions straddling the Doubs hooked north into the Belfort Gap, which sundered the Vosges from the Jura Mountains and Swiss Alps to the south. Moroccan riflemen killed a German division commander who had been trapped along the river by the artillery barrage; his effects included a map and notes detailing defensive positions on the German left flank.

By Thursday, French tanks were “decisive everywhere,” De Lattre reported. German gunners firing captured Russian howitzers had little ammunition, and thirty new 88mm antitank weapons arrived without sights and other vital components. Among the few reserves slapped into the crumbling line were riflemen pedaling through the snow on bicycles and an
Ohren-Bataillon
of deaf soldiers. French shock troops swarmed into Belfort town, surprising Wehrmacht bakers at their dough trays. Three French tank columns with lights burning clattered east along Highway N-463, and at 6:30
P.M.
on Sunday, November 19, a patrol from the 1st Armored Division reached the slate-blue Rhine, thirty miles east of Belfort and four miles above the Swiss border. Gleeful batteries lobbed a few shells across the river, the first French artillery to fall on German soil since 1940.

Having forsaken a substantial wedge of southern Alsace despite Hitler’s order not to yield a centimeter, the Nineteenth Army belatedly stiffened. Confusion in the French ranks helped. While a weak detachment wheeled north up the Rhine toward the bridge at Chalampé, other forces keen to liberate their Alsatian
frères
instead swung toward Mulhouse, seven miles west of the river. Twenty German
Feldpost
workers were captured at pistol-point while sorting the military mail on Monday morning, and sixty other deep sleepers surrendered on their cots. But Waffen-SS troops and a brigade of new Panthers sent straight from the factory in Nuremberg rebuilt the enemy line. Savage brawling in Mulhouse persisted for four days; south of Chalampé, a counterattack on Thursday, November 23, clubbed the French away, just three miles short of the bridge. De Lattre’s forces would come no closer for the next two and a half months: having captured fifteen thousand Germans at a cost of nine thousand casualties, the French First Army for the moment was a spent force.

*   *   *

Hopes for a decisive breakthrough now rested on Seventh Army’s eight divisions packed along Devers’s left wing. Here, where the High Vosges descended to the Low Vosges, the Saverne Gap provided a topographic counterpoint in the north to the Belfort Gap in the south. Barely a hundred yards wide in spots, the defile carried the main rail line to Strasbourg, as well as the Rhine–Marne Canal and an ancient roadbed, described by an eighteenth-century travel writer as “one of the masterpieces of man.” Twelve thousand infantrymen from a pair of Major General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps divisions had been gnawing at the western approaches to the gap since November 13, past moldering World War I trenches and conifers bent beneath wet snow. Four German defensive lines lay athwart the gap, manned by a few thousand Volksgrenadiers held in check by the threat of SS reprisals, producing what Seventh Army intelligence called “ersatz morale.”

By November 19, American firepower began to tell. Shelling “left little more of the woods than an old man’s scraggly beard,” and retreating Germans could be seen silhouetted against flaming houses they had put to the torch. On that Sunday, even as De Lattre’s men were spitting into the Rhine, the 44th Division rambled for nine miles along Highway N-4, and the 79th Division just to the south broke through to Sarrebourg. Tricolors appeared. French policemen pulled on uniforms hidden away four years earlier. Cries of
“Kamerad!”
could be heard from more surrendering Germans, including artillerymen overrun before they could limber their guns. Rain turned to snow, then back to rain—“as hard as I have ever seen it rain anywhere,” Devers told his diary on Monday. But not even the harshest weather would save a German line now cracked beyond repair.