The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (68 page)

Devers grew shrill. Eisenhower’s plan to clear the entire west bank of the Rhine before advancing into central Germany seemed pointless. Was SHAEF intent on destroying the enemy or simply on occupying territory? Yet Devers undercut his own argument by describing the lunge across the Rhine at Rastatt not as a great wheeling movement by an army group, but as a sally that would take only “a matter of hours.” Further, he likened it to Patton’s effort in August 1943 to loop behind the enemy with an amphibious landing by a single battalion on the north coast of Sicily at Brolo—a misbegotten analogy, since that operation had ended in calamity.

Eisenhower remained immovable, and in truth he had made up his mind days earlier. The advances through Alsace, though welcome and applauded, were “far from the Ruhr,” he observed, and a Rhine crossing here led to no “definitely decisive area.” Weary of arguing, he gave Devers explicit orders: Seventh Army would immediately pivot northward, west of the Rhine, while the French finished expelling the enemy from Alsace below Strasbourg. Although reportedly “mad as hell” at Devers’s obstinacy, Eisenhower offered a compromise, telling him that XV Corps would remain under 6th Army Group and even be strengthened with another armored division.

The trio of generals retired for a few hours’ sleep, not a happy man among them. Orders went forth the next morning. Seventh Army Staff Memorandum X-376 on Saturday advised commanders that the plan “has recently been changed. At the present, no crossing of the Rhine River is contemplated and the direction of the advance will turn north astride the Vosges Mountains and generally parallel to the Rhine.” Letter of Instruction No. 3 from 6th Army Group ordered the French First Army to extirpate the remaining Germans west of the river, with Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division driving south from Strasbourg under De Lattre’s command. SHAEF planners began concocting a collaborative attack by Patton and Patch, while noting that “although the joint Third Army–Seventh Army offensive is not the most important sector of the front, it offers the best chance of quick returns and of getting the main offensive underway once more.”

To his diary Devers confided, “The decision not to cross the Rhine was a blow to both Patch and myself, for we were really poised.”

*   *   *

Even the Army official history, published half a century after the event and disinclined to second-guess the high command, found Eisenhower’s decision “difficult to understand.” The supreme commander “had opted for an operational ‘strategy’ of firepower and attrition—the direct approach—as opposed to a war of opportunistic maneuver.” After encouraging a bloody attack through the Vosges, SHAEF possessed neither a coherent strategic goal for its southern wing nor the agility to exploit unexpected success. Even Patton believed Devers should have jumped the Rhine, yet little thought seems to have been given either in Versailles or in Luxembourg City to using Third Army’s tank legions to exploit a bridgehead at Rastatt. In “misusing 6th Army Group,” as one Army historian later charged, Eisenhower unwittingly gave the Germans a respite, allowing Hitler to continue assembling a secret counteroffensive aimed at the Ardennes in mid-December. Crossing the Rhine after Thanksgiving might well have complicated German planning for what soon would be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Surely the supreme commander’s personal distaste for Devers informed these events. Some also believed he played favorites with Bradley, his classmate and confidant. Devers emerged from the midnight session in Vittel wondering whether he was “a member of the same team.” In a letter to his wife a day later he scornfully referred to unnamed “great strategists” and lamented not receiving “a little encouragement … to bring the war to a quicker end.” In his diary he added, “The tragedy to my mind has been that the higher command has not seen fit to reinforce success on the flank.”

Yet Devers made errors of his own—not least, he failed to recognize how feeble the French were. Six of eight German infantry divisions in the Nineteenth Army had been destroyed, leaving a fifty-thousand-man remnant in a rectangular Alsatian pocket that extended for forty-five miles along the Rhine and twenty-five miles west toward the High Vosges. Although Hitler on November 26 decreed that “to give up Alsace is out of the question,” Rundstedt estimated that the pocket, which centered on the town of Colmar, could hold out for only three weeks. Devers told his diary, “It is hoped that the French Army will be able to destroy the Germans in their sector by 15 December.”

This was not to be. De Lattre would claim that thirty German battalions reinforced the pocket “with the help of darkness and fog,” but in fact only a few thousand more troops arrived west of the Rhine in the fortnight after Hitler’s decree. French exhaustion, losses among junior officers, and “confusion I have never seen anywhere,” as an American general put it, allowed the Germans to cauterize their lines.

Still more disheartening was the internecine bickering among Frenchmen who loathed one another at least as much as they loathed the enemy. Leclerc flatly refused Devers’s order to march south from Strasbourg to join De Lattre’s command, declaring, “I will not serve with any commanders who previously obeyed Vichy and whom I consider to be turncoats.” For their part, De Lattre’s men disdainfully refused to use Leclerc’s nom de guerre, calling him instead by his antebellum name, Hauteclocque. Paris seemed unable to resolve the bickering, and Devers confessed to his diary, “Having a great deal of trouble keeping the French at their job of closing the pocket.” He later added, “This was the only failure in command I ever had in war.” Even when reinforced with the U.S. 36th Infantry Division, De Lattre failed to crack the Colmar Pocket; it was to remain an open wound in the Allied flank for months and the source, as an American colonel wrote, of “a great deal of consternation and ill-feeling between Jakey Devers and Eisenhower.”

Seventh Army engineers trucked their storm boats back to supply dumps near Lunéville to await a brighter day. German dynamite on December 2 dropped the Kehl bridge into the Rhine with a thunderous splash, and the Strasbourg bridgehead escaped by boat to the Fatherland. Two railroad spans and three pontoon bridges closer to Colmar would keep the pocket victualed through the winter. Vicious sniper and artillery fire regularly swept back and forth across the river. Loudspeaker broadcasts from Kehl warned Alsatians that the Reich would soon return to reclaim Strasbourg.

“SHAEF treats us as bastard children,” a Seventh Army officer later wrote his family, “slightly ashamed of our progress.” Once again, an apparent battlefield victory was etched with vexation. Perhaps the taste of ashes was the flavor of war itself.

8.
A W
INTER
S
HADOW

“We Are All So Human That It Is Pitiful”

N
INE
million Allied propaganda leaflets fluttered over Germany every day, one thousand tons of paper each month, six billion sheets by war’s end, all urging insurrection or surrender. In the early days of this “nickeling,” airmen shoveled sheaves of leaflets into the slipstream from B-17 bomb bays thirty thousand feet over Brussels in hopes of littering occupied Paris; many instead drifted as far afield as Italy. Mass production of the T-1 Monroe Leaflet Bomb, beginning in April 1944, greatly improved accuracy: a barometric nose fuze blew open the five-foot-long cylinder two thousand feet above the target, scattering eighty thousand leaflets over one square mile. A single B-24 could sprinkle a million pages over five enemy towns during a single sortie.

Psychological-warfare teams studied previous surrender appeals, such as those used by the Japanese at Corregidor, searching for a key to unlock German intransigence. Many leaflets included a
Passierschein,
a safe-conduct pass, signed by Eisenhower and stressing the humane treatment accorded prisoners—for example, they would get the same food served “the best fed Army in the world.” Bradley’s army group alone also fired fifteen thousand artillery propaganda shells every month, each packed with five hundred leaflets, and loudspeaker appeals encouraged defection along the front, a practice known as “hog calling.” Radio Luxembourg had begun German-language broadcasts in late September, with airtime devoted to composers banned by the Nazis, information programs such as
The Voice of SHAEF,
and dire war news, including street-by-street damage reports of recent bombing raids.

Millions of time-fuze incendiaries were dropped with instructions printed in nine languages to encourage sabotage, particularly by non-German slave laborers. OSS “Field Manual No. 3” offered advice to saboteurs on how to insinuate sawdust, hair, sugar, or molasses into German fuel tanks, preferably one hundred grams for each ten gallons of gasoline. A half-pint of urine or salt water would also do the trick. “Try to commit acts for which large numbers of people could be responsible,” the manual advised. “For instance, if you blow out the wiring in a factory at a central fire box, almost anyone could have done it.”

Still Germany fought on. Some Allied strategists believed that the insistence on unconditional surrender, announced by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, was prolonging the war. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists claimed that the demand “means slavery, castration, the end of Germany as a nation.” A U.S. government analysis warned that most Germans felt they had “nothing to lose by continuing the war.” Others argued that the Reich kept fighting out of fear of the Russians and the Gestapo “rather than any phrase coined at a conference,” as John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, put it. Proposals for “conditional unconditional surrender,” similar to the modified terms under which Italy had capitulated, found no favor with Roosevelt. “I want at all costs to prevent it from being said that the unconditional surrender principle has been abandoned,” the president had declared even before
OVERLORD
. Germans must recognize, he later added, “that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”

Eventual Allied victory had long been an article of faith, of course. Even before the Normandy landings, SHAEF commissioned seventy-two studies on how to govern postwar Germany, under a plan now code-named
ECLIPSE
. Yet no consensus existed on the construct of postwar Europe, or the political architecture of a future Germany, or, as the experience in Aachen had revealed, the nuances of occupation. Roosevelt inclined toward a hard peace following the hard war—he proposed feeding the eighty million Germans three bowls of soup a day from U.S. Army vats, a gesture of largesse given that he had at first suggested just one bowl daily. In this the president reflected his people: polls showed that more than four in five Americans supported unconditional surrender and the reduction of Germany to a third-rate power. SHAEF in the summer of 1944 drafted a “Handbook for Military Government in Germany,” recommending enlightened benevolence in rebuilding the postwar economy and administrative apparatus. “This so-called Handbook is pretty bad,” Roosevelt wrote Secretary of War Stimson. “All copies should be withdrawn.” So they were, notwithstanding a SHAEF officer’s lament that “nobody ever reads handbooks anyhow”; no revision was issued until December. Even Eisenhower’s decree that “we come as conquerors, but not as oppressors” proved problematic when translated into German, because
Eroberer
—conqueror—implied plunder and annexation
auf Deutsch
. The issue eventually reached the War Department’s top linguist, who substituted
ein siegreiches Heer
—a victorious army—as less inflammatory.

The victorious Red Army in the east helped focus the Anglo-Americans on postwar matters when Washington and London realized that Soviet troops could soon occupy Germany as far west as the Rhine. A War Department analysis prophesied:

The defeat of Germany will leave Russia in a position of assured military dominance in eastern Europe and in the Middle East, [bringing] a world profoundly changed in respect to relative national military strengths, a change more comparable indeed with that occasioned by the fall of Rome than with any other change occurring during the succeeding fifteen hundred years.… The British Empire will emerge from the war having lost ground both economically and militarily.

Winston Churchill also perceived that his nation’s empire was imperiled and he sought to stave off decline in his own fashion. In mid-October, during a private meeting in Moscow with Stalin, the prime minister had jotted a few notations on a sheet of paper in proposing an allocation of postwar influence between Moscow and London in southeastern Europe. He suggested 90 percent for the Soviets in Romania, a similar British preponderance in Greece, 75 percent for Moscow in Bulgaria, and an even split in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin penciled a blue tick mark on the paper and told Churchill to keep what the prime minister called his “naughty document.” Although the “percentages agreement” had no legal force and proved a poor forecast of subsequent events, the Americans were incensed upon eventually learning of this nefarious sidebar arrangement, which contravened Roosevelt’s antipathy toward spheres of influence in postwar Europe.