The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (86 page)

While Smith prevaricated, Devers temporized. He moved his command post seventy miles west, to Vittel, but ordered his staff to prepare plans for three intermediate fallback positions leading to a final line along the eastern face of the Vosges. When General Patch was told to ready his Seventh Army for withdrawal, he winked at a staff officer and said, “Ain’t going to do it. We aren’t that bad off.” De Lattre was even more recalcitrant, decrying “a psychosis of retreat” that would force the Allies to capture the same ground twice. He took two days to translate Devers’s withdrawal directive into his own General Order No. 201, which on December 30 instructed French subordinates “to maintain the integrity of the present front” by yielding not a single square centimeter of Alsatian soil. Devers cabled Eisenhower that falling back to the Vosges could take two weeks.

Once again the supreme commander’s neck flushed deep red. “Call up Devers and tell him he is not doing what he was told,” he barked at Smith. “Tell him to obey his orders and shorten his line.” In a phone call from Vittel, Devers feebly claimed that Eisenhower’s earlier instruction had been discretionary. “I won’t go to him with that story,” Smith snapped. “He thinks you’ve been disloyal.” Another written order from Eisenhower left no wiggle room:

The political pressure to retain French soil, which you are undoubtedly experiencing, must be resisted if it leads to any risk of your losing divisions.… You must not endanger the integrity of your units east of your main position, the Vosges. You must be prepared to accept the loss of territory east of the Vosges and all its political consequences.

Devers capitulated, telling subordinates that all forces would have to retreat to the Vosges no later than January 5. “Eisenhower,” he advised his diary, “has given me no alternative.” As for the supreme commander, he was now so vexed at a man whom he had long disliked that he considered sacking Devers and giving command of his army group to Patch.

“You can kill a willing horse by overdoing what you require of him,” Devers wrote in his diary. “SHAEF has given me too much front, and taken away too many of my troops. This is unsound.” A message from De Gaulle through Juin urged the Allies not to surrender Strasbourg “but to make it a Stalingrad.”

The final day of the year ticked by with fresh snow and more omens. A reconnaissance flight at last light detected German artillery lumbering forward into new gun pits. Seventh Army placed all troops on high alert and canceled holiday celebrations. A reporter who insisted on toasting the departure of 1944 declared, “Never was the world plagued by such a year less worth remembering.” Devers’s diary entry for December 31 was just as cheerless: “Patch called me.… He was sure he was going to be attacked during the night.”

*   *   *

The attack indeed fell that night, the last substantial German offensive of the war in western Europe. Hitler had given another Adlerhorst pep talk to commanders in Army Group G, conceding failure in the Ardennes, but offering another chance to thrash the Americans in Operation
NORDWIND
, North Wind. A lunge by eight divisions southwest down the Vosges axis would recapture the Saverne Gap and link up with Nineteenth Army troops occupying the Colmar Pocket; in addition, the attack would force Patton to withdraw from Bastogne to parry this new threat. French troops in Alsace were weak and disorganized, the Führer promised, and the U.S. Seventh Army was overextended along a 126-mile perimeter.

The Americans were also alert and entrenched. Ultra intercepts provided no specific enemy attack order, but ample intelligence revealed the German order of battle and unit boundaries below Saarbrücken. Patch had little doubt that the main attack would come against the Seventh Army left, west of the Haardt Mountains, with a complementary attack to the east between the mountains and the Rhine.

“German offensive began on Seventh Army front about 0030 hours,” Patch’s chief of staff wrote in a diary entry on Monday, January 1. “Krauts were howling drunk. Murdered them.” Shrieking Waffen-SS troops, silhouetted by moonlight that glistened off snowfields near the Sarre River, hardly dented the American left wing. A single .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun, slewing left and right with long, chattering bursts, was credited with slaying more than one hundred attackers. Volksgrenadier corpses piled up in a kill sack soon dubbed “Morgue Valley.” “Gained only insignificant ground,” the Army Group G war diary recorded; then, by nightfall on Tuesday: “The attack has lost its momentum.”

The most flamboyant German sally occurred on New Year’s Day, an attack by nine hundred Luftwaffe planes flying at treetop altitude across the Western Front. Operation
BODENPLATTE
, Baseplate, also known as the “Hangover Raid,” included pilots said to be wearing dress uniforms with patent-leather shoes and white gloves after celebrating the arrival of 1945. The raiders caught seventeen Allied airfields by surprise, destroying 150 parked planes and damaging more than 100 others. Montgomery’s personal aircraft was among those wrecked. But German losses approached 300 planes, some shot down by their own antiaircraft gunners who, for reasons of secrecy, had not been informed of
BODENPLATTE
. Worse still was the loss of 237 German pilots, including veteran airmen, instructors, and commanders. “We sacrificed our last substance,” one Luftwaffe officer said.

Even as
NORDWIND
collapsed on the German right, an ancillary New Year’s attack ten miles to the east spilled from old Maginot Line bunkers to gain traction through corrugated terrain below Bitche. Bypassing American strongpoints in the Low Vosges, the 6th SS Mountain Division bent the Seventh Army line sufficiently to alarm SHAEF and terrify Strasbourg, thirty miles southeast. Propaganda broadcasts from Radio Stuttgart reported German shock troops assembling to seize the city, with reprisals certain to fall on Alsatians who had helped the Allies. Rumors of Seventh Army detachments packing to leave along the Rhine “spread like a powder fuze and caused a general panic,” according to a French lieutenant.

Lowered tricolors and the sight of official sedans being gassed up added to the dread. Journalists reported that roads west were clogged with “women pushing baby carriages [and] wagons piled high with furniture,” as Strasbourg steeled itself for yet another reversal of fortune. One soldier spied inverted dinner plates laid across a road in the thin hope that they sufficiently resembled antitank mines to delay, at least briefly, the Hun’s return.

*   *   *

Charles de Gaulle, once again referring to himself in the third person, declared that the abandonment of Strasbourg would not only be “a terrible wound inflicted on the honor of the country,” but also “a profound blow to the nation’s confidence in de Gaulle.” On Tuesday, January 2, he told De Lattre in a handwritten note, “Naturally the French Army cannot consent to the abandonment of Strasbourg.… I order you to take matters into your own hands.” At nearly the same moment, Devers cabled De Lattre to pull his left wing back toward the Vosges no later than Friday morning, necessarily exposing the city. The American order had “a bomb-like effect” in the French army headquarters, one staff officer observed, and it provoked an anguished
“Ça, non!”
from De Lattre, now confronted by conflicting orders from two masters in what he called “a grave problem of conscience.”

De Gaulle saw no dilemma. When De Lattre proposed waiting “until the Allied high command has given its consent” to defend Strasbourg, De Gaulle replied, “I cannot accept your last communication.” De Lattre’s sole duty, De Gaulle added, was to France; it was said that at an afternoon reception in Paris, Madame de Gaulle snubbed Madame de Lattre. Strasbourg’s mayor sent the army commander a photograph of the spectacular cathedral with an inscription, “To General de Lattre, our last hope.” Confined to his cot by residual lung inflammation from a World War I gassing, the long-suffering De Lattre now suffered more.

At nine
P.M.
on Tuesday, General Juin appeared at Beetle Smith’s office in Versailles, tossed his left-handed salute, and then spent five hours warning of “extremely grave consequences” that would cause “the supreme commander to be severely judged” should Strasbourg be abandoned. After repeating himself incessantly, Juin at two
A.M.
pulled from his pocket a letter in which De Gaulle threatened to withdraw French forces from SHAEF command. “We are dependent on them,” De Gaulle had told Juin, “but inversely they are dependent on us.”

“Juin said things to me last night, which, if he had been an American, I would have socked him on the jaw,” a bleary-eyed Smith told Eisenhower during a staff meeting Wednesday morning, January 3. For more than an hour in the supreme commander’s office, joined by Strong and Spaatz, they debated their course. Smith still believed that withdrawal to the Vosges was imperative; 6th Army Group reported pressure across the entire front from
NORDWIND
. Devers had now accepted Eisenhower’s order “to forget Strasbourg,” but to forsake the city would threaten Allied unity. Strasbourg’s military governor had warned Patch, “You will cover the American flag with ineradicable shame,” and dispatches from the city at five that morning predicted “terrible reprisals” and “mass massacres.” Evacuation plans had already been drafted, beginning with a thousand civil servants that afternoon although only two hundred railcars were available to transport at least a hundred thousand civilians. Buffeted by contradictory demands, De Lattre appeared to have fallen in step with De Gaulle by ordering the 3rd Algerian Division to prepare for deployment to Strasbourg.

“Next to the weather,” Eisenhower would tell George Marshall, the French “have caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor. They even rank above landing craft.” The art of command at times requires tactical retreat for strategic advantage, in a headquarters no less than on a battlefield, and by midday on Wednesday the supreme commander sensibly recognized that in the interest of Allied comity he would have to yield. De Gaulle had requested a meeting at three
P.M.
, but before formally acceding to French demands Eisenhower intended to land a punch or two.

Smith phoned Devers to ask how close German forces were to the Alsatian capital.

“About thirty miles,” Devers replied.

“Well, keep them as far away as you can,” Smith said. “It looks now as if you will have to hold Strasbourg.”

*   *   *

The crowded stage in this melodrama grew more congested at 2:15
P.M.
with the arrival of Churchill and Brooke after a turbulent flight from England in filthy weather. Eisenhower whisked them from the airfield to his house for a quick lunch, and then to a conference room in the Trianon Palace. De Gaulle soon appeared, stiff and unsmiling, with Juin on his heels. The men settled into armchairs arranged in a circle around a situation map spread across the floor, and De Gaulle handed Eisenhower a copy of his letter ordering De Lattre to defend Strasbourg.

Eisenhower gestured to the map of Alsace, which showed three German corps bearing down from the north, as well as half a dozen enemy divisions threatening attack from the Colmar salient. “In Alsace, where the enemy has extended his attack for two days, the Colmar pocket makes our position a precarious one,” he said. The long front exposed French and American soldiers alike. Moreover, Devers not only had no reserves, he had been told to forfeit two divisions to reinforce the Ardennes, where fighting remained savage.

“Alsace is sacred ground,” De Gaulle replied. Allowing the Germans to regain Strasbourg could bring down the French government, leading to “a state bordering on anarchy in the entire country.”

“All my life,” Churchill said pleasantly, “I have remarked what significance Alsace has for the French.”

Even so, Eisenhower said, he resented being pressured to amend military plans for political reasons. The threat to pull French forces from SHAEF command seemed spiteful, given all that the Allies had done for France; the Combined Chiefs already had agreed to equip sixteen French divisions, and De Gaulle had recently asked for a total of fifty. Should
le général
choose to fight independently, SHAEF would have no choice but to suspend supplies of fuel and munitions to the French army. This crisis could have been averted, Eisenhower added, had De Lattre’s troops fought well and eradicated the Colmar Pocket, as ordered.

By now the supreme commander’s face had grown beet red. De Gaulle stared down his great beak. General Eisenhower, he said, was at “risk of seeing the outraged French people forbid the use of its railroads and communications.… If you carry out the withdrawal, I will give the order to a French division to barricade itself inside Strasbourg and before the scandalized world you will be obliged to go in and free it.”

The prime minister chose this moment to gently lower himself from his chair to the floor with feline grace. Laying an index finger on the map, he murmured, “Strasbourg, this point.”

Having lost his composure, Eisenhower now regained it. Very well, he conceded, Strasbourg would be defended. Sacred Alsace would remain French, the withdrawal order to Devers canceled. Ringing for tea, he confided to De Gaulle in a low voice, “I am having a lot of trouble with Montgomery.”

The conference ended. “I think you’ve done the wise and proper thing,” Churchill told Eisenhower. Buttonholing De Gaulle in a corridor outside, the prime minister said, in his sibilant, fractured French, that Eisenhower was “not always aware of the political consequences of his decisions,” but was nonetheless “an excellent supreme commander.” De Gaulle said nothing, but before Eisenhower bade him adieu at the front door of the Trianon Palace, Deux Mètres told him, “Glory has its price. Now you are going to be a conqueror.” To a dinner companion the next night, De Gaulle said, “Imagine, asking us to withdraw our troops from Strasbourg. Could you believe it?” The contretemps, he said, revealed that “these Americans … equate politics with sentiment, the military art with logic.”

As the happy news of salvation spread through Strasbourg late Wednesday afternoon, jubilant crowds belted out “La Marseillaise.” A tricolor rose again before the Caserne de Gendarmerie, and a Seventh Army loudspeaker truck rolled through the city, urging calm. Eisenhower authorized Devers to keep the new SHAEF reserve for his own use; Strasbourg was to be defended “as strongly as possible”—primarily by French troops—but without risking “the integrity of your forces, which will not be jeopardized.”