The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (94 page)

Within weeks the bloom had left the rose. Churchill sat listening to
The Mikado
on a gramophone, lamenting “the shadows of victory” and fretting that he had trusted Stalin as Neville Chamberlain had once trusted Hitler. “We had the world at our feet,” he mused. “Twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.” Provisional agreements made at Yalta soon came unstitched. The Western Allies effectively scuttled the deal to dismember Germany and to extract reparations collectively. Moscow in turn consolidated its grip on eastern Europe, installing a Communist regime in Bucharest and deporting tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to the Ural Mountains as slave laborers. Polish leaders deemed anti-Soviet were arrested in utter disregard of the “declaration on liberated Europe”; exiled Poles in London decried the “partition of Poland, now accomplished by her allies.” The sentimentality of
ARGONAUT
quickly faded, along with delusions that Russian xenophobia and Leninist dogma could be sweet-talked away. Marshall alerted the Joint Chiefs to reports of “increasing Russian non-cooperation with U.S. military authorities,” and Roosevelt would complain in mid-March, “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” To a friend in Washington he added, “I didn’t say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.”

Recriminations followed, inflamed by the eventual revelation of secret concessions regarding United Nations membership and the enticements that had induced Moscow to make war on Japan. A stigma soon stained Yalta, “a connotation of shameful failure, if not outright treason,” as one British historian wrote, “matching that attached to the Munich Conference of September 1938.” For decades the Western delegates would be blamed for everything from the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe to the rise of Communist regimes in China, northern Korea, and Indochina.

Roosevelt’s frailty came to be seen as both the proximate cause of craven negotiating and a metaphor for the West’s weak answer to Stalin’s belligerence. “The shrewdness has gone, and there is nothing left,” Moran wrote of Roosevelt during the conference. “The president’s opinions flutter in the wind.” Yet those working in closest proximity found, as Churchill later told the Commons, “an extraordinary effort of the spirit over the flesh, of willpower over physical infirmity.” The president evinced both a reasonable command of complex issues and, the historian S. M. Plokhy would write, “his trademark ability to make alliances, strike deals, and maneuver in order to achieve his main goals.” Eden wrote that although Roosevelt “gives the impression of failing powers … I do not believe that the president’s declining health altered his judgment.” Photos from Yalta would show a wasting man, gray and thin; U.S. Navy color movie footage shows a man indeed gray and thin, but also animated and plainly alert. Reporters ferried to the
Quincy
for the 992nd press conference of Roosevelt’s presidency found him articulate, droll, and quick; asked whether the conference had laid a foundation for an enduring peace, Roosevelt replied, “I can answer that question if you can tell me who your descendants will be in the year 2057.… We can look as far ahead as humanity believes in this sort of thing.”

Two generations later, Yalta can be seen as neither the portal to Roosevelt’s “world of justice and equity” nor a disgraceful capitulation to red fascism but, rather, an intricate nexus of compromises by East and West. Roosevelt “largely followed through on earlier plans, and gained most of what he wished,” the historian Robert Dallek concluded, including Soviet support for the United Nations and participation in the defeat of Japan, an obligation punctually fulfilled by Moscow’s declaration of war three months after the German surrender. That declaration may not have “saved two million Americans,” as Admiral King had envisioned at Yalta, but along with two atomic bombs it encouraged Tokyo’s decision to surrender. With the Soviet Union killing far more Germans in combat than all other Allied forces combined, at a fell price of 26 million Soviet lives, Stalin was not to be denied what the diplomat George F. Kennan called “a wide military and political
glacis
on his Western frontier.” If Roosevelt sounded plaintive and exasperated, his explanation also captured the political reality of Europe in February 1945:
It was the best I could do.

War had held the Big Three together—the common cause of crushing Germany proved stronger than the centrifugal forces that beset any alliance. Now the entropy of peace threatened to unknot those ties, as postwar interests and imperatives emerged. Even Roosevelt and Churchill, who had met on nine occasions to spend 120 days together during the war, felt the bonds of blood and history fraying week by week. When the reporters aboard
Quincy
asked Roosevelt whether Churchill hoped to reassemble the antebellum imperial empire, the president replied, “Yes, he is mid-Victorian on all things like that.… Dear old Winston will never learn on that point.… This is, of course, off the record.” But Churchill knew. Roosevelt “cannot leave the empire alone,” he told Moran. “It seems to upset him.” Eden shrewdly suspected that the president “hoped that former colonial territories, once free of their masters, would become politically and economically dependent upon the United States.”

Moran in February observed, “We have moved a long way since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakesh [in January 1943], ‘I love that man.’” Perhaps it was too much to expect such attachments to survive when so much had perished. Speaking to the Commons a few days after his return from Yalta, the prime minister warned: “We are now entering a world of imponderables.… It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

Yet for those who felt destiny as a following wind, the morrow beckoned and the imponderable held more promise than peril. “The Americans pitch their song on a higher note,” Moran wrote. “They feel they are on top of the world.”

“Only Our Eyes Are Alive”

F
ROM
the Swiss border to the North Sea, across the fronts of almost eighty Allied divisions in seven armies, none of this mattered at the moment, not a whit. What preoccupied several million soldiers was the effort to find a bit of warmth in the frozen night, and perhaps a lukewarm meal rather than congealed hash in a cold can, and to live to see the next dawn, and then the next, and the next after that. The autumn rallying cry of “Win the War in ’44” had been supplanted by the sour “Stay Alive in ’45.” A soldier in the 70th Division spoke for many GIs in a letter to his parents in Minnesota: “My mind is absolutely stripped of any traces of reason for war.… Maybe the overall picture justifies what goes on up here, but from an infantryman’s point of view, it’s hard to see.”

The harshest winter in decades compounded the misery, even after the German retreat from the Bulge. “My hands shivered like tuning forks,” wrote one private in Lorraine. “But worst of all, the cold had settled in my spine.… I was a bundle of icy vibrations.” A soldier in the 84th Division described awakening in a slushy foxhole to find his feet “encased in a block of ice up to my ankles”; comrades chipped him free with bayonets. Impassioned debates raged over “whether sleeping with hands in the crotch or the armpits was the best way to avoid frostbite.” Troops jerked awake by gunfire left patches of hair stuck to the icy ground. Soldiers fashioned crude igloos or huddled over tiny fires fueled with cardboard scraps from K-ration boxes. GIs became adept at chopping a small divot from the frozen ground with a pickax, then detonating a quarter-pound TNT block to finish excavating a foxhole. Graffiti scribbled on a concrete fortification in Lorraine read: “Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918. Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1945. This is the last time I want to write my name here.”

A SHAEF plan to cut one million cords of firewood by February 1 fell short by 964,000 for want of tools and lumberjacks. Coal production in Europe fell 40 percent in January, partly because Belgian miners went on strike; frozen canals impeded deliveries of what stock there was. GI work details spent a month slicing peat from Norman bogs for fuel before abandoning the task as pointless. Sled dogs shipped from Alaska and Labrador to evacuate the wounded in snowy terrain arrived after the spring thaw, and so gave the field armies only useless, barking mouths to feed.

A lieutenant in the 99th Division wrote his wife in January:

To date, I’ve slept on a mattress, a steel deck, a wet concrete floor with a little straw on top, dirt floors, a bed, a stretcher, on an LST, in a truck, in a foxhole, across the front seats of a jeep, in a rope hammock, in cellars, first, second, and third floors, in a pillbox, on the back window shelf of a command car, in haylofts, on snow, and in shacks.

There were horrors to see, hear, and smell, horrors to relive and remember because they could never be forgotten. A soldier from the 75th Division described an hour in a foxhole with a mortally wounded comrade and no morphine: “I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked as hard as I could.… That didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly bled to death.” Another GI assigned to police corpses from the battlefield wrote:

Everywhere we searched we found bodies, floating in the rivers, trampled on the roads, bloated in the ditches, rotting in the bunkers, pretzeled into foxholes, burned in the tanks, buried in the snow, sprawled in doorways, splattered in gutters, dismembered in minefields, and even literally blown up into trees.

When a reporter asked a private in the 23rd Infantry what he wanted Americans at home to know, he said, “Tell ’em it’s rough as hell. Tell ’em it’s rough. Tell ’em it’s rough, serious business. That’s all. That’s all.” A nurse in Seventh Army wrote her family in January: “Admitted a 19-year-old from Texas last night who had both legs blown off by a shell. He was unhappy because now he could never wear his nice cowboy boots. He died before he could be taken to surgery.” Another nurse, in a Third Army shock ward dubbed the Chamber of Horrors, said, “Maybe it’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die.”

Prison-camp guards opened the locked boxcars on a freight train carrying captured Germans across France to find that 104 had suffocated. Their pleas and shouts had been ignored, and investigators found “evidence of teeth marks and clawing on inner walls.” Eisenhower wrote Marshall, “I certainly loathe having to apologize to the Germans. It looks as if this time I have no other recourse.” His message to Berlin, sent through the Swiss, read: “The supreme commander profoundly regrets this incident and has taken steps to prevent its recurrence.”

War made the warriors sardonic, cynical, old before their time. “Will you tell me what the hell I’m being saved for?” a captain in the 30th Division mused after surviving a bloody attack on the West Wall. Another soldier replied, “For the Pacific.” To a GI in the 100th Division, “it wasn’t so much fear of death as the uncertainty of life.” One squad leader found his battle-weary men “impassive, lethargic, uncommunicative.” Some deliberately extended an arm or leg from their foxholes in hopes of the proverbial million-dollar wound, but for most “each succeeding town came and each succeeding town went, and we continued dying a thousand deaths.” After the Germans ambushed his patrol, a soldier in the 275th Infantry wrote, “Things didn’t go exactly as planned. They usually don’t.” To Lieutenant Paul Fussell, the bitterest lessons of combat were indeed “about the eternal presence in human affairs of accident and contingency, as well as the fatuity of optimism at any time or place.”

All planning was not just likely to recoil ironically; it was almost certain to do so. Human beings were clearly not machines. They were mysterious congeries of twisted will and error, misapprehension and misrepresentation, and the expected could not be expected of them.

There was nothing for it but obduracy, to soldier on even for those who were not soldiers. “How hard I have become,” an American Red Cross volunteer told her diary in February. “Emotions which formerly would have wracked my soul leave me almost untouched. It’s a hardness of survival.” A soldier in the 84th Division described seeing GIs using a severed German head as a soccer ball in an icy pasture; when a mortar round blew apart a U.S. trooper in a nearby street, he added, “I sat and ate my food. I had not known him.” J. Glenn Gray, a counterintelligence officer, wrote in his journal, “Yesterday we caught two spies.… One had to be severely beaten before he confessed. It was pretty horrible.… I thought of the
Hamlet
line as most appropriate, ‘’Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.’”

Not all would learn to hate. Nor would all find satisfaction, even exhilaration, in killing the Huns, Heinies, Hermanns, Lugerheads, Jerries, Fritzes, Boches, Krauts, Katzenjammers, Squareheads. A survey of four thousand GIs found that although four-fifths expressed strong hatred toward German leaders, less than half voiced hatred toward German soldiers. But by late winter enough haters and killers filled the ranks to constitute a ferocious killing engine. After Malmédy, an officer in the 35th Division wrote: “A hatred such as I have never seen has sprung up among us against Hitler’s armies and all of Germany.” A British soldier added, “The question of killing does not present itself as a moral problem any more—or as a problem at all.”

“Slowly it is beginning to dawn on them that the only good German is a dead German,” the XII Corps chief of staff wrote his parents. “The result is that we’re killing more and taking fewer prisoners.” While smashing up a German house, a 2nd Division soldier bellowed, “Screw the bastards and all their works. Shit on them. Piss on them.” A Canadian soldier wrote, “When the Jerries come in with their hands up, shouting ‘
Kamerad,
’ we just bowl them over with bursts of Sten fire.” A lieutenant in the 15th Infantry told his diary, “Sergeant Burton, somewhat inebriated, shoots two Krauts who are trying to surrender.… Some of our best men are the most murderous.”

Fussell described how GIs in his 103rd Division found some fifteen Germans cowering in a deep crater in the forest.