The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (95 page)

Their visible wish to surrender—most were in tears of terror and despair—was ignored by our men lining the rim.… Laughing and howling, hoo-ha-ing and cowboy and good-old-boy yelling, our men exultantly shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead.… The result was deep satisfaction.

“Killing is an obsession,” a private in the 86th Division wrote his parents. “What code could withstand it?”

*   *   *

At 7:30
A.M.
on Wednesday, January 31, a U.S. Army weapons carrier clanked up to a gray farmhouse with orange shutters outside Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines, an Alsatian town long celebrated for mineralogy, fifteen miles northwest of Colmar. A scrawny, handcuffed twenty-four-year-old private from Michigan named Eddie D. Slovik stepped from the rear bay, escorted by four MPs. A Vosges snowstorm had delayed their journey from Paris through the Saverne Gap, and Private Slovik was late for his own execution. No task gripped Eisenhower with more urgency than clearing the Colmar Pocket to expel the enemy from Alsace and shore up the Allied right wing. But first, a dozen riflemen were to discharge a single, vengeful volley in the high-walled garden of 86 Rue du Général Bourgeois.

As a miscreant, Private Slovik was more bumbling than iniquitous. First arrested at age twelve, he quit school at fifteen, and served jail time for burglary, assault, and embezzlement. Originally declared 4-F by a draft board and exempted from conscription for what the British would call “LMF”—lack of moral fiber—he was reclassified 1-A, an indication of the desperate need for infantrymen. Inducted in late 1943, Slovik arrived in France in August 1944, was assigned to the 28th Infantry Division, and promptly deserted. Perhaps his only endearing trait was a uxorious devotion to his wife, Antoinette, to whom he wrote 376 letters, in pencil, during his 372 days in the Army. “I fought to make you love me,” he told her, adding, “I think I’m going to have a lot of trouble. Army life don’t agree with me.”

In this he was not unique. Indiscipline had become a nagging worry for Eisenhower: nearly 11,000 general courts-martial would be convened for serious crimes committed in Europe by U.S. soldiers, in addition to 126,000 special and summary courts-martial for lesser infractions. “Disciplinary conditions are becoming bad,” Eisenhower had told his diary in November. A month later he advised subordinates, “The large incidence of crimes such as rape, murder, assault, robbery, housebreaking, etc., continues to cause grave concerns.” A French prefect lamented that “the liberators have turned into looters, rapists, and killers,” and a newspaper in Cherbourg declared, “Never has one witnessed such debauchery.” (“Unfortunately,” a U.S. Army provost marshal conceded, “the editorial is justified.”) General Juin wrote Eisenhower that civilian women dared “not to go about their daily chores even when accompanied by a man for fear of being accosted by American soldiers.” Although less than one-half of one percent of Allied troops in Europe were implicated in serious offenses, a SHAEF memo in late January noted that “a considerable percentage of the French civil population” believed that GIs behaved badly, if not criminally.

Severe punishment had a fitful deterrent effect. A study of military offenders found that many had “mental ages of seven or eight”; some were psychopaths or chronic alcoholics. Of fourteen hundred convictions for violating Article of War No. 64—striking an officer, drawing a weapon on an officer, or “willful disobedience”—the average sentence for infractions in combat was fifteen years’ imprisonment. Thirty-year sentences for felonious behavior were not uncommon, and any jail term over six months also drew a dishonorable discharge. Four hundred and forty-three death penalties were imposed on GIs, most for murder or rape, and a severely disproportionate number fell on black soldiers, often after dubious due process. Seventy executions took place in Europe, including several public hangings; War Department Pamphlet 27-4 specified that the hangman’s rope was to be “manila hemp, 1¼ inches in diameter … stretched to eliminate any spring,” and coated “with wax, soap, or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.”

Desertion, defined by the U.S. military as an unauthorized absence of two months or more, was as old as warfare, and historically it was a capital crime punished by a firing squad. The British had handed down more than 3,000 death sentences from 1914 to 1920, and had executed about 10 percent of those condemned—before abolishing the death penalty for cowardice and desertion in 1930. The German military issued 50,000 military death sentences in World War II, with half or more carried out. Twenty-one thousand soldiers would desert from the U.S. Army during the war; less than half had been caught by the late 1940s. Of nearly 2,000 deserters convicted in Europe, 139 received death sentences. But the United States had not actually executed a deserter since 1864.

Slovik was arrested in October after living for weeks with a Canadian unit. Offered amnesty if he went to the front, he refused, vowing, “I’ll run away again if I have to.” He was convicted following a two-hour court-martial in the Hürtgen Forest on November 11. From a jail cell in Paris he appealed his death sentence to Eisenhower in a six-paragraph clemency plea. “How can I tell you how humbley sorry I am for the sins I’ve comitted.… I beg of you deeply and sincerely for the sake of my dear wife and mother back home to have mercy on me,” he wrote, according to the author William Bradford Huie. “I Remain Yours for Victory, Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik.” Unfortunately for the condemned, the supreme commander reviewed the petition at the nadir of the Bulge, on December 23, during a session in his Versailles office known as “the Hanging Hour.” Eisenhower not only affirmed the sentence, but decreed that as a lesson to shirkers it be carried out by Slovik’s putative unit, the 109th Infantry Regiment, in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division. “Darling,” Slovik wrote Antoinette, “I’m in a little trouble.”

The MP guards had lost the handcuff key during the trip through the Vosges, and a hacksaw was used to free the prisoner’s wrists so that he could be properly bound with nylon parachute cord. A priest heard his confession and handed him twenty-eight letters from the wife who would soon be a widow. Cota convened the firing squad of twelve specially chosen sharpshooters to remind them that they were “the finest marksmen in the Army”; a physician gave a tutorial on the location of the heart, but, considering the point-blank range of twenty yards, chose not to pin a target on Slovik’s chest. He was hooded with a black sack, sewn by a local seamstress in accord with the Army regulation “to cover the head and neck of the prisoner and to obscure all light.” A blanket was draped over his shoulders against the cold. Slovik declined to make a final statement other than to ask, “Please shoot straight so I won’t have to suffer.”

Gray overcast roofed the garden at ten
A.M.
as Cota, clutching a brass-handled swagger stick, stood in the snow with forty-two other witnesses. Murmuring a prayer, the condemned man shuffled through an archway and was lashed to a six-foot stake. The firing squad appeared in quick step, halted, faced right, shouldered rifles, and on command cut loose a smoking volley. Eleven bullets struck Slovik, including two in the left arm; not one hit his heart. Even the Army’s finest marksmen trembled at such an awful moment. Three physicians with stethoscopes listened to the wounded man’s shallow breathing and irregular heartbeat as the squad prepared to reload. “The second volley won’t be necessary,” a doctor pronounced at 10:08
A.M.
“Private Slovik is dead.” Cota, who in the past eight months had endured Omaha Beach, St.-Lô, the Hürtgen Forest, and the Bulge, later described this episode as “the toughest fifteen minutes of my life.”

A priest anointed the body with oil. Slovik would be buried outside a World War I cemetery at Oise-Aisne, near Soissons, in row three of Plot E—a hidden, unsanctified tract reserved for the dishonorable dead.
’Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

*   *   *

Eisenhower acknowledged a gnawing obsession with the Colmar Pocket. He called it “the one sore on the whole front,” and insisted that “we must get cleaned up in the south, even if it is going to hold up the offensives in the north.”

In this he would be further frustrated, for Hitler showed no inclination to forswear his 850-square-mile swatch of Alsace, stubbornly held by 23,000 Wehrmacht troops. Deep trenches zigged and zagged across snowy terrain now seeded with minefields, and more than a dozen Alsatian villages had been converted into fortresses around the pocket’s 130-mile perimeter. Perpetual smoke screens hid rail and road bridges across the Rhine, as well as ten ferry sites, frustrating AAF bombers trying to sever German supply routes. Allied engineers upstream had released more than two hundred floating contact mines, to no avail. The Führer even awarded an Iron Cross for valor to one particularly durable span near Brisach.

General Devers’s initial effort to reduce the pocket through Operation
CHEERFUL
, an ill-named double envelopment, had foundered in late January on French inadequacy. In the south, General de Lattre’s I Corps fired off the entire French artillery ammunition consignment in a fruitless barrage, then lost half its tanks to mines and antitank guns. By early February, after eleven days of flopping around on “polished ice terrain,” not a single objective had been captured. The French II Corps, attacking from the north on a seven-mile front, did a bit better, but enemy graffiti scribbled on walls throughout the pocket—
“Elsass bleibt deutsch,”
Alsace remains German—still obtained.

Franco-American fraternity, always delicate, grew brittle. “Having gained surprise in both north and south, we have been unable to exploit,” Devers told his diary. “Continual trouble with Gen. de Lattre.… Situation on the front does not look good.” The French, he lamented, lacked “the punch or the willingness to go all out.” General Leclerc’s refusal to take orders from De Lattre, again, led Devers to observe that if he “were in the Russian army he would be shot.” When Devers repeatedly pressed De Lattre to close up his straggling line, the Frenchman snarled, “Goddamn it! Am I commander here or not? If I am, let me command. If not, relieve me.” Eisenhower privately complained, “We have certainly been let down by the French.”

American units had their own difficulties. Cota’s 28th Division, consigned to De Lattre’s French First Army in mid-January, was described as “exhausted and depleted” after the Bulge. When the veteran 3rd Division joined the French II Corps in attacking north of Colmar, soldiers donned mattress covers or improvised nightshirts for camouflage and carried wooden planks to cross the countless streams braiding the marsh flats. But no plank would support a Sherman M-4, and the first tank in an armored column crashed through a frail bridge over the Ill River at Maison Rouge; the mishap left three infantry battalions exposed to a panzer counterattack on the far bank. Terrified GIs scoured across the plain “in flight and panic,” splashing through the icy, steep-banked Ill while enemy grazing fire lashed their backs with white tracers. “It was like a goddamned scene from Civil War days,” a captain reported. One regiment lost 80 percent of its combat kit and 350 men, many of them taken prisoner while hiding in boggy burrows. “Our clothes were so frozen after we were captured,” wrote one private, “that we rattled like paper.” As a taunt, enemy gunners fired leaflet canisters stuffed with the names of GIs now in German custody.

Audie Murphy helped redeem the day with valor uncommon even by his standards. Since advancing up the Rhône and across the Vosges with the 3rd Division, Murphy—who was still not yet old enough to vote or to shave more than once a week—had collected two Silver Stars, a battlefield commission, and a severe wound that turned gangrenous and cost him several pounds of flesh whittled from his right hip and buttock. Rejoining the 15th Infantry in mid-January after two months’ recuperation, he soon took command of the same company he had joined as a private in North Africa two years earlier; it was now reduced to eighteen men and a single officer, himself. On January 26, two hundred German infantrymen with half a dozen panzers attacked from the woods near Riedwihr. Clutching a map and a field phone, Second Lieutenant Murphy leaped onto a burning tank destroyer and for an hour repulsed the enemy with a .50-caliber machine gun while calling in artillery salvos. He “killed them in the draws, in the meadows, in the woods,” a sergeant reported; the dead included a dozen Germans “huddled like partridges” in a nearby ditch. “Things seemed to slow down for me,” Murphy later said. “Things became very clarified.” De Lattre described the action as “the bravest thing man had ever done in battle,” but Murphy reflected that “there is no exhilaration at being alive.” He would receive the Medal of Honor.

At last an Allied preponderance began to crush the pocket. An exasperated Eisenhower committed a U.S. corps, the XXI, for a total of four American divisions to bolster De Lattre’s eight; the reinforcements gave Devers better than a five-to-one advantage in men, tanks, and artillery ammunition. “God be praised!” the French commander exclaimed. By Friday, February 2, the 28th Division had cleared Colmar’s outskirts, then stood aside to let French tanks liberate the town. “Your city,” De Lattre said, “has found the motherland and the tricolor once more.”