General Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny, described by one admirer as “an animal of action,” commanded the French First Army as part of the 6th Army Group in southern France. (©KEYSTONE-FRANCE)
Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, the chief American logistician as commander of the Communications Zone. “Heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless,” as the Army’s official history described him, “General Lee often aroused suspicions and created opposition.”
British paratroopers in a C-47 transport plane, bound for Holland in Operation MARKET GARDEN.
More than twenty thousand parachutists and glider troops descended behind German lines on September 17, 1944, in the biggest, boldest airborne operation of the war.
By late September 1944, the once-handsome Dutch town of Nijmegen had been reduced to ruins, although the road bridge leading toward Arnhem, ten miles north, still spanned the Waal River.
GIs from the 1st Infantry Division battle through central Aachen on October 17, 1944, several days before German defenders finally capitulated.
Captain Joseph T. Dawson helped stave off German counterattacks at Aachen. “These bitter tragic months of terrible war leave one morally as well as physically exhausted,” he told his family. Here Dawson receives the Distinguished Service Cross from Eisenhower for heroics at Omaha Beach. (McCormick Research Center, First Division Museum)
Riflemen from the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division creep through the Hürtgen Forest near Vossenack in early November. “The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,” one soldier recalled, “and the nights were so bad that I would pray for daylight.”
Eisenhower quizzes Major General Norman D. Cota about the Hürtgen battle at the 28th Division command post in Rott. “Well, Dutch,” the supreme commander told him, “it looks like you got a bloody nose.”
Sherman tanks push eastward on November 16 as part of Operation QUEEN. After more than three weeks the attack sputtered and stalled, reaching the west bank of the Roer River but not the Rhine, as U.S. commanders had hoped.
The high command contemplates a winter campaign in northern Europe. Conferring in mid-November at the supreme commander’s forward headquarters in Reims are, left to right, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff; Eisenhower; Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill.
A boy’s body burns after a V-2 rocket explosion in central Antwerp in late November 1944. German launch crews would fire more than 1,700 V-2s at Antwerp during a six-month period, in addition to some 4,200 V-1 flying bombs.
A French woman welcomes an American soldier on November 25, two days after French and U.S. troops liberated Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace.
Two GIs from the 9th Infantry Division shelter beneath a Sherman tank on December 11 in the smashed German town of Geich, near Düren.
At a Belgian crossroads in the early hours of the Battle of the Bulge, German soldiers strip boots and other equipment from three dead GIs. After U.S. troops captured this film, an Army censor redacted the road sign to Büllingen and other landmarks.
German soldiers smoke captured American cigarettes in front of a U.S. Army armored car on December 17, the second day of Operation HERBSTNEBEL, the attack through Belgium and Luxembourg.
General Hasso von Manteuffel commanded the Fifth Panzer Army in the Battle of the Bulge. An elfin veteran of campaigns in both Russia and Africa, Manteuffel was described by one superior as “a daredevil, a bold and dashing leader.”
General Sepp Dietrich, the one-time butcher’s apprentice and beer-hall brawler, commanded the Sixth Panzer Army. He is seen here in a Nuremberg jail cell, awaiting trial for war crimes in late 1945.
Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper led a vanguard of six thousand SS troops across Belgium in a vain effort to seize crossings on the Meuse river. Convicted of mass murder, he would be condemned to death, though his sentence was later commuted.
Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, left, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, confers during the Battle of the Bulge with Major General James M. Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Command of the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne fell to Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe, a short, genial artilleryman.
Montgomery, center, was given command early in the Bulge of all Allied forces in the northern Ardennes. His army commanders as of late December 1944 included, left to right: Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey, British Second Army; Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges, U.S. First Army; Lieutenant General William H. Simpson, U.S. Ninth Army; General Harry D. G. Crerar, Canadian First Army. (©Illustrated London News Ltd /Mary Evans Picture Library)
GIs from the 347th Infantry Regiment in a mess line north of Bastogne on January 13, 1945, shortly before the convergence of the U.S. First and Third Armies in the Ardennes.
A young SS soldier captured by the U.S. 3rd Armored Division in Belgium on January 15.
A German saboteur, captured while wearing a U.S. Army uniform during the Battle of the Bulge, is lashed to a stake moments before his execution by a firing squad in Belgium. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill aboard the U.S.S. Quincy in Grand Harbour, Malta, on February 2. Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, left, and Sarah Churchill Oliver accompanied their fathers on the long journey to the Crimea.
The Big Three at Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin on the terrace of the Villa Livadia. The president had but two months to live.
A self-propelled 155mm “Long Tom” pounds enemy targets to the east. After overcoming ammunition shortages early in the summer and fall of 1944, American gunners by early 1945 often fired ten shells or more for every one fired by the enemy.
German mortar fire causes GIs to shelter among concrete dragon’s teeth along the Siegfried Line. Known to Germans as the Westwall and begun in 1936, the fortifications, which included three thousand bunkers and pillboxes, stretched from the Dutch border to Switzerland.
Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers, left, commander of the 6th Army Group, with Patch, his Seventh Army commander. Capable and decisive, with a talent for handling his prickly French subordinates, Devers also had a knack for provoking his American peers.
Lieutenant Audie Murphy, right, is congratulated by Major General John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division. Murphy, a fifth-grade dropout from Texas, earned both a battlefield commission and the Medal of Honor for his valor in France. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
U.S. Seventh Army 155mm howitzers hammer a German observation post across the Rhine in Brisach in mid-February, shortly after the last enemy troops were expelled from the Colmar Pocket in Alsace.
The Ludendorff railroad bridge, seen from the east on the morning of March 17, with the German town of Remagen visible across the Rhine. Four hours after this photo was taken, the “Ludy” abruptly collapsed into the river, killing twenty-eight U.S. soldiers who were making repairs on the captured span.
Soldiers of the 89th Division, part of Patton’s Third Army, crossing the Rhine at St. Goar on March 26. One battalion came under fire even before launching its assault boats, and German defenses included a gasoline-soaked barge set ablaze in mid-stream. The division suffered almost three hundred casualties in reaching the east bank.
“In Cologne life is no longer possible,” wrote a German diarist, and the poet Stephen Spender compared the shattered city to “the open mouth of a charred corpse.” Although the Rhine bridges and thousands of buildings were destroyed, the great cathedral survived.
The wreckage of a B-24 Liberator in a German field. Of 240 low-flying Liberators that dropped supplies to Allied troops in the Rhine crossing operation called VARSITY PLUNDER, fifteen were lost and 104 damaged.
Churchill stands on a demolished Rhine rail bridge on March 25 during VARSITY PLUNDER. When U.S. officers demanded that
he return to a safer position, the prime minister “put both his arms round one of the twisted girders of the bridge and looked over his shoulder…with pouting mouth and angry eyes.” (William Simpson Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Major General Maurice Rose, commander of the 3rd Armored Division, receives the Croix de Guerre and an embrace from a French general in mid-March. Less than three weeks later, Rose, considered among the U.S. Army’s finest armored commanders, would be shot dead. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, captured in Tunisia in 1943, survived two years of German captivity and a failed raid on the Hammelburg prison camp, a scheme concocted by his father-in-law, George Patton. Seen here in a hospital bed after his eventual liberation, Waters went on to attain four-star rank. (Courtesy of George Patton “Pat” Waters)
The booty discovered by Third Army troops in an old potassium mine below the German town of Merkers included gold bars, gold coins, art works, and valuables stolen from concentration camp victims. “If these were the old free-booting days when a soldier kept his loot,” Omar Bradley told Patton, “you’d be the richest man in the world.”
Canadian infantrymen march through a Dutch town on April 9. The starving Dutch had been reduced to eating nettle soup, laundry starch, the occasional cat or dog, and 140 million tulip bulbs.
The Pegnitz river in Nuremberg on April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday and the day this shattered city—reduced to “alluvial fans of rubble”—fell to the U.S. XV Corps.
Dead inmates discovered in the concentration camp at Buchenwald after its liberation on April 11 by the U.S. 6th Armored Division. An estimated 56,000 victims had been murdered at Buchenwald and its subcamps.
Soldiers from the U.S. 45th and 42nd Divisions arrived at Dachau camp, near Munich, on April 29. Investigators later concluded that vengeful GIs gunned down at least twenty-eight SS guards after they had surrendered.
Prisoners by the acre: an aerial photograph taken on April 25 shows some of the 160,000 Germans herded into a temporary encampment near Remagen. American stockades alone held more than 1.3 million enemy soldiers by mid-April, even before the haul from the Ruhr was complete.
Perched above Hitler’s vacation home in the remote Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, a lavish mountaintop chalet known as the Eagle’s Nest had been built by the Nazi regime as a fiftieth birthday present for the Führer. American troops seized the area in early May, shortly after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin.
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt following his capture by American troops south of Munich on May 2. The former OB West commander is accompanied by a medic wearing a brassard, and his son, a German lieutenant.
The victorious American commanders, on May 11, 1945. Seated from left to right: Simpson; Patton; General Carl A. Spaatz, U.S. Strategic Air Forces Europe; Eisenhower; Bradley; Hodges; Lieutenant General Leonard T. Gerow, Fifteenth Army. Standing from left to right: Brigadier General Ralph F. Stearley, IX Tactical Air Command; Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenburg, Ninth Air Force; Beetle Smith; Major General Otto P. Weyland, XIX Tactical Air Command; Brigadier General Richard E. Nugent, XXIX Tactical Air Command.
On the night of May 7, hours before the official end of the war in Europe, jubilant Americans celebrate with the British at Piccadilly in central London.
A bugler blows “Taps” at the close of Memorial Day ceremonies in May 1945 at the U.S. military cemetery at Margraten, Holland.
NOTES
The following abbreviations appear in the endnotes and bibliography. Some stack locations and box numbers change as archivists reconfigure their collections. A list of additional manuscripts, monographs, and unpublished documents used in this book appears online at www.liberationtrilogy.com.
a.p. author’s possession
AAAD Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn
AAF Army Air Forces
AAFinWWII W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 3
AAR after action report
AB After the Battle
AB Div airborne division
AD armored division
admin administration
AF air force
AFHQ micro Allied Forces Headquarters microfilm, NARA RG 331
AFHRA Air Force Historical Research Agency
AFIA American Forces in Action publications and background papers
AG Army Group
ag adjutant general
AGF Army Ground Forces
ALH Howard L. Gleck et al., “The Administrative and Logistical History of the ETO,” part 5, WD, May 1946, a.p.
ALM Audie Leon Murphy papers, USMA Special Collections, West Point, N.Y.
ANSCOL Army-Navy Staff College Collection, NWC Lib, U.S. National Archives
AR action report
Ardennes Hugh M. Cole, The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge, USAWWII
AS Armored School
ASEQ Army Service Experiences Questionnaire, MHI
ASF Army Service Forces
AU Air University
bde brigade
Beck Alfred M. Beck et al., The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany, USAWWII
BLM Bernard Law Montgomery
bn battalion
BP Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit, USAWWII
CARL Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kans.
CBH Chester B. Hansen, including papers, diary, MHI
CBM Charles B. MacDonald, including papers, MHI
CCA Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, USAWWII
CCS Combined Chiefs of Staff
CE U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
CEOH U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History
Chandler Alfred Chandler, ed., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years
CI Combat Interview, ETO
CINCLANT Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet
CJB Clay and Joan Blair collection, MHI
CJR Cornelius J. Ryan, including papers, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
CMH U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.
CNO Chief of Naval Operations
co company
Coakley Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy 1943–1945, USAWWII
COHQ Combined Operations Headquarters, U.K.
Col U OHRO Columbia University Oral History Research Office, N.Y.
corr correspondence
COS chief of staff
CSI U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kans.
DA Department of the Army
Danchev Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
DDE Dwight David Eisenhower
DDE Lib Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kans.
diss dissertation
div division
DOB Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
DTL Donovan Technical Library, Fort Benning, Ga.
E entry
ET Exercise Tiger collection, MHI
ETO European Theater of Operations
FA field artillery
FAJ Field Artillery Journal
FCP Forrest C. Pogue, including background material for The Supreme Command, MHI
FDR Lib Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.
FMS Foreign Military Studies
FOIA Freedom of Information Act
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta
Ft. K Ft. Knox, Ky.
Ft. L Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.
FUSA First U.S. Army
GCM Lib George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Va.
Germany VII Horst Boog et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943–1944/45
Germany IX Ralf Blank et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 9, part 1, German Wartime Society, 1
939–1945
GS V John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, vol. 5
GS VI John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, vol. 6
GSP George S. Patton, Jr., including papers, Library of Congress
HCB Harry C. Butcher, including papers
HD Historical Division
HI “Hospital Interviews,” NARA RG 407 E 427, ML #2233
HIA Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.
Hinsley F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, abridged
HKH Henry Kent Hewitt papers
Hq headquarters
ID infantry division
IFG Samuel Eliot Morison, The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944–1945
IG inspector general
IJ Infantry Journal
inf infantry
intel intelligence
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 303