The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  The number of Americans killed, wounded, missing, or captured since June 6 topped 134,000; casualties among the British, Canadians, and Poles totaled 91,000. In half a million sorties flown during the summer, more than four thousand planes were lost, evenly divided between the RAF and the AAF. Some units had been eviscerated. The 82nd Airborne had given battle in Normandy with four regimental and sixteen battalion commanders, as well as several spare senior officers; of these, fifteen were killed, wounded, or captured. Normandy paid a fell price for her freedom: by one tally, of 3,400 Norman villages and towns, 586 required complete reconstruction. Throughout France, 24,000 FFI fighters would ultimately be slain or executed by the Germans; the 600,000 tons of Allied bombs dropped on occupied France—the weight of sixty-four Eiffel Towers—would be blamed for between 50,000 and 67,000 French deaths.

  Most prominent among the German dead was Erwin Rommel, albeit his was a death delayed. For two months he recuperated from the strafing attack at home in Herrlingen, reminiscing about Africa and fingering his marshal’s baton. Insomnia, headaches, and his injured left eye troubled him; merely lifting the eyelid proved difficult. Despite an unctuous letter to Hitler—“Just one thought possessed me constantly, to fight and win for your new Germany”—he was implicated in the July 20 assassination plot as a man who had known too much for his own good.

  The killers would come to Herrlingen in a green car with Berlin plates on October 14. After a brief private meeting with them in his study, Rommel told his son, “I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour.… Hitler is charging me with high treason.” Dressed in an open-collar Africa tunic, he emptied his wallet, petted the family dachshund, and climbed into the rear seat of the car with his marshal’s baton under his left arm. To spare his family he swallowed cyanide, permitting the regime to claim he had died of his injuries. Hitler, who sent a six-foot floral wreath even before Rommel’s death was confirmed, said of the news, “Yet another of the old ones.” In a funeral oration at the Ulm town hall, Rundstedt would declare, “A pitiless destiny has snatched him from us. His heart belonged to the Führer.” That was another lie: not his heart, but certainly his soul.

  Among the Allied casualties was Ernie Pyle. “If I ever was brave, I ain’t any more,” he wrote a friend. “I’m so indifferent to everything I don’t even give a damn that I’m in Paris.” The war had become “a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.” In a final column from Europe, he told his readers, “I have had all I can take for a while. I’ve been twenty-nine months overseas since this war started; have written around seven hundred thousand words about it.… The hurt has finally become too great.” Arriving at Bradley’s headquarters on September 2—“worn out, thin, and badly in need of a shave,” one officer reported—he said goodbye, then sailed home on the Queen Elizabeth, her decks crowded with other wounded. “I feel like I’m running out,” he confessed to another writer. Eight months later, while covering the Pacific war, he would be killed by a Japanese bullet in the head.

  For many rank-and-file troops a wild optimism took hold, “spreading like a disease,” as one SHAEF officer wrote home. PX officials announced that holiday gifts already in the mail from the home front to soldiers in Europe would be returned because the war was likely to end before Christmas. But others recognized, as an officer told his family, that “Hitler can trade space for a long time.” Eisenhower advised reporters, “Anyone who measures this war in terms of weeks is just a damn fool.”

  Yet surely things looked brighter than ever for the Allies. Berlin had again demonstrated a “fundamental inability to make sound strategic judgments,” as the historian Geoffrey P. Megargee later wrote, with profound weaknesses in intelligence, personnel, and logistical systems. The tactical edge long possessed by Wehrmacht troops now seemed much diminished as GIs gained competence and confidence. The Luftwaffe had fled to the Fatherland, whereas the U.S. Army Air Forces had built thirty-one airfields in France by August 25 and in the next three weeks would begin sixty-one more. The U.S. Army had displayed not only devastating firepower—a method as effective as any in killing an adversary—but also an impressive ability to adapt under the gun. And Montgomery’s strategy had won through, even if he resisted acknowledging necessary deviations from the plan. He had fought perhaps his most skilled battle, in the estimation of the historians Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, and the swift liberation of Paris lifted spirits throughout the Allied ranks. A British major wrote his mother, “The war is much more amusing now we are on the move.”

  The European war also could be seen ever more clearly to “possess a vivid moral structure,” in the phrase of the writer Paul Fussell, who fought as an infantry lieutenant. Just when Allied soldiers reached Paris, Soviet troops in Poland overran the concentration camp at Majdanek, where tens of thousands had been murdered. “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth,” a New York Times reporter wrote. Other journalists accompanying the Red Army described machines for grinding bones into fertilizer. “This is German food production,” a Soviet officer explained. “Kill people, fertilize cabbages.” Photos of Zyklon B, the poison used in gas chambers, appeared in Life, and Time published a vivid account of a warehouse containing 820,000 pairs of shoes taken from inmates: “Boots. Rubbers. Leggings. Slippers. Children’s shoes, soldiers’ shoes, old shoes, new shoes.… In a corner there was a stock of artificial limbs.” Other storerooms contained piled spectacles, razors, suitcases, toys. The evidence gave weight to Roosevelt’s recent accusations of deportations and “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe,” although not until the camps in Germany were uncovered in 1945 would the full horror come clear to the civilized world.

  In truth, a soldier need not look far to know what he was fighting for: markers on Allied graves all over Normandy contained that most stirring of epitaphs, “Mort pour la liberté.” After viewing a military cemetery near Ste.-Mère-Église, a soldier on August 28 scribbled lines from A. E. Housman in his diary: “The saviors come not home tonight: Themselves they could not save.” At the La Cambe cemetery, Don Whitehead listened as a French girl read a letter to a dead soldier from his mother: “My dearest and unfortunate son, on June 16, 1944, like a lamb you died and left me alone without hope.… Your last words to me were, ‘Mother, like the wind I came and like the wind I shall go.’”

  The death of Conrad J. Nutting III, whose P-51 clipped a tree as he attacked an enemy truck convoy on June 10, also prompted his pregnant wife, Katherine, to write to him beyond the grave:

  It will be my cross, my curse, and my joy forever, that in my mind you shall always be vibrantly alive.… I hope God will let me be happy, not wildly, consumingly happy as I was with you.… I will miss you so much—your hands, your kiss, your body.

  Another pilot, Bert Stiles, who at age twenty-three had but three months of his own life left, wrote, “It is summer and there is war all over the world.… There is hope as bright as the sun that it will end soon. I hope it does. I hope the hell it does.”

  * * *

  A final gesture of American arms played out in Paris three days after the Notre Dame shootout. De Gaulle had pleaded for two U.S. divisions as a “show of force” against communists and other troublemakers. A bemused Eisenhower agreed to a half measure, diverting the 28th Infantry Division through the capital en route to the front. The 28th’s ancestry reached back to units first organized by Benjamin Franklin before the Revolution; its forebears had fought in every American war since. Once commanded by Omar Bradley, now the division was led by the paladin of Omaha Beach and St.-Lô, Dutch Cota, recently promoted to major general.

  Hurriedly trucked to Versailles on Monday, August 28, then assembled in the Bois de Boulogne, the men toiled through a rainy night to clean uniforms and polish brass. On Tuesday morning, as skies cleared and the Seine bridges gleamed in the summer sun, Cota and the division band led the ranks in battle dress as they marched twenty-eight abreast t
o the strains of “Khaki Bill” beneath the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées, a sight so grand that its image soon appeared on a three-cent postage stamp. With weapons loaded and antiaircraft guns poised, the troops tramped past cheering Parisians and an improvised reviewing stand packed with generals in the Place de la Concorde.

  Beyond Paris to St.-Denis they marched, through the rolling meadows of Ile-de-France, past stone churches and beetroot fields, marching as the blue shadows grew long, marching in pursuit of the foeman fleeing east, marching, marching, marching toward the sound of the guns.

  Part Two

  4. PURSUIT

  “The Huntsman Is Hungry”

  NAPLES in August 1944 still carried scars from the city’s liberation ten months earlier and the hard winter that followed. A typhus epidemic had been suppressed by dusting a million citizens with DDT, but hungry Neapolitans rummaged for scraps in garbage bins along the piers, and black market C-ration hash sold for a quarter a can. Italian matrons struggling to make ends meet hawked their jewelry and old books “in a shamefaced and surreptitious way,” wrote the British intelligence officer Norman Lewis; he described priests peddling umbrella handles and candlesticks supposedly carved from the bones of saints filched from the catacombs. The damage caused by German demolitions had been largely repaired, and the port was once again among the world’s busiest; but a British study estimated that thieves pilfered one-third of all arriving cargo. American uniforms and GI blankets often reappeared on the street tailored as civilian suits after being unstitched, dyed, and recut. A sign above stolen footwear displayed on the Via Forcella promised, “You can march to kingdom come on these beautiful imported boots.”

  The city was “colorful, noisily poor, filthy, musical,” wrote Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a matinee idol now serving in the Navy. He might also have added baroque, sybaritic, and deeply odd. Superstitious men warded off the evil eye by reaching into a pocket to touch their testicles whenever strangers approached. Streetcorner troubadours sold freshly penned ballads, Lewis observed, all “dedicated to romantic frustration.” Prostitutes’ prices had jumped thirtyfold since the previous October, despite rumors that the Germans had smuggled in trollops with especially virulent strains of venereal disease. “Hey, Joe,” adolescent pimps yelled at soldiers along the waterfront. “Piece ass! Gal nice!” Smoke and steam leaked from Vesuvius day and night, although most of the ash and vitrified clinkers from the eleven-day eruption in March had been swept up.

  More than ever, Naples was a military town, sustaining two Allied armies that for a year had clawed their way up the Italian Peninsula. Although since June 6 the campaign seemed to have been reduced to a dismal backwater, two dozen divisions kept punching north of Rome, under the American Fifth Army in the west and the British Eighth Army in the east. German troops had abandoned Florence on August 7, and Allied forces now planned to assault the Gothic Line, yet another of those heartbreaking barriers built across the spiny Apennines. Troops poured into Naples for a final respite before the battle resumed, not just for “I&I”—intercourse and intoxication—but also for more sedate pastimes, like watching Dorothy Lamour in Riding High at the big open-air theater, or sipping a gin fizz at the Orange Club, or splashing about in the huge swimming pool with statuary nudes built for an antebellum world’s fair.

  But it was not the Allied armies preparing to breach the Gothic Line that now preoccupied military Naples. Rather, it was the quarter-million men seconded to Operation DRAGOON, who under Plan 4-44 had begun slipping inconspicuously from the port on August 9 for the invasion of southern France. Day by day more convoys left Naples, joined by ships from Malta and Palermo, Brindisi and Taranto, Bizerte and Oran, until nearly nine hundred vessels plied ten arterial routes across the Mediterranean, converging within striking distance of Provence along the west coast of Corsica. Making up the great fleet were attack transports and Liberty ships, LSTs and LCTs, twenty-one cruisers and eighty-seven destroyers and five battleships, including Texas, Nevada, and Arkansas, those smoke-stained veterans of Normandy.

  By August 13, the 36th and 45th Infantry Divisions had finished their last rehearsals at Salerno, where wrecked Higgins boats and moldering corpses could still be found from the divisions’ death struggle there the previous September. Now troops sat beneath tarpaulins on the transport decks, sewing shoulder flashes to uniform sleeves or thumbing through A Pocket Guide to France. The last tanks, trucks, and rubber terrain models were bullied into the holds. From the docks, cranes hoisted ten L-4 Piper Grasshoppers onto LST-906, which had been overlaid with a flight deck to serve as a makeshift aircraft carrier for artillery spotter planes. “Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! blared from loudspeakers on U.S.S. Henrico, while 3rd Division soldiers tuned a small radio to Axis Sally, a propaganda doxy in Berlin, who boasted that she was well acquainted with Allied designs on southern France. Unimpressed, the troops never glanced up from their poker game.

  Pacing the bridge of the flagship, U.S.S. Catoctin, was a portly seafarer with cascading chins and as much experience at seizing a hostile shore as any American in uniform: Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, who would command the invasion until ground forces were well inland. A native of Hackensack, New Jersey, Hewitt as a young Naval Academy ensign had circled the globe aboard U.S.S. Missouri with Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, and in the four decades since, he had sailed the wettest corners of the remotest seas. Thirty years ago, he had been in Naples harbor as a navigator aboard U.S.S. Idaho when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot dead in Sarajevo; he recalled vividly the battleship lowering her flag to half mast, as if to salute a dying world. Hewitt had won the Navy Cross for valor in the ensuing war, and many decorations subsequently. In this war, too, he had distinguished himself by putting Patton’s forces on the strand in both Morocco and Sicily despite ferocious storms. He was lucky, skilled, and unflappable. Now, as his crew prepared to cast off, Hewitt took a seat on the flag bridge and with a pencil stub began working a double-crostic. The puzzles lifted him above his troubles.

  Troubles he had. DRAGOON had begun dreadfully. On August 4, Rear Admiral Don Moon, who had commanded the naval force at Utah Beach and would oversee the right wing of the DRAGOON landings, had begged Hewitt to postpone the invasion. For hours he argued that forces had arrived in Naples too late to prepare properly, that assault training had been too skimpy, that the forewarned Germans would butcher the landing teams. Hewitt had known Moon as an Annapolis midshipman, knew him to be intense, overworked, and reluctant to delegate authority; he evidently did not know that Moon on June 6 had tried to persuade Joe Collins to suspend the Utah landings, or that the ship’s doctor aboard Moon’s Catoctin had treated him for acute depression, or that the fleet medical officer also had interviewed Moon about his mental balance. “I don’t think it’s as bad as you think it is,” Hewitt told him. He promised to consider Moon’s plea.

  At seven the next morning, Moon rang from his cabin to ask for orange juice. Fifteen minutes later, a steward entered the stateroom, opened the blackout curtain, and found the admiral, dressed in shorts and undershirt, sitting on the sofa with a .45 in his right hand, his eyes open, and a red worm of blood trickling from his ear. The spent bullet was found in the shower. A note in neat cursive on a ruled pad explained: “The mind is gone.… My mind is running cycles with occasional nearly lucid periods and then others the complete reverse.… What am I doing to you my wife and dear children? I am sick, so sick.” An inquest before noon ruled death had come “during a period of insanity.” The certificate read: “Cause: suicide, gunshot wound, head. Combat fatigue.” He was buried at five P.M., ten hours after his passing, in the Naples military cemetery. To his widow and four children, Collins later wrote, “He was a casualty of this war just as much as if he had been killed in action.” Hewitt sent his own chief of staff to take Moon’s command.

  At two P.M. on August 13, under clear skies on a calm sea, Catoctin, Bayfield, and more than two dozen transports eased away from the doc
ks and built to twelve knots. An escort of sixteen warships joined this final convoy as it steamed from the Naples anchorage. A witness thought of John Masefield’s lines from Gallipoli: “All that they felt was a gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used.”

  Vesuvius had begun to recede in the distance when a commotion on deck caught Hewitt’s attention. A British admiral’s barge, making for the port from the island of Ischia, could be seen weaving among the outbound ships. A stubby figure with pink cheeks stood in the forepeak, disdaining a handhold and wearing a light tropical suit beneath an enormous sun helmet. Abruptly from soldiers and sailors crowding Catoctin’s rails a cry went up: “It’s Churchill!” So it was: with a smile he doffed his ten-gallon helmet, wispy hair tossing in the breeze, then raised his right hand to flash the famous V with his fingers. The men huzzahed until he slid from sight in their wake.

  * * *

  He was traveling under the improbable nom de guerre of Colonel Kent, as if a phony name and a big hat could render him inconspicuous. Ostensibly Churchill was on a fortnight’s bathing holiday in southern Italy, wallowing “like a benevolent hippo” at Capri’s Blue Grotto and in various Tyrrhenian coves around Naples while following the heartening news from Normandy in his portable map room. Yet he also had come to keep a pale eye on an enterprise he still bitterly opposed, and which had churned up as much enmity within the Anglo-American alliance as any episode of the war.

  DRAGOON, originally called ANVIL, had first been intended as a diversion during OVERLORD to occupy eighteen German divisions south of the Loire in Army Group G. Shipping shortages and delays in capturing Rome forced a postponement until long after the Normandy landings, yet the Americans remained keen on the operation. Marseille and Toulon would provide ports at a time when dozens of U.S. Army divisions were stuck at home for lack of dockage in Normandy. DRAGOON could discomfit the enemy with a thrust up the Rhône valley, an invasion route since Caesar’s wars, and it would profitably employ several veteran French divisions now fighting in Italy; with a mother country still to liberate, De Gaulle had forbidden those forces to venture beyond the river Arno. “France,” Eisenhower told the British, “is the decisive theater.”