Truscott put the spurs to Butler, who galloped north from Le Muy before dawn on Friday, August 18. “No-man’s land,” he declared, “is our land.” The force had traveled less than seven miles, choosing to avoid the easily barricaded Route Napoléon in this sector, when the column was stopped cold in Draguignan by a stupendous roadblock built by unwitting 36th Division engineers. While this barrow of boulders, mines, and cables was muscled aside, cavalry scouts captured a German corps commander who was found sitting on a park bench with pistol and brandy at hand, “having a nice quiet dignified weep,” as Butler reported, while his orderly stood near holding the general’s suitcase and eyeing a vengeful French mob.
And then they were off. Task Force Butler covered forty-five miles on Friday and the same on Saturday and Sunday, using Michelin maps and a Cub plane overhead to spot downed bridges, most of which had been blown by the maquis. In Quinson, when jeeps mired in a creek bed, civilians formed a fire brigade to pass flagstones and build a ford. A thousand prisoners were taken in Digne-les-Bains, many of them just arrived from Grenoble with vague, useless orders to block the Route Napoléon. Sisteron fell without a fight on August 19.
Across folded limestone hills they sped, through stands of chestnut and Aleppo pine, slowed only by nagging gasoline shortages and by road signs that locals had jumbled to confuse the Boche. Frenchmen in threadbare Great War uniforms held their salutes on the roadsides, and mildewed tricolors were retrieved from cellar hiding holes. Eric Sevareid described the chase
through civilized, settled Provence, through the sun fields of Van Gogh and the green-and-purple patchwork of Cézanne.… The sun was warm and the air like crystal. The fruits were ripening, and the girls were lovely.… This was war as it ought to be, the war of pageantry and story.
In Gap, nearly a hundred miles from the sea, a cavalry troop of 130 men and ten armored cars fired a few dozen rounds from their assault guns, toppling a radio tower. An Army captain warned the German garrison that sixty B-17s were prepared to flatten the town; the bluff worked, or perhaps it was fear of maquis reprisals that caused another eleven hundred enemy soldiers to appear in the town plaza, wearing full packs and ready for the cages. They were frog-marched to the rear by captured Poles deputized as prison guards.
At four A.M. on Monday, August 21, an envoy appeared in Butler’s command post at Aspres with a message from Truscott: “You will move at first light 21 August with all possible speed to Montélimar. Block all routes of withdrawal up the Rhône valley.” Ultra and air reconnaissance had shown four retreating German divisions concentrated along the Rhône, with a rear guard provided by the 11th Panzer Division. The U.S. 3rd Division, Truscott’s former command, would act as a hammer in striking from the south, while Task Force Butler and the 36th Division provided the anvil across the Rhône gorge at Montélimar, a town long celebrated for its nougat. Leaving a small blocking force at Gap to protect his rear, Butler and his wayworn column made a sharp turn to the west and at daybreak began a sixty-mile dash toward the river.
By now supply shortages threatened to undermine Truscott’s master plan. Thousands of tons of ammunition had been loaded on top of other cargo in ships on the presumption that it would be required for fighting through the beachhead. Now stevedores stacked mountains of ammunition above the waterline so they could burrow deeper into the holds for desperately needed gasoline and food. The audacious sprint north—some scouts were almost to Grenoble—required supply trucks to make a three-hundred-mile round-trip, but the Seventh Army motor pool on August 21 comprised just sixty-two vehicles. Three U.S. infantry divisions together were burning 100,000 gallons of gasoline every day, but beach depots on this Monday held only 11,000 gallons. In the haste to turn ships around, thousands of artillery rounds had been inadvertently sent back to the United States, and a thousand mortar shells somehow ended up in Sardinia. French supply units proved particularly feeble, with severe shortages of even simple items such as tire patches. Artillery firing at night was reduced to conserve ammunition, and GIs in the battle zone were placed on two-thirds rations.
Even so, by late Monday afternoon the vanguard of Task Force Butler reached the wooded high ground north of Montélimar with armored cars, tank destroyers, and Stuart light tanks. An artillery battery unlimbered, and soon the crash of guns echoed across the riverbanks. German convoys nosing north on Highway 7 along the Rhône’s eastern shore swerved in panic as exploding shells heaved up geysers of dirt and smoke. A cavalry troop pushed down the Drôme, a narrow, west-flowing tributary of the Rhône; they blew a road bridge and ripped up a truck convoy. Fifty Wehrmacht vehicles soon burned like pitch.
VI Corps had severed the enemy escape route, and they had done it with just a few platoons overlooking the river and gunners reduced to twenty-five rounds per howitzer. From his new command post in Marsanne, eight miles northeast of Montélimar, Butler advised Truscott in a message shortly before midnight that with reinforcement, resupply, and more artillery he would launch a full-throated attack the next day.
“Everything has gone better than we dared hope,” Truscott told Sarah in a note scribbled on Monday night, subsequently adding, “Georgie P. is not the only one who can cover ground.” He was cheerful enough to tell her about camp life, of eating Gruyère, “which of course delights my soul,” and swapping a pound and a half of coffee for three bottles of vermouth. Although he had seen few wildflowers, “this country is too beautiful to fight over, or should be at any rate.” He asked her to send him soda crackers, witch hazel, four bottles of hot sauce to spice his rations, and a dozen Benzedrine inhalers.
“I am having my troubles and think I need a lot of things I do not have,” he told her. “But think of how my opponent must feel.”
* * *
His opponent felt dreadful. Blaskowitz, trying to hustle two corps from the Nineteenth Army up the Rhône after receiving Hitler’s withdrawal order, was so unsure of battlefield dispositions that he described himself as commanding in “pre-technical days.” A sharp debate had unfolded within Army Group G over whether the 11th Panzer Division—the most mobile and lethal unit in southern France—should save itself by fleeing, or be sacrificed to help other divisions escape. For now, as ferries finished lugging panzers to the river’s eastern shore near Avignon, the division feinted toward the beachhead, then fell in behind her retreating sisters as a rear guard, bounding north between successive positions eleven kilometers apart to remain beyond American 105mm howitzer range. Trucks and troop carriers dangled ropes to tow bicycle troops, and engineers blew holes in the Rhône cliffsides as shelters against Allied strafing attacks.
Truscott took the German feint. The 3rd Division had traveled more than thirty easy miles from the beachhead before encountering modest resistance and blown bridges on August 20 at Aix-en-Provence; the next morning, Truscott got wind of a battlefield rumor suggesting that 150 panzers had sortied southeast from Avignon. The division commander, Major General John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, was ever eager to do battle. (De Lattre once said that his face “might have been carved out with an axe.”) But at noon on August 21, Truscott phoned his command post. “Tell General O’Daniel that I want him to halt the bulk of his command,” Truscott told a staff officer. “The 11th Panzer is out in front of you and there is a possibility you might get a counterattack.” For two days, the 3rd Division inched along before creeping into Arles at midday on August 24 and into Avignon a day later, tormented by mines, felled trees, and dropped bridges, but by few Germans. Most enemy troops were scurrying north up the Rhône.
At Montélimar, Task Force Butler struggled to hold sway over a 250-square-mile sector east of the river, across terrain ranging from flat farmland to looming hills almost two thousand feet high. Now confronted by two German corps frantic to escape, Butler’s little command included thirty Shermans, a dozen tank destroyers, an infantry battalion, and twelve self-propelled guns. Few American fighter-bombers appeared overhead; the first airstrip in southern France had been completed o
nly late on the twentieth, and the Army’s swift advance had outrun P-47s flying from Corsica, which often forsook bomb payloads in order to carry extra fuel in wing tanks. Reinforcements from the 36th Division were nowhere to be seen, except for a single infantry battalion and two VI Corps artillery battalions that arrived on August 22.
This pleased Truscott not at all. At eleven that morning he flew by Piper Cub to the 36th Division command post in Aspres to find an infantry regiment and various gunners still in bivouac. The division commander, Major General John E. Dahlquist, was out in the field, so Truscott wheeled on the staff, his carbolic growl restored:
Don’t you understand? This is the opportunity of a lifetime. We can trap the entire German corps and 11th Panzer Division with a few men and guns. Every minute is precious. Now get moving.
For Dahlquist, he left a scorching note, describing himself as “considerably upset” that artillery and other corps units attached to the 36th were meandering toward Grenoble rather than besieging Montélimar. “Apparently I failed to make your mission clear to you,” Truscott wrote. “Make no mistake about it—I expect you to command … and will hold you responsible.”
In truth, Dahlquist was out of his depth. A large, fleshy Minnesotan who had worked as a haberdasher and college thespian in Swedish-language dramas before enlisting in 1917, he was humorless, blunt, and given to brooding. The campaign would quickly wear him down. “I must admit I get winded going up the hills,” he wrote his wife. “Too many cigarettes.” After receiving his commander’s note, Dahlquist called Truscott to explain that his division was scattered from St.-Tropez to Grenoble. Half his transport had yet to be unloaded from the ships; his men had even commandeered a Spanish consul’s car, and a small truck towing an antitank gun had been seen carrying three dozen men, including one astride the tube. “There is absolutely no gas available at the beaches,” Dahlquist added. “I have less than five thousand gallons.” Truscott waved away the excuses. “Your primary mission is to block the Rhône valley and I expect you to do it,” he said. “And when you run out of gas, you park your trucks and move on foot.”
Tough talk would not win the day. A battalion from the 141st Infantry cut Highway 7 before dawn on Thursday, August 24, but by early afternoon enemy forces had breached both flanks. A grim unit history later described Panthers “so close you could feel the heat from the motor.” The battalion withdrew “at night from a hill covered with burning, exploding tanks, knocked out guns, and dead men.”
The German capture of a 36th Division battle plan that same day revealed a weak seam in the American line, along a segment held by a single engineer company at Bonlieu, several miles east of the Rhône. Six German battle groups attacked there and at other points on Friday, in fighting so intense that a U.S. battalion commander called artillery onto his own post to avoid being overrun. A chaotic midnight cavalry charge led personally by the 11th Panzer commander bowled aside another roadblock on Highway 7—“Come on, you bastards, give up,” the Germans demanded in English—and enemy convoys continued leaking through to the north.
Truscott again flew to Dahlquist’s command post, now south of Crest on the Drôme. “John, I have come here with the full intention of relieving you from command,” the corps commander said. “You have failed to carry out my orders. You have just five minutes in which to convince me you are not at fault.” Dahlquist used the time well; Truscott left persuaded the division had finally come to fight.
Surely the artillery had. More than eight battalions—some one hundred guns—ranged the highway, the town, and the narrow river gorge known as the Gate of Montélimar. Shellfire grew so furious that the road asphalt caught fire, and gunners aiming at nearby rail lines smashed several German trains trying to force the gate on the Rhône’s east bank. A single infantry company fired 2,500 mortar rounds on Sunday, August 27, in beating off successive counterattacks. The weather gods also helped, with heavy downpours that put the Drôme in spate, inundating the fords German engineers had built of railroad sleepers laid on crushed stone; for several hours, until the water subsided, the fleeing columns were stalled on the south bank under scorching artillery. By midday Sunday, three German infantry divisions had splashed across the Drôme, herded by the 11th Panzer, while a fourth division struggled up Highway 7. Blaskowitz urged speed in messages carried through the screaming shellfire by couriers with dispatch cases.
In a confused mêlée after midnight on Monday, August 28, two columns from the German 198th Division collided northeast of Montélimar with Dahlquist’s 143rd Infantry; enemy corpses carpeted the roadbed, and most of those not killed were captured. Savage gunfights raged through the orchards and scrub woods along the Drôme, where the 132nd Field Artillery Battalion opened fire at eight thousand yards on German columns stacked bumper to bumper and three abreast at river fords. Horse-drawn wagons unable to scale the muddy embankment slid back into the water, animals and men shrieking in terror as the singing shell fragments chopped them to pieces.
Task Force Butler, reduced to hardly more than a battalion, soon pushed into Loriol on Highway 7 just below the Drôme; GIs severed the road for a final time. At Livron, on the north bank, they counted five hundred dead horses and one hundred vehicles destroyed within a hundred-yard radius. Truckloads of cognac and cigarettes were abandoned by Germans pelting north toward Lyon, and riflemen pulled looted Bank of France notes by the fistful from the wreckage.
The 3rd Division’s 15th Infantry pushed into Montélimar from the south at 2:30 P.M. on Monday, clearing the town of snipers and booby traps through the night and the next morning. Audie Murphy was among those creeping from house to house. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, behind one creaking door he glimpsed what he later described as “a terrible looking creature with a tommy gun. His face is black; his eyes are red and glaring.” Murphy saw a muzzle flash just as he fired; then came the sound of shattering glass. He had shot his own reflection in a mirror, prompting one comrade to observe, “That’s the first time I ever saw a Texan beat himself to the draw.”
The battle of Montélimar was over, but once again a chance to annihilate a fleeing enemy had gone begging. “Although the concept was daring,” a VI Corps colonel concluded, “the execution left much to be desired.” Task Force Butler had been too weak, the 36th Division too slow, the 3rd Division too cautious, the Army Air Forces too late to the game. Some sixty thousand U.S. artillery shells had scourged but not obliterated the enemy. “I fumbled it badly,” Dahlquist wrote his wife on August 29, “and should have done a great deal better.” In exchange for sixteen hundred American casualties, Blaskowitz’s losses exceeded ten thousand, including six thousand captured, but half were laborers, railway workers, and other noncombatants. About 80 percent of those fleeing up the Rhône’s east bank would reach Lyon, although Blaskowitz reported that the 338th Division mustered barely one thousand men. The 11th Panzer lost half its armor and a quarter of its artillery, but stolen French vehicles kept the division mobile. A German commander considered the escape “almost a miracle.”
Truscott was disappointed—perhaps not least in his own generalship. Even the best battle captain may be outmaneuvered by war’s caprice and a wily, desperate opponent. But a view of the battlefield from a Cub cockpit soon lifted his spirits: an aide described the scene as “carnage compounded.” For fifteen miles along the river, the detritus of eight days’ fighting stretched like a black mourning ribbon: two thousand charred vehicles; at least a thousand dead horses, many still harnessed to caissons and gun carriages; and “fire-blackened” Germans said to be such “an affront to the nose” that this grisly segment of highway became known as the Avenue of Stenches. As at Falaise, bulldozer operators wore gas masks.
All in all, Truscott allowed himself what he described as “some degree of satisfaction.” In two weeks, another ten thousand square miles of France had been liberated, while VI Corps had captured 23,000 Germans to complement the even larger throng bagged by the French. The DRAGOON death struggle was
over, and a race to the German frontier had begun.
* * *
Two field-gray torrents streamed toward the Fatherland from southern France. The German First Army—half of Blaskowitz’s Army Group G—beat its slow way, mostly on foot, from the nether reaches of the southwest and the Atlantic coast. Though they were 88,000 strong, only a fraction were combat troops, and few of those were armed with more than rifles. Hitler had ordered them to “carry away or destroy during the retreat everything of economic or military value,” including bridges, locomotives, and power stations; to this list the high command added horses, cattle, timber, coal, furniture, and even underwear, all of which was plundered or put to the torch. Frenchmen of military age were to be kidnapped whenever possible. Civilians were murdered for petty offenses, such as “improper remarks” about the shrinking Reich.
Allied air strikes and FFI marauders punished this retreating horde, and only sixty thousand or so would reach Germany. “Foot March Group South,” one of three columns within First Army, found itself isolated and cut off near Beaugency, southwest of Orléans, despite giving 8 million francs to local officials to buy goodwill and to pay for scorched-earth inconveniences. After making bonfires of their weapons, twenty thousand Germans in Foot March Group South would surrender to one of Patton’s divisions along the Loire.
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 Page 29