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

by Rick Atkinson

  * * *

  Charles de Gaulle, once again referring to himself in the third person, declared that the abandonment of Strasbourg would not only be “a terrible wound inflicted on the honor of the country,” but also “a profound blow to the nation’s confidence in de Gaulle.” On Tuesday, January 2, he told De Lattre in a handwritten note, “Naturally the French Army cannot consent to the abandonment of Strasbourg.… I order you to take matters into your own hands.” At nearly the same moment, Devers cabled De Lattre to pull his left wing back toward the Vosges no later than Friday morning, necessarily exposing the city. The American order had “a bomb-like effect” in the French army headquarters, one staff officer observed, and it provoked an anguished “Ça, non!” from De Lattre, now confronted by conflicting orders from two masters in what he called “a grave problem of conscience.”

  De Gaulle saw no dilemma. When De Lattre proposed waiting “until the Allied high command has given its consent” to defend Strasbourg, De Gaulle replied, “I cannot accept your last communication.” De Lattre’s sole duty, De Gaulle added, was to France; it was said that at an afternoon reception in Paris, Madame de Gaulle snubbed Madame de Lattre. Strasbourg’s mayor sent the army commander a photograph of the spectacular cathedral with an inscription, “To General de Lattre, our last hope.” Confined to his cot by residual lung inflammation from a World War I gassing, the long-suffering De Lattre now suffered more.

  At nine P.M. on Tuesday, General Juin appeared at Beetle Smith’s office in Versailles, tossed his left-handed salute, and then spent five hours warning of “extremely grave consequences” that would cause “the supreme commander to be severely judged” should Strasbourg be abandoned. After repeating himself incessantly, Juin at two A.M. pulled from his pocket a letter in which De Gaulle threatened to withdraw French forces from SHAEF command. “We are dependent on them,” De Gaulle had told Juin, “but inversely they are dependent on us.”

  “Juin said things to me last night, which, if he had been an American, I would have socked him on the jaw,” a bleary-eyed Smith told Eisenhower during a staff meeting Wednesday morning, January 3. For more than an hour in the supreme commander’s office, joined by Strong and Spaatz, they debated their course. Smith still believed that withdrawal to the Vosges was imperative; 6th Army Group reported pressure across the entire front from NORDWIND. Devers had now accepted Eisenhower’s order “to forget Strasbourg,” but to forsake the city would threaten Allied unity. Strasbourg’s military governor had warned Patch, “You will cover the American flag with ineradicable shame,” and dispatches from the city at five that morning predicted “terrible reprisals” and “mass massacres.” Evacuation plans had already been drafted, beginning with a thousand civil servants that afternoon although only two hundred railcars were available to transport at least a hundred thousand civilians. Buffeted by contradictory demands, De Lattre appeared to have fallen in step with De Gaulle by ordering the 3rd Algerian Division to prepare for deployment to Strasbourg.

  “Next to the weather,” Eisenhower would tell George Marshall, the French “have caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor. They even rank above landing craft.” The art of command at times requires tactical retreat for strategic advantage, in a headquarters no less than on a battlefield, and by midday on Wednesday the supreme commander sensibly recognized that in the interest of Allied comity he would have to yield. De Gaulle had requested a meeting at three P.M., but before formally acceding to French demands Eisenhower intended to land a punch or two.

  Smith phoned Devers to ask how close German forces were to the Alsatian capital.

  “About thirty miles,” Devers replied.

  “Well, keep them as far away as you can,” Smith said. “It looks now as if you will have to hold Strasbourg.”

  * * *

  The crowded stage in this melodrama grew more congested at 2:15 P.M. with the arrival of Churchill and Brooke after a turbulent flight from England in filthy weather. Eisenhower whisked them from the airfield to his house for a quick lunch, and then to a conference room in the Trianon Palace. De Gaulle soon appeared, stiff and unsmiling, with Juin on his heels. The men settled into armchairs arranged in a circle around a situation map spread across the floor, and De Gaulle handed Eisenhower a copy of his letter ordering De Lattre to defend Strasbourg.

  Eisenhower gestured to the map of Alsace, which showed three German corps bearing down from the north, as well as half a dozen enemy divisions threatening attack from the Colmar salient. “In Alsace, where the enemy has extended his attack for two days, the Colmar pocket makes our position a precarious one,” he said. The long front exposed French and American soldiers alike. Moreover, Devers not only had no reserves, he had been told to forfeit two divisions to reinforce the Ardennes, where fighting remained savage.

  “Alsace is sacred ground,” De Gaulle replied. Allowing the Germans to regain Strasbourg could bring down the French government, leading to “a state bordering on anarchy in the entire country.”

  “All my life,” Churchill said pleasantly, “I have remarked what significance Alsace has for the French.”

  Even so, Eisenhower said, he resented being pressured to amend military plans for political reasons. The threat to pull French forces from SHAEF command seemed spiteful, given all that the Allies had done for France; the Combined Chiefs already had agreed to equip sixteen French divisions, and De Gaulle had recently asked for a total of fifty. Should le général choose to fight independently, SHAEF would have no choice but to suspend supplies of fuel and munitions to the French army. This crisis could have been averted, Eisenhower added, had De Lattre’s troops fought well and eradicated the Colmar Pocket, as ordered.

  By now the supreme commander’s face had grown beet red. De Gaulle stared down his great beak. General Eisenhower, he said, was at “risk of seeing the outraged French people forbid the use of its railroads and communications.… If you carry out the withdrawal, I will give the order to a French division to barricade itself inside Strasbourg and before the scandalized world you will be obliged to go in and free it.”

  The prime minister chose this moment to gently lower himself from his chair to the floor with feline grace. Laying an index finger on the map, he murmured, “Strasbourg, this point.”

  Having lost his composure, Eisenhower now regained it. Very well, he conceded, Strasbourg would be defended. Sacred Alsace would remain French, the withdrawal order to Devers canceled. Ringing for tea, he confided to De Gaulle in a low voice, “I am having a lot of trouble with Montgomery.”

  The conference ended. “I think you’ve done the wise and proper thing,” Churchill told Eisenhower. Buttonholing De Gaulle in a corridor outside, the prime minister said, in his sibilant, fractured French, that Eisenhower was “not always aware of the political consequences of his decisions,” but was nonetheless “an excellent supreme commander.” De Gaulle said nothing, but before Eisenhower bade him adieu at the front door of the Trianon Palace, Deux Mètres told him, “Glory has its price. Now you are going to be a conqueror.” To a dinner companion the next night, De Gaulle said, “Imagine, asking us to withdraw our troops from Strasbourg. Could you believe it?” The contretemps, he said, revealed that “these Americans … equate politics with sentiment, the military art with logic.”

  As the happy news of salvation spread through Strasbourg late Wednesday afternoon, jubilant crowds belted out “La Marseillaise.” A tricolor rose again before the Caserne de Gendarmerie, and a Seventh Army loudspeaker truck rolled through the city, urging calm. Eisenhower authorized Devers to keep the new SHAEF reserve for his own use; Strasbourg was to be defended “as strongly as possible”—primarily by French troops—but without risking “the integrity of your forces, which will not be jeopardized.”

  * * *

  NORDWIND would drag on, with three more attacks against the Americans of at least corps size, and another against the French up the Rhine–Rhône Canal from Colmar. Seventh Army’s right wing bent
back ten miles and more, particularly along the Rhine near Haguenau, and enemy troops ferried across the river at Gambsheim closed to within a few miles of Strasbourg before being cuffed back. But these paltry territorial gains, which cost 23,000 irreplaceable German casualties, carried little strategic heft; Patch held the Saverne Gap and the Rhine–Marne Canal, and Patton was not diverted from the Ardennes. Hitler denounced as “pessimistic” reports from Alsace that NORDWIND had failed for want of sufficient infantry. Yet he was reduced to using Volksgrenadiers who had trained together for barely a month, among them recruits from eastern Europe who spoke no German, and a convalescent unit known as the “Whipped Cream Division” because of its special dietary needs.

  “We must believe in the ultimate purposes of a merciful God,” Eisenhower had written Mamie after his confrontation with De Gaulle. “These are trying days.” Rarely had the burden of command weighed more heavily on him. Bodyguards still shadowed his every move, he found no time for exercise, and despite his regular letters home his wife chided him for not writing often enough.

  He had new worries, too: recent intelligence suggested the Germans might soon use poison gas, and it was also said that enemy scientists were developing a ray capable of stopping Allied aircraft engines in flight. Further, he suffered yet another significant loss: on January 2, ice on the wings combined with pilot error during takeoff had caused the crash of a twin-engine Hudson at airfield A-46, five miles south of Versailles. The fiery accident killed Admiral Ramsay—among Eisenhower’s staunchest and most valued advisers—who was flying to Brussels for a conference with Montgomery about the defenses at Antwerp. On Sunday, January 7, a French naval band played Chopin’s funeral march as a gun carriage bore Ramsay’s coffin to a hillside grave above the Seine. The supreme commander joined mourners in the shuffling cortège.

  Later that afternoon, Eisenhower’s office calendar recorded: “E. leaves office early, 4:30 & goes home. He is very depressed these days.”

  The Agony Grapevine

  SHAEF on January 5 confirmed an American press report that the U.S. First and Ninth Armies now fought under British command. The statement from Versailles claimed that the arrangement had been made “by instant agreement of all concerned,” but failed to explain that the reconfiguration was only temporary. Smug accounts in London newspapers began describing GIs as “Monty’s troops”; privately encouraged by the field marshal, the press clamored for a “proper” chain of command in northwestern Europe, under a single battle captain.

  “We have nothing to apologize for,” Bradley told his staff. “We have nothing to explain.” Major Hansen wrote in his diary, “Many of us who were avowed Anglophiles in Great Britain have now been irritated, hurt, and infuriated by the British radio and press. All this good feeling has vanished.”

  On Saturday, January 6, Montgomery cabled Churchill that he planned to summon reporters to explain “how [the] Germans were first ‘headed off,’ then ‘seen off,’ and now are being ‘written off.’” He also intended to rebut any suggestion of American failure in the Ardennes. “I shall show how the whole Allied team rallied to the call and how national considerations were thrown overboard.… I shall stress the great friendship between myself and Ike.”

  On the same day, he wrote a confidant in London, “The real trouble with the Yanks is that they are completely ignorant as to the rules of the game we are playing with the Germans.” When Brigadier Williams, the intelligence chief, asked why he intended to hold a press conference, Montgomery explained that Eisenhower’s generalship had been impugned, and “I want to put it right.” Williams offered two words of counsel: “Please don’t.” Others in his headquarters, smelling condescension, also sought to dissuade him. Alan Moorehead pleaded with De Guingand to muzzle Montgomery, lest he “make some bloody awful mistake.”

  “That’s a funny position for a newsman to take,” De Guingand said.

  “I want to win the war,” Moorehead replied.

  In a double-badged maroon beret and a parachute harness—“dressed like a clown,” in Moorehead’s description—the field marshal appeared before a gaggle of correspondents in Zonhoven on January 7. No doubt he meant well. Praising the American GI as “a brave fighting man, steady under fire, and with that tenacity in battle which stamps the first-class soldier,” he also saluted Eisenhower as “the captain of our team,” declaring, “I am absolutely devoted to Ike. We are the greatest of friends.” No mention was made of Bradley, and an assertion that British troops were “fighting hard” exaggerated their role as reserves very much on the fringe of the battlefield.

  Much of the recitation, however, was devoted to describing the field marshal’s own brilliance upon taking command almost three weeks earlier. “The first thing I did,” Montgomery said, “was busy myself in getting the battle area tidy—getting it sorted out”:

  As soon as I saw what was happening I took certain steps myself to ensure that if the Germans got to the Meuse they would certainly not get over that river. And I carried out certain movements so as to provide balanced dispositions.… I was thinking ahead.… The battle has been most interesting. I think possibly one of the most interesting and tricky battles I have ever handled.

  Montgomery likened “seeing off” the enemy to his repulse of Rommel in Egypt in 1942. He closed by declaring, without a scintilla of irony, “Let us have done with the destructive criticism that aims a blow at Allied solidarity.”

  “Oh, God, why didn’t you stop him?” Moorehead asked Williams as reporters scattered to file their stories. “It was so awful.” Many British officers agreed. The field marshal had been “indecently exultant,” as one put it, displaying “what a good boy am I” self-regard, in De Guingand’s phrase, and conveying what another general called his “cock on a dunghill mood.” A headline in the Daily Mail—“Montgomery Foresaw Attack, Acted ‘On Own’ to Save Day”—captured the prevailing Fleet Street sentiment, although Churchill’s private secretary told his diary, “Monty’s triumphant, jingoistic, and exceedingly self-satisfied talk to the press on Sunday has given wide offense.” A mischievous German radio broadcast mimicked the BBC with a phony news flash that quoted Montgomery as describing the Americans as “‘somewhat bewildered.’ … The battle of the Ardennes can now be written off, thanks to Field Marshal Montgomery.”

  “He sees fit to assume all the glory and scarcely permits the mention of an army commander’s name,” the Ninth Army war diary complained. “Bitterness and real resentment is [sic] creeping in.” No one was more bitter or resentful than Bradley, whose “contempt had grown into active hatred” for Montgomery, reported one British general at SHAEF. Air Marshal Tedder informed his diary that cooperation between Bradley and the field marshal was now “out of the question.”

  Bradley twice called Versailles on Tuesday, January 9, “very much upset over the big play up Monty is getting in the British press,” Kay Summersby noted. He, too, summoned reporters, using a map and a pointer to render his own version of events, which included the dubious assertion that American commanders had consciously taken “a calculated risk” in thinning out defenses in the Ardennes. Privately he denounced Montgomery’s “attempt to discredit me so he could get control of the whole operation.” The field marshal, he asserted, wanted to “be in on the kill, and no one else.”

  In another call to Eisenhower, Bradley warned, “I cannot serve under Montgomery. If he is to be put in command of all ground forces, you must send me home.”

  Eisenhower assured him that he had no plans to expand the field marshal’s authority, then added, “I thought you were the one person I could count on for doing anything I asked you to do.”

  “This is one thing I cannot take,” Bradley replied.

  Once again Eisenhower sought to mollify, to mediate, and to keep his temperamental subordinates concentrated on the task at hand: evicting Rundstedt from the Bulge and resuming the march on Germany. But in a note to Brooke he admitted, “No single incident that I have encountered throughout m
y experience as an Allied commander has been so difficult.”

  * * *

  Heading off, seeing off, and writing off the Germans proved more problematic than Montgomery’s facile catchphrases implied. Rundstedt in late December had reported that both panzer armies in HERBSTNEBEL “are forced completely into the defensive.” Some German strategists urged Hitler to shift his armor to the Eastern Front—the Soviets had encircled Budapest in late December—but the Führer replied that the east “must take care of itself.” Twenty infantry and eight panzer divisions remained committed to the Bulge in early January. Such a host would not be easily expelled, even though German infantry regiments were half the size of their American counterparts and U.S. armored divisions on average mustered more than twice as many tanks as their German equivalents. The “German soldier is fighting with great determination and bravery,” a SHAEF assessment concluded. “Desertions few.”

  Yet many enemy commanders had been killed or wounded, and some Volksgrenadier companies near Bastogne had fewer than thirty men. Mortars and antitank guns were muscled to the rear for want of ammunition. German rations would be cut twice in January, to eleven ounces of bread and an ounce of fat per day. Potatoes and vegetables ran short. Motorcycle scouts combed the countryside for gasoline, which OB West allocated virtually drop by drop. One division traveled by bicycle for more than a week. In a schoolhouse hospital, a German doctor asked a shrieking, wounded Landser, “Are you a soldier or a pants-crapper?”

  “Ten shells for their one,” a U.S. Third Army soldier told the journalist Osmar White. “That’s the secret of it.” Work details of German prisoners were forced to break stone for road repairs, with a GI guard yelling, “Get along there, you cocksucking sonofabitch.” They were the fortunate ones: to his diary, Patton disclosed “some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. (I hope we can conceal this.)” Others were executed legally, among them eighteen of Skorzeny’s saboteurs, convicted by military commissions within days of their apprehension and sentenced to be “shot to death with musketry.” Three of the condemned requested that captured German nurses in an adjacent cell serenade them with Christmas carols. “We had to stop them after a while,” an Army captain reported. “They were disturbing our troops.” The reporter W. C. Heinz witnessed the firing-squad execution of the trio. “I looked at the ground, frost-white, the grass tufts frozen, the soil hard and uneven,” Heinz wrote. “This view I see now, I told myself, will be the last thing their eyes will ever see.” Trussed and then blindfolded, with paper circles pinned over their hearts, “the three stood rigid against the posts like woodcuts of men facing execution” until the fatal volley left them limp and leaking blood.