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

by Rick Atkinson

  Patton had abused his authority, issuing reckless, impulsive orders to indulge his personal interests. As in the slapping incidents in Sicily, his deportment, compounded this time by mendacity, was unworthy of the soldiers he was privileged to lead. Yet with victory so near, his superiors had no heart for public rebukes. Bradley considered the raid “foolhardy,” but kept silent. “Failure itself was George’s own worst reprimand,” he concluded. In cables to Marshall, Eisenhower referred to the raid as “a wild goose chase” and “Patton’s latest crackpot actions.” The Third Army commander had “lost a full company of medium tanks and a platoon of light tanks. Foolishly he then imposed censorship on the movement.”

  “Patton is a problem child,” Eisenhower added, “but he is a great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.”

  Lovers’ Quarrels Are a Part of Love

  EISENHOWER’S office in Reims occupied the second floor of the Collège Moderne et Technique de Garçons, three stories of red brick on Rue Henri Joliauer. His windows overlooked a rail marshaling yard and the city’s seedy train station; beyond the tracks, German prisoners with push brooms swept the cathedral close. Military convoys crawled through the narrow streets at all hours in a clangor of grinding truck gears and straining engines. SHAEF’s forward headquarters now accommodated more than five thousand Allied officers and enlisted men, double the intended number, and they filled not only the collège but a music conservatory, various offices on Rue Talleyrand, French military casernes, and the Hôtel du Lion d’Or, where at night jitterbugging soldiers danced in a cabaret with rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “France smells wonderful these days,” a SHAEF lieutenant wrote home after exploring Reims.

  We get the variegated odors of roast beef, onion and oil dressing, and naturally French pastry. The air is scented with the blossoming chestnut trees.… The lilacs were in full bloom, the wisteria dripped from their vines, and all those fruit trees! I nearly was overcome.

  Such vernal delights were largely wasted on the supreme commander, who despite recent battlefield successes showed alarming signs of dispirited exhaustion. Eisenhower “looked terrible,” Bradley conceded, beset with an aching knee, respiratory miseries, and a painful cyst on his back that required surgical excision. Kay Summersby described his waspish mood as “truly vile”; his “physical and mental condition was worse than we had ever known it,” she later wrote. “Beetle was positive that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Smith was hardly in the pink himself, tormented by a bleeding ulcer and an infection that had confined him to bed for several days, further burdening Eisenhower. In his diary, Everett Hughes had written, “Ike shouts and rants. Says ‘I have too many things to do.’ … He acted like a crazy man.… On defensive, guard up, worried, self-isolated.”

  The supreme commander needed rest. With Smith he flew to Cannes in late March and spent five days at a borrowed villa doing little but sleep, sunbathe, and play an occasional rubber of bridge. For the first forty-eight hours, he woke only long enough to lunch on the terrace before shuffling back to bed. “I just can’t concentrate,” he complained. But the break proved salutary, and he returned to Reims restored and ready to finish the war. Still, as he confessed to Mamie, “Those of us that are bearing real responsibility in this war will find it difficult to ever be restful [or] serene again.”

  He also returned from the Riviera with a revised battle plan. “Ike has learnt his lesson and he consults me before taking any action,” Montgomery had told Brooke earlier in March. But on Wednesday, March 28, only a day after Montgomery had informed Eisenhower that he was beginning his drive from the Rhine toward the river Elbe with the U.S. Ninth Army and British Second Army, the supreme commander delivered a thunderbolt message:

  As soon as you have joined hands with Bradley in the Kassel-Paderborn area, Ninth United States Army will revert to Bradley’s command. Bradley … will deliver his main thrust on the axis Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden to join hands with the Russians. The mission of your army group will be to protect Bradley’s northern flank.… Devers will protect Bradley’s right flank.

  This plan, Eisenhower assured him, “is simplicity itself.” In a clear tweak at the field marshal’s presumption, he added, “As you say, the situation looks good.”

  The supreme commander had his reasons for shifting the main attack avenue from the Allied north to the center, none of which he had discussed with Montgomery or Churchill during their Palm Sunday picnic on the Rhine. Not least, as Eisenhower had written Marshall, “I get tired of trying to arrange the blankets smoothly over several prima donnas in the same bed.” Now they would have separate beds. Moreover, Montgomery’s armies in the north would have to cross the fenny Westphalian plain, a lowland of watercourses that could easily impede armored columns; the corridor farther south presented few obstructions and offered fine highways for the mobile Americans. With ten thousand German soldiers now surrendering every day, the Wehrmacht tottered toward annihilation, although some Allied intelligence officers worried that diehards might escape to the Alps or organize guerrilla brigades. Speed was paramount, and SHAEF had concluded, in General Whiteley’s words, that “if anything was to be done quickly, don’t give it to Monty.”

  Montgomery was gobsmacked by what he called “the blow from Ike.… A very dirty work, I fear.” Without General Simpson’s heft, 21st Army Group was unlikely to reach the Elbe soon, much less Berlin. “The violent pro-American element at SHAEF is pressing for a set-up which will clip the wings of the British group of armies,” he wrote London. “The Americans then finish off the business alone.” To Brooke, he went further. “This new plan of Ike’s,” he warned, “will prolong the war.” Montgomery elicited less sympathy than he might have hoped. “Monty has only himself to blame for the suspicion with which the Americans treat him,” said Admiral Cunningham, the first sea lord.

  There was more. Since OVERLORD, Allied planners had presumed that Berlin was their ultimate objective. “Berlin is the main prize,” Eisenhower had affirmed in September. “There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that we should concentrate all our energies and resources on rapid thrusts to Berlin.” Now he changed his mind. In a “personal message to Marshal Stalin” cabled that same fateful Wednesday, with a copy to the Charlie-Charlies, the supreme commander disclosed that “the best axis” would carry his legions to Leipzig and Dresden in southeast Germany, a hundred miles from the capital. To Montgomery he added in a subsequent note, “In none of this do I mention Berlin. That place has become, so far as I am concerned, nothing but a geographical location.… My purpose is to destroy the enemy’s forces and his powers to resist.”

  Again he had cause. The Red Army was thirty miles from Berlin, on favorable terrain with more than a million men who had been massing for this assault since January; the Anglo-Americans remained well over two hundred miles from the capital. Bradley and other commanders estimated that taking Berlin might cost between ten thousand and one hundred thousand American casualties alone. Marshall had cautioned Eisenhower against “unfortunate incidents,” including fratricide between forces approaching from east and west. (On a single day in early April, U.S. and Soviet planes would inadvertently tangle five times, with exchanges of gunfire.) Postwar occupation zones already had been established, and the partition of Berlin would take effect regardless of who captured the city. A race to Berlin, or Vienna, or Prague would bleed U.S. forces needed in the Pacific, and perhaps corrode Moscow’s commitment to make war on Japan. By angling southeast, Bradley’s spearhead would cut the Reich in half, severing Bavaria and Austria from Berlin, and help forestall the scorched-earth decree Hitler had issued on March 19, “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory.” Finally, Eisenhower well understood that Roosevelt’s vision of an enduring peace was predicated on cooperation with the Soviets, a comity unlikely to be enhanced by a rivalrous dash to the Reichstag. As he later asked an interviewer, “What would you have done with Berlin if we had captured it?”

  None of
this went down easily in London. Not only did Eisenhower’s new plan steal Montgomery’s thunder—this, when the British had suffered twenty thousand casualties in the past two months—but in directly corresponding with Stalin the supreme commander appeared, in British eyes, to exceed his authority. When it was suggested that Eisenhower had impinged on the prerogatives of his superiors, Marshall and the other U.S. chiefs demurred. “The commander in the field,” they wrote Brooke and his confederates on March 30, “is the best judge of the measures which offer the earliest prospect of destroying the German armies or their power to resist.”

  A day later Churchill lowered his beaver and entered the lists. “We might be condemned to an almost static role in the north,” he warned the British chiefs, and on Sunday he wrote Roosevelt:

  Berlin remains of high strategic importance.… The Russian armies will no doubt overrun all Austria and enter Vienna. If they also take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds?

  “Laying aside every impediment and shunning every diversion,” the prime minister advised, “the allied armies of the north and center should now march at the highest speed towards the Elbe.” Yet the Americans were not to be headed. In a deft rebuff from his vacation cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt told Churchill that “the British Army is given what seems to me very logical objectives on the northern flank.”

  Eisenhower would further assure Marshall, “I shall not attempt any move I deem militarily unwise merely to gain a political prize unless I receive specific orders from the Combined Chiefs of Staff.” No such directive was forthcoming, nor had Eisenhower’s marching orders changed significantly from the charge given him the previous spring—to “enter the continent of Europe” and destroy Germany’s armed forces.

  He had accomplished the former; now he would fulfill the latter. The Allied juggernaut in the west had grown to almost four and a half million, including ninety divisions. They faced a tatterdemalion enemy: sixty-five divisions so depleted that their combined combat strength barely equaled two dozen. Gasoline had grown precious enough that a sour joke in German ranks described a new “fifty-man panzer crew”—one man to steer, one to shoot, and forty-eight to push.

  Montgomery had not quite yielded. But when he asked SHAEF for ten American divisions to reinforce a British thrust toward Lübeck and then Berlin—“I consider that Berlin has definite value as an objective,” he said—Eisenhower brought him up short. “You must not lose sight of the fact that during the advance to Leipzig you have the role of protecting Bradley’s northern flank,” the supreme commander replied. “It is not his role to protect your southern flank. My directive is quite clear.” Montgomery answered meekly, “It is quite clear to me what you want.”

  Churchill saw that further bickering was pointless. In a graceful capitulation, he first pronounced the Anglo-Americans “the truest friends and comrades that ever fought side by side,” and then sent Roosevelt a scrap of wisdom from the Roman playwright Terence: “I will use one of my very few Latin quotations, ‘Amantium irae amoris integratio est.’” Lovers’ quarrels are a part of love.

  * * *

  With Armed Forces Radio playing “The Last Round-Up,” the U.S. First, Third, and Ninth Armies trundled onto the German Autobahnen and stepped on the gas. The wide double highways were described as “real dream roads … as smooth as a highly polished floor,” although the cloverleaf ramps baffled those who had never encountered them before. Truck drivers kept themselves awake by singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” T Force intelligence units would fall on each captured city in search of not only Nazi villains but also industrial secrets; thirty-five mobile microfilm teams rooted through factories and universities. From Wehrmacht depots, they also collected fine German maps of the Soviet Union, just in case.

  Towns fell quickly: Limburg, Weilburg, Giessen—Hodges won a box of cigars from Patton by getting there first—Marburg, Kirchhain. “This mad, Alice in Wonderland rush forward through Germany,” in one major’s description, was both exhilarating and ruthless. Enemy soldiers who resisted were shot down on the instant. Enemy villages that failed to surrender were razed. When SS troops in search of gasoline and vehicles captured an American field hospital in late March, false rumors that doctors had been murdered and nurses raped led to a feverish, malignant manhunt, which left five hundred enemy troops dead before eight hundred others were allowed to capitulate. “How I want the war to end,” wrote one soldier. “The danger now begins to frighten me. To die at this stage—with the door at the end of the passage, the door into the rose garden, already in sight, ajar—would be awful.”

  The hour had come to cinch the noose around the Ruhr. With Ninth Army spanking east and soon to rejoin his command, Bradley on Wednesday, March 28, ordered First Army to hurry north for a rendezvous with Simpson’s vanguard, the 2nd Armored Division, while Patton’s Third Army angled northeast toward Kassel, shielding Hodges’s right flank. The First and Ninth Armies were to meet in Paderborn, an eighth-century bishopric founded by Charlemagne—or rather, they were to meet in what remained of the town: in a thirty-minute raid on Tuesday, RAF Lancasters had dropped 75,000 incendiaries, igniting three thousand individual fires that merged into a single blaze fed by half-timbered houses. It was said that the very air had first turned yellow, then peat brown, then pitch black. Here the enemy intended to stand, with a defensive line of sixty Panthers and Tigers below the town, crewed mostly by SS fledglings and reinforced with a motley brigade of Luftwaffe, Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, and Waffen-SS zealots.

  General Collins’s VII Corps led the First Army cavalcade, and on a cool, drear Good Friday, March 30, four columns from the 3rd Armored Division converged on Paderborn after a forty-five-mile gallop from Marburg the previous day. In a southern precinct known as Jammertal—Wailing Valley—an ambush brought the American sally to a halt, with tank and Panzerfaust fire skewering one Sherman in the flank and blowing a track from a second. Stabbing volleys from King Tigers caught others in the open at short range, and tracers bounced off the asphalt roads like flaming marbles. Seventeen Shermans, seventeen half-tracks, and a small fleet of Army trucks, jeeps, and ambulances soon brightened the dull day with their pyres; the only saving grace was the inability of panzer gunners to depress their machine guns low enough to rake GIs cowering in a roadside ditch. Napalm dumped along a ridgeline by P-47s did little more than further illuminate the calamity.

  Flame, smoke, and percussive gunfire brought the division commander hastening to the front, and no soldier seemed more likely to redeem the day than Major General Maurice Rose. Tall and taciturn, with an addiction to Camel cigarettes and a fondness for musical comedy, Rose was considered the best armored commander in the U.S. Army by Collins and other admirers. Having earned battle honors at St.-Mihiel during the last war, and in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy during this one, he now led a unit of nearly four hundred tanks, many carrying infantrymen clustered on the hull like barnacles. The son and grandson of rabbis from White Russia, Rose had grown up speaking Yiddish at home in Denver before joining the Colorado National Guard at age sixteen; beginning in 1918, on various Army forms he repeatedly declared himself to be either Methodist, Episcopalian, or generically Protestant, a conversion perhaps inspired by residual anti-Semitism in the officer corps. Near Marburg two days earlier, when a reporter had asked Rose about his plans after the war, he replied, “I have a son. He’s four years old now, and I don’t know him. We’re going to get acquainted.”

  No, they would not. Moving up the spearhead’s eastern edge at dusk in a convoy of three jeeps, two motorcycles, and an armored car, Rose and his command group abruptly took fire from both flanks. “We’re in a hell of a fix now,” he murmured. Chased by machine-gun bullets, the convoy bolted forward; but at last light, four panzers emerged from the darkness, each emitting the twin exhaust-flame signature of a Tiger. A quick swerve by one tank pinned Rose’s jeep against
a plum tree. “It looks like they have us,” he said. The Tiger commander popped from his turret hatch with a submachine gun, yelling and gesticulating as the general, his aide, and the jeep driver stood in the road with hands high, laved by the faint light of Shermans afire in a nearby field. As Rose reached for his pistol to drop it in the road, the German fired. Two slugs hit him in the right hand, another ripped into his right cheek. Four stitched his chest, four more struck him in the head, and a final three hit him in the groin, thigh, and lower back. His two comrades tumbled into a ditch, then fled through the dark wood, leaving behind their commander’s riddled corpse.

  That night as the enemy retreated into Paderborn, a platoon recovered Rose’s body and laid him in a grain bin, wrapped in a blanket with an MP honor guard. “It can’t be him. I’m sure it ain’t him,” a young lieutenant said. Told that the dead man had been irrefutably identified, the lieutenant persisted, “I sure hope it ain’t him.” Rose would be interred in a temporary grave under a wooden cross, then reburied in the majestic Margraten cemetery beneath a Star of David at the insistence of Jewish chaplains who recited Kaddish over his grave. In 1949 a Latin cross was reinstated after a hearing board affirmed his conversion. Under any insignia, a gallant soldier was gone, and his hard death foretold a Reich that would also die hard.

  A war-crimes investigation by Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski, who three decades later won fame as a special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, ruled Rose’s shooting accidental. By then, reprisal had run its red course. Feral American troops smashed the villages south of Paderborn, burning houses and executing wounded enemy soldiers. Twenty-seven Germans, said to have been shot after surrendering, were later discovered behind the Etteln cemetery, and eighteen more were counted in Dörenhagen. Some GIs reportedly prevented the Germans from burying their dead, and bodies lay corrupting in the sun and rain for days as a reminder to the living of what war had wrought. Carrion crows hopped about, stiff-legged and unsentimental. It had come to this.