The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  The next objective was the city of Lyons at the intersection of the rivers Rhône and Saône. There were fears it would be fiercely defended, but as the Thunderbirds approached from the east, an estimated ten thousand German defenders evaded capture by slipping out of the city at night like frightened rats. Even old-timers began to wager that by October the war would be over. News reports indicated that the Allies were advancing fast on all fronts. September would be “victory month,” said some. Survive its thirty days and one would survive the war.

  Sparks had meanwhile resumed his role as second in command of the First Battalion with the return of Colonel Krieger from the hospital. The regiment’s aim now, he learned, was to close the Belfort Gap, a plateau between the northern end of the Jura Mountains and the southernmost Vosges, which provided the last escape route back to the Fatherland for several retreating German divisions in the upper Rhône valley. Lying in wait for the Thunderbirds was the German Nineteenth Army. Walter Bosch, its chief of staff, was a canny tactician, able to get the most from his depleted forces. When he studied the maps, those indicating the 45th Division’s path worried him most. To buy time for other forces to pull back through the Belfort Gap, the Thunderbird blitzkrieg had to be stopped. “The thrust of the 45th U.S. Division north was the most dangerous,” he recalled, “and most critical potentially for us of all the different attacks launched by the French and the Americans.”

  On the afternoon of September 11, as it approached the Belfort Gap, the regiment’s Third Battalion seized the small village of Abbenans ten miles north of the Rhône River. The Germans counterattacked, determined to delay the American advance. That evening, Sparks learned that Third Battalion commander Major Merle Mitchell and some of his staff had been ambushed while on reconnaissance. Patrols were sent out that night, but they found no trace of the missing men. Two days later, however, scouts stumbled across an abandoned jeep with two working radios. It was a macabre scene: Several helmets and packs had been arranged in a neat pile; and nearby lay a group of dead American officers, among them Major Mitchell.

  Sparks moved from the First Battalion and took charge of the Third Battalion. Remembering the example of leadership set by Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily, he made a defining decision that set him apart from many other battalion commanders in World War II. He would stay as close as practically possible to his men, either in a forward command post or in combat with them if necessary, and leave the day-to-day management of the battalion to his second in command. He knew that the closer he got to Germany, the harder the fighting would become. As the battle to break into the Third Reich loomed, he believed he would need to lead the advance if his men were to succeed in taking the next objective, be it a town or a mountain.

  THE WESTERN FRONT, SEPTEMBER 1944

  THE LOSSES AT Abbenans were repeated throughout eastern France that September. Casualties mounted as the leaves at higher elevations began to fall and winter threatened. Mountains and deep forest stretched along the German border from Switzerland to Holland. As soon as the Allies tried to penetrate this difficult terrain, which afforded precious little mobility, the fighting intensified and turned to bloody attrition—just as it had in Italy.

  Allied planners tried to get men and matériel where they were most needed, but supply lines were badly overextended, stretching several hundred miles to Normandy and southern France. When vehicles broke down, they had to be abandoned because of the shortage of spare parts. Gas reserves began to run perilously low. The Allies were consuming more than a million gallons a day. Armies competed for the remaining stockpiles.

  At Aachen and Metz and other cities close to or on the German border, the Allied advance ground to a halt. Indeed, from the flooded banks of the Schelde in Holland to the tightly bunched firs of the “Death Factory,” as the Huertgen Forest on the Belgian-German border soon became known, the fighting grew more lethal, each yard costing more in men and matériel. Generals like George Patton, who had been rehabilitated after the slapping incident and was now in command of the Third Army, were increasingly frustrated by the situation and quarreled violently over strategy and supply issues. Hopes of victory by Christmas, which both Eisenhower and Montgomery had predicted, began to fade.

  One of the greatest problems was manpower. Unlike the Soviets, the Western Allies were running out of cannon fodder, having badly underestimated the number of men needed to defeat Hitler. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s failed attempt to cross the Rhine at Arnhem that September—the Allies’ only major defeat in Europe—had cost the British six thousand of their finest paratroops. After five years of war, the British Army had, in fact, reached the limit of its human resources, with Americans now outnumbering British soldiers in Europe by almost three to one. Yanks, not Tommies, would do most of the dying from here on out.

  An increasingly marginalized Churchill feared his country’s immense sacrifice might be forgotten as the United States assumed the dominant role in ending the war in Western Europe. Distant indeed was the summer of 1940, when the British had stood alone, the English Channel being the only barrier separating Hitler from total European domination. How many Englishmen, Churchill asked, had died since 1939? The answer was sobering indeed, even for a legendary tippler like Churchill: 1 in 165 Englishmen and 1 in 135 Londoners had been killed, compared to 1 in 775 Americans.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE VOSGES

  Thunderbirds in the Vosges mountains, 1944. [National Archives]

  EPINAL, FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 21, 1944

  THE MOSELLE RIVER SURGED, high with autumn rains, through the gorges and past the vineyards with their ripe white grapes. Where it crossed through the medieval fortress town of Epinal, at the base of the forested Vosges mountains, the Germans dug in. They blew the stone bridges, mounted machine guns on the northern banks, and then waited to start mowing down Americans.

  On September 21, the Thunderbirds attempted to cross the fast-flowing Moselle at Epinal, less than a hundred miles from the German border. All three regiments managed to get across the river, despite its eighty-foot span with steep banks rising twenty feet high in some places. But they suffered heavy casualties. One company lost a fifth of its men. The bloody crossing marked a milestone: The Thunderbirds were now midway between the beaches of France and Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. A signpost was placed on a pontoon bridge across the Moselle with arrows pointing in both directions and reading: ST. TROPEZ, 430 MILES; BERLIN, 430 MILES. Sparks had traveled farther in six weeks than he had in almost a year of war in Italy.

  Beyond Epinal, he pushed his Third Battalion into the Vosges, mountains thought to be insurmountable in winter, where progress meant mastering a new form of warfare as intense as anything experienced in the dense jungles of the Pacific. The enemy could be inches away and a man would not know it, so closely bunched were the pines trees and so thick were the fogs and mists that clung to the valley floors that fall. “You saw men get killed right beside you every day,” recalled G Company’s George Courlas. “You soon realized your life was going to be very short.”

  The thick forests aroused primeval fears in the least superstitious. Scouts could expect to be fired on at any moment. The mere snapping of a twig underfoot could cost a man his life. It took immense sangfroid, nerves of iron, to creep up on enemy positions, footsteps soft in the pine needles beneath towering fir trees. Without a compass, men would get lost for days. Every tree was a possible German strongpoint and every bush could shield a machine gun. “It was sometimes a relief to be fired on,” recalled one man, “for fire gave away the location of the enemy.”

  Others became so tightly wound that they jumped and opened fire at the slightest sound. Men felt they were being watched at all times. They kept their bayonets sharp just in case the next bush, shrouded in mist, suddenly leapt to life. Raindrops sounded uncannily like footsteps, the steady dripping from branches making it seem as if the enemy was creeping closer and closer. At night, the darkness was total. Men could not even see their hands.
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  Silence was essential to staying alive. Officers and platoon leaders sometimes dared not speak or even whisper commands. It was safest to gesture and blow signals into a field telephone to direct supporting fire. But often it didn’t matter how quietly men moved in the trees, whose lower boughs sometimes touched the ground. The enemy would dig in, cover their holes, wait for Americans to creep past, then jump up and fire at them from behind. “You had to get right on top of the goddamn Germans before you got into a firefight,” remembered Sparks. “We took more small arms casualties than any other place because it was very close fighting.”

  Nazi ingenuity and subterfuge reached new heights. One day, a patrol spotted Germans wearing American uniforms and carrying M1 rifles as they booby-trapped a woodpile. The latest latrine joke was that the “Krauts” had stopped surrendering because Americans had started feeding prisoners C rations. Instead, the enemy retreated just far enough to regroup and strike back like a coiled snake. They never failed to leave death hidden in their wake, burying mines and then running over them in tracked vehicles before arming them, so that Sparks’s men would see the fresh tracks and assume the roads were safe.

  The fir trees, stretching toward the Fatherland, were as lethal as the mines. Artillery fire exploding in their upper branches had a devastating effect on any man cowering in an uncovered foxhole below. Shell fragments and jagged pieces of wood showered down, splitting skulls wide open. The best protection was to stand upright against a tree, exposing only shoulders and helmet, but few had the composure to do so, and instead most flung themselves instinctively to the ground.

  Men sometimes had to cross open pastures dotted with dead cows to reach the trees, from which snipers wrapped in camouflaged capes often fired. If Thunderbirds were spotted in the open, just a few seconds might pass before they heard the terrifying sounds of a multiple rocket launcher, the Nebelwerfer. It was as if women far in the distance were sobbing their hearts out, then the moaning would grow louder and louder, becoming a banshee-like scream. After a heart-stopping silence, six-inch mortar bombs would land with a deafening racket, spraying shards of metal in every direction.

  The unrelenting stress was too much for many men. Even the seemingly unflappable began to break. Stranded one day in a field as bullets cracked a few inches above his head, twenty-year-old Clarence Schmitt, who had been with the regiment a year, realized that his nerves had “snapped”: “I’d been one of the lucky bastards who’d never been hit. I just couldn’t take any more.”

  Schmitt ran back to a sergeant in his company.

  “I can’t take this shit no more.”

  The sergeant was busy dealing with a sane but terrified private.

  “Get your fucking ass back up there,” the sergeant shouted at the private.

  Then he pointed to Schmitt.

  “Can’t you see? My men are going crazy.”

  IT DIDN’T MATTER what rank men were, how tough their upbringing, how calm they appeared before others, when the German 88s began to seed every square yard with lethal shards of hot steel that cauterized as they ripped through flesh. Everyone’s nerves snapped sooner or later. According to the U.S. Army surgeon general, all men in rifle battalions became psychiatric casualties after two hundred days in combat. “There aren’t any iron men,” declared one army psychiatrist. “The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress over a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.”

  The all-important infantrymen, the only forces that could actually defeat Nazism on the ground, comprised just 14 percent of the U.S. Army’s overseas numbers. But they suffered three-quarters of its casualties that fall in Europe, with well over a hundred thousand men already pulled off the line for “psychoneurotic” reasons, one of the official euphemisms for combat fatigue. Before they went crazy, more and more young Americans chose to go AWOL. Officially, eighteen thousand American deserters now roamed behind the lines, desperate for the war to end before they got caught and sent back to the front.

  The incidence of self-inflicted wounds soared. In the trade-off between life and a big toe, there was no contest. Guy Prestia, in the regiment’s E Company, had carried a machine gun all the way from Sicily. He joked with one man in his unit about the man’s failure to shoot off his toe. He had kept his boot on and shot himself in the foot, but the bullet had gone between his big toe and the next one. Others were smarter and did it right. They took a loaf of bread and put it on their foot so that when they fired there would be no powder trace. That way, they got away with it.

  Most Thunderbirds carried on until they couldn’t go a step farther and then suddenly collapsed. One night, Sparks came across a soldier sitting beside a trail through thick woods. The man was crying.

  “What’s the matter, soldier?” asked Sparks.

  When the man didn’t reply, Sparks knelt down beside him. Close up, he recognized him. He was one of his company commanders. He had been in combat for more than a year.

  Sparks turned to the men beside him.

  “Take the captain back to the aid station and you tell the doctor I want this man evacuated permanently. He’s not to come back.”

  Yet another of Sparks’s men had finally reached his limit. “You get pounded enough, you’re going to break,” recalled another of them, Private First Class Adam Przychocki, who had also lived on borrowed time until he too was treated in an evacuation hospital for combat fatigue after enduring one too many bombardments.

  How long would his men last, Sparks wondered, in the face of death, with a determined enemy trying to kill them every minute of every day? Few believed they would survive to see the defeat of Nazi Germany, let alone their families back in America. Yet they kept fighting, carrying out his every command like automatons, no questions asked. They were exactly the kind of soldiers the army wanted: dedicated, hardened, professional killers.

  Staying as numb as possible yet still being able to fight was crucial. After Anzio, Sparks had learned how vital it was to cut himself off from his emotions, to stay detached, if he was going to continue to function effectively as a leader. It was all about minimizing pain. He had seen men in foxholes in Italy who understood that if they left their frozen feet alone they would suffer less. If you rubbed them, tried to reanimate them to bring feeling back, you would soon be in agony, unable to stagger down the mountain. You’d have to be carried. No one wanted that.

  So long as he stayed numb, Sparks could fight. He could stay sane. He had stopped worrying about getting killed. Only the letters and photos from Mary, the glimpses at her and Kirk in the photos he had placed under Perspex on the butt of his lucky Colt .45, reminded him to care whether he lived or died.

  MEURTHE RIVER VALLEY, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1, 1944

  SPARKS AND HIS men had arrived in the Alsace-Lorraine region of northeastern France. Many of the signs on roadways here bore German names. Some locals were taciturn and surly, waving halfheartedly at their liberators: It was a far cry from the beaming and joyous French farther south. Many communities had both German and French loyalties, in a region that had passed back and forth between the two countries several times in the last century.

  A machine gun snarled. Another joined in. Then there was the hollow sound of German mortars firing, followed by explosions that ripped across a wooded hill. Soon came the whistle and whine of artillery shells. Alarmed by radio reports from his rifle platoons, Sparks set out from his forward command post to join his men who had come under fire. As he crossed an open field, machine-gun bullets snapped overhead. He dived to the ground, crawled back to a radio operator, and called regimental headquarters for reinforcements. When he looked up, he saw a column of half-tracks and a group of tanks in the distance, moving toward him. He was in the open, pinned down with no way to escape.

  Sparks began to prepare for the worst—until he noticed that the soldiers in the half-tracks were wearing long woolen coats. He had seen such overcoats before in Italy. To his immense relief, he realized they belonged to Goums, the Moro
ccan soldiers serving under French command who had relieved him on the Winter Line almost a year ago.

  The lead tank trundled forward and stopped thirty feet from Sparks. A small French flag was flying from the tank’s radio antenna. He picked himself up and ran over to the tank. An officer jumped down from its turret. Sparks had never been so glad to see a Frenchman. Once again, he had escaped capture or worse. He pointed out where his men and the Germans were. The Frenchman climbed back into his tank and issued orders over his radio, and the tanks moved toward the Germans. Meanwhile, other Goums had jumped down from half-tracks and joined forces with Sparks’s men. “The ensuing battle lasted only a few minutes,” he recalled. “The surviving Germans, about thirty, were quickly disposed of by the Moroccans. Apparently, they had no use for prisoners.”

  HOUSSERAS, THE VOSGES, FRANCE, OCTOBER 25, 1944

  DAWN WAS ALWAYS the worst time. Heavy dew soaked into boots, the chill air sending shivers down sleepless men’s spines. They rubbed their hands together, pulled on beanies to keep their heads warm, checked their rifles, clipped in new magazines, and waited as the somber landscape changed from gray to green.

  Chemical mortar rounds landed and large clouds of thick white smoke drifted across a field. Under the billowing screen, Sparks’s men moved toward a village called Housseras, northeast of Epinal. It had taken them more than a month to advance a little more than twenty miles, so stubborn was German resistance.

  Men’s nerves were stretched taut as they stalked the enemy once more. The attack would either be a pushover or very tough going if the Germans chose to counterattack. They had been in continual combat since landing in France on August 15, and most, Sparks knew, were at their limit of endurance. They crept down wet lanes, skirted by bare trees, not knowing if they would see green leaves again. Combat never became less terrifying. It felt as if they were starting from scratch every time they closed on the enemy, cracking feeble jokes to keep their minds off what lay ahead, hearts pounding, stomachs contracting, calves twitching, muscles fluttering in their cheeks, jaws clenched, lips cracked with the dryness of fear.