by Alex Kershaw
That October 25, as the Thunderbirds entered woods near Housseras, the Germans opened fire with machine guns and mortars. Several men were killed and wounded. Later, in the quaint village of half-timber houses, a sniper perched in a church steeple stared through the calibrated glass of his high-velocity rifle’s sights and moved the crosshairs until they settled on an American. Then came the crack of a bullet, like a dry twig snapping underfoot, and yet another GI fell. By dusk, Sparks’s I Company had cleared the town but had lost its second, much-respected commander in less than six weeks, Lieutenant Earl Railsback, whom Sparks had held in high regard. If the killing continued at such a pace, he knew his Third Battalion would soon run out of experienced officers. The Thunderbirds had now been in combat for eighty-eight days straight, without receiving a single replacement.
ST. RÉMY, ALSACE-LORRAINE, FRANCE, NOVEMBER 5, 1944
IN THE LATRINES, rumors began to circulate that finally the Thunderbirds were to be relieved. When they weren’t cowering in foxholes under shellfire, trying to keep their feet dry, or defecating in icy slit trenches, men read letters from home and soggy newspaper clippings and laughed bitterly at predictions they would be home by Christmas. Clearly, the American public had not the remotest idea what was happening in Europe.
Early on November 5, Sparks ordered his Third Battalion to seize a village called St. Rémy, a few miles northeast of Housseras. By afternoon he had learned that K Company had come under heavy fire. He left his command post and set out to join his men. As he climbed a hill to reach K Company’s location, he recognized a man lying on a stretcher, his leg blown off at the knee. He had known twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Otis Vanderpool since he had been a platoon leader at Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1941. Finally, the odds had caught up with him.
When Sparks moved closer to the fighting, he spotted Otis’s older brother Ervin, thirty-one, a platoon sergeant, but so intense was the firefight up ahead that he wasn’t able to tell him about Otis’s injury. Ervin had only joined the regiment so he could be keep an eye on Otis. Yet he had since proved to be a superb soldier. At Anzio, he had single-handedly saved his platoon when it came under attack, firing clip after clip from his M1 rifle at an armored car, finally scoring a direct hit and taking out the driver.
That evening, thirty-one-year-old Ervin was shot in the stomach and killed. It was uncanny that both brothers were hit, after so long in the field, on the same day. Perhaps Sparks should have offered Ervin a promotion or at least reassigned him to a noncombat position, as he had done with other men who had fought all the way from Sicily. According to Otis, who would eventually return to Colorado to face his parents alone, Ervin would not have accepted: “He wanted to stay near me.”
JUST TWO DAYS after the Vanderpool brothers were hit, the horror and heartbreak finally ended. Sparks and his men were pulled off the line for two weeks of badly needed rest. The forest fighting in the Vosges had pushed them to and beyond the breaking point. It was indeed a twitchy and demoralized battalion that was trucked to a rest area near the spa of Martigny-les-Bains, on a sheltered plateau, famous for its healing waters. Men’s jaws finally relaxed, leaving their faces slack, mouths hanging open, after months of tension.
“Who the hell do I see about a discharge?” asked one Thunderbird as he fumbled with trembling fingers to light a cigarette.
There were hot showers and movies. Every radio seemed to play Bing Crosby’s hit “White Christmas.” Sparks and his men tried to savor every second away from the front, getting dry, catching up on sleep, and writing long-delayed letters to loved ones. Sparks was careful, like every other Thunderbird, to avoid conveying the reality of the war to his parents and Mary back home, for fear of causing undue concern. Letters focused on the mundane, and on birthdays and weddings missed, and that November on Thanksgivings past and the approach of yet another away from home. In 1944 Thanksgiving fell on November 23. Eisenhower had ordered that every man in the European Theater be able to eat some turkey, whether served in a canteen or carried to a remote foxhole in a cold sandwich.
Many Thunderbirds also received forty-eight-hour passes to nearby cities. After being promoted, much to his surprise and delight, on November 14, from major to lieutenant colonel, Sparks is said to have visited a cabaret with a fellow officer. He tried to relax with a beer, only to overhear five enlisted men, who were clearly drunk, making loud and derogatory comments about officers.
“Shut your mouth!” ordered Sparks.
“Go to hell!”
Sparks and his fellow officer apparently ended up in a fistfight with a couple of the enlisted men. Regardless of the provocation, it was a serious transgression for an officer who now had the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel on his uniform. He was finally showing the strain of being so long in combat, even when resting. The close fighting in the forests of the Vosges, where men jumped at the sound of the wind, had pushed him to the edge. As with so many under his command, it was now only a matter of time before he also broke.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BLACK DECEMBER
Thunderbirds approach a house in Bobenthal, looking for German snipers, December 16, 1944. [National Archives]
SARREBOURG, ALSACE, FRANCE, DECEMBER 3, 1944
THE COMMAND CAR WOUND through the thick pine forests of the Vosges, followed by several vans and a trailer stocked with high-quality liquor. It was December 3 when the car pulled up near the 45th Division’s headquarters and thirty-seven-year-old Major General Robert Frederick stepped out of it. He had arrived to replace General Eagles, who had been injured by a mine near Strasbourg on November 30.
It was not a good time for a change of command. The division had returned to combat on Thanksgiving Day and then suffered heavy losses in a nearby town called Sarrebourg, where time bombs left by the Germans had exploded every few hours, causing severe trauma. No one in the division headquarters had slept properly. Everyone was on edge, wondering where and when the next bomb would go off. The Germans had also opened up with 88s on replacements entering combat for the first time and left them splattered on the walls and rafters of a nearby factory.
Frederick’s predecessor, Eagles, had been a popular and highly capable figure, and many Thunderbirds were not overjoyed at the news that the thirty-seven-year-old was taking over. The celebrated cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who was covering the 45th Infantry’s advance now in the pages of the Stars and Stripes, met with Frederick shortly after his arrival. “It will take these men,” Frederick confessed to Mauldin, “an inordinately long time to get used to me, partly because of my age, partly because I replaced a well thought of leader.”
Frederick had led paratroops with exceptional skill and panache. No less than Winston Churchill believed he was one of America’s finest combat leaders of the war: “If we had [had] a dozen men like him, we would have smashed Hitler in 1942. He’s the greatest fighting general of all time.” However, taking up the reins of a hard-pressed infantry division of more than ten thousand men, just as they tried to break into Germany, was an immense challenge. Did he have sufficient tactical experience to react decisively, like Patton, to fast-moving events, setbacks, and openings? Or would he be hesitant and overwhelmed by the sheer scale and weight of his responsibilities?
WINGEN, ALSACE, FRANCE, DECEMBER 12, 1944
SNOW FELL AS Sparks led his Third Battalion toward the Siegfried Line, the fabled defensive installations stretching along Germany’s western border for 630 miles, from Holland to Switzerland.
That evening, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Funk of the 158th Field Artillery contacted regimental commander Colonel Walter O’Brien.
“Colonel,” said Funk, “from where we are now we can put a barrage across the border. Say the word and we can toss a concentration into Germany!”
“What are you waiting for?” O’Brien shouted into the telephone. “Fire away!”
The first man to step into Germany four days later was a muddy Thunderbird who came under fire and took cover behind a stone road
sign dated 1826. Machine-gun fire raked the nearby fields. The tired soldier waited for a break in the firing, then rolled to the side, got to his feet, and moved into the Third Reich.
Sparks and his battalion soon followed and set up on a hillside north of the German village of Nothweiler. From his forward command post, Sparks could see the concrete dragon’s teeth and pillboxes of the Siegfried Line in the gloomy distance.
THE ARDENNES, DECEMBER 16, 1944
IT WAS JUST after dawn when the uneasy silence ended in the Ardennes Forest, two hundred miles north of Sparks. Along an eighty-mile front, the Germans launched their heaviest barrage of the war in Western Europe. An hour later, a brutal SS spearhead followed by some two hundred thousand Germans pierced the American lines, and dozens of Panzers and Tiger tanks began to storm toward the river Meuse. Hitler’s desperate attempt to change the outcome of the war in the west, code-named “Watch on the Rhine,” was underway. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
The German surprise attack was the most serious intelligence failure of the war in Europe for the Allies. The ensuing struggle would rapidly become the largest battle, in terms of participants, ever fought by the United States, with more than eight hundred thousand men involved and almost ninety thousand casualties, including nineteen thousand dead. By nightfall on the first day of the battle, hundreds of German tanks were rolling through Belgium, their commanders hoping to reach the Meuse, cross it before bridges could be blown, and then press on to the strategically vital port of Antwerp, thereby fatally splitting the British and the Americans.
To the south, meanwhile, Sparks and his division had made a significant advance in the opposite direction, into Germany, penetrating over three miles and opening a gap in the German lines four miles wide. The breach had involved fierce fighting by some fifteen thousand men. The Stars and Stripes trumpeted: SEVENTH SMASHES INTO GERMANY. But few in the United States would notice. All the major headlines would now be about the fighting farther north. Once again, the Thunderbirds had gotten to their objective, and once more events elsewhere, as in June with D-Day, had robbed them of recognition. The Thunderbirds had been the first Americans to enter Germany from the south. No force in history was thought to have freed so many people and marched so far to do so. But no one back home now knew or cared.
VERDUN, FRANCE, DECEMBER 19, 1944
IT WAS THE most critical meeting during the entire Allied liberation of Europe. Early on Tuesday, December 19, General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied supreme commander, gathered his senior generals in a Maginot Line fortress in Verdun. Fifty miles away, fanatical SS troops were still advancing toward the river Meuse. If they succeeded, Hitler would in theory be in a position to negotiate terms to end the war in the west and then be able to turn all his forces toward the east.
Verdun was indeed a fitting location, being the site of some of the bloodiest carnage and costliest bungling by Allied generals in World War I. The dank, cold atmosphere matched the generals’ mood as they sat sullenly nursing their cups of tepid coffee on the second floor of the French barracks. Several tried to hide their embarrassment and shame, knowing their intelligence had failed spectacularly. “The meeting was crowded and atmosphere tense,” recalled Sir Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence. “The British were worried by events. As so often before, their confidence in the ability of the Americans to deal with the situation was not great. Reports had been reaching them of disorganization behind the American lines, of American headquarters abandoned without notice, and of documents and weapons falling into the hands of the enemy.”
Eisenhower entered the room, pale and tense, chain-smoking as usual. He took one look at his despondent staff, huddled in their coats, forced a smile, and then announced confidently: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.”
Eisenhower’s career was on the line. He had no option but to buck up his deflated staff. His strategy of advancing into Germany along a broad front, stretching from Holland to Switzerland, now looked like a mistake, as the ever more surly and arrogant General Montgomery had long argued, much to Eisenhower’s great irritation.
One of the generals seated in the Maginot Caserne building needed no cheering up: America’s last great cavalryman, General George S. Patton. He too had argued that summer against the “broad front strategy,” maintaining that a series of bold thrusts at perceived weak points in the German lines would be much more likely to end the war before Christmas, less than a fortnight away.
“Hell,” Patton said, “let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ’em up and chew ’em up.”
Eisenhower dragged on another Lucky Strike, then turned to face Patton. He had saved Patton’s career after the slapping incident in Sicily. Now he needed Patton to return the favor.
“George, I want you to go to Luxembourg and take charge of the battle, making a strong counterattack with at least six divisions. When can you start?”
“As soon as you’re through with me.”
There was laughter, especially from some of the British officers who believed Patton was being typically brash but also unrealistic. To pull off his counterattack, Patton would need to move 133,179 gasoline-powered vehicles over 1.6 million road miles in atrocious weather.
Patton was not bluffing. He had already drawn up not just one but three plans for a Third Army counterattack in the Ardennes.
“I left my [HQ] in perfect order before I came here,” said Patton.
“When will you be able to attack?” Eisenhower asked again.
“The morning of the twenty-first,” replied Patton. “With three divisions.”
The assembled officers’ reaction was now “electric.” “There was a stir, a shuffling of feet, as those present straightened their chairs,” recalled one aide. “In some faces, skepticism. But through the room the current of excitement leaped like a flame.”
“Don’t be fatuous, George,” said Eisenhower. “If you go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second.”
Patton lit a cigar.
“This has nothing to do with being fatuous, sir. I’ve made my arrangements and my staff are working like beavers at this very moment to shape them up.”
Patton outlined his plans and then turned to face fifty-one-year-old General Omar Bradley, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, who had served with him in Sicily.
“Brad, this time the Kraut has stuck his head in a meat grinder.”
Patton closed his fist around his cigar, held it aloft, and then made a grinding motion.
“And this time,” he added, “I’ve got hold of the handle!”
Even the dour and increasingly dyspeptic Bradley, whose forces had been split almost in two, now had to laugh.
The conference broke up, the attendees filled with renewed confidence, at around 1 P.M. that December 19, 1944.
As they left the meeting, Eisenhower and Patton shared a few choice words.
Eisenhower mentioned that he had just been given his fifth star.
“Funny thing, George, every time I get a new star I get attacked.”
Without missing a beat, Patton fired back: “And every time you get attacked, Ike, I pull you out.”
Among others leaving the conference at Verdun was fifty-seven-year-old three-star general Jacob Devers, who commanded the U.S. Sixth Army Group, which included General Sandy Patch’s Seventh Army, to which the veteran Thunderbirds belonged. The handsome and highly capable Devers, a classmate of Patton’s at West Point, was no favorite of Eisenhower’s. In fact Ike, the supreme politician, had unfairly criticized Devers for providing inaccurate evaluations of the fighting in his sector.
Eisenhower now issued Devers fresh orders. His Seventh Army was to abandon its push against the Siegfried Line. Instead, it would now fill in for Patton’s divisions heading to the A
rdennes. Indeed, the Seventh would replace the Third along Germany’s frontier. Eisenhower also told Devers that he must at all costs prevent the Germans from reentering “those mountains [the Vosges].” If that entailed giving up hard-won ground to hold a firmer defensive line, then so be it. There was to be no repeat of the Ardennes crisis. There could be no second successful German counterattack, not if Eisenhower was to retain the confidence of his political masters.
One can only imagine how Devers felt that cold December day as Eisenhower left Verdun to return to Paris. He had just received extraordinary orders: If the Germans attacked in force in his sector, he was to do what no other American general had yet been asked to do in Europe. He was to retreat. It was a shameful thing for any American soldier, let alone a proud and talented three-star general, to have to contemplate. And in the meantime, Devers would have to make do with just six divisions to man almost a hundred miles of the most difficult terrain on the entire Western Front.
GANDERSHEIM, GERMANY, DECEMBER 24, 1944
THICK FLAKES DRIFTED down, covering the woods and hills outside Gandersheim labor camp in central Germany. Twenty-seven-year-old Robert Antelme, a French writer and resistance worker, made his way to a latrine through the fresh snow. It was now almost six months since Antelme had been arrested in Paris, interrogated by the Gestapo, and then deported into the Reich’s vast gulag of labor and concentration camps. He wondered whether he would ever again see his thirty-one-year-old wife, fellow French writer Marguerite Duras.