The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  The SS did not line them up and aim MG42 machine guns at them. Instead, they formed an honor guard as more than four hundred battered and shivering Thunderbirds walked, stumbled, or were carried on litters off the ridge. Twenty-five officers were taken to regimental headquarters and asked to pass through the SS mess tent and share what rations the SS had, a rare honor indeed. “Rumor had it that all the men were handed a box of Scho-Ka-Kola each, a fine gesture by our commander,” remembered Johann Voss, “although I heard some grumbling that there weren’t any boxes [containing chocolate] left for us.”

  Sparks’s men were not the hopeless half-breeds of Goebbels’s propaganda rants. They had fought like lions to the very end. The SS were duly impressed by their “resilience,” as Voss put it, during arguably the most heroic last stand by U.S. infantrymen that winter in Europe. Before Sparks’s men began their march to the rear as POWs, they were praised by no less than Generalmajor Gerhard Franz, commander of the 256th Volksgrenadier Division.

  Franz stood in his staff car and formally addressed his brave opponents, both officers and men, before they set off on a five-day journey to Stalag 12A. The survivors were put on a train, seventy to a boxcar. They couldn’t all lie down at the same time, so they took turns standing and sitting. There was a bucket in the middle of one boxcar for a toilet. It leaked. But few cared. All that mattered was that they were alive, unlike two hundred of their friends whose stiff corpses dotted the ridge. According to SS records, the survivors numbered 456 enlisted men and 26 officers, most of them wounded.

  For Johann Voss and his fellow SS, there was no exaltation in victory. They had lost twenty-six comrades. One hundred and twenty-seven were wounded and twelve were listed as missing. Voss felt a deep joy that he had survived but a growing horror as he walked along the silent ridge and saw the devastation, the bodies of dead young Americans, covered in a white shroud of snow. Even though he held little hope of eventual victory in the war, he was proud he and his fellow SS had succeeded in dealing a major setback to the Americans in Operation Northwind, the last great strike at the Allies in the west. He had the satisfaction of knowing his Black Edelweiss regiment had won a battle if not the war.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, January 21, 1945, was the darkest in the Thunderbirds’ long and distinguished history. Defeated for the first time, the 157th Infantry Regiment was ordered off the line. The raw facts of the disaster were impossible to accept. Sparks struggled to come to terms with the enormity of the tragedy as snow fell on the fatal ridge above his command post. First at Anzio, now at Reipertswiller, he had lost almost all of his men. “My most tortured memory is of the Battle of Reipertswiller,” he would write decades later. “It is still difficult for me to believe that it happened.”

  On the ridge, the falling snow covered the shell-strewn dugouts where Sparks’s men had fought so courageously, the black stains of shell impacts, the smashed trees, and the bundles of two hundred fallen GIs. There was utter quiet. Nothing moved. It was as if the landscape itself were stunned, frozen in mourning.

  The wind whipped the snow into a blizzard that hounded what was left of the battered regiment as it fell back to a rest area not far from Reipertswiller. The wind and snow turned to sleet, soaking the men, biting at them, scolding them, taunting them, it seemed. The temperature dropped as the men boarded trucks. Sleet became freezing rain. Roads were soon strips of ice. Thunderbirds cursed as the trucks slipped into ditches. They were moving back, away from the SS, away from death, but for the second time in less than a month they were passing through towns that they had captured with great loss and pain.

  The roads grew even icier, the snow deeper, as the remnants of the 157th Infantry Regiment moved to a nearby village called Metting. For the third time since landing in Sicily in 1943, the regiment was then completely reorganized. Over three days, more than a thousand replacements were brought in, including thirty new officers. They were full of questions and energy, a stark contrast to the men who had come down from the mountains utterly exhausted and depressed.

  METTING, FRANCE, LATE JANUARY 1945

  NOT LONG AFTER the battle, Frederick met with Sparks as he tried to re-form his battalion in the town of Metting. Wracked by survivor’s guilt and humiliated by defeat for the first time, Sparks was in no mood to gloss over what had happened at Reipertswiller. He was “hurt badly.” Had Frederick given the order to pull back, as had been requested, two hundred of Sparks’s men would still be alive. Frederick had made an unforgivable mistake.

  They discussed what had happened at Reipertswiller. It was quickly evident that the scale of the loss was too much for Sparks to even begin to absorb: seven company commanders, thirty platoon leaders, and six hundred brave men killed, wounded, or captured. He began to cry, tears streaming down his cheeks. Perhaps Frederick lit the fuse paper. Or maybe Sparks provoked Frederick. What’s certain is that Sparks failed to control his anger.

  “If I had it to do over,” said Sparks, “I’d go against your orders and pull the battalion out while I could.”

  Frederick lost his temper. Harsh words were exchanged. After a few minutes, he was seen leaving Sparks’s command post, visibly angry. Sparks knew he had made an enemy. Generals didn’t appreciate being insulted and taken down a peg or two by a lieutenant colonel. But he didn’t care. As far as Sparks was concerned, Frederick wasn’t “worth a damn.”

  It was not just Frederick who suffered a tongue-lashing. Sparks also had a confrontation with the assistant division commander, General Paul Adams. And to make matters worse, he did more than show his contempt for his superiors face-to-face. In late January he went an extraordinary step further, formally requesting that the inspector general investigate the division staff’s mishandling of the battle, in particular their failure to allow the withdrawal of his troops. It was an astonishing act, as courageous and perhaps foolhardy as anything he had done on the battlefield. Having finally passed the breaking point at Reipertswiller, an utterly drained yet still iron-willed Sparks didn’t care if his actions imperiled his chances for promotion or further honors.

  There was no excuse for what had happened at Reipertswiller. Other officers in the regiment agreed. Captain Anse Speairs had recently returned from leave in the States to discover that he had lost every man in his company. “Frederick didn’t see the situation,” he recalled. “Sparks did.”

  Frederick must have deeply resented Sparks’s call for an investigation, though he had little reason to worry about censure, given senior Allied generals’ demand during the battle for him to not yield a yard. His reaction to Sparks’s request for an investigation was harsh and swift. In a confidential letter, sent from 45th Infantry Division HQ on January 29, only a few days after Sparks had upbraided him in person, he had his revenge, stating that he did not concur with a January 24 recommendation, made by Colonel O’Brien, that a Distinguished Service Cross be awarded to Sparks. “The circumstances surrounding the capture of elements of Lieutenant Colonel Sparks’ battalion are now under investigation,” wrote Frederick. “The actions for which he is cited … are considered to have been the normal actions of any commander in this situation and do not constitute extraordinary heroism for which the Distinguished Service Cross is awarded.”

  Frederick had nixed Sparks’s DSC recommendation, despite three officers’ providing evidence of Sparks’s extraordinary heroism. But he thrust the knife far deeper by then adding: “He [Sparks] was ordered by his Headquarters to assemble available personnel of his battalion and … join his battalion.” Frederick’s implication was obvious: Sparks had been partly responsible for his men’s capture and deaths because he had not been with them when they were surrounded. As a result of Frederick’s actions, Sparks would never gain due recognition for his heroism on January 18, when he had saved at least some of his men. Instead, he would receive a silver star in the mail—four years later.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE RIVER

  I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of
the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, FEBRUARY 6, 1945, YALTA

  GIs take a cigarette break during the fight to break into Nazi Germany. [National Archives]

  PARIS, FEBRUARY 1945

  THEY WERE GORGEOUS. They wore hats piled high on their heads, like wastebaskets turned upside down and coated with flowers and feathers, black silk stockings provided by their many officer boyfriends working at SHAEF headquarters, and bright dresses they had made from offcut fabric. Despite severe rationing, these chic midinettes who worked in the fashion industry mercifully brightened the streets and bars of Paris in the dead of winter. All of Europe was hungry, especially Paris, but the young and old, and above all the midinettes, could still find the esprit and energy to fill the bals publics, the dance halls, around the Place de Bastille. Their wooden-soled shoes—the Germans had seized all leather stocks during the occupation—sounded like a frenzied clacking after a few glasses of the strong, brassy wine that GIs couldn’t get enough of.

  Sparks was there that gray February, drowning his sorrows and seeing the sights. Early that month, he had received a seventy-two-hour pass to Paris, where he was able to meet with his brother, Earl, a captain serving in the Army Air Forces. Earl was two years younger and close to Sparks. Before the war, they had spent many a winter’s day hunting and laying traps in the desert around Miami, Arizona. Now they went on the prowl for booze and a good time. It was a relief to walk down streets without having to look out for mines. In the American Officers’ Club, after enduring months of bowel-blocking field rations, Sparks could gorge on fresh vegetables and T-bone steaks doused in thick gravy.

  He wrote his parents that he had managed to “get around to see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, Napoleon’s Tomb and other places of historical interest.” He added that he found Paris “quite interesting,” but by now, after almost two years away from home, he was heartily sick of Europe. “To me it was just like any other European city,” he continued. “Any American city has it beat a mile.”

  When Sparks returned from Paris, he resumed his command of the Third Battalion. He had not been demoted or disciplined after confronting his two most senior officers, Adams and Frederick, about the loss of his battalion at Reipertswiller. They needed field commanders like him to finish the war. As Frederick knew only too well after three years in combat, such highly experienced and effective officers, however maverick and insubordinate, were utterly indispensable and increasingly rare.

  After the bitter disappointments and setbacks of late 1944, the Allies were now back on the offensive, poised to break deep into Germany once they had crossed the Rhine. The SS had been repelled late that January in the Vosges, Johann Voss’s unit and others forced to retreat into the Fatherland along with tens of thousands of their comrades from the Ardennes, where the Allies had also succeeded in regaining lost ground. The battle for Germany was about to begin.

  The Thunderbirds would play their part. But first they had to be brought back to full strength. Green officers came in from the States, some were transferred from other units, and Sparks was given just three weeks to reconstitute a battalion of about nine hundred and fifty men. Many of his new lieutenants were ninety-day wonders who had never fired a shot in anger. Because men with at least some combat experience were essential, other divisions in the Seventh Army had been scoured for sergeants to help lead the instant infantry that now replaced Sparks’s lost Third Battalion.

  Private Dan Dougherty was one of hundreds of young men rushed in from other units to fill the gaping holes in the regiment’s ranks. His first sergeant had told him: “Dougherty, you are now a staff sergeant in the 45th Division.” There was a jeep waiting and he didn’t even get the chance to say good-bye to the men he had known for ten months. Dougherty and the new men constituting Sparks’s Third Battalion hoped and prayed they would see out the rest of the war, but they knew the odds of surviving unscathed were slim. Twenty thousand Americans had died in Europe that January—more than in any other month of the war.

  There was still no sign of any imminent Nazi collapse. Many more like Dougherty—“reinforcements,” as the U.S. Army preferred to call replacements—would be needed before all of Nazi Germany was subdued. In Berlin, Hitler was calling for the Gauleiters—regional Nazi Party leaders—to instill in the German people a “Teutonic rage.” Only by rising to the challenge of fighting the invaders, he stressed, would the German people discover their true worth. The Führer’s implication was clear: If the Germans did not stop the Allied advance, they were not deserving of the Third Reich or of ultimate victory in the great racial struggle that would determine all of Europe’s future. Therefore, like all inferior races, they were expendable. “Should the German people give up,” Hitler warned, “then this would demonstrate that they had no moral worth, and in that case they would deserve destruction. That would be the rightful judgment of history and providence.”

  Hitler went further in an angry aside to Albert Speer, his amoral armaments minister, who dared express the hope that some of Germany’s industrial base might be saved rather than incinerated. “If the war is lost,” snapped Hitler, “the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger. In any case only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.”

  REMAGEN, GERMANY, MARCH 7, 1945

  IT WAS AROUND 4 P.M. when Lieutenant Karl Timmerman and men from the 27th Armored Infantry of the 9th Division reached the approaches to the Ludendorff railway bridge near Remagen, fifty miles east of the French border near Bonn. To their surprise, the Americans saw that the bridge was still standing. Since September 1944, some seven months before, the Allies had been fighting to reach and then cross the river only to be repelled in Holland and stalled all along Germany’s borders. Every other bridge across the Rhine had been destroyed. Seizing the Ludendorff intact would constitute one of the great achievements of the war. But surely the Germans would blow it up before the Allies could cross?

  “Do you think you can get your company across the bridge?” Timmerman’s battalion commander asked.

  “Well, we can try it, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What if the bridge blows in my face?”

  There was no reply.

  “All right,” Timmerman ordered his men. “We’re going across.”

  Sure enough, as Timmerman and his company neared the bridge, there was a huge explosion. When the debris settled, Timmerman picked himself up and looked through the smoke and dust, expecting the bridge to have collapsed.

  “Look,” he shouted. “She’s still standing.”

  Timmerman ordered his company across the 350-yard span.

  There was some hesitation so he decided to lead the way.

  “Get going, you guys, get going.”

  They got going, dodging holes in the planking that gave awful glimpses of the Rhine’s swirling eddies far below, and quickly secured the bridge. When General Omar Bradley contacted Eisenhower at his Reims headquarters with the good news, the supreme commander could barely believe it. “Hold on to it, Brad. Get across with whatever you need—but make sure you hold that bridgehead.” Within twenty-four hours, eight thousand Americans had poured across. The first bridgehead on the eastern banks of the Rhine had been established.

  Hitler immediately ordered the trial and execution of five officers who had failed to destroy the bridge, and replaced Field Marshal von Rundstedt, commander in chief west, with Albert Kesselring, who had frustrated the Allies so brilliantly in Italy. But not even the supreme optimist Kesselring could hold back the Allied tide. On all sides, as the spring thaw arrived, the enemies of National Socialism were thrusting relentlessly toward the heart of
the Third Reich. In the east, a massive January offensive had been spectacularly successful; more than two million Soviet troops were closing on Berlin itself, less than a hundred miles from the Reichstag. The only hope of prolonging the war for Hitler lay in grinding down the Allies in street fighting in cities designated as fortresses all across what was left of the Third Reich—which he had boasted would last a thousand years.

  FEW SOCIETIES IN history have fought to the point of utter destruction. The question that vexed many was why the Germans fought on so fiercely, dying in their thousands each day, even when it was clear that the war was lost. The Allied demand for unconditional surrender may have been a factor, although Churchill himself rejected the notion out of hand—the Allies’ conditions for a negotiated surrender, he noted, “looked so terrible when set forth on paper, and so far exceeded what was in fact done, that their publication would have only stimulated German resistance.”

  Nazi propaganda was not a critical factor either. Highly effective until the cataclysmic defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Goebbels’s hysterical diatribes swayed only the very young and willfully gullible by spring 1945. “I wish I had a pistol to kill all of you,” a captured twelve-year-old Hitler Youth leader, born the year Hitler had taken power, told his American interrogators. “Do not hope ever to eradicate our National Socialist ideals or ideas. There are enough of us left to continue the fight as long as we live.”