by Alex Kershaw
Nor did Hitler’s popularity explain why the Germans kept on fighting. By now, many reviled him. Very few, however, dared openly express their disdain for him and his party, lest they be executed by one of the many roving kangaroo courts, which doled out instant discipline. Some ten thousand Germans would be killed without trial in the last days of the Third Reich. “German soldiers were told to fight, to do their duty,” recalled Thunderbird Sergeant Rex Raney, “or they’d be machine gunned in the back. That’s why the Germans held out so long: there was a hard core of ‘crazy men’ that put the fear of God into their countrymen.”
At the front lines, many German officers had long since become disillusioned with Hitler’s leadership. “Is there nobody there who will restrain the madman and call a halt?” wrote one embittered junior officer on the Western Front. “Are they still generals? No, they are shitbags … cowards! Not the ordinary soldier.” Cowards indeed. After the July 1944 assassination plot, Hitler had purged Germany of any potentially effective counterforce. There wasn’t a single general left who dared question the rush toward Armageddon.
Terror, the central dynamic of Nazism, explained a great deal. Fear of the truly barbaric Soviets, who would rape a woman every three minutes in Vienna and at an even faster rate in Berlin; fear of maniacal Nazis in the SS and the Gestapo; fear of the invader and loss of one’s homeland—all were key factors in explaining the scale of the final Götterdämmerung now enveloping the German people from all sides. But not even terror kept so many fighting, with real enthusiasm and skill, when it was clear that all was lost. In the end, it all came down to Hitler. He had diabolically trapped Germans in a vortex of escalating nihilism. So long as he breathed, the rush toward annihilation gathered pace. He was still head of state, the armed forces, the party, the apparatus of terror. Every institution, from the civil service to the judiciary, had been radicalized and brought under his total control. Until his death or capture, there could be no release for the German people. Nor would there be any respite for Felix Sparks and his men.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE SIEGFRIED LINE
The famous dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line. [National Archives]
THE SIEGFRIED LINE, MARCH 15, 1945
NIGHT WAS DAY. Huge batteries of American searchlights shone on the clouds that reflected an eerie glow on the landscape below. They illuminated the dragon’s teeth tank traps, the four-foot-thick concrete bunkers, and the faces of frightened young Thunderbirds on the attack once more. Heading back into combat never got any easier, even for veterans like Sparks, who had made the transition from rest to fighting more than twelve times since Sicily.
It was 1 A.M. as Sparks led his battalion from the French border town of Sarreguemines, ten miles due south of the German city of Saarbrücken, toward the much-fabled Siegfried Line, the major bulwark stretching from Switzerland to Holland. He had first set eyes on it the previous December but had been ordered to pull back during Operation Northwind. Now he would have to overcome its formidable defenses, bathed in the eerie reflected light, before pushing on into Germany. In briefings, he had been told it might take several weeks to breach them.
The Siegfried Line’s bunkers, numbering some thirty-five hundred, were the key strongpoints. Seizing those in the sector assigned to the Third Battalion was Sparks’s immediate objective. It soon proved to be a deadly and laborious process. Air strikes, artillery fire, and blasting with anti-tank guns were effective, but Thunderbirds still had to brave machine-gun and mortar fire to get close enough to aim their M1s at embrasures and drop phosphorous grenades through air vents. Any Germans inside then usually panicked as choking and blinding white smoke filled the bunker. The phosphorous was highly effective. Pellets burrowed into uniforms and then seared through flesh down to the bone.
Flushed from their concrete death traps, the enemy either surrendered or were killed in a hail of machine-gun fire. Others pulled back before they could be cornered, then regrouped and counterattacked. Cranston Rogers, a staff sergeant and platoon guide in G Company, got pinned down during a three-hour firefight when the Germans struck back later that morning of March 15, 1945. Two platoon leaders out of three in his rifle company were killed. Rogers assumed command of one platoon, contacted regimental headquarters, and gave his position. Around 1 P.M., he detected a friendly unit moving toward him. A young officer led the force. He introduced himself as Colonel Felix Sparks. It was the only time in Rogers’s 183 days of combat that he witnessed an officer of Sparks’s rank at the actual front.
The gains that first day were steady but costly. Thirty pillboxes were taken and the first German defense line had been broken, but five men in Sparks’s regiment were killed and more than forty wounded, mostly by artillery fire. The following day was even more deadly, with fifteen men killed. But resistance weakened by the hour and Germans began to give up in droves, more than a hundred and fifty by nightfall. Three hundred surrendered to the regiment two days later, on March 20, when Sparks finally led his Third Battalion through the last of the Siegfried Line’s pillboxes and tank traps into open country beyond. “It had taken the enemy nine years to prepare the Siegfried defenses,” stated one report. “The 157th and other Seventh Army units over-ran it in less than a week.”
THE RHINELAND, MARCH 21, 1945
IT WAS A spectacular advance. Sparks’s battalion took to trucks once more and sped toward the mighty Rhine, eighty miles due east through mostly flat farmland. The Thunderbirds were now on Nazi soil. Unlike in France, where their artillery had been careful to avoid civilian casualties, few cared who got hurt so long as the charge into Germany, day and night, did not stall. They could sense that the war was almost at an end. The faster they advanced, the more savage their response to any delay, the more “Krauts” they killed—the better their own odds of survival. “Every time you killed one,” recalled Captain Anse Speairs, “you were one step closer to Berlin.”
The Allied Air Force had almost complete control of the air, so there was little chance of being strafed by Messerschmitts as the Thunderbird convoy hurtled down main roads. Reconnaissance cars led the way, followed by alert infantrymen wielding bazookas and machine guns, who rode on tank destroyers and Shermans, with Sparks’s heavy-weapons company a few hundred yards behind. As soon as reconnaissance cars ran into a roadblock, enemy fire, or snipers in houses, word quickly passed down the line and the tank destroyers and tanks blasted the resistance mercilessly. Then men remounted their vehicles, reloaded, and rolled on once more.
Wednesday, March 21, was officially the first day of spring. Spirits soared as the Thunderbirds roared through quiet villages and towns where crocuses and daffodils bloomed and a ragtag group of defenders chose to surrender rather than fight on. “Straggling Germans, still wearing their grey-green uniforms and surrender caps,” recalled one Thunderbird, “wandered aimlessly about, watching in dazed amazement the flood of troops, supplies and equipment sweeping past them toward the west bank of the Rhine River.” In some homes that flew white flags, locals huddled close to their radios, hoping the Americans would quickly pass by, and listened between newscasts to the latest hit song: “This Will Be a Spring Without End.”
Sparks’s first command post beyond the Siegfried Line was in Homburg, thirty miles inside Germany and sixty from the Rhine. Fires had consumed much of the city and corpses lay in every ruined street. Traumatized young German women begged for food and offered themselves in exchange. “For an extra bar of chocolate I could have had her mother too!” boasted one soldier.
“It is difficult to describe the devastation which [air strikes] have wrought,” General Frederick wrote from his command post in the shattered Homburger Hotel. “So intense has been the attack that scarcely a man-made thing exists: it is even difficult to find buildings suitable for command posts. This is the scorched earth.”
OPPENHEIM, GERMANY, MARCH 24, 1945
BENEATH CLEAR SKIES, General George S. Patton walked, head held high, onto a pontoon bridge acr
oss the Rhine near Oppenheim. The incomparable Napoleon, whom Patton idolized, had once crossed the river just a few miles away.
Patton was in an ebullient mood. Two days earlier, his Third Army had beaten Bernard Montgomery’s forces to the river by a matter of hours. He had outmaneuvered the “little fart” yet again.
Patton sauntered with his senior aides toward the middle of the Rhine.
“Time out for a short halt,” he said.
Patton grinned as he strolled to the edge of the pontoon bridge, undid his fly, and urinated into the river. He turned toward his aides, doing up his fly, and said: “I have been looking forward to this for a long time.”
On the eastern bank of the river, in imitation of William the Conqueror, he knelt down, scooped up two fistfuls of Nazi soil, and then let it fall through his fingers.
“Thus, William the Conqueror!”
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT two days later, the Thunderbirds’ 179th and 180th infantry regiments began to cross the Rhine in boats. There was no supporting artillery barrage in the hopes of surprising German defenders on the eastern bank. It proved a costly mistake. Men were greeted by intense machine-gun fire, with the 180th losing half the boats in its second and third waves. But there was now no stopping the Americans—those who made it across the river sprinted for cover, fixed bayonets, and then quickly stormed the German positions.
Sparks’s Third Battalion crossed on March 26 near the cathedral city of Worms and met comparatively little resistance. Many were disappointed when they finally saw the fabled river that had held up the Allied advance since Montgomery’s disastrous attempt to cross it at Arnhem in Holland the previous September. “It was small compared to the Hudson,” recalled Private First Class Vincent Presutti of M Company. “Nonetheless it was no picnic because we had no cover as we crossed.”
“Call that thing a river?” said one Thunderbird seated in the back of a truck. “Why, we’ve got mill streams bigger than that back home.”
Beyond the river, the advance once again gathered pace. Sparks knew the war would not last much longer, perhaps a month at most. The last great obstacles blocking the path to victory had been crossed. The grass was turning green. Each day was warmer than the last. Men no longer huddled together in foxholes at night to stay warm. The worst was surely over. There was even time, as Sparks passed through villages and towns that had hastily surrendered, to collect a few spoils of war. Nazi flags were popular items, but the most sought after were weapons, and in particular daggers, especially those belonging to the SS. One day, he found a black SS jacket with a single bullet hole in the chest over the heart, complete with lurid red armband, and an SS dagger with a double-edged blade that had an officer’s name inscribed on it.
On March 27, as Sparks pressed toward the river Main, forty miles to the southeast of Worms, he received new orders. He was to take his Third Battalion and cross the river at Aschaffenburg. The city had already been cleared by elements of Patton’s Third Army. It would be a simple, routine mission, another day’s easy rolling past white sheets dangling from yet more windows. The remainder of the Thunderbirds would soon follow.
By nightfall on March 27, Sparks had reached the western bank of the Main. His men dug in for the night. At around 9:30 P.M., they heard the unsettling sound of women screaming. Somewhere on the eastern bank of the river, Germans were playing at psychological warfare. Loudspeakers blared “Achtung, Achtung” as the piercing screams continued.
Most of Sparks’s men paid little or no attention to the eerie wails. They had become indifferent to the increasingly pathetic German attempts to unnerve them. Indeed, the “Krauts” were simply up to their usual tricks again. Few if any asked themselves why the Germans would try to intimidate them if Patton’s Third Army had already cleared the area—what would be the point?
A FEW MILES to the east that night, in a fortified command post at the center of Aschaffenburg, a gray-haired and bespectacled Major von Lamberth issued crisp orders and waited, confident he had done all he could to turn Aschaffenburg into a death trap. Hours earlier, he had issued a proclamation:
SOLDIERS, MEN OF THE WEHRMACHT, COMRADES—THE FORTRESS OF ASCHAFFENBURG WILL BE DEFENDED TO THE LAST MAN. AS LONG AS THE ENEMY GIVES US TIME WE WILL PREPARE AND EMPLOY OUR TROOPS TO OUR BEST ADVANTAGE. THIS MEANS … FIGHT! ERECT DUGOUTS! MAKE BARRIERS! GET SUPPLIES! AND WIN!… AS OF TODAY, EVERYONE IS TO GIVE TO HIS LAST. I ORDER THAT NO ONE SHALL REST MORE THAN THREE HOURS OUT OF TWENTY. I FORBID ANY SITTING AROUND OR LOAFING. OUR BELIEF IS THAT IT IS OUR MISSION TO GIVE THE CURSED ENEMY THE GREATEST RESISTANCE AND TO SEND AS MANY AS POSSIBLE OF THEM TO THE DEVIL.
Lamberth was a formidable foe, chosen by the German high command to lead the defense of the city because he was deemed most capable, even though several of his fellow officers outranked him. His resolve had only increased when he saw a message from the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces in the west. It instructed him and his men to fight to the last bullet. He had fought in World War I, on the Eastern Front, and was determined to do precisely as ordered: kill as many Americans as he possibly could.
Concrete bunkers and pillboxes had been heavily fortified, mines laid in all critical areas, and buildings strewn with countless booby traps. But it had been the troops’ psyches that Lamberth had taken most care to bolster, bearing in mind Napoleon’s dictum that the “moral is to the physical as three is to one.” To ensure loyalty and obedience in the ranks—pour encourager les autres—Lamberth even had a man hanged in public, a lieutenant called Friedl Heymann, a highly decorated combat veteran who had been recovering from serious wounds in the city. When Heymann had not joined a reserve unit as ordered, Lamberth’s men had seized him from the home he shared with his young wife, whom he had recently married. He was quickly tried, convicted of “Fahnenflucht”—“fleeing the flag”—and then executed in a public square on Lamberth’s orders.
A sign was attached to Heymann’s dangling corpse: DEATH TO ALL TRAITORS.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CASSINO ON THE MAIN
Icy-eyed GI’s darted through the flaming streets, killing the vicious German troops like mad dogs.
PAUL HOLLISTER, “THUNDERBIRDS OF THE ETO,” IN OLECK, ED., EYE WITNESS WORLD WAR II BATTLES
Thunderbirds fight through the ruins of Aschaffenburg, Germany, March 1945. [National Archives]
ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY, MARCH 28, 1945
THE THIRD BATTALION BOARDED trucks and was driven toward Aschaffenburg, with Sparks following in his jeep. After two hours, the convoy neared the Nilkheim railway bridge across the Main. At a ridgeline, Sparks stopped the trucks. He wanted to take a good look at Aschaffenburg, lying below him on the eastern banks of the river.
The city rested on a bluff some forty miles upriver from Frankfurt. Forested foothills of the Spessart Mountains rose to the north, east, and south. Through his field glasses, Sparks could make out two main landmarks: the Schloss Joahnnesburg, a seventeenth-century castle, and the tenth-century Stiftskirche, a Roman Catholic basilica that sat atop the city’s highest point, the Dahlberg. To his surprise, he could not see any American troops in the city. There was no movement at all.
Something’s wrong. If the Third Army took that place, there should be some Third Army troops.
He looked down again at the railroad bridge. All was quiet. There was no sign of the enemy. The bridge had been covered with planks to allow troops across. But he felt uneasy all the same. He ordered his men off the trucks and then reconnoitered ahead on foot with his runner Johnson and a few other men until he got to within a mile of the bridge. Again the area was deserted. Around 2 P.M., Sparks ordered a platoon of around forty men to cross the bridge. The silence continued until a full company of two hundred had crossed the bridge and begun to move into streets on the eastern side. Then Sparks heard the unmistakable sounds of German small-arms fire and mortars in the distance. His men scattered, looking for shelter.
What the goddamn hell?
Sparks was furious.
He had been told that Patton’s Third Army had secured the city. Clearly, that was not the case. Fearing a German counterattack, he ordered his three companies to set up defensive positions across the bridge, on the eastern bank of the Main, in the outskirts of the city that had supposedly been made safe. As his men set up machine-gun positions and mortars, Sparks made contact with a reconnaissance troop of around a hundred men from the 4th Armored Division, which belonged to Patton’s Third Army. They were dug in near the bank of the river, upstream from the bridge, and led by a young captain.
“Colonel,” said the captain, “I’m glad to see you.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Well, Colonel, there’s a hell of a lot of Germans still here. German civilians tell us there’s at least five thousand.”
Five thousand?
That was five times the strength of Sparks’s battalion. Most of his privates were replacements, and all of his men were less than eager to engage the enemy in fierce close combat, especially so near to the end of the war. In recent weeks they had encountered far more civilians waving white flags than they had enemy soldiers with guns. Indeed, they had assumed the war was all but over.
The captain gathered his men and prepared to leave. He clearly had no stomach for the fierce fighting he knew lay ahead.
“I was ordered to stay here until relieved and guard the bridge,” he explained to Sparks.
“I guess you’re relieved,” said a caustic Sparks.
Sparks then radioed back to the division.
“There’s no way I can take this area with one battalion.”
Sparks was told that the rest of the regiment would arrive the next morning. He was to hold his position through the night.