by Alex Kershaw
As dusk settled, there was considerable bitterness among Sparks’s men. They felt they had been cruelly deceived. Yet again, they had been given the rough end of the deal. It was supposed to have been a SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) as GI slang had it, not a FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition). Elements of the 4th Armored, Task Force Baum, had in fact passed through the area but had not stopped to secure it. Instead they had been bound for Hammelburg prison camp, some seventy miles away, on a highly secretive mission to free George Patton’s son-in-law, Colonel John Waters, who had been captured in Tunisia in February 1943. The foolhardy rescue attempt, ordered by a reckless Patton, would fail catastrophically within a matter of hours, with all but fifteen of the three-hundred-man force captured, killed, or wounded. From start to finish, the whole exercise was a tragic fiasco. The suicidal “Hammelburg Raid,” as it was called, was far less forgivable than slapping shell-shocked GIs. It would certainly have cost Patton his career had it not been quickly covered up and its survivors sworn to silence.
The city had not been taken—far from it. Task Force Baum had passed by in the night but had not gone unnoticed. Festung Aschaffenburg (Fortress Aschaffenburg), like a hornet’s nest, had merely been tapped unnecessarily with a flimsy stick. Now Lamberth’s most fanatical troops were stirring.
There was, however, some good news that evening. Captain Anse Speairs, the regimental adjutant, had made an extraordinary discovery a few miles from the Nilkheim Bridge: a huge warehouse of more than a million bottles of fine wine and liquor that had been seized from all over occupied France. He returned to the regiment’s mobile headquarters—where the staff was preparing to reinforce Third Battalion the following morning—with a jeep loaded with twenty-three cases of the finest French brandy he had ever seen. Soon, every available truck in the regiment was dispatched to the warehouse to liberate more cases of brandy, at least 640 cases of vintage wine, as well as countless other bottles of assorted liquor and champagne.
“You’ve got a problem,” Speairs told regimental commander Colonel O’Brien. “Do you want the wine or the cognac?”
There was only so much room in O’Brien’s trailer. He couldn’t take it all.
“Let’s get rid of the wine.”
What O’Brien couldn’t take was quickly shared throughout the regiment that night. One battalion issued twenty-six cases of brandy to each company—more than one bottle to each Thunderbird. Ever inventive, a thirsty GI quickly devised a potent new cocktail, the soon-to-be-famous “157th Zombie,” consisting of cognac, Bénédictine, and Cointreau; most men agreed it was best followed by a champagne chaser. It would be several days before some canteens actually carried water rather than wine.
If it was Dutch courage the Thunderbirds needed, they now had plenty of it. In a supply run, cases of booze were apparently delivered to the Third Battalion that night as it guarded the Nilkheim Bridge. The uneasy silence was split not by machine-gun fire but by the sound of popping champagne corks. Some Thunderbirds got blind drunk, but others opted to stay sober, anxiously awaiting the dawn. They didn’t want to have to fight the Germans with a hangover.
Cranston Rogers in G Company was ordered to take his platoon and cover the railroad bridge’s southern approach that night. In his entire six months in combat, he had never been so scared. According to his company commander, a division of German troops, more than ten thousand men, was gathering a few miles away before heading to retake the bridge. Sparks and his battalion would be outnumbered ten to one.
ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY, MARCH 29, 1945
IT WAS A relief to see the trucks cross the Nilkheim Bridge at first light, and Thunderbirds from the regiment’s First and Second Battalions form into squads and platoons. As promised, the rest of the regiment had arrived. After a sleepless night, Cranston Rogers, the platoon guide in G Company, was equally relieved that the story about the German division coming to attack in the night had turned out to be a false alarm.
In almost five hundred days of combat, the Thunderbirds had not been ordered to clear a heavily defended urban area. Doing so was always costly, for it meant engaging the enemy at close quarters by clearing houses room by room. Resentful Thunderbirds from all three of the regiment’s battalions now prepared for the worst. Officers checked their pistols. Rifle squads armed themselves with extra grenades, sharpened knives, grabbed crowbars and axes for breaking through doors, and organized themselves into “search groups” of up to six men. One or two men in each group would enter a building first, covered by the others, and then try to kill any defenders without being hit first.
Having come so far, it was agonizing for Sparks to have to commit his men to a form of attrition that made no strategic sense whatsoever—the German high command had nothing to gain from Aschaffenburg’s defense. That morning, under a murky sky, his battalion made very slow progress. By lunchtime, the advance had become infuriatingly costly and tough going. It seemed as if snipers’ crosshairs covered every open window and rubble-strewn crossroads. To his shock, Sparks learned that in the suburb of Schweinheim, Company L had attacked across open fields and lost all of its officers in just five minutes. Not since Anzio had so many men fallen so fast, more than fifty wounded from the regiment in only a few hours. By late afternoon, his entire battalion had stalled. He ordered his men to dig in while the 158th Artillery tried to soften up defenses.
That evening, unsettling rumors began to spread that some civilians were fighting alongside the uniformed German defenders. According to one report, young girls were hurling grenades from roofs, and wounded soldiers from a military hospital had even joined the fray, egged on by both Major von Lamberth and a local Nazi Party ideologue, Kreisleiter Wohlgemuth, who had recently issued a proclamation: “Whoever remains in the city belongs to a battle group which will not know any selfishness, but will know only the unlimited hatred for this cursed enemy of ours.”
“Nun Volk steh auf und Sturm brich los!” declared Aschaffenburg’s most fanatical defenders. “Now the people stand up and the storm breaks loose!”
FESTUNG ASCHAFFENBURG (FORTRESS ASCHAFFENBURG), GERMANY, MARCH 30, 1945
THEY ATTACKED AGAIN at dawn—all three battalions in the regiment. “It was tough, tough, tough, tough,” recalled Sparks. It appeared that Germans were hidden behind every window and door. He could not use artillery in some areas because his men were often just yards from the enemy. In some rooms, they were only inches away from Hitler’s last stalwarts, forced to kill or be killed with daggers and pistols. At one point, his men came under fire from one of their own tanks that had been captured and hastily repainted and identified with the German white cross. Sparks ordered his accompanying tank destroyers to eliminate the seized Sherman. They did so, but not long after, the leader of the tank destroyer platoon and Sparks’s operations officer were both hit and had to be taken back to an aid station, joining fifty-nine other men from the regiment wounded that day.
Later that afternoon, Sparks went in search of somewhere to set up a command post. Karl Mann sat in the back of a jeep with Sparks’s runner Johnson, behind Turk and Sparks, as they reconnoitered a deserted street. At a crossroads, Turk stopped close to a Sherman tank and Sparks spoke with its crew. Soon after, recalled Mann, Sparks found a cute little dog in a deserted house nearby and decided to keep it. They then returned to the crossroads. In their absence, the Germans had shelled it and several of the tank crew had been wounded. Mann wondered what might have happened had they stayed just a few minutes longer at that crossroads.
As night fell, the costs of securing Festung Aschaffenburg became depressingly clear: The regiment’s aid station recorded its highest daily casualty count so far. From the top to the bottom of the division, frustration and a hardening anger set in. The only good news that night for some officers was that Captain Anse Speairs, whose job it was to scout out potential command posts, had yet again found a safe and comfortable headquarters for the regiment—a hotel that had been abandoned in a rush by the pregna
nt wives and girlfriends of SS troops. “There was a good supply of baby bottles and nipples,” recalled Speairs, “some Swiss chocolate and the bar still had beer on tap.”
Meanwhile, the Germans tried to cut off the American forces by destroying the Nilkheim Bridge across the river Main. Two of the world’s first combat fighter jets—formidable Me-262s*—attacked the bridge but failed to destroy it. German Navy frogmen also attempted to blow it up by placing a torpedo against its sandstone center support, but they were spotted by sentries as they floated down the river toward the bridge. Mortars opened up and one round landed among the four intrepid frogmen, detonating the mine they were carrying and killing them all.
ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY, MARCH 31, 1945
BY DAYLIGHT, THE entire division had been committed to the battle—three regiments numbering over five thousand riflemen. Yet casualties continued to mount. Sparks ordered his men to employ direct fire from heavy-caliber weapons as they tried to clear out German positions. Every mobile piece available was quickly deployed. The M36 tank destroyer had a highly effective 90mm gun and proved particularly effective, as did the M4A3 tank with its 76mm gun. Sparks watched as these vehicles blasted away, often at point-blank range. Then Thunderbirds stormed the positions. The Germans answered round for round, landing hundreds of mortars on Sparks’s battalion. In one fifteen-minute spell, more than two hundred rounds fell on his men, one every five seconds, sounding like a vicious hailstorm.
As far as Captain Anse Speairs at regimental headquarters was concerned, it was time to offer an ultimatum to the Germans in the hope of saving lives. He suggested to regimental commander Colonel O’Brien that he drop on the town from a plane some leaflets demanding surrender or else the city would be completely flattened. Speairs finally managed to get approval at division level.
That afternoon, he found himself sitting in a Piper Cub spotter plane above the city.
Speairs opened a window and dropped two hundred leaflets on the Germans. “Your situation is hopeless,” read the handfuls of mimeographed leaflets, addressed politely to The Commandant of the City of Aschaffenburg. “Our superiority in men and material is overpowering. You are offered herewith the opportunity, by accepting unconditional surrender, to save the lives of countless civilians.… Should you refuse to accept these conditions, we shall be forced to level Aschaffenburg.”
Lamberth ignored the offer.
Sparks’s men reached the strongest points of resistance by late that afternoon, penetrating as far as the artillery barracks, the Artillerie Kaserne, in central Aschaffenburg. By nightfall, they had split the city in two but were struggling to hold their gains because of German infiltration. Snipers would crawl through rubble and sewers into buildings that had been cleared by Sparks’s men and then open fire on them from behind.
Mopping up such resistance usually meant sudden death for either an American or a German. Thunderbirds kicked in doors, lobbed in grenades, ran inside to see who was still alive, who wanted to surrender, and who wanted to die. Then they yelled upstairs for others to come down and give up. If nobody answered, they had to creep upstairs to check, hoping there weren’t more Germans waiting with grenades in a bedroom or the toilet.
When running from one house to another, or across a street, it was safest to do so in squads, each man a few yards from the next. Snipers didn’t usually fire at groups, preferring the lone soldier. Squads had a tendency, if they lost a man, to hunt down the sniper with a vengeance. As was the case throughout Germany that spring, not many snipers, recognizable by the bruises on their faces from a rifle’s recoil, were taken alive.
Just like killing, surviving this kind of warfare required one to act counterintuitively. When bullets started buzzing past, Sparks’s men instinctively wanted to drop their heads and kiss the rubble. But if they all did so and then clustered, they provided an ideal target, especially to an MG42 machine gunner. The experienced men knew they should always hold their heads up with their eyes open and stay on the attack. It was the best way to stay alive.
In some streets, recalled First Sergeant Cranston “Chan” Rogers, the G Company platoon guide, he had to fight against a curtain of small-arms fire. It was the utter randomness of the killing—the feeling it induced that any man could die unfairly at any second—that would still haunt him many years later. Ordered by his company commander to take a schoolhouse, Rogers joined a young lieutenant and others from his platoon in a frontal assault on the schoolhouse held by a hundred Germans.
“Let’s go,” ordered the lieutenant.
Rogers scrambled up a pile of rubble. He stumbled and fell flat on his face. His helmet came off as he dropped his rifle. He was stunned for a moment. The lieutenant and his runner kept going. They were both cut down by a machine gun and killed. Had he not stumbled, Rogers too would have been dead.
The fighting only intensified as the Thunderbirds tried to eliminate German strongholds in the center of the city. In the Bois-Brule Barracks on Würzburger Strasse, Sparks’s men wounded or killed every German defender. Unprecedented quantities of white phosphorous were fired into cellars to smoke the enemy out. Explosions ripped at the eardrums every few seconds, the constant barrage sounding to stunned defenders as if a gigantic machine gun had opened up on them. Any building or high point in the city from which German fire could be directed was quickly destroyed, including the Roman Catholic basilica’s steeple, the highest point in the city, which was demolished by twenty-five artillery rounds. Nothing was sacred. Only God knew when it would end.
ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY, EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 1945
THE LOW-LYING CLOUD above Aschaffenburg cleared on the fourth day of the battle, April 1, 1945, and an increasingly frustrated General Frederick was able to call in air support. A P-47 fighter-bomber squadron attacked using .50-caliber ammunition because of fears that bombing might kill Americans below in the burning and shattered city. But the strafing runs were ineffective, and so the P-47s were instructed to bomb specific targets such as the Gestapo headquarters. Fighter-bombers were soon flouting curtains of 20mm anti-aircraft flak and striking all across the city where resistance was strongest.
Around a thousand Germans kept on fighting. Lamberth’s overall strategy—Auftragstaktik—to hold off the Americans for as long as possible was proving agonizingly effective. Then, for the first time in Europe in World War II, it was reportedly decided to use napalm on a civilian area. The napalm, essentially jellied petroleum, added a particularly deadly fuel to flames that engulfed more and more of the city.
The air strikes seemed to make no difference, nor did the napalm, the phosphorous that burned to the bone, the tons of high explosives, the thousands of artillery rounds aimed at strongpoints each day. Still the Nazis held out. So stubborn in fact was the resistance that Allied Supreme Command even considered issuing a directive, eerily like Lamberth’s, that any German civilian would be shot without trial on the spot if found bearing arms.
Four times that Easter Sunday, Lamberth’s fanatics were dislodged from their hiding places in ruins yet managed to creep back through sewers and the skeletons of buildings into Thunderbird positions in the town’s center and inflict casualties. Aschaffenburg was indeed what one newspaper described as a “half-destroyed city of death.”
“Hate is our prayer,” announced Deutschlander radio in a national broadcast that day. “Revenge is our battle cry.”
LAMBERTH AND HIS men clearly still possessed the energy and obedience that had made the Wehrmacht so hard to destroy, from Sicily to Anzio, from the Vosges to the river Main. But they were not, after all, Supermen. Finally, that evening, facing another long night of close combat and relentless shelling, cornered in hopeless positions, low on ammunition and out of water, some of the defenders began to surrender.
Sparks was surprised how old some of Lamberth’s warriors were: over fifty in some cases. The German Army was clearly running low on manpower, however fanatical its resistance. Others who wandered toward the Thunderbirds’ line
s in tearful dazes, arms above their dirty faces, wore uniforms several sizes too big. They were mere boys, yet to grow stubble or taste alcohol. That March of 1945, sixty thousand German sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were sent into battle, often with just a few days’ training.
Late on Easter Sunday, Sparks reached Aschaffenburg’s central square. A gruesome scene awaited him. Two German soldiers, executed on Lamberth’s orders, had been hanged from a gallows with signs pinned on each of them: THIS IS THE REWARD FOR COWARDS.
WORN DOWN BY the constant shelling, hundreds more Germans began to throw down their weapons and wave white flags. The most eager to escape the American onslaught were traumatized women and children, some three thousand of whom still remained in the shattered city, cowering in cellars and bomb shelters.
As the Thunderbirds closed on the last SS holdouts in the city, many civilians tried to break out of Festung Aschaffenburg, much to the displeasure of the more fanatical defenders. One young Thunderbird, Harry Eisner, caught sight of a crowd of around a hundred moving toward him. Some were walking and others running. Then he heard rifle shots and saw civilians fall dead, fired upon by their own countrymen. Others kept on, walking and running, undeterred.
Eisner spotted a pretty schoolgirl. Her pale arms were folded tightly across her stomach. Her socks drooped around her ankles. She had an ashen face.
She was a laughing child once.
The girl looked so terribly sad. Eisner would never forget that she wore a faded blue dress and had a pigtail. Soon, she stood right in front of him and he saw a thin red line across her stomach. He realized that she was bleeding. He tried to move her arms from her stomach. She resisted, keeping them firmly in place. He opened the collar of her dress and saw that she had been badly wounded. Her arms were all that were keeping her from being disemboweled.