by Alex Kershaw
Eisner picked her up and held her tenderly. He was determined to save her. He no longer felt tired. Adrenaline coursed through him as he turned to other Thunderbirds for help. They too were galvanized by the girl’s plight and were soon clearing the nearby road so that a medic in a jeep could get to her. Killing Krauts did not matter now. All that counted was saving this one child, preserving a life rather than taking one. Finally, the medic arrived. Eisner felt his heart pounding as the medic tended to the child, injecting her with fluid. She still had her eyes open. Their steady gaze never left Eisner as the medic carried her to the jeep and then placed her gently in it. She kept looking at Eisner, even as the jeep pulled away.
ASCHAFFENBURG, GERMANY, APRIL 3, 1945
THE THUNDERBIRD WAS with a German captain when he arrived at Colonel O’Brien’s command post. He had been captured in fierce combat and had been allowed to return to his own lines with the German, who bore a note from Aschaffenburg’s military commander. It was excellent news: Lamberth was finally prepared to surrender if the Americans would send someone to his headquarters to negotiate terms.
Colonel O’Brien was, however, in no mood to negotiate and refused Lamberth’s offer. Instead, he told the German officer to tell Lamberth to surrender at once or air strikes would intensify and the entire city center, as well as its outskirts, would be pulverized. There would be unconditional surrender or total destruction, consistent with the broader Allied approach in subjugating Nazi Germany.
A brave German-speaking American lieutenant accompanied Lamberth’s officer back to the German headquarters. Thankfully, Lamberth agreed to O’Brien’s demand, but he would not himself surrender to a mere lieutenant. Sparks was the most senior officer available in the vicinity of the Old City where von Lamberth was holed up, and so he was instructed to take Lamberth’s surrender in person.
Sparks, his interpreter Karl Mann, and his runner Johnson arrived at Lamberth’s headquarters later that morning. Lamberth emerged, holding his pistol belt and holster in one hand. With the other, he saluted Sparks before handing over his gun. Then he ordered all of his fellow officers to give up. Soon, they had all dropped their pistols at Sparks’s feet. To the end of his life, Sparks would prize Lamberth’s Luger.
Sparks knew Germans were still holding out in several places. So he turned to Karl Mann, his interpreter.
“Tell the major he’s got to go with me,” said Sparks. “We’re going to all these remaining strong points.”
Lamberth rode on the hood of the jeep, holding a bullhorn, and ordered his men to give up. His defense of the city had been totally pointless. Sparks had only contempt for him. His devotion to Hitler had cost thousands of lives and reduced a beautiful, ancient city to a vast field of rubble. He had executed honorable men for suggesting surrender, and yet here he was, walking from one shattered building to another, holding a white flag, ordering boys and old men to lay down their weapons.
At last, silence descended on Festung Aschaffenburg. When the last Germans had given up, Sparks turned Lamberth over to officers who took him back across the river Main, where he formally surrendered to Colonel O’Brien. I Company medic Robert Franklin watched as other Germans were escorted from strongpoints to be processed into POW camps, the so-called cages, which now swelled throughout Germany with hundreds of thousands of vanquished Nazis. Even in defeat, some were full of spit and vinegar, astonishingly arrogant. Franklin saw a German officer marching alongside his captured men, shouting abuse at an American officer. The American walked over to the German and kicked him hard in the backside. The German looked humiliated and fell silent.
Then the looting began. Some Thunderbirds smashed windows of a jewelry store and pocketed everything in display cabinets. Franklin also saw men from his own I Company, now commanded by a Lieutenant Bill Walsh, enter a German headquarters and break into a safe containing a large amount of German payroll. One of the thieves handed Franklin a handful of several hundred thousand marks. Franklin gave most of the banknotes to other men in his unit as souvenirs, not realizing that the money could actually be used. “Had I known it was good,” he recalled, “I would have bought some hotels and cafes and other property in Aschaffenburg.”
In the defense of Aschaffenburg, the Germans had suffered more than 5,000 casualties. At least 1,000 were killed. It was a heavy price to pay for useless ground, but a mere fraction of the 284,000 fatalities suffered by the German armed forces that March of 1945. The regiment had lost 200 men, 90 from Sparks’s battalion alone. Eleven officers had been killed.
Lamberth’s fanatical resistance had shocked not only the Thunderbirds but also the American high command. No less than secretary of war Henry L. Stimson had learned of the intensity of the siege and soon told reporters: “Nazi fanatics used the visible threat of two hangings to compel German soldiers and civilians to fight for a week.” Such behavior meant he must now make it clear to the German people that their “only choice is immediate surrender or the destruction of the Reich city by city.”
SOUTHERN GERMANY, APRIL 4, 1945
IT WAS BEHIND him now, the “Cassino on the Main,” its smoldering ruins and fires receding into the distance. Sparks pressed on, heading south toward Bavaria, the birthplace of Nazism. Shaken by the fanatical resistance in Aschaffenburg, some of his men riding in trucks believed rumors of a Nazi suicide mission to stall the advance once more. Thankfully, the counterattack failed to materialize and the Thunderbird caravan rolled on, smashing through “sixty-one minute” barricades hastily placed in streets by the increasingly pathetic Volksturm and other halfhearted resisters. “Sixty minutes to build them,” Thunderbirds joked, “and one minute to knock ’em down!”
In the savage close combat at Aschaffenburg, many of the men had passed a point of no return. “I didn’t feel sorry for any Germans after Aschaffenburg,” recalled Sergeant Rex Raney, who had fought all the way from Sicily. “When women and kids hold you off, war takes on a different atmosphere.” Raney had accidentally stepped on part of a blown-up German soldier in the city and tried everything to clean his boots but wasn’t able to get rid of the stench of death, even though his sense of smell had been severely impaired at Anzio. “My boots stunk so bad—death walked with me for about five days before I got a new pair. I left the old ones for some Frenchman.”
The Thunderbird convoy built up speed as it made toward the Danube River. Spirits rose. The confidence of conquerors returned. Men pulled out bottles and began to drink. There had been little time to savor the wonders of France during the long march to Germany. At last some of the old-timers discovered what the ripening grapes they had seen were capable of producing—the best wines in the world.
There had been so much booze stashed in the liquor warehouse that the Thunderbirds had not been able to bring it all with them. So Sparks and others had decided to bury some of the bottles, vowing to return for the hidden caches. On they rolled, through villages where from every window there seemed to hang crisp white sheets. Men opened more bottles and toasted the imminent fall of the Third Reich. A few undoubtedly sipped the vintages with hearts full of hate, determined to wreak vengeance. They had lost their best friends for no good reason, so close to the end.
* * *
* The Me-262 could fly at 528 mph—ninety more than any Allied plane in the ETO.
Lieutenant Van T. Barfoot (right) near Epinal, France, after receiving the Medal of Honor, September 28, 1944. [National Archives]
Lieutenant Earl Railsback, one of Sparks’s finest young officers, killed in the Vosges, fall 1944. [National Archives]
Karl Mann, Sparks’s German-born interpreter. [Courtesy of Karl Mann]
Johann Voss, SS Black Edelweiss machine gun squad leader. [Courtesy of Johann Voss]
Medics take a German prisoner (left) and an American to an aid station near Aschaffenburg, March 31, 1945. [National Archives]
Tanks attached to 157th Infantry Regiment clear buildings of snipers in Aschaffenburg. [National Archives]
Barricades created by Germans in Aschaffenburg, March 1945. [National Archives]
German civilians flee their homes, which have been set on fire by Thunderbird tanks trying to eliminate snipers in Aschaffenburg, March 28, 1945. [National Archives]
American tanks roll through ruins of Nuremberg, April 20, 1945. [National Archives]
German troops captured in Nuremberg, April 20, 1945. [National Archives]
American tanks take to one of Hitler’s famous autobahns, April 1945. [National Archives]
Thunderbirds from 157th Infantry Regiment cross the Danube on April 26, 1945. [National Archives]
The infamous “death train” containing about 2,000 dead people, which Sparks and his men discovered near the entrance to Dachau on April 29, 1945. [National Archives]
Sparks’s men in I Company run toward the shelter of woods near the entrance to Dachau, April 29, 1945. [National Archives]
Entrance to the Dachau complex, shortly after liberation. [National Archives]
Dachau inmates assault an SS guard in the coal yard on April 29, 1945. [National Archives]
GIs inspect boxcars at Dachau shortly after liberation. [National Archives]
Sparks’s men rounding up German soldiers in Dachau. [National Archives]
SS guards killed by American liberators lie beside a guard tower at Dachau concentration camp. [National Archives]
Robert Frederick, 45th Division commander (center), arrives at Dachau, the afternoon of April 29, 1945. [National Archives]
Robert Frederick being shown the crematorium at Dachau by an inmate. [National Archives]
Three of 32,000 inmates liberated from Dachau, photographed on April 30, 1945. [National Archives]
Sparks’s 157th Infantry regiment comes to attention in Munich for decoration ceremonies, May 24, 1945. [National Archives]
Felix Sparks, commanding general, Colorado National Guard, 1960s. [Courtesy of the Sparks family]
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DOWNFALL
Everyone now has a chance to choose the part which he will play in the film a hundred years hence.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS, APRIL 17, 1945
One of tens of thousands of German boy soldiers captured in spring 1945. [National Archives]
BAVARIA, APRIL 13, 1945
THE NEXT OBJECTIVE WAS Nuremberg, venue of the famous Nazi rallies of the 1930s. Even the old-timers under Sparks’s command dared hope they might survive to the very end as the division stormed south toward the Bavarian city where Hitler had basked in the adulation of vast, torch-bearing crowds at the height of his popularity and power. Reports from all across Germany were ever more heartening for the Thunderbirds. The Nazis and Hitler were doomed, the Wehrmacht in disarray, resistance collapsing on many fronts. Stalin’s rampaging Red Army was closing the vise on Berlin, eager to strike the final stake into the heart of German fascism.
Some of the less experienced Thunderbirds began to talk of the end being a few days away.
“The shooting’s all over.…”
“Hitler’s suing for peace.…”
“The war’s ended, but they haven’t announced it yet.”
“Yeah,” replied one veteran, “the war’s over just the way it was before Aschaffenburg!”
German troops were few and far between as both the 45th and 3rd divisions raced toward Nuremberg, their commanding generals, Frederick and “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, eager to claim the kudos that would come from capturing the city.
On April 13, Frederick was being driven along a road lined with troops when he heard some of them call out to him.
“Roosevelt died!”
Frederick was a die-hard Republican but was deeply saddened as well as concerned by the news of the sixty-three-year-old Roosevelt’s death the previous day. Would the new U.S. president, Harry Truman, be able to fill Roosevelt’s shoes?
There was barely a single GI who did not mourn their commander in chief’s passing. An editorial in the New York Times declared: “Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House.”
In Berlin, by contrast, Dr. Joseph Goebbels ordered his staff to bring out the best champagne.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler telephoned Hitler in his bunker.
“Mein Führer,” Himmler said excitedly. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April Thirteenth! Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us. Twice he has saved you from assassins. Death, which the enemy aimed at you in 1939 and 1944, has now struck down our most dangerous enemy. It is a miracle.”
When armaments minister Albert Speer visited Hitler’s bunker later that Friday the 13th, he was surprised to see Hitler rushing toward him, brandishing a newspaper clipping.
“Here, read it!” exclaimed Hitler. “Here! You never wanted to believe it! Here it is! Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost. Read it! Roosevelt is dead!”
NUREMBERG, GERMANY, APRIL 17, 1945
THEY WERE ON the outskirts, pressing through the first streets, crouching behind piles of rubble, hoping they were not in the crosshairs of an SS sniper. Sparks’s men began to probe the suburbs of Nuremberg. Would the city, which Hitler described as the most German of all, be another Aschaffenburg, only on a greater scale?
The Germans tried to stall the advance, relying mostly on MG42 machine guns and snipers concealed in the mile after mile of huge piles of rubble that now made up most of the city. The scale of destruction of Germany’s industrial cities and towns was now abundantly clear. Nuremberg itself was a vast ruin. Sparks could stand in some places and see for miles without a single building blocking his sight.
On January 2, under a rising moon, thousands of tons of incendiary and explosive devices had been dropped by the RAF, and the city’s ancient center had been quickly destroyed. The famous Rathaus castle, almost all of the churches, and about two thousand medieval houses had gone up in flames. Four hundred and fifteen industrial sites had been obliterated. The raid had in fact been a “near-perfect example of area bombing,” as an RAF source would later describe it.
Nuremberg was but one of many Bomber Command successes. Across Germany, ten million civilians were now homeless. More than six hundred thousand had been killed and eight hundred thousand badly injured in the Allies’ five-year-old bombing campaign, the ferocity and scale of which even Churchill, its primary architect, had come to regret. The airborne destruction, which had cost the lives of fifty-five thousand Bomber Command crewmen—more than the total of British Army officers lost in the First World War—in fact sickened the increasingly tired and dispirited warlord who urged Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, to concentrate on strategic targets rather than German cities: “Otherwise what will lie between the white snows of Russia and white cliffs of Dover?”
Hidden in the skeletons of apartment buildings, armed with Panzerfausts, the SS were of particular concern to Sparks after the ordeals at Reipertswiller and then Aschaffenburg. Himmler, although desperately trying to do a deal with the Allies to save his own neck, had ordered the more than one million men in the Waffen-SS and Allgemeine-SS to never capitulate even if they faced, in Hitler’s words, an apparently hopeless situation. From bitter experience, Sparks knew the SS could be counted on to do so.
But still he could not despise them. Unlike his supreme commander, Dwight Eisenhower, he felt no hatred for the men trying to kill him, even the hawk-faced diehards of the SS, despite losing his battalion to them. In fact, he respected some of them. They were very good soldiers. There were sons of bitches to be sure. But most were just following orders. Like their American foe, the Germans had no choice but to fight. They were caught in the Nazi machine. They were told to fight, so they fought.
In Nuremberg, in the last days of World War II, not many of Hitler’s most loyal warriors were given a chance to capitulat
e. The Seventh Army, to which the 45th Division still belonged, had been granted full resources for the first time. Sparks was able to call in tank support and kill the last remaining SS by simply blasting the buildings from under their feet.
So it went in dozens of other cities and towns in what was left of the Third Reich as Hitler’s birthday, on April 20, approached.
NUREMBERG, GERMANY, APRIL 19, 1945
SPARKS CONSULTED HIS MAP. He was not far from a prominent landmark: the 1905 Opera House in the center of Nuremberg, a cradle of culture and civilization from medieval times, home to the artist Dürer and others who had once made Germany world renowned as a country of great poets and philosophers.
It was April 19, the day before Hitler’s birthday. That morning, Sparks’s Third Battalion had encountered its stiffest resistance yet in Nuremberg, coming under intense fire near a railroad embankment. Sparks had deployed two companies and now followed close behind in a jeep, driven as usual by Turk, and with his runner Johnson and interpreter Karl Mann in the backseat. Yet again, he wanted to be as close as possible to the front lines. But it was difficult to find a path through the endless acres of rubble. Turk drove slowly as Sparks tried to spot street signs amid the blocks that had all but disappeared. Then he saw the Opera House with its enormous green roof.
Sparks turned to his driver, Turk.