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20) Pages 422-423: General von Choltitz and the surrender of Paris
By August 19, 1944, street fighting in Paris had begun to get out of hand when independent bands of FFI fired on German patrols. Afraid that von Choltitz would retaliate, the Resistance leadership sent an envoy to Raoul Nordling. Swedish consul in Paris for eighteen years, asking him to act as intermediary with the occupying force. Nordling went to see the German commander at his offices in the Hôtel Meurice.
The consul found the German General in a depressed state, bemoaning his fate to have again be left in the rear with the duty of destroying a city. ‘Now I shall be remembered as the man who destroyed Paris.’ Nordling begged him not to do it until he could consult with the Resistance to negotiate a truce. Von Choltitz offered these terms: either the attacks on his garrison would stop or he would effectively destroy Paris.
The Resistance accepted the truce, but the quiet lasted no more than a day. Poor communications hampered the spread of the truce. Communist news-papers exhorted the Parisian public to reject the truce and take to the barricades! Also, both the Gaullist and Communist factions within the FH acted independently to grab as many symbolic buildings as they could during the lull. On August 21, the National Council of the Resistance met and rescinded the truce, with the Communist position prevailing. The Gaullist members followed to avoid the peril of a civil war.
Von Choltitz retaliated by shutting off the city’s food. But by this point neither he nor the FFI could restrain their forces in the streets. He told Nordling there was no alternative but to execute his orders, for he would never surrender ‘to an irregular army.’
Nordling recognized that von Choltitz might instead surrender to an Allied army. He received from the General permission to lead a mission through the American lines to bid the Yanks to enter the city and allow von Choltitz to surrender Paris with honor. The General agreed and sent an officer with Nordling for safe conduct.
On August 22., Nordling and a delegation departed Paris in a small Citroen. By the next morning, they had reached Patton’s CP southwest of Chartres. The delegation was loaded by Patton into a flight of Piper Cubs and ferried to where General Bradley waited on the airstrip near St. Saveur Lendelin. After clearing Nordling’s story, Bradley ordered the French 2nd Armored to start immediately for Paris, paired with an advance of the American 4th Infantry. Bradley then buckled into a Cub himself and flew off to Granville to clear these orders with Eisenhower.
In the meantime, von Choltitz had received a telegram from Adolf Hitler, instructing him that ‘Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy except as a field of ruins.’ The German General had already made his preparations in advance of receiving this message: he had placed three tons of explosives in Notre Dame cathedral, two tons in the Invalides, and one in the Palais Bourbon. He was prepared to level the Arc de Triomphe, the Opera, and the Madeleine with artillery fire, and had drawn plans to dynamite the Eiffel Tower and use it as a wire entanglement to snarl the Seine. He found it impossible to wreck the more than seventy bridges of Paris, but he determined to do his best. With these plans and Hitler’s telegram in hand, von Choltitz awaited the arrival of a ‘regular’ army.
The French tank commander Jacques Leclerc (nomme de guerre for Phillipe de Hauteclocque) was ordered to commence for Paris immediately on August 22, but did not get his division under way until the 23rd. For the next twenty-four hours, Leclerc’s tanks dallied through a phalanx of exuberant French folk along his path, slowing the advance with celebration. General Bradley wrote, ‘Although I could not censure them for responding to this hospitality of their countrymen, neither could I wait for them to dance their way to Paris, If von Choltitz was to deliver the city, we had a compact to fulfill.’ (Bradley, page 392).
Bradley ordered the 4th Division to liberate Paris at once. Hearing this news, Leclerc’s men dropped their napkins and mounted their tanks tout de suite. By 10 p.m. on August 24, a squad of tanks and a company of infantry from the French 2nd Armored arrived at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.
The following morning, von Choltitz walked out of the Hôtel Meurice through the billows of three purple smoke grenades heaved into the lobby. He was driven to the Gare Montparnasse, where he formally surrendered the City of Light to the French.
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21) Page 431: Naming the Red Ball Express
The Red Ball was an impromptu affair, springing up almost overnight as need dictated. COM Z chose the name for its new delivery service from railway lingo; in the 1940s, Red Ball Express meant ‘through freights,’ the fastest form of delivery.
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22) Page 440: English translation of the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer of mourning
‘Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.
‘May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
‘Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.
‘May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.
‘He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for ail Israel; and say, Amen.’
(It is worth noting that nowhere in the Kaddish is death mentioned. The theme of the Kaddish is the greatness of God. There is also an appeal for peace, between nations, individuals, and for peace of mind.)
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23) Page 454: The relocation of COM Z headquarters to Paris
Eisenhower’s chief logistician was Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, the commanding officer of COM Z. General Lee’s decision to move his gargantuan headquarters from Valognes to Paris came at a particularly bad time, in the middle of the fuel crisis that was interrupting the pursuit of the Germans east to their border.
Months before the liberation of Paris, Ike had ordered that the city was banned to HQ commands. The city’s boulevards and hotels were reserved for troops on furlough.
The ban apparently did not reach General Lee, who on August 30 abandoned his immense cantonment at Cherbourg for the comforts of Paris, two hundred miles away. Regardless of how carefully Lee may have orchestrated his move, the shuffle could not have helped but confound COM Z’s operations at a time when its full resources should have been dedicated to moving fuel and supplies to the front line. Instead, COM Z itself occupied hundreds of trucks and cargo planes, consuming thousands of gallons of gasoline.
General Lee’s indiscretion came at a critical time. His move combined with the immense losses of fuel to the black market in Paris, as well as along the roads through liberated towns, to worsen the fuel shortage and curtail pursuit of the enemy to the German border.
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24) A history of the 90th Division in World War II
Despite its rough first steps in Normandy, the 90th went on to become one of the most decorated infantry units in the European Theater, what George Patton called ‘one of the greatest divisions that ever fought.’ Here is a record of their medals and casualties:
Assuming the 90th Division’s initial strength to be 14,000, the total casualties of 21,371 represents a casualty rate of 153 percent.
Source: John Colby, War from the Ground Up: The Ninetieth
Division in WW II, Nortex Press, 1991, page 518.
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24) A note on infantry casualties
General Bradley observed the following about overall casualties:
‘Previous combat had taught us that casualties are lumped primarily in the rifle platoons. For here are concentrated the handful of troops who must advance under enemy fire. It is upon them that the burden of war falls with greater risk and with less likelihood of survival t
han any other of the combat arms. An infantry division of WWII consisted of 81 rifle platoons, each with a combat strength of approximately 40 men. Altogether those 81 assault units comprised but 3,240 men in a division of 14,000. In an army of 350,000, fewer than one out of seven soldiers stood in the front line. That does not mean, of course, that none of the other seven fought. Many of them did, but as machine gunners, artillerymen, engineers and tankers. And in Theater, the proportion [was]... one man with a rifle for each 15 men behind him.
‘Prior to invasion we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows.’
(Bradley, page 445).
Some rifle platoons lost over 200 percent during the war in Europe; because of the replacement system used by the U.S. Army, more than 80 men may have passed through a platoon’s ranks during the eleven months of ground combat.
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25) Casualties among the Chaplain Corps
Out of 5,200 total chaplains who served in the U.S. Army or Navy during World War II, 100 were killed in action, 275 were wounded, and 42 were detained as prisoners of war.
Late in the war, the Army Chaplain Corps stated that it had suffered a greater percentage of casualties than any other branch of service except the infantry and the Air Corps.
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26) Casualties among the Red Ball Express drivers
Because such an immense number and diversity of quartermaster and transportation companies drove over the oneway Red Ball Express route, no casualty numbers are available. Certainly thousands of drivers, black and white, put their lives on the line in the ETO, and many suffered wounds or lost their lives in the line of duty. Suffice it to say that delivering supplies to any front line in any war has been, and remains, a highly dangerous duty.
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27) The end of the Red Ball
The Red Ball became the ‘tail’ of a U.S. Army that was the most highly mechanized and mobile force in military history. The Red Ball Express ran for eighty-one days, from August 25 to November 16, 1944, ending finally when resistance stiffened at the German border and the Allied advance slowed.
In those three months, the Red Ball took its place in the mythology of World War II, becoming one of the great wartime achievements of the American ‘can-do’ mind-set. More than six thousand trucks and trailers and twenty-three thousand men moved 412,193 tons of supplies to the advancing American armies all the way to the German and Belgian frontiers.
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28) All-black units and the integration of the U.S. Army
In addition to driving trucks, African American soldiers in service units manned engineer units that kept open the supply routes and ordnance companies that maintained vehicles and depots, and they represented three-quarters of the stevedores in port battalions unloading ships bringing supplies from England and the United States.
Blacks were not strictly limited to service units. Some were allowed to serve in a few segregated combat units. The largest of these were the 92nd Infantry Division, which fought in Italy, and the 9th Infantry Division in the Pacific. The most well-known of the black combat units was the 332nd Fighter Group, the ‘Tuskegee Airmen,’ made up of the 9th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd Fighter Squadrons. Blacks also saw combat in segregated artillery battalions. In addition, blacks fought in three segregated armored units, including the 84th, the 827th, and the 761st Tank Battalions. In particular, the 761st distinguished itself during 183 days of combat in the ETO.
Another unit, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, known as the ‘Triple Nickels,’ was assigned in early 1945 to the Pacific Northwest as smoke jumpers instead of being allowed to fight in Europe. The 555th jumped into forest fires set by Japanese incendiary devices, which had been attached to balloons, then floated across the Pacific on the jet stream. The battalion made more than 1,200 individual jumps during the last summer of the war, covering all the northwestern states, including Montana.
Near the end of the war, a few thousand blacks were integrated into regular combat units. Due to the losses at the Battle of the Bulge and the immense casualty count among inexperienced infantrymen, Eisenhower rushed another 30,000 white troops to Europe. Fresh out of training, these boys were rashly applied and quickly swelled the casualty count. The shortage of riflemen worsened. Eisenhower tried another gambit: amnesty for men in the stockade. If the prisoners would pick up a rifle and fight, he promised their slates would be wiped clean. The response was underwhelming, as most of the men to whom this deal was offered were in the stockade in the first place for their reluctance to fight. Eisenhower tried one more time to dredge up reinforcements for his starving infantry. He looked to the black service units, offering them the chance to fight alongside their white comrades for the remainder of the war. The blacks were to be integrated into infantry divisions only by platoon, never by individual, thus preserving at least a modicum of segregation. Twenty-five hundred blacks volunteered immediately, and by February the total reached 4,562. Because of the prohibition on blacks being in charge of white soldiers, only privates and privates first class were accepted. Many black soldiers took a reduction in rank to be included. The platoons were distributed through the Sixth and Twelfth Army Groups. None of the black volunteers went to Third Army, due to George Patton’s dislike of black soldiers.
The exploits and fighting prowess of these units (in particular the Tuskegee pilots, the tankers of the 761st, the Triple Nickel parachutists, and the drivers of the Red Ball) combined to change the entrenched notion that a black man was not fit to fight in the U.S. Army. With the Cold War heating up in 1948, President Truman, on July 26, issued an executive order: ‘It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.’
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David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 54