Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Twenty-four hours after the D-Day landings and two years to the day since he left Nazi-occupied Europe as a refugee on a ship that was stopped in midocean by a German U-boat, Stephan Lewy left New York Harbor aboard the Queen Mary to return to Europe as a Ritchie Boy. His three-man Order of Battle (OB) team was assigned to the 6th Armored Division, about to see its first combat with Patton’s Third Army.

  It had been a long road for the boy who spent his first thirteen years in Berlin, the last half of them at the Baruch Auerbach Orphanage. After surviving a terrifying night locked in the orphanage synagogue by uniformed Nazis during Kristallnacht, Stephan had been sent by his father from Germany to France: first to Quincysous-Sénart, a village twenty miles from Paris; then, when the Germans marched on that city, to the château farther south in Chabannes. It was nearly two years before Stephan, with the help of the Red Cross, was able to reestablish contact with his father and stepmother, Arthur and Johanna, who had since fled Germany for the United States. They helped him get the documents he needed in order to join them, which he finally did in June 1942 in Boston, where they worked as household domestics.

  Arriving in America speaking no English, Stephan signed up for night school and within a year was fluent. He registered for the draft in March 1943, on his eighteenth birthday, and was inducted into the U.S. Army five months later. He was first sent to basic training in the medical corps before being transferred to Camp Ritchie, where he found himself in a sea of German Jewish refugees. My God, he thought. I feel like I’m back in Berlin. After Stephan and a group of other soldiers went before a federal magistrate to be sworn in as American citizens, he wrote his parents: “I am no longer stateless.”

  The week of his nineteenth birthday Stephan graduated as a French interpreter in Camp Ritchie’s Fifteenth Class, then was chosen to complete a four-week Order of Battle course focusing on the structure of the German army. Stephan was able to spend his final few days before heading overseas with his parents, who were still awaiting their U.S. citizenship. Before their final good-byes, his father pulled him aside. Arthur had earned a medal for his service in the German army in World War I, two decades before the Nazis sent him to Oranienburg concentration camp along with other “undesirables.” He told Stephan how proud he was of him, but also included a note of caution. “It’s not going to be a picnic,” he warned. “You better try to be very, very careful.”

  The night before the Queen Mary left port, Stephan was among a capacity crowd of GIs in a dockside building serving as a temporary theater. The movie, Lassie Come Home, was no doubt meant as an entertaining diversion. But two hours later, moved by the long, dangerous journey of the loyal collie seeking to reunite with its family, hundreds of soldiers about to go to war emerged from the movie with tears streaming down long faces.

  The Queen Mary had once been a stately passenger liner; now it was an overcrowded troopship. The Ritchie Boys occupied an adjacent block of bunks. Like Stephan, most of them had been promoted upon graduation to staff or master sergeant, and had so many stripes on their arms that other GIs called them the Zebra Battalion. The Allies had lost numerous ships in the Atlantic to German U-boats, so everyone was alarmed when they learned they would make the crossing unescorted. They were told the Queen was so fast it could outrun any enemy submarines they might encounter. Indeed, the big ship, with twelve thousand soldiers and a crew of more than one thousand, made the 3,195-mile crossing in six days flat.

  After Stephan’s team joined the 6th Armored, nicknamed the “Super Sixth” for its spirit while in training stateside, maneuvers were held in the English countryside. Then came the day when they were taken to another port and boarded ships for still another crossing, this one much shorter than the ocean: the English Channel. On July 19, 1944, they arrived at Utah Beach. Six weeks after D-Day, pontoon docks jutted out from the beachheads, and men and tanks came ashore without even getting wet.

  Once all its units had landed, the 6th swung southwest into the Brittany peninsula. On July 29, its first day of combat, the division crossed the Sienne River at Pont de La Roque and its armored tanks advanced twenty-six miles in twenty-four hours. Over the next few days, the 6th liberated several cities against stubborn enemy resistance, capturing eight hundred prisoners in the process. En route, Stephan’s team searched houses and offices once held by the enemy, looking for maps and documents that contained actionable intelligence. Then, on August 1, Patton directed the armored division to drive up the center of the peninsula to the westernmost tip of France and capture the port city of Brest, where the Germans maintained a large U-boat base.

  As the division’s lone Order of Battle team, Stephan and his two teammates operated out of division headquarters, where Patton was a regular visitor. The flamboyant general visited his commanders in the field in a converted 2.5-ton truck with a fire-engine siren that cleared tanks, trucks, men, and anything else in his path. Patton traveled with an entourage of adjuncts and orderlies, and usually also with his bull terrier, Willie (short for “William the Conqueror”). The general was a vision in highly polished helmet and boots, and matching .45 revolvers with ivory handles swinging gunslinger-style from a wide cowboy belt. It was said he had carried two guns ever since he ran out of ammunition during a 1914 shootout in Mexico while hunting down the outlaw Pancho Villa. His legend had evolved from that tale and others, such as his refusing to take cover and blazing away at a diving Luftwaffe plane as it strafed his encampment in North Africa in 1943.

  Staff Sergeant Stephan Lewy. (Family photograph)

  Stephan was present for some of the briefings that Patton was given by the division staff. Whenever Patton was presented with various contingencies of a proposed plan of attack, his first question was always the same: “Which will give me the fewest casualties?”

  Stephan’s team learned early on not to bother to unload the trailer they pulled behind their jeep. Unpacking was a waste of time because Patton’s army didn’t stay in any one place for long. His refrain to his commanders was constant: “You gotta get your mileage in for the day!” Stephan thought a lot about what made Patton a good general, and to him it boiled down to two primary factors: his concern for his troops and an aggressive philosophy that held it was better to attack first than to be attacked.

  While Stephan conducted some interrogations—he was the only native German speaker on his OB team—his team’s primary job was to use the information obtained by the interrogators of the division’s IPW teams to identify which enemy units they were facing and determine their fighting capabilities. Their extensive knowledge of the German army was soon put to the test.

  Brittany, like Normandy, was hedgerow country, and the hedges in the vicinity of Brest were particularly formidable. Earth embankments, often higher than six feet, were surrounded by trees and scrubs. In the final days of its drive on Brest, the 6th met a fierce and determined enemy. An estimated twenty thousand enemy troops were dug in to defend the port city. As the 6th positioned itself for the final assault, the staff car of a Nazi general decked out in a full-length leather coat drove headlong into the 6th’s field artillery battalion. The irate general tore open his tunic to bare his chest and said he would rather be shot than suffer the humiliation of being captured, but the Americans still took him prisoner. Though he refused to talk when he was interrogated, he was identified as Lieutenant General Karl Spang, the commander of Germany’s 266th Infantry Division.

  From their OB book and more recent intelligence gathered from interrogations, Stephan’s team knew that the 266th had formed a year ago in Stuttgart, and had been stationed along the northern coast of Brittany. Some of its units fought in late June as the Allies broke out of their Normandy beachheads. Stephan and his team further determined from documents the captured general was carrying that the division was headed to Brest to help defend the port to the last man.

  Based on this key piece of intelligence that a German division was to his rear, the 6th’s commander, Major General Robert Grow, changed his
plan and canceled the attack on Brest. While keeping a light screen of forces facing Brest, he wheeled the rest of the division in an about-face, moved north in three combat columns, and struck the in-transit German division the next morning. The battle that followed was a complete success due to outflanking the surprised enemy with tanks and infantry led by hedge-cutting bulldozers plowing through the Brittany hedgerows.

  The 266th German Infantry was wiped out as a fighting force, and without firing a shot, Stephan’s team of Ritchie Boys had played a crucial role.

  A month after landing at Omaha Beach, Victor Brombert was ordered to temporary duty with the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion—known as the “eyes and ears” of the 2nd Armored Division—for the looming battle to capture the German stronghold of Saint-Lô.

  Victor considered himself unlucky to have been selected. The recon unit was charged with racing ahead of the main body of troops and tanks to roam behind enemy lines. Having a French-speaking interrogator, like Victor, with the unit would assist them in gathering information from the locals, and if they took any prisoners, Victor could immediately question them in German. It was like having two interrogators in one.

  Saint-Lô, twenty-five miles inland from the invasion beaches, was a strategic crossroads with paved roads and railroad tracks that sprouted in all directions. If it weren’t taken, the men and equipment of the U.S. First Army would be stalled indefinitely by the hedgerows and orchards, now crammed with fresh troops that had unloaded from transports arriving at the invasion beaches, but had nowhere to go. Taking Saint-Lô would relieve the bottleneck. The Germans knew this, too, and had infantry and Panzer tank divisions ready to defend the town and block the roads.

  Riding in the back of a reconnaissance half-track—a lightly armored open vehicle propelled by caterpillar treads in the rear and truck wheels in the front—Victor felt exposed as they proceeded forth on their scouting mission. He wasn’t sure how successful he was in hiding his anxiety from the other guys in the unit, who acted as if this were an ordinary assignment, which it was for them.

  Before long, they were ordered to halt and await new instructions. They pulled off at the edge of a wood a few miles from Saint-Lô. Something big—code named Operation Cobra—was about to happen, but before it could be launched the weather turned nasty, which grounded Allied air power. For Victor and the men of the recon unit, the suspense grew during the long wait. On the third morning, the skies finally cleared. Soon, a tremendous rumble shook the ground, and they looked up to a sight none of them could have imagined. From horizon to horizon, the sky filled with the silhouettes of American and British heavy and medium-sized bombers—not hundreds but thousands of them, Victor estimated. They watched as the planes disgorged their loads over Saint-Lô, the long strings of bombs spiraling earthward and exploding in a sustained crescendo.

  The recon team took cover in the heavy forest, but Victor felt as if his head would implode from the pressure of concussive waves from the bombs dropping nearby. He knew the theory of carpet bombing but had never experienced it firsthand; indiscriminate and imprecise, its intent was to clear a wide corridor through fixed enemy positions even if it meant destroying everything and everyone around them. In a flash, he thought of what it must be like for the poor civilians who hadn’t made it out of Saint-Lô.

  As the bombing continued, visibility decreased due to the volume of smoke and dust in the air. After the sky emptied of the last squadron of bombers and the blasts ceased, there was an eerie silence.

  Finally, the recon team got the signal to move forward. Their half-track crawled across stretches of moonlike landscape, devoid of life and pockmarked with blast craters. Roads and other landmarks were unrecognizable. They passed animals and Germans slaughtered by the same bombs. Some of the soldiers had fallen over one another and were locked forever in embrace. Others had been frozen in ordinary activities at the instant of sudden death, reminding Victor of the pictures he had seen of ancient human figures mummified by volcanic lava. Most ghastly were those corpses left in contorted, lively poses—one young soldier had an arm raised as though cursing the sky that had rained such devastation.

  Pulling into Saint-Lô, they found a city in shambles, with buildings turned into burning or smoldering heaps. Although there were isolated snipers and pockets of stubborn German resistance, they continued on, past gutted homes with black smoke bellowing out of empty window frames and collapsed walls of masonry dwellings whose furnishings had been blown out into streets also littered with corpses and destroyed vehicles. Most of the enemy troops and tanks in the area that had survived the bombardment were sent fleeing, at last giving the U.S. Army the breakout of Normandy it so desperately sought. The turning point of the entire Normandy campaign, the taking of Saint-Lô opened the way into the Cotentin Peninsula to the west and Caen and Paris to the east.

  Victor rejoined his IPW team in Saint-Lô. The 2nd Armored spent the next few weeks on the move, spearheading the Allied thrust. The nature and pace of the war had changed; no longer slowed down by the hedgerows, which were like the trenches of an earlier generation’s war, the Allies now turned to a more modern, mobile brand of warfare.

  In mid-August, a vast Allied pincer movement forced more than a dozen German army divisions into a fifteen-mile gap between the towns of Falaise and Argentan, south of Caen. In what became known as the Falaise Pocket, the German army suffered a defeat of epic proportions, with as many as ten thousand Third Reich soldiers killed, although at least twenty thousand more escaped through the gap minus their heavy equipment and would be reorganized and rearmed to fight another day.

  The 2nd Armored, now attached to Patton’s Third Army, had a new objective: to cross the Seine River, which connects Paris to the English Channel at Le Havre. Patton’s tank columns forged ahead so fast, rolling over any opposition in their path, that the detailed military maps the tank crews used were frequently no longer relevant because they only showed territory that they had left behind. Lead armored tanks often had to stop at gas stations to pick up local road maps. Some days, they went more than a dozen miles. Many of the IPW team’s waking hours were spent riding in their jeeps trying to keep up with the armored columns. The road-weary interrogators agreed they would have a limited appetite for auto sightseeing after the war. Finally, the 2nd came to a grinding halt at Mantes-Gassicourt, so they could do maintenance on the tanks and allow fuel and supply trucks to catch up before crossing the Seine.

  On the lightning-quick drive out of Normandy, Victor had been a bit disoriented, losing some sense of time and place. Now, when he realized that he was looking at the banks of the familiar Seine, he knew they were only thirty miles from Paris.

  There was another reason the Americans had stopped where they did. Word had come down from the top that U.S. troops were not to enter the city. Out of respect for French pride, the Free French Forces under General Philippe Leclerc were being allowed to liberate their own capital.

  But Victor could not bear to be so close to Paris, where he had spent some of his happiest days, and not be present for the liberation celebration. He heard that the 2nd would remain bivouacked where it was near the Seine for a couple of days. Finding a co-conspirator on his team, the two men grabbed their M1 carbines, took one of the jeeps, and drove off into the night for Paris. Although the IPW teams operated with significant latitude and independence—often requisitioning homes and farms to use for interrogations as well as their own private quarters—the two interrogators left without permission.

  En route, they picked up a young Frenchman who was hitching a ride a few miles down the road. He carried a rifle, wore an armband with the French national tricolors, and claimed to be a member of the Resistance. He kept mooching their American cigarettes, and as he chain-smoked he told colorful tales of blowing up railroad tracks, derailing German troop trains, and rescuing Allied paratroopers. Victor had his doubts, having already met an endless number of Frenchmen who claimed to have fought for the Resistance. The way the young
man handled his rifle made it seem more like a stage prop than a weapon.

  Nearly every French person Victor had spoken to claimed to have engaged in some form or other of resistance against the Germans. Entire villages claimed to have been part of the French Forces of the Interior, the underground Resistance group known as FFI. Such claims, he knew, were wildly exaggerated. There had long been a sizable portion of the population—not just the pro-Nazi Vichy government and their gendarmes complicit in mass roundups and deportations of Jews—who had collaborated with the German occupiers for their own gain. An epidemic of collaboration had been followed by an epidemic of denunciations after the Allied landings: neighbors denouncing neighbors, merchants denouncing other merchants, all accusing one another of being pro-Nazi collaborators. Victor was saddened to see that the end of the occupation had not diminished France’s internal strife. The cleansing and purging taking place all over France, by the French themselves, was leading to summary executions without legal proceedings. Women were exposed to public scorn, and at times even brutalized, for having cavorted with or fallen in love with German soldiers. Although there were plenty of French patriots, Victor concluded that France was sick with a bad conscience, not only about how quickly its large army had been defeated, but about how badly many of its leaders and citizens had acted during the occupation.

  They reached Paris early in the morning, entering the city through the Sixteenth Arrondissement, Victor’s home turf from age nine until he and his parents fled the advancing Germans in 1940. There were very few vehicles on the road, so they were able to get around quickly, and the city unfolded before Victor as if out of a dream. He drove past his old elementary school, where as a boy he had played marbles on the sidewalk, sped down the Champs-Élysées, past the circle of the Rond-Point, onto the boulevards where his mother took him to the movies, and up the boulevard Poissonnière, near where his father had his office. He went by his aunt Anya’s apartment building, where he and his parents had spent their first few days in Paris after emigrating from Germany in 1933. He knew from his parents that his aunt, who had taken him to his first street market, had fled occupied Paris for Nice, where she was eventually caught up in a Vichy roundup of foreign Jews; no one had heard from her in more than two years. The quick auto tour revealed that the streets, plazas, squares, and parks that gave Paris its charm were largely undamaged after four years of German occupation. Europe’s most enchanted city had been spared the ruin of Saint-Lô.