Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  The threat of snipers and artillery shelling was constant. On September 30, Technician Fifth Grade Eric Nathan, a twenty-nine-year-old German Jew who had immigrated in the 1930s to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was attached to the headquarters staff of the 82nd Airborne, was walking down the street in Nijmegen when a German shell landed nearby. He was struck by shrapnel and killed.

  And the next week, the Germans threw a new weapon into the fight. Manny happened to be outside in a long chow line at the time. Hearing an unfamiliar buzz-saw sound, everyone looked up. A strange-looking pair of Luftwaffe fighter-bombers without propellers streaked past, raking the ground with machine gun fire. Before anyone could react, the fast-moving aircraft were gone, as quickly as they had arrived.

  Manny Steinfeld didn’t know it at the time, but he had just seen his first jet planes.

  Werner Angress soon saw how different Holland was going to be from Normandy, where the Allies had stayed on the move as the aggressors. Operation Market Garden quickly turned defensive, with brief attacks and counterattacks but no major changes in battle lines.

  All the while, German artillery, fired from five to ten miles away, took a toll. Werner, in fact, came close to being killed by enemy artillery shelling on three consecutive days in October 1944. It began on Friday the 13th, with a close artillery strike in front of the jeep in which he and another team member were riding. They disappeared into a plume of dirt and rocks. As they did, the jeep dropped heavily into the shell’s crater. Werner never knew how they emerged unscathed on the other side, without a broken axle or even a dented fender.

  The next night, Werner and another interrogator dug an extra-deep slit trench in which to sleep outside the regimental headquarters tent. But sometime in the middle of the night, German artillery opened up, and the men listened as the explosions crept closer and closer to their position. Werner realized with alarm that enemy observers must have identified the headquarters tent. How stupid of us to dig a trench right next to it! he thought. Now there was nothing they could do but press themselves against the dirt at the bottom of their trench and hope not to take a direct hit as the ground shook and the concussive explosions of artillery rounds threatened to burst their eardrums. Finally, after ten minutes that seemed like ten hours, the shelling stopped. They stayed planted at the bottom of the trench the rest of the night, cracking unfunny jokes and sharing each other’s misery. At sunrise, Werner climbed out of the trench to stretch his legs. A few yards away, a thirty-pound German 105 mm artillery shell was sticking half in and half out of the ground. A dud, it had failed to explode, thereby sparing their lives.

  Werner spent the next day at the command post of one of the regiment’s three battalions, which he took turns visiting because the battalions—each numbering about five hundred men—were closer to the fighting than regimental headquarters and thus had newly captured prisoners to interrogate. Werner got to shooting the breeze with a sergeant he hadn’t met before. Toward evening, the sergeant invited Werner to join him in his large slit trench for more conversation and some whiskey from a bottle the sergeant had liberated from a cellar. It was a tempting offer, but Werner was tired. He declined and retired to his own foxhole for the night. Foxholes were less comfortable than elongated slit trenches because one slept half squatting in them rather than lying down, but they were considered safer because their narrow opening made less of a target for an artillery or mortar shell to drop into—and foxholes were usually deeper, too. During the night, there was again enemy artillery fire but it was less heavy than the night before, and Werner, hunkered down in his foxhole, slept soundly. In the morning, his new friend was dead, the victim of an artillery shell that had made a direct hit on his slit trench.

  By now, Werner had seen enough of war to realize there was only one possible explanation for his run of luck. It hadn’t been his time to die.

  In the meantime, Operation Market Garden was not going as planned. At Arnhem, the British paratroopers were facing much more resistance than anticipated. Six thousand veteran soldiers of the German 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions were bivouacked in the area when the paratroopers landed, a surprise to Allied planners. What was believed to be a lightly defended target that would make for the quick capture of the most important bridge of the entire operation—the span across the Nederrijn that would open the way into northern Germany—had become a street-to-street fight.

  The British ground forces in the south that were supposed to reinforce the paratroopers in Arnhem still weren’t close to reaching them. In fact, they were barely moving at all. The terrain was filled with bridges, dikes, and drainage ditches, many of them hard to pass, and the ground on either side of the narrow road was often too soft to support vehicles, so that trucks carrying troops and pulling heavy artillery pieces were forced to crawl northward in single file. And they were frequently under attack, forced to halt and fight a series of battles along the only direct route that led from Belgium up to Nijmegen. It took the lead units three days just to get halfway to Arnhem, and then the combination of the terrain and the Germans halted them altogether. Thousands of soldiers and countless tanks and vehicles were parked bumper to bumper on the road and backed up for miles. The British ground forces finally arrived in Nijmegen, still twenty miles from Arnhem, a full two weeks after the 82nd had jumped on the city. But they never did reach Arnhem.

  After seven days on its own, the British 1st Airborne in Arnhem was cut off and outnumbered by enemy forces, and its commander finally had to order a withdrawal to avoid losing the entire division. The statistics were ghastly: of the nine thousand British paratroopers who jumped at Arnhem, nearly six thousand were captured or missing, more than one thousand killed, and a little fewer than two thousand were able to withdraw safely. After losing nearly three-quarters of its strength, the British 1st Airborne would not see combat again. With Arnhem and the bridges over the Nederrijn still held by the Germans, the Allies could not advance any farther.

  The two American airborne divisions had largely succeeded in their missions, however, and their new assignment was to stay in Holland to hold the bridges and ground they had conquered. For the 82nd, which had already suffered nearly eight hundred killed, that meant staying in and around Nijmegen, which was still being shelled from a distance by the Germans off and on, day and night, and wrecked block by block. Civilian hospitals overflowed with casualties of all ages.

  In October, Werner settled down in a deserted hothouse full of grapevines to write a letter to Curt Bondy, who was trying to keep track of his former charges now serving in the U.S. military.

  Heavy rain fell outside, as it had for days, and it dripped through the shattered windows of the hothouse. Smashed glass and grapes covered the ground. The few houses Werner could see from where he sat were torn to pieces, nothing more than rubble and debris.

  Rounds of the U.S. artillery were whistling down into German lines a few miles away, and the muffled explosions he heard were satisfying. But Werner was sorry that war had come to Holland for a second time: first, the German invasion in 1940, and now, four years later, the Allied invasion to kick out the Germans. Holland had been the first real harbor of safety for him and his family after they escaped from Germany. He had liked its simplicity and cleanliness, and the hospitality of its people. It was a good country, and once beautiful, but now it was torn and battered.

  “The longer this war lasts,” he wrote, “the more ugly sights I see and the more I get to know what death looks like, the more I am convinced that it will be our first duty after this war to prevent a second one. I don’t know yet whether this will be possible, but at least we should do our best to try.”

  He told Bondy that he had not yet been able to inquire about his family in Amsterdam, and said he hoped that the military situation would make that possible very soon. He shared with Bondy a kind of moral dilemma he had been pondering often these days.

  “The question of what to do with the future generation of Germans? This is the first part o
f their education. Shells, bullets, retreat, the fact that the Führer is wrong and that there is no master race. It will show what dying and despair mean. It will show them that it does not pay to start wars. Later on, it will take years and years of methodical teaching by handpicked teachers of German and American stock to reeducate the German youth.”

  At the time he wrote to Bondy, Werner believed that his mother and brothers were still in Amsterdam, and he hoped his father was now there as well. The city was less than a hundred miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand. The mission of the 82nd, and Operation Market Garden, did not include a campaign to liberate western Holland.

  He spoke Dutch reasonably well, and whenever he encountered a Dutch civilian, he asked them what they knew about the situation in Amsterdam. But most of them hadn’t been there since the occupation, and he learned little.

  On November 11, the 82nd was relieved by Canadian troops. Their campaign in Holland was over. They piled into trucks and rode south to a military camp in France for rest and recuperation.

  As they left Holland behind, Werner Angress had a dreadful feeling that he had just lost his best chance to find out what had happened to his family.

  9

  THE FORESTS

  After their unauthorized jaunt into liberated Paris, Victor Brombert and his fellow Ritchie Boy caught up with Hell on Wheels, the 2nd Armored Division, sixty miles down the road. Luckily for them, the leader of their IPW team had covered for them in their absence, and there were no consequences for their wild ride through the City of Light.

  As the armored division continued its rapid advance into France’s northern plains, nothing stopped them for long. Town after town fell. With the Germans now in a disorderly retreat, victory seemed within sight. A giddy optimism spread through the ranks as well as the Allied chain of command, leading to bold talk of the war being over by Christmas and everyone going home soon.

  Victor was one of the first U.S. soldiers to enter Bapaume, a town of a few thousand residents not far from the Belgian border. Nearly devastated during World War I and reeling from years of another German military occupation, the locals went all out to welcome their American liberators. On the public square, a town official rushed up to Victor’s jeep and thrust an official proclamation at him, declaring him an honorary citizen. Then, with a flourish, he pinned a Cross of Lorraine on Victor’s field jacket. The cross, consisting of one vertical and two horizontal bars, dated back to the Byzantine empire and had been adopted as the emblem of de Gaulle’s Free French forces. Although it caused some people to be confused about which army Victor was fighting with, particularly given his French accent, he wore it for months until a U.S. colonel ordered him to remove it.

  Leading the way, the division’s recon battalion—the same unit Victor had briefly joined during the Saint-Lô offensive—crossed into Belgium in early September, with the armored tanks and Victor’s team in their jeeps not far behind. A week later, after traversing the hundred-mile breadth of Belgium nearly unopposed, the 2nd Armored Division approached the outskirts of Hasselt, a coal-mining town in the northeastern corner of the country. Here they were slowed by a series of booby-trapped obstacles, such as felled trees wired with high explosives, left on the roads by recently retreating Germans.

  The townsfolk of Hasselt greeted the Americans with open arms and steins of beer in smoky pubs filled with jubilant customers singing Belgian drinking songs. In one of the bars, Victor, who a lifetime ago had dreamed of being an opera singer, belted out a pitch-perfect rendition of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” The room was stilled by the first line, Aux armes, citoyens! (To arms, citizens!), and he drew rousing applause when he finished.

  Unfortunately, not all the scenes of liberation were celebratory. The next morning, a rowdy mob dragged through the streets several young women accused of sleeping with German soldiers. The women were kicked and slapped, their heads shaved and swastikas painted on their bare scalps.

  In mid-September, the 2nd Armored rolled into southern Holland. But when they reached Maastricht, a few miles from the German border, Victor’s French team was abruptly recalled to Paris. Since the division was now well beyond French-speaking territory, they were told that their language skills were no longer needed. A jubilant Victor concluded that the war was over for him, and he envisioned spending the remainder of it in Paris. He imagined a future for himself filled with wine, women, and song in the city he loved.

  At first, it appeared Victor might have his wish granted. When the French team reported to Army Intelligence—located on avenue Marceau in an office devoid of furnishings except for utilitarian desks, lamps, and metal chairs—they were officially disbanded. With no new duties for any of them, they were assigned lodgings close to headquarters and told to check in daily.

  The neighborhood where they settled, in the center of Paris, was close to where Victor and his parents had stayed in a small hotel before finding an apartment. For Victor, it felt like a homecoming. He strolled through the leafy parks and meandering streets he knew so well. Eager to settle in and get his own place, he checked out of his assigned room within a couple of days and rented a furnished studio on rue des Vignes, a few streets from where he and other boys used to watch the girls come out of school at Lycée Molière. After moving into his new place with his duffel bag and M1 carbine, he went to the corner bar for a drink. There, sipping an espresso and chatting with the bartender, was a petite, dark-haired woman. Seeing Victor’s uniform, she smiled, and assuming he was American asked in English if he had been at Normandy. She was astonished when he responded in flawless French.

  Her name was Yvette. Her sad eyes below heavy lids and her plucked eyebrows reminded him of Edith Piaf. Later, they went outside and sat on a bench in a park, holding hands. From comments she made, Victor gathered that there had been someone in her life—a husband or a lover—but that it was over now. Victor chose not to ask any questions. Although they did not kiss before parting, they made a date for the next day. She was soon his first guest in his tiny flat, with its crimson walls and soft lights. Yvette liked to pull the top sheet over their bodies to shut out the rest of the world, making it all the easier for Victor to keep at bay any lingering thoughts of war.

  But Victor had to check in daily at headquarters, and one day when he did, he was sent to meet with a British colonel who was looking for someone who spoke multiple languages. The colonel needed someone to travel weekly between Paris and London, carrying to Allied Intelligence headquarters in Hyde Park top secret reports identifying German industrial targets that would be used to assign bombing missions to British and U.S. long-range bombers. Just about anyone in the army would covet a cushy assignment like this, safely away from combat, but Victor didn’t see it that way because he couldn’t think of anything other than the nights he would be away from Yvette. So he did his best to sabotage the interview. He told the colonel he hated “drab office work,” and purposefully failed to mention he spoke Russian, which would have added to his impressive list of foreign languages. The colonel, who had initially been interested in Victor, finally gave up on him.

  Victor was certain that by flubbing the interview he had guaranteed his stay in Paris for the duration, and he rushed to tell Yvette the good news. But just a few days later, his Camp Ritchie training caught up with him when someone at headquarters saw in his personnel file that he spoke German as well as French, and that he had been trained to interrogate German POWs. The next thing he knew he was a member of a German-language IPW team, which was ordered to report immediately to the 28th Infantry Division, then taking part in a major offensive near the German border.

  Victor was furious with himself. He had thrown away the opportunity to be assigned to the choice job in Paris, which, even with the weekly travel to England, would have allowed him to spend several nights a week with lovely Yvette. He could also imagine the stern disapproval of his parents, who were already afraid he would be killed or captured by the Nazis, for f
ailing to play it safe and get a job far removed from the front lines. But the hardest part was saying good-bye to Yvette. His team departed in such a rush that he had to break the news to her over the phone, leaving her heartbroken and both of them doubting that they would ever see each other again.

  His new team was an impressive group of Ritchie Boys. Between the five of them—two Germans, one of them a rabbi’s son who sang old Jewish songs in his cantorial tenor; an Austrian; a Hungarian; and Victor, who was soon being called “Frenchy” again—they spoke fifteen languages, including Yiddish. As for Victor’s German, it was impeccable if uncultivated. Because he had left Germany when he was only nine years old, he had a schoolboy’s vocabulary. He couldn’t discuss eighteenth-century German philosophers but didn’t need to in order to interrogate prisoners of war.

  A portrait Victor Brombert had taken in liberated Paris for Yvette shortly before his transfer to the 28th Infantry Division fighting in the Hürtgen Forest. (Family photograph)

  When his team caught up with the 28th Infantry Division three hundred miles from Paris, they found it just outside Roetgen, the first Germany city captured by the U.S. Army. A placid town of row houses, Roetgen gave no hint of the horrendous fight under way a few miles away in the Hürtgen Forest.

  The plan to push into the densely wooded terrain east of the Belgian-German border had evolved from Eisenhower’s September directive to his forces to breach the German frontier and strike deeply into Germany. The initial goal was to pin down a large German force in the Hürtgen Forest, at some fifty square miles one of the largest wooded tracts in Germany, to keep them from hurrying north twenty miles to reinforce Aachen, which was the first major German city about to fall to the Allies. The second phase of the operation was to cross through the forest to drive into the heart of Germany’s Ruhr industrial region.