Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II

by Belton Y. Cooper

  Her father had been convinced by Hitler and the continuous stream of German propaganda that Americans were barbarians. He was told that if the Americans ever occupied Darmstadt, he and his entire family would be brutally tortured and put to death. He, his wife, and daughter made a pact that if such came to pass, they would all take cyanide capsules before the Americans arrived.

  In late February 1945, when the American Third Army crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, her father called the family together in the living room. He told the daughter to leave the two little girls, approximately three and five years old, in one of the bedrooms behind a closed door. He then distributed five cyanide capsules. The mother and father took their capsules and died quickly. She took the capsules for the children and put them in candy that she had prepared. She gave the candy to the children and stayed with them until they became unconscious. When she was convinced they were dead, she took her capsule and collapsed.

  Shortly afterward, American troops reached Darmstadt and found the five bodies in the house. She apparently had regurgitated the capsule in her unconscious state and was still breathing when the troops arrived. The medics revived her, then took her to the Catholic hospital and turned her over to the nuns. When she finally revived sufficiently to realize what had happened, she was in a state of shock. How could she possibly have believed the Americans were barbarians when they instead had saved her life. She had become such a pawn of Nazi propaganda that she had killed her own children. This was more than she could cope with, and she cut her wrists with a razor. The German nurses found her in a pool of blood and managed to save her again.

  It’s relatively easy to accept the fact that propaganda can be a powerful weapon among backward, uneducated people. This young woman, on the other hand, had had all the privileges of an aristocratic upbringing in a modern nation and had even gone to school in France and England. How could she possibly believe Americans were barbarians who would torture and kill her little girls?

  One would think that after ten months of combat, nothing would shock you. As I was fortunate not to have been a tanker or infantryman exposed to terror on a twenty-four hour basis, I was perhaps more sensitive to shock. In any event the death camps in Nordhausen, Belsen, and Auschwitz and incidents such as this were bound to shock even the most insensitive person. How could any civilized people, on the face of this earth, possibly have been brought to do what the Germans did in this war? Man’s inhumanity to man seemed limitless. To this day, I’ve never heard a reasonable explanation of how this could have happened in a modern civilized world. I have no answers to this terrible question.

  After two weeks at Darmstadt, we had caught up on our maintenance and had time to relax. The photographic equipment we had found in the Agfa plant came in handy. We set up our own lab and started developing pictures, not just our own but also film that we had found in many captured German cameras.

  One roll of film, apparently taken by a German guard in one of the death camps, showed the slave workers in the process of burning the bodies. The corpses were stacked in piles along the wall at the end of the crematorium vault. There appeared to be fifteen to twenty furnaces in the crematorium. The workers used large clamps to grab the head and feet of the naked corpses and drag them across the floor to a small conveyor in front of each furnace. They loaded the corpses on the conveyor head first and used a long poker in the crotch to push the bodies into the furnace.

  As soon as the first conveyor was loaded, the workers would load the next one. By the time they had loaded all the furnaces, they would come back to the first one and start all over again. Any bits of bone or residue remaining on the conveyor were brushed into the ash pit. The workers’ faces appeared void of any emotion. Several years after the war, a set of these pictures appeared in the holocaust museum in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Major Arrington had us bring our final combat loss reports up-to-date. He told each liaison officer to review his records and those of the maintenance battalion shop work order clerk to make sure we had not missed anything. We went through all the records and tried to recount as accurately as possible every incident of vehicles being knocked out or damaged and repaired. After many hours, the final record was compiled and turned over to the division, which in turn sent it to the War Department for historical documentation. A summary copy of these records appeared in the 3d Armored Division history, entitled Spearhead in the West.

  During this period, I received a ten-page V-mail letter from my Aunt Betty in Nashville, Tennessee. She was my grandmother’s youngest sister, and I had fond memories of the summers that she and the young grandchildren spent together in my grandfather’s house on the mountain in Huntsville. She would show us postcards of her trip to Europe many years before and would tell us stories about castles on the Rhine and knights and their exploits in great battles in the glorious past. Little did I realize as a little boy that I would someday be involved in similar exploits in this same land.

  In her long letter, Aunt Betty described a trip she had taken with her father to Germany in the early 1890s, when she was seventeen years old. They had been invited to visit the family of a German music teacher in Rüdesheim, a small village on the east bank of the Rhine across the river from Mainz. The day they arrived in Rüdesheim on the train from Berlin, the Germans were celebrating the dedication of the Germania Denkmal (monument), a huge bronze statue cast from French cannon captured by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871. The statue represented Germania, the German goddess of war, and was the largest statue in the world at the time.

  The American ambassador and his daughter, who had been invited to participate in the dedication, were supposed to arrive on the same train from Berlin but had missed the train. My great-grandfather and aunt were mistakenly identified as the ambassador and his daughter and were given seats as guests of honor. While the bürgermeister and other high German officials gave numerous speeches, my aunt was given a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a red, white, and blue cockade to wear on her hat. Not until the ceremony was over did she finally comprehend what had taken place.

  After reflecting on this event for some fifty years and through two world wars, she felt that this statue represented the height of German-Prussian militarism and wanted me to blow it up. This was the purpose of her letter. I was shocked to read that the woman I had regarded as a sweet little old lady music teacher had harbored such aggressive thoughts all these years. I looked at my map and discovered that Rüdesheim was only about seventy-five miles from Darmstadt. I decided to go there.

  My aunt had described in the most minute detail the layout of the village and gave me the address of the house where she had stayed, number ten Schmidthoff. I soon found the street and the little courtyard with a small chapel and a fountain, which my aunt had described; she remembered having seen it from her bedroom window. I went around to the front of the house and found the number ten almost covered by an overhanging thatched eave. I took several pictures of the house, clearly showing the address.

  We found the road that wound up the hill through the Niederwald to the Germania statue, still standing in all its majesty. Including its large stone pedestal, the statue was well over a hundred feet tall. From the shell craters around it and from the blasts on the stone base, we could tell that the area had been subjected to heavy shelling. The statue itself did not appear to have taken any direct hits, but there was great evidence of strikes by shell fragments. Perhaps the Germans had used this as an observation post, and the shelling was an attempt to neutralize it. On the front of the stone base was inscribed in large letters Wacht am Rhein (“watch on the Rhine”).

  I took several pictures of the statue, then found a number of battered postcards in the little tourist center at the base of the statue. I later gave them to Aunt Betty, who was angry that I hadn’t blown up the statue. I explained that a quarter-ton Jeep loaded with TNT wouldn’t have been enough to destroy it. That seemed to assuage her fury.

  German soldiers were being r
epatriated as rapidly as possible. If their background and personnel data showed no possible record of war crimes or high Nazi connections, they were dismissed immediately. Many of the high-ranking officers, particularly in the SS, were held for further questioning.

  Although the war had been over for about a month, we still saw groups of German soldiers in uniform walking along the road heading toward their homes. Even though they were disarmed, they had to wear their uniforms because that was their only clothing. The men were either very young, many in their early teens, or in their late fifties and sixties. There was an almost complete absence of men in their twenties, thirties, and forties; they had been killed or wounded long ago.

  My Christian background told me that I should have sympathy and understanding for the defeated enemy, but the memory of the devastation they had caused made me feel hatred instead, even for the women and children. Although we had accepted war as a terrible barbaric tradition, the Germans breached all bounds of humanity: the machine-gunning of disarmed American soldiers at Malmédy; the wanton slaughter of Belgian civilians in Stavelot; the deliberate starvation, torture, and the killing of millions of innocent civilians at Nordhausen, Belsen, and Auschwitz revealed the ghastly genocide that Hitler inflicted on an entire generation. These terrors were incomprehensible to the American mind; there was no answer.

  The First Industrial Survey of Postwar Germany

  The joint Allied high command ordered a preliminary survey of all German industries to determine what each one made before and during the war and what it was capable of making after the war. The survey would produce a rough listing of German facilities, with particular emphasis on military technology, sources of raw material, and the status of utilities. It would seize and impound all documents and technical information.

  The American sector of occupied Germany was divided into division areas. The primary function was to feed and clothe the civilians in each area and get industry and agriculture going as a productive enterprise as quickly as possible. The 3d Armored Division area was divided into three segments, one for each liaison officer. My area was a pie-shaped segment extending northwest from Darmstadt at the apex, with the Rhine River on the west and the Main River on the north. It included the cities of Gross-Gerau and Rüsselsheim plus numerous other small towns and villages.

  Our liaison group reported to division headquarters to receive our instructions for the survey. We were given lists and locations of major German industries in our area and were told to be on the lookout for other industries not listed and to survey them if we felt they had any significant value. We received printed forms, several pages each, on which to record all pertinent information plus any comments we might choose to add. In addition to my driver and my Jeep, I was assigned an American soldier who was fluent in German. We also had a copy of a SHAEF order written in both English and German directing German civilians to cooperate with us fully.

  As a young engineering student, I could understand some of the intricacies and problems of organizing a major industrial economy for war. At Gross-Gerau I surveyed a medium-sized plant that manufactured 40mm ammunition for Bofors antiaircraft guns. The plant’s several rambling, older buildings contained about fifty thousand square feet of space. The roofs of several had been damaged by bombing, but the machinery, covered with tarpaulins, seemed intact. The director general and owner of the company took us through the plant and described in detail his production process. He opened his books and records and gave us all the pertinent information we needed to fill out our forms.

  He said it was not until February, when the bridges across the Main River were destroyed, that he experienced a shortage of steel bar stock, which came from the Ruhr. He was able to operate with the considerable stock he had on hand, but in late February the bombing destroyed the roof and disrupted his main power feeders. Although the power was restored, he could not obtain materials to fix the roof. When his machinery started rusting because of the inclement weather, he had to shut down.

  He told me that the 40mm Bofors shells he was making would fit our navy’s 40mm antiaircraft guns. I knew this to be true, because both the United States and Germany had licensed the design from Sweden. In good English, he offered to make a deal. If the U.S. Army could get him roofing material to make repairs, he would assemble enough men to start up the plant and manufacture shells. He seemed to have no qualms about producing shells to destroy his former allies, the Japanese, if he could make a fast buck doing it.

  I explained that, although the United States had adequate shell production of its own, I would include his suggestion in my report. I recommended that the plant be tooled for automatic screw machine parts, because I knew that postwar Germany would have a great demand for them.

  It took several days to complete our survey of the General Motors Opel plant, the largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, which had been taken over by the German government and converted to war production. Although the plant manufactured many items, its major products were trucks and the FW190 fighter plane’s radial engine for the German Luftwaffe.

  Because of the plant’s location at the confluence of the Main and Rhine Rivers just west of Rüsselsheim, it was easy to identify from the air. The bombing of December 1944 damaged the roofs of several production buildings, although making quick temporary repairs and moving some of the machinery to less damaged areas enabled full production to resume quickly. The plant operated continuously until February 1945, when bombing destroyed the Darmstadt gas works, which supplied the gas for the annealing furnaces and foundries.

  All German plant managers had to be regarded with suspicion, because their position hinged on being Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. One of the Opel plant’s assistant directors, who worked with us on our survey, was cooperative in showing us all the records and documents (which we immediately impounded), but he appeared more interested in covering his tracks and protecting himself than in helping us. All the managers knew about the forthcoming war crimes trials and wanted to make sure that they would not be accused of atrocities against slave laborers. They wanted their names cleared. Although it was not our job to get involved in the politics, we did note whether or not the various managers were cooperative.

  Each evening, all three liaison officers got together in our quarters at Darmstadt to compare notes. An air force team from SHAEF headquarters who lived in the house next door was also surveying the bombings; however, their focus was on the physical extent of the bomb damage as compared to the after-action reports from the flight crews.

  From these surveys and earlier observations, I began to develop reservations about how and why the air force chose targets. There is no question that their efforts were a primary factor in the defeat of Germany. Strategic bombing had completely devastated all the major German cities and many of the industries. Severe damage to the infrastructure had made it extremely difficult for the Germans to move troops and matériel during the last stages of the war.

  In spite of this, there were questions. For at least two years prior to the war’s end, both American and British bombers had made deep raids into central Germany. These flights passed right over the plants that contributed about 70 percent of all the electric power for the Ruhr and for German industry. The flights also bypassed the chemical by-product plants that manufactured lubricants for the army and briquettes to heat German homes.

  During the deep raids, the air force suffered terrible losses, because they had to go without fighter protection. Yet many of the more accessible large power plants went untouched. The large Fortuna plant at Oberaussem and many others around it were still operational two months before the war ended. The destruction of the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt, which was extremely costly to the air force, may not have been necessary if the power plants in the Rhineland had been destroyed and the Opel plant in Rüsselsheim had been shut down. The FW190 engines manufactured at the Opel plant used ball bearings made at Schweinfurt.

  Why these power plants remained oper
ational until ground forces captured them was debated at length at the higher levels of command. There was, no doubt, a great deal of political maneuvering involved. Although the air force planners tried to do what they thought best, it appears that they made some serious errors in judgment.

  Reflections on the Aftermath

  The pain, suffering, and losses of our tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen, engineers, and other combat arms affected me deeply and profoundly. I came on active duty in June 1941 at Camp Polk in a cadre group of about four hundred officers. During the next three years of training in the States and in England, I got to know many of them and became close friends with some of them. Of all those assigned to the infantry, tanks, or engineers, or as artillery forward observers, I did not know of a single one who survived without being seriously wounded.

  As a young ordnance ROTC cadet in August 1939, I was shocked to find that our total tank research and development budget for that year was only $85,000. How could the greatest industrial nation on earth devote such a pittance to the development of a major weapons system, particularly when World War II was to start in two weeks?

  Development of the M4 Sherman was further hindered by bickering and rivalry between the infantry, artillery, and armored officers about the characteristics of this tank. The infantry wanted a heavy tank that they could use for breakthroughs. Armored officers wanted a fast, mobile tank with adequate armor and a high-velocity gun. These requirements conflicted with those of the artillery, who felt that the tank was essentially a mobile artillery piece and therefore they should dictate the characteristics of the gun. It should be capable of firing at least five thousand rounds before being replaced. To do this, it was necessary to use a low-velocity gun. Artillery won on this point; the tank carried the short-barreled 75mm M2 gun.

  Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that there was only a remote possibility that a tank would last long enough in combat to fire five thousand rounds. Ordnance intelligence had indicated that the Germans were rapidly replacing their short-barreled 75mm howitzers in the PzKw IV tank with long-barreled, high-velocity KwK41s for greater penetration against enemy tanks. There was also information that the Russians and Germans both were using tank against tank in massive battles. This information, which should have been the handwriting on the wall for future trends in high-velocity tank-gun design, was either misunderstood or completely ignored. It appeared inexcusable to me that our troops were furnished with such a deficient main battle tank. The M4 appeared to have been designed by a committee, and many young Americans bled and died as a result.