Armageddon (71 page)

It was three days before the Sauer crossing was secure. Yet though the Americans suffered difficulties, they were able to keep moving. Hitler signalled his displeasure in the usual fashion, by sacking the commander of Seventh Army on 20 February. It is hard to see what any German general could have done better or differently, however, faced with attacks in such overwhelming strength. When the U.S. 5th Division crossed the Prüm on the night of 24 February, it met little resistance. For the first time, many Germans seemed ready to surrender without a fight. Patton’s formations broke through the West Wall on a front of some twenty-five miles, and were also making good progress further south. Walker, commanding XX Corps, staged an imaginative operation on the night of 23 February, when in advance of an attack by the 94th Division he sent 5th Ranger battalion to create a roadblock around Zerf, to prevent German reinforcements from intervening. The Rangers did the job with their usual drive and effectiveness. When the 94th Division’s advance stalled in the face of an ambush manned by the usual German mix of a tank, an 88mm gun and some infantry with fausts, the Rangers about-faced and attacked the Germans from the rear, driving them off. Patton’s men took Trier on 1 March, capturing a useful Moselle bridge intact. His XII Corps began to drive a deep salient into German Seventh Army. At last, the great pursuit commander’s offensive was achieving the sort of pace and drive he yearned for.

On the night of 9 February, after days of bitter fighting and some severe setbacks and losses, Hodges’s First Army finally gained possession of the Roer dams, focus of so much anxiety for five months. The Germans had not, as had been feared, demolished the structures. They merely opened the discharge valves to release a torrent which flooded the river valley for a fortnight. This delayed the start of Simpson’s attack, Operation Grenade, until the waters in front of his army’s positions subsided.

All along the Allied front, it was apparent that German resistance was weaker than the attackers had ever seen it. American units met Germans surrendering in substantial numbers without a fight. When the U.S. 90th Division captured six 120mm mortars, some paratrooper PoWs proved perfectly willing to instruct GIs on how best to use the tubes against their own people. Aggressive American formations were rewarded with dramatic rewards, above all on Third Army’s front. Patton himself stood on the road, urging his men forward with his usual theatricality and frequent losses of temper. When two armoured divisions became snarled at an intersection and an MP died in the consequent traffic jam, Patton insisted that the responsible corps commander should spend the next nine hours personally directing vehicles, to learn not to make the same mistake again. Such stories contributed to the Patton legend, and also to suspicions of his derangement. “There was something a bit scary about Patton,” observed Eisenhower’s son John. “To pretend to love war like he did, there had to have been a screw loose somewhere.”

When 4th Armored Division found itself facing little resistance, it raced north-eastwards. In one bound, it covered twenty-five miles, taking 5,000 prisoners and killing several hundred Germans for the loss of 111 of its own men, before reaching the hills above the Rhine. If only others had done likewise. “For a victorious army,” said Lieutenant Glavin, G-3 of 6th Armored Division on 22 February, echoing German opinion, “our divisions are too sensitive to their flanks . . . the result of this timidity is that we do not exploit local weaknesses, and unless the whole army moves forward along a broad front, nobody moves.” If every American formation had shown the same drive and enthusiasm as the best of Patton’s troops, the Allies might have secured their line on the Rhine weeks earlier. A major opportunity was missed on Hodges’s front because of Eisenhower’s commitment to Montgomery. Collins’s VII Corps was making dramatic progress towards Cologne when the order came to halt the drive, because it was time to pass the baton—and the necessary logistic support—to Montgomery, in accordance with Eisenhower’s undertakings to the British. A more flexible and imaginative commander—or one unconstrained by the demands of inter-allied relations—would have allowed Hodges’s forces to keep going to the river and delayed Montgomery for the necessary few days.

As it was, 21st Army Group’s big push south-east from Nijmegen, spearheaded by the Canadians, was launched as scheduled on 8 February. The attack, Operation Veritable, was a characteristic Montgomery setpiece. It began with a five-hour barrage by 1,034 guns, the heaviest of the war in the west. Five infantry divisions supported by three armoured brigades advanced on an eight-mile front with the Rhine on their left flank and the Maas on their right. The Germans had flooded much of the countryside and strongly fortified the area. They now drained their reserves to meet the attack, throwing in five divisions and the remains of Panzer Lehr. “Everybody hated Veritable,” said Brigadier Michael Carver. The British found the fighting tough and miserable from beginning to end.

In theory, only 30,000 Germans supported by seventy tanks were left to face the U.S. Ninth Army when it launched Grenade on 19 February. This began with a crossing of the Roer on a fifteen-mile front. There was a supporting artillery piece for every thirty-two yards. A vast smokescreen was laid over the crossings, rising 2,000 feet into the air. Yet as the Americans began to move, they found themselves floundering in the waterlogged morass left behind by the floods. When they reached the river proper, boats were swept relentlessly downstream by a five-knot current. Private David Williams of the 104th Combat Engineers was struggling with an assault boat when there was a blast close by and his leg went numb. Shrapnel had gashed open his upper thigh. His buddy Ray, beside him, cried out, “Dave, Dave, Dave—oh dear, oh dear,” slung him over his shoulder and carried him to the rear.

The advancing Allies were becoming bolder about using darkness. The U.S. 30th Division staged a highly successful night attack on Altdorf, which they took almost without loss. However, when they tried another such operation on 26 February, two tanks at once tipped into unseen craters, in what turned out to be a minefield. German fire then brewed up two Shermans, and the flames brilliantly illuminated the attackers. American gunners spotted armoured movement on their left flank and knocked out four tanks. These were British mine-clearing flails, attached for the assault, which had strayed off-course in the darkness. A single day’s fighting on 27 February, attacking the town of Königshafen, cost one U.S. regiment nine tanks.

Many officers and men felt desperately tired. “It has been quite bloody awful for days,” Lieutenant-Colonel George Turner-Cain wrote in his diary on 2 March, “we have fought day and night . . . I am extremely tired and very nervy.” He added a few days later: “It is quite time I left command, as I am no longer fit to conduct stiff operations.” Even in retreat, the Germans remained unimpressed by Allied tactics: “Infantry do not press forward energetically,” observed an Army Group B report. “They merely follow the armoured forces and occupy ground. There are long pauses after the objective of a given attack has been taken. They are very sensitive about exposing their flanks.”

When the 92nd Reconnaissance Squadron of 12th Armored Division entered the little town of Linderburgerhof near Trier, in seconds the German defenders brewed up three light tanks leading the column. Private Frank Rumph dashed into the house nearest his wrecked vehicle. A Sherman roared forward, only to be knocked out at once. Its commander, the only survivor, crouched behind its immobilized hull. Rumph yelled at the man to join him. The two Americans retired into the cellar and munched some dried carrots they found there, until at evening more American light tanks arrived to rescue the survivors of the armoured party. Next day infantry cleared the place street by street, as so often proved necessary.

The British found the experience of fighting their way through the Reichs-wald forest especially painful. “The Reichswald was the nastiest battle we had fought since Normandy,” said Lieutenant Edwin Bramall. The Germans had constructed five successive lines of defence, manned chiefly by paratroopers. Flooded ground on both flanks forced the British and Canadians to advance on a narrow front. The thick woodland was almost impenetrable to tanks. Foliage jammed turret traverses. The Shermans were anyway unable to use their armament effectively—it was too dangerous to fire high-explosive shells lest they hit trees above their own infantry. The tanks were also highly vulnerable to faust ambushes in the dense cover. Lieutenant Kingsley Field, commanding a Churchill troop of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, was enraged when a British infantryman mistook his tank for a German and fired a PIAT bomb at it. Field sprang down from his turret and kicked the man. Shellbursts among the tree canopy caused many infantry casualties from splinters. The movement of supplies was a nightmare in the cold and mud. The rain scarcely abated for a single day.

The British 7th Somersets set off from Nijmegen aboard Shermans on the evening of 9 February, in a heavy downpour. The sky was lit up by flames from a brief and unusual German air raid on the Dutch town. The infantrymen clung to the tank hulls in sodden misery, fearful of falling off into the path of the vehicle behind. The rain was interrupted only by sleet. Early on the morning of the 10th, the column paused for the men to drink a few cans of self-heating soup. Private Len Stokes found that his hands and feet were utterly numbed, “at the last stage before frostbite.” They rode onwards all that day, and in the middle of the night reached the Reichswald. They crossed their start line at 1600 hours on 11 February, under orders to take the village of Hau. The attack stopped for a time, when the leading company reached a crossroads which was under heavy artillery fire. “Everyone was exhausted,” Stokes wrote in his diary, “the conditions were appalling—cold, wet and sleet, very dark between farms.” Eventually they all fell asleep on the floor of a farmhouse. The battalion reached its objective, but spent the following day and night under incessant mortar and shellfire. Late on 14 February, they were attacked by three German tanks with infantry support. The British had seen the Germans forming up, but were unable to make wireless contact with their supporting artillery. Stokes was sent as a runner to the rear, to pass map references orally. He had gone only sixty yards under German fire when he met the battalion commander, moving forward in a Bren-carrier to see for himself. The colonel dismounted, sprinted forward, checked the positions, ran back to his radio and called down devastating artillery fire which crushed the German advance in its tracks. Such was a typical single-unit action in Germany in February 1945.

The
21st Army Group’s month-long battle in the Reichswald became as miserable an experience as that of the Americans in the Hürtgen. Dai Evans, a private in 53rd (Welsh) Division, saw his neighbour looking ashen after a German mortar “stonk” and called to him: “What’s up, Frank? Are you hit?” The man replied simply: “No. I’ve shit myself.” His mates helped to get his trousers off, and wiped him with grass as best they could. Here was an uncommonly vivid demonstration of comradeship. Nor was it only private soldiers whose fears overcame their bodily processes. Soon after, as the platoon advanced Evans was dismayed to see their officer fall, apparently wounded. “It’s my ankle,” he said. Evans looked at the lieutenant’s leg and could see no blood. The officer said again: “I think I’ve sprained my ankle. I can’t go on.” Evans “suddenly realised that he was a bundle of nerves, scared almost out of his mind.” The private said, “You’d better stay there, sir. I’ll tell the stretcher-bearers where you are,” and marched onwards with the leaderless platoon. Evans was honest enough also to record, as few unit war diaries ever recorded, an occasion when his platoon simply ran away. They were in the midst of a Reichswald attack when he suddenly found himself alone. He called out by name to some of his squad. Nothing happened. “In the end, I had to give up the search and admit that they had done a bunk . . .”

On 14 February, Montgomery reported to Brooke that the British were opposed by all or part of four parachute, three infantry and two panzer or panzergrenadier divisions: “This is a pretty good party.” Three weeks later, he acknowledged grimly: “It is tough going, and many of the enemy paratroops refuse to surrender even when they have run out of ammunition, and have to be shot.” Allied soldiers often felt unembarrassed respect for German courage. One night, an enemy patrol crossed a river in front of the 6th Cameronians. The Germans were obliged to withdraw after being fired on, leaving a wounded man under the British bank. When daylight came, the British were amazed to see a German soldier run down to the far bank, launch a rubber boat, paddle furiously across under machine-gun fire, seize the wounded man and return unscathed. “It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Lieutenant Cliff Pettit admiringly. “Every night, we kept wondering when the Germans were going to pack it in,” said Captain John Langdon of 3rd Royal Tanks. “I can’t say one felt sorry for them. Our object was to kill them. Theirs was to kill us. But they fought fairly against terrific odds.”

Allied armour found itself increasingly impeded by rubble in towns devastated by heavy bombing. The city of Cleve, for instance, became a much more difficult obstacle after the Allied air forces had visited it. Mistakenly, 1,384 tons of high explosive had been dropped instead of the incendiaries requested by the army. “Bomb craters and fallen trees were everywhere,” recorded a British officer, “bomb craters packed so tightly together that the debris from one was piled against the rim of the next in a pathetic heap of rubble, roofs and radiators. There was not an undamaged house anywhere, piles of smashed furniture, clothing, children’s books and toys, old photographs and bottled fruit were spilled in hopeless confusion into gardens from sagging, crazy skeletons of homes.” Ruins provided better defensive positions for surviving Germans than undamaged buildings. One platoon of the 7th Somersets found a Panther tank crunching relentlessly towards its positions. A PIAT operator, Private Hipple, crawled to the edge of a bomb crater and was preparing to fire at the great brute from a range of twenty-five yards when the Panther’s gun went off. The blast, at point-blank range, blew the hapless soldier into the bottom of the crater. Astonishingly, he recovered and crept upwards again with his PIAT. He fired several bombs which seemed to strike the Panther, without disabling it. The German occupants, however, were sufficiently discomfited to beat a retreat.