Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (43 page)

In the meantime, though, reports indicate that we keep losing men and many are being taken prisoners. I’ve heard that so far, 10,000 of us are now in German Prisoner of War camps but St. Vith and Bastogne are both still in our hands. Just as importantly, Antwerp is still ours and continues to bring in critical supplies. We’re watching these sectors very closely as it looks like Bastogne and St. Vith are in for some very tense days. As of December 20
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, the Germans were surrounding Bastogne and overrunning St. Vith 20 miles away. We moved troops from Aachen up to help stem the Ardennes Offensive in the north but there wasn’t anything close enough to help the southern salient except Patton who was 150 miles south of where we now needed him to be. The clouds were low and were expected to be that way for a while which was also a big pain in our ass because that meant we couldn’t send air cover to help out the poor bastards at Bastogne. If the Krauts move like they’ve been known to move before, those guys could be in real trouble until the cavalry can reach them.

A couple of days after the Jerries probably thought they had us in the bag, we were still fighting and still holding. By December 22
^nd
, General Clark got more than 20,000 of his men out of St. Vith which then fell to the Krauts. That same day, McAuliffe’s men in Bastogne were down to their last ammo and they were now completely surrounded by the goddamn Krauts. They had to ration artillery shells, they had no medical supplies or doctors and they were down to their last bullets. We had to get them rescued or reinforced so we held a staff meeting the next day, to decide what immediate action is to be undertaken. Both McAuliffe and General Clark are goddamn heroes for holding out as long as they have. I even heard that General McAuliffe told the Kraut Commander who told him to surrender because he was surrounded to go fuck himself or something along those lines though I’m sure he didn’t use those exact words because he never swears. Still, I’m sure whoever read his response knew what the general meant.

When Patton heard of the straits McAuliffe and the 650 men he was stranded with were in, he shocked everybody at the staff meeting by saying he could get to Bastogne in 48 hours. There was nothing left to do but let him try so Ike ordered Patton off of the Saar position up towards Bastogne. He’d be up against some of the best Panzer divisions still in existence in the German army but Patton said he could do it and by God, he tore out of there like a bat out of hell. His men were on the move in no time flat. They had to cover a distance of about 150 miles in some of the worst winter weather encountered in over 40 years I was told. The weather absolutely stinks. Besides huge snowfalls, the temperature is goddamn Baltic. I really feel bad for those sons of bitches who are out fighting in it. Ours, I mean. I don’t give a good rat’s ass how bad the Krauts suffer. I hope their trigger fingers and their peckers all freeze and fall off and not necessarily in that order, the sons of bitches.

As it played out, Patton got his guys moving faster and truer than anyone thought possible and they were within 10 miles or so of Bastogne by the 25
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as promised. What I think is that General Patton didn’t fall for the storyline about the Krauts just moving their tanks for defensive purposes. I think he probably smelled a ploy and modified his original line of attack to get to the Rhine around the Saar so that if needed, he could move those troops toot sweet to the north. He fought like hell to get his men to Bastogne proper but was delayed by resistance so strong that even Patton’s darlings, the 4
^th
Armored Division, couldn’t advance. When his men got there, they had to fight to get to the surrounded McAuliffe and the plan was to split the Krauts in two to break the encirclement. General Creighton Abrams reached Bastogne first while the Germans continued to fight off any and all attempts to divide their position. Attacking through these crack SS Panzer battalions, Patton’s troops finally reinforced the brave survivors of that bloody fight by early the day after Christmas. The Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne, as they now called themselves, were relieved. In more ways than one.

Now the First Army was ordered to withdraw and to establish a firmer front for a counter-attack. The skies cleared which is just what our bombers were waiting for and they took off and bombed to smithereens whatever looked German. Although the Germans had destroyed 300 of our tanks and taken 25,000 of our men POWs, they were now losing momentum. Bradley flew out on Christmas Day when the “Bulge” was 60 miles deep and 30 miles wide. He argued the time was right for a counter-attack but Montgomery said he wasn’t ready yet. He was STILL angling for the role of sole commander and some, myself included, were speculating that he once again might be “ready to attack” if he got what he wanted. He wrote to Eisenhower again telling him that he should be appointed Commander in Chief and even provided the draft order which all Eisenhower had to do was sign. This finally was the last straw and Ike wrote a letter to the Combined Chiefs of Staff which said cooperation was no longer possible and “either Montgomery goes or I go.” Eisenhower was persuaded to hold on to that letter for a day while Monty was tipped off and finally apologized for his behavior though it was in a letter that Monty’s chief of Staff essentially wrote. As if we don’t have enough goddamn problems without another temper tantrum from HRA (“His Royal Ass ache”) Montgomery. Histrionics in the middle of Hitler’s Christmas Ardennes Offensive. What Child is this?

A week later, armed with Patton’s reinforcements, we retook several of the towns we had lost in the Ardennes Offensive. General Hodges and his men who had held out at St. Vith for five days before withdrawing, had prevented the northern Krauts from breaking out and wiping out Bastogne. Less than a month later and through shitty snow and ice, Patton linked up with the British XXX Army and we all knew then, that this move of Hitler’s was doomed to failure. We only hoped it was more costly for them than it was for us. After the Casualty Lists came in and were calculated, it looked like we lost about 10,000 men killed and just something less than 70,000 wounded or missing. That was a big price tag, but we knew the Germans, who could afford it less, lost more men and tanks than we did and that made it just a bit more easy to take. We lost ground and our front was pushed back east a bit after this surprise attack, but if the nut with the Charlie Chaplin mustache thought he was going to defeat us with it, he had another think coming. We lost some time with Hitler’s stupid gamble but at least we knocked out plenty of Kraut troops who could have been used to defend the border so I guess we either fought them in the Ardennes in winter or in Germany in the spring. Between the two forests, Hürtgen and Ardennes, we lost an awful lot of good men and I still haven’t heard from Harold.

With Bastogne and its intersecting roadways in our hands, we were able to control the movements on the roads and we used them to launch further attacks. We were short of white camouflage uniforms and to avoid sticking out like the sore thumbs we were, I heard that General Patton had requisitioned all the white cloth he could find from the locals. I heard he even requested mattress pads and had them sewn into camouflage snow suits. The Krauts wanted Bastogne back and they tried another goddamn offensive to get it. Off and on, we fought for Bastogne but at least we now blended with the scenery. We fought until February, when the Jerries finally gave it up as ours. It also took a while for the troops stuck in St. Vith to be relieved since the First Army didn’t get there until January 23
^rd
. Less than a week later, all the goddamn Krauts had retreated and we were back to where we started, albeit a little angrier and a little hungrier for revenge. Goddamn bastards. If this was the best they could do, I have no doubt the war will be over before summer because after getting out of that Godforsaken town of St. Vith, the U.S. First Army moved east and ended up just two miles away from the highly touted but little regarded Siegfried Line by the last day of January. Patton’s Third Army was soon over the Siegfried Line heading for the Rhine and shortly after that, we had the whole west bank of the Rhine River in our control from Switzerland to Northern France. Then just two weeks after that on March 2
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the Third Army took the ancient Kraut town of Trier with its walls built by the Romans two thousand years ago and the U.S. Ninth Army found itself just outside of Düsseldorf, right by the Rhine. A couple of days after that, the U.S. First Army was in Cologne. It’s like our armies are playing leap frog. One goes in and another passes it by. So by the first week of March, 1945, just nine months after DDay, the Allied Armies are looking for a way to cross the Rhine, a river that no enemy army has breached since Napoleon crossed it in 1805.

Even before the Battle of the Ardennes Forest, the Allieds had captured their first German city. Aachen fell in the middle of October and other German towns and cities followed but all were on the west side of the Rhine River. By the middle of February, the Allieds were stretched along the Rhine River, from Strasbourg to the Swiss border. For the Allieds, the Rhine was the last hurdle to be crossed before the defeat of Germany could be accomplished. On March 7, 1945 the Americans captured an intact bridge at Remagen, Germany. The Luddendorf Bridge was not in a particularly strategic location but it was put to immediate use for 10 days, until it collapsed under the weight of all the traffic, troops and supplies that had used it to cross into the heart of Germany. Plans for crossing the Rhine at a more favorable location were also being made by General Montgomery under Operation Plunder. General Patton, however, crossed the river first, a day before Plunder was to commence. Once the Rhine was crossed, the Allieds brought all arms to bear with coordinated air support of tank and ground troops orchestrated by Eisenhower. German cities were now being bombed for the adverse psychological effect this might have on the enemy.

Although it was clear to most German generals that they were effectively destroyed, they were still under the command of the maniacal Hitler who appeared to be the only German commander who still thought Germany could be victorious in this war. He continued to refuse permission for any of his troops to retreat for any reason and his troops near Strasbourg and Colmar were effectively wiped out because of his continued “Stand Fast” (Sieg oder Todt) orders. While many German soldiers were surrendering en masse some, mostly the very young, continued fighting fanatically in the defense of their homeland.

Churchill ordered Montgomery to reach Berlin before the fast advancing Russians. Eisenhower, however, determined that any fighting for Berlin, which was already to be divided and controlled jointly by the terms of the Yalta Conference agreement, would unnecessarily cost American lives for territory that would end up being under Russian control as soon as the war ended. Eisenhower therefore allowed the Russians to reach Berlin first. The Russians eventually reached the German capitol and cleared the city of the diehard Nazi fanatics but at a great cost in dead and wounded. On April 25
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, 1945 the Americans met the Russians on the Elbe River at Torgau. Germany was now divided in two and was soundly in Allied hands. Less than a week later Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, were found dead in Hitler’s bunker of self inflicted gunshot wounds. While various German Generals surrendered their troops after the fall of Berlin, a week later Germany surrendered unconditionally and the war, which had now lasted six years, ended. May 8, 1945 was declared V-E Day. The Victory in Europe came 11 months after the Allieds invaded Normandy.

We’ve been monitoring progress since we began moving after the shit hit the fan in the Ardennes during December and January. We seemed to be having supply issues again and each commander was constantly asking for his capful of gasoline. When there was an issue about who got what first, whatever was needed first went to
the Field Marshal,
of course. The only good thing about that was that we were constantly entertained by Patton’s letters to us telling us what a mistake we were making and how, if given what little he asked for, he could singlehandedly win the war. Actually, I should say it was entertaining at first but then it got tiresome and finally one day, Ike really exploded and he told Bradley to tell Patton that, “Ike is running this damned war!” How he deals with these egotistical bastards day after goddamn day is just beyond my human comprehension. Ike’d make a great politician some day, that’s for sure. And I finally got a letter from Harold.

January 31, 1945

Hello, Frank.

Please excuse the tardiness of my letter but I’ve been busier than a one armed paperhanger lately. If I don’t never step foot in another forest, it will be too soon for me. I got hit in the Hürtgen but it wasn’t too bad so they put me back after a couple of weeks of recovery in a field hospital. We were sending some troops further and further out, mostly to conduct scouting patrols, or to repulse Kraut patrols we found, or to fight whatever other Krauts we could find. I was on one of those patrols when a sniper got me. I had just twisted my ankle on some tree root or something so I zigged and boy am I glad I hadn’t zagged or he’d have caught me right in the heart. I got a sore arm where a bullet went through but it wasn’t really anything more than a big, bad scratch.