The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (39 page)

In a confused mêlée after midnight on Monday, August 28, two columns from the German 198th Division collided northeast of Montélimar with Dahlquist’s 143rd Infantry; enemy corpses carpeted the roadbed, and most of those not killed were captured. Savage gunfights raged through the orchards and scrub woods along the Drôme, where the 132nd Field Artillery Battalion opened fire at eight thousand yards on German columns stacked bumper to bumper and three abreast at river fords. Horse-drawn wagons unable to scale the muddy embankment slid back into the water, animals and men shrieking in terror as the singing shell fragments chopped them to pieces.

Task Force Butler, reduced to hardly more than a battalion, soon pushed into Loriol on Highway 7 just below the Drôme; GIs severed the road for a final time. At Livron, on the north bank, they counted five hundred dead horses and one hundred vehicles destroyed within a hundred-yard radius. Truckloads of cognac and cigarettes were abandoned by Germans pelting north toward Lyon, and riflemen pulled looted Bank of France notes by the fistful from the wreckage.

The 3rd Division’s 15th Infantry pushed into Montélimar from the south at 2:30
P.M.
on Monday, clearing the town of snipers and booby traps through the night and the next morning. Audie Murphy was among those creeping from house to house. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, behind one creaking door he glimpsed what he later described as “a terrible looking creature with a tommy gun. His face is black; his eyes are red and glaring.” Murphy saw a muzzle flash just as he fired; then came the sound of shattering glass. He had shot his own reflection in a mirror, prompting one comrade to observe, “That’s the first time I ever saw a Texan beat himself to the draw.”

The battle of Montélimar was over, but once again a chance to annihilate a fleeing enemy had gone begging. “Although the concept was daring,” a VI Corps colonel concluded, “the execution left much to be desired.” Task Force Butler had been too weak, the 36th Division too slow, the 3rd Division too cautious, the Army Air Forces too late to the game. Some sixty thousand U.S. artillery shells had scourged but not obliterated the enemy. “I fumbled it badly,” Dahlquist wrote his wife on August 29, “and should have done a great deal better.” In exchange for sixteen hundred American casualties, Blaskowitz’s losses exceeded ten thousand, including six thousand captured, but half were laborers, railway workers, and other noncombatants. About 80 percent of those fleeing up the Rhône’s east bank would reach Lyon, although Blaskowitz reported that the 338th Division mustered barely one thousand men. The 11th Panzer lost half its armor and a quarter of its artillery, but stolen French vehicles kept the division mobile. A German commander considered the escape “almost a miracle.”

Truscott was disappointed—perhaps not least in his own generalship. Even the best battle captain may be outmaneuvered by war’s caprice and a wily, desperate opponent. But a view of the battlefield from a Cub cockpit soon lifted his spirits: an aide described the scene as “carnage compounded.” For fifteen miles along the river, the detritus of eight days’ fighting stretched like a black mourning ribbon: two thousand charred vehicles; at least a thousand dead horses, many still harnessed to caissons and gun carriages; and “fire-blackened” Germans said to be such “an affront to the nose” that this grisly segment of highway became known as the Avenue of Stenches. As at Falaise, bulldozer operators wore gas masks.

All in all, Truscott allowed himself what he described as “some degree of satisfaction.” In two weeks, another ten thousand square miles of France had been liberated, while VI Corps had captured 23,000 Germans to complement the even larger throng bagged by the French. The
DRAGOON
death struggle was over, and a race to the German frontier had begun.

*   *   *

Two field-gray torrents streamed toward the Fatherland from southern France. The German First Army—half of Blaskowitz’s Army Group G—beat its slow way, mostly on foot, from the nether reaches of the southwest and the Atlantic coast. Though they were 88,000 strong, only a fraction were combat troops, and few of those were armed with more than rifles. Hitler had ordered them to “carry away or destroy during the retreat everything of economic or military value,” including bridges, locomotives, and power stations; to this list the high command added horses, cattle, timber, coal, furniture, and even underwear, all of which was plundered or put to the torch. Frenchmen of military age were to be kidnapped whenever possible. Civilians were murdered for petty offenses, such as “improper remarks” about the shrinking Reich.

Allied air strikes and FFI marauders punished this retreating horde, and only sixty thousand or so would reach Germany. “Foot March Group South,” one of three columns within First Army, found itself isolated and cut off near Beaugency, southwest of Orléans, despite giving 8 million francs to local officials to buy goodwill and to pay for scorched-earth inconveniences. After making bonfires of their weapons, twenty thousand Germans in Foot March Group South would surrender to one of Patton’s divisions along the Loire.

The other retreating gaggle in what Berlin now called “the trekking Wehrmacht” included the 138,000 men of Nineteenth Army tramping up the Rhône with horses so heavily camouflaged that “from above they look like moving bushes,” a VI Corps intelligence officer wrote. It was this force that drew most of Seventh Army’s attention. Field Order No. 4, issued on August 28, demanded that every effort be exerted to overtake and destroy the Germans, if not in the eighty-four miles between Montélimar and Lyon, then in the two hundred miles between Lyon and the Rhine. Stalin the previous November had declared the Swiss to be “swine” and urged the Allies to disregard Switzerland’s neutrality if necessary; that suggestion found no favor in Washington or London, and American and French pursuers were told to swing wide of Geneva and the adjacent cantons. The anxious Swiss mobilized their militia anyway as fighting drew near, and bitterly objected to repeated American violations of Swiss airspace. On a single September day thirty intrusions would be logged, including some by errant P-47s that shot up a train chuffing from Zurich to Basel, mistaking it for German.

By early September, almost 200,000 Allied soldiers had come ashore in Provence. Up the Rhône and along the Route Napoléon, a GI described scenes “of liberation, libation, osculation, gesticulation, and celebration.” A BBC reporter found his jeep “festooned with humanity” as he tried to drive north; a British liaison officer accompanying VI Corps admitted that his job was “to get into towns we liberate with the first troops and hand out British flags to be put up, although we have no British fighting units with us.” French farm wives filled the helmets of passing soldiers with eggs, or handed out cakes of butter rolled in clean wet leaves.

“Sometimes the sheets on the hotel beds don’t get changed between German and American occupation,” wrote J. Glenn Gray, a Seventh Army counterintelligence officer. A French officer pointed to a dead German lying on the roadside with his hands folded across his chest and said,
auf Deutsch, “So möchte ich sie alle sehen”
—I’d like to see them all like this. A dignified American woman with close-cropped gray hair, whose living room in Culoz was dominated by a large portrait of her painted by Picasso, sent a note to Seventh Army headquarters along with a fruitcake baked by her companion, Alice B. Toklas. “We have waited for you all so long and here you are,” wrote Gertrude Stein. “I cannot tell you enough what it means to see you to hear you to have you here with us.” (Of Stein’s prose, an American officer wrote: “I understand that she puts together a lot of repetitions which have significance only to those whose minds are in a higher sphere than mine.”)

In Grenoble, the fleeing Germans set fire to 37 Rue Maréchal Pétain, said to be the Gestapo headquarters. As victims’ bodies turned up here and there, a notice posted at the prefecture advised, “Bring your documents on atrocities to the third floor.” A separate room was set aside to record denunciations of collaborators. One drizzly afternoon, several thousand citizens with umbrellas or newspapers folded into rain hats gathered in a factory yard where six French fascists were tied to execution stakes. Eric Sevareid described the “metallic noise of rifle bolts and then the sharp report” of a firing squad; a French officer administered the coup de grâce with a pistol shot in the ear of each slumped figure as a “terrible, savage cry” rose from the howling crowd. “Mothers with babies rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range,” Sevareid wrote, “and small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the bodies.”

A 36th Division patrol entered Lyon on Saturday morning, September 2, followed a day later by the French 1st Division hurrying up the west bank of the Rhône. To reach France’s third largest city had taken less than three weeks rather than the three months predicted by Churchill. The Americans were accorded the thin satisfaction of knowing, as the historian Trumbull Higgins later wrote, that “the British opposed to the end the only fully successful military operation in the Mediterranean between the fall of Tunis and the final collapse of Germany.”

“In the shops one could buy anything,” a 45th Division soldier in Lyon told his journal. “Evening gowns, furs, electric fixtures, furniture, antiques, everything except food”—a sad irony in a city celebrated for gastronomy. Lyon during the German occupation had been considered “the capital of repression” in southern France, with 14,000 arrests in the city and surrounding district, as well as 4,300 murders and 300 rapes. The Resistance now cashed its blood chits. “Too much gunfire on the streets here from the FFI,” an American colonel wrote. “It seems they are completely out of control. I’m reminded of a revolution.”

Tracers fired into a city hospital that supposedly housed German snipers set the building on fire. Nurses scurried out carrying patients on stretchers, whom they “laid under the plane trees along the parkway by the river near a stack of fresh coffins,” Sevareid wrote. Of two dozen bridges in the city, the Germans had demolished all but two. Hundreds of French farmers pushing produce carts aggravated monumental traffic jams, and military convoys often waited three to six hours to cross makeshift spans over the Rhône before swinging northeast toward the Rhine.

*   *   *

Precisely where those convoys should go now confounded the Seventh Army and its commander, Lieutenant General Alexander McCarrell Patch, Jr.
DRAGOON
’s success had put Patch on the cover of
Time
magazine, giving the public another hero to lionize and another battle front to cheer on. “This temporary notoriety will soon die out,” the general wrote his wife, Julia. “God protect me from being spoiled by it.”

That seemed unlikely. Sandy Patch was tall, gangly, and so taciturn that Truscott believed he had “some difficulty in expressing himself.” De Lattre more charitably detected a “mystic turn of mind” in a man with “ascetic features.” Possessed of “a temper like the devil before dawn,” in one subordinate’s phrase, he could also play the accordion and roll a cigarette with one hand from his sack of Bull Durham. Born in the Apache country of southern Arizona to a cavalry lieutenant who had lost a leg chasing horse thieves, Patch had graduated from West Point in 1913 without distinction except as a pole vaulter; he served credibly in France during the last war and began this one in the South Pacific. George Marshall had personally thanked him for a “superb job in New Caledonia and Guadalcanal” as a division and corps commander, then almost cashiered him for indiscreetly discussing the secret American code-breaking that permitted American fighter pilots in April 1943 to ambush and kill Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor sneak attack. “I am puzzled as to the course to follow,” Marshall had confessed during the investigation. In the end the chief did nothing, preferring to forgive if not forget, and Patch, now fifty-four, had been packed off to Europe.

“It feels as though it was three months ago when we commenced landing on the beaches,” Patch wrote Julia in September. “I look now for some very heavy stubborn resistance.” Resistance he got, but it was neither especially heavy nor stubborn. After three weeks of running, Blaskowitz halted the Nineteenth Army more than a hundred miles northeast of Lyon at Besançon, a town tucked into an oxbow of the river Doubs and elaborately fortified by the famed seventeenth-century military engineer, Vauban. At Truscott’s urging, the 3rd Division pounced before the enemy could dig in, reducing five outer forts in quick order with scaling ladders borrowed from local farmers. Twenty-five tank destroyer shells fired point-blank at the citadel gate unmanned the defenders on September 8, and four thousand men in the garrison surrendered or pelted for the woods on stolen bicycles. “I never saw such confusion in my life,” an American officer said. “Germans were flying every which way.”

The captured booty included 183,000 gallons of high-octane gasoline, a godsend. Truscott persuaded Patch to exploit the “fleeting opportunity”: rather than wait for the French to move forward, as originally planned, three U.S. divisions wheeled east toward the Belfort Gap. That ancient pass, also known as the Gate of Burgundy, had for centuries served as a trade and invasion corridor between the Rhône and the Rhine. Narrowing to just fifteen miles between the Jura Mountains in the south and the Vosges Mountains to the north, the gap in looking east gave onto the Alsatian plain, the Rhine valley, and the Black Forest beyond. Patch’s decision to press ahead irked the easily irked De Lattre, who accused the Americans of conspiring to exclude Army B from its fair ration of glory; in response, Patch agreed to permit one French corps to drive toward Belfort between Truscott’s right flank and the Swiss border, while another corps, which liberated Dijon on September 11, swung northeast toward Strasbourg. In a September 12 conference, Patch endorsed Truscott’s assessment that “the Belfort Gap is the gateway to Germany.”