The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (65 page)

The inclement fall weather gave Germany a bit of breathing room, as did crash programs dedicated to smoke generation, camouflage, the dispersal of targets, and repair. By late autumn, 350,000 workers—mostly foreign slaves—toiled to repair and hide oil facilities. Defenses became more ferocious: the vast Leuna synthetic-oil plant west of Leipzig, which was attacked twenty-one times at a cost of eighty-two Allied bombers, became the single most heavily defended industrial plant in Germany, bristling with more than five hundred heavy flak guns.

But the die had been cast. For a time in late fall, Rundstedt limited divisions in the west to 1,200 gallons of gasoline a day rather than the standard 7,200. Aviation-fuel production by the end of November had dropped to a quarter of the May level; the Luftwaffe was even forced to minimize aircraft taxiing, and some planes were pulled to the runway by oxen. Attacks on oil-hydrogenation plants also led to dwindling nitrogen stocks, which in turn severely constricted German ammunition production. Likewise, the destruction of synthetic-oil facilities brought the added benefit of impairing production of synthetic rubber, as well as of other chemicals used in explosives.

No industrial disparity during the war had greater importance than the gap between German and American fuel production. From 1942 through 1944, Berlin’s refineries and plants generated 23 million tons of fuel; during the same period, the United States produced more than 600 million tons. By the spring of 1945, after more than 500 Allied attacks against some 130 oil targets, German petroleum output would decline to 12 percent of what it had been a year earlier. For want of the commodity most vital in a modern society, the Reich was dying.

*   *   *

The German people were dying, too. From the Air Ministry rooftop in King Charles Street, while watching London burn after a Luftwaffe raid in 1940, Harris had mused, “They are sowing the wind.” Now came the whirlwind: some 131 German cities and towns would be attacked from the air during the war, leaving 400,000 dead and seven million homeless.

For those on the ground, the ordeal always began with the shriek of warning sirens, signaling that it was time to turn off the gas, turn on the radio, fill the bathtub, get out the flashlight. In cinemas the words “
Flieger Alarme
” appeared on the screen. Hurrying to the shelters during daylight raids, citizens craned their necks to look for the bright beads of approaching bombers dragging their white contrails. “People alongside us started counting the tiny silver dots,” one German recalled. “They had already got to four hundred, but there was still no end to be seen.” At night, civilians wore fluorescent badges to avoid colliding in the dark as they made their way by following the phosphorescent paint slathered on street curbs.

Three thousand municipal air-raid shelters had been built by the regime, far too few even when supplemented by mine shafts and subway tunnels. “I had the feeling of having ended up in an underworld, in filth and disorder,” a diarist in Krefeld wrote. “It went well with a sign saying in bright letters, ‘The People are grateful to their Führer.’” Shelter dwellers wrapped themselves in wet sheets and covered their eyes with gauze, opening their mouths to protect eardrums against concussion and drawing shallow breaths when the ventilators were closed because of fires raging above. A German medic in Hamm reported, “Children with scarlet fever and diphtheria … keep being found in bunker rooms. Hopefully we will be spared typhus this time.”

“In Cologne life is no longer possible,” a diarist wrote in an entry that no doubt would have pleased Harris. “No water, gas, or electricity, and no food.” Stuttgart’s inner city “ceased to exist” after raids in mid-September: “We had to climb over the dead to get away from the sea of fire,” one woman recalled. “I couldn’t help thinking, ‘We’ve been living through the day of judgment.’” Bombs battered Essen in 39 of the air war’s 60 months; 272 raids left only 5,000 of 65,000 buildings undamaged. From the air, an Allied crewman wrote in his logbook, the burning city resembled “an immense pot, boiling over.”

The iron and steel center of Duisburg was bombed nearly three hundred times; during one twenty-four-hour period in November, Bomber Command dropped as much tonnage on the city as had fallen on London during the entire war. In Hanover, a man who rode through the charred ruins on his bicycle after one raid wrote, “The night had done its work.… All you could say, over and over, was, ‘That too, oh, and that too!’” In Osnabrück, where the ruins were sardonically dubbed “Hermann Göring Square,” a single fourteen-minute raid on September 13 dropped 181,000 incendiaries and 2,171 high-explosive bombs; more followed a month later. Five thousand died in Braunschweig in “one great maelstrom of fire” on October 15. Seven thousand died in Heilbronn—one-tenth of the population—during raids in early December. Delay-fuzed bombs kept rescue crews at bay while flames loped through the half-timbered town; among the dead were hundreds in cellars where ventilation pumps had sucked in carbon monoxide. Goebbels told his diary, “A large industrial town ablaze from end to end is a hideous sight.” He proclaimed “Politeness Week,” urging civic amiability.

Even from the Dutch coast, pilots could see Cologne burning, wrote the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald, like “a fiery speck in the darkness, like the tail of a motionless comet.” Names of former residents were chalked on charred apartment walls, with crosses next to those killed; survivors received 210 Reichmarks toward the cost of burying their dead, according to the historian Jörg Friedrich. Helmut Kohl, a future German chancellor who was fourteen in 1944, described shoveling debris from a destroyed house near Mannheim where residents had suffocated in the basement: “They lay there with blue faces.” Police assigned to work in morgues and cemeteries were fortified with alcohol. “Do you still remember when we were in school we read Schiller’s ‘The Bell’?” a girl in Hanover wrote an SS corporal at the front. “‘Many must go into the hostile world.’ Then we did not think much about it.… Monotonously and cheerlessly we spend our best years, we bury our youth.”

On and on it went, high explosives and incendiaries falling nearly every night and every day by the thousands of tons, week after week, month upon month. Deranged mothers, unwilling to abandon their dead children when evacuating Hamburg, carried away the roasted or asphyxiated corpses in cardboard suitcases. A firefighter in Krefeld reported, “The heat was so great that we could not touch the metal on our helmets.” A one-hour RAF attack on Darmstadt ignited a firestorm that drew 3,000 firefighters with 220 engines from across the region. “Burning people raced past like live torches,” a witness reported, “and I listened to their unforgettable final screams.” Among the dead were knots of human beings so thoroughly fused together by the heat that tools were needed to pry the bodies apart for burial. Nurses soaked the sheets of burn victims in salad oil as a palliative. One survivor wrote, “I saw a man dragging a sack with five or six bulges in it as if he were carrying heads of cabbages. It was the heads of his family, a whole family, that he had found in the cellar.”

Here then, the annihilative whirlwind—this vortex, this gyre of flame, this destroyer of worlds. “The destruction will go on,” wrote one man in Berlin, “until the world has bled to death.”

“Providence Decrees and We Must Obey”

A
FTER
advancing nearly four hundred miles in the month following the invasion of southern France, the
DRAGOON
juggernaut had gained hardly fifteen miles in the subsequent six weeks. In mid-November, it remained pinned along the western slope of the Vosges Mountains: as Lucian Truscott had feared, the failure to force the Belfort Gap near the Swiss border had enabled the German Nineteenth Army, spavined though it was, to make a stand. Nine weak enemy divisions straddled the high ground along an eighty-mile front from Switzerland to the Rhine–Marne Canal. Opposing them was the 6th Army Group, formally created in September from two armies: Patch’s Seventh on the left, in the north, and De Lattre’s French First on the right, in the south. Eisenhower’s transfer of XV Corps from Third Army to Seventh—much to Patton’s annoyance—gave the Franco-American host four corps, nearly half a million men. They now steeled themselves for what was described as “the first crossing of the Vosges in history under winter battle conditions.”

Few could feel optimistic. The Vosges massif loomed like a granite glacis thirty miles deep and seventy miles wide; cleft by few passes, the range was so thickly wooded that a Guadalcanal veteran like Patch was reminded of jungle fighting. “Mountains, woods, and rain are things I do not like anymore, at least in a war,” John Dahlquist, the 36th Division commander, wrote his wife in November. “But I will probably see a lot more of them before I am through, so I had better get philosophical about them.” Italy veterans in the 36th, 45th, and 3rd Divisions had little stomach for another winter campaign in the uplands, and “alarming mental and physical lethargy” was reported in at least one regiment.

The season had been marked by straggling and desertion; replacements were described as “inept and poorly trained,” and the mud was so deep that even airstrips for spotter planes had to be corduroyed with logs painted olive drab. Trench foot, frostbite, mines, and steel-jawed bear traps planted by the Germans added to the misery. The first snow had fallen on October 27, and GIs smeared Vaseline on their tent seams in a vain effort to stay dry. Winter clothing arrived late, despite emergency shipments flown into Dijon aboard B-24s. Six hundred thousand men and almost a million tons of matériel had come through Marseille and Toulon and across the Côte d’Azur beaches by early November. But a long trek to the front, various miscalculations, and a thriving black market in the French ports—20 percent of the cargo unloaded in Marseille was stolen, often by Army freebooters—made for shortages of food, ammunition, and fuel.

“Dear Family,” wrote Lieutenant June Wandrey, a nurse in Seventh Army,

If it wasn’t against the family tradition to commit suicide, I’d do it, as wherever I’d go it would be warmer than it is here.… I’m tired of the noises of war, the trauma of war, the sleeplessness of war, the hunger of war.… Our cook was a mortician in civilian life. He embalms all our food.

The season also had been marked by the usual heartbreak, a reminder that even as millions perished in the global conflagration, they died one by one. Among those killed in late October was Dahlquist’s aide, Lieutenant Wells Lewis, son of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. A Harvard graduate named for H. G. Wells, young Lewis died in Dahlquist’s arms after being shot in the head by a sniper. “It is over two years since I last saw my son,” his mother wrote Dahlquist. “For a soldier to die in his General’s arms is in the great tradition, a literary symbol which I know Wells himself would appreciate.”

Killed the same week, by antitank fire, was Patch’s only son, Captain Alexander M. “Mac” Patch III, a company commander in the 79th Division who had returned to combat four days earlier after recuperating from a bullet wound to the shoulder suffered in Normandy. General Patch ordered Mac’s body brought to his headquarters at Épinal. “So long, son,” he said at the open grave, then muttered, “Well, he is not cold and wet and hungry.”

Two weeks later Patch wrote to his wife, Julia: “I’ve been dreading my first letter from you after you had heard from me. It came today.” He continued:

You, and only you, know how deeply hurt I am.… It is our private, strictly private grief. No one else’s. My hardest period is over. It was during the period after Mac’s death, when I kept getting letters from you—such happy letters.… You would tell me in those letters to please not let him get back to his outfit too soon. And I could hardly stand it, knowing I
had
done just that. I shall never be able to forgive myself.

“I cannot and must not allow myself to dwell upon our irreparable loss,” he told her. “As I write, the tears are falling from my eyes.… Providence decrees and we must obey.”

The good soldier soldiered on, but Omar Bradley later wrote that “the psychological effect on Patch has been so devastating as to impair his effectiveness as an army commander.” Reflecting on Patch’s loss, General Dahlquist told his wife, “It is almost beyond comprehension that the human being can stand so much.”

*   *   *

The town of Baccarat had been liberated in late October and its famous crystal works captured intact, including an elegant service ordered by Hermann Göring but instead confiscated by Allied officers from which to sip champagne. Dahlquist also bought 100,000 gallons of beer from a French brewery, and engineers rigged pumps to siphon it to the troops. Many toasts were drunk—to the dead, to the living, to fickle life itself. “Rain has started again,” Dahlquist wrote home, “and how I hate it. It makes the job ten times harder.”

Perpetual friction with the French made the job harder still. General de Lattre de Tassigny, that animal of action, struggled to whip his quarter of a million men into an army rather than a mob. “Our African soldiers felt lost in the dark forests,” De Lattre later wrote. Colonial troops still wearing summer uniforms were “unsuited to the winter climate,” he added, and cruelly susceptible to trench foot; some French troops wore wooden shoes. On De Gaulle’s orders, many colonials were sent to the rear to make room for untrained FFI irregulars. This
blanchiment,
or whitening, was intended to nurture French national unity; De Gaulle also wished both to relieve the African troops, who had carried a disproportionate burden of France’s fight in the Mediterranean, and to bring some 400,000 Resistance fighters—many of them communists—under military control. The colonials had once made up more than half the manpower of the French army; now that share would decline to about one-third. Senegalese and Cameroonians shambled from the Vosges front, handing their rifles, helmets, and greatcoats to white Frenchmen trotting into the line. This “crusade” for French self-respect, as De Lattre called it, would add to the French First Army some 137,000 maquis, a “vibrant and tumultuous force” with thin combat skills and paltry logistical support. De Lattre found himself waging what he called “a battle against shortage, anarchy, and complaisance.”