The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (73 page)

Eisenhower’s provost marshal estimated that in December eighteen thousand American deserters roamed the European theater, plus another ten thousand British absconders. The equivalent of a division of military fugitives was believed to be hiding in the Parisian demimonde, often joining forces with local black marketeers to peddle K rations for 75 cents from the tailgates of stolen Army trucks—hundreds of such vehicles vanished every day—or simply selling the entire deuce-and-a-half for $5,000. Eventually four thousand military policemen and detectives worked the streets of Paris. From September through December they arrested more than ten thousand people, including French civilians caught selling marijuana to soldiers. A five-story French army barracks on the Boulevard Mortier became a detention block capable of holding more than two thousand miscreants, while the merely AWOL were rounded up and trucked back to the front in lots of sixteen under MP guard. Many soldiers in an Army railway battalion in Paris were arrested and court-martialed en masse for pilferage; nearly two hundred of them drew prison sentences, some as long as fifty years—later commuted for those who agreed to combat duty. Still, the malfeasance and misconduct would thrive through the end of the war, to the point that Paris, the city of light, the city of learning, the city of love, earned yet another nickname: “Chicago-sur-Seine.”

*   *   *

Shortly before six
P.M.
on Tuesday, December 12, at roughly the hour that Hitler was meeting his second group of
HERBSTNEBEL
generals at the Adlerhorst, Eisenhower rode in a limousine through the dim streets of London toward 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Churchill and
his
military brain trust. After flying from Versailles the previous day, the supreme commander had kept busy with appointments in his high-windowed corner office overlooking Grosvenor Square, followed this afternoon by a courtesy call on Ambassador Winant at the U.S. embassy down the street.

As his car sped southeast across Piccadilly toward Whitehall, Eisenhower could see that London, unlike Paris, showed little evidence of revival. Blackout restrictions remained in force, and the few cars on the road were described by one visitor as “little points of blue light dragging darkness after them but leaving blackness behind.” At Claridge’s, a doorman flashed his torch to guide patrons across the sidewalk. Toy and cake shops stood empty a fortnight before Christmas, and even potatoes were in short supply. The city’s most popular diversions included a new film adaptation of
Henry V
starring Laurence Olivier and a waxwork exhibit depicting German atrocities. “Horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Come inside and see real Nazi tortures,” the marquee beckoned. “Children’s amusement section no extra charge.”

A national ban on making ice cream had been lifted in November, and, with the threat of German invasion now gone, the antique Home Guard stood down with a fine parade. But what would be the coldest winter in fifty years had set in, its miseries exacerbated by millions of broken windows and missing roof tiles. The homeless and unnerved still retreated to shelters and subways at dusk with their deck chairs and rugs—“cave dwellers getting their cave ready for the night,” an American airman recorded—sometimes sleeping five deep on steel shelves erected across the platforms. Much of the Tate Gallery collection had been stored in unused Underground stations on the Piccadilly and Central Lines; the Elgin Marbles now resided in an empty tunnel under Aldwych. An all too familiar sight on London’s streets was a telegram delivery boy carrying bad news past twitching parlor curtains as he sought the proper address. “This is a priority,” the messengers were told as they set out. “It’s death.”

As in Antwerp, death could also arrive directly, as a consequence of Hitler’s decision to concentrate his V-2 rockets almost exclusively on the Belgian port and the British capital. Churchill in mid-November had finally confirmed that those mysterious detonations since early September were
not
exploding gas mains. More than one thousand of the rockets would fall on British soil, about half in greater London. Like the V-1, the V-2, dubbed Big Ben, would have little military impact; according to official German calculations the effort invested by Berlin in the V-weapons was roughly equivalent to that of producing 24,000 fighter planes. Further, the V-2 rocket—a hundred times more expensive to build than the V-1—proved less effective than the flying bomb as a terror weapon. Not least among the reasons was the very futility of defending against a missile streaking across the heavens at Mach 5. Since they afforded no protection anyway, neither Allied antiaircraft batteries nor fighter squadrons were tied down, as they had been during the V-1 onslaught.

Radar usually detected V-2 launches from the Netherlands, but warning sirens were deemed pointless; only transport authorities got a minute or two of notification to close subway floodgates beneath the Thames. “You just strolled along, daydreaming, till you were hit,” one witness said. Because the odds against shooting down a V-2 with ground fire were considered as high as a thousand to one, dupery had to suffice as a countermeasure. False intelligence about where the Big Bens hit, fed that fall to the Germans through agents controlled by British counterintelligence, persuaded enemy rocketeers that they were overshooting central London. Soon the mean point of impact migrated eastward, a shift that by war’s end was credited with sparing an estimated 1,300 British lives, 10,000 other casualties, and 23,000 houses.

That was cold comfort for the nearly three thousand Britons killed by V-2s, or the tens of thousands whose homes were obliterated. “Never have I seen buildings so cleanly swept away, and these are 3- or 4-story tenement houses,” a survivor reported. One of the worst attacks occurred shortly after noon on November 25 in the working-class borough of Deptford, where a Saturday sale on saucepans had drawn a long queue at the local Woolworth’s. A young mother outside the store described “a sudden airless quiet, which seemed to stop one’s breath, then an almighty sound so tremendous that it seemed to blot out my mind completely.” A survivor recalled that as the smoke cleared:

A horse’s head was lying in the gutter. There was a pram hood all twisted and bent and there was a little baby’s hand still in its wooly sleeve. Outside the pub there was a crumpled bus, still with rows of people sitting inside, all covered in dust and dead. Where Woolworth’s had been, there was nothing.

The blast killed 168 and injured even more. “The slogan of ‘London can take it’ will prevail,” a British government official wrote Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close aide. “But there may be quite a lot to take.”

*   *   *

No V-weapons fell on Whitehall during Eisenhower’s Tuesday night visit, but the specter was never farther away than the nearby gutted shops and blown-out windows patched with beaverboard. At six
P.M.
, Churchill welcomed the supreme commander to his map room, where they were joined by Tedder, Brooke, and several other senior British officers. Brooke, as part of his conspiracy with Montgomery to “take the control out of Eisenhower’s hands,” had tried to arrange a direct meeting with George Marshall; the Army chief declined the invitation and instead told Eisenhower to make his own case in London.

Eisenhower now commanded sixty-nine divisions on the Western Front, a force he expected to expand to eighty-one divisions by February. Using the prime minister’s huge wall maps, upon which various battlefronts were delineated with pushpins and colored yarn, the supreme commander once again reviewed his campaign scheme: how Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, bolstered by the U.S. Ninth Army, would angle north of the Ruhr, while Bradley’s 12th Army Group swung farther south, shielded on the right flank by Devers’s 6th Army Group. The twin envelopment would exploit Allied mobility and force the enemy to burn his dwindling fuel stocks by defending a wide, perilous front.

Brooke—his narrow raptor face as intent as the visage of a peregrine watching a pigeon—told his diary later that night:

Ike explained his plan, which contemplates a double advance into Germany, north of Rhine and by Frankfurt. I disagreed flatly with it, accused Ike of violating principles of concentration of force, which had resulted in his previous failures. I criticized his future plans and … I stressed the importance of concentrating on one thrust.… Ike does not hope to cross the Rhine before May!!!

Two years earlier, under similar circumstances in Casablanca, Brooke had assailed Eisenhower over a proposed offensive across Tunisia. Unprepared and intimidated, Eisenhower had mounted a halfhearted defense before retreating in disarray from the room. This time he held his ground, parrying Brooke’s objections and explaining his rationale with patience and coherence. Closing to the Rhine from Holland to Alsace would give Allied forces the “capability of concentration” for an eventual double thrust. Winter flooding along much of the river now precluded attacks farther east anyway. The fighting in October and November had been grim indeed—Allied troops still occupied only five hundred square miles of Germany—but Wehrmacht divisions were bleeding to death, and with them, the Reich.

“Ike was good,” wrote Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, the first sea lord. “Kept an even keel. He was obviously impressed by [Brooke’s] arguments but refused to commit himself.” The debate continued over cocktails and dinner, quickly becoming the same tautological gyre that characterized so many Anglo-American strategic conversations.

The evening ended in stilted silences and muzzy talk about postwar Allied unity, to which the supreme commander pledged to devote “the afternoon and evening of my life.” Brooke grew so frustrated that he contemplated resigning, particularly after Churchill chimed in to endorse Eisenhower’s broad-front concept. In his diary Brooke conceded that he had “utterly failed … in getting either Winston or Ike to see that their strategy is fundamentally wrong.” A day later, the prime minister asserted that he had simply been acting the gracious host in refusing to gang up on the only American at table.

Eisenhower flew back to Versailles on Wednesday morning, weary and hardly less dispirited than Brooke. “Field Marshal Brooke seemed disturbed by what he calls our ‘dispersion’ of the past weeks of this campaign,” he cabled Marshall. To Mamie he admitted craving a three-month vacation on a remote beach. “And oh, Lordy, Lordy,” he added, “let it be sunny.”

*   *   *

Eisenhower knew that more was at stake in this tedious contretemps than the march routes of armies. Every additional day of war left Britain weaker and less capable of preserving the empire or shaping the postwar world.

“I greatly fear the dwindling of the British Army is a factor in France as it will affect our right to express our opinion upon strategic and other matters,” Churchill had cabled Montgomery. German intelligence believed that fourteen British divisions still awaited deployment to the Continent, but the prime minister and Brooke knew otherwise. Indeed, Britain was so hard-pressed that even after cannibalizing two existing divisions to fill the diminished ranks in other units, commanders faced “an acute problem in the next six months to keep the army up to strength,” as one staff officer in London warned. Wastage in infantry riflemen especially was running at a rate higher than the War Office could make good: a British rifle-company officer who landed in France on June 6 had nearly a 70 percent probability of being wounded by the end of the war, and a 20 percent chance of being killed.

Nor was Britain’s plight unique. “All of us are now faced with an unanticipated shortage of manpower,” Roosevelt had written Churchill in October. The American dearth was even more problematic, if only because U.S. troops provided the preponderance of Eisenhower’s strength. In December, the American armed forces comprised twelve million, compared with five million for the British, but insatiable and competing global demands pressed even that multitude. A million Army troops were now in the Pacific, while the Army Air Forces had requested 130,000 men to fly and maintain the new B-29 bomber—beyond the 300,000 workers already building the Superfortress. Almost five million American men had been granted occupational deferments, and many soldiers were being furloughed to work in hard-pressed critical industries. In December, 2,500 were sent home to make artillery ammunition and another 2,000 to make tires; thousands more went to foundries, toolmakers, and other plants. Even now Marshall felt pressure from Congress to trim Army manpower so that the production of consumer goods, from toasters to Buicks, could resume.

To swell the ranks, Selective Service exemptions for fathers were belatedly abolished: one million would be drafted in 1944–45. The average age of draftees had climbed from twenty-two in 1940 to twenty-six in 1944, and many new privates were over thirty-five. A ban on shipping eighteen-year-olds overseas was rescinded in August. Induction standards for “physically imperfect men,” already loosened, were further relaxed in October. Draft examiners were advised that “such terms as ‘imbecile’ and ‘moron’ will not be used,” but 330,000 inductees, some of whom could fairly be classified as at least dull-witted, were subsequently discharged for sundry mental defects. A three-page primer advised examiners how to detect malingering, including feigned epilepsy, bed-wetting, and tachycardia “induced by ingestion of drugs such as thyroid extracts.” Would-be draft dodgers “may shoot or cut off their fingers or toes, usually on the right side.… Some may put their hands under cars for this purpose.”

The need for more soldiers—fit or unfit, willing or unwilling, whole or maimed—grew ever more acute as the fall months passed. U.S. battle casualties in Europe had doubled from October to November, to two thousand a day; on December 7, the figure hit three thousand. The trench foot epidemic caused nonbattle casualties to also double in November, to 56,000. Consequently, even as the last of the U.S. Army’s eighty-nine divisions prepared for deployment to Europe, and even though more than three hundred thousand individual replacement troops had arrived since D-Day, Bradley’s 12th Army Group reported in December that every division already in the theater was below its authorized strength. “The life expectancy of a junior officer in combat was twelve days before he was hit and evacuated,” Bradley asserted. Patton advised his diary on December 3, “Our situation is bad; 11,000 short in an army of three armored divisions and six infantry divisions.”