The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (97 page)

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At length Ninth Army was ready to take up the cudgels. Hoping to catch the enemy by surprise several days before the Roer spate had fully subsided, Simpson on Thursday, February 22, ordered Operation
GRENADE
launched the next morning; he then watched Bing Crosby in
Going My Way,
tossed down a nightcap, and went to bed. Hardly had the crooning ended than, at 2:45
A.M.
Friday, two thousand massed guns cut loose. “The light from the flash of the cannon and explosion of the rounds was so brilliant,” a lieutenant colonel in XIX Corps reported, “that you could read a document in the dark of night without any impression that there was flickering light.”

Forty-five minutes later three corps plunged forward on a seventeen-mile front. Enemy fire and an unruly current still flowing at seven miles per hour would cost the assault six hundred storm boats. A footbridge installed at 4:24
A.M.
promptly collapsed when rammed by a careering river craft. A falling tree and German gunners sank more foot spans, as mortar rounds walked across the water and plunging machine-gun fire chewed through GIs flailing for shore. One bridge built by 30th Division engineers was knocked out eight times before being abandoned. The damp cold prevented a battalion in Joe Collins’s VII Corps on the right flank from starting even a single outboard motor, and other boats swamped, sank, or were shot to driftwood by either enemy artillery or white-phosphorus rounds fired short from U.S. guns. A battalion commander reported “indescribable confusion.”

But within hours brute force won through. Anchor cables held fast and by seven
A.M.
three footbridges crossed the flood; a sturdier span opened at four
P.M.
Friday, bearing the first vehicles. By nightfall, the bridgehead was four miles deep, and three feeble German counterattacks had been slapped aside. Of fourteen hundred U.S. casualties, most were engineers. Simpson’s headquarters kept a one-page chart listing each battalion in thirteen infantry regiments with the notation “crossing” or “over” as appropriate. By dawn on Saturday, twenty-eight battalions from six divisions had reached the far shore, with ten more to follow by nightfall. A separate list of “cities captured”—mostly German villages, really—grew to sixteen. On Saturday evening, nineteen bridges spanned the Roer, seven of them fit for tanks. Scouts found beer on tap in a
Gasthaus
; other GIs captured a Nebelwerfer battery before it could fire a shot. “It looks like things are beginning to break a bit,” the 30th Division commander reported.

By Monday, February 26, as three corps fanned across a bridgehead twenty-five miles wide, Ninth Army was advancing three or four miles a day with VII Corps shielding the right flank. On Tuesday, Simpson committed his armor under orders to exploit, and columns of Shermans clattered across the Cologne plain toward Düsseldorf. Swarming fighter-bombers heckled the fleeing foe; villages with streetlights burning and trolleys running fell without a shot fired. Abruptly the war seemed to have returned, as one Army historian later wrote, “to the halcyon days of August and September.” By Thursday, March 1, Simpson’s spearhead had reached Neuss, within rifle shot of the Rhine. From the rooftop of a seven-story grain elevator, American officers with telescopes reported seeing “the dead, lifeless giant of Düsseldorf.… Of the sea of factory chimneys, one smoked; of the miles of railroad yards in the foreground, not one car moved.”

Eight bridges spanned the great river on Ninth Army’s front, and one by one German engineers blew them into the water. A ruse to seize the crossing at Oberkassel almost succeeded: the strike force moved at night, with Shermans tricked up as panzers and with German-speaking GIs perched on the fenders. The deception was unmasked only at dawn by a gimlet-eyed enemy soldier on a bicycle who bellowed in alarm. Gunfire raked the street, sirens wailed, and a pell-mell rush for the ramp ended abruptly when bridge girders, towers, and roadbed plunged into the river with a roar and another of those mighty, disheartening splashes.

Simpson now proposed a quick amphibious assault over the Rhine north of Düsseldorf. A thrust by XIX Corps could shorten the war by weeks, he believed; patrols reported that “the enemy is completely disorganized and has neither defensive forces on this side nor the far side of the Rhine capable of stopping a fast crossing.” Montgomery declined with a curt “Don’t go across,” adding that any attempt by Ninth Army to invade the “industrial wilderness” of the Ruhr without extensive, deliberate preparation was “unwise” and would risk precious bridging matériel. The field marshal’s rationale was quite plausible, but an incensed Simpson believed Montgomery coveted for himself and the British the glory of the first Rhine crossing—“a selfish idea,” in the army commander’s estimation. American officers increasingly derided the British as the “time out for tea army.”

GRENADE
was over. Ninth Army in less than two weeks had driven more than fifty miles from the Roer to the Rhine. The Canadian First Army had covered forty miles, against stiffer opposition. The two forces met on March 3 at Geldern, west of Duisburg. Together they had suffered 23,000 casualties while capturing 51,000 Germans and killing or wounding 38,000 more.

Despite the staggering losses, enemy survivors escaped in good order across the Rhine before blowing six final bridges in Duisburg and Wesel. Allied armies had begun to mass along the great river, if piecemeal and without a clear sense of how or where to cross. Still, Rundstedt told Hitler that the German plight on the Western Front was “bad everywhere,” and even the Führer was forced to acknowledge “a heavy heart.”

11.
C
ROSSINGS

The Inner Door to Germany

I
NTO
the Rhineland they pounded, and across the Saar and down the Mosel, where violets and myrtle had begun to bloom and the first early buds stippled the fruit trees. Engineers corduroyed cart tracks through smitten glades, and filled roadside ditches with bricks and stone from granulated villages to fashion an extra lane for the endless convoys rolling east. “This is better than the other sort of war,” a British lieutenant reflected. “You feel you’re getting somewhere.”

German refugees trudged away from the beaten zone, lugging suitcases and favorite lamps and tablecloth peddler packs. Martial slogans could still be seen on the broken walls—
“Führer befehl, wir folgen!”
Führer, command us and we’ll follow!—but so could slatherings of despair, including
“Hitler weg! Krieg weg!”
Down with Hitler! Down with war! Churches posted “In Memoriam” notices for dead soldiers by the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands. U.S. Army trucks trundled to the rear with coal-scuttle helmets as hood ornaments, each open bed packed with prisoners. “They stood facing the rear, their gray-green uniforms dirty,” wrote W. C. Heinz, “all of them rocking together with the motion of the trucks.” German women held up babies or tossed bread from their doorways as they studied the passing blur of faces in hopes of a recognition. “I am in the fodderland,” Audie Murphy would write to his family. “It is much different than the other countrys ive been in. The Houses are nicer and more modern but still arnt as good as ours.”

As two dozen British, Canadian, and American divisions in 21st Army Group closed on the Rhine in the north, Hodges’s First Army also made for the river between Cologne and Koblenz, with thirteen divisions in three corps abreast. “It is impossible not to be elated,” the headquarters diary noted on March 3. Farther south, twelve divisions in Patton’s Third Army overran the rubble that once was Bitburg, then pivoted through the Saar-Palatinate in tandem with fourteen divisions from Patch’s Seventh Army. Together, they would attack on a seventy-mile front along the flanks of the Haardt Mountains. Any town that spurned surrender demands from a “bullshit wagon”—a Sherman fitted with loudspeakers audible two miles away—was scourged with tank and howitzer shells until eventually a white flag or two popped up; the obstinate died. “On the road yesterday I could look ahead and see at least a dozen towns burning and fires sprouting out from various and sundry places all over the horizon,” Major General Alvan C. Gillem, Jr., commander of XIII Corps, wrote his wife in Georgia. Of 1,700 buildings in Jülich, 300 remained intact; of 9,322 in Düren, described by an engineer as “the most totally destroyed city I have ever seen,” 13 stood undamaged. Doors torn from their hinges were used to cover German bodies awaiting burial, and big paper sacks served as coffins for want of lumber.

“Everything smelled of death,” Iris Carpenter wrote after viewing another place reduced to slag. “Bulldozers scraped a road through the heart of the town which was little more than a smoldering rockery.” Allied fighter-bombers harried the fleeing enemy in what one pilot called a “rat hunt: You beat the ground. You flushed the vermin.” Artillery barrages ignited open-pit coal seams, Alan Moorehead noted, giving “a lovely play of light and gold flowing heat.” To his family in Virginia, a logistics officer wrote in early March, “The earth is certainly scorched.”

Nearer the Rhine, however, the swift bound of Allied armies captured intact a
gemütlich
land of bucolic farmsteads and bulging larders. “The cattle, so numerous, so well fed. Chickens and pigs and horses were running everywhere,” Moorehead wrote. “Every house seemed to have a good linen cupboard.” The reporter R. W. Thompson catalogued “fine stocks of ironmongery, metal goods, oil stoves, furniture, and mattresses. The paper in the deserted offices was of fine quality.” In a former candy factory, Martha Gellhorn found “vast stocks of sugar, chocolate, cocoa, butter, almonds,” as well as rooms chock-full of Dutch and French cheese, Portuguese sardines, Norwegian canned fish, and syrup by the barrel.

Here was a world of Dresden plates, pewter steins, and trophy antlers arranged
just so
on parlor walls, of Goethe and Schiller bound in calfskin, of boiled eggs in brine vats and the smell of roasting goose. Here was a world of damask tablecloths and silverware in handsome hutches, of Third Reich motherhood medals for stalwart childbearing, and French cosmetics looted from Paris or Lyon. Every house seemed to display a crucifix or Christian texts over the bedsteads; some flew Allied flags, or posted signs claiming that the occupants were Dutch or Belgian, and never mind that discolored patch of wallpaper where the Führer’s portrait had hung until the day before. “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was,” Gellhorn wrote. “It would sound better if it were set to music. Then the Germans could sing this refrain.”

Here too was a world to be looted. “We’re advancing as fast as the looting will permit,” a 29th Division unit in München-Gladbach reported. German towns were “processed,” houses “liberated” from attic to cellar, with everything from Leica cameras to accordions pilfered. A corps provost marshal complained of “gangsterism” by GIs who were “looting and bullying civilians”; some were caught exhuming a medieval grave in a hunt for jewels, while others ripped up floorboards or searched gardens with mine detectors. W. C. Heinz watched a soldier on a stolen bicycle with half a dozen women’s dresses draped over his arm carefully stow both bike and garments in a jeep trailer. Plundering MPs were known as the “Lootwaffe”: according to a soldier in the 45th Division, a “typical infantry squad involved two shooting and ten looting.” Moorehead described how “German cars by the hundred were dragged out of garages … painted khaki and driven away.” French troops hauled German motorcycles, typewriters, and Friesian cows back to Lorraine. British soldiers pillaged a hardware shop, carrying away screws, nails, and hinges simply from “a desire to do some unhindered shoplifting,” a
Daily Telegraph
reporter concluded.

That which escaped plunder often was vandalized in what one private called “the chaotic air of a drunken, end-of-the-world carnival.” A Canadian soldier recounted his own rampage through a Westphalian house:

First I took a hammer and smashed over 100 plates, and the cups along with them. Then I took an axe to the china cabinets and buffets. Next I smashed all the furniture.… I put a grenade in the big piano, and after I poured a jar of molasses into it. I broke all the French doors and all the doors with mirrors in them and threw the lamps into the street. I was so mad.