The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (35 page)

Dawson began to shed tears. Then he jerked his head up. “Turn it up,” he said to a lieutenant by the radio. “That’s Puccini. I want to hear it.” Two GIs came into the room. They were apprehensive because Captain Dawson had sent for them. But it was good news. “I’m sending you to Paris,” Dawson announced. “For six days. How do you like that?” “Thanks,” one replied, reluctantly.

“Well, you had better like it,” Dawson said, “and you had better stay out of trouble, but have a good time and bless your hearts.” The men mumbled thanks and left.

“Two of the best boys I’ve got,” Dawson told Heinz. “Wire boys. They’ve had to run new lines every day because the old ones get chopped up. One day they laid heavy wire for 200 yards and by the time they got to the end and worked back, the wire had been cut in three places by shellfire.” Dawson told Heinz that he had men who had been wounded in mid-September, when he first occupied the ridge, who returned four weeks later. They had gone AWOL from the field hospital and made their way back “and the first thing I know they show up again here and they’re grinning from ear to ear. I know it must sound absolutely crazy that anyone would want to come back to this, but it is true.” The following morning one of the lieutenants told Dawson, “Captain, those wire men, they say they don’t want to go to Paris.”

“All right,” Dawson sighed. “Get two other guys-if you can.”

The Battle of Aachen benefited no one. The Americans never should have attacked.  The Germans never should have defended. Neither side had a choice. This was war at its worst, wanton destruction for no purpose.  Still the Americans continued to attack. A steady flow of replacements coming from England allowed the generals to build companies up to full strength after a few days on the line, even when casualties had run as high as 90 percent.  This replacement flow added to the sense of strength-surely the Germans couldn’t keep up. At higher headquarters the feeling was, just one more push here, or another there, and we’ll be through the Siegfried Line and up to and across the Rhine.

In addition to individual replacements, new divisions were coming onto the line in a steady stream. These high-number divisions were made up of the high school classes of 1942, 1943, and 1944. The training these young men had gone through at Fort Benning and the other State-side posts was rigorous physically but severely short on the tactical and leadership challenges the junior officers would have to meet.

Paul Fussell was a twenty-year-old lieutenant in command of a rifle platoon in the 103rd Division. He found the six months’ training period in the States to be repetitious and unrealistic. He was struck by “the futility and waste of training and re-training and finding some work to do for the expendables awaiting their moment to be expended.” In the field, “Our stock-in-trade was the elementary fire-and-flank maneuver hammered into us over and over at Benning. It was very simple. With half your platoon, you establish a firing line to keep your enemy’s heads down while you lead the other half around to the enemy’s flank for a sudden surprise assault, preferably with bayonets and shouting.” Fire-and-movement had been the doctrine developed by General Marshall when he was at Benning in the 1920s. Marshall had reasoned that in the next war, the army would expand rapidly and therefore needed to “develop a technique and methods so simple and so brief that the citizen officer of good common sense can readily grasp the idea.”

“We all did grasp the idea,” Fussell remembered, “but in combat it had one signal defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy’s flankis . If you get up and go looking for it, you’ll be killed.” Nevertheless, Fussell saw the positive benefit to doing fire-and-movement over and over: “Perhaps its function was rather to raise our morale and confidence than to work as defined. It did have the effect of persuading us that such an attack could be led successfully and that we were the people who could do it. That was good for our self-respect and our courage, and perhaps that was the point.” This was distressingly close to the Duke of Wellington’s sole requirement for his lieutenants, that they be brave.  Fussell was a rich kid from southern California who had a couple of years of college and some professional journalism behind him. He had blown the lid off the IQ test. Had he been born two years earlier and brought into the army in 1941 or 1942, he would have gone into the Army Air Force, or intelligence, or onto somebody’s staff, or been sent back to college for more education. But he was one of those American males born in 1924 or 1925 to whom fell the duty, as rifle platoon leaders, to bear the brunt of the Battle of Northwest Europe, after their older brothers and friends, born in 1922 or 1923, had driven the enemy back to his border.

There were hundreds of young officers like Fussell, lieutenants who came into Europe in the fall of 1944 to take up the fighting. Rich kids. Bright kids. The quarterback on the championship highschool football team. The president of his class. The chess champion. The lead in the class play. The solo in the spring concert. The wizard in the chemistry class. America was throwing its finest young men at the Germans.

It was bad enough being an untrained infantry replacement; it could be worse going into armor untrained. Yet many did. One tank commander remembered that in the Bulge “I spent long hours in the turret when I was literally showing men how to feed bullets to the gun. Could they shoot straight? They couldn’t even hold the gun right! In the midst of the toughest fighting of the Third Army’s campaign I was teaching men what I had learned in basic training.” Sgt. Raymond Janus of the 1st Armored Division got a new three-man crew for his light tank. They were all eighteen years of age. Only one had driven a car, and that only to church on Sundays. He became driver. Neither of the other two had any experience firing a machine gun or a 37mm tank gun. Janus gave them a two-hour demonstration. Then they moved out on a mission.  The tank had hardly proceeded a half kilometer when the driver panicked and rolled the tank down a hill. The crash threw Janus out of the turret and on his head, causing a severe concussion that cost him his hearing.  The replacements paid the price for a criminally wasteful Replacement System that chose to put quantity ahead of quality. Its criterion was the flow of bodies. Whose fault was this?

Eisenhower’s first. He was the boss. And Bradley’s. And Patton’s. They demanded an ever greater flow of replacements while doing precious little to insist on improving the training, and got what they demanded. In no other way did the American high command in ETO show such disengagement as Eisenhower, Bradley, et al. did in failing to look at the source of their replacements and then to force some obvious and relatively easy improvements in the Repple Depples* and in the assignment methods. It can only be that Eisenhower, Bradley, et al. had no clear conception of life on the front line. They didn’t listen to foxhole GIs often enough. So they threw the eighteen-year-olds and the former ASTPers* into the battle, untrained, alone.

Replacement Depots

Army Specialist Training Program, for the brightest enlisted men. Broken up in

1943

The American army approaching Germany in the fall of 1944 was in part a children’s crusade. It had hundreds of thousands of eighteen- to twenty-year-old soldiers, most of them at the cutting edge of the general offensive and almost none of them properly trained for combat. Capt. Charles Roland remembered receiving replacements in January, “a number of whom had eaten Christmas dinner at home with their families, who were killed in action before they had an opportunity to learn the names of the soldiers in the foxholes with them.” Eisenhower said that in war everything is expendable-even generals’ lives-in pursuit of victory. If victory required replacements, some of them would have to be expended. One had to be tough. The problem here is that the Replacement System was guilty of the worst sin of all in war, inefficiency. It was paying lives but getting no return. It was just pure waste and the commanders should have done something about it.

Example: In January 1945, Captain Cooper of the 3rd Armored Division got thirty-five replacements to help crew the seventeen new tanks the division had received. “These men had just unloaded from the boat in Antwerp a few hours earlier,” Cooper said. “They had received no previous indoctrination on what they were to do.” Not one had any previous experience with tanks. “Most of them had never even been in a tank or even close to one.” Cooper gave them a brief verbal orientation. Then his mechanics took small groups into tanks, where each recruit got to fire the main gun three times.  “This was all the training time permitted,” Cooper remembered, because the guides came to take the tanks to their assignments to the various units.  The previous night, the thirty-five replacements had been in Antwerp. At 1500 they lumbered off in a convoy of seventeen tanks headed for the front. Two hours later fifteen of the seventeen were knocked out by German panzers firing 88s.  It often happened that more than half the replacements sent directly into combat became casualties in the first few days.

At Metz, Patton continued to attack the forts-although not Driant, which he was by now content to bypass. Finally, on November 22, Metz was secured-except that six forts around the city were still defiant. The Americans made no attempt to overrun them, and soon enough they began to surrender. The last to give up was Fort Driant, which finally capitulated on December 8.  In August, Third Army had advanced almost six hundred kilometers, from Normandy to the Moselle River. From September 1 to mid-December it advanced thirty-five kilometers east of the Moselle. The Siegfried Line, which Patton had said he would reach on November 10, was still a dozen or so kilometers to the east. In crossing the Moselle and taking Metz, Third Army had suffered 47,039 battle casualties.

Up north of Aachen, the Americans continued to attack, side by side with the British. Gen. Brian Horrocks surprised the GIs by showing up on the front lines to see conditions. He was a sympathetic yet critical observer. The 84th Division struck him as “an impressive product of American training methods which turned out division after division complete, fully equipped.” The division “was composed of splendid, very brave, tough young men.” But he thought it a bit much to ask of a green division that it penetrate the Siegfried Line, then stand up to counterattacks from two first-class divisions, the 15th Panzer and the 10th SS. And he was disturbed by the failure of American division and corps commanders and their staffs toever visit the front lines. He was greatly concerned to find that the men were not getting hot meals brought up from the rear, in contrast to the forward units in the British line. He gave the GIs “my most experienced armoured regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry,” told the American battalion and division commanders to get up front, and returned to his headquarters.

The problem Horrocks saw was becoming endemic in the U.S. Army in ETO. Not even battalion commanders were going to the front. From the Swiss border north to Geilenkirchen, the Americans were attacking. SHAEF put the pressure on Twelfth Army Group; Bradley passed it on to First, Third, and Ninth Armies; Hodges, Patton, and Lt. Gen. William Simpson told their corps commanders to get results; by the time the pressure reached the battalion COs, it was intense. They raised it even higher as they set objectives for the rifle company COs. The trouble with all this pressure was that the senior officers and their staffs didn’t know what they were ordering the rifle companies to do. They had seen neither the terrain nor the enemy. They did their work from maps and over radios and telephones. And unlike the company and platoon leaders, who had to be replaced every few weeks at best, and every few days at worst, the staff officers took few casualties, so the same men stayed at the same job, doing it badly.  In the First World War, a British staff officer from Gen. Douglas Haig’s headquarters visited the Somme battlefield a week or so after the battle. The orders had been to attack, with objectives drawn up back at headquarters. The attacks had gone forward, through barbed wire, mud, mines, mortar, and machine-gun fire, fallen back with appalling loss, only to be ordered forward again. This had gone on for weeks. And the officer looked at the sea of mud and was shocked by his own ignorance. He cried out, “My God! Did we really send men to fight in this?”

In the Second World War, the U.S. Army in ETO was getting disturbingly close to the British model of the earlier war. When the chase across France was on, senior commanders (although seldom their staffs) were often at the front, urging the men forward. But when the line became stationary, headquarters personnel from battalion on up to corps and army found themselves good billets and seldom strayed. Of course there were notable exceptions, but in general the American officers handing down the orders to attack and assigning the objective had no idea what it was like at the front. Any answer to why this happened would have to be a guess, and I have no statistics on front-line visits, but from what combat veterans from the fall campaigns have told me, it was only on the rarest of occasions that any officer above the rank of captain or officer from the staff was seen by them.

This was inexcusable. It was humiliating that a British general would have to order American staff officers and their COs to go see for themselves. It was costly to a heartbreaking degree. Tens of thousands of young Americans and Germans died in battles that November, battles that did little to hasten the end of the war and should have been avoided. If there was anything positive to these battles, it was that they gave the American commanders, from Eisenhower on down, the feeling that with all this pressure coming down on them, the Germans surely didn’t have the resources to build a reserve for an offensive thrust.  Just south of Aachen lies the Hurtgen Forest. Roughly fifty square miles, it sits along the German-Belgian border, within a triangle outlined by Aachen, Monschau, and Düren. It is densely wooded, with fir trees twenty to thirty meters tall. They block the sun, so the forest floor is dark, damp, devoid of underbrush. The firs interlock their lower limbs at less than two meters, so everyone has to stoop all the time. It is like a green cave, always dripping water, low-roofed and forbidding. The terrain is rugged, a series of ridges and deep gorges formed by the numerous streams and rivers.  The Roer River runs along the eastern edge of the Hurtgen. Beyond it is the Rhine. First Army wanted to close to the Rhine, which General Hodges decided required driving the Germans out of the forest. Neither he nor his staff noted the obvious point that the Germans controlled the dams upstream on the Roer. If the Americans ever got down into the river valley, the Germans could release the dammed-up water and flood the valley. The forest could have been bypassed to the south, with the dams as the objective. The forest without the dams was worthless; the dams without the forest were priceless. But the generals got it backward, and went for the forest. Thus did the Battle of Hurtgen get started on the basis of a plan that was grossly, even criminally stupid.  It was fought under conditions as bad as American soldiers ever had to face, even including the Wilderness and the Meuse-Argonne. Sgt. George Morgan of the 4th Division described it: “The forest was a helluva eerie place to fight. You can’t get protection. You can’t see. You can’t get fields of fire. Artillery slashes the trees like a scythe. Everything is tangled. You can scarcely walk.  Everybody is cold and wet, and the mixture of cold rain and sleet keeps falling.