The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Montgomery suddenly became obsessed with the idea that his army group could rush right on into Berlin provided we gave him all the maintenance that was in the theater—that is, immobilize all other divisions.… Examination of this scheme exposes it as a fantastic idea.… I have sacrificed a lot to give Montgomery the strength he needs.

  As for the future, Eisenhower proved himself an imperfect seer:

  We will have to fight one more major battle in the West. This will be to break through the German defenses on the border.… Thereafter the advance into Germany will not be as rapid as it was in France … but I doubt that there will be another full-dress battle involved.

  Just after six P.M. on the warm, clear Monday evening of September 11, a jeep carrying a five-man American patrol from Troop B of the 85th Reconnaissance Squadron crept north on the river road from Vianden in northeastern Luxembourg. Thickly timbered hills pitched and yawed in all directions, and blue shadows bled into the dells. The jeep lurched to a halt near the jackstraw wreckage of a blown bridge across the narrow Our River. Staff Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger, a German-speaker from Reedsburg, Wisconsin, scrambled down the bank, followed by a rifleman and a French interpreter hired by the troop in Paris. Holzinger’s orders from the 5th Armored Division urged caution, but added, “Should probing indicate great weakness in some portion of the frontier line, penetration may become possible.” The sergeant detected great weakness. With the limpid water barely reaching their boot cuffs, he and his two comrades sloshed twenty yards across the Our to become the first Allied soldiers into Germany.

  Up the slope for four hundred yards they trudged to a clutch of houses, where a farmer reported that the German rear guard had scuttled off the previous day. With the man impressed as a guide—“in case he was lying,” Holzinger later explained—the GIs hiked to the crest of a knife-blade ridge half a mile above the river for a panoramic view. Raking the hills with his field glasses, Holzinger counted twenty concrete pillboxes tucked among the glades and brakes, including one with a chicken coop attached. Each appeared to be vacant. As dusk thickened, he hurried back across the river to report by radio that his men had found the Siegfried Line.

  By midnight, other patrols from the 4th and 28th Infantry Divisions had also crossed the border, to be greeted by hostile stares and white bedsheets draped from upper windows. Three corps abreast, the U.S. First Army approached the German frontier through southern Holland, eastern Belgium, and Luxembourg. Scouts watched for “cuckoos”—local civilians, often ethnic Germans of dubious loyalty, scurrying east—and listened to the chat-chat-chat of machine guns said to be “eating away at each other” as outposts traded fire across the lines. Farther south on the same Monday, a patrol from the 6th Armored Division in Patton’s army spied French dragoons from Patch’s army at Saulieu in Burgundy. A few hours later, a detachment from General Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division—also part of Third Army—encountered twenty men in three scout cars from De Lattre’s 1st Infantry Division outside Nod-sur-Seine, forty miles northeast of Dijon. Straightening his collar as he ran, the local mayor raced toward the rendezvous with the entire village on his heels. There beneath an elm tree on Route Nationale 71, as church bells sang in their belfries, they witnessed officers from the two units shake hands to seal the merger of the Allied liberators who had landed in Normandy with those who had come through Provence.

  From the North Sea to the Mediterranean, the Allies now presented an unbroken front. Never had the Third Reich’s prospects seemed bleaker. The Wehrmacht in three months had lost fifty divisions in the east, twenty-eight in the west, and territory several times larger than Germany proper. Axis regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland were suing for peace. Berlin had begun evacuating southern Greece, dispatching transport planes across the Aegean at night to spirit 37,000 troops from Crete. The operational life of a U-boat commander now averaged just two patrols. Advancing Soviet armies had swarmed into the Baltics and halfway across Poland before the Red Army paused to regroup, a delay that had let the Germans obliterate rebellious Warsaw. After five years of war, German army casualties exceeded 114,000 officers and 3.6 million enlisted men, not counting those who returned to duty after recovering from their wounds.

  For all his troubles in the east, Hitler’s greatest peril at the moment lay in the west, where three army groups prepared to pounce on Germany. In search of a savior, he once again summoned Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who after his dismissal in July had spent much of his time taking the cure at Bad Tölz. “I would like to place the Western front in your hands again,” Hitler told him. Field Marshal Model would remain in harness to command the remains of Army Group B. “My Führer,” Rundstedt replied, “whatever you order, I shall do to my last breath.” Life declared him not only “the Wehrmacht’s best general,” but “Germany’s last hope.”

  From his new headquarters near Koblenz, Rundstedt soon found how wan hope had become. The German high command, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW, considered its fighting strength in the west to equal no more than thirteen robust infantry and four motorized divisions; several dozen others were exhausted if not eviscerated. Rundstedt advised Berlin that “Army Group B has about 100 tanks in working order”; the oncoming Allies, he added, had “roughly 1,700.” General Erich Brandenberger had taken command of Seventh Army after Eberbach’s capture only to be told that “it is unknown where the army headquarters are for the moment”; when the command post was found, Brandenberger reported, “everything gave the impression of flight and disorganization.” In mid-September, he calculated the effective strength of his army at three to four divisions, including such “mongrel units” as one assembled from two hundred postal detachments. Across the front, items from tanks and trucks to ammunition and uniforms were in short supply. Eighteen new “Volksgrenadier” divisions had been created in late summer from recuperating hospital patients, industrial workers, stragglers, combat veterans, converted sailors and airmen, and boys. More such divisions would materialize, but each numbered only ten thousand troops, compared to seventeen thousand in the Wehrmacht’s palmy days, and transport was predominately bipedal or four-hooved.

  The Siegfried Line—to Germans, the Westwall—stood as a last bastion before the Rhine. Begun in 1936, its fortifications eventually stretched from the Dutch border to Switzerland and comprised three thousand pillboxes and bunkers. Built with walls and ceilings up to eight feet thick, some included fireplaces, tin chimneys, and connecting tunnels. Others were disguised as electrical substations, with dummy power lines, or as barns, with hay bales stacked in the windows. Planned with a shrewd eye for terrain and interlocking fields of fire, the pillboxes were most numerous where approach avenues seemed especially vulnerable; as many as fifteen big bunkers might be found in a single square kilometer. Thousands of dragon’s teeth—pyramidal tank barriers of reinforced concrete two to six feet high—also stippled the landscape. By 1939, propaganda films were assuring German audiences that the Fatherland had been made invincible against ground attack from the west.

  But years of neglect had ravaged the West Wall. Barbed wire, steel doors, and heavy weapons were plundered for the Atlantic Wall. Saplings and brush soon blocked firing apertures. Farmers laid roadbeds atop the dragon’s teeth to reach their fields and transformed pillboxes into tool sheds or storage bins for potatoes and turnips. Bunkers flooded, or were looted, or became hideouts for soldiers straggling back from Normandy. Dank as a troll’s lair, the fortifications seemed “more like sewage works than subterranean forts,” one visitor reported.

  Hitler in mid-August ordered the Westwall rehabilitated with a levy of “people’s labor.” Simply finding keys to locked doors proved exasperating. By September 10, the workforce had grown to 167,000, including girls from the League of German Maidens and boys from the Hitler Youth, as well as others plucked from depots, training schools, police stations, and convalescent homes. Captured weapons from the Eastern Front rearmed some bunkers, although the concussion and large barrel of
the MG-42—a notoriously lethal German machine gun developed after the West Wall was designed—proved too much for many pillboxes.

  With characteristic agility, Rundstedt manned the fortifications with makeshift units rushed to the front. Even as he complained on September 10 of needing another six weeks to properly rebuild the line, he improvised with dismounted panzer crews, border guards, and training battalions. The 49th Infantry Division scooped up officers and men from more than a dozen broken battalions and moved into a ten-mile stretch of the wall. The equivalent of two Luftwaffe divisions were deployed along a sixty-mile stretch in Holland. The I SS Panzer Corps officially halted its long retreat on September 14 to help shore up defenses. Within a week, 160,000 stragglers had been redirected to the front, with twenty-one Volksgrenadier divisions and nearly eight panzer divisions stiffening the Westwall.

  Hitler demanded “a holding of the position until annihilation.” He added:

  The fight in the West has spread to the German Reich. The situation no longer permits any maneuvering. Stand your ground or die!… Every bunker, every block of houses in a German city, every German village must become a fortress.

  The question of how to breach the Siegfried Line now preoccupied Allied generals and privates alike. “It is a monument to stupidity,” Patton insisted. “Anything that man makes, man can overcome.” But the U.S. Army had little experience in reducing elaborate European fortifications; Corps of Engineer manuals focused more on makeshift fieldworks. A single bunker atop a hill south of Aachen and attacked by the 39th Infantry in mid-September showed how tough the nut could be. Sequentially and without success, GIs fired bazookas and placed pole charges; poured burning gasoline under the door; detonated a beehive explosive charge on the rooftop ventilator, followed by three dozen stacked Teller mines and eleven more beehives; and scorched the embrasures with flamethrowers. Only after three hundred pounds of TNT were tamped into a divot on the roof and detonated with a monumental roar did thirty Germans emerge under a white flag to report that the greatest inconvenience during the ordeal was the occasional snuffing out of their candles.

  Ordinary artillery barrages did little against West Wall redoubts except “dust off the camouflage.” Napalm and other incendiaries proved disappointing. Experiments showed that twenty-five to fifty pounds of explosives often was needed to break a single dragon’s tooth, and large pillboxes required half a ton. Ten to twenty rounds fired from a self-propelled 155mm gun might penetrate six-foot concrete walls, or might not. Engineers learned to use an armored bulldozer hidden within a smoke screen to entomb pillboxes; doors were sealed shut with a jeep-towed arc welder. At a minimum, heavy shelling sometimes made it hard for defenders to breathe by causing the inside concrete walls to powder.

  As Rundstedt rushed defenders into the line, two American armies poked and probed, looking for a seam to rip. Patton’s brash assurance notwithstanding, his Third Army had yet to even close with the Siegfried Line, which abruptly bent eastward in trace with the border. Reduced to Michelin maps and guesswork—200,000 aerial photos, requiring four acres of paper, would not arrive until mid-September—Patton planned to leap the Moselle and advance to Mainz and Mannheim on the Rhine. He intended to bypass the French city of Metz “if it doesn’t fall like a ripe plum,” and little resistance was anticipated short of the West Wall.

  Hitler had other ideas. German reinforcements swarmed in from Denmark and northern Italy, giving the Metz commander the equivalent of almost five divisions to shore up not only the elaborate constellation of forts around the city but also a defensive line west of the Moselle. Four armored columns from Third Army reached the river north and south of Metz on September 7 to find screaming sheets of enemy artillery and no bridges still standing.

  The next morning, a battalion from the 5th Infantry Division slipped across the Moselle from Dornot only to be counterattacked by close-order panzer grenadiers shrieking “Heil, Hitler!” Four American companies dug a last-ditch horseshoe line only three hundred yards wide with the river at their backs; wounded GIs were asked not to cry out in hopes of keeping secret the extent of the casualties. Peppered from the bluffs by German flak guns, the battalion fought off three dozen assaults in sixty hours. “This sure is a hell hole,” the unit log noted. Not until nightfall on September 10 were survivors authorized to fall back across the river, evacuating under blistering fire in three bullet-pricked boats that required two men to bail for each man paddling. Others swam with water wings fashioned from inflated condoms, or rode rafts built from empty ammunition cans. In addition to more than 360 battle casualties, the battalion sent another 150 to the hospital with combat exhaustion.

  Patton would gain other bridgeheads over the Moselle, and on September 14 the unfortified city of Nancy was captured to become the Third Army headquarters. But his barnyard aspiration—“to go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose”—had clearly been checked. He had misjudged enemy grit: a Reuters dispatch reported that captured Germans tended to “thrash about and bite.” By attacking on a broad front, Patton had failed to exploit a vulnerable if temporary gap between the German Fifth Panzer and First Armies. For now he was reduced to bluster. “I have studied the German all my life,” he told his staff in Nancy. “I know exactly how he will react.… He hasn’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do. Therefore, when the day comes, I’m going to whip hell out of him.”

  * * *

  Farther north, First Army’s prospects at first seemed brighter as three corps butted up against the West Wall on a seventy-five-mile front, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. On the army’s right wing, where Sergeant Holzinger had first trespassed across the Our, V Corps soon found itself overmatched by enemy counterblows and scorching fire from stout fortifications in the Ardennes borderlands. The 28th Infantry Division, proud to have tramped through Paris on its postage-stamp march three weeks earlier, now had so little artillery ammunition that guns were restricted to twenty-five rounds a day and only one battalion per regiment could fight at any given time. Three days’ brawling in the sinister German uplands known as the Schnee Eifel made little headway, though the Americans took seventeen pillboxes and fifty-eight prisoners in one firefight. Even this modest penetration of the Siegfried Line provoked a counterattack that cost the division fifteen hundred casualties. Once again, as in World War I, the unit’s red keystone shoulder flash—honoring its Pennsylvania National Guard heritage—became known as the Blutiger Eimer, the Bloody Bucket.

  In a sector just to the north, Hemingway on September 12 accompanied the 4th Division into Germany, where he found “ugly women and squatty ill-shaped men.” Requisitioning a deserted farmhouse, he shot the heads off several chickens with his pistol, then served a supper of fricassee, peas, onions, and carrots to regimental officers, one of whom wrote, “We all seemed for the moment like minor gods.” The moment passed. A counterattack by the 2nd SS Panzer Division sealed a six-mile gap torn in the line and inflicted eight hundred American casualties; one company broke and pelted a mile to the rear. On Friday, September 15, the division command post shuffled back into Belgium, purportedly the 4th Division’s first retreat since the Carolina maneuvers of 1941. A promising 5th Armored Division foray also petered out, and the corps bridgehead was soon abandoned, leaving the Ardennes to lapse into an uneasy repose that would last until mid-December.

  On First Army’s left flank, XIX Corps rolled through the Dutch city of Maastricht on September 14, finding the Germans gone but for three scoundrels burning papers at the Gestapo headquarters. Three days later, the 30th Division crossed into Germany only to encounter pillboxes and fire pits newly manned by Austrians in a Volksgrenadier division. A corps offensive to seize crossings on the Roer River, nine miles distant, was twice postponed for lack of ammunition, heavy weather, and anxiety over an exposed northern flank; this gave the enemy time to entrench and the Americans time “to ponder their apprehensions,” as the Army’s official history acknowledged.

  That left the last, best ch
ance for a quick American breakthrough in the First Army center, where Joe Collins’s VII Corps had massed before Aachen with three divisions abreast on a thirty-five-mile front. Collins knew this ground intimately from his three years with the occupation force in Koblenz after World War I. (He prided himself in correctly pronouncing German names.) He also knew that the Aachen Gap had been a major trade gateway since the Roman Empire and, as he put it, “the real route into and out of Germany” since early Christendom. For precisely that reason, Hitler had doubled the strength of the Westwall here with twin fortification belts: the Scharnhorst Line almost straddled the Belgian-Dutch border, paralleled a few miles to the east by the thicker Schill Line. Aachen sat in a bowl between the two belts, ancient and vulnerable, the city of Charlemagne and Nazi romanticism, where for seven centuries Holy Roman emperors had been crowned as heirs to the Caesars.

  Collins now made a tactical choice he would soon regret. He decided to isolate Aachen rather than capture it. Short of gasoline and ammunition, keen to avoid an urban gunfight like the Cassino bloodletting in Italy, he ordered the 1st Division to seize the hills ringing the city south and east while the 9th Division pushed through the dense woods, seven miles below Aachen, known as the Hürtgenwald—the Hürtgen Forest. Between those two infantry divisions, the 3rd Armored Division would butt northeast toward the village of Stolberg, beyond which lay open ground leading to the Roer and Rhine Rivers. With luck, Collins believed, the Germans would abandon Aachen rather than risk encirclement by fifty thousand American troops chewing through the Scharnhorst and Schill Lines.

  * * *

  The sudden appearance of VII Corps had ignited panic in the city. Antiaircraft crews smashed their gun sights and fled toward Cologne, followed by police, municipal, and Nazi Party officials. Hitler ordered the evacuation of all 160,000 citizens. Terrified of being shot as traitors if they failed to comply, shopkeepers, pensioners, and mothers pushing prams soon clogged the roads leading east.