The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Two tank armies would form the point of the spear: on the right wing, in the north, the main blow would be delivered by Sixth Panzer Army under Dietrich, a squat former butcher’s apprentice with an underslung jaw, a harpoon nose, and a taste for schnapps. A tank sergeant in World War I and a favorite of Hitler’s since the early 1920s, Dietrich had once led the Führer’s Mercedes-mounted personal guard, which he armed with revolvers and hippopotamus whips. More recently he had commanded SS troops in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Russia, reportedly boasting in 1943 that of his original 23,000 men, only 30 remained alive and uncaptured. He was accused in one hideous episode of ordering more than four thousand Russians shot in retaliation for six German deaths. Rundstedt deemed Dietrich “decent but stupid,” yet accepted him as the paramount tactical commander for HERBSTNEBEL. Dietrich would lead nine divisions with more than 1,000 guns and 120,000 soldiers, a third of them in Waffen-SS units. His lead echelons included five hundred tanks and assault guns, many of which were to funnel into Belgium through the five-mile-wide Losheim Gap—an upland passage exploited by German horse cavalry in 1914 and by Rommel in 1940—then hurry down five roads to reach the Meuse near Liège before wheeling northwest toward Antwerp.

  On the left, Fifth Panzer Army with seven divisions was to sweep to the Meuse through southern Belgium and Luxembourg, shielding Dietrich’s flank against counterattack from the southwest. Manteuffel, the Fifth Panzer commander, an elfin five-foot-two and 120 pounds, was a veteran of both Russia and Africa, tormented by migraines but described in one efficiency report as “a daredevil, a bold and dashing leader.” His army had received a thousand artillery tubes and ample ammunition, but Manteuffel fretted more about fuel: hilly terrain and icy roads, he warned, required two to five times the standard petrol allocation. Model’s logisticians had calculated that four and a half million gallons would suffice to reach the Meuse, plus another four million to seize Antwerp; only three million gallons had been delivered to the armies so far, much of it stockpiled far to the rear, in the Rhine valley. “If you need anything,” Model advised, “take it from the Americans.” Even more strapped was the German Seventh Army, positioned with seven divisions on the far left wing as another shield against counterattack from the southern flank; Hitler ordered Himmler to round up two thousand horses to enhance its mobility.

  A thousand trains beginning in early December had hauled the HERBSTNEBEL legions across the Rhine, where they disembarked at night between Trier and München-Gladbach before marching in darkness toward the front. Security remained paramount. No open fires were allowed; to minimize smoke, only charcoal could be used for cooking. Any officer initiated into the plan took multiple secrecy oaths and then was forbidden to travel by airplane lest he be shot down and captured. Gestapo agents sniffed for leaks. Manteuffel personally started a rumor—by means of loud, theatrical dinner conversation at a restaurant—that his army intended to attack through the Saar in January.

  Maps remained sealed until the eleventh hour. No motor vehicles could approach within eight kilometers of the front line, a restriction that hampered reconnaissance and artillery coordination. To forestall deserters, only on the final night would shock troops move into their assault trenches. Storch planes buzzing low overhead provided “noise curtains” to conceal engine sounds. The attack, originally scheduled for late November and then postponed until December 10, had been delayed again for nearly a week to stockpile more fuel and permit further positioning. Null Tag—Zero Day—now was fixed for Saturday, December 16, the date celebrated as the birthday of that most exquisite German, Ludwig van Beethoven.

  * * *

  In the club’s cellar Hitler brought his two-hour oration to a close, eyes still bright, voice still strong. He would repeat the performance again the following night to a second tranche of senior generals.

  “The army must gain a victory.… The German people can no longer endure the heavy bombing attacks,” he told them. “We have many exhausted troops. The enemy also has exhausted troops, and he has lost a lot of blood.” Reich intelligence estimated that the Americans alone “have lost about 240,000 men within a period of hardly three weeks.” (This figure bore no relation to reality.) “Technically,” he said, “both sides are equal.”

  The central weather office in Berlin predicted poor flying weather over the Ardennes for a week; that would negate Allied air superiority. “Troops must act with brutality and show no human inhibitions,” Hitler said. “A wave of fright and terror must precede the troops.”

  War is of course a test of endurance for those involved.… Wars are finally decided when one side or the other realizes that the war as such can no longer be won. Our most important task is to force the enemy to realize this. He can never reckon upon us surrendering. Never! Never!

  Finally spent, Hitler ended his monologue. Rundstedt rose slowly from his chair, the field-gray apotheosis of Prussian dignity. On behalf of his generals, he pledged loyalty to the Führer and vowed that they would not disappoint him. Hardly a month earlier, the field marshal had voiced “grave doubts” about this desperate scheme. Now he proved that he too was one of the Jaleute, the yes-men. He too was a nodding donkey.

  The Light Line

  FOR three months after her glorious liberation, Paris suffered. “She was largely without light or gas or heat,” wrote Alan Moorehead. “There were still no buses in the streets, no taxis. Every boulevard was a river of bicycles.” Shortages of soap and warm water resulted in an epidemic of ugly leg sores. “You could more easily take a bath in champagne than in hot water,” Martha Gellhorn added. “Since there was no leather for shoes, women clattered about the streets on platform soles made of wood, sounding like horses’ hooves.” Restaurant patrons dined in their overcoats on carrot-and-turnip soup.

  The small fuel ration was restricted to adults over seventy-five, children under three, and the certifiably sick. A cord of black-market firewood sold for $120, or 6,000 francs at official exchange rates. The rich sometimes bought sawdust by the ton to burn in their stoves; they also purchased black-market gasoline for the trucks that delivered it. An American officer wrote home that his flat was “cold as charity,” and another soldier, assigned a dank, sepulchral room, reported that “on many nights we opened the windows and slept in sleeping bags.” A SHAEF officer who attended the opera described heavily muffled musicians, and patrons in formal dress swaddled in lap robes. “Like opening a refrigerator door,” he wrote, “a cold wave rolled out on us from backstage as the curtain was lifted.” Isaiah Berlin wrote a friend that the city seemed “empty and hollow and dead, like an exquisite corpse.” As for actual corpses, the Paris crematorium received only enough gas to operate for two hours a day, so bodies were burned quickly or not at all.

  By late November conditions began to brighten and the city “was again alive,” according to Forrest Pogue. Tacticians defined the “light line” as the boundary between Allied field armies and the far rear; west of the line, nighttime blackouts no longer were mandatory. Paris again became la ville lumière, not least because the great coal fields around Valenciennes had been liberated intact and were soon disgorging the seven thousand tons a day needed to keep city utilities operating and the subway running. By mid-December, SHAEF reported that “electricity consumption in Paris is 94% of the peacetime figure,” with “an unnecessary amount of lighting used.”

  For liberators behind the light line, life was good, and for the brass in Paris, life was splendid. A PX open only to general officers stocked perfume, bracelets, fountain pens, and new Zippos. General Everett Hughes described hunting partridge near Versailles, with “all the farm hands for miles around acting as beaters.” General Lee, the COMZ commander, ensured that fresh milk, butter, and fruit filled Eisenhower’s larder, and the White House even sent the supreme commander a bushel of Chesapeake oysters. Frontline troops groused about “all those goddamned chair-borne infantry at the Hôtel Majestic,” where Court House Lee kept his headquarters. “The COMZ set-up is shoc
king,” wrote Pogue. “Working on a schedule of 8:30–5:30 (more nearly 4:30); off one afternoon a week.” Denizens of the Majestic messed in a swank three-story café on the corner of the Champs-Élysées and Rue de Berri, where French waitresses served meals on starched tablecloths and a GI orchestra played from a mezzanine balcony.

  The Majestic was hardly unique. Fifty-one generals lived in the George V, by Lee’s careful count, and more filled the Hôtel Palais Quai d’Orsay, where desk clerks and porters wore frock coats. SHAEF’s offices in the city occupied the J. P. Morgan bank on the elegant Place Vendôme, near the house where Frédéric Chopin died and opposite Napoléon’s column, made from melted-down enemy cannons captured at Austerlitz. SHAEF officers dined in the Hôtel Meurice, that last-ditch redoubt of General Choltitz, where the cupboards still smelled of Wehrmacht boot leather. A ditty percolating through the ranks advised:

  Don’t go forward of army group,

  Your proper place is SHAEF.

  Don’t mind a bit

  If you’re called a shit,

  Just say, “Thank God I’m safe.”

  The British occupied twelve hotels in Paris, the Canadians two; Americans filled well over three hundred. Champagne cost 300 to 600 francs a bottle—$6 to $12 at official exchange rates, $1.20 to $2.40 at black market rates—although imbibers were required to turn in two empty bottles to get a full one, and stoppers were at a premium because of Spanish cork shortages. A December 2 memo from COMZ, titled “Whiskey and Gin for General Officers,” allocated a total of six cases for each army commander through January, with four cases permitted corps commanders, three cases for division commanders, and two cases for every brigadier general. Aides could retrieve the tipple from a warehouse at the Belgium Exposition Grounds in Brussels.

  For GIs without stars on their shoulders, Paris seemed a fantastic sanctuary, the ne plus ultra of life outside the combat zone. The Army’s first leave center opened in Paris in late October. That was followed by the first of fifty-one GI clubs on the Continent. Located in the Grand Hotel on Boulevard des Capucines, the initial club in Paris charged 30 cents a night for a bed; Major Glenn Miller’s orchestra played each evening, even after the band leader disappeared in mid-December during a foul-weather flight over the English Channel. Soon ten thousand soldiers a day poured into the city on forty-eight-hour passes. “Just returned from a trip to Paris,” a Seventh Army soldier wrote his wife. “It was wonderful, but I slept on the floor because the bed was just too much like sleeping in butter.” A woman working for the OSS described fleets of vélos, odd contraptions like “canvas-covered bathtubs and drawn or propelled by motorcycles or bicycles,” carting around GIs “who little count the cost in their exuberance at being alive.” The writer Simone de Beauvoir concluded that “the easygoing manner of the young Americans incarnated liberty itself.”

  Troops packed movie theaters along the Champs-Élysées, and two music halls featured vaudeville shows. Post Number One of the American Legion served hamburgers and bourbon, and bars opened with names intended to entice the homesick, like The Sunny Side of the Street and New York. Army special services organized activities ranging from piano recitals to jitterbug lessons, while distributing thousands of hobby kits for sketching, clay modeling, and leather craft. The Bayeux Tapestry, long tucked away for safekeeping, reemerged in an exhibit at the Louvre, with the segment depicting the Norman defeat of the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 tactfully folded from sight.

  In early December, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas returned to Paris from exile in southern France with their dog, Basket, and the Red Cross arranged GI tours of their apartment. Soldiers organized in groups of fifty, often bearing gifts of cigarettes and soap, also visited Picasso in his studio on Rue des Grand Augustins, where Hemingway had left behind a box of grenades. Callers to the atelier were “stratified,” wrote one observer: “on the ground floor there were GIs and American journalists; then came communist deputies and prominent party members who showed signs of impatience; then came old acquaintances; and finally one came to Picasso.” When the artist—who sometimes received guests in his underwear—was shown photos of war damage in London, he exclaimed, “C’est épouvantable! And that is happening all over the world?”

  For many soldiers, of course, culture was the least of their interests. From deuce-and-a-half truck beds rumbling toward the Tuileries came shouts of “We’re all going to get laid, French-style!” COMZ counted at least 230 brothels in the city, plus six thousand licensed prostitutes working the streets. Another seven thousand were unregistered, according to Paris police estimates, and of the unregistered more than a third carried venereal disease. A typical transaction cost three packs of Chesterfields, and a survey found that among soldiers who spent two days or more in Paris, two-thirds had intercourse at least once, often in what were called “Where am I?” rooms. In Pigalle, solicitations from aggressive streetwalkers—known as “body snatchers”—could be heard from every corner. “Come along, ba-bee,” they cooed, “come along.” Soldiers replied, “Coushay avec?” or simply, “Zig zig?” One quartermaster private disclosed on his required “VD contact form” that he picked up nine different women around the same Parisian intersection, took them to six different hotels, and essayed seven “sexual exposures,” all within eight hours. “Our soldiers,” an American officer wrote, “were devastated by aphrodisiac dreams.”

  They were devastated by more than dreams. The venereal-disease rate in the European theater quickly doubled, and more than two-thirds of all infections acquired in France originated in Paris. The U.S. Army, which had tracked VD in the ranks since 1830, considered a rate below 30 cases per 1,000 troops annually to be “acceptable”; by mid-October the rate in Europe was twice that. It doubled again among the Army Air Forces, and—at 222 per 1,000—was sevenfold the “acceptable” figure in COMZ’s Loire encampments. Confronted by another threat to Allied strength, Eisenhower counterattacked by declaring “all brothels, bordellos and similar establishments” off-limits.

  Twenty-nine prophylactic dispensaries sprouted across Paris, with huge signs declaring, “Pro Station Here.” Mandatory “short-arm” inspections by medical “pecker checkers” increased sharply. Naval commanders at a hotel on the Avenue Marceau barred entry to any woman unless she produced “proof of chastity.” A December issue of Army Talks warned, “Don’t forget the Krauts were fooling around France a long time before we got here.… So any dame you get now is plenty second-hand.”

  Still the VD rate climbed. Soldiers excused from duty while being treated for syphilis or gonorrhea were said to be “whores de combat,” and the Good Conduct ribbon became known as the “No-Clap Medal.” Women who swapped sex for rations or chocolate were called “Hershey bars,” while a brothel was a “house of horizontal refreshment.” The French Foreign Ministry asked SHAEF to consider “assigning a certain number of houses of prostitution for the Allied nationals’ use” because of “a noteworthy recrudescence of clandestine prostitution” and increasing VD among French civilians. Eisenhower declined. When Patton proposed providing bordellos with penicillin because “it is futile to attempt to go against human nature,” the supreme commander replied tartly, “I most emphatically do not agree.… To run the risk of being short in this important drug merely in order that brothels in France may be supplied with it is absolutely unacceptable to me.” Patton for once held his tongue.

  * * *

  Paris soldiered on, or perhaps sashayed. Vendors near the Eiffel Tower sold pinwheels and balloons, and among pitched stalls at the stamp market, collectors by the hundreds examined specimens with magnifying lenses. French communists tossed clenched-fist salutes to British officers in red-banded uniform caps, mistaking them for Soviets, and young women bicycled down the boulevards with billowing skirts and big hats, a vivid apparition that brightened everyone’s morale. In November, De Gaulle’s government had closed public dance halls as unseemly, since some two million French citizens remained incarcerated in German labor camps or prisons.
But surreptitious dancing continued across Montmartre, and cabarets and nightclubs remained open. Among them was the Sphinx, which Bill Mauldin described as “jammed with French civilians, all smoking [black market] Camels” and served by waitresses who “wore lace caps and high-heeled shoes, with absolutely nothing between.”

  A lively tableau could also be found in the Hôtel Scribe, abode of many of the nearly one thousand journalists accredited to SHAEF, including the likes of William Shirer, George Orwell, and Robert Capa. “It was an American enclave in the heart of Paris,” De Beauvoir wrote. “White bread, fresh eggs, jam, sugar and Spam.” (The bar, always crowded, featured a medley of intoxicants called the Suffering Bastard.) Collectively the correspondents filed more than 100,000 words from Paris each day, plus hundreds of photographs and thousands of feet of movie film. Two dozen SHAEF censors sat in a suite on the second floor of the hotel, scrutinizing the copy while occasionally glancing at a long list of “hot stops”—details not to be publicly disclosed, such as troop movements and unit strengths—scrawled in colored chalk on a blackboard. The triple bleating of buzzers in the Scribe lobby announced a new press release, according to the Australian reporter Osmar White, and wire services hired “nimble French youths to race from the briefing room to the dispatching office on the first floor with ‘flashes.’”

  Sporadic privation would beset Paris for the duration, including shortages of milk, bread, and even government stationery. Reams embossed with the Vichy letterhead were reused, with “État Français” struck out and “République Française” typed in. Particularly alarming to GIs was a theater-wide cigarette shortage: U.S. Army soldiers alone smoked more than a million packs a day in Europe, and COMZ put the total need for December at 84 million packs. A two-month supply—along with more than one million blankets and sleeping bags—was discovered aboard offshore cargo ships, unable to berth for weeks because priority was given to ammunition and fuel. Until the crisis eased, cigarettes were diverted from rear-echelon troops behind the light line to the front, and Eisenhower began rolling his own as a gesture of solidarity with his men.