The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  The British disagreed, politely at first, then adamantly. Churchill warned Roosevelt of a “bleak and sterile” invasion through Provence, followed by “very great hazards, difficulties, and delays” in slogging up the Rhône. Marseille lay four hundred miles from Paris, and a battle there was unlikely to influence the fight for northern France; simply reaching Lyon, he predicted, would take three months. Pulling the U.S. VI Corps and the French divisions from Italy “is unacceptable to us,” the British military chiefs added. Instead, why not blast across the Po valley in northern Italy, swing east with help from an amphibious landing at Trieste, and drive through the so-called Ljubljana Gap in Slovenia to reach Austria and the Danube valley? The Allied commander in Italy, Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, promised Churchill that he intended to “eliminate the German forces in Italy. I shall then have nothing to prevent me from marching on Vienna.” This thrust of “a dagger under the armpit,” as the prime minister called it, might even force Hitler to abandon France in order to shore up his southeastern front.

  Back and forth the argument flew like a shuttlecock. In an exasperated message to Marshall, Eisenhower decried the project of “wandering off overland via Trieste to Ljubljana.… We must concentrate our forces.… We need big ports.” Even if the Germans in Italy collapsed, and heavily fortified Trieste fell, threading the gap meant traversing a high col only thirty miles wide, followed by six-thousand-foot mountains with poor roads, worse rails, and more narrow valleys. Pentagon studies, noting that “the Austrians held off the Italians [in this region] for four years in World War I,” concluded that “not more than seven divisions at the outside could be pushed through” to Austria. Churchill advised Alexander to be ready to dash to Vienna with armored cars, even though British planners reckoned a need for at least fifteen divisions. (“Winston is a gambler,” his physician later explained, “and gamblers do not count the coins in their pockets.”) Brooke privately decried “Winston’s strategic ravings” about campaigning “through the Alps in winter.” While also skeptical of DRAGOON, Brooke advised telling Washington, “If you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we shall be damned fools with you.”

  The prime minister would have none of it. Later he portrayed his scheme as a way to forestall Soviet domination of eastern Europe, but in the summer of 1944 no such argument was advanced. In a windy message to Roosevelt marked “strictly private, personal, and top secret,” he warned of “the complete ruin of all our great affairs in the Mediterranean.… This has sunk very deeply into my mind.” The president rebuffed him with election-year logic another politician could understand: “I would never survive even a slight setback in OVERLORD if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”

  Still Churchill persisted, flying to Normandy with an escort of six Spitfires as Mortain and Falaise began to unfold, hectoring Eisenhower, Bradley, and others with, as an Army staff officer described, “beautifully colored speech, hunched forward on his chair, his eyes slightly red and beady, scattering cigar ashes on the floor and hiding his burnt match under the seat.” After directing British commanders to examine “in the greatest secrecy” whether DRAGOON forces could be diverted to Brittany, the prime minister urged Eisenhower to do just that. This was a loony caprice, so “extremely unwise” that it would “cause the utmost confusion everywhere,” as the Pentagon advised. Not least, tens of thousands of troops were already boarding vessels insufficiently seaworthy to venture beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and no major Breton port would open for weeks. “Ike said no, continued saying no all afternoon, and ended up saying no in every form of the English language at his command,” Harry Butcher wrote. In a subsequent session in London, Churchill wept copiously and threatened to “lay down the mantle of my high office.” “I have never seen him so obviously stirred, upset, and even despondent,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall on August 11, after a taxing confrontation at 10 Downing Street. Roosevelt put paid to the wrangling in nine words: “There is no more to be done about it.”

  Unable to move the president or his lieutenants, Churchill raged with the ineffectual petulance of a declining power. Denouncing the “sheer folly” of his “strong and dominating partner,” he slipped into first-person royal: “We have been ill-treated and are furious. Do not let any smoothings or smirchings cover up this fact.… If we take this lying down, there will be no end to what will be put upon us.” Even the king’s equerry told his diary, “Winston is very bitter about it, and not so sure that he really likes FDR.” As for Marshall and the other American chiefs, Churchill now derided them to Brooke as “one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.” To Clementine he later wrote, “The only times I ever quarrel with the Americans are when they fail to give us a fair share of the opportunity to win glory.”

  And so he had come to Naples to take the waters. Britain would win the war while losing this battle and most other battles waged against the Americans henceforth. More than two years of bickering over strategy—with London usually prevailing—had made Marshall truculent and inclined to agree with the State Department adage that “an Englishman’s idea of cooperation is to persuade someone to do what he wants him to do.” Even Roosevelt would later declare, “Churchill is always a disperser.” This contretemps was indeed the final gasp of the prime minister’s cherished peripheral strategy for winning World War II; it had become incoherent, in the judgment of the historian Michael Howard. The fabled soft underbelly was “a slogan not a strategy,” another British historian concluded, a hodgepodge of improvisations. While the Americans were wary of British imperial interests in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, the project of stealing a march on the Russians was both impractical—the Red Army already was poised to spread through Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary, and communist partisans were ascendant in Yugoslavia—and strategically suspect. Why antagonize Moscow when Soviet forces continued to do “the main work of tearing the guts out of the German army,” as Churchill himself told the House of Commons in early August?

  Certainly the fraught imperatives of national interest and national pride also were playing out. Britain’s stature and influence seemed to diminish with each new arrival of a Liberty ship jammed with GIs; the empire’s future was uncertain at best, and that insecurity would inform the Anglo-American brotherhood for the duration. Moreover, as Brooke wrote in August, the Americans “now look upon themselves no longer as the apprentices at war, but on the contrary as full-blown professionals.” The U.S. Army this month would exceed eight million soldiers; more than one in every ten was in the Mediterranean, and the American high command was bent on putting them to good use quickly.

  Churchill played a poor second fiddle. “The trouble is the P.M. can never give way gracefully,” a British admiral observed. “He must always be right.” As the war churned into its sixth year, some found the prime minister increasingly erratic. “He is becoming more and more unbalanced!” Brooke told his diary in late summer. “He was literally frothing at the corners of his mouth with rage.” He was much given to “corrective sneering,” his secretary reported, and obsessed with inconsequential details, such as the black bristles of the hairbrushes in the Cabinet War Room lavatory, which he complained hid the dirt. “Churchill is preoccupied by his own vivid world,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote. “He does not react, he acts; he does not mirror, he affects others and alters them to his own powerful measure.” The prime minister acknowledged his mulish nature: “Of course I am an egotist. Where do you get if you aren’t?”

  Without doubt, “that unresting genius,” in the phrase of one contemporary, needed rest. “The P.M. is very tired,” an aide complained. “He insists on everything being boiled down to half a sheet of notepaper. It simply can’t be done.” He had described himself in midsummer as “an old and weary man,” and he advocated “economy of effort. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down
when you can lie down.”

  Already this Mediterranean sojourn had revivified him, as the Middle Sea always did. Champagne lunches were followed by brandy, an hour’s nap, a bath, then a whiskey and soda, and more champagne and brandy at dinner before working until three A.M. (Churchill was no alcoholic, C. P. Snow once observed, because no alcoholic could drink that much.) Now, after passing the outbound fleet, he would return to the Villa Rivalta, his hostel above Naples Bay, and pack for a C-47 flight to Corsica, his own staging area for the invasion. The U.S. Joint Chiefs, that “stupidest strategic team,” had cabled London a week earlier: “We are convinced that DRAGOON will be successful in its landing phase, and we anticipate a rapid advance up the Rhône valley.” Churchill intended to see for himself.

  * * *

  In the smallest hours of Tuesday, August 15—Napoléon’s birthday—the invasion force crept toward sixteen narrow beaches along a forty-five-mile stretch of the Côte d’Azur. The coast here was steep-to, plunging to one hundred fathoms only three miles from shore, with a negligible eight-inch tide. Allied bombers since late April had dumped twenty thousand tons on German fortifications, and on more than a few French towns. Much of the population already had fled to the hills, hiding in streambeds and hollows from what one refugee described as “a deluge of metal.” Coded phrases broadcast from Algiers and London on Monday night had alerted the FFI and OSS teams of the imminent assault: “Nancy has a stiff neck. The huntsman is hungry. Gaby is going to lie down in the grass.” Each soldier aboard the combat loaders received an American flag armband and two packs of Lucky Strikes. “Swilled coffee and chain-smoked, flicking our Zippos with trembling, nicotined fingers,” a soldier in the 45th Division told his journal. Some lay thrashing in the sickbays with recurrent malaria contracted in Italy—“pure fire, sunstorms flaring from inside outward,” as a victim described his symptoms. Yet for most, another GI wrote in his diary, “it hardly seems that an invasion is on, things are so quiet.”

  Catoctin’s malfunctioning ventilation system had forced sweltering passengers belowdecks to strip to their undershirts for much of the passage. But as the French coast drew near, Major General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., commander of the U.S. Army’s VI Corps—the main assault force in DRAGOON—carefully dressed for combat: enameled two-star helmet, breeches, lucky cavalry boots, and the white scarf, fashioned from a paratrooper’s silk map found on Sicily, that had become his trademark. This was Truscott’s third invasion. Previously he had commanded the left flank of Patton’s force in both TORCH and HUSKY, before taking command during the darkest hours at Anzio and rallying VI Corps to be in on the kill at Rome. Truscott possessed what one staff officer called a “predatory” face, with protruding gray eyes and gapped incisors set in a jut jaw built to scowl. But the “beaten-up foghorn” voice, scarred from carbolic acid swallowed as a child, had softened a bit in recent months after repeated paintings of his vocal cords with silver nitrate. Partial though he was to violets on his desk and to lively discussions of poetry, history, and the rationalist edition of the New Testament edited by Thomas Jefferson, at heart Truscott remained “one of the really tough generals,” as the cartoonist and infantryman Bill Mauldin described him. From an enlisted iconoclast, that was staunch praise.

  Truscott’s was an unorthodox path to high command. His father, originally a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail, had abandoned the range to become both the physician and the pharmacist in Chatfield, Texas; an unlucky dabbler in racehorse and farmland investments, he later moved the family to Oklahoma. Lucian at sixteen claimed he was eighteen to win a teaching job in a hinterland schoolhouse, walking six miles to and fro each day. A voracious reader who renounced strong drink, tobacco, and profanity, he eventually was promoted to principal. Yet not until he joined the Army and won a cavalry officer’s commission in 1917, at age twenty-two, did he find his true calling. Slowly ascending through the ranks between the wars, Truscott won admirers for both his professional competence and his skills as a polo player. Army life also put rough edges on the former teacher, who soon drank, smoked, and swore profusely. For the past two years in Africa and Italy, he had had few peers as a combat commander, demonstrating what one high-ranking comrade described as “willpower, decision, and drive”; Eisenhower still lamented his inability to get Truscott released from Anzio for OVERLORD. Truscott’s generalship stressed speed, vigor, violence, and clarity; staff papers that displeased him provoked the blunt, scrawled epithet “Bullshit.” Convinced that American soldiers were “hunters by instinct,” he urged his officers to “make every soldier go into every fight feeling like a hunter.”

  To his wife, Sarah, waiting in Virginia, Truscott had confessed in recent letters how “horribly lonesome” he felt. He regretted being so “far removed from the softening touch of women and home.” Before leaving his quarters on Catoctin he took a moment to write her again, beginning, as he always began, “Beloved wife”:

  On the eve of every major undertaking in this war I have always written to you so that you would know that if anything should happen to me you were in my mind and in my heart.… I would live no part of my life over if I had the opportunity. My only real regret is that I have not made you happier and your life easier.

  He stalked from the cabin to join Hewitt on the bridge, jaw set, thick shoulders slightly hunched, the hunter looking for prey.

  * * *

  The enemy never had a chance. In rubber boats and kayaks, and on surfboards with electric motors, three thousand American and French commandos swept onto coastal fortifications and two offshore islands. Much of the littoral was sparsely defended; some hilltop pillboxes were found to brandish only Quaker guns made from streetlight poles. Allied deceivers dropped hundreds of rubber “paradummies” with noisemakers and colored lights far from the actual assault, and electronic simulators created ghost convoys where no ships sailed. So befuddled were the Germans that for days defenders braced against an expected attack at Genoa, two hundred miles northeast.

  The usual anarchy and intrepidity attended the airborne assault. From ten Italian airfields, nine thousand paratroopers and glidermen made for the Riviera. Thick inland fog caused six of nine pathfinder teams to miss their drop zones; more than half of the main jump force in predawn drops also drifted wide. Some sticks fell ten miles or more from their targets, landing on rooftops and in vineyards around St.-Tropez. Despite the muddle, airborne casualties were light—only 230, or under 3 percent—and the Germans were further discomposed.

  At eight A.M., eleven American assault battalions swept ashore in a flat calm, hidden from enemy gunners by summer haze and six thousand tons of smoke spewed from special landing craft fitted with airplane propellers to spread the miasma. At Bougnon Bay, in the center of the assault, discouraged Osttruppen and superannuated Germans facing the 45th Division folded quickly. On the left, the 3rd Division also clattered through the dunes at Cavalaire Bay and across the St.-Tropez Peninsula.

  Among those at the point of the spear with the 3rd Division’s 15th Infantry Regiment was a short and skinny—5'7˝, 138 pounds—staff sergeant who on Sicily and at Anzio had already earned a reputation for élan, and would soon be deemed “the greatest folk hero of Texas since Davy Crockett.” Audie Leon Murphy, Army Serial Number 18093707, was the seventh child of an itinerant farmer who owned a milk cow and little else. A fifth-grade dropout who at one point during the Depression lived in a rail boxcar, Murphy later said, “I can’t remember ever being young in my life.” He had learned to shoot by plinking squirrels—“little greys,” he called them—and became proficient enough to hit a darting rabbit from a moving car. His sister forged his enlistment papers in 1942, falsely attesting that he was eighteen rather than seventeen. He had fainted during the induction immunizations.

  Sharpshooting now served him well. Murphy and his rifle platoon were making for St.-Tropez at ten A.M., when German machine-gun fire rattled down a rocky draw, stopping the advance with the incivility of a slammed door. Murphy scampered back to the
beach, grabbed a light machine gun from a dawdling gunner, and dragged it back uphill to his men. With his commandeered gun, grenades, and a carbine, he killed two enemy gunners atop a knoll and enticed a white flag from a second nest. But when Private First Class Lattie Tipton stood to take the surrender, a sniper shot him dead. Enraged, Murphy killed the surrendering Germans with grenades before seizing an enemy machine gun; firing from the hip, he exterminated two more enemy fighting positions. “My whole being,” he later wrote, “is concentrated on killing.” Here surely was Truscott’s instinctive hunter. When the shooting finally ceased, Murphy slipped a pack under Tipton’s head as a pillow, then sat down and wept. The Army would award ASN 18093707 the Distinguished Service Cross.

  Only on the invasion right flank did the enemy stiffen, particularly along the Gulf of Fréjus. Napoléon had landed on this shore after returning from Egypt in 1799, and fifteen years later embarked from the same beach for his exile on Elba, complaining that the French mob was as “fickle as a weathercock.” Now, thick mines, barbed-wire tangles, and strongpoints hidden in villas and seaside gazebos proved irksome, although hardly as lethal as Admiral Moon had feared. Secret Navy drone boats—radio-controlled landing craft packed with four tons of explosives to blow holes in beach obstacles—failed abjectly, possibly because German radios used the same frequencies. The boats “milled around at high speed in crazy directions, completely on their own,” a witness reported; some reversed course toward the offshore fleet and had to be sunk by destroyers. “As a general proposition,” a Navy demolition officer reported, “the drone boats did not function.”