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

by Rick Atkinson

  Another lethal legacy from the Italian campaign was the M-12, an ungainly 155mm gun mounted on a tank chassis that was capable of keeping pace with armored spearheads during the gallop across France. On a single day in Aachen, M-12s fired sixty-four rounds almost point-blank to demolish nine buildings, including a movie theater occupied by a company of enemy riflemen, every one of whom was killed or wounded. As 2nd Battalion edged closer to the rubble that once was the town hall, with its proud façade of German rulers, an M-12 clanked onto Wilhelmstrasse; there a tank destroyer fired sixteen rounds to bore a hole through a house wall. The 155mm gun then used the firing loophole to throw seven rounds down Hindenburgstrasse into the State Theater, five blocks away. German troops in the stronghold pelted west toward the cathedral.

  Across the city the Americans crept at a steady, sanguinary fifty feet an hour, shooting, dynamiting, grenading. National Socialist slogans on a broken wall reminded the faithful, auf Deutsch, “For this we thank our Führer,” and, “You are nothing, the state is all.” GIs chalked their own scatological exegesis. Drew Middleton described a soldier firing into the street from a back bedroom, where eiderdown quilts in red silk covered the beds. “The sons of bitching bastards,” the GI muttered as he emptied his rifle. “The fucking, fucking bastards.”

  Knock ’em all down.

  * * *

  As the house-to-house ruination proceeded, the imminent merger of the 1st and 30th Divisions outside Aachen had hit a snag. Savage German artillery ripped up the ridgelines, searched the dells, and scorched suburban streets—enemy observers could see the Americans plainly—forcing GIs to shelter in captured pillboxes from daybreak until dusk. Not even a radio antenna could protrude without being snipped off by whizzing shell fragments. The 30th Division had suffered two thousand casualties since beginning its assault, and the 1st had lost another eight hundred. Lieutenant General Hodges, the First Army commander, grew impatient and then choleric, proposing to sack Hobbs, the commander of the 30th Division. “He hasn’t moved an inch in four days,” Hodges complained. “We have to close that gap.”

  Hodges also castigated the XIX Corps commander, Major General Charles H. Corlett, for shooting two thousand rounds of reserve artillery ammunition. Raised on a ranch in southern Colorado and known as “Cowboy Pete,” Corlett had commanded assaults in both the Aleutians and the South Pacific; at Aachen he had already thrown in his last reserves, converted engineers to trigger-pullers, and contemplated shoving cooks and clerks into the line. When Hodges kept pressing the point—“When are you going to close the gap?” he demanded—Corlett jumped into his jeep and drove to First Army headquarters. Unable to find the army commander, he instead roared at the staff, “If you don’t think we are fighting, I will take you down and show you.”

  Worse was yet to come, and much of it would fall on the 1st Division’s 16th Infantry. “Every hour seems interminable,” Captain Joe Dawson, commander of G Company, had written his family in Waco earlier that week. “Long, long ago I entered this land of horror.” In fact just over four months had passed since Dawson landed at Omaha Beach to fight across Easy Red and up the Colleville bluffs; for that passage, he received the Distinguished Service Cross. Since then he had shed twenty-five pounds as well as any illusions he still harbored after the campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. “For over two years,” he had recently written his sister, “I’ve calloused my emotions with countless experiences that will never be recalled to memory if I can find power to erase them forever.”

  Son of a Baptist preacher and just thirty-one, he looked older. “His face is bony,” wrote W. C. Heinz, a reporter for the New York Sun who was with Dawson at Aachen, “and he has large ears and very brown eyes.” Three miles northeast of Aachen cathedral, G and I Companies occupied a ridge eight hundred feet high and four hundred yards long, with clear vistas not only of the city but also of adjacent Belgium and Holland. Maps and magazines lay scattered on a table in Dawson’s pillbox command post, along with a candle, a kerosene lamp, two field phones in leather cases, and a small radio that could pick up Bruno and the Swinging Tigers on Radio Berlin. Soldiers in G Company debated with theological intensity whether the malodorous German corpses along the line deterred enemy frontal attacks. One GI advised, “Just move the ones that are within ten feet.”

  The past week had brought “periods of quiet and periods of great noise,” Heinz wrote; but with five hundred shells hitting the ridge each day—one every three minutes—tranquil moments had grown rare. Great noise returned before dawn on Sunday, October 15, when 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division troops filtered onto the ridge from the east with orders to break the siege of Aachen. “We could hear them singing rousing marching songs as they came through the woods,” a sergeant later recalled. Mortars and six artillery battalions blunted the initial assault, but at dawn a dozen panzers stood in a meadow below the pillboxes. By ten A.M. several Tigers had churned uphill through a railroad cut, raking the Americans with main-gun and machine-gun fire. GIs unable to even peer from their foxholes defecated in empty ration cans and flung their scat at the enemy. “G and I Companies are being overrun with tanks and infantry,” the regimental log recorded at 12:44 P.M., then added fourteen minutes later, “Situation critical … Situation very critical.” Dawson called artillery onto his own command post, every concussive thud “like a body being thrown against the door.” P-47 fighters roared in at twenty-five feet just before two P.M., guns winking along their wings, and the gray tide ebbed, leaving more dead to stink up the slope. Bing Crosby and Judy Garland sang from the little radio.

  At nine P.M. the attackers again advanced, under hissing chandelier flares that stretched the panzer shadows into long, lupine shapes. Two tanks closed to within ten yards of G Company’s line before massed artillery again bounced them back. Fires burned in the trees and among the diced bodies. “Much moaning and groaning out in the wooded area,” an Army account noted. More German assaults followed, with bayonets fixed. When an officer warned General Huebner of mounting casualties, the division commander drew on his pipe and replied, “If higher authority decides that this is the place and time that the 1st Division is going to cease to exist, I guess this is where we cease to exist.”

  As the enemy attacks grew feebler, two dozen men from G Company counterattacked with grenades, tommy guns, and their own fixed bayonets, slaughtering all enemies lurking along the line. More than two hundred German corpses were counted across a quarter-mile slope, but it was the sight of a dead GI that made Dawson buckle for a moment. “He doesn’t know why, and I don’t know why, and you don’t know why,” the captain told Heinz. “You want to know what I think? I think it stinks.” Dawson put his head in his hands and sobbed.

  Then the silver voice of Lily Pons, the coloratura soprano, came from the radio. Dawson abruptly straightened. “Shut up. I want to hear this,” he said. “It’s the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé.”

  “Puccini,” said a lieutenant in the command post.

  “No, not Puccini,” Dawson said. “Not Puccini, but I can’t remember the name of the guy.”

  At 4:15 P.M. on Monday, October 16, 30th Division scouts edged from the southwest corner of Würselen to meet comrades from the 18th Infantry scrabbling down from the Ravelsberg. Aachen’s fate was sealed, though German efforts to crack the encirclement would persist for several days. By one count, the enemy had lost sixty-three of ninety panzers thrown into the battle.

  No, not Puccini. Lakmé, an opera in three acts set in British India, was by Léo Delibes.

  The tally for G Company totaled forty-eight men, one-third of the unit. Joe Dawson had more memories to erase. Gesturing outside his pillbox to the scorched ridge that would subsequently bear his name in Army nomenclature, Dawson told Heinz, “We died right here.” To his family he wrote, “My nerves are somewhat shattered.”

  * * *

  In keeping with the Führer’s wishes, Aachen’s death throes were painful and protracted. From his headquarters a couple mile
s northeast of the cathedral in the five-story Palast Hotel Quellenhof, once the kaiser’s country home, the dutiful Colonel Wilck proclaimed, “We shall fight to the last man, the last shell, the last bullet.” The hotel billiard room, beauty parlor, and children’s dining room all became strongpoints, and Wilck’s men hauled a disassembled 20mm gun to the second floor, piece by piece, then rebuilt it to cover approaches through Farwick Park. Into the park on Wednesday, October 18, swept the 26th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John T. Corley, the Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants, whose combat decorations over the war’s course would include two Distinguished Service Crosses and eight Silver Stars.

  At seven A.M., as mortars pummeled the German line south of the tennis courts, an M-12 rumbled down Roland Street, flanked by tanks and tank destroyers spitting fire into the smart houses fronting the boulevard. Thirty rounds of 155mm fire soon made a shambles of the Palast and the nearby Kurhaus spa; a U.S. platoon rushed across the half-moon driveway into the hotel lobby, killing two dozen defenders in a brisk exchange of grenades that shredded the hunting-scene oils in the reading room. Wilck had retreated hastily to a stout bunker at the north end of Lousbergstrasse, where he held out for three more days, assuring Berlin by radio that “the defenders of Aachen will prepare for their last battle” even as they donated ten thousand marks to charity in a gesture of solidarity with the German Volk. “We shall fight on,” he vowed.

  The colonel instead had packed his bags. On Saturday morning, overzealous GIs shot two German emissaries who emerged from the bunker carrying a white flag. Two more figures soon crept out—nervous American prisoners this time—to inform Corley of Wilck’s capitulation. At noon he emerged, a slender man with a pointed chin and hair swept back from his widow’s peak, with four hundred bitter-enders behind him. “They marched smartly in column,” wrote Don Whitehead, “all well-groomed, with shining black boots.” After signing a formal surrender, Wilck told Corley, “Everything belongs to the Americans that was German.” Permitted to bid a brief farewell to his men, the colonel scrambled onto a jeep hood. “I am speaking to you at a painful moment,” he said. “The American commander has told me that I cannot give you the Sieg Heil or Heil Hitler. But we can still do it in our hearts.” As Wilck climbed down for removal to the cages, he added, “I don’t believe in miracles any longer.”

  Nearly twelve thousand Germans had been captured by the 30th and 1st Divisions, with many hundreds killed. American casualties approached six thousand, among them hundreds treated for combat exhaustion. Joe Dawson, wholly spent, was evacuated to the United States later in the month. “These bitter tragic months of terrible war leave one morally as well as physically exhausted,” he wrote his family. Also sent home was General Corlett, the XIX Corps commander, whom Hodges removed ostensibly on grounds of failing health. Corlett, who called his relief “just plain heartbreak,” told his staff as he departed, “Anyone who sasses the army commander and disobeys an order ought to be relieved.… This is the price one must pay.” He was replaced by the capable Major General Raymond S. McLain, who had commanded the 45th Division artillery in Sicily and Italy before taking over the 90th Division in Normandy. A former Oklahoma National Guard soldier with a sixth-grade education, McLain was the only Guardsman to command an Army corps during the war, as well as the only officer without at least a modicum of higher education.

  * * *

  No one would take the waters in Aachen for quite some time. Visitors piled up metaphors to convey the desolation. The city was “as dead as a Roman ruin,” an intelligence officer declared, “but unlike a ruin it has none of the grace of gradual decay.” The reporter Iris Carpenter wrote that Aachen was “as dead as yesterday.” By one calculation, 83 percent of Aachen’s houses had been destroyed or damaged. Most streets were impassable except on foot. A horse carcass sprawled in the Palast porte-cochère, and medics laid German dead from the hotel and spa on the beaten grass in Farwick Park. An old woman flagged down passing GIs and asked, “Can you tell me, please, when they will take the dead from my house?” A soldier shook his head and said in a Texas drawl, “These ruins. These people.”

  A plump, sooty man wandering the streets proved to be the bishop of Aachen. An inspection of his cathedral found the graveyard uprooted and the stained glass shattered. But an Allied bomb that pierced the apse had failed to detonate, and six pious boys had formed a fire brigade to extinguish flames on the roof. Charlemagne’s bones lay unmolested though hardly undisturbed. GIs erected a large sign bearing a paraphrase from Hitler, and the English translation: “Gebt mir fünf Jahre und ihr werdet Deutschland nicht wiedererkennen.” Give me five years and you will not recognize Germany again.

  “We can force the Boche to their knees if we go about it the right way,” Collins wrote. But what was the right way? Just as Aachen had offered a proving ground for modes of destruction, now this first German city to be captured would serve as a laboratory for military occupation policies. A curfew was imposed from nine P.M. to six A.M., no one could travel more than six kilometers from home without permission, and gatherings of more than five people were prohibited, except for worship services—a fine irony given the battered condition of the churches. The use of cameras, binoculars, and carrier pigeons was banned. Lists of known pigeoneers in western Germany were compiled—it was said that Heinrich Himmler himself, the Reichsführer-SS, was a pigeon fancier—and “clipping details” visited local lofts to snip the birds’ flight feathers, leaving them earthbound until their next molt. As an added precaution, a “falconry unit” in England stood ready to deploy to the Continent if enemy agents showed signs of clandestine avian communication.

  “We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors,” Eisenhower had declared in late September. Even before the broken glass was swept from the cathedral nave, however, complications arose that would perplex the conquerors to the end of the war and beyond. The Combined Chiefs, for example, decreed that “it is not intended to import food supplies into Germany,” yet that would consign millions to starvation. The chiefs also ordered the exclusion from office of “active Nazis” and “ardent Nazi sympathizers,” but to identify such scoundrels proved difficult, and to run Germany without them sometimes impossible. During the first occupation months, more than fifty key city employees in Aachen were party members, including the only man still alive who understood the region’s electrical grid.

  An Army study also concluded that two blunders made during the assault had had unintended psychological consequences: an ultimatum had been issued to the commander of a besieged city without affording him an “honorable” way to capitulate, thus prolonging his resistance; and that ultimatum had been made public without recognizing the mortal threat of Nazi reprisals against the families of surrendering soldiers. Indeed, it was in an effort to forestall such retribution that Colonel Wilck had insisted that his capitulation document include a clause attesting to the exhaustion of German food and ammunition stocks.

  Still, Aachen was theirs, the “first German city to be taken by an invading army in over a hundred years,” Drew Middleton noted. Yet no soldier picking a path through the drifted rubble needed to be told that a hundred more German cities remained untaken—and a thousand towns, and ten thousand villages, each potentially as dead as yesterday.

  “Do Not Let Us Pretend We Are All Right”

  THE autumnal struggles at Arnhem and Aachen leached any undue optimism from the Allied high command, except among those too far from the battlefield to know better. The Charlie-Charlies in October ordered SHAEF to immediately establish direct links with Moscow “in anticipation of [the] approach of Allied and Russian forces within the very near future,” even though those forces remained more than five hundred miles apart. George Marshall arrived in France for a visit and proclaimed, “We have them licked. All they have is a thin shell and when we break that, they are finished.” Beguiled by dubious intelligence to the effect that organized German resistance was unlikely to last beyond Dec
ember 1, the Army chief subsequently advocated a full-bore offensive to win the war in Europe by year’s end. Marshall proposed “playing everything for a conclusion,” even as he began earmarking divisions to fight in the Pacific.

  Eisenhower took pains to dampen such expectations. “We have facing us now one of our most difficult periods of the entire European war,” he warned Marshall in early October. “Deteriorating weather is going to place an increased strain on morale.” To his mother in Kansas, he wrote: “Most people that write to me these days want to know when the war in Europe is going to be over.… I wish I knew. It is a long, hard, dreary piece of work.”

  Eisenhower now commanded fifty-eight divisions, including those in southern France, yet a month after crossing the German frontier no Allied soldier stood deeper than twelve miles into Germany. Enemy casualties were accruing at four thousand a day, but Allied losses since June 6 equaled a third of a million. Logistics were “in a bad state,” the supreme commander told Marshall, “reminiscent of the early days in Tunisia.” Half a dozen U.S. divisions remained in the rear because of insufficient means to support them on the battlefront; moreover, SHAEF logisticians calculated that even if the American armies reached the Rhine near the Ruhr, no more than twenty divisions could be sustained in combat.

  To further explain his plight, Eisenhower and his logisticians composed a long essay for the Pentagon on combat realities in Europe. Uniforms wore out “at a rate almost incomprehensible to civilians,” twice as fast as U.S. clothing manufacturers could make them. Overcoats, shoes, mess kits, and blankets were also consumed at double the War Department’s estimates. Food demands through the winter—even if the war ended, soldiers still had to eat—would require the shipment of 3.5 billion pounds from the United States, equivalent to 340 loaded Liberty ships. “Beef requirements for European theater will call for the slaughtering of … approximately 4,000 [cattle] every day,” Eisenhower wrote. “Dehydrated egg requirements amount to the equivalent of 2½ billion fresh eggs, or a daily requirement of 6½ million.” Tent canvas was short by 100 million square feet. Just the demand for paper was staggering: the U.S. Army since the liberation of Paris had been forced to print ten million maps on the flip side of captured German maps. (Many depicted southern England, having been produced for Operation SEA LION, the aborted 1940 invasion of Britain; sheafs of these had been found in an abandoned enemy depot in Liège.)