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

by Rick Atkinson

  Except in the crow’s-feet crinkling his eyes and the deepening furrows on his forehead, few could see the strain from years of decisions that by now had consigned tens of thousands to their deaths. Only in a handwritten reply to a waspish letter from Mamie did he let the mask slip a bit as he began his fifty-fifth year. “We’ve now been apart for 2½ years and at a time under conditions that make separations painful and hard to bear,” he wrote. “The load of responsibility I carry would be intolerable unless I could have the belief that there is someone who wants me to come home—for good. Don’t forget that I take a beating, every day.”

  The miles slid past, and with them the day. At dusk the Cadillac crossed the Belgian border and soon rolled into Luxembourg City. Here Bradley had just shifted the 12th Army Group command post from damp tents in Verdun to steam-heated stone buildings in the grand duchy. Only twelve miles from the German border—hardly enough distance to safely position a regimental headquarters, much less that of an army group—the capital was still reeling from four years of occupation. Overrun in less than a day in 1940, Luxembourg had been integrated into the Third Reich, and relentlessly germanized: the occupiers renamed the country Gau Moselland, changed the street names, banned the local French dialect, and conscripted ten thousand men into the Wehrmacht. Now Adolf Hitler Strasse had once again become the Avenue de la Liberté, and banners above the boulevard proclaimed, “We wish to remain what we are.”

  Bradley’s office on the Place de Metz occupied a brownstone belonging to the state railway, but the limousine continued across the Pétrusse River, where tanneries, breweries, and shoemaker shops lined the bottoms near the ruined buttresses of Count Siegfried’s thousand-year-old castle. On the Avenue de la Gare, the two generals climbed out at the Hôtel Alfa, a seven-story building with a mansard roof and balconies overlooking the train station.

  Here in the dining room, to Eisenhower’s surprise and evident delight, a party had been organized, with martinis, champagne, and an enormous four-star cake baked by a pastry chef in Paris. An orchestra played into the night, dreamy songs from another time they hardly remembered, and for a few sweet hours the war went away, even with the enemy but a dozen miles to the east and still scheming to reclaim Gau Moselland. Happy birthday, they sang, happy birthday, dear Ike, raising their glasses to a man they trusted and admired, the very man who would lead them to victory and then would lead them home.

  The Worst Place of Any

  IN late October, the U.S. First Army headquarters moved into winter quarters in the Belgian town of Spa. A flourishing resort since the 1500s—Karl Baedeker had called it “the oldest European watering-place of any importance”—Spa reached its zenith in the eighteenth century with visits by Peter the Great and other potentates keen to promenade beneath the elms or to marinate in the sixteen mineral springs infused with iron and carbonic acid. The town declined after the French Revolution, then revived itself, as such towns do—in Spa’s case, by peddling varnished woodware and a liqueur known as Elixir de Spa. Here the Imperial German Army had placed its field headquarters during the last weeks of World War I: in the Grand Hôtel Britannique on the Rue de la Sauvenière, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg concluded that the cause was lost. The last of the Hohenzollerns to wear the crown, Kaiser Wilhelm II, arrived here from Berlin in October 1918, to fantasize about unleashing the army on his own rebellious Volk; instead he chose abdication and exile in the Netherlands.

  Now GIs hauled the roulette wheels and chemin-de-fer tables from the casino on the Rue Royale, replacing them with field desks and triple bunks beneath the crystal chandeliers. “We’ll take the ‘hit’ out of Hitler,” they sang. Tests by Army engineers confirmed that every one of the city’s eleven drinking water sources was polluted, but a decent black market meal could be had at the Hôtel de Portugal—horsemeat with mushroom caps seemed to be a Walloon specialty in these straitened times. As for the thirsty, each general in First Army received a monthly consignment of a case of gin and half-cases of scotch and bourbon; lesser officers combined their allotments in a nightly ritual to make twelve quarts of martinis for the Hôtel Britannique mess, a grand ballroom with mirrors on three walls and exquisite windows filling the fourth. Headquarters generals also requisitioned the hilltop mansion of a Liège steel magnate as their bivouac; Belgian guests occasionally were invited to movie screenings in a nearby school, where soldiers tried to explain in broken French the nuances of Gaslight and A Guy Named Joe. Drew Middleton reported that fleeing German troops had left behind in an Italian restaurant a recording of “Lili Marlene”; GIs played the disc incessantly while assuring skeptical Belgians that “the song had been taken prisoner … and could no longer be considered German.” Almost hourly, the clatter of a V-1 bound for Antwerp from one of the launch sites in the Reich could be heard in the heavens above Spa.

  Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges moved his office into Hindenburg’s old Britannique suite and settled in to ponder how to wage a late autumn campaign in northern Europe. Hodges was an old-school soldier: he had flunked out of West Point—undone by plebe geometry—and had risen through the ranks after enlisting as a private in 1905. The son of a newspaper publisher from southern Georgia, he was of average height but so erect that he appeared taller, with a domed forehead and prominent ears. Army records described the color of his close-set eyes as “#10 Blue.” “God gave him a face that always looked pessimistic,” Eisenhower once observed, and even Hodges complained that a portrait commissioned by Life in early September made him appear “a little too sad.”

  A crack shot and big-game hunter—caribou and moose in Canada, elephants and tigers in Indochina—Hodges had earned two Purple Heart citations after being gassed in World War I but tore them up as excessively “sissy.” He smoked Old Golds in a long holder, favored bourbon and Dubonnet on ice with a dash of bitters, and messed formally every night, in jacket, necktie, and combat boots. He had been seen weeping by the road as trucks passed carrying wounded soldiers from the front. “I wish everybody could see them,” he said in his soft drawl. One division commander said of him: “Unexcitable. A killer. A gentleman.” A reporter wrote that even in battle “he sounds like a Georgia farmer leaning on the fence, discussing his crops.” Bradley, who as Hodges’s subordinate used to shoot skeet or hunt quail with him on Sunday mornings at Fort Benning, later recalled, “He was very dignified and I can’t imagine anyone getting familiar with him.” Now his superior, Bradley still called him “sir.”

  First Army was the largest American fighting force in Europe, and Hodges was the wrong general to command it. Capable enough during the pursuit across France, he now was worn by illness, fatigue, and his own shortcomings—“an old man playing the game by the rules of the book, and a little confused as to what it was all about,” a War Department observer wrote. “There was little of the vital fighting spirit.” Even the Army’s official histories would describe his fall campaign as “lacking in vigor and imagination,” and among senior commanders he was “the least disposed to make any attempt to understand logistic problems.” He was “pretty slow making the big decisions,” a staff officer conceded, and he rarely left Spa to visit the front; for nearly two months the 30th Division’s General Hobbs never laid eyes on him. Peremptory and inarticulate, Hodges “refused to discuss orders, let alone argue about them,” one military officer later wrote. He sometimes insisted that situation reports show even platoon dispositions—a finicky level of detail far below an army commander’s legitimate focus—and he complained in his war diary that “too many of these battalions and regiments of ours have tried to flank and skirt and never meet the enemy straight on.” He believed it “safer, sounder, and in the end, quicker to keep smashing ahead.” “Straight on” and “smashing ahead” would be Hodges’s battlefield signature, with all that such frontal tactics implied.

  Peevish and insulated, ever watchful for hints of disloyalty, Hodges showed an intolerance for perceived failure that was harsh even by the exacting standards of th
e U.S. Army. Of thirteen corps and division commanders relieved in 12th Army Group during the war, ten would fall from grace in First Army, the most recent being General Corlett of XIX Corps after Aachen. When the frayed commander of the 8th Division requested brief leave after his son was killed in action, Hodges sacked him. The Army historian Forrest Pogue described one cashiered officer waiting by the road for a ride to the rear, belongings piled about him “like a mendicant.… The sickness of heart was there, and the look of tired, beaten, exhausted helplessness could not be effaced.”

  Such a command climate bred inordinate caution, suppressing both initiative and élan, and First Army’s senior staff made it worse. “Aggressive, touchy, and high-strung,” Bradley later wrote of the staff he had created before ascending to 12th Army Group. “Critical, unforgiving, and resentful of all authority but its own.” Three rivalrous figures played central roles in this unhappy family: Major General William B. Kean, the able, ruthless chief of staff, who was privately dubbed “Captain Bligh” and to whom Hodges ceded great authority; Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson, the grim, chain-smoking operations officer nicknamed Tubby but also called Iago; and Colonel Benjamin A. Dickson, the brilliant, turbulent intelligence chief long known as Monk, a histrionic man of smoldering grievances.

  Not least of First Army’s quirks as it prepared to renew the drive toward the Rhine was what one correspondent called a “slightly angry bafflement” at continued German resistance, a resentment that the enemy did not know he was beaten. As this colicky command group settled into Spa and prepared for the coming campaign, they all agreed that they would simply have to take the “hit” out of Hitler.

  * * *

  On October 28, Eisenhower reiterated his plan for winning the war. “The enemy has continued to reinforce his forces in the West,” he cabled his lieutenants. “Present indications are that he intends to make the strongest possible stand on the West Wall, in the hope of preventing the war spreading to German soil.” Antwerp, he declared, remained “our first and most important immediate objective.” Canadian First Army troops had captured Breskens a week earlier, and the dwindling enemy pocket on the Scheldt’s southern bank seemed certain to collapse within days if not hours. Canadian troops also were advancing along the north edge of the estuary; German defenders trapped on the Beveland Peninsula and Walcheren Island had been reduced to little more than a “White Bread” division comprising soldiers with digestive ailments. Eisenhower finally felt confident that the entire Scheldt soon would be cleansed of Germans, and Antwerp open to shipping shortly thereafter.

  With that accomplished, he added, the final battle for Europe would unfold in “three general phases”: an unsparing struggle west of the Rhine; the seizure of bridgeheads over the river; and finally a mortal dagger thrust into the heart of Germany. Seven Allied armies would advance eastward apace, arrayed from north to south: the Canadian First; the British Second; the U.S. Ninth, First, Third, and Seventh; and the French First. The enemy’s industrial centers in the Ruhr and the Saar remained paramount objectives in the north and center, respectively, with Berlin as the ultimate target.

  First Army’s capture of Aachen and breach of the Siegfried Line in the adjacent Stolberg corridor left barely twenty miles to traverse before the Rhine. Here lay the most promising frontage on the entire Allied line. Hodges, with assistance from Simpson’s Ninth Army, was to sweep forward another ten miles to the Roer River, overrun Düren on the far bank, then press on toward Cologne and the Rhine. Joe Collins’s VII Corps would again lead the attack, but first V Corps on his right was to clear out the Hürtgen Forest and capture the high-ground village of Schmidt, providing First Army with more maneuver room and forestalling any counterattack into VII Corps’ right flank by enemies who might be skulking in the forest dark.

  Four compact woodland tracts formed the Hürtgen, eleven miles long and five miles wide in all. Forest masters for generations had meticulously pruned undergrowth and regulated logging, leaving perfectly aligned firs as straight and regular as soldiers on parade, in what one visitor called “a picture forest.” But some of its acreage grew wild, particularly along creek beds and in the deep ravines where even at midday sunlight penetrated only as a dim rumor. Here was the Grimm forest primeval, a place of shades. “I never saw a wood so thick with trees as the Hürtgen,” a GI later wrote. “It turned out to be the worst place of any.”

  The Hürtgenwald had been fortified as part of the Siegfried Line, beginning in 1938. German engineers more recently had pruned timber for fields of fire, built log bunkers with interlocking kill zones, and sowed mines by the thousands on trails and firebreaks; along one especially vicious trace, a mine could be found every eight paces for three miles. The 9th Division in late September had learned how lethal the Hürtgen could be when trying to cross the forest as part of the initial VII Corps effort to outflank Aachen. One regiment took four days to move a mile; another needed five. By mid-October the division was still far short of Schmidt and had suffered 4,500 casualties to gain three thousand yards—a man down every two feet—and no battalion in the two spearhead regiments could field more than three hundred men. More and more of the perfect groves were gashed yellow with machine-gun bullets or reduced to charred stumps—“no birds, no sighing winds, no carpeted paths,” Forrest Pogue reported. A commander who offered his men $5 for every tree found unscarred by shellfire got no takers. Pogue was reminded of the claustrophobic bloodletting of May 1864 in another haunted woodland, one in eastern Virginia: “There was a desolation,” he wrote, “such as one associated with the Battle of the Wilderness.”

  Nearly half of the 6,500 German defenders from the 275th Division had been killed, wounded, or captured in checking the 9th Division; reinforcements included two companies of Düren policemen known as “family-fathers” because most were at least forty-five years old. More bunkers were built, more barbed wire uncoiled, more mines sown, including nonmetallic shoe and box mines, and lethal round devices said to be “no larger than an ointment box.” Enemy officers considered it unlikely that the Americans would persist in attacking through what one German commander called “extensive, thick, and nearly trackless forest terrain.”

  That underestimated American obstinacy. The Hürtgen neutralized U.S. military advantages in armor, artillery, airpower, and mobility, but Hodges was convinced that no First Army drive to the Roer was possible without first securing the forest and capturing Schmidt, from which every approach to the river was visible. He likened the menace on his right flank to that posed by German forces in the Argonne Forest to the American left flank during General John J. Pershing’s storied offensive on the Meuse in the autumn of 1918. This specious historical analogy—the Germans could hardly mass enough armor in the cramped Hürtgen to pose a mortal threat—received little critical scrutiny within First Army, not least because of reluctance to challenge Hodges. In truth, “the most likely way to make the Hürtgen a menace to the American Army,” the historian Russell F. Weigley later wrote, “was to send American troops attacking into its depths.”

  No consideration was given to bypassing or screening the forest, or to outflanking Schmidt from the south by sending V Corps up the vulnerable attack corridor through Monschau, fifteen miles below Aachen. Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind the Hürtgen battle plan. “All we could do was sit back and pray to God that nothing would happen,” General Thorson, the operations officer, later lamented. “It was a horrible business, the forest.… We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn’t turn loose.” Even Joe Collins, who enjoyed favorite-son status with Hodges, conceded that he “would not question Courtney.” After the war Collins said:

  We had to go into the forest in order to secure our right flank.… Nobody was enthusiastic about fighting there, but what was the alternative?… If we would have turned loose of the Hürtgen and let the Germans roam there, they could have hit my flank.

  No less regrettabl
e was a misreading of German topography. Seven dams built for flood control, drinking water, and hydroelectric power stood near the headwaters of the Roer, which arose in Belgium and spilled east through the German highlands before flowing north across the Cologne plain and eventually emptying into the Maas southeast of Eindhoven. Five of the seven dams lacked the capacity to substantially affect the river’s regime, but the other two—the Schwammenauel and the Urft—impounded sizable lakes that together held up to forty billion gallons. In early October, the 9th Division’s intelligence officer had warned that German mischief could generate “great destructive flood waves” as far downstream as Holland. Colonel Dickson, First Army’s intelligence chief, disagreed. Opening the floodgates or destroying the dams would cause “at the most local floodings for about five days,” Dickson asserted. No terrain analysis was undertaken, nor were the dams mentioned in tactical plans. “We had not studied that particular part of the zone,” Collins later acknowledged. “That was an intelligence failure, a real combat intelligence failure.”

  By late October, as First Army coiled to resume its attack, unnerving details about the Roer and its waterworks had begun to accumulate. A German prisoner disclosed that arrangements had been made to ring Düren’s church bells if the dams upstream were blown. A German engineer interrogated in Spa intimated that a wall of water could barrel down the Roer. Inside an Aachen safe, an American lieutenant found Wehrmacht plans for demolishing several dams; by one calculation, a hundred million metric tons of water could flood the Roer valley for twenty miles, transforming the narrow river to a half-mile-wide torrent. A top secret memo to Hodges from Ninth Army’s General Simpson on November 5 cited a Corps of Engineers study titled “Summaries of the Military Use of the Roer River Reservoir System,” which concluded that the enemy could “maintain the Roer River at flood stage for approximately ten days … or can produce a two-day flood of catastrophic proportions.” An American attack over the Roer might be crippled, with tactical bridges swept away and any troops east of the river isolated and annihilated. Obviously neither the First Army nor the Ninth, farther downstream, could safely cross the Roer and make for the Rhine until the dams were neutralized. Simpson proposed to Hodges that he immediately “block these [enemy] capabilities.” A flanking attack toward Schmidt from Monschau in the south would also permit capture of Schwammenauel, Urft, and their sisters.