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

by Rick Atkinson

  Almost half a mile wide, the Moselle rose farther until water lapped through villages fronting the river. Floodwaters inundated German minefields, which helped eight battalions from the 90th Division get a purchase on the far bank, but building a bridge to carry tanks took days. Engineers blue with cold and wearing flak jackets struggled to hold bridge pontoons in place against the bully current and crashing artillery. “The air seemed filled with white tracers,” a nineteen-year-old soldier in the 5th Division reported. “Men would get up in front of me, head toward the trees and, as a string of tracers would pass through them, [fall] to the ground or into the stream.”

  “Groans, suffering, and pain. Men shot to pieces,” a surgical technician entered in his diary. “All wards were completely filled, also the barber shop, supply tent, pharmacy, and laboratory tents. And finally, the mess tent filled up.” A surgeon toiling over the mangled legs of a soldier whose jeep triggered a mine described “bolts, washers, [and] bushings in the muscle, as on a work bench.” Another GI was wounded when a shell detonated in a barnyard, “filling his thigh from knee to buttocks with manure, all tightly packed … as into a sausage.” Wounded men who had narrowly escaped death lay in silence on the ward cots, the surgeon added, “like somebody rescued from the ledge of a skyscraper.” Patton spent his fifty-ninth birthday on November 11 “by getting up where the dead were still warm,” as he wrote Bea. “However the enemy must be suffering more, so it is a question of mutual crucifiction [sic] till he cracks.”

  On November 14, nearly a week into the offensive, engineers finished a Bailey bridge north of the city. Early the next morning, the 10th Armored Division rumbled over the Moselle in a spitting sleet storm, threatening a wide envelopment in tandem with the 90th Division, twenty miles above Metz, complemented by a shallower swing in the south by the 6th Armored and 80th Infantry Divisions. As other forces pinched the city’s near flanks, the 95th Division battered German garrison forces west of the river; many of these were the overage or infirm troops known as Halb-soldaten, half soldiers. Eisenhower arrived for a visit on November 15, tromping about in the mud before dining with Patton on the Rue Auxerre. “It was very jolly,” an aide noted, “and the two generals sat up and talked until after two A.M.”

  Battlefield advances made them jolly. The next day, Patton more than doubled the daily artillery allocation for XII Corps to twenty thousand rounds, explaining, “If we win now we will not need shells later; if we do not use the shells now, we will not win the war.” Hitler had twice rebuffed Rundstedt’s suggestion to abandon Metz, but Nazi functionaries fled in stolen Renaults and Citroëns. The city water system had been smashed, ammunition was short, and reinforcements were so feeble—including constables armed with ancient French rifles and decrepit supernumeraries wearing brassards in lieu of uniforms—that a Wehrmacht general described them as “drops of water on a hot stone.” The phones failed on November 17 as the last German civilians were evacuated to the east by a police escort from Darmstadt. A new garrison commander summoned from the Eastern Front, General Heinrich Kittel, was made to swear an oath to defend the city “to the last man and cartridge,” the usual immolation blithely demanded of those in harm’s way by those far from it.

  At 10:30 A.M. on November 19, the two wings of Third Army completed the encirclement of Metz when soldiers from the 5th Division met cavalry troopers from the 90th seven miles east of the city, in Retonfey. Patton’s two corps now held a line ten to twenty miles east of where they had begun eleven days earlier. In Metz, the end came quickly, with mercifully few room-to-room brawls. Six thousand prisoners were captured; General Kittel was discovered on November 21 in an underground field hospital, suffused with morphine after being badly wounded while fighting in the line. The city formally surrendered at 2:35 P.M. the next day.

  * * *

  Patton drove into Metz as the conquering hero, sirens wailing to herald his arrival, punctuated by the “steamboat trombone” on his personal jeep. “It was very pleasant to drive into a town which has not been captured for more than 1,300 years,” he wrote, still insisting on his fictitious version of history. To Bea he added, “I will be hard to live with. I have been a sort of demi-god too long.” He personally interrogated General Anton Dunckern, the bug-eyed security commander for Lorraine, who had been apprehended by a 5th Division patrol while trying to slink out of Metz with an aide. After threatening to turn him over to the French, who “know how to make people talk,” Patton told an interpreter, “If he wanted to be a good Nazi, he could have died then and there. It would have been a pleasanter death than what he will get now.” When Dunckern protested that he had been captured by Americans and should therefore remain in U.S. custody, Patton snapped, “When I am dealing with vipers, I do not have to be bothered by any foolish ideas.… I understand German very well, but I will not demean myself by speaking such a language.”

  An honor guard played ruffles and flourishes for the victors. Patton sprinkled medals among his legions, acclaiming what he deemed “one of the epic river crossings of history,” and Metz formally returned to French custody. GIs in muddy boots and frayed uniforms stood at attention in a central square, as a military band with colors flying preceded French soldiers in black berets, white leggings, and Sam Browne belts, each with two submachine guns slung over his shoulders.

  Little mention was made of the outlying forts, several of which remained defiantly unconquered. Sherman tanks blackened those works with thousands of rounds of French white-phosphorus ammunition, using special firing pins improvised by Third Army armorers. Fort St.-Privat surrendered on November 29, yielding more than five hundred prisoners, scores of whom had phosphorus burns. Fort Driant, that hard nut, would hold out until December 8, and Fort Jeanne d’Arc was the last to fold, on December 13.

  By that time Third Army’s left wing had finally closed on the Saar River and the Siegfried Line, although Patton’s right remained short of the German frontier. The sixty-mile advance in the Lorraine campaign had liberated another five thousand square miles of France, but at a cost in three months of nearly a hundred thousand U.S. battle and nonbattle casualties. Third Army had yet to breach the Westwall, much less reach the Rhine, and the long autumn amounted to what one historian would call “Patton’s bloodiest and least successful campaign,” a season of unimaginative and dispersed frontal attacks of the sort he ridiculed when lesser generals launched them. Unable to resist the prestige of bagging Metz, he had forfeited the single greatest advantage the Americans now held over their adversaries—mobility—by permitting much of his army to be drawn into a sanguinary siege.

  In a note to Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war, Patton proposed that as part of any surrender terms the Germans be required to keep Lorraine, “this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consists in assorted manure piles.” He also summoned the Third Army chaplain, Colonel James H. O’Neill, to his office in an old French barracks in Nancy. “Chaplain, how much praying is being done in the Third Army?” Patton asked.

  “I’m afraid to admit it,” O’Neill said, “but I do not believe that much praying is going on.”

  “We must ask God to stop these rains,” Patton said, staring through his high windows at the sopping landscape outside. “These rains are the margin that holds defeat or victory.” O’Neill typed out an improvised appeal on a three-by-five card, and engineers reproduced a quarter-million copies to be distributed throughout Third Army. “Restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend,” the text asked.

  Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.

  To his diary a week later Patton confided, “It has certainly rained less since my prayer.”

  To the Land of Doom

  FAR above the killing fields, the struggle for comm
and of the skies had long tilted in the Allies’ favor, allowing some four thousand Anglo-American heavy bombers flying from England and Italy to get on with what an airman called “the murder business”: the gutting of the German homeland with well over one million tons of high explosives, incendiaries, and fragmentation bombs.

  Allied hopes for strategic bombing early in the war had proved too optimistic, especially the belief that precision strikes would quickly eviscerate the enemy war economy, and so spare ground forces the blood-letting that had characterized World War I. Imprecise targeting, bad weather, and savage German defenses had forced Allied strategists to use the bomber fleet as a blunt instrument, a bludgeon rather than a scalpel. Terrible aircraft losses in the first three months of 1944, including almost 800 U.S. heavies shot down, had been stanched in the spring by the belated arrival of the P-51 Mustang, a fighter with sufficient range to escort bombers to any target on the Continent. An unexpected surge in German aircraft production, with 10,000 single-engine fighters built from May through September, had again challenged Allied hegemony; during the summer, another 900 bombers went down from Eighth Air Force alone. But the Luftwaffe now was in a death spiral, having lost 31,000 planes before D-Day and another 13,000 from June through October. By July, novice German fighter pilots typically received less than thirty flying hours in training before being hurled into combat, less than one-tenth the Anglo-American average; the life expectancy of a Luftwaffe pilot could be measured in weeks if not hours. “Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” wrote one airman, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.”

  Of necessity, antiaircraft flak had become the primary German defense. Flak was credited with destroying 6,400 Anglo-American planes in 1944 and damaging 27,000 others. A standard 88mm flak gun fired a 17-pound shrapnel grenade that climbed thirteen thousand feet in six seconds before bursting into fifteen hundred shards that could perforate any plane within two hundred yards. Fortunately for Allied crews, sixteen thousand 88mm shells were required on average to bring down a single heavy bomber. Flak nevertheless “held an evil, hypnotic fascination,” an American pilot acknowledged. Heavier German guns were deployed to reach high-flying B-17s, and by war’s end 1.2 million Germans would man the Reich’s ground-based air defenses.

  British bombers, flying mostly at night, tried to avoid what a BBC reporter over Berlin described as “a wall of light.” A blue-tinted searchlight beam, guided by radar, would fix on an approaching plane, drawing other searchlights into a brilliant cone so that “the bomber appeared to ride at its moving vertex” while gunfire converged on the target. “The only hope,” an RAF crewman said, “was to get clear before the searchlights could form a cone.” American bombers, flying by day, sought to counter German search and fire-control radars with an expanding array of electronic jammers; one study estimated that effective jamming meant that 25 percent fewer planes were destroyed and 50 percent fewer were spared serious flak damage compared to those flying without countermeasures. Still, as the poet-airman Randall Jarrell wrote:

  Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

  I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

  When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

  Air supremacy provided an invaluable advantage to Allied ground forces and spared the lives of many Anglo-American fliers, even if that meant little to those washed out with a hose. The Allied strategic air effort in Europe cost some eighty thousand lives and ten thousand aircraft, and the vast tactical air war in direct support of ground forces added more losses. In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

  Perhaps less lethal, but hardly less stressful: the seven British crewmen aboard a Lancaster bomber sometimes spoke of being joined by “the eighth passenger”—fear. Of 7,374 Lancasters built, 3,349 would be lost in action. A British airman had just a one-in-five chance of surviving the loss of his plane, in part because the Lancaster had only a single emergency exit. For an American crewman, the chance was three in five. (The B-17 Flying Fortress had four exits.) In British Bomber Command, two of every five fliers did not live to complete a tour of duty, a mortality rate far exceeding that of British infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I.

  The simplest missions could be fatal: an American B-24 returning to base from a training flight clipped a tree in Lancashire during a violent thunderstorm, then cartwheeled through the village of Freckleton. A wall of flame one hundred feet high burned for two hours, engulfing the infants’ wing of Holy Trinity School and the Sad Sack Snack Bar, which catered to airmen. Of the sixty-one dead, more than half were children, including some who had been evacuated from London to escape the V-weapon barrage. Bing Crosby, in England on a goodwill tour, found himself too stricken to sing at the sight of the burned children in a local hospital ward. Instead he stood outside in a corridor, crooning “Don’t Fence Me In” and “White Christmas” as elegies to innocence and youth.

  High though the war’s cost in men and machines, the U.S. industrial and military base by the fall of 1944 was producing far more planes, pilots, gunners, bombardiers, and navigators than needed to replace combat losses; during the winter, the training of new pilots, which had climbed to more than 100,000 annually, would be cut by over 70 percent. Yet General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, fretted over reports of “incipient weaknesses” among bomber crews in Europe, which he described as “lack of respect (amounting to near hatred) for certain very senior general officers;… lack of desire to kill Germans; lack of understanding of political necessity for fighting the war; general personal lassitude.” Low morale did plague at least part of the force; a rest-and-recuperation program in Atlantic City, Miami, and Santa Monica was abandoned because the interlude at home seemed to make airmen more resentful of civilians, bellicose toward their officers, and reluctant to return to combat. An officer in the 319th Bombardment Group described a fellow pilot as “so shot that he spills food at the table, jerks all night in his sleep, and is highly irritable.… He’ll kill a whole crew someday and it will be called ‘pilot error.’ Oh well, such is war.” Lieutenant Joseph T. Hallock, a twenty-two-year-old flying in B-17s, told the reporter Brendan Gill, “Sometimes I feel as if I’d never had a chance to live at all, but most of the time I feel as if I’d lived forever.” At precarious moments over Germany, he confessed, he would whisper: “God, you gotta. You gotta get me back. God, listen, you gotta.”

  In the airman’s world, those afflicted with “the clanks”—a paralyzing inability to shake a sense of dread—were known as “dead men flying.” Bailing out of a stricken “kite” was called “giving birth,” and “chop girls” were English women shunned by superstitious crews because they had befriended airmen who then went missing in action. Temperatures of minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit left brown frostbite patches on foreheads and buttocks, at least until deployment of the F-3 heated suit, with 250 watts flowing through wired jackets, trousers, and felt slippers to give eight Clos of insulation. Plastic surgeons learned to rebuild burned-away faces; after sculpting new lips from skin grafted off an arm, they tattooed them red and then added tiny black dots to simulate mustache whiskers.

  In the airman’s world, a B-17 pilot sat in the five-foot cube of his cockpit with “an oxygen mask full of drool” amid the roar of four engines. He fiddled with 130 switches, dials, gauges, levers, and pedals long enough to dump his payload of bombs—“big ugly dead things,” in one officer’s phrase—and then fled for home. In this world, Germany was known as “the Land of Doom.” In this world, the pilot John Muirhead took pains not to grow close to his Flying Fortress
crewmates, because “if I didn’t know them, I would not grieve.”

  * * *

  How best to destroy the Land of Doom had perplexed air strategists for years. The Combined Chiefs at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 called for “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system” in order to undermine the enemy “capacity for armed resistance.” But where was a big modern state most vulnerable? Some analysts studied the U.S. industrial system in search of “instructive hints to what might be German weak points,” such as the single plant in Chicago that processed 90 percent of all tantalum, a corrosion-resistant metal critical to radar and radio production. Others scrutinized Germany directly, reviewing thousands of intelligence reports. One conclusion: sustained bombing of enemy steel plants was pointless, because the Reich was using only 20 percent of its steel-making capacity.

  But Germany did have an Achilles heel: oil. The Allied powers controlled more than 90 percent of the world’s natural oil, compared to just 3 percent for the Axis. German schemes to exploit Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus had been thwarted by battlefield reverses in Africa and Russia. By the spring of 1944, this vulnerability became increasingly evident to Allied intelligence analysts. Shortages impeded the training of some combat divisions, fuel cuts were imposed on the German navy, and fleets of vehicles were converted to wood-burning engines. Nearly all Luftwaffe aviation fuel came from synthetic-oil plants, and German chemists sought energy substitutes in such unlikely European flora as acorns and grapes. An OSS analysis asserted that further reduction of the Reich’s oil production would have “rapid and drastic effects upon her military capacity.” Ultra intercepts revealed Berlin’s alarm at Allied raids on the vast Romanian petroleum facilities around Ploesti and against oil targets in Germany. British intelligence by late May had concluded that sustained air attacks on German oil production would cause disastrous industrial shortages within three to six months. “Oil,” warned a decrypted message from Japanese officials in Berlin to Tokyo, “is Germany’s problem.”