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

by Rick Atkinson

  “Providence Decrees and We Must Obey”

  AFTER advancing nearly four hundred miles in the month following the invasion of southern France, the DRAGOON juggernaut had gained hardly fifteen miles in the subsequent six weeks. In mid-November, it remained pinned along the western slope of the Vosges Mountains: as Lucian Truscott had feared, the failure to force the Belfort Gap near the Swiss border had enabled the German Nineteenth Army, spavined though it was, to make a stand. Nine weak enemy divisions straddled the high ground along an eighty-mile front from Switzerland to the Rhine–Marne Canal. Opposing them was the 6th Army Group, formally created in September from two armies: Patch’s Seventh on the left, in the north, and De Lattre’s French First on the right, in the south. Eisenhower’s transfer of XV Corps from Third Army to Seventh—much to Patton’s annoyance—gave the Franco-American host four corps, nearly half a million men. They now steeled themselves for what was described as “the first crossing of the Vosges in history under winter battle conditions.”

  Few could feel optimistic. The Vosges massif loomed like a granite glacis thirty miles deep and seventy miles wide; cleft by few passes, the range was so thickly wooded that a Guadalcanal veteran like Patch was reminded of jungle fighting. “Mountains, woods, and rain are things I do not like anymore, at least in a war,” John Dahlquist, the 36th Division commander, wrote his wife in November. “But I will probably see a lot more of them before I am through, so I had better get philosophical about them.” Italy veterans in the 36th, 45th, and 3rd Divisions had little stomach for another winter campaign in the uplands, and “alarming mental and physical lethargy” was reported in at least one regiment.

  The season had been marked by straggling and desertion; replacements were described as “inept and poorly trained,” and the mud was so deep that even airstrips for spotter planes had to be corduroyed with logs painted olive drab. Trench foot, frostbite, mines, and steel-jawed bear traps planted by the Germans added to the misery. The first snow had fallen on October 27, and GIs smeared Vaseline on their tent seams in a vain effort to stay dry. Winter clothing arrived late, despite emergency shipments flown into Dijon aboard B-24s. Six hundred thousand men and almost a million tons of matériel had come through Marseille and Toulon and across the Côte d’Azur beaches by early November. But a long trek to the front, various miscalculations, and a thriving black market in the French ports—20 percent of the cargo unloaded in Marseille was stolen, often by Army freebooters—made for shortages of food, ammunition, and fuel.

  “Dear Family,” wrote Lieutenant June Wandrey, a nurse in Seventh Army,

  If it wasn’t against the family tradition to commit suicide, I’d do it, as wherever I’d go it would be warmer than it is here.… I’m tired of the noises of war, the trauma of war, the sleeplessness of war, the hunger of war.… Our cook was a mortician in civilian life. He embalms all our food.

  The season also had been marked by the usual heartbreak, a reminder that even as millions perished in the global conflagration, they died one by one. Among those killed in late October was Dahlquist’s aide, Lieutenant Wells Lewis, son of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. A Harvard graduate named for H. G. Wells, young Lewis died in Dahlquist’s arms after being shot in the head by a sniper. “It is over two years since I last saw my son,” his mother wrote Dahlquist. “For a soldier to die in his General’s arms is in the great tradition, a literary symbol which I know Wells himself would appreciate.”

  Killed the same week, by antitank fire, was Patch’s only son, Captain Alexander M. “Mac” Patch III, a company commander in the 79th Division who had returned to combat four days earlier after recuperating from a bullet wound to the shoulder suffered in Normandy. General Patch ordered Mac’s body brought to his headquarters at Épinal. “So long, son,” he said at the open grave, then muttered, “Well, he is not cold and wet and hungry.”

  Two weeks later Patch wrote to his wife, Julia: “I’ve been dreading my first letter from you after you had heard from me. It came today.” He continued:

  You, and only you, know how deeply hurt I am.… It is our private, strictly private grief. No one else’s. My hardest period is over. It was during the period after Mac’s death, when I kept getting letters from you—such happy letters.… You would tell me in those letters to please not let him get back to his outfit too soon. And I could hardly stand it, knowing I had done just that. I shall never be able to forgive myself.

  “I cannot and must not allow myself to dwell upon our irreparable loss,” he told her. “As I write, the tears are falling from my eyes.… Providence decrees and we must obey.”

  The good soldier soldiered on, but Omar Bradley later wrote that “the psychological effect on Patch has been so devastating as to impair his effectiveness as an army commander.” Reflecting on Patch’s loss, General Dahlquist told his wife, “It is almost beyond comprehension that the human being can stand so much.”

  * * *

  The town of Baccarat had been liberated in late October and its famous crystal works captured intact, including an elegant service ordered by Hermann Göring but instead confiscated by Allied officers from which to sip champagne. Dahlquist also bought 100,000 gallons of beer from a French brewery, and engineers rigged pumps to siphon it to the troops. Many toasts were drunk—to the dead, to the living, to fickle life itself. “Rain has started again,” Dahlquist wrote home, “and how I hate it. It makes the job ten times harder.”

  Perpetual friction with the French made the job harder still. General de Lattre de Tassigny, that animal of action, struggled to whip his quarter of a million men into an army rather than a mob. “Our African soldiers felt lost in the dark forests,” De Lattre later wrote. Colonial troops still wearing summer uniforms were “unsuited to the winter climate,” he added, and cruelly susceptible to trench foot; some French troops wore wooden shoes. On De Gaulle’s orders, many colonials were sent to the rear to make room for untrained FFI irregulars. This blanchiment, or whitening, was intended to nurture French national unity; De Gaulle also wished both to relieve the African troops, who had carried a disproportionate burden of France’s fight in the Mediterranean, and to bring some 400,000 Resistance fighters—many of them communists—under military control. The colonials had once made up more than half the manpower of the French army; now that share would decline to about one-third. Senegalese and Cameroonians shambled from the Vosges front, handing their rifles, helmets, and greatcoats to white Frenchmen trotting into the line. This “crusade” for French self-respect, as De Lattre called it, would add to the French First Army some 137,000 maquis, a “vibrant and tumultuous force” with thin combat skills and paltry logistical support. De Lattre found himself waging what he called “a battle against shortage, anarchy, and complaisance.”

  Base 901, the French supply organization, in late fall consisted of twelve hundred men with two hundred vehicles. American logisticians calculated that an eight-division army should have more than 100,000 support troops, but De Lattre would never have even a third of that number. Consequently he relied on the Americans—with all of the pathologies that dependency engendered—for everything from the one-third liter of wine included in French rations to the ten pounds of crushed oats, fourteen pounds of hay, and two ounces of salt needed each day for a mountain mule. For every French soldier in Europe, the U.S. Army billed De Gaulle $6.67 per day in support costs.

  Franco-American frictions intensified as winter approached. When only 25,000 uniforms could be found for French troops, in a Canadian warehouse in Algiers, De Lattre announced that unless his men received wool clothing he would be “forced to withdraw them from combat.” To the 6th Army Group headquarters, he wrote: “This army has been discriminated against … in a way seriously prejudicial to its life and to its capabilities for action.” The French First Army, he charged, received less than a third of the ammunition, fuel, and rations provided Seventh Army, causing an “asphyxiation of the front line.” U.S. quartermasters bitterly denied th
e allegation and countered that reckless French troops had ruined three thousand pyramidal tents at a time when canvas was “extremely critical.” An American general wrote of De Lattre, “He goes into these tirades at least twice a week, at which time he seems to lose his balance.” One ill-advised tantrum, launched in the presence of a visiting George Marshall, included allegations that Truscott’s VI Corps had pilfered gasoline allocated to the French. The chief of staff walked out. Later, he rounded on De Lattre with pale fury. “You celebrated all the way up the road. You were late on every damn thing. And you were critical of Truscott, who is a fighter and not a talker,” Marshall said. The chief finished with the worst epithet he could conjure: “You are a politico.”

  “It was our duty,” De Lattre subsequently explained, “to be dissatisfied.”

  Now Truscott was gone, initially summoned by Eisenhower to organize the new Fifteenth Army as an occupation force—“You won’t like it,” the supreme commander warned—but then just as abruptly dispatched instead to command Fifth Army in Italy, after General Mark W. Clark took over all Allied forces there. At a farewell ceremony in the Vosges, a band crashed through “The Dogface Soldier” as tears streamed down Truscott’s rough cheeks. His successor as commander of VI Corps was Major General Edward H. Brooks, a New Englander who had commanded both the 11th and 2nd Armored Divisions.

  With Truscott’s departure, the dominant figure on the southern front was the officer who would orchestrate the offensive to breach the Vosges: Lieutenant General Jacob Loucks Devers, the 6th Army Group commander. Now fifty-seven, Devers was the grandson of a blacksmith and son of a jeweler in York, Pennsylvania. There young Jake had climbed a ladder every Sunday with his father to make sure the courthouse clock on East Market Street was correct to the second. A classmate of Patton’s at West Point, he played baseball, basketball, and lacrosse, later returning to teach mathematics; the academy yearbook described him as “clever”—always suspect in the Army—and as “an exceedingly earnest youth with rather Puritanical views.” A gifted artilleryman and administrator, Devers, like De Lattre, was among the youngest officers in his army to become a general, jumping over nearly five hundred more senior colonels to win his first star in 1940. As chief of the armored force for two years, he helped modernize a tank arm rife with traditionalists nostalgic for the horse. (“I made a lot of mistakes today,” he would tell subordinates during maneuvers. “So did you.”) With Marshall and McNair as patrons, in May 1943 he became commander of U.S. forces in Europe until Eisenhower’s return to London for OVERLORD, whereupon Devers was bundled off to the Mediterranean as the eventual commander of the forces that now formed the right wing of the Allied armies in northwestern Europe.

  Capable and decisive, he had a knack for provoking the enmity of his peers. Perhaps it was his brazen ambition—it was said that when Marshall appointed him to a committee to recommend general officers worthy of further promotion, Devers listed himself first. Perhaps it was his overeager smile, the mien “of a boy who hasn’t grown up,” as one British general said. He and Mark Clark detested each other to the point of not speaking, and Devers’s classmate Patton considered him “a very small caliber man.” In Beetle Smith’s assessment, “Devers talks too much and doesn’t care what he says.” Bradley condemned him, with both barrels, as “overly garrulous … egotistical, shallow, intolerant, not very smart, and much too inclined to rush off half-cocked.”

  Worse yet, according to a recent entry in Patton’s diary after a conference in Paris, “Ike hates him.” The supreme commander evidently nursed old resentments: Devers’s reluctance in 1943 to shift bomber squadrons from England to North Africa had displeased Eisenhower, as did his refusal a year later to release Truscott from the Mediterranean for OVERLORD. “E. says that [Devers] talks a lot but never gets down to facts,” Kay Summersby told her diary. Devers brought out the conniver in E., who told Marshall, “I have nothing in the world against General Devers,” but allowed that he had previously harbored an “uneasy feeling” about him. When Marshall asked Eisenhower to assess thirty-eight senior American generals in Europe, Devers ranked twenty-fourth on the supreme commander’s list and elicited the only pejorative comments of the lot:

  Enthusiastic but often inaccurate in statements and evaluations; loyal and energetic.… He has not, so far, produced among the seniors of the American organization here that feeling of trust and confidence that is so necessary to continued success.

  Eisenhower sold Devers short. The top U.S. airman in the Mediterranean, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, considered him “the ablest commander I saw in the war.” Among other skills, Devers was second only to Eisenhower in his ability to reconcile national differences and forge an effective Allied military coalition. While acknowledging in his diary that De Lattre “is a very difficult man to handle, hears only the things he wants to hear [and is] a temperamental personality who causes more trouble within his own staff and troops than he does with us,” Devers showed a sure touch in dealing with a warrior he recognized as “a great inspirational leader”—even if “I never did learn to pronounce that name.” De Lattre spoke no English, and French had been Devers’s worst subject at West Point, but they shared what Devers called “that common language—the gesture and the smile.” More practically, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a former U.S. senator who had been schooled in France and now wore a lieutenant colonel’s uniform, served as an able liaison between the two.

  As for his compatriots, Devers displayed more than a little naiveté. To his diary in November he described Bradley as “the same fine character as always”; in fact, Devers had modeled his headquarters after that of 12th Army Group, which he admired. Though he brooded, in a letter to his wife, about possible “enemies” at SHAEF and “the undercutting that goes on,” he believed Eisenhower and Smith to be friendly, “in their way.” But even the bouncy sangfroid and the too-ready smile sometimes slipped a bit as his troops prepared to fling themselves into the Vosges. “Nobody but an utter fool would do what I’m about to do,” he told subordinates. “That’s the reason why we’ll take them by surprise—they won’t be expecting us.” A staff officer close to Devers concluded, “He’s lonely as the devil.”

  * * *

  SHAEF’s orders called for 6th Army Group to shield Bradley’s southern flank, destroy the enemy in Alsace west of the Rhine, breach the Siegfried Line, and secure river crossings near Karlsruhe and Mannheim, respectively forty and seventy miles northeast of Strasbourg—all in service of Eisenhower’s plan to cleanse the Rhine’s left bank from Switzerland to Nijmegen before pushing across Germany in 1945. Privately the planners in Versailles expected little from the southern front, given the difficulties of the past six weeks. New, unblooded units now weighted the American force, including the 100th and 103rd Infantry Divisions and the 14th Armored Division, not to mention those callow amateurs flocking to De Lattre’s flag.

  Devers had grander ambitions. German forces along the Vosges were believed to have a strength equivalent to no more than four infantry and two panzer divisions. The general calculated that an offensive launched in mid-November ought to break onto the Alsatian plain and reach the Rhine in two weeks, before swinging north to isolate the Saar. A vengeful urgency now gripped the French: the Germans had begun scorched-earth reprisals, dragging many able-bodied Alsatians between sixteen and sixty across the Rhine as forced laborers, while SS brigands burned farms, villages, and towns rather than cede winter shelter to the Allies. “Don’t get stuck in those mountains,” Devers warned his subordinates. “You’ll never get out.”

  De Lattre made the first move, attacking on Tuesday, November 14, after heavy snow created what he described as “a Scandinavian landscape.” Various deceptions—including phony command posts and an announcement that French troops would begin holiday leave in mid-November—suggested that the army either had designs on the High Vosges to the north or was moving into winter quarters. Instead, De Lattre sent blacked-out convoys bearing his I Corps along the Doubs R
iver near the Swiss frontier. A two-hour artillery barrage caught the Germans unawares, and French infantrymen surged forward at noon. Two divisions straddling the Doubs hooked north into the Belfort Gap, which sundered the Vosges from the Jura Mountains and Swiss Alps to the south. Moroccan riflemen killed a German division commander who had been trapped along the river by the artillery barrage; his effects included a map and notes detailing defensive positions on the German left flank.

  By Thursday, French tanks were “decisive everywhere,” De Lattre reported. German gunners firing captured Russian howitzers had little ammunition, and thirty new 88mm antitank weapons arrived without sights and other vital components. Among the few reserves slapped into the crumbling line were riflemen pedaling through the snow on bicycles and an Ohren-Bataillon of deaf soldiers. French shock troops swarmed into Belfort town, surprising Wehrmacht bakers at their dough trays. Three French tank columns with lights burning clattered east along Highway N-463, and at 6:30 P.M. on Sunday, November 19, a patrol from the 1st Armored Division reached the slate-blue Rhine, thirty miles east of Belfort and four miles above the Swiss border. Gleeful batteries lobbed a few shells across the river, the first French artillery to fall on German soil since 1940.

  Having forsaken a substantial wedge of southern Alsace despite Hitler’s order not to yield a centimeter, the Nineteenth Army belatedly stiffened. Confusion in the French ranks helped. While a weak detachment wheeled north up the Rhine toward the bridge at Chalampé, other forces keen to liberate their Alsatian frères instead swung toward Mulhouse, seven miles west of the river. Twenty German Feldpost workers were captured at pistol-point while sorting the military mail on Monday morning, and sixty other deep sleepers surrendered on their cots. But Waffen-SS troops and a brigade of new Panthers sent straight from the factory in Nuremberg rebuilt the enemy line. Savage brawling in Mulhouse persisted for four days; south of Chalampé, a counterattack on Thursday, November 23, clubbed the French away, just three miles short of the bridge. De Lattre’s forces would come no closer for the next two and a half months: having captured fifteen thousand Germans at a cost of nine thousand casualties, the French First Army for the moment was a spent force.