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

by Rick Atkinson

  Two generations later, Yalta can be seen as neither the portal to Roosevelt’s “world of justice and equity” nor a disgraceful capitulation to red fascism but, rather, an intricate nexus of compromises by East and West. Roosevelt “largely followed through on earlier plans, and gained most of what he wished,” the historian Robert Dallek concluded, including Soviet support for the United Nations and participation in the defeat of Japan, an obligation punctually fulfilled by Moscow’s declaration of war three months after the German surrender. That declaration may not have “saved two million Americans,” as Admiral King had envisioned at Yalta, but along with two atomic bombs it encouraged Tokyo’s decision to surrender. With the Soviet Union killing far more Germans in combat than all other Allied forces combined, at a fell price of 26 million Soviet lives, Stalin was not to be denied what the diplomat George F. Kennan called “a wide military and political glacis on his Western frontier.” If Roosevelt sounded plaintive and exasperated, his explanation also captured the political reality of Europe in February 1945: It was the best I could do.

  War had held the Big Three together—the common cause of crushing Germany proved stronger than the centrifugal forces that beset any alliance. Now the entropy of peace threatened to unknot those ties, as postwar interests and imperatives emerged. Even Roosevelt and Churchill, who had met on nine occasions to spend 120 days together during the war, felt the bonds of blood and history fraying week by week. When the reporters aboard Quincy asked Roosevelt whether Churchill hoped to reassemble the antebellum imperial empire, the president replied, “Yes, he is mid-Victorian on all things like that.… Dear old Winston will never learn on that point.… This is, of course, off the record.” But Churchill knew. Roosevelt “cannot leave the empire alone,” he told Moran. “It seems to upset him.” Eden shrewdly suspected that the president “hoped that former colonial territories, once free of their masters, would become politically and economically dependent upon the United States.”

  Moran in February observed, “We have moved a long way since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakesh [in January 1943], ‘I love that man.’” Perhaps it was too much to expect such attachments to survive when so much had perished. Speaking to the Commons a few days after his return from Yalta, the prime minister warned: “We are now entering a world of imponderables.… It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

  Yet for those who felt destiny as a following wind, the morrow beckoned and the imponderable held more promise than peril. “The Americans pitch their song on a higher note,” Moran wrote. “They feel they are on top of the world.”

  “Only Our Eyes Are Alive”

  FROM the Swiss border to the North Sea, across the fronts of almost eighty Allied divisions in seven armies, none of this mattered at the moment, not a whit. What preoccupied several million soldiers was the effort to find a bit of warmth in the frozen night, and perhaps a lukewarm meal rather than congealed hash in a cold can, and to live to see the next dawn, and then the next, and the next after that. The autumn rallying cry of “Win the War in ’44” had been supplanted by the sour “Stay Alive in ’45.” A soldier in the 70th Division spoke for many GIs in a letter to his parents in Minnesota: “My mind is absolutely stripped of any traces of reason for war.… Maybe the overall picture justifies what goes on up here, but from an infantryman’s point of view, it’s hard to see.”

  The harshest winter in decades compounded the misery, even after the German retreat from the Bulge. “My hands shivered like tuning forks,” wrote one private in Lorraine. “But worst of all, the cold had settled in my spine.… I was a bundle of icy vibrations.” A soldier in the 84th Division described awakening in a slushy foxhole to find his feet “encased in a block of ice up to my ankles”; comrades chipped him free with bayonets. Impassioned debates raged over “whether sleeping with hands in the crotch or the armpits was the best way to avoid frostbite.” Troops jerked awake by gunfire left patches of hair stuck to the icy ground. Soldiers fashioned crude igloos or huddled over tiny fires fueled with cardboard scraps from K-ration boxes. GIs became adept at chopping a small divot from the frozen ground with a pickax, then detonating a quarter-pound TNT block to finish excavating a foxhole. Graffiti scribbled on a concrete fortification in Lorraine read: “Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918. Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1945. This is the last time I want to write my name here.”

  A SHAEF plan to cut one million cords of firewood by February 1 fell short by 964,000 for want of tools and lumberjacks. Coal production in Europe fell 40 percent in January, partly because Belgian miners went on strike; frozen canals impeded deliveries of what stock there was. GI work details spent a month slicing peat from Norman bogs for fuel before abandoning the task as pointless. Sled dogs shipped from Alaska and Labrador to evacuate the wounded in snowy terrain arrived after the spring thaw, and so gave the field armies only useless, barking mouths to feed.

  A lieutenant in the 99th Division wrote his wife in January:

  To date, I’ve slept on a mattress, a steel deck, a wet concrete floor with a little straw on top, dirt floors, a bed, a stretcher, on an LST, in a truck, in a foxhole, across the front seats of a jeep, in a rope hammock, in cellars, first, second, and third floors, in a pillbox, on the back window shelf of a command car, in haylofts, on snow, and in shacks.

  There were horrors to see, hear, and smell, horrors to relive and remember because they could never be forgotten. A soldier from the 75th Division described an hour in a foxhole with a mortally wounded comrade and no morphine: “I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked as hard as I could.… That didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly bled to death.” Another GI assigned to police corpses from the battlefield wrote:

  Everywhere we searched we found bodies, floating in the rivers, trampled on the roads, bloated in the ditches, rotting in the bunkers, pretzeled into foxholes, burned in the tanks, buried in the snow, sprawled in doorways, splattered in gutters, dismembered in minefields, and even literally blown up into trees.

  When a reporter asked a private in the 23rd Infantry what he wanted Americans at home to know, he said, “Tell ’em it’s rough as hell. Tell ’em it’s rough. Tell ’em it’s rough, serious business. That’s all. That’s all.” A nurse in Seventh Army wrote her family in January: “Admitted a 19-year-old from Texas last night who had both legs blown off by a shell. He was unhappy because now he could never wear his nice cowboy boots. He died before he could be taken to surgery.” Another nurse, in a Third Army shock ward dubbed the Chamber of Horrors, said, “Maybe it’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die.”

  Prison-camp guards opened the locked boxcars on a freight train carrying captured Germans across France to find that 104 had suffocated. Their pleas and shouts had been ignored, and investigators found “evidence of teeth marks and clawing on inner walls.” Eisenhower wrote Marshall, “I certainly loathe having to apologize to the Germans. It looks as if this time I have no other recourse.” His message to Berlin, sent through the Swiss, read: “The supreme commander profoundly regrets this incident and has taken steps to prevent its recurrence.”

  War made the warriors sardonic, cynical, old before their time. “Will you tell me what the hell I’m being saved for?” a captain in the 30th Division mused after surviving a bloody attack on the West Wall. Another soldier replied, “For the Pacific.” To a GI in the 100th Division, “it wasn’t so much fear of death as the uncertainty of life.” One squad leader found his battle-weary men “impassive, lethargic, uncommunicative.” Some deliberately extended an arm or leg from their foxholes in hopes of the proverbial million-dollar wound, but for most “each succeeding town came and each succeeding town went, and we continued dying a thousand deaths.” After the Germans ambushed his patrol, a soldier in the 275th Infantry wrote, “Things didn’t go exactly as planned. They usually don’t.” To Lieutenant Paul Fussell,
the bitterest lessons of combat were indeed “about the eternal presence in human affairs of accident and contingency, as well as the fatuity of optimism at any time or place.”

  All planning was not just likely to recoil ironically; it was almost certain to do so. Human beings were clearly not machines. They were mysterious congeries of twisted will and error, misapprehension and misrepresentation, and the expected could not be expected of them.

  There was nothing for it but obduracy, to soldier on even for those who were not soldiers. “How hard I have become,” an American Red Cross volunteer told her diary in February. “Emotions which formerly would have wracked my soul leave me almost untouched. It’s a hardness of survival.” A soldier in the 84th Division described seeing GIs using a severed German head as a soccer ball in an icy pasture; when a mortar round blew apart a U.S. trooper in a nearby street, he added, “I sat and ate my food. I had not known him.” J. Glenn Gray, a counterintelligence officer, wrote in his journal, “Yesterday we caught two spies.… One had to be severely beaten before he confessed. It was pretty horrible.… I thought of the Hamlet line as most appropriate, ‘’Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.’”

  Not all would learn to hate. Nor would all find satisfaction, even exhilaration, in killing the Huns, Heinies, Hermanns, Lugerheads, Jerries, Fritzes, Boches, Krauts, Katzenjammers, Squareheads. A survey of four thousand GIs found that although four-fifths expressed strong hatred toward German leaders, less than half voiced hatred toward German soldiers. But by late winter enough haters and killers filled the ranks to constitute a ferocious killing engine. After Malmédy, an officer in the 35th Division wrote: “A hatred such as I have never seen has sprung up among us against Hitler’s armies and all of Germany.” A British soldier added, “The question of killing does not present itself as a moral problem any more—or as a problem at all.”

  “Slowly it is beginning to dawn on them that the only good German is a dead German,” the XII Corps chief of staff wrote his parents. “The result is that we’re killing more and taking fewer prisoners.” While smashing up a German house, a 2nd Division soldier bellowed, “Screw the bastards and all their works. Shit on them. Piss on them.” A Canadian soldier wrote, “When the Jerries come in with their hands up, shouting ‘Kamerad,’ we just bowl them over with bursts of Sten fire.” A lieutenant in the 15th Infantry told his diary, “Sergeant Burton, somewhat inebriated, shoots two Krauts who are trying to surrender.… Some of our best men are the most murderous.”

  Fussell described how GIs in his 103rd Division found some fifteen Germans cowering in a deep crater in the forest.

  Their visible wish to surrender—most were in tears of terror and despair—was ignored by our men lining the rim.… Laughing and howling, hoo-ha-ing and cowboy and good-old-boy yelling, our men exultantly shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead.… The result was deep satisfaction.

  “Killing is an obsession,” a private in the 86th Division wrote his parents. “What code could withstand it?”

  * * *

  At 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday, January 31, a U.S. Army weapons carrier clanked up to a gray farmhouse with orange shutters outside Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines, an Alsatian town long celebrated for mineralogy, fifteen miles northwest of Colmar. A scrawny, handcuffed twenty-four-year-old private from Michigan named Eddie D. Slovik stepped from the rear bay, escorted by four MPs. A Vosges snowstorm had delayed their journey from Paris through the Saverne Gap, and Private Slovik was late for his own execution. No task gripped Eisenhower with more urgency than clearing the Colmar Pocket to expel the enemy from Alsace and shore up the Allied right wing. But first, a dozen riflemen were to discharge a single, vengeful volley in the high-walled garden of 86 Rue du Général Bourgeois.

  As a miscreant, Private Slovik was more bumbling than iniquitous. First arrested at age twelve, he quit school at fifteen, and served jail time for burglary, assault, and embezzlement. Originally declared 4-F by a draft board and exempted from conscription for what the British would call “LMF”—lack of moral fiber—he was reclassified 1-A, an indication of the desperate need for infantrymen. Inducted in late 1943, Slovik arrived in France in August 1944, was assigned to the 28th Infantry Division, and promptly deserted. Perhaps his only endearing trait was a uxorious devotion to his wife, Antoinette, to whom he wrote 376 letters, in pencil, during his 372 days in the Army. “I fought to make you love me,” he told her, adding, “I think I’m going to have a lot of trouble. Army life don’t agree with me.”

  In this he was not unique. Indiscipline had become a nagging worry for Eisenhower: nearly 11,000 general courts-martial would be convened for serious crimes committed in Europe by U.S. soldiers, in addition to 126,000 special and summary courts-martial for lesser infractions. “Disciplinary conditions are becoming bad,” Eisenhower had told his diary in November. A month later he advised subordinates, “The large incidence of crimes such as rape, murder, assault, robbery, housebreaking, etc., continues to cause grave concerns.” A French prefect lamented that “the liberators have turned into looters, rapists, and killers,” and a newspaper in Cherbourg declared, “Never has one witnessed such debauchery.” (“Unfortunately,” a U.S. Army provost marshal conceded, “the editorial is justified.”) General Juin wrote Eisenhower that civilian women dared “not to go about their daily chores even when accompanied by a man for fear of being accosted by American soldiers.” Although less than one-half of one percent of Allied troops in Europe were implicated in serious offenses, a SHAEF memo in late January noted that “a considerable percentage of the French civil population” believed that GIs behaved badly, if not criminally.

  Severe punishment had a fitful deterrent effect. A study of military offenders found that many had “mental ages of seven or eight”; some were psychopaths or chronic alcoholics. Of fourteen hundred convictions for violating Article of War No. 64—striking an officer, drawing a weapon on an officer, or “willful disobedience”—the average sentence for infractions in combat was fifteen years’ imprisonment. Thirty-year sentences for felonious behavior were not uncommon, and any jail term over six months also drew a dishonorable discharge. Four hundred and forty-three death penalties were imposed on GIs, most for murder or rape, and a severely disproportionate number fell on black soldiers, often after dubious due process. Seventy executions took place in Europe, including several public hangings; War Department Pamphlet 27-4 specified that the hangman’s rope was to be “manila hemp, 1¼ inches in diameter … stretched to eliminate any spring,” and coated “with wax, soap, or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.”

  Desertion, defined by the U.S. military as an unauthorized absence of two months or more, was as old as warfare, and historically it was a capital crime punished by a firing squad. The British had handed down more than 3,000 death sentences from 1914 to 1920, and had executed about 10 percent of those condemned—before abolishing the death penalty for cowardice and desertion in 1930. The German military issued 50,000 military death sentences in World War II, with half or more carried out. Twenty-one thousand soldiers would desert from the U.S. Army during the war; less than half had been caught by the late 1940s. Of nearly 2,000 deserters convicted in Europe, 139 received death sentences. But the United States had not actually executed a deserter since 1864.

  Slovik was arrested in October after living for weeks with a Canadian unit. Offered amnesty if he went to the front, he refused, vowing, “I’ll run away again if I have to.” He was convicted following a two-hour court-martial in the Hürtgen Forest on November 11. From a jail cell in Paris he appealed his death sentence to Eisenhower in a six-paragraph clemency plea. “How can I tell you how humbley sorry I am for the sins I’ve comitted.… I beg of you deeply and sincerely for the sake of my dear wife and mother back home to have mercy on me,” he wrote, according to the author William Bradford Huie. “I Remain Yours for Victory, Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik.” Unfortunately for the condemned, the supreme commander reviewed the petition at the
nadir of the Bulge, on December 23, during a session in his Versailles office known as “the Hanging Hour.” Eisenhower not only affirmed the sentence, but decreed that as a lesson to shirkers it be carried out by Slovik’s putative unit, the 109th Infantry Regiment, in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division. “Darling,” Slovik wrote Antoinette, “I’m in a little trouble.”

  The MP guards had lost the handcuff key during the trip through the Vosges, and a hacksaw was used to free the prisoner’s wrists so that he could be properly bound with nylon parachute cord. A priest heard his confession and handed him twenty-eight letters from the wife who would soon be a widow. Cota convened the firing squad of twelve specially chosen sharpshooters to remind them that they were “the finest marksmen in the Army”; a physician gave a tutorial on the location of the heart, but, considering the point-blank range of twenty yards, chose not to pin a target on Slovik’s chest. He was hooded with a black sack, sewn by a local seamstress in accord with the Army regulation “to cover the head and neck of the prisoner and to obscure all light.” A blanket was draped over his shoulders against the cold. Slovik declined to make a final statement other than to ask, “Please shoot straight so I won’t have to suffer.”