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

by Rick Atkinson

  What Churchill called the American “prodigy of organization” had shipped 18 million tons of war stuff to Europe, equivalent to the cargo in 3,600 Liberty ships or 181,000 rail cars: the kit ranged from 800,000 military vehicles to footwear in sizes 2A to 22EEE. U.S. munitions plants had turned out 40 billion rounds of small arms ammunition and 56 million grenades. From D-Day to V-E Day, GIs fired 500 million machine-gun bullets and 23 million artillery rounds. “I’m letting the American taxpayer take this hill,” one prodigal gunner declared, and no one disagreed. By 1945, the United States had built two-thirds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured goods in the world, including nearly half of all armaments. The enemy was crushed by logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic juggernaut that produced much, much more of nearly everything than Germany could—bombers, bombs, fighters, transport planes, mortars, machine guns, trucks—yet the war absorbed barely one-third of the American gross domestic product, a smaller proportion than that of any major belligerent. A German prisoner complained, “Warfare like yours is easy.”

  There was nothing easy about it, of course. But the United States emerged from World War II with extraordinary advantages that would ensure prosperity for decades: an intact, thriving industrial base; a population relatively unscarred by war; cheap energy; two-thirds of the world’s gold supply; and great optimism. As the major power in western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific, possessing both atomic weapons and a Navy and Air Force of unequaled might, the United States was ready to exploit what the historian H. P. Willmott described as “the end of the period of European supremacy in the world that had existed for four centuries.” If the war had dispelled American isolationism, it also encouraged American exceptionalism, as well as a penchant for military solutions and a self-regard that led some to label their epoch “the American century.” “Power,” as John Adams had written, “always thinks it has a great soul.”

  The war was a potent catalyst for social change across the republic. New technologies—jets, computers, ballistic missiles, penicillin—soon spurred vibrant new industries, which in turn encouraged the migration of black workers from south to north, and of all peoples to the emerging west. The GI Bill put millions of soldiers into college classrooms, spurring unprecedented social mobility. Nineteen million American women had entered the workplace by war’s end; although they quickly reverted to traditional antebellum roles—the percentage working in 1947 was hardly higher than it had been in 1940—that genie would not remain back in the bottle forever. The modest experiment in racially integrating infantry battalions ended when the war did, despite nearly universal agreement that black riflemen had performed ably and in harmony with their white comrades. A presidential order in 1948 would be required to desegregate the military, and much more than that would be needed to reverse three centuries of racial oppression in America.

  But tectonic plates had begun to shift. “Glad to be home,” a black soldier from Chicago observed as his troopship sailed into New York harbor. “Proud of my country, as irregular as it is. Determined it could be better.”

  * * *

  In battered Europe, enormous tasks remained. Those who had outlived the war must “learn how to reassemble our broken world,” as Pyle had put it. The last debris of the Third Reich had to be swept up, including 400,000 German troops adrift in Norway. Grand Admiral Dönitz and his bureaucrats stayed busy in Flensburg for two weeks after the surrender—writing reports, exchanging memos, even posing for an official regime photo—until SHAEF authorities finally arrived to hustle them off to jail. (“Any word from me would be superfluous,” Dönitz said.) An Allied Control Council would assume power over Germany in early June on behalf of the victors, and Anglo-American troops vacated the Soviet zone a month later. SHAEF moved from Reims to Frankfurt and became USFET, U.S. Forces in the European Theater, even as those forces—more than three million strong—began heading home. Not least among the jobs at hand was the disposal of 211,000 tons of German poisonous gas munitions found in the U.S. and British zones alone, including 90,000 tons of mustard bombs and 3.7 million gas artillery shells—a reminder of how much worse the war could have been. Military authorities considered shipping some of the stuff to the Pacific for use against the Japanese, then concluded that the 160,000 tons of U.S. gas munitions stockpiled in Europe and the Mediterranean offered an ample reserve, if needed.

  “On the continent of Europe we have yet to make sure that … the words ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘liberation’ are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them,” Churchill told Britons in mid-May. “Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done and the whole world safe and clean.” Part of that cleansing required the investigation and prosecution of those culpable for murdering six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, and others, many others. Three thousand tons of documents relating to the camps would be captured and parsed. In Room 600 of the Nuremberg courthouse, the most celebrated of all war-crimes tribunals would hear testimony from 360 witnesses and review 200,000 affidavits. Of two dozen major Nazi defendants, ten would be hanged in October 1946, from gallows built in a jail gymnasium.

  Individual Allied governments also conducted hundreds of additional trials. The Western powers alone arrested 200,000 suspected culprits, charging more than 5,000 with major war crimes. Of 48 defendants tried by a British military court in Lüneburg for crimes relating to Bergen-Belsen, 11 would be executed by an experienced hangman specially flown to the Continent. From 1945 to 1948, American military tribunals tried 1,672 Germans—military officers, politicians, diplomats, industrialists, physicians, jurists—in 489 trials.

  The path to justice often proved circuitous. Seventy-four defendants were tried in a Dachau courtroom for murdering GIs and Belgian civilians at or near the Malmédy crossroads during the Bulge, and forty-three of them received death sentences, including their commander, Colonel Joachim Peiper. But confessions had been coerced, by threats to defendants’ relatives, physical force, and other wrongful inducements; all capital sentences were commuted. Released from Landsberg prison in 1956, Peiper found a job managing American sales for Porsche. Later he worked for Volkswagen and as a translator, remaining active in Waffen-SS veterans associations. In 1976, Peiper burned to death when his house in Alsace was fire-bombed by a killer who also had slashed the hoses of the local fire department. The crime remained unsolved.

  * * *

  Eisenhower’s avowed “number 1 plan” after the war was “to sit on the bank of a quiet stream and fish.” That would not happen: the victorious commander was destined for grander things. Among the many accolades he received was a graceful note from Montgomery. “I owe much to your wise guidance and kindly forbearance,” the field marshal wrote. “I know my own faults very well and I do not suppose I am an easy subordinate; I like to go my own way. But you have kept me on the rails in difficult and stormy times.”

  No laurel meant more to Eisenhower than Marshall’s encomium:

  You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare.… You have made history, great history for the good of all mankind, and you have stood for all we hope for and admire in an officer of the United States Army.

  Ahead lay fifteen more years of service, as Army chief of staff, president of Columbia University, commander of the new NATO military alliance, and president of his country. But first Eisenhower would return to London, where three years earlier he had arrived as a new and quite anonymous major general responsible for planning the liberation of Europe. Now a mob instantly congregated when he tried to take a quiet stroll through Hyde Park—“Ike! Good old Ike!” they cried—and two bobbies had to escort him back to the Dorchester Hotel. “It’s nice to be back in a country where I can almost speak the language,” he had quipped.

  On Tuesday, June 12, in an open landau pulled by a pair of high-stepping bays, he rode to the Guildhall, London’s eight-hundred-y
ear-old city hall, still scarred from the Blitz. Here he would receive a sword of honor and Britain’s formal thanks. A band played Handel’s “See the Conquering Hero Comes” as policemen mounted on five white chargers led the carriage into Gresham Street, where thousands of spectators let loose a roar that sent pigeons flapping from the church belfries. Inside, a string orchestra had just finished “My Old Kentucky Home” when a bailiff bellowed from the door, “The supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force!” Eisenhower climbed to the dais to be welcomed with applause by the great men of England, Churchill foremost among them. For twenty minutes, pale and a bit nervous, he spoke without notes of their common cause, their shared sacrifice, and their joint victory. “I had never realized that Ike was as big a man until I heard his performance today,” Brooke told his diary. One line from Eisenhower’s address would be engraved over his tomb in Kansas a quarter-century later: “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”

  * * *

  Blood there had surely been, and sacrifices beyond comprehension. Battle casualties among armies of the Western Allies since D-Day exceeded three-quarters of a million, of whom at least 165,000 were dead. Added to that were 10,000 naval losses, half of them dead, and 62,000 air casualties—half of them dead, too, in the 12,000 Allied planes lost over Europe.

  British, Canadian, Polish, and ancillary forces in 21st Army Group tallied combat losses of 194,000 in eleven months, including 42,000 killed. French battle casualties in northwestern Europe reached 69,000, of whom 12,600 had died. Ghastly as such losses were, they paled beside those suffered by other combatants. Of all German boys born between 1915 and 1924, one-third were dead or missing. Some 14 percent of the Soviet population of 190 million perished during the war; the Red Army suffered more combat deaths at Stalingrad alone than the U.S. armed forces did in the entire war. Soviet forces also had killed roughly nine times more Germans than the United States and Britain combined.

  American soldiers bore the brunt for the Western armies in the climactic final year: the 587,000 U.S. casualties in western Europe included 135,576 dead, almost half of the U.S. total worldwide. Of 361,000 wounded GIs, the quick and the lucky escaped with superficial scars, like the veteran who years later wrote that “my left index finger still carries the mark where a tiny shell fragment entered it once, back there one raving afternoon.” Others were less fortunate, among them the 1,700 left blind from all theaters, and the 11,000 with at least partial paralysis of one or more limbs. The Army also tallied 18,000 amputations, most of which occurred after June 1944. A single hospital in Michigan treated more amputees than the total number of amputations incurred by the entire U.S. Army in World War I. “You didn’t always remember their name,” one surgeon later said, “but you did remember their stump.”

  * * *

  Seventy-five thousand Americans had been listed as missing or captured during the European campaign; thousands still were not accounted for at war’s end, leaving their loved ones with the particular anguish of uncertainty. “Darling, come to me in a dream tonight and tell me that you’re alive and safe,” Myra A. Strachner had written from the Bronx on April 18, after Private First Class Bernie Staller went missing. “Please! I know you want to tell me.” Private Staller’s secret eventually would out: he had been killed by German artillery a month earlier, at age nineteen. For others, the mystery endured. An estimated 25,000 GIs lay in isolated graves around the Continent, many of them hidden or lost.

  No sooner had the ink dried on the surrender documents than mobile teams fanned across Europe to seek the dead and missing, including 14,000 Americans believed killed in air crashes behind enemy lines and others who had died in German prison hospitals. Similar searches began from the Arctic Circle to Cape Town, from the Azores to Iran. Graves Registration units labored to confirm the identities of more than 250,000 American dead in 450 cemeteries scattered across 86 countries, two-thirds of them in Europe or the Mediterranean. For an estimated 44,000 lost at sea, nothing could be done.

  Within weeks, 700 bodies were disinterred in Czechoslovakia. Hundreds more emerged from scattered graves in eastern Germany, where the Soviets grudgingly permitted three American recovery squads to roam the countryside. Thirteen hundred sets of American remains were unearthed in the Low Countries, many from MARKET GARDEN polders. Millions of land mines made tromping around the Hürtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line perilous, but a nine-month hunt through western Germany would find 6,220 Americans on battlefields large and small. In three years, European fields, forests, orchards, and cellars would yield 16,548 isolated GI dead; over the subsequent decades they would continue to give up a skull here or a femur there.

  Even as this search began, all twelve U.S. military cemeteries on German soil were emptied; no dead GI would knowingly be left in the former Reich. By the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands, the dead were reinterred at thirty-eight temporary sites, mostly in France, of which ten eventually became permanent American cemeteries. The solicitude accorded them could be seen at the Ninth Army cemetery in Margraten, where on May 30, 1945, Memorial Day, Dutch citizens gathered flowers from sixty villages and spread them like a brilliant quilt across seventeen thousand graves.

  The power of a well-wrought grave was beyond measure. Patricia O’Malley, who was a year old when her father, Major Richard James O’Malley, a battalion commander in the 12th Infantry, was killed by a sniper in Normandy, later wrote of seeing his headstone for the first time in the cemetery at Colleville, above Omaha Beach.

  I cried for the joy of being there and the sadness of my father’s death. I cried for all the times I needed a father and never had one. I cried for all the words I had wanted to say and wanted to hear but had not. I cried and cried.

  In 1947, the next of kin of 270,000 identifiable American dead buried overseas would submit Quartermaster General Form 345 to choose whether they wanted their soldier brought back to the United States or left interred with comrades abroad. More than 60 percent of the dead worldwide would return home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 per body, an unprecedented repatriation that only an affluent, victorious nation could afford. In Europe the exhumations began that July: every grave was opened by hand, and the remains sprinkled with an embalming compound of formaldehyde, aluminum chloride, plaster of Paris, wood powder, and clay. Wrapped in a blanket, each body was then laid on a pillow in a metal casket lined with rayon satin.

  Labor strikes in the United States caused a shortage of casket steel, and repatriation was further delayed by a dearth of licensed embalmers, although government representatives made recruiting visits to mortician schools around the country. In warehouses at Cherbourg, Cardiff, and elsewhere the dead accumulated. Finally the Joseph V. Connolly, the first of twenty-one ghost ships to sail from Europe, steamed down the Scheldt with 5,060 dead soldiers in her hold. Thirty thousand Belgians bade them adieu from the Antwerp docks, while pledging to look after the 61,000 Americans who would remain in those ten European cemeteries, “as if,” one man vowed, “their tombs were our children’s.”

  On Saturday, October 27, the Connolly berthed in New York. Stevedores winched the caskets from the ship two at a time in specially designed slings. Most then traveled by rail in a great diaspora across the republic for burial in their hometowns. Among those waiting was Henry A. Wright, a widower who lived on a farm in southwestern Missouri, near Springfield. One by one his dead sons arrived at the local train station: Sergeant Frank H. Wright, killed on Christmas Eve 1944 in the Bulge; then Private Harold B. Wright, who had died of his wounds in a German prison camp on February 3, 1945; and finally Private Elton E. Wright, killed in Germany on April 25, two weeks before the war ended. Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born. Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery
for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky.

  Thus did the fallen return from Europe, 82,357 strong. As the dead came home, so too the things they carried. Two hundred miles north of the Wright farm, the Army Effects Bureau of the Kansas City Quartermaster Depot filled a large warehouse at 601 Hardesty Avenue, just below a majestic bend in the Missouri River. From a modest enterprise that had begun with half a dozen employees in February 1942, the Effects Bureau had expanded to more than a thousand workers, and by August 1945 they were handling sixty thousand shipments a month, each laden with the belongings of American dead from six continents.

  Hour after hour, day after day, shipping containers were unloaded from rail freight cars onto a receiving dock and then hoisted by elevator to the depot’s tenth floor. Here with assembly-line efficiency the containers traveled by conveyor belt from station to station down to the seventh floor as inspectors pawed through the crates to extract classified documents, pornography, ammunition, and perhaps amorous letters from a girlfriend that would further grieve a grieving widow. The prevailing rule on Hardesty Avenue was said to be “Remove anything you would not want returned to your family if you were the soldier.” Workers used grinding stones and dentist drills to remove corrosion and blood from helmets and web gear; laundresses took pains to scrub bloodstains out of field jackets and uniform blouses. A detailed inventory was pinned to each repacked container before it was stacked in a storage bin. And all the while banks of typists in an adjacent room hammered out correspondence to the next of kin, up to seventy thousand letters a month, asking where the soldier’s last possessions should be sent.