Citizen Soldiers [Condensed]

by Stephen Ambrose

  On August 9, German light tanks tried again. There were five attacks in the first hour that morning. Weiss, who had not eaten or slept for 48 hours, was operating on adrenaline. He was 21 years old and filled with the wonderful feeling that he was making a difference in a crucial battle. The frantic activity-shooting up tanks, troops, guns, and vehicles-cut through his fatigue and masked it. He was exhilarated. On the third day, still without rest, he sent this message: "As sleepy, tired and hungry as I am, I never felt so good as I feel right now."

  The observers were calling up to P-47s and British Typhoons whenever they saw German tanks on the road. Meanwhile, elements of the 4th, 9th, and 35th divisions hammered the German flanks. As on Hill 317, forward observers on high ground called in fire missions. Eighteen-year-old Private Robert Baldridge was in the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, 9th Division. He recalled, "The visibility from the top of this hill was excellent. What a change it was from the narrow confines of the hedgerows. We saw some twenty miles distant, even the spires of Mont-St. Michel."

  That day the leading elements of the American forces got into Alengon. Argentan was but 40 kilometres to the northwest. But the GIs were meeting stouter resistance because the Germans were awakening to their danger. Major Charles Cawthorn, an infantry battalion CO in Patton's army, recalled that this was not "a game of Allied hounds coursing the German hare," as the press was reporting it, but rather the hunt after "a wounded tiger into the bush; the tiger turning now and again to slash at its tormentors, each slash drawing blood." Kluge, meanwhile, was pleading with Hitler to allow him to retreat to the east while the gap was still open.

  ON HILL 317 the position was precarious-no food, ammunition running low, and worst of all, the radio batteries were dying. Sergeant Sasser retrieved discarded batteries and set them out on rocks. The sun restored some life. He switched batteries several times a day, restoring one set while using another. Even so, by the end of the fourth day, it was doubtful that he could keep them going.

  The GIs had long since cleaned out the chicken coops and rabbit pens around the half-dozen farms on the hill, along with the fruit and vegetable cellars, and were eating raw vegetables gathered from the gardens-when they got anything to eat. Medical supplies had long since run out. After the fourth day Weiss reported, "We could see no end." Incoming radio messages told the 2nd Battalion to hold on, help was coming. But when?

  Lieutenant Ralph Kerley commanded E Company of the 2nd. After four days and nights of fighting, he was exhausted, discombobulated, but he kept at his work. At midmorning of the fifth day, studying the panorama below him through binoculars, he spotted a German mortar crew served by a half-dozen men.

  "Sergeant," he called out to the leader of his own mortar team, "how many rounds do you have left?" "One, sir."

  Kerley paused, thought about what relief it would bring if he could put that mortar out of action, thought about the danger he would be in if he was out of shells. "Do you think you can hit the son of a bitch?"

  "Yes, sir. I reckon I can."

  "Then blow his ass off."

  The sergeant gathered up his crew and brought the 60-mm mortar assembly forward. Kerley watched the enemy mortar crew loafing, lying around, sunbathing, laughing. Occasionally one man would stroll back into the bushes and emerge with a shell, drop it down the tube, and shortly thereafter the shell would explode to the right or left, showering Kerley with rocks and dirt.

  Kerley studied his map, turned to the sergeant, pointed, and said, "Put it right here."

  The sergeant made his own survey with his binoculars. A private, his M-l slung across his back, clutched the sole remaining mortar shell for dear life against his belly. Kerley and the sergeant talked quietly about wind, distance, elevation, made adjustments on the elevating screw. One last consultation, one minor adjustment.

  Satisfied, the sergeant turned to the rifleman with the mortar shell. The private stretched his hands out to the sergeant as if passing off a newborn baby. The sergeant took the shell, kissed it, dropped it in, ducked, and called out, "On the way." Kerley steadied his glasses, peering intently, holding his breath.

  Klaboom! The shell exploded less than ten metres from the enemy mortar team. Two of the men leapt up and dashed away. Two others grabbed their mortar and ran. Kerley started breathing again. "Nice work, Sergeant," he called out.

  ON AUGUST 11 Kluge finally got Hitler's permission to break off the attack at Mortain and begin the retreat through the Falaise gap. It was a momentous, if inevitable, decision, because once the retreat began, there was no place to stop, turn, and defend short of the Siegfried Line at the German border. The line of the Seine could not be defended: there were too many bends in the river, too many potential crossing places to defend. Once the retreat began, the Battle of France had been won.

  At 1430 on the fifth day of the siege of Hill 317, August 12, the 35th Division broke through the German lines and relieved the 2nd Battalion on Hill 317. Of the 700 GIs on the hill, some 300 were dead (including Sergeant Corn) or wounded. Lieutenant Weiss had called in 193 fire missions while the battalion had been surrounded. After eating and getting some sleep, he wrote his after action report on a typewriter, hunting and pecking. It was ten pages long. Summing up what he had learned from his five-day ordeal, Weiss wrote: "Although quite often beat back and silenced, at the slightest carelessness in exposing ourselves thereafter, the enemy would strike back at us. He doesn't quit. His aggressiveness demands a twenty-four-hour observation."

  Then Weiss wrote a letter to his father: "Not much to write about from here."

  THE SPECTACULAR performance by 2nd Battalion, aided by the remainder of the 30th Division, had stopped the German thrust to the coast. Altogether the Germans lost more than 80 per cent of the tanks and vehicles they had thrown into the Mortain attack. Now their entire army in Normandy was threatened. The rush to get out, to get over the Seine and back to Germany, was on.

  By no means did all the Germans participate. Slackers, defeatists, realists seized their opportunity to surrender, convinced that becoming a POW in British or American hands was their best chance of survival. Captain John Colby remembered: "One dark night we pulled off the road. One of our guys lay down to sleep beside an already sleeping German soldier who had become separated from his comrades and had lain down here for the night. When the German awoke the next morning he shook the American to arouse him and then surrendered to him."

  But by no means were all the Germans surrendering. The toughest units and the most fanatical Nazis-panzer and Waffen SS troops-were determined to get out so as to fight another day.

  On August 14 Eisenhower issued a rare order of the day (he sent out only ten in the course of the war), exhorting the Allied soldiers: "If everyone does his job, we can make this week a momentous one in the history of this war-a brilliant and fruitful week for us, a fateful one for the ambitions of the Nazi tyrants." The order of the day was broadcast over BBC and distributed to the troops in mimeographed form.

  The following day Eisenhower held a press conference. There was great excitement among the reporters, who had earlier been gloomy about the stalemate in Normandy and were now optimistic about what lay ahead, as evidenced by the first question Eisenhower received: "How many weeks to the end of the war?"

  Eisenhower, disturbed by the excessive optimism, exploded. He said such thoughts were "crazy." The Germans were not going to collapse. He predicted that the end would come only when Hitler hanged himself, but warned that before he did, he would "fight to the bitter end," and most of his troops would fight with him.

  IF NOT MOST, enough. The Canadians did not get to Falaise until August 17 and then failed to close the gap between Falaise and Argentan. The German army still had an escape route open. For sheer ghastliness in World War II nothing exceeded the experience of the Germans caught in the Falaise gap. They were in a state of total fear day and night. They seldom slept. They dodged from bomb crater to bomb crater. "It was complete chaos," Private Herbert Meier remem
bered. "That's when I thought. This is the end of the world."

  German army, corps, and division headquarters got out first and headed towards the Siegfried Line. Most junior officers felt like the enlisted men- it was every man for himself.

  "It was terrible," Lieutenant Giinter Materne recalled, "especially for those lying there in pain. It was terrible to see men screaming 'Mother!' or 'Take me with you; don't leave me here! I have a wife and child at home. I'm bleeding to death!'"

  Lieutenant Walter Padberg explained: "Honestly said, you did not stop to consider whether you could help this person when you were running for your life. One thought only of oneself."

  "All shared a single idea," according to Corporal Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division. "Out! Out! Out!"

  All this time, bombs, rockets, mortars, and machine-gun fire came down on the Germans. Along the roads and in the fields dead cows, horses, and .soldiers swelled in the hot August sun, their mouths agape, filled with flies. Maggots crawled through their wounds. Tanks drove over men in the way-dead or alive. Human and animal intestines made the roads slippery.

  Lieutenant George Wilson of the 4th Division was astonished to discover that the Wehrmacht was a horse-drawn army, but impressed by the equipment. He had been raised on a farm and "was amazed at such superb draughthorses and accoutrements. The leather was highly polished, and all the brass rivets and hardware shone brightly. The horses had been groomed, with tails bobbed, as though for a parade." His men mercifully shot the wounded animals.

  By August 18 the 1st Polish Armoured Division had moved south, almost to the point of linking up with the US 90th Division to close the gap. Still. Germans escaped. One of them was Lieutenant Padberg. "When we made it out of the pocket," he recalled, "we were of the opinion that we had left hell behind us." He quickly discovered that the boundaries of hel! were not so constricted. Once beyond the gap, Padberg ran into an SS colonel.

  "Line up!" the colonel bellowed. "Everyone is now under my command! We are going to launch a counterattack." There were twenty or so men. The others shuffled into something like a line, Padberg said, "but unfortunately, I had to go behind a bush to relieve myself and missed joining the group behind the colonel."

  Even in the bloody chaos of Falaise, a humane spirit could come over the young men sc far from home. Lieutenant Hans-Heinrich Dibbern, of Panzer Grenadier Regiment 902, set up a roadblock outside Argentan. "From the direction of the American line came an ambulance driving towards us," he remembered. "The driver was obviously lost. When he noticed that he was behind German lines, he slammed on the brakes." Dibbern went to the ambulance. "The driver's face was completely white. He had wounded men he was responsible for. But we told him, 'Back out of here and get going. We don't attack the Red Cross.' He quickly disappeared."

  An hour or so later, "here comes another Red Cross truck. It pulls up right in front of us. The driver got out, opened the back, and took out a crate. He set it down on the street and drove away. We feared a bomb, but nothing happened. We opened the box and it was filled with Chesterfield cigarettes."

  ON AUGUST 20, at Chambois, the linkup of the Americans and Polish troops finally occurred. Captain Laughlin Waters recorded that over the next couple of days "the Germans attacked with all of the fury they could bring to bear, fuelled by their desperation to escape." Others were trying to surrender, many of them successfully-too many, in fact. Neither the Poles nor the Americans had the facilities to deal with them. Waters established a POW pen in Chambois. but it was badly overcrowded.

  On August 23 the SHAEF G-2 summary declared, "The enemy in the West has had it. Two and a half months of bitter fighting have brought the end of the war in Europe within sight, almost within reach." Two days later American forces liberated Paris. General Charles de Gaulle was already there, along with elements of the French 2nd Armoured Division. Paris was overrun by reporters, led by Ernest Hemingway, and over the next few days had one of the great parties of the war.

  THE BATTLE of Normandy had lasted seventy-five days. It cost the Allies 209,672 casualties, 39,976 dead. Two thirds of the losses were American. It cost the Germans around 450,000 men, 240,000 of them killed or wounded.

  But between 20,000 and 40,000 Wehrmacht and SS soldiers got out. They had but a single thought: get home. Home meant Germany, prepared defensive positions in the Siegfried Line, fresh supplies, reinforcements. They had taken a terrible pounding, but they were not so sure as SHAEF G-2 that they had "had it."

  Chapter Four

  To the Siegfried Line: August 26-September 30, 1944

  THE LAST WEEK of August and the first week of September, 1944, were among the most dramatic of the war. The Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) swept through France, covering in hours ground that had taken months, years, really, to take in World War I. The sons of the soldiers of the Great War crossed rivers and liberated towns whose names resonated with the Tommies and doughboys-the Marne, the Somme, Ypres, Verdun.

  Romania surrendered to the Soviets, then declared war on Germany. Finland signed a truce with the Soviet Union. Bulgaria tried to surrender. The Germans pulled out of Greece. The Red Army's summer offensive liberated Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, eastern Poland, and reached Yugoslavia's eastern border. It destroyed twelve German divisions and inflicted 700,000 casualties.

  American and French troops had landed in the south of France on August 15 and were driving up the Rhone Valley against scant opposition (they called it the Champagne Campaign). American reinforcements continued to come from England, enough for the creation of yet another army, the US Ninth, commanded by Lieutenant General William Simpson. British, Polish, and American paratroopers five divisions strong-in England were organized into the First Allied Airborne Army and constituted a highly mobile reserve capable of striking wherever and whenever needed.

  The end of the war did seem at hand. Thoughts of November 1918 were in everyone's mind. General Bradley issued instructions to store the winter clothing that was coming in at Le Havre and over the beaches, in order to use the space on the trucks bringing supplies to the front for ammunition and gasoline. He figured the war would be over before winter clothing was needed.

  THE GERMAN army in retreat was a sad spectacle. Occasionally a battery of 88s or what was left of a company of riflemen and machine gunners would try to throw up a roadblock, but when they did, a tremendous barrage from American artillery, Shermans, Jabos, and small-arms fire would quickly overwhelm them. Then it was every man for himself, with the wounded left behind.

  "Making it home is the motor of the old soldier," Private Paul-Alfred Stoob, a driver of a Panther, observed. Their tank shot out from under them, Stoob and the crew commandeered a truck and took off for Belgium. Stoob recalled, "We had to scavenge for food, here a dog without a master, there a few eggs in a chicken coop. The houses were mostly empty. We found a field bakery. One room was packed to the ceiling with bread. So we filled our truck with bread and moved on."

  The German rout was so complete that the retreating troops didn't even take the time to destroy supply dumps. Elements of Patton's Third Army captured tons of grain, flour, sugar, and rice, along with hundreds of carloads of coal, all of which the GIs distributed to the French civilian population. At another dump Patton's men captured 2.6 million pounds of frozen beef and 500,000 pounds of canned beef, which were distributed to the troops.

  In the 4th Infantry Division, Lieutenant George Wilson felt he was engaging in "a wild, mad, exciting race to see which army could gain the most ground in a single day." To the men of the 743rd Tank Battalion, 2nd Armoured Division, it was "holiday warfare." There was occasional shooting but no casualties. Mainly this was because they had warning of trouble ahead. If the villages were bedecked with flowers and the people were lining the streets, holding out food and bottles of wine, the Germans had pulled out. If there was no reception committee, the Germans were still there.

  On September 2 Shermans from the 743rd got to the crest of a hill overlooking Tournai,
Belgium. Instead of moving down to be the first to cross the border, they sat there, because they were out of gasoline. The great supply crisis in ETO had hit the 743rd.

  THE CRISIS was inevitable. It had been foreseen. It could not have been avoided. Too many vehicles were driving too far away from the ports and beaches. The Red Ball Express, an improvised truck transport system that got started in late August, made every effort to get fuel, food, and ammunition to the front lines. Drivers were on the road twenty hours a day. Between August 29 and September 15, 6,000 trucks carried 135,000 tons of supplies from St. Lo to a supply dump near Chartres. At the dump the supplies were picked up by other drivers and taken to the front. But the front line continued to move east and north, and the system couldn't keep up.

  The 743rd stayed in Tournai for four days, waiting for fuel. On September 7 the battalion filled its vehicles and took off. The GIs got a wild welcome in the Belgian villages. According to the battalion history, "They cheered, and waved, and risked their lives to crowd up to the tanks in motion and in all the demonstrative ways of a happy people they showed their enthusiastic thanks." On September 12 the leading platoon of Charlie Company in the 743rd crossed into Holland, the first Americans to reach that country. The German border was but a few kilometres away.

  Now there was opposition. German artillery boomed. Panzerfaust shells disabled a couple of Shermans. The other Shermans could still fire but not move-their fuel tanks were empty. And the Germans had got into the Siegfried Line. They had fuel problems, too, but they could dig their tanks in and use them as fortified batteries. Their supply lines had grown shorter-Aachen was just to the south, Dtisseldorf and Cologne just to the east.

  They had reached home. Men who saw no point to fighting to retain Hitler's conquests in France were ready to fight to defend the homeland. The German officer corps began organizing the terrified survivors of the rout in France, and suddenly what had been a chaotic mob became an army again. Meanwhile, the armies of the AEF were coming to a halt. On September 2 Third Army requested 750.000 gallons of gasoline and got 25,390. The next day it was 590,000 with 49,930 received. After September 7 Patton got a trickle only. A handful of advance patrols had made it across the Moselle River north and south of Nancy, but Patton's men were still far short of the Rhine and the Siegfried Line protecting it.