Citizen Soldiers [Condensed]

by Stephen Ambrose

DAWN, September 20. One mile downstream from the bridges, Major Cook's men were ready to go, but the assault boats had not arrived. Vandervoort's battalion, meanwhile, was unable to drive the Germans out of the park, despite great effort. Sergeant Sampson was badly wounded that morning by shellfire.

  While Cook's battalion waited for the boats. Cook went to the top of a tower at a nearby power station to survey the opposite bank of the Waal River. A young captain with Cook, Henry Keep. wrote in a letter home, "What greeted our eyes was a broad, flat plain void of all cover or concealment . ...some three hundred metres, where there was a built-up highway where we would get our first opportunity to get some protection. We could see all along the Kraut side of the river strong defensive positions, a formidable line both in length as well as in depth-pillboxes, machinegun emplacements."

  Ten British tanks and an artillery battery were lined up along the river to give covering fire when Cook crossed. But not until 1500 did the trucks arrive. They brought only twenty-six assault boats, instead of the thirty-three that had been promised. And they were the frailest of craft-six metres long, of canvas, with a reinforced plywood bottom. There were only three paddles per boat. The Waal was almost 400 metres wide, with a swift current of about ten kilometres per hour.

  The paratroopers pushed off into deep water, thirteen men to a boat, plus three British engineers with the paddles. As they got out into the current and headed for the far bank, the Germans opened fire. Cook and Keep were in the first boat. "It was a horrible picture, this river crossing," Captain Keep wrote to his mother, "set to (lie deafening roar of omnipresent firing. It was fiendish and dreadful. Defenceless, frail canvas boats jammed to overflowing with humanity, all striving desperately to cross the Waal as quickly as possible, and get to a place where at least they could fight."

  Some boats took direct hits, leaving nothing but flotsam. The flotilla came on. Only eleven boats made it to the far shore, but when they did, the paratroopers who had survived the ordeal had their blood up. They were not going to be denied.

  "Nobody paused," a British tank officer wrote. "Men got out and began running towards the embankment. My God what a courageous sight it was!"

  Cook led the way. Captain Keep commented, "Many times I have seen troops who are driven to a fever pitch-troops who, for a brief interval of combat, are lifted out of themselves, fanatics rendered crazy by rage and the lust for killing, men who forget temporarily the meaning of fear. However, I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. The men were beside themselves. They continued to cross that field in spite of all the Kraut could do, cursing savagely, their guns spitting fire."

  In less than a half hour his men had reached the top of the highway embankment and driven the Germans out. The engineers, meanwhile, had paddled back to the west bank and returned with a second wave. Altogether it took six crossings to get Cook's battalion over.

  As those crossings were being made. Cook led the first wave in an assault on the bridges. His men came on fast. Meanwhile, Vandervoort's people on the west side had finally overrun the park. The Germans scrambled frantically for the plungers to set off explosives on the bridges, but Cook's men did what they had been trained to do-wherever they saw wires on the ground, they cut them. The German engineers hit the plungers, and nothing happened.

  Cook's men set up defensive positions at the bridges, facing east. As the British tanks with Vandervoort started across the highway bridge, their crews saw the Stars and Stripes go up on the other end. Of Cook's men forty were killed, a hundred wounded, but he had the bridges. There were 267 German dead on the railroad bridge alone, plus many hundreds wounded and captured. It was one of the great feats of arms of World War II.

  Darkness was descending. Arnhem was but eleven kilometres away. Frost's battalion was still barely holding the eastern end of the bridge. But General Horrocks decided to set up defensive positions for the night. The Guards began to brew up their tea.

  Cook's men were enraged. They yelled and swore at the Brits, told them those were their countrymen in Arnhem and they needed help- now. Horrocks commented, "This operation of Cook's was the best and most gallant attack I have ever seen carried out in my life. No wonder the leading paratroopers were furious that we did not push straight on for Arnhem. They felt they had risked their lives for nothing, but it was impossible, owing to the confusion which existed in Nijmegen, with houses burning and the British and US forces all mixed up."

  On September 21 the tanks moved out, only to be stopped halfway to Arnhem by two enemy battalions with tanks and 88s. There were Jabos overhead, but the radio sets in the RAF ground liaison car would not work. That afternoon the 9th SS Panzer Division overwhelmed Frost's battalion. Some days later the survivors of 1st Airborne crossed the Rhine to safety. The division had gone into Arnhem 10,005 men strong. It came out with 2,163 live soldiers.

  OVER THE next six months the front line in Holland hardly moved. For the 82nd and 101st that meant months of misery. They couldn't move by day, because the Germans held the high ground to the east and had enough 88 shells to expend at a single soldier whenever one was visible.

  The American airborne troops had been trained as a light infantry assault outfit, with the emphasis on quick movement, daring manoeuvres, and small-arms fire. Now they were involved in a static warfare that was reminiscent of World War I. And as in the Great War, the casualties were heaviest among the junior officers.

  Stefanich gone, Cole gone, Wray gone, so many others gone. Reflecting on the losses, Dutch Schultz commented, "By the end in Holland, most of the officers trained by General Gavin had become battlefield casualties." The pain of the loss of these good men was compounded by the knowledge that nothing had been gained. At the end of September, Patton's Third Army was stuck; the supply crisis was worse than ever. Antwerp wasn't open. And Market-Garden had failed. What would be the consequences?

  Chapter Five

  The Siegfried Line: October 1944

  As THE Americans reached the German border from Luxembourg north, they were entering country that had been fought over since Caesar's time. It was interlaced with ancient walled cities, and villages that made natural strongpoints.

  The French region of Lorraine is south of Luxembourg. Since the beginning of European civilization it has been a battlefield. It was an invasion route for the Germanic tribes coming from Central Europe into France. Over the centuries there have been many fortifications in the area, which is bounded on the east by the Saar River and on the west by the Moselle River.

  Metz is on the Moselle, 45 kilometres north of Nancy, the historic ruling city of Lorraine. Metz is perhaps the most heavily fortified city in the most heavily fortified part of Europe. Fifteen fortifications were built close around the city in the seventeenth century by the famous French military engineer Sebastien Vauban. The Prussians came through Metz in 1870, nevertheless. After the Franco Prussian War, Bismarck incorporated Lorraine into the new Germany, and the German army constructed a second, outer belt of twenty-eight forts, mainly north and west of the city. In 1918 Lorraine returned to France. Soon the French army was building the Maginot Line some twenty kilometres east and north of Metz, while the Germans built the Siegfried Line another twenty kilometres to the east, along the line of the Saar River, the prewar border.

  Hitler, whose faith in reinforced cement never wavered-a result of his World War I experiences-poured a lot of it into the Siegfried in this area. By 1940 the strongest part of the Siegfried faced the strongest part of the Maginot Line. In the summer of 1944, when the retreat from Normandy began, Hitler poured more cement, put more guns into the Siegfried and Metz forts, and waited.

  Hitler had the weather on his side. Fall is the wet season in Lorraine, with an average monthly rainfall in autumn of 3 inches. In November 1944, 6.95 inches of rain fell during the month.

  Patton cursed. His Third Army's mission was to take Lorraine, but in the sheets of cold rain, with the mud clinging to boots and tank trea
ds, and the Moselle at flood stage, he couldn't do it. He lusted for Metz. To get it, he had to take Fort Driant. The fort stood on a dominating hill, with clear fields of fire up and down the Moselle. The Americans could not cross the river above or below Metz until Driant was theirs. Built in 1902 and later strengthened by both French and Germans, the fort covered 355 acres. It was surrounded by a 65-foot wide moat, which in turn was surrounded by a 65-foot band of barbed wire. It had living quarters for a garrison of 2,000. Most of the fortification was underground, along with food and ammunition supplies, enough for a month or more. The only way in was over a causeway. There were four outlying casement batteries and a detached fifth battery. Concealed machine-gun pillboxes were scattered through the area.

  On September 27 Third Army made its first attempt to take Driant. Although they had only a vague idea of the fort's works, they figured that a pre-World War I fortress system couldn't possibly stand up to the pounding of modern artillery, much less air-dropped bombs of 500 to 1,000 pounds, not to mention napalm. From dawn to 1415 hours the Americans hit the fort with all the high explosives in their arsenal.

  At 1415 the llth Infantry Regiment began to move in on the fort. To their astonishment, when they reached the barbed wire surrounding the moat, Germans rose up from pillboxes all around and opened fire. Sher-mans came forward to blast the pillboxes, but their 75-mm shells hardly chipped the thick concrete. The infantry ignominiously withdrew under cover of darkness.

  Third Army now faced the oldest tactical-engineering problem in warfare-how to overcome a fortified position. It helped considerably that the Americans eventually got their hands on the blueprints of the fort, which showed a warren of tunnels. No amount of high explosive was going to knock the fort down. Infantry would have to get inside and take possession.

  On October 3 the second assault on Driant began. Captain Harry Anderson of Company B led the way, tossing grenades into German bunkers as he ran across the causeway into Driant, where he established a position alongside one of the casements. An intense firefight ensued. Germans popped out of their holes like prairie dogs, fired, and dropped back. They called in their own artillery from other forts in the area. American engineers got forward with TNT to blast a hole in the casement, but the heavy walls were as impervious to TNT as to shells and bombs.

  On top of the casement Private Robert Holmlund found a ventilator shaft. Despite enemy fire, he managed to open the shaft's cover and drop several bangalore torpedoes down the opening. Germans who survived evacuated the area, and Captain Anderson led the first Americans inside the fort. The room they had taken turned out to be a barracks. They quickly took an adjacent one.

  The Germans counterattacked. The ensuing firelight was a new dimension of combat. It shattered nerves, ears, and lives with machine-gun fire and hand grenade explosions reverberating in the tunnels enclosed by thick, dripping masonry walls. The air was virtually unbreathable; men in the barracks room had to take turns at gulping fresh air from firing slits.

  B Company was stuck there. It had neither the equipment nor the manpower to fight its way through the maze of tunnels. It couldn't go back; being on top of the fort was more dangerous than being in it. At dark, reinforcements accompanied by a half-dozen Shermans crossed the causeway and assaulted another casement, but they were badly shot up and forced to withdraw.

  Captain Jack Gerrie, CO of G Company, llth Infantry, led the reinforcements. On October 4 Gerrie tried to knock down the steel doors at the rear of the fort. Direct cannon fire couldn't do it, and protruding grillwork made it impossible to put TNT charges against the doors. The Germans again called down fire on Driant, which forced G Company to scatter to abandoned pillboxes, ditches, anywhere for shelter. That evening Gerrie tried to reorganize his company, but the Germans came out of the underground tunnels-here, there, everywhere-fired, and retreated.

  At dawn on October 5 German artillery commenced firing. After hours of this, Gerrie wrote a report for his battalion commander: "The situation is critical. A couple more barrages and another counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot and we just can't go on. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions. The enemy artillery is butchering these troops. We cannot get out to get our wounded and there is a hell of a lot of dead and missing. There is only one answer the way things stand. First either to withdraw and saturate it with heavy bombers or reinforce with a hell of a strong force, but eventually they'll get it by artillery too. This is just a suggestion but if we want this damned fort let's get the stuff required to take it and then go. Right now you haven't got it."

  Written from a shell hole under fire by a man who hadn't slept in two days, it is a remarkable report, accurate and rightly critical of the fools who had got him into this predicament. It moved right up to the corps commander, who showed it to Patton and said the battalion commander wanted to withdraw. Never, Patton replied.

  Over the next three days Third Army threw one more regiment into the attack, with similar ghastly results. The lowliest private could see clearly what Patton could not, that this fort had to be bypassed and neutralized because it was never going to be taken.

  Patton finally relented. Still, not until October 13 were the GIs withdrawn. About half as many returned as went up. This was Third Army's first defeat in battle.

  The only good thing about a defeat is that it teaches lessons. The Driant debacle caused a badly needed deflation of Patton's hubris. That led to a recognition of the need to plan more thoroughly, to get proper equipment. The next time, Third Army was going to get it right.

  NORTH OF Luxembourg, at Eilendorf, just outside Aachen, Captain Dawson's G Company was holding its position on the ridge astride the Siegfried Line. By October 4, G Company had repulsed three German counterattacks and endured 500 shells per day from 105 howitzers. The Germans came on in division strength, but again Dawson's company beat them back, with help from the artillery and air. "We had constant shelling for eight hours," Dawson remembered. "We had twelve direct hits on what was our command post."

  An officer in Dawson's battalion, Lieutenant Fred Hall, wrote his mother on October 6, "This action is as rough as I have seen. Still the hardships are borne with little complaint." Hall told his mother, 'Tn the lower echelons of command, faced with the realities of the situation, the feeling is that the war will not be over before the spring of 1945 at the earliest."

  Because of the weather, planes could not fly, tanks could not manoeuvre, soldiers marched only with the greatest difficulty. Patton was stuck. Antwerp was what Eisenhower wanted, but Montgomery failed to open it. According to reports coming to Eisenhower, the Canadians trying to overrun the Schelde estuary were short on ammunition because Montgomery persisted in trying to widen the Market-Garden salient in Holland and had given priority in supplies to the British Second Army.

  Eisenhower ordered Montgomery to put his full effort into opening the Schelde. But not until October 16 did Montgomery give priority to the Canadians. Not until November 8 were they able to drive the Germans out of the estuary. Then the mines had to be cleared and the facilities repaired. Not until November 28 did the first Allied convoy reach Antwerp's docks. By then the weather precluded major operations.

  Under the circumstances, an obvious strategy would have been to abandon any offensive moves, create defensive positions facing the German border, go into winter camp, and wait for the supply situation to improve and the weather to clear. But Eisenhower gave no thought to winter quarters. With the V-2s coming down on London, with thousands dying daily in concentration camps, he could not. With the Red Army pushing into Central Europe, with the unknown factor of how the race for an atomic bomb was progressing, he could not.

  Eisenhower urged his subordinates to offensive action. The campaign that resulted was one of the toughest of the war. The strategy was just to attack to the east. The terrain in the centre of the American line-the Eifel mountains and the rugged Ardennes and Hurtgen fore
sts-dictated that the main efforts would take place to the north and south of these obstacles. To the north. First and Ninth armies would head towards the Rhine along the axis Maastricht-Aachen Cologne. The major obstacles were the Siegfried Line, the city of Aachen, and the northern part of the Hurtgen. To the south, Third Army would continue to attack through Lorraine and advance towards the Saar River.

  To CARRY out those missions, the American army needed to overcome problems aplenty. For the first time since early August, when they had fled the hedgerow country, the Germans had prepared positions to defend. One of the first tasks they accomplished as they manned the Siegfried Line was to put S-mines-Bouncing Betties-in front of their positions. Thousands of them. When triggered by a trip wire or foot pressure, they sprang a metre or so into the air before exploding. The canister contained 360 steel balls or small pieces of scrap steel. They were capable of tearing off a leg above the knee or inflicting the wound that above all others terrified the soldiers.

  Lieutenant George Wilson had joined the 4th Division at the time of St. Lo. By early October he had been in combat for nine weeks, but he had not yet seen an S-mine. On October 10, when he led a reconnaissance platoon into the Siegfried Line east of Malmedy, Belgium, suddenly they were everywhere. Engineers came forward to clear the mines and use white tape to mark paths through the fields. They set to probing every inch of ground, gently working trench knives in at an angle, hoping to hit only the sides of the mines. They began uncovering-and sometimes exploding-devilish little handmade mines in pottery crocks, set just below the ground. The only metal was the detonator, too small to be picked up by mine detectors. They blew off hands.

  A squad to Wilson's right got caught in a minefield. The lieutenant leading it had a leg blown off. Four men who came to help him also set off mines, and each lost a leg. Wilson started over, but the lieutenant yelled at him to stay back. Then the lieutenant began talking calmly to the wounded men around him. One by one he directed them back over the path they had taken into the minefield. One by one, on hands and knee, dragging a stump, they got out. Then the lieutenant dragged himself out.