by Oliver North
The day before the Yalta Conference began, Staff Sergeant Joe Regan, an Iowa farm boy turned B-17 ball-turret gunner, was part of a 2,400-plane raid over the German capital. He learned firsthand how hard a desperate enemy could still fight.
STAFF SERGEANT JOE REGAN, USAAF
92nd Bomb Group
03 February 1945
My dream was to be a pilot, and it was a possibility, until they washed out 10,000 cadets in early ’44, because they weren’t losing pilots as fast as they had been. It was a big disappointment that I wasn’t going to get my pilot’s wings. But I did get gunnery wings, and assigned to a B-17 crew.
We trained in England and Scotland and were assigned to the 92nd Bomb Group. I started flying missions about the same time we were bombing targets around the Bastogne and towns along the western part of the Bulge.
On 3 February 1945, my fifteenth mission, we took off and headed for Berlin. There were over 1,000 B-17s, 424 B-24s, and 900-plus fighters. Now, they never gave us any parachute training, because they didn’t want gunners bailing out. They just told us, if you ever need it, put your parachute harness on and tighten it up. I used to put my parachute on the floor up above the ball turret.
We had just dropped our bombs, and I looked out and saw that number four engine was on fire. The pilot knew it too, and he dived to blow the fire out, as I sat there bouncing around in the ball turret. We were going straight down, and I didn’t know what was happening. But he put that fire out and then pulled the plane out level at about 20,000 feet. In that maneuver we got three more hits.
We were still heading east. The pilot thought we could make it to the Russian lines, less than sixty-five miles from Berlin. But, we’d taken too many hits from the flak—some of them really bad—and the pilot rang the “bail out now” buzzer.
The ball turret is hard to get out of—you have to have your guns pointing straight down in order to get out. There’s a trap door behind you that you have to open up first. So, I stood on the seat, looking for my parachute and I retrieved it. Well, there was a door just in front of the horizontal stabilizer, where you had to pull the hinge pins out. I did that and kicked the door until it fell out, and I followed it out.
Other crew members were going out from the hatch in the nose, but the pilot stayed with the plane until he was sure everybody was out. The pilot and co-pilot went out through the bomb bay. This was my first parachute jump, and I figured I’d better get it right the first time. When the crew jumped it was like throwing leaves out—we were scattered all over. And because we opened our parachutes at different altitudes, none of us saw each other as we landed.
The B-17 apparently came down about twenty miles northeast of Berlin. When I jumped I saw the ground coming up pretty fast. And so I pulled the ripcord and after a couple minutes I crashed through some trees, and my knees came up under my chin when I hit the ground.
A few minutes later, a German truck drove up with seven or eight German soldiers sitting in it, obviously looking for where I came down. Not finding me, they went back up the road. As soon as they left I headed east. I walked for five days before I got captured.
I almost made it to where the Russians were shelling a village off to my right. And I figured I was in Russian territory, but I wasn’t—a German soldier took me prisoner. I was taken to a headquarters of some kind and they asked me a lot of questions, checked my dog tags, and then took my Parker 51 pen set, my wristwatch that I’d won in a poker game, and put me in a room with a bunch of German enlisted men. I was given a blanket and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning a German soldier was looking down at me.
He turned me over to a civilian—I suspect he was Gestapo. Of course I couldn’t understand what he was saying in German. But, I think they were trying to locate the rest of my crew—who must have been picked up—because he kept asking me if I knew Lieutenant Morrow, Lieutenant Early, and he went right through the list of my crew members.
By that time the Germans had a pretty good contingent of prisoners, mostly Americans. They put us on a train, and took us north to a place called Stalag Luft, a temporary prison camp for airmen. That’s where I caught up to my crew members—they were in line for some food. When I walked up, they didn’t know who I was, because I’d lost fifteen pounds and they had shaved my head. We were there for a while before they moved us down to Nuremberg.
In the weeks that followed we got news from new guys coming into camp. They’d tell us how where Patton was, so we expected liberation any day. But then they decided to move us again. They moved 9,000 of us on a march that took about two weeks, covering ten kilometers a day.
The new prison camp was a hell-hole—filthy and overcrowded. I heard one time there had been 135,000 prisoners of war in that camp. Not all were Americans, some were Allies. Hitler ordered all prisoners moved when our troops got close. He had visions of holding us hostage. There were no barracks left, so we were sleeping in big circus tents. We were just like sardines in there.
One day an American P-51 Mustang flew over, and did barrel rolls over the camp. That was signal that Americans were coming. I think the guards fled when they saw our planes come over.
On 29 April, American tanks came crashing through the barbed wire—and General George Patton was in one of the tanks. He walked through the main street of the compound, and some GI standing next to me says, “You can slap me now, General Patton.” And the general laughed like hell. He was a pretty happy guy. And by then, so were we.
After Patton’s 3rd Army tanks smashed through the gates of Joe Regan’s POW camp, the captured airmen had to wait several more days to be taken out. Food and transport trucks finally arrived and the former POWs were taken to Reims to be deloused, given first aid, then convoyed to St. Valerie, France, where Joe was hospitalized for a couple of weeks before shipping home.
On 8 February the Canadian 1st Army launched Operation Veritable, an effort to secure the remaining ground west of the Rhine. They met stiff resistance from the German 25th Army and remnants of the 1st Parachute Division. The U.S. 9th Army, bogged down in the flooded Ruhr River valley, were unable to link up with the Canadians until 23 February—delaying a late-winter offensive east by Montgomery’s British armor.
But by the first weeks of March, with the Red Army closing in on Berlin from the east, German defenses in the west began to collapse. On 23–24 March 8,000 U.S. soldiers of the 9th Armored Division forced across the Rhine River just south of Wesel—and the Rhine was the last natural barrier into the German heartland. The U.S. 1st Army, in Operation Lumberjack, captured Cologne on 5 March and two days later, Hodges’s 1st Army seized the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen. The span was taken intact—German demolition teams had failed to blow it as they retreated. Further to the south, Patton’s 3rd Army cleared the Moselle River basin, pushed the Wehrmacht out of the Saar Valley, and on 11 March he crossed the Rhine—pausing only long enough to make a statement by urinating in it.
In a last-ditch effort to stem the Allied advance in the west, on 10 March, Hitler had replaced the aristocratic von Rundstedt with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring—the man who had so effectively delayed American-British advances in Italy. But it was too late—even the master of defense could not stem the Allied tide.
The German ranks were now filled with old men and boys. Kesselring was plagued by inadequate equipment, insufficient fuel, and deficits in ammunition, weapons—even food. Patton, Hodges, and the other Allied commanders rolled right over his western army in every engagement. On 22 March Patch’s 7th Army joined with Patton in the Saar and Palatinate regions, and captured a bridgehead on the Rhine at Oppenheim.
By the end of the month, the American 1st, 3rd, and 9th Armies had encircled Germany’s nearly ruined industrial heartland. There, Joachim Fest, a seventeen-year-old German conscript, came face-to-face with the Americans.
JOACHIM FEST
Freiburg Gun Battery
Breisgau, Germany
27 March 1945
At age f
ifteen I was drafted into the military, but in May 1944 at age seventeen I transferred into the Luftwaffe. But none of us had any idea of flying anymore. By then, it was much too late for that.
Goering had organized the Luftwaffe into so-called air force infantry divisions, and I was assigned to one of those—not knowing if I would be sent to either the Eastern Front or the Western Front. In the east there was the danger of being taken as a Russian prisoner of war. No one wanted that—but there was still great danger in the west, due to the Allied air superiority.
I saw action at the famous bridgehead of Remagen. I thought about what would happen if the Americans captured me—how would I be treated? During the battle we went six days with nothing to eat. So I ate my “last resort” rations, as they were called—I ate them up.
Off to the left side of my position, about 100 meters away, there was a farm. I was sent there to see if there was any food but as I approached the main building through a narrow passageway for the harvest wagons and mowers, I ran into an American soldier, and he immediately yelled, “Hands up!”
I also said “Hands up!” to him. But then other American soldiers showed and I was taken captive. They led me into a room in this farm and imprisoned there. The next day I was brought to the Rhine River and during the night was brought over Remagen Bridge to the other side of the Rhine. There, several dozen of us were locked inside a school building.
After that we were driven in trucks to a prisoner of war camp near Paris—where almost half-million German soldiers had been detained. We were all together in primitive tents and conditions. My family was in Berlin and for weeks before I was captured I had heard nothing from them. There hadn’t been any mail—and of course it had been impossible to phone during the last weeks of the war. So I was very worried about my parents and my sisters.
When the war was finally over I learned that my father had been taken as a Russian prisoner of war, and my mother and my two sisters were displaced from the area of Berlin where they lived. Within the space of two hours they had to vacate their apartment to accommodate Russian soldiers. They were only permitted to take what one person could carry in one suitcase. They tossed in whatever they could, but then they were suddenly on the street.
In January 1947 I was released from the American prisoner of war camp. My father was one of the lucky few who made it back from being a Russian prisoner of war. He had lost about half his weight. We slowly nursed him back to health and he lived another fifteen years, in spite of his terrible captivity.
When I came back to Germany, I first had to finish my schooling since I had been drafted before finishing school. Half a year later I graduated with the so-called German Abitur certificate. And then from that moment on, I was allowed to read anything, say anything, think anything, and publish anything. And suddenly I realized that there is indeed a new freedom that is worth something.
In 1948, the Americans organized the “Berlin Airlift” to feed the people of the city while the Russians blockaded the trains and roads into Berlin from the west. The airlift has always engendered a feeling of deep thankfulness in me and in my entire generation. We will not forget—and I know many of my friends feel the same way—what America has done for our freedom.
On 19 March a tormented Adolf Hitler sought refuge in his Berlin underground bunker—caught in an undeniable downward spiral, measured only by the continuing injections that his doctor administered regularly. One of Hitler’s own staff members described him as, “a dreadful sight . . . saliva frequently dripped from the corners of his mouth.” Yet, the Führer continued to issue orders—including a directive drafted by Albert Speer, calling for war production to continue until the last possible moment, then—if factories or facilities were unable to function—they should be crippled or destroyed.
By the evening of 23 March, the 21st Army Group and the U.S. 17th and British 6th Airborne Divisions had followed Patton across the Rhine and the next day, the rest of the U.S. 9th and British 2nd Army had also entered Germany’s heartland. The U.S. 7th Army crossed the Rhine further south, at Worms on 26 March, along with the French 1st Army.
But then, on 28 March, Eisenhower, at Marshall’s direction, sent word to Stalin that the western Allies would not advance on Berlin. Instead, the British and Americans would proceed along the Efurt-Leipzig-Dresden corridor to split German defenses and then link up with the Red Army. When General Omar Bradley called Patton and told him that Eisenhower did not want him to venture any farther into Germany, it is said that “Old Blood and Guts” had tears in his eyes. By 1 April 1945, the final Red Army drive to Berlin was on.
Hitler shortly before the end of the war.
A disheartened General George Patton turned his army east toward Czechoslovakia, and on 7 April, his troops literally struck gold, uncovering a hoard of Nazi treasure—$250 million in gold bars—hidden deep inside a salt mine in the town of Merkers. After receiving a tip from local residents, Patton’s engineers blasted their way into the salt caverns outside the town and found millions more in priceless works of art—paintings, jewels, and 8,000 gold bars—along with more than fifty boxes of gold bullion, gold and silver coins, and hundreds of bales of currency from various nations worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It appeared that most of the gold reserves of the German Central Bank had been stored there.
Excitement about the discovery was tempered with a grisly realization—Hitler’s SS had also used the mine to hide gold and jewels stolen from Nazi death camp inmates—including dental fillings, wedding rings, and other jewelry and personal effects.
Although the Merkers mine was located in an area designated as a Soviet-controlled zone, Patton ordered the booty to be removed before the Red Army arrived.
The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 April did nothing to slow the momentum. The following day, Soviets troops occupied Vienna, Austria, and subdued the last German defenders in Hungary. Though American and British troops paused briefly out of respect to the American president, Russian troops continued their offensive and by 13 April, 2.5 million Red Army soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Front and the 1st Ukrainian Front effectively encircled the capital in a ring of massed artillery and mortar fire. Two days later, American and British soldiers overran the Ruhr Valley, capturing 320,000 German troops. The Third Reich was in its death throes.
Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on 19 April 1945 by decorating several Hitler Youth defenders of Berlin for their valor. The next day, the 3rd Infantry Division entered Nuremberg, the seat of Nazi power. American troops lined up in Adolf Hitlerplatz and ceremoniously raised the Stars and Stripes over a huge Nazi swastika.
With the end near, Hitler was spending nearly every moment in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery with his closest Nazi Party officials. Nonetheless, Heinrich Himmler, one of his most steadfast followers, still managed to slip away long enough to meet in secret with Swedish diplomats in an effort to see if he could negotiate some kind of conditional surrender on the Western Front.
Now, only a select few remained loyal to Hitler. One of them was Eva Braun and another, a Hitler Youth soldier, sixteen-year-old Armin Lehmann, on courier duty, was dodging Russian bullets to deliver messages to and from Hitler’s bunker.
CORPORAL ARMIN LEHMANN
Hitler Youth—Jungsturm Adolf Hitler
Berlin, Germany
19 April 1945
When the war started, I volunteered for the mountain Jungsturm unit. These were AA units to shoot down enemy bombers. I was fifteen at the time. At Christmas ’44 I had the papers at home to report to the pre-military training for mountain soldiers.
I reported to my Jungsturm unit of the Hitler Youth, and our commanding officer was an army first lieutenant, who had been wounded and only had one lung left. He said, “I need a courier,” and picked me for the job. That was good news for me, because to a certain extent as a runner you’re on your own. You are given a destination; you deliver your dispatch, and get back to the unit. You are mostly r
esponsible to yourself.
I was never afraid of death. But I was afraid of the Russian soldiers. We were told that they slaughter to sterben Sie einen langsamen Tod, which means they let you die a painful, slow death.
Twice I was given the Iron Cross for bravery, after being wounded, and for getting some of my wounded comrades out of the line of fire. We had encountered a Russian tank. A German panzerfaust—like an American bazooka—was the only weapon available to me at the time so I knocked out one of the Russian tanks, and completed the mission without any more casualties.
After attending to my wounds they put me on a hospital train, and then later I was sent back to our unit. But my orders changed—I was to go and defend Berlin. The unit was comprised of the students of a Jugen-sturm, and some others from a pre-military training facility—altogether about 150 young people.
I was there getting ready when a German-type jeep drove up and a man jumped out right in front of me, and pointed to the medal I had been awarded, and said, “Where did you get the Iron Cross?”
I explained it to him. And then he went to my commander and pointed to me and said, “Are there two more like him? I need three decorated boys to present to the Führer on his birthday.” The celebration was on the nineteenth, but the reception for us was postponed to the twentieth, at five o’clock in the afternoon. We were driven right into the garden of the Chancellery. Hitler was shaking so badly he couldn’t even really shake our hand. He had to hold on to his jacket.
When I first saw Hitler seven years earlier, in 1938, he was strong, healthy looking, wearing his Nazi uniform, and his medals from the First World War. He had radiated energy, and people went wild. But when I saw him on April 20, he looked older than my grandfather who was in his seventies. Hitler’s birthday was that day—he was fifty-six. He also looked smaller, which might have to do with age.
