Armageddon (16 page)
The Germans generally fought well, but their weaker units sometimes surprised the Allies by lack of will and skill, while good American soldiers behaved with resolution. In one of the Moselle bridgeheads at Comy on 11 September, B Company of the 11th Infantry was established around a brick factory. In the early hours of the morning, Lieutenant Mitchell Hazam ran into company headquarters shouting “Tanks!” Sergeant Norris Boyer alerted a nearby 57mm anti-tank gun crew, and the company commander Captain Harry Anderson dashed upstairs. An approaching German tank fired at and missed Hazam as he ran across the street. German infantry were following. Anderson ordered everyone to keep absolutely quiet, and to withhold fire. The enemy made no attempt to clear the houses in which the Americans lay. Anderson called in a tank destroyer, which promptly knocked out one German tank. A 57mm gun hit another. Anderson shot one tank commander in his turret with a rifle. The tank destroyer finished off the tank as it tried to escape. Anderson’s men then opened fire on the German infantry to devastating effect, inflicting some twenty-eight casualties, for the loss of only two Americans killed. Just as firing was dying away and the GIs were rounding up another twenty-eight of the attackers who had surrendered, a German officer suddenly appeared in the street with a machine pistol. Sergeant Boyer shot him. B Company’s notable little success was marred by the loss of one nineteen-man platoon, which was presumed captured in its entirety, since no American bodies were found on its positions after the attack. But the action showed how richly determination could be rewarded on the battlefield.
The archives of the European campaign suggest that many American officers were more honest and self-critical about their units’ weaknesses and failures than their counterparts in any other combatant army. It is impressive to observe the frankness of U.S. Army after-action analyses. Lieutenant-Colonel William Simpson, commanding the 2/10th Infantry, submitted a report in September arguing that the drive towards the German border was seriously hampered by excessive caution: “We lost time because of a lack of boldness and aggressiveness on the part of our scouts.” Suggesting that infantry were much too ready to pull back if they met resistance, he highlighted an incident in his own battalion on the Moselle. He was dismayed to discover an entire rifle company preparing to withdraw on its own initiative, after American artillery rounds began to fall short in its sector. When two tank destroyers withdrew from the forward area, “some of the men of my reserve company, whose commander had been killed, started to withdraw. They were checked by a battalion liaison officer.”
“Every day seems like the day before . . . with the rain pouring down,” Lieutenant-Colonel D. K. Reimers of the 90th Division wrote gloomily in his diary on 23 September. After Third Army’s early repulses at Metz, Patton shifted the focus of his advance thirty miles further south, to Nancy. Here his men made good headway east of the river, until they met substantial armoured forces of the German First Army. Thereafter, in the middle days of September, Patton’s forces fought the fiercest tank battles the Allies had known since Normandy.
The Germans feared Patton above all his peers. More than any other Allied commander, his vision of war reflected their own driving urgency. Von Rundstedt’s deployments on the Western Front flattered Patton’s role in Eisenhower’s plans, and reflected German respect for the explosive American’s energies. In September 1944, Army Group B dispatched in haste to Alsace-Lorraine the best new tanks von Rundstedt could muster, and threw them into battle against the American Shermans. Chester Wilmot observed that in September this became the only sector of the entire Western Front where von Rundstedt’s troops could meet the Allies on more or less equal terms. At heavy cost, above all in armour, the Germans checked Third Army. But the American performance showed what able commanders and determined troops could accomplish. Armoured units of von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army attacked near Lunéville on 18 September. In the four days fighting that followed, General John S. Wood, one of the outstanding U.S. tank leaders in Europe, fought his 4th Armored Division to such effect that the Germans were not merely beaten but shattered. 111th Panzer Division, which had arrived in Lorraine with ninety-eight tanks, ended the battle reduced to seven tanks and eighty men. Unusually, American casualties were far smaller than those of the Germans. It is true that many of the Wehrmacht units were new formations, and that their tanks fresh from the factories suffered as severely from mechanical failure as from enemy fire. But these handicaps did not suffice to grant the Allies victory on many other occasions. When the Germans renewed their offensive on 25 September, they made a little ground, but by the end of the month they had run out of steam. The Americans were going nowhere in a hurry in Lorraine, but Third Army had destroyed some of the strongest forces von Rundstedt possessed on the Western Front.
Patton now began to launch a long, bloody series of assaults on the forts of Metz which cost Third Army a thousand casualties a day, a higher rate of loss than the Arnhem battle. Even Patton’s admirers have nothing to say in praise of his Metz attack, which seemed simply to reflect stubborn determination to achieve a declared objective. Captain Jack Gerrie, a company commander in the 11th Infantry, submitted a withering after-action report on the folly of attempting such operations with depleted units made up to strength with raw replacements. “I took a dim view of trying to take Fort Driant with these men,” he wrote.
I knew they were not trained nor hardened . . . We took a crack at Driant, and as expected we couldn’t make it. The three days we spent in the breach of the fort consisted in keeping the men in the line. All the leaders were lost exposing themselves at the wrong time in order to get this accomplished. The new men seemed to lose all sense of reasoning. They left their rifles, flamethrowers, satchel charges and what not laying right where it was. I was disgusted, and so damn mad that I couldn’t see straight. If it had not been for preplanned defensive artillery fire, they [the Germans] would have shoved us clear out of the fort with the calibre of troops we had. Why? The men wouldn’t fight.
In the eyes of Patton’s critics such assaults demonstrated that, for all his brilliance as a pursuit commander, in a slogging match against the German Army he fared no better than any of his rivals. It has continued to bemuse history that he expended so much effort and so many lives on battering Metz once the strength of the German positions there had become plain. Bradley argued that “there was nothing to be gained by pecking away at those forts. It was too costly.” Patton himself wrote to Henry Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, late in October: “I hope that in the final settlement of the war, you insist that the Germans retain Lorraine because I can imagine no greater burden than to be the owner of this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consisted in assorted manure piles.” That month, rainfall in Lorraine doubled the average for the season. For the men on the line, conditions were wretched. Mildew attacked leather, rust coated metal, and mud clogged every movement by men or vehicles. Condoms became a universal prophylactic not for sexual activity, but for protecting rifle barrels, gunsights and radio and telephone mouthpieces from the relentless precipitation. It required an effort of will for a man merely to exist through the days and nights in foxholes and ruins, and an even greater one to participate in operations against the enemy.
The Germans possessed some redoubtable formations to throw into the line. “We were still pretty good,” said Sergeant Max Wind of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, rebuilt after Normandy into a formation of 8,000 men, about half its established strength. “There were some young boys, but we also had some very experienced men. We respected Patton, because we knew that he respected Germany. But the American soldier was nothing like the Russian. Yes, of course, the U.S. had the material. But we never thought a lot of their soldiers. They lacked the motivation we had.”
The U.S. Seventh Army under Patch, having driven north from the Mediterranean, together with the French First under de Lattre de Tassigny, closed up on Patton’s right through the Vosges Mountains to the Swiss border. The French military contribution was small, and almost entirely symbolic. Their formations suffered chronic problems of indiscipline—indeed, French colonial units in Italy and later Germany were sometimes responsible for mass rapes on a Russian scale. The French left to the Americans the mundane tasks of providing supply and support for their fighting units. No one anyway had illusions about the scope for swift progress in the Vosges region, or about the significance of advances in south Lorraine. Harsh though this reality might seem to men obliged to fight and die there, every Allied planner knew that the vital organs of Germany lay in the north, not in the south of the country.
The most painful missed opportunities of the autumn, perhaps of the entire campaign, occurred 120 miles from Metz, in the U.S. First Army’s sector on the German border south of Aachen. On Wednesday 13 September, four days before Market Garden was launched, the U.S. VII Corps made tentative penetrations of Hitler’s West Wall. The attacking forces were commanded by Major-General J. Lawton Collins, “Lightning Joe,” the ablest and most combative American corps commander in north-west Europe. For the first three days, Collins’s men made good headway. The fortifications were not inherently strong, for Hitler had never expected to need them. They encompassed an interlocking network of pillboxes, for which the German Army Group B had to scrabble to find keys after the August retreat, to allow defenders to occupy them. Most were protected by a thicket of concrete “dragons’ teeth,” designed to arrest armoured vehicles. Early American VII Corps operations encountered only German Home Guard units. By the weekend, however, three days after the first American incursions, substantial regular forces were moving into the line. Even pillboxes became formidable obstacles if they were manned by men who knew what they were doing.
E Company of the American 28th Division’s 109th Infantry fought a typical little action on the morning of 14 September near Harspelt, just inside the German border. The company was depleted by casualties from mortar fire even before it began its attack on the West Wall. It was commanded by a first lieutenant, because its commander had been wounded the previous day. Technical-Sergeant Tom Beers was told to take a twelve-strong platoon with a tank to seize a pillbox. While it was still dark, Beers walked back into Harspelt to show his accompanying tank the way forward. The soldiers crossed their start line at 1030, following the Sherman, and quickly came under mortar and artillery fire. The tank stopped. Its commander called down to Beers, demanding to know when he should stop firing and—by implication—advancing. “Use your head,” said the sergeant irritably. One squad set out towards a pillbox 350 yards away. They were stopped by wire. Beers went forward himself and started cutting it. Then a machine-gun opened fire on the Americans, causing some men to scurry back down the road. One sergeant, Moulding, picked up a BAR light machine-gun and continued forward with three riflemen. Beers said: “It was getting to be quite a run, and the machine-gun fire wasn’t anything to sneeze at.” He shouted back at the men who lay prone fifty yards behind him: “Keep coming—these heinie bastards can’t hit us!” He moved forward himself, and others followed. Nine Americans finally reached the pillbox. Beers fired his rifle into its embrasure, “I guess just for my morale’s sake.” He ran round the back, throwing two grenades to keep the Germans’ heads down. Then they laid a 10-pound satchel charge by the door, which failed to explode. The rest of the company was now 200 yards behind. There was a brief pause before an NCO of another platoon arrived, carrying a new satchel charge. This exploded without doing much visible damage to the pillbox, but evidently shocked its inhabitants. Beers left two men to watch the entrance, and scouted warily around its surrounding fire trenches and sleeping quarters, throwing grenades in front of him, though the positions proved to be empty. Then one of the watchers by the entrance hollered: “They’re coming out!” Twenty-one Germans led by a captain emerged from the pillbox with their hands up. One attempted to make a run for it and was shot. The rest were taken prisoner.
This little skirmish was typical of a hundred others up and down the West Wall, save that attackers elsewhere often met more determined resistance. To the men of the 109th who advanced up the road from Harspelt, the overwhelming superiority of the Allied armies and the strategic weakness of the Germans possessed no significance. They knew only that their depleted company was being asked to assault the vaunted Siegfried Line, with precious little help from anybody else. “I think that the propaganda on the strength of the Siegfried Line has created a feeling of timidity in attacking the defences,” Lieutenant-Colonel H. G. McFealey wrote to Bradley on 22 September. “Once they have had some success, the feeling is gone.”
As with many units in many battles, most of the men involved in the 109th’s little action behaved cautiously and hesitantly. The outcome was decided by the persistence and courage of a handful of NCOs and riflemen. So much depended upon a small minority of such men. As the bold and experienced soldiers were wounded or killed through the weeks that followed, they proved ever harder to replace. The pace of the Allied advance became progressively more sluggish. Lieutenant Witt of the 109th was especially scornful about the behaviour of supporting tanks: “If one gets hit, they all turn tail and run, and it surely is hard to get your men up when that happens.”
South of VII Corps, V Corps also made initial penetrations. But these were halted by German reinforcements. The Americans reported, correctly, that they faced 9th Panzer Division. Its armoured strength was reduced to just three tanks. But as usual the Germans’ professionalism and energy made the most of tiny resources. They counter-attacked again and again, pushing at exposed flanks, about which they considered the Americans morbidly sensitive.
