Armageddon (40 page)

They were in a village a few days later, on 11 December, when word came of Americans nearby. Pusch and his depleted unit were ordered to push the enemy back. The men, most of whom scarcely knew each other, trudged miserably forward. They occupied the first few houses, just as the Americans approached and opened fire. The Germans could see a score or more Shermans. A young lieutenant told Pusch: “Get a faust.” When the paratrooper seemed reluctant to comply, the officer ran for one himself, fired, and set the leading tank on fire before he staggered back into the porch of their house, hit in the legs. The other men dragged him in, then ceased firing and retired to the cellar.

They heard Americans closing in. Two Germans cautiously climbed the steps to meet them, hands held high. A torch probed down from the ground floor upon Pusch and his remaining comrades. An American voice told them to come out. They dumped their weapons and ascended into captivity. Their wounded officer still clutched his Schmeisser, doggedly determined to fight on. The other Germans removed the gun, laid him on a door and carried him out. Pusch felt moved by the care with which an American medic treated his friend from Hamburg, Werner Mittelstrauss, who was badly wounded in the legs. German shells were now falling around them. The paratrooper was slightly wounded by splinters in his lip and eye. Yet he was overwhelmed with gratitude that his war was over: “It was like a reprieve from cancer.” The following two years that he spent as a prisoner, initially working in a fertilizer factory at Norfolk, Virginia, were among the happiest of his life: “I was in heaven. I met no hostility in America.” His story is important, because it highlights the experience of a German soldier no more eager for glory than most of his Allied counterparts. Pusch embraced escape from the war.

T
HE
A
MERICANS
at last inched out of the Hürtgen Forest in the first days of December. They had won their battle, at fearsome cost. The 4th Division suffered terribly—some 4,053 battle casualties, together with a further 2,000 cases of trench foot and combat fatigue. Some of the division’s companies were reduced to fifty men. Robert Sterling Rush writes of the 4th’s 22nd Infantry: “The soldiers of the regiment did not quit, but at the end there was no attack left in them. The soul of the regiment had been ripped out when it lost its experienced junior leaders, NCOs, platoon officers . . . Although the unit remained above 75 per cent strength through a constant influx of replacements, once all its veterans were lost, its effectiveness declined dramatically.” Meanwhile 1st Division, the “Big Red One,” had lost 3,993 casualties, 1,479 of these in the 26th Infantry Regiment, to advance four miles. On 29 November, in an attempt to take the town of Merode, just north-east of the Hürtgen, the regiment lost two companies cut off and almost wiped out.

At last, the way seemed open to the Roer plain. Yet at the head of its river stood the Roer dams. These offered the Germans scope to flood the low ground at will. Control of the dams was critical, and this had been understood by Allied intelligence staffs since the beginning of October. The obvious solution was to destroy the dams by bombing before the armies reached them. This task was delegated to the RAF, which had made much of its 1943 success in bursting the Möhne and Eder dams by precision attack. Unfortunately, the Roer dams—like the vital Sorpe in 1943—proved resistant to air attack. Three attempts by Bomber Command failed. The RAF then abandoned the operation. The Roer dams remained potent threats in the hands of the Germans. No Allied ground force could advance into the plain until they were taken.

The dams might be reached through the so-called Monschau Corridor, a narrow strip of open ground just south of the Hürtgen, difficult country for an attacker because of its gorges, streams and pillboxes. Its seizure must inevitably be an infantry task. Back in October and November, the Americans had persuaded themselves that they could not advance up the Monschau Corridor while German forces remained on their flank in the forest. Yet the enemy in the trees were not elite mobile formations but infantry dependent upon their own feet and horse-drawn carts to go anywhere.

When the Americans finally addressed the Monschau Corridor in December, Gerow’s V Corps at first made uncommonly good progress. His fresh divisions, especially the 78th, advanced without artillery preparation, exploiting friendly fog on 13 December. The 2nd Division made much slower work of the Monschau Forest. It may have been “battle-hardened,” to use one of the most abused clichés of war, but it was also very tired. Its 9th Infantry Regiment suffered 400 losses from trench foot and exposure, and a rather smaller number of battle casualties. “The German Army almost until its final extremity rotated units out of the line more frequently and regularly than the American Army,” a U.S. historian notes. “The effect was to undermine an effective American division’s asset of experience by sheer weariness.” By the morning of 16 December, the Monschau Corridor attack was stuck. There was also a lurking sense of menace. While the 78th Division confronted the German 272nd Division, there was growing evidence of larger enemy forces beyond, with more ambitious purposes than those of merely checking the U.S. V Corps.

S
OUTHWARDS IN
L
ORRAINE,
Third Army launched a new attack on 8 November, across a front of almost sixty miles. An assault on such a broad front represented a dispersal of hitting power which puzzled those who admired Patton’s rare grasp of the importance of concentration. The conditions were dreadful. It was at this period that Patton enlisted the aid of Colonel James O’Neill, Third Army’s senior chaplain: “Do you have a good prayer for weather? We must do something about this rain if we are to win the war . . . We must ask God to stop.” If this request strengthened the widespread belief that Patton was not wholly sane, it inspired O’Neill to write a prayer which was afterwards circulated to every man in Third Army alongside its commander’s Christmas greeting: “Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle.” When it began to snow soon afterwards, opinion was divided about interpretations of the divine response.

Sergeant Bill Mauldin became a legend in the U.S. Army long before he achieved the same status in the United States as a cartoonist, by creating his two dogface GIs Willie and Joe for
Stars & Stripes.
Patton loathed these characters, whose shaggy mien and unheroic behaviour he deemed “subversive.” He summoned their creator for a personal reprimand. Mauldin afterwards provided one of the most vivid portraits of Third Army’s commander:

There he sat, big as life . . . His hair was silver, his face was pink, his collar and shoulders glittered with more stars than I could count, his fingers sparkled with rings, and an incredible mass of ribbons started around desktop level and spread upward in a flood over his chest to the very top of his shoulder, as if preparing to march down his back too. His face was rugged, with an odd, strangely shapeless outline; his eyes were pale, almost colorless, with a choleric bulge. His small, compressed mouth was sharply downturned at the corner, with a lower lip which suggested a pouting child as much as a no-nonsense martinet. It was a welcome, rather human touch. Beside him, lying in a big chair, was Willie, the bull terrier. If ever dog was suited to master this one was. Willie had his beloved boss’s expression and lacked only the ribbons and stars. I stood in that door staring into the four meanest eyes I’d ever seen.

Mauldin observed: “I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn’t like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes.” For all Patton’s bombast, however, in south-eastern France Third Army was still struggling to win ground. The Germans had thickly sown their positions with new plastic and wooden mines, impervious to American detectors. On 25 November, Patton belatedly but triumphantly entered the city of Metz. The local German corps commander sent a message to the remaining encircled forts in the hands of his men, warning them that if they gave up they “would surrender not to fighting troops . . . and in all probability to coloured troops.” The last forts did not yield until 13 December. Enemy officers pricked their captors by expounding on the feebleness of the garrison. There had been no SS fanatics among them, said the Germans proudly, but rather a mix of old men and young replacements, in the usual muddle of units.

On 22 November at Nancy, an SS general galled Patton, who was interrogating him personally, by asserting: “The combat efficiency of the troops on the Eastern Front is far above the sector here.” Patton asked why, if that was so, the SS officer had let the side down by remaining alive. Third Army’s commander implied that the German’s undamaged condition might not prove permanent. The general replied coolly that he was a prisoner of war of the Americans. Patton said: “When I am dealing with vipers, I do not have to be bothered by any foolish ideas . . .” Third Army’s commander likewise questioned a Wehrmacht colonel about why his men were still bothering to fight. This officer replied: “They will continue to fight until such time as they receive orders to lay down their arms . . . It is the fear of Russia that is forcing us to use every man who can carry a weapon.” He added that he hoped he would be taken to a PoW camp in the U.S. rather than Britain. Patton said this was likely.

In the last days of November, Third Army’s offensive ran out of steam. It had reached the West Wall and made some penetrations after initial difficulties. On 1 December, American troops crossed the Sarre river. The Germans abandoned their efforts to hold a line on the west bank, and withdrew on the U.S. XX Corps’s front. The men of every formation in the American advance had suffered heavily from exposure and trench foot. All Patton’s infantry units were seriously short of men. They were weary, and morale was flagging. The mud made it impossible for either side to use tanks off-road, and thus drastically reduced the scope for bold initiatives. Further south in Alsace, Devers’s 6th Army Group overcame weak German opposition to drive through the Vosges Mountains and take Strasbourg on 26 November. Patton urged that at least a part of Devers’s forces should push on eastwards, to cross the upper Rhine and threaten the German First Army with outflanking. Eisenhower vetoed the proposal. He saw no purpose in crossing the Rhine so far south. Devers’s divisions, like Patton’s, were intended to swing northwards. By mid-December, their spearheads had begun to engage the positions of the old French Maginot Line, which the Germans were now defending backwards. Almost everywhere, from the Ardennes southwards, U.S. and French forces had closed up to the borders of Germany. Yet for Patton of all men, the great exponent of speed and dash, the battles of October and November had been deeply disappointing. All hope of a dramatic drive into Germany was gone with the coming of winter weather. After ten weeks of painful slogging, only more slogging seemed to lie ahead.

Some men cracked. Staff-Sergeant Bill Getman of the 254th Infantry spent thirty-one days in the Vosges before his unit began to push forward towards the Alsatian plain. One day during an attack, Getman suddenly turned and ran screaming towards the rear across a blazing field. A medic injected him with morphia and took him to the rear. He found himself unable to speak. After tests, he was taken to the 682nd Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, where he had more tests. In the months that followed, he received narco-synthesis, narco-analysis and sodium-pentathol treatment. He began to speak again, stammering, and recovered some memory. He felt desperate to escape the army, and after a further examination he got his way. A doctor noted “my misery, my pains, my shaking body and poor speech. It was then that I heard the words: ‘Sergeant, no more duty for you, limited or otherwise.’ ” Early in 1945, Getman went home.

“Many people here are resigned to a static winter,” wrote Bradley’s aide Colonel Chester Hansen on 22 November, “which is hard to understand . . . Germany is now flat on her back and still resisting furiously. With good weather, we might smash on through with the help of our fighter-bombers, but the weather has been miserable and does not seem to want to cooperate.” A visiting group of U.S. industrialists asked Bradley himself on 30 November whether he thought it possible that the armies might still be fighting over the same ground six months on. “I think it’s entirely possible,” answered 12th Army Group’s commander, “unless we get a great deal more of ammunition and matériel.”

“The average infantryman was nearly always certain that everyone else had quit the war except his own platoon,” wrote Sergeant Forrest Pogue with the U.S. V Corps. “They knew whether fire came from left or right, and what casualties, but had little clue about time, or where they had been.” Pogue noted the flat, dreary lull that descended upon the campaign towards the end of November:

Such periods always seemed marked by growing doubts on the part of the soldiers as to the wisdom of the war. In a typical discussion one evening, several of us talked of the listlessness of the American soldier, and the fact that he seldom seemed to know what he was fighting for. Some of them argued that there had never been any reason for our coming over, that all the U.S. needed was a strong navy. I doubted if we could ever make people see what they were fighting for, unless we were invaded. I said that most of them in 1942, soon after Pearl Harbor, seemed to think they knew why they were fighting, but as time went on it was harder to show them.

By the end of the Hürtgen battle, 24,000 Americans had become combat casualties, and another 5,000 had succumbed to trench foot, respiratory diseases and combat fatigue. Overall U.S. casualties in the autumn fighting were 57,000 combat and 70,000 non-combat, to achieve insignificant territorial gains, though the Americans could claim to have inflicted substantial losses upon the enemy. These totals masked harsher realities for individual units which had suffered most severely. A Company of the 4th Division’s 22nd Infantry landed on D-Day with 229 soldiers of all ranks. By 16 November, only fifty-four of these men remained in the line; 275 replacements had been received. Among 500 soldiers all told, 70 had been killed, 41 were missing or captured, 235 were wounded and 91 had become non-battle casualties—trench foot or combat fatigue cases—though most of these returned to duty. Between 16 November and 4 December, 59.4 per cent of the 22nd’s officers were either killed, wounded or missing, or became non-battle casualties, together with 53.9 per cent of their men.