War Stories III (39 page)

But Bill Merriken and Emile Jamar did finally meet—in 1999 at the site of the Malmedy Massacre. Merriken had written Belgian friends that he would visit them during a trip he was taking to Europe to commemorate his WWII experiences. Emile, now in his sixties, wanted to meet the wounded man who rode away that day in an ambulance that he had made possible, and thereby saving Bill's life.

As the two men came together, Bill began to weep and laugh at the same time. He said, “I'm so thankful.”

Emile said of the meeting, “To know him not five minutes and see the tears streaming down his face . . . there was a bond that formed between us in that moment.”

This “Battle of the Bulge” was Hitler's last futile attempt at any kind of offensive operation. Though it cost the Allies nearly 20,000 killed and
15,000 POWs, it had destroyed two Panzer armies—nearly 100,000 killed, wounded, and captured. None of those troops, their 800 tanks, 3,000 vehicles or 400 aircraft lost in Autumn Mist would be there when Hitler needed them to stop the Red Army as it closed in on Berlin.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the sheer courage of the American fighting man prevented a disaster and eventually won a bloody victory. This epic triumph wasn't achieved by the brilliance of military strategists. It was won by hundreds of thousands of ordinary GIs in their foxholes . . . exhausted, low on ammunition, hungry, freezing—who simply refused to give up—men who witnessed their friends blown to pieces, but who mustered the courage to fight on day after day, denying Hitler the success he so desperately needed.

CHAPTER 14

THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER AND THE THIRD REICH 1945

T
he Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's Autumn Mist December 1944 offensive in the Ardennes, had proven to be an unmitigated disaster for the Third Reich. By New Year's Day 1945, American, British, and Red Army offensives were closing in on Germany's industrial heartland and Berlin from the east, south, and west. At the Argonaut Conference in Yalta—4–11 February—Churchill, Stalin, and an ailing Roosevelt met to map out final strategy for how the Führer would be finished off—and the shape of postwar Europe.

Churchill left Yalta disappointed. Roosevelt, clearly ill and in failing health, was unable or unwilling to stand up to Stalin's demands for hegemony over Eastern Europe. To his chagrin, the “United Nations”—as the Allies had taken to describing themselves in press releases—announced “unanimous” withdrawal of recognition for the Polish government in exile that had been resident in London since 1940. Even before Hitler's final defeat, the fissures that would dominate European politics for more than four decades were beginning to show.

Roosevelt departed from the Crimea convinced that a plan had been put in place for the “cooperative administration” of postwar Germany—divided into four “occupation zones”—U.S., British, Russian, and French. He had also won acquiescence from the Soviet and British leaders to publicly try the leaders of the Reich as “war criminals” before an international tribunal. But he also left the Black Sea port a dying man.

Stalin returned to Moscow determined to become the arbiter of continental Europe and with an understanding that Berlin would fall to the Red Army. While the “Big Three” posed for photographs at the conference, Soviet Field Marshall Georgi Zhukov's Red Army columns were barely fifty miles from Berlin.

None of the three leaders foresaw that Hitler—or the German people—would invite Armageddon by continuing to resist the Allied onslaught. Once again, the leaders of the “Grand Alliance” had underestimated their adversary.

On both the eastern and western fronts, the Wehrmacht was being battered incessantly. And in the east, millions of terrified German civilians were fleeing the approaching Russians. The brutal savagery of the vengeful Red Army was well beyond anything that even Paul Goebbels' propaganda could envision. Rape, torture, and murder of German civilians became so prevalent that many fathers killed their wives and daughters rather than subject them to the “tender mercies” of the Russian enemy. The atrocities made the Wehrmacht fight even harder.

By the time the Allied heads of state gathered at Yalta, all of Germany was being subjected to round-the-clock air bombardment, reducing whole cities to gutted, smoking ruins. There was little food, fuel, heat, or electricity available in much of the country. Yet the Germans resisted.

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.

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.