The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (12 page)

The city that took the greatest brunt of the German V- weapons—other than London, which suffered 2,419 hits and 6,184 deaths—was Antwerp, the great Belgian port city into which British forces had rolled on September

4. From that date until March 1945, Antwerp was under a constant barrage of rocket attacks, usually three or so per day, which killed 3,700 people and injured 6,000

more. In October, before the attacks intensified, the British authorities did not think the V-weapon attacks likely to shake the morale of the stalwart residents of Antwerp. In fact, General Erskine seemed to think the rockets not at all a bad thing: “On its present scale, it is rather a healthy reminder that the war is not yet over,” he told SHAEF.
12
But the attacks became very unhealthy indeed in November and December. The worst single attack occurred on the afternoon of December 16, 1944. Belgian civilians as well as many Allied soldiers on leave had just settled in at Antwerp’s Rex cinema on the avenue De Keyserlei to see a recent release from Hollywood: The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. The cinema was packed with 1,200 people. At 3:20 P.M., a blinding flash of light cut through the darkened cinema, followed by a defeaning crash and roar. The entire theater exploded into pieces, sending bricks, mortar, wood, and bodies into the air. The cin- ema had been struck by a V-2 rocket. The ceiling col- lapsed, the walls caved in, and the balcony fell onto the viewers beneath. There were 567 people killed, 291 in- jured; 296 of the dead were Allied servicemen.
13

In the eyes of both British and Belgian observers, Bel- gium in the late fall of 1944 looked like a dangerously fragile country, beset by shortages, weak leadership, threats of leftist violence, and constant V-rocket at-

tacks. General Erskine used various metaphors, liken- ing Belgium to “a tender plant needing much material and moral nourishment,” or an ill patient “which is now convalescent.” Nand Geersens of the Belgian branch of the BBC was less sanguine about the country’s pros- pects for recovery: once the joy of liberation had worn off, he said, Belgians faced “the ugly disillusioning re- ality” that their country had been defeated, occupied, and betrayed by greedy, selfish collaborators that had welcomed Nazi overlords. “ The general morality of the country,” he felt, “has naturally suffered through all this…. Our people, to a certain extent, are sick.” He worried that “it will take a long, a very long time before our whole people will once more be healthy.”
14

* * *

T

HE ELECTRIFYING DASH of the Allied armies from the Seine across France and into Belgium was “the headiest and most optimistic advance of

the European war,” General Omar Bradley, command- er of 12th U.S. Army Group, recalled. The Germans had collapsed in France; they turned tail and ran in Bel- gium; on September 13, tanks from the American 3rd Armored Division of VII Corps kicked through the first belt of the Siegfried Line just south of Aachen. And this was no pin-prick: along a five-hundred-mile front, the

powerful Allied armies, numbering fifty-four divisions, seemed poised to crash into Hitler’s Germany, cross the Rhine, and drive for Berlin. Inevitably, there was talk, both in the newspapers and in Bradley’s headquarters, “of getting home by Christmas.”
15

Then the advance came to a shuddering halt. In the next weeks and months, the clash of armies in the west shifted from a high-gear race across hundreds of miles to a slow, pitched battle for every square yard of turf. The reason is simple: the Allied armies were running out of everything, most crucially, ammunition, gaso- line, and men. The joy of gobbling up all those miles of territory between the Normandy beachheads and the German border hid the serious danger of overextended lines. The Germans had made this risk more grave by ordering besieged garrisons in key port cities—Brest, Le Havre, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Calais, Dunkerque—to hold out as long as possible and to sabotage all port facilities. Months after the D-Day landings, Allied forces were still unloading supplies in Normandy and Marseilles, both many miles away from the front, then trucking those supplies across the narrow, rutted, muddy roads of France toward the front—a laborious and inefficient process. And it simply could not be done fast enough to supply the gigantic force of men and ve- hicles that now massed along the German border.
16

The Allies actually made their logistics problem worse through a strategic blunder in mid- September that must rank as one of the worst of the European war. On September 4, the British had entered Antwerp. But the port was useless to them as long as the Germans con- trolled the banks of the watery approaches to the city known as the Scheldt estuary, and in particular Wal- cheren Island, which sits at the mouth of the Scheldt. Rather than concentrating on the essential task of clearing the approaches to Antwerp when the Germans were still disorganized, Eisenhower approved of a plan hatched by General Montgomery for an airborne as- sault into Holland in an attempt to seize a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem— Operation Market Gar- den. Had it worked, it could have outflanked the con- crete dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line and opened up a path into the heart of Germany. But it failed: the Germans were well prepared for the attack, and the British paratroopers took too long to get to the bridge, giving the Germans time to respond. The American 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne divisions did their part, crossing the river Waal and taking the bridges at Nijmegen, but the operation failed to cross the Rhine and seize the proverbial “bridge too far” at Arnhem. In the meantime, the German Fifteenth Army, recently in flight from the Pas-de- Calais, dug in along the Scheldt, thus denying Antwerp to Allied shipping. Not until No-

vember 26 did the British and Canadians manage to clear the German hold on this vital waterway and begin unloading supplies in Belgium. While the Allied armies started to ration their ammunition, the Germans, so bloodied and disorganized after their retreat from France, swiftly resupplied their forces and prepared to defend their homeland. The war that looked as if it might be over by Christmas settled into a stalemate with no end in sight.
17

Like a long electrified wire snaking through northwest Europe from the North Sea down to Switzerland, the western front continually crackled with lethal violence throughout the fall of 1944. Eisenhower and Brad- ley agreed that even without adequate supplies, they must continue to put pressure on the Germans without letup, if only because time would allow the Germans to recover further from their reverses of the summer. Talk of darting to Berlin was forgotten, to be replaced by the simple ambition of killing as many German sol- diers as possible along as wide a front as possible, thus to deplete the German army and bleed it to death. The heaviest fighting from mid- September to mid-Decem- ber was located on Walcheren Island by the mouth of the Scheldt; around Aachen and its hinterland; in the Hürtgen Forest and the western bank of the river Roer; in Lorraine, through the French cities of Metz, Nancy,

and toward the Saar basin; and in the Vosges moun- tains of Alsace on toward Strasbourg, right up against the Franco- German border and the Rhine river.
18
For hundreds of thousands of American soldiers this was a time they would never forget, for these battles would prove to be the most difficult, prolonged, and costly of the war. Battle casualties spiked in November, reach- ing 62,437; they rose in December to 77,726, and in Jan- uary, the Americans sustained a further 69,119 casual- ties: these were the three highest monthly totals for the entire European campaign.
19
General Bradley wrote later that he had “to comb the ETO for emergency re- placements. But, though truckloads of hastily trained riflemen were bundled off to the front, they could not offset the litter cases that passed them headed rear- ward.” Most of the men being carried out on stretchers were the riflemen of the infantry, the front-line troops. Despite replacements, by December 15, Bradley’s 12th Army Group was short 17,000 riflemen, and the rate of loss in the rifle platoons was over 90 percent. If this was a war of attrition, it appeared to be draining the Americans of blood as effectively as it was killing Ger- mans.
20

The stalemate in the west was broken on December 16, 1944, though not in the manner anticipated by the Americans. Unbeknownst to the huge American force

strung out across the western front, the Germans had massed thirty divisions, in total secrecy, just to the east of the Ardennes—precisely the weakest point in the American line. Here, a mere four U.S. divisions occu- pied an eighty-mile front. Two of them, the 99th and the 106th, had just been deployed and were filled with green troops; the other two, the 4th and the 28th, had recently been withdrawn from the carnage of the Hürt- gen Forest, and were refitting and recuperating. Hit- ler’s goal—and this offensive was very much Hitler’s idea—was to slice through the wooded Ardennes, race to the Meuse, seize Liège, and head for Antwerp, in the process splitting the Allied armies in two.

The German attack succeeded in creating a menacing “bulge” in the American lines. The two divisions that took the brunt of the attack, the 106th and the 28th, vir- tually disintegrated, and thousands of men from these divisions would spend the next five months in a brutal captivity behind enemy lines. Yet the advantage of sur- prise and local superiority in forces lasted only a few days. The Americans showed remarkable resilience in recovering from the initial shock. General Eisenhower, once he grasped the scale and reckless ambition of the attack, ordered the 10th Armored Division into the southern shoulder of the Bulge, and called on the 7th Armored Division to push onto the northern shoulder,

thereby holding the German salient to a fairly narrow front. He also sent the 101st Airborne Division into the road junction town of Bastogne, determined to block the Germans there. General Patton’s Third Army, pre- viously engaged to the south, wheeled northward and crashed into the German salient, heading toward Bas- togne. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodg- es sent his VII Corps toward Houffalize in an effort to pinch the Bulge. The Germans, running out of fuel, and pounded by relentless Allied air attack (the poor weather that had shielded the Germans cleared on De- cember 23), stopped and by early January had begun a withdrawal. The attack had been a costly failure for Hitler: 12,652 soldiers killed, 38,600 wounded, and 30,000 missing. The Germans also lost half their tanks and guns they had committed to battle. For the Ameri- cans, the Battle of the Bulge was a decisive victory, but it had been extremely costly: 10,276 men were killed, 47,493 were wounded, and 23,218 were missing. Nearly 7,000 soldiers of the 106th Infantry Division were taken prisoner.
21

* * *

“

THERE WERE MANY dead and many wounded,” wrote war correspondent Martha Gellhorn of the Battle of the Bulge, “but the survivors contained

the fluid situation and slowly turned it into a retreat, and finally, as the communiqué said, the bulge was ironed out. This was not done fast or easily; and it was not done by those anonymous things, armies, di- visions, regiments. It was done by men, one by one.” Gellhorn had seen the Battle of the Bulge up close—as close as a war reporter could see it—and had become well acquainted with the fear, mud, and death that the western front offered. Writing for Collier’s magazine, she insisted that Americans on the home front attend to the experiences of the common soldier in the field. Gellhorn wanted to remind her readers that beneath the maps, the colored lines, and the flags set out on planning tables, there was a human tragedy unfold- ing, in which men were dying in awful ways, in large numbers. Like Ernie Pyle, Gellhorn could only hint at the reality of what she saw. We now can look in greater detail, with the benefit of memoirs and oral histories, into what one company commander called “the dread, gnawing daily diet of war.” This kind of attention to the human experience of war is necessary not only so that posterity can marvel at the bravery and perhaps even more at the endurance of these soldiers. A close explo- ration of the physical and mental toll that this fight- ing took on American soldiers also shows us that the brutalization of the average soldier, which historians readily agree became a feature of the German- Soviet

war in the east, occurred in the west as well, with con- sequences for the liberators and liberated alike.
22

Many of the men who fought in the ETO in the fall and winter of 1944 were teenagers. Paul Fussell (himself a nineteen-year-old rifleman in 1944) stressed this point in his excellent brief chronicle of the infantry soldier, which he deliberately entitled The Boys’ Crusade. Captain Charles MacDonald, a company commander in the 2nd Infantry Division who led over 120 men in battle, was twenty-one years old during the Battle of the Bulge. Donald Burgett, a member of the 82nd Air- borne Division, went into battle in the Ardennes as a nineteen-year-old—and he was considered “one of the old men who had survived both operations,” that is, both the landings of D-Day and Market Garden. Ser- geant Spencer Wurst, of the 101st Airborne, also fought in Holland as a nineteen-year-old; on December 19, his twentieth birthday, he was fighting in the Ardennes and killed three men. Being very young, most of these men had seen little of the world before being shipped to Europe, had not held a steady job, started families, or in some cases even finished high school. They knew little of the cause for which they fought: in the summer of 1943, over a third of a sample of three thousand men in the United States had never heard of the Four Free- doms, and only 13 percent could actually name three or

four of them. This was a war that men could not avoid; once in combat, they fought to stay alive, and to kill Germans so the war would end.
23