The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (2 page)

An account of liberation would be incomplete without the voices of liberating soldiers, and this book pres- ents their perceptions as well. These men speak little of heroism, or of their “Crusade in Europe,” as General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s postwar memoir was called. Instead, they offer cautious, humble, at times evasive accounts of their experiences. Reading through count- less memoirs, diaries, letters, and oral testimonies of British and American soldiers who fought in Europe, the historian can immediately perceive the profound ambivalence of these young men in combat. They

understood the importance of the job they had been asked to do, but seemed to hate every minute of it. Fighting on behalf of others, in a faraway land of for- eign customs and languages, amid filth, death, and de- struction, occasioned in most liberating soldiers a pro- found distaste and disgust with the whole business of war. Few soldiers in combat were motivated by idealis- tic objectives. Most fought simply because they had to fight in order to end the war and go home. As Sergeant John Babcock of the 78th Infantry Division put it in his memoir, “our bunch of GIs was not fighting for moth- er, country, and apple pie. Bullshit. We wanted to live. Our ties were to those unfortunates fighting next to us, sharing the same fate.”
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This would seem to be a more honest assessment of the soldier’s experience than the hortatory text on the monument in Luxembourg.

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HE MATERIAL PRESENTED in these pages bears directly on our own times. When I began this re- search in 2003, Americans and Europeans were

then embroiled in a bitter dispute about the proper role of military force in the world, and the responsibili- ties of wealthy, democratic nations to use their armies to wage war on repressive nations. At that time, many American leaders, drawing on popular conceptions

of the liberation of Europe during the Second World War, argued that the United States had an obligation to use its power to advance the cause of democracy and freedom in the world. As in World War II, the argument ran, when America had led the world in a war against fascism and won the world’s gratitude, so in our own times could America overthrow dictators, free op- pressed peoples, and bring the blessings of liberty to others. Some American leaders even implied that war itself, while undesirable, might offer a test in which we could measure ourselves against previous generations of honored warriors.

Europeans generally viewed these claims with skep- ticism, and I now know why. They began from a dif- ferent premise than Americans, for they had lived through liberation, and still carry the scars. The year 1945 taught Europeans a lesson they have never forgot- ten: that a war of liberation is still a war, and no mat- ter how noble the cause, mothers and children will die, houses of worship will be burned, disease will spread, refugees will tramp the roads; and then, after all these horrors are over, liberators and liberated alike will still face the hard work of constructing freedom and restoring human dignity. Liberation in 1945 entailed such destruction and social upheaval that it came to be seen by those who were liberated as a time of cruel

paradoxes—a time of high hopes and profound disap- pointment, of cherished freedom and new threats, of full-throated celebration and echoing silences. This is why those who have lived through liberation are often slow to wish the experience on others.

Of course, Europeans remain enormously grateful to Americans for the liberation they helped secure. To see the sincerity of this gratitude, one need only visit the humble coastal towns of Normandy in early June upon the anniversary of the D-Day landings. There, one can admire the hundreds of Allied flags unfurled in the sea breeze, witness the warm reception accorded to the proud, elderly veterans who return to these hallowed precincts, and bask in the genuine sense of trans- Atlantic solidarity that these ceremonials evoke, year after year. These people who ritually gather and shake hands and march to the fading strains of martial tunes are bound by a common project, a common commit- ment to those four simple freedoms Franklin Roosevelt had named in 1941—freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear.

But those who lived through these times have no il- lusions about war. They recall all too well the terrible destruction, the countless deaths, and the appalling violence of the Second World War. They know, too, that

military victory over Nazism was only a preliminary act in the longer struggle to restore peace to Europe, to re- build order and stability, and revive the civic, humane traditions that the Nazis had trampled in the dust. They have a clear memory that liberation was a time of valor, but also a time of unceasing toil, bitterness, and death. As these aging witnesses now pass from the scene, we will have to rely on other sources to inform us about this war. If we want to recover the reality of the final stages of the war, in all its ugliness and its ec- stasy, we shall have to turn our eyes away from maps and monuments, and explore the lives of ordinary men and women, Europeans and Americans, civilians and soldiers, as they struggled to survive these tragic hours of liberation.

Part I: LIBERATION IN THE WEST

Prologue: D-Day

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HE LIBERATION OF Europe may have begun as early as November 1942, on the banks of the Vol- ga river at Stalingrad, when the Soviet Red Army

checked Nazi Germany’s advance into Central Asia and began the long, murderous fight that would expel the German invaders from the Soviet Union and bring the Russians across 1,500 bloody miles to Berlin. Or it may have begun with the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, also in November 1942, a deft operation that pointed the blade of the Allied spear-head into Germa- ny’s southern flank and opened the way to the invasion of southern Italy in July 1943. Perhaps the liberation began in earnest when the Red Army crossed the pre- war Polish border in January 1944, or when American troops entered Rome in June 1944. These are all plausi- ble candidates for the status of “starting point,” for the liberation of Europe was a global process, the press- ing inward toward Berlin of millions of soldiers, from all directions, gradually tightening a choke hold on the Third Reich. Yet in popular imagination, and most his- torical writing, the liberation of Europe commenced on that wet gray morning in the rolling surf off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Here, in France, came the long-awaited, long-planned Second Front, designed to complement the massive thrusts of the Red Army into

Germany from the east. This was the moment that Eu- ropean civilians, suffering under German occupation, had awaited for years, the moment when the decisive battle against Germany would be opened, the start of a continental campaign that would bring about the final defeat of the malevolent, depraved Nazi regime. This is where our story of liberation begins.

The great Allied armada that set out across the English Channel on June 6 comprised some 5,000 vessels of all sorts, from hulking, monstrous battleships, cruisers, and destroyers to a vast array of small landing craft. On board, they carried over 100,000 soldiers—American, English, Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Canadians, Poles, and a few Belgians, Dutch, French, and Norwegians—to land- ing sites along twenty miles of coastline in the French départements (departments) of Calvados and Manche. The overall supreme commander of Operation Over- lord was General Dwight D. Eisenhower; the ground commander of the landing forces was an Englishman, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. On June 6, the landing forces were all grouped together in the 21st Army Group under Montgomery’s command. The Brit- ish Second Army, commanded by Lieutenant- General Sir Miles Dempsey, took aim at three beaches, code- named Sword, Juno, and Gold, running from the vil- lages of Ouistreham in the east to Arromanches in the

west. The Anglo- Canadian forces that splashed ashore here faced moderate resistance but within a few hours had established three beachheads and made contact with the British 6th Airborne Division, which had been dropped across the Orne river to secure the eastern flanks. The British suffered approximately 1,000 casu- alties on Gold beach and the same number on Sword; 600 airborne troops were killed or wounded, and 600 more were missing; 100 glider pilots also became ca- sualties. The Canadians at Juno beach suffered 340 killed, 574 wounded, and 47 taken prisoner. Twenty- four hours after the landings, British forces had taken the town of Bayeux almost unopposed and were push- ing on toward the city of Caen.

To the west, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s U.S. First Army landed on two beaches, Omaha and Utah. Utah beach was on the western flank of the Allied as- sault, running along the coast of the Cotentin peninsu- la. The beach here was thinly defended; three regimen- tal combat teams of the 4th Division faced negligible fire from the German positions and they moved inland in search of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions with whom they were supposed to link up. These airborne landings, which had commenced late at night on the 5th, had been badly scattered and it was some days before any cohesion came to this sector; yet the losses

sustained on Utah were relatively small. The picture on Omaha beach was far more serious. The 1st and 29th divisions of Bradley’s landing force, hitting the beach- es between Port-en-Bessin and Vierville-sur-Mer, ran straight into the teeth of well-defended German bat- teries that had not been softened up by the preliminary air and naval bombardments. The cliffs along Omaha, running up from a stony beach, rise some hundred to two hundred feet, and provided excellent cover for the defenders, who had created extensive trenches and concrete pillbox firing positions; moreover, 27 out of 32 of the “swimming” amphibious DD tanks that were meant to provide armor support for the infantry sank in choppy seas during the landing. The beach and wa- ters were packed with obstacles and mines on which landing craft snagged, blocking the way for those be- hind. Many heavily burdened soldiers whose craft spilled them into the water sank and drowned. With extraordinary courage, small numbers of soldiers, re- alizing that to remain on the beach under German fire would surely get them killed, began to fight their way up the craggy hillside and into the narrow ravines that led from the beaches up the hills. Slowly they gained a foothold. The horror on Omaha, which had seemed an eternity to those pinned down there, had lasted less than four hours; by 11:00 A.M. Vierville was in American hands. At the end of the day, a narrow beachhead had

been established, but it had cost the Americans dearly. While there had been but 197 casualties on Utah, over 2,000 men were wounded or killed on Omaha beach. Overall, 1,465 American soldiers were killed on D-Day, 3,184 were wounded, 1,928 were listed as missing, and 26 were captured.
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The Omaha landings had been something close to a catastrophe, and the broad territorial objectives of the Allied landings had not been attained anywhere on any beach on D-Day. Even so, the overall strategic picture twenty-four hours after D-Day was good. The landings successfully created a beachhead that could be de- fended against counterattack, and the planned build-

up of additional Allied forces could proceed apace. Casualties, totaling some 10,000 men, had been far smaller than General Eisenhower had anticipated. But over the following weeks and months, the realities of the huge task that lay ahead began to sink in. The first disappointments came on the eastern flank, where the British, whose landings had gone so well, were unable to seize the city of Caen, which lay on the axis that the Allies had hoped to follow farther into France. In the three days after the landings, Canadian and British forces were badly mauled by the 12th SS Panzer Divi- sion, which tried desperately to push the invaders back into the sea; by June 10, the Germans, bolstered by the swift arrival of the Panzer Lehr Division and the 21st Panzer Division, took up defensive positions in front of Caen. In the coming weeks, repeated efforts by Mont- gomery’s forces to outflank Caen, at Tilly-sur- Seulles and Villers-Bocage, failed and the struggle for Caen turned into a desperate yard-by-yard fight that many likened to the western front in the First World War. The daring and surprise of the D-Day landings had been completely lost.

The picture was only marginally better on the western flank. After consolidating the Utah and Omaha beach- heads, the American VII Corps under Major General J. Lawton Collins attacked westward to cut the Cotentin

peninsula in half, then thrust north to capture the port of Cherbourg on June 27. Despite this success, the pic- ture across Normandy was discouraging for General Eisenhower. The Germans had systematically, expertly reduced Cherbourg to rubble, which interfered with the logistical supply plan. By late June, conditions on the ground had settled into a bloody stalemate, as the Germans made superb use of the defensive advan- tages they possessed, particularly the thick, ancient hedgerows that divided the countryside up into nearly impenetrable squares. The Americans found them- selves fighting for every yard across a landscape that looked something like a gigantic ice-cube tray: each square had to be penetrated and seized, one by one. This slow, costly fighting made June and July “a dif- ficult period for all of us,” General Eisenhower wrote later.
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Yet gradually, two elements in the Allied arsenal began to tell in the battle: the steady buildup of men and materiel through the massive Anglo-American na- val forces that continued to pour supplies through the beachheads; and the punishing blows delivered daily to the Germans by the dominant Allied air forces. By July 2, there were about one million Allied soldiers in Normandy, including thirteen American, eleven Brit- ish, and one Canadian division. Over 560,000 tons of supplies had been landed along with 171,000 vehicles.
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While the Germans proved able to out-fight the Allies

on the ground in Normandy, they could not easily re- place the men and materiel they lost; nor could they hide from the Allied tactical air attack. The battle in Normandy settled into a long, slow battle of attrition, just what the Germans could not afford.