The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (100 page)

Field commanders in mid-March urged Kesselring to complete the Wehrmacht’s evacuation across the Rhine; clinging to enclaves west of the river was deemed hopeless if not disastrous. The field marshal disagreed, fearful that retreat would degenerate into rout. In line with Hitler’s “hang on” policy, on March 17 he ordered “the retention of present positions,” while telling subordinates that “annihilation … is to be avoided.”

Yet only three days later even the Reich’s last optimist had to acknowledge that the Americans had “torn our front wide open.” The enemy might be delayed, but not stopped. “The best general,” Kesselring mused, “cannot make bricks without straw.”

*   *   *

George Patton had taken brief leave in Paris, where Beetle Smith took him hunting in an old royal preserve outside the city. Patton shot three ducks, three hares, and a pheasant. Later he sat in a box at the Folies Bergère, sipping champagne and acknowledging an adulatory ovation from the audience. The revue girls, he noted, were “perfectly naked, so much so that no one is interested.” Hurrying back to the front, he resolved to remain within sound of the guns for the duration.

Battlefield carnage always inflamed Patton’s imagination, and the Saar-Palatinate proved particularly vivifying. In Trier, for instance, twenty air raids and Third Army onslaughts had reduced the city to 730,000 cubic yards of rubble. “The desolation is frozen, as if the moment of combustion was suddenly arrested, and the air had lost its power to hold atoms together,” wrote Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, who would soon found the New York City Ballet. “Hardly a whole thing is left.” The entrance to the old Roman amphitheater still stood and that, coupled with his nightly readings from Caesar’s
Gallic Wars,
sufficed for Patton to inform his diary in mid-March that he “could smell the sweat of the legions.” It was all there for him: gladiators grappling with wild beasts; legionnaires and centurions “marching down that same road” now carrying his own legions; Caesar himself mulling how best to bound across the Rhine.

Rarely, perhaps never, had his generalship been nimbler, surer, more relentless. With Patch’s Seventh Army also sweeping like a scythe from the south, the Americans would count ninety thousand prisoners captured in the Saar, three thousand square miles overrun, and irreplaceable German steel, chemical, and synthetic-oil plants flattened or seized. American mobility unhinged the enemy, and firepower flayed him. “Scarcely a man-made thing exists in our wake,” one division commander reported. The butcher’s bill increased each day, of course. “Lots of young men dying miserably, or fighting to keep from dying,” a nurse wrote in her diary, “hanging onto my hand until it hurts, as if I could keep them from slipping into that dark chasm.” Patton urged on those still standing. “Roads don’t matter,” he declared. “Terrain doesn’t matter. Exposed flanks don’t matter.” When a self-propelled gun got wedged under a rail overpass, Patton told the hapless artillery commander, “Colonel, you can blow up the goddamn gun. You can blow up the goddamn bridge. Or you can blow out your goddamn brains, I don’t care which.”

By Wednesday, March 21, three corps from Third Army had reached the Rhine. General Middleton’s VIII Corps vaulted the Mosel to envelop Koblenz and reported “not a shot, not a round of shellfire, indeed not a sign of the enemy.” Fewer than two thousand disheartened German defenders soon paddled across the Rhine in heavy fog. Forty miles upstream at Mainz, and beyond to Worms in Seventh Army’s sector, enemy rear guards fled on any conveyance that could float. More bridges were blown, at Ludwigshafen and Germersheim. “We’re going to cross the Rhine,” Patton declared on Thursday, “and we’re going to do it before I’m a day older.”

He made good his boast. At Oppenheim, a wine town and barge harbor midway between Mainz and Worms, two battalions from the 5th Division crossed by stealth in assault boats at 10:30
P.M.
, surprising enemy soldiers in their bedrolls. By daybreak on Friday, March 23, six infantry battalions had reached the far shore with just twenty casualties before pressing eastward behind the marching fire known as “walking death.” Tanks followed by ferry, and then across a floating bridge; GIs ripped down roadside fences to accommodate three columns of traffic on the far bank. Patton recorded how he “drove to the river and went across the pontoon bridge, stopping in the middle to take a piss in the Rhine, and then pick up some dirt on the far side … in emulation of William the Conqueror.”

“Brad, we’re across!” he bellowed in a phone call to Namur. “And you can tell the world Third Army made it before Monty.” Bradley obliged him: the American crossing, he informed reporters, had been accomplished without aerial bombardment, without airborne assault, even without artillery fire. Within a day the 5th Division bridgehead was five miles deep. To “produce a proper feeling of rivalry,” Patton ordered all three Third Army corps to race for Giessen and a juncture with First Army.

“I love war and responsibility and excitement,” he wrote Bea. “Peace is going to be hell on me. I will probably be a great nuisance.”

*   *   *

Churchill had proposed riding into battle in a British tank during Operation
VARSITY PLUNDER
, the 21st Army Group attack over the Rhine. “I’m an old man and I work hard,” he later explained. “Why shouldn’t I have a little fun?” Dissuaded, he instead donned the uniform of a colonel in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars—the regiment in which he had been commissioned half a century earlier—and on the afternoon of March 23, he boarded a C-47 Dakota with Brooke to fly to Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. An Anglo-American smoke screen fifty miles long already hugged the river, “a thick black haze,” one witness reported, “for all the world like Manchester or Birmingham as seen from the air.”

They found Montgomery’s command post in a pine forest, occupying a clearing once used by an equestrian school. Photos of Rommel and Rundstedt still adorned the caravan walls, like the vanquished ghosts from battles past. After supper, the prime minister repaired to Montgomery’s map wagon, where caged canaries sang their arias. A few hours earlier, the field marshal explained, he had put his master plan in motion with a code phrase to his lieutenants: “Two if by sea.” The British were coming.

Under Montgomery’s command, more than 1.2 million Allied soldiers now leaned forward, in an operation that rivaled
OVERLORD
for complexity and grandeur. Three armies crowded the west bank of the Rhine, with the British Second squeezed between the Canadian First to the north and the U.S. Ninth to the south, all imperfectly concealed by that smoky miasma. On the east bank, arrayed around Wesel, their foe was reduced to what a German general called the “shadow of an army” that could “only pretend to resist.” The British Army might be melting away—the bloody slog from Nijmegen had cost the equivalent of thirty-five infantry battalions, for which there were few replacements—but Montgomery intended to stage one last, glorious military pageant, worthy of an empire.

The plan for
PLUNDER
called for three corps, two British and one American, to assault the river that night. Less than twelve hours later, in
VARSITY
, they would be followed by an Anglo-American airborne corps that would descend onto the reeling enemy—a reversal of previous battle sequences. Sixty thousand engineers had gathered on this stretch of the Rhine. Fifty-five hundred artillery tubes stood elevated and poised to fire: a single 105mm howitzer could spray almost two tons of lethal fragments over nine acres in an hour. Fifteen thousand tons of bombs had been dropped in the past three days to soften up the battlefield. The British alone had amassed 120,000 tons of matériel, half of it ammunition; American stocks were larger still. Churchill already had chalked a message on one huge shell: “Hitler Personally.”

With a final pinch of his cheek and clipped assurances that all would be well, Montgomery retired to his sleeping trailer. The distant grumble of guns signaled that
PLUNDER
had commenced. Churchill and Brooke strolled among the pines in the balmy evening, reflecting on how far they had come in the past thirty months, from Alam Halfa and Alamein in Egypt to Hitler’s inner keep. Just before ten
P.M.
Churchill took a final draw on his cigar and then he, too, turned to bed, an aging hussar in need of sleep.

Twenty miles east, the Rhine attack had grown febrile with “the unbearable whip and lash of the guns,” in Alan Moorehead’s phrase. Flame and steel seared the far shore with as much hellfire as several thousand tubes could deliver. Concussion ghosts drifted back across the river, rippling the battle dress of Tommies assembled in water meadows, where they drained their rum mugs and blackened their cheeks with teakettle soot. Commandos “appeared in long files, coming out of the woods,” wrote Eric Sevareid. “There was the sound of creaking boots and straps.… They were slightly bent under their packs. Some were singing.” Into storm boats and amphibious Buffaloes they clambered, and soon the flotillas beat for the far shore, following an azimuth of Oerlikon tracers that stretched to the east like bright strands of rubies. Chandelier flares hissed overhead, dripping silver light into the river. “If you happen to hear a few stray bullets, you needn’t think they’re intended for you,” a British officer had told his troops. “That, gentlemen, is a form of egotism.”

From the second floor of a holiday villa overlooking the Rhine, Moorehead watched a Pathfinder aircraft orbit above Wesel’s church spires to mark the target for British bombers. He thought the plane resembled “a single hurrying black moth in the air.”

He shot his clusters of red flares into the center of the town, which meant—and how acutely one felt it—that Wesel had just about ten minutes to live. Then the Lancasters fill[ed] the air with roaring and at last the cataclysmic, unbelievable shock of the strike.… Buildings and trees and wide acres of city parkland simply detached themselves from the earth.… A violent wind came tearing across the river.

“A great crimson stain of smoke and flame poured up like a huge open wound,” wrote R. W. Thompson, “and the river seemed the color of blood.” A British major wondered in his diary “if more than mortal powers had been unleashed.” The bombers flew off, a thousand tons lighter, and a violet pall draped Wesel as the Commandos, who had gone to ground on the east bank, now rose to claim their prize. “Burglar-like and in single file, the leaders paying out a white tape, the whole brigade crept into the town,” Moorehead wrote. Wesel, or rather its charred carcass, soon was theirs. Two British corps, the XII and XXX, surged over the river in force.

A few miles upstream, 40,000 Ninth Army gunners cut loose at one
A.M.
with a barrage exceeding a thousand shells a minute. An hour later Simpson’s XVI Corps, swollen to 120,000 men, hoisted the first of seven hundred assault boats up over a dike and into the river. Medical heating pads had been used to warm the outboard motors, and now the frenzied yank of starter cords sent, in one writer’s description, “shoals of small boats scudding across the water” under a three-quarter moon. Machine-gun tracers guided the initial waves until colored airfield landing lights could be emplaced on the far shore. German resistance evinced “no real fight in it,” a lieutenant reported, and the two assault divisions tallied only thirty-one casualties. On the near shore, beachmasters in white helmets hectored stragglers, and twenty-ton cranes hoisted the larger landing craft into the Rhine.

By Saturday morning, March 24, thirteen U.S. infantry battalions held the east bank on an eight-mile front. Engineers in five equipment dumps west of the river whipped off camouflage covers—garnished fishing nets, chicken wire, tar paper, and fabric darkened with coal dust—to reveal endless acres of pontoons, stringers, trusses, and anchor cables. The bridge-builders set to work on the river with a will, and a way.

*   *   *

Rested and exultant, Churchill shortly before ten
A.M.
on Saturday settled into an armchair placed for his benefit on a hillside in Xanten, five miles west of Wesel. A clement sun climbed through a cloudless sky, marred only by the milky contrail of a V-2 streaking southwest toward Antwerp, or perhaps London. Booming British guns battered targets far beyond the Rhine, and the orange starbursts of exploding shells twinkled through the morning haze. Gazing at the pageant of boats and rafts plying the river below him, the prime minister mused, “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge. But now my armies are too vast.”

A deep droning from the rear grew insistent. Churchill sprang to his feet with unwonted agility. Flocks of Allied fighters abruptly thundered overhead, trailed by tidy formations of transport planes, low enough for those on the ground to discern paratroopers standing in each open jump door. Following behind, as far as eye could see or imagination conjure, came aerial tugs, each towing a glider or two. The prime minister capered downhill for several steps, shouting, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” Just north of Wesel the first red and yellow parachutes blossomed, in Moorehead’s description, “like enormous poppies.”