The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (103 page)

Drumfire and coiling black smoke had roused the prisoners, and the sight of five-pointed white stars in the distance provoked jubilant pandemonium. A kriegie priest captured in the Ardennes offered absolution to those who wanted it, but most stood braying at the windows until tank rounds began to slam through the cantonment. The Shermans riddled guard towers and a water tank, and also ignited several buildings in an adjacent compound: Baum’s gunners had mistaken Serb uniforms for German. Prisoners dropped to the floor, and word circulated through the barracks: “No smoking, no lights.”

With consent from a German commandant eager to surrender, five volunteers led by Colonel Waters marched out the main gate amid the battle din and flitting tracers, waving an American flag and a bedsheet tied to a pole. Several hundred yards from the camp, making for Baum’s left flank, they passed a barnyard enclosed by a plank fence. Waters turned just as a German soldier thrust his rifle between the slats and, without aiming, pulled the trigger. The bullet hit POW No. 4161 just below the right hip, chipping his coccyx and exiting through his left buttock. He fell like a stone. Carried in a blanket sling to a nearby German hospital, where he was refused treatment, Waters was then hauled back to the camp and entrusted to Serb surgeons equipped with little more than paper bandages and a table knife for a scalpel.

Baum’s tanks meanwhile had crashed through the perimeter fence to be greeted by whooping, back-slapping prisoners. Many appeared ready to bolt, with bedrolls under their arms and pockets stuffed with Red Cross food cans rifled from the mess pantry. Baum had anticipated finding 300 American officers. Instead he confronted 1,291, according to the latest head count; the milling throng reminded him of Times Square.

It was now 6:30
P.M.
, with daylight fading and the enemy undoubtedly convening another attack. Clambering onto the hood of a jeep, Baum quieted the men and told them, “There are far more of you than we expected. We don’t have enough vehicles to take all of you.” He pointed west. “When I left, the lines were about sixty miles back in that direction, at the River Main.” He could squeeze a hundred or so onto his tanks and half-tracks. The rest would have to walk, or wait in Hammelburg for eventual liberation. A dismayed murmur ran through the throng.

Evening’s first stars glittered overhead as hundreds of officers, on foot and outfitted by Baum with a few compasses and maps, tramped into the gloaming, vaguely heading west. Separately, with tanks in the vanguard and every hull upholstered with kriegies, Baum’s motorized procession eventually rolled west by southwest, hoping to collide with Patch’s Seventh Army.

Instead they promptly found more trouble. Gunfire and Panzerfausts launched from the shadows harassed them. Vehicles burned, casualties mounted. Scouts reported ambushes and roadblocks with panzers ahead at Höllrich and at Hessdorf, where Baum had hoped to pick up Highway 27. Sometime after three
A.M.
on Wednesday, he ordered the column to shelter atop a dark knob identified on the map as Hill 427, only four miles southwest of Oflag XIII-B. The wounded were carried into a stone barn as the last gasoline was drained from eight half-tracks to fill six surviving tanks. All but a dozen of the hitchhiking kriegies formed into a column of twos and tramped back toward Hammelburg under a white flag, surely the better part of valor. They would reach the camp at 9:30
A.M.
to find that German patrols had already rounded up many of the officers who had set out on foot the previous night.

Just after eight
A.M.
, Baum and his depleted band started to edge down Hill 427. “A sheet of hell,” as he subsequently put it, abruptly engulfed the ridgeline with tank, artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire. “At daylight,” Major Stiller later wrote, “they destroyed us.” As one olive-drab vehicle after another burst into flame, a final Morse message was tapped over the radio—“Task Force Baum surrounded. Under heavy fire. Request air support.”

“Every man for himself,” Baum hollered. Into the trees he ran, with Stiller on his heels. The baying of dogs echoed across the slope. One by one the GIs were captured or shot down. A German soldier found Baum and Spiller burrowed beneath a den of leaves; when Baum fumbled for his .45 automatic, the German raised his own pistol and shot him in the left thigh, his third wound of the expedition. They, too, would return to Hammelburg, Baum sprawled in a horse cart. “Get a good sleep, boys,” a guard told the Americans. “You had a hard night.”

*   *   *

After his wounding, John Waters managed to scratch a few spare entries into his “Remembrances” journal:

March 27
: “Shot while under white flag by German.”

March 28
: “Operation & hospital. Suffering.”

March 29
: “Hosp. Morphine.”

March 30
: “Hosp. Suffering.”

Not for some days would Patton learn details of the failed raid, although German propaganda broadcasts celebrated the repulse at Hammelburg as a signal victory for the Reich. A few officers from Oflag XIII-B escaped their pursuers and eventually stumbled into American lines with fragmentary accounts of salvation, flight, and gunfire. Most prisoners and their erstwhile rescuers, including Stiller, were force-marched to another camp near Munich, where they would await Seventh Army’s arrival a month later. Task Force Baum had been obliterated, every vehicle lost and nearly every man captured in addition to the fifty-seven killed, wounded, or missing. An uncertain number of prisoners had died in the escapade.

Patton both evaded responsibility—blaming Major General Manton S. Eddy, the XII Corps commander, for dispatching an undersized force—and prevaricated. To reporters on March 30 he claimed that Task Force Baum was intended largely as a feint. “I felt by hazarding a small force I would confuse the enemy completely as to where we were going,” he said. “It did work, for they thought I was going to Nuremberg.” Later he would insist that he had first learned of Waters’s internment at the camp long after the raid. To Bea on March 31, he wrote:

I had known of the camp there for a week but did not know definitely he was in it. I sent a force to capture it but fear that the force was destroyed. However it was the proper thing to do.

As details of the fiasco emerged and criticism intensified, Patton unsuccessfully tried to suppress the story. “They are trying to make an incident out of my attempt to rescue John,” he told Bea. “How I hate the press.” Ten days after the raid, when troops from the 14th Armored Division overran Hammelburg, they found that those too ill or too damaged to travel to Munich had been left in the Serb dispensary, including Colonel Waters and Captain Baum. Patton sent an Army surgeon and two small planes to evacuate his son-in-law to a Frankfurt hospital; the young officer would recover from his injuries and later attain four-star rank. Baum and other wounded Americans were left behind at the camp for several more days. Eventually the former pattern cutter was promoted to major and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for “loyal, courageous devotion to duty,” a decoration pinned on his hospital pajamas by Patton.

Patton had abused his authority, issuing reckless, impulsive orders to indulge his personal interests. As in the slapping incidents in Sicily, his deportment, compounded this time by mendacity, was unworthy of the soldiers he was privileged to lead. Yet with victory so near, his superiors had no heart for public rebukes. Bradley considered the raid “foolhardy,” but kept silent. “Failure itself was George’s own worst reprimand,” he concluded. In cables to Marshall, Eisenhower referred to the raid as “a wild goose chase” and “Patton’s latest crackpot actions.” The Third Army commander had “lost a full company of medium tanks and a platoon of light tanks. Foolishly he then imposed censorship on the movement.”

“Patton is a problem child,” Eisenhower added, “but he is a great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.”

Lovers’ Quarrels Are a Part of Love

E
ISENHOWER’S
office in Reims occupied the second floor of the Collège Moderne et Technique de Garçons, three stories of red brick on Rue Henri Joliauer. His windows overlooked a rail marshaling yard and the city’s seedy train station; beyond the tracks, German prisoners with push brooms swept the cathedral close. Military convoys crawled through the narrow streets at all hours in a clangor of grinding truck gears and straining engines. SHAEF’s forward headquarters now accommodated more than five thousand Allied officers and enlisted men, double the intended number, and they filled not only the
collège
but a music conservatory, various offices on Rue Talleyrand, French military casernes, and the Hôtel du Lion d’Or, where at night jitterbugging soldiers danced in a cabaret with rifles slung over their shoulders.

“France smells wonderful these days,” a SHAEF lieutenant wrote home after exploring Reims.

We get the variegated odors of roast beef, onion and oil dressing, and naturally French pastry. The air is scented with the blossoming chestnut trees.… The lilacs were in full bloom, the wisteria dripped from their vines, and all those fruit trees! I nearly was overcome.

Such vernal delights were largely wasted on the supreme commander, who despite recent battlefield successes showed alarming signs of dispirited exhaustion. Eisenhower “looked terrible,” Bradley conceded, beset with an aching knee, respiratory miseries, and a painful cyst on his back that required surgical excision. Kay Summersby described his waspish mood as “truly vile”; his “physical and mental condition was worse than we had ever known it,” she later wrote. “Beetle was positive that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Smith was hardly in the pink himself, tormented by a bleeding ulcer and an infection that had confined him to bed for several days, further burdening Eisenhower. In his diary, Everett Hughes had written, “Ike shouts and rants. Says ‘I have too many things to do.’ … He acted like a crazy man.… On defensive, guard up, worried, self-isolated.”

The supreme commander needed rest. With Smith he flew to Cannes in late March and spent five days at a borrowed villa doing little but sleep, sunbathe, and play an occasional rubber of bridge. For the first forty-eight hours, he woke only long enough to lunch on the terrace before shuffling back to bed. “I just can’t concentrate,” he complained. But the break proved salutary, and he returned to Reims restored and ready to finish the war. Still, as he confessed to Mamie, “Those of us that are bearing real responsibility in this war will find it difficult to ever be restful [or] serene again.”

He also returned from the Riviera with a revised battle plan. “Ike has learnt his lesson and he consults me before taking any action,” Montgomery had told Brooke earlier in March. But on Wednesday, March 28, only a day after Montgomery had informed Eisenhower that he was beginning his drive from the Rhine toward the river Elbe with the U.S. Ninth Army and British Second Army, the supreme commander delivered a thunderbolt message:

As soon as you have joined hands with Bradley in the Kassel-Paderborn area, Ninth United States Army will revert to Bradley’s command. Bradley … will deliver his main thrust on the axis Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden to join hands with the Russians. The mission of your army group will be to protect Bradley’s northern flank.… Devers will protect Bradley’s right flank.

This plan, Eisenhower assured him, “is simplicity itself.” In a clear tweak at the field marshal’s presumption, he added, “As you say, the situation looks good.”

The supreme commander had his reasons for shifting the main attack avenue from the Allied north to the center, none of which he had discussed with Montgomery or Churchill during their Palm Sunday picnic on the Rhine. Not least, as Eisenhower had written Marshall, “I get tired of trying to arrange the blankets smoothly over several prima donnas in the same bed.” Now they would have separate beds. Moreover, Montgomery’s armies in the north would have to cross the fenny Westphalian plain, a lowland of watercourses that could easily impede armored columns; the corridor farther south presented few obstructions and offered fine highways for the mobile Americans. With ten thousand German soldiers now surrendering every day, the Wehrmacht tottered toward annihilation, although some Allied intelligence officers worried that diehards might escape to the Alps or organize guerrilla brigades. Speed was paramount, and SHAEF had concluded, in General Whiteley’s words, that “if anything was to be done quickly, don’t give it to Monty.”

Montgomery was gobsmacked by what he called “the blow from Ike.… A very dirty work, I fear.” Without General Simpson’s heft, 21st Army Group was unlikely to reach the Elbe soon, much less Berlin. “The violent pro-American element at SHAEF is pressing for a set-up which will clip the wings of the British group of armies,” he wrote London. “The Americans then finish off the business alone.” To Brooke, he went further. “This new plan of Ike’s,” he warned, “will prolong the war.” Montgomery elicited less sympathy than he might have hoped. “Monty has only himself to blame for the suspicion with which the Americans treat him,” said Admiral Cunningham, the first sea lord.

There was more. Since
OVERLORD
, Allied planners had presumed that Berlin was their ultimate objective. “Berlin is the main prize,” Eisenhower had affirmed in September. “There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that we should concentrate all our energies and resources on rapid thrusts to Berlin.” Now he changed his mind. In a “personal message to Marshal Stalin” cabled that same fateful Wednesday, with a copy to the Charlie-Charlies, the supreme commander disclosed that “the best axis” would carry his legions to Leipzig and Dresden in southeast Germany, a hundred miles from the capital. To Montgomery he added in a subsequent note, “In none of this do I mention Berlin. That place has become, so far as I am concerned, nothing but a geographical location.… My purpose is to destroy the enemy’s forces and his powers to resist.”

Again he had cause. The Red Army was thirty miles from Berlin, on favorable terrain with more than a million men who had been massing for this assault since January; the Anglo-Americans remained well over two hundred miles from the capital. Bradley and other commanders estimated that taking Berlin might cost between ten thousand and one hundred thousand American casualties alone. Marshall had cautioned Eisenhower against “unfortunate incidents,” including fratricide between forces approaching from east and west. (On a single day in early April, U.S. and Soviet planes would inadvertently tangle five times, with exchanges of gunfire.) Postwar occupation zones already had been established, and the partition of Berlin would take effect regardless of who captured the city. A race to Berlin, or Vienna, or Prague would bleed U.S. forces needed in the Pacific, and perhaps corrode Moscow’s commitment to make war on Japan. By angling southeast, Bradley’s spearhead would cut the Reich in half, severing Bavaria and Austria from Berlin, and help forestall the scorched-earth decree Hitler had issued on March 19, “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory.” Finally, Eisenhower well understood that Roosevelt’s vision of an enduring peace was predicated on cooperation with the Soviets, a comity unlikely to be enhanced by a rivalrous dash to the Reichstag. As he later asked an interviewer, “What would you have done with Berlin if we had captured it?”