The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (45 page)

“One of our guys yelled, ‘Watch it! He’s got a gun!’ and came running up shooting and there were eight Krauts on the ground shot up but not dead. They wanted water but no one gave them any. I never felt bad about it although I’m sure civilians would be horrified. But these guys asked for it. If we had not been so tired and frustrated and keyed up and mad about our boys they shot up, it never would have happened. But a lot of things happen in war and both sides know the penalties.”

Hitler and the Nazis had poisoned the minds of the boys Germany was throwing into the battle. Capt. F. W. Norris of the 90th Division ran into a roadblock.  His company took some casualties, then blasted away, wounding many. “The most seriously wounded was a young SS sergeant who looked just like one of Hitler’s supermen. He had led the attack. He was bleeding copiously and badly needed some plasma.” One of Norris’s medics started giving him a transfusion. The wounded German, who spoke excellent English, demanded to know if there was any Jewish blood in the plasma. The medic said damned if he knew, in the United States people didn’t make such a distinction. The German said if he couldn’t have a guarantee that there was no Jewish blood he would refuse treatment.  “I had been listening and had heard enough,” Norris remembered. “I turned to this SS guy and in very positive terms I told him I really didn’t care whether he lived or not, but if he did not take the plasma he would certainly die. He looked at me calmly and said, ‘I would rather die than have any Jewish blood in me.’

“So he died.”

18 - Overrunning Germany

THE STANDARD STORY of how the American GI reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of World War II runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, lying, stealing, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were lying, stealing, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average GI never was in Holland, only the airborne).  The story ends up thus: Wonder of wonders, the average GI found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles (many GIs noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as “just like us.”

Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st hated the Nazis and wished more of the German villages would be destroyed, so that the Germans would suffer as the French and Belgians and Italians had suffered, and thus learn not to start wars. But despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were regular churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”

With a growing area of western and central Germany under American occupation, the high command ordered a policy of non-fraternization. GIs were told they could not talk toany German, even small children, except on official business.  This absurd order, which flew in the face of human nature in so obvious a way, was impossible to enforce. Still some tried. Webster recalled a replacement lieutenant who “became such a fiend on the non-fraternization policy that he ordered all butts field-stripped [torn apart and scattered] so that the Germans might derive no pleasure from American tobacco.” In some cases the GIs mistreated the civilian population, and they engaged in widespread looting, especially of wine, jewelry, Nazi memorabilia, and other portable items. Combat veterans insist that the worst of this sort of thing was carried out by replacements who had arrived too late to see any action. These American teenagers could be especially brutal in their treatment of German POWs.  There were some rapes, not many because the army’s policy was to identify, try, and, if found guilty, execute rapists (forty-nine GIs were shot for rape or murder). Overall, it is simple fact to state that the American and British occupying armies, in comparison to the other conquering armies in World War II, acted correctly and honorably. As a single example, a German woman in Königsberg when it was occupied by the Red Army recalled how, after she and her friends had been repeatedly raped, “we often asked the soldiers to shoot us, but they always answered: ‘Russian soldiers do not shoot women, only German soldiers do that.’ “ Webster told a story that speaks to the point. “Reese, who was more intent on finding women than in trading for eggs, and I made another expedition a mile west to a larger village where there were no G.I.s. Like McCreary, Reese tended to show an impatience with hens and a strong interest in skirts; regardless of age or appearance, he’d tell me, ‘There’s a nice one. Boy that’s a honey. Speak to her Web, goddamn!’ Since I was shy, however, and those females invariably looked about as sociable as a fresh iceberg, I ignored his panting plaints.  Besides, the Fraus weren’t apt to be friendly in public, where the neighbors could see them. Maybe indoors or at night. Finally we came to a farm where a buxom peasant lass greeted us. Reese smiled. After I had gotten some eggs, Reese, who kept winking at her, gave her a cigarette and a chocolate bar, and, as love bloomed in the garden of D ration [a newly issued food package] and Chelseas, I backed out the door and waited in the sun. No dice, Reese later reported. I returned home with a helmetful of eggs, Reese with a broken heart.  But it was, as he said, ‘good fratranizin’ territory.’ He tried again that night before the six o’clock curfew went into effect. No luck.” Had Reese been a Soviet, German, or Japanese soldier, this little nonincident probably would have turned out differently.

So the Germans in areas occupied by the Americans were lucky, and they knew it.  They did their best, most of them, to please the Americans, with considerable success. There was something approaching mutual admiration. That caused the GIs to wonder about what they had heard about the Germans. Glenn Gray spoke to the point: “The enemy could not have changed so quickly from a beast to a likable human being. Thus, the conclusion is nearly forced upon the GIs that they have been previously blinded by fear and hatred and the propaganda of their own government.” The theme of German-American relations in the first week of April 1945 was harmony.

It helped immeasurably that the Germans were no longer putting up much of a fight. The 101st Airborne, for example, was headed southeast through Bavaria on its way to Austria. Contact with the enemy picked up as the convoy moved southeast, but not in the sense of combat. The men began to see German soldiers in small groups, trying to surrender. Then larger groups. Finally, more field gray uniforms than anyone could have imagined existed.  Easy Company was in the midst of a German army in disintegration. The supply system lay in ruins. All the German soldiers wanted was a safe entry into a POW cage. “I couldn’t get over the sensation of having the Germans, who only a short time ago had been so difficult to capture, come in from the hills like sheep and surrender,” Webster wrote. When the convoy reached the autobahn leading east to Munich, the road was reserved for Allied military traffic, the median for Germans marching west to captivity. Gordon Carson recalled that “as far as you could see in the median were German prisoners, fully armed. No one would stop to take their surrender. We just waved.”

Webster called the sight of the Germans in the median, “a tingling spectacle.” They came on “in huge blocks. We saw the unbelieveable spectacle of two G.I.s keeping watch on some 2,500 enemy.” At that moment the men of the company realized that the German collapse was complete, that there would be no recovery this spring as there had been last fall.

There was still some scattered, sporadic resistance. Every single bridge was destroyed by German engineers as the Allies approached. Occasionally a fanatic SS unit would fire from its side of the stream. It was more an irritant than a threat or danger. The Americans would bring forward some light artillery, drive the SS troops away, and wait for the engineers to repair the old or make a new bridge.

Major Winters was struck by the German fanaticism, the discipline that led German engineers to blow their own bridges when the uselessness of the destruction was clear to any idiot, and “the total futility of the war. Here was a German army trying to surrender and walking north along the autobahn, while at the same time another group was blowing out the bridges to slow down the surrender.”

On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands; corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds.  Winters found stacks of huge wheels of cheese in the cellar of a building he was using for the battalion CP and ordered it distributed to the inmates. He radioed to regiment to describe the situation and ask for help.  The company stayed in Buchloe for two nights. Thus it was present in the morning when the people of Landsberg turned out, carrying rakes, brooms, shovels, and marched off to the camp. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, it turned out, had been so incensed by the sight that he had declared martial law and ordered everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age to be rounded up and sent to the camp, to bury the bodies and clean up the place. That evening the crew came back down the road from the camp. Some were still vomiting.

“The memory of starved, dazed men,” Winters wrote, “who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, ‘Now I know why I am here!’ “ Eisenhower was free to send his armies wherever he chose. Montgomery wanted him to give First Army to Twenty-first Army Group and let it join Ninth Army for a drive on to Berlin-under his command. Hodges wanted Berlin, as did Simpson, Patton, Brooke, and Churchill. But Bradley didn’t and neither did Eisenhower.  Partly their reason was political. At the Yalta conference the Big Three had agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation, and Berlin into sectors. In central Germany, the Elbe River was the boundary. If Simpson’s Ninth or Hodges’s First Army fought its way across the Elbe and on to Berlin, they would be taking territory that would have to be turned over to the Soviet occupation forces; if they fought their way into Berlin they would have to give up more than half the city to the Red Army. Eisenhower asked Bradley for an estimate on the cost of taking Berlin. About 100,000 casualties, Bradley replied, and added that was “a pretty stiff price to pay for a prestige objective, especially when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take over.”

Further, Eisenhower believed that if the Americans tried to race the Russians to Berlin, they would lose. Ninth and First Armies were four hundred kilometers from Berlin; the Red Army was on the banks of the Oder River, less than a hundred kilometers from the city. And the Red Army was there in great strength-more than 1.25 million troops.

Another consideration: Eisenhower’s goal was to win the war and thus end the carnage as quickly as possible. Every day that the war went on meant more death for the concentration camp inmates, for the millions of slave laborers in Germany, for the Allied POWs. If he concentrated on Berlin, the Germans in Bavaria and Austria, where many of the POW and slave labor camps were located, would be able to hold out for who knew how long.  There is a parallel here with the end of the American Civil War. Just before Appomattox, some of Robert E. Lee’s staff suggested to him that he disband the Army of Northern Virginia and instruct the troops to scatter into the West Virginia mountains, where as small groups they could carry on guerrilla warfare.  Lee was appalled by the suggestion. He said there could be nothing worse for the South than having armed bands roaming the countryside without discipline or direction.

But Hitler was no Lee. And the SS and Hitler Youth were not only fanatics but were armed with the most modern weapons, which gave small groups of them a firepower greater than that of the Army of Northern Virginia at its peak. Even after the surrender of the Ruhr, the Germans never ran out of guns or ammunition. These boys could get all the panzerfausts, potato mashers, machine guns, burp guns, rifles, and Schu mines they could carry. If they were lucky enough to have fuel, they could have Tiger tanks, 88s, and more heavy stuff.  This combination of fanatic boys and plenty of weapons and ammunition created a nightmare situation.

After the mid-April surrender of 325,000 troops (plus thirty generals) in the Ruhr pocket, the Wehrmacht packed it in. Lt. Günter Materne was a German artilleryman caught in the pocket (“where everything was a complete mess”). Out of ammunition and fuel, he destroyed his self-propelled cannon. “At the command post, the CO of our artillery regiment, holding back his tears, told us that we had lost the war, all the victims died in vain. The code word ‘werewolf’ had been sent out by Hitler’s command post. This meant that we were all supposed to divide up into small groups and head east.” Not many did, Materne observed. The veterans sat down and awaited their American captors. There was no attempt by the regular army to maintain a front line.

The Volkssturm, the Waffen SS, and the Hitler Youth were another matter. They fought fiercely and inflicted great damage. The GIs never knew, when the lead jeep rounded a corner, what was ahead. If inexperienced boys were there, they would fire-most often a panzerfaust shell at the jeep. The Americans would proceed to smash the village. “I’m not going to be the last man killed in this war” was the feeling, so when some teenage boy fired on them, they brought down a tremendous amount of shells. It was chaos and catastrophe, brought on for no reason-except that Hitler had raised these boys for just this moment. The fanatics were forcing the Americans to do to the German civilians and cities what Hitler wanted to do to them, because they had shown themselves to be unworthy of him.