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1
AT THE WESTWALL
Optimism, an end to the war by Christmas, had infected the American forces by the first week of September 1944, as the Allied tide seemed poised to sweep the map clean of the Axis forces. In the Pacific, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz, MacArthur’s seagoing counterpart, had all but destroyed the Japanese navy, recaptured almost all of the islands conquered by the enemy, and begun to assemble a massive invasion force designed to carry out MacArthur’s boast of a return to the Philippine Islands. The homeland of the enemy was under siege from U.S. bombers.
In Eastern Europe, the relentless Red Armies pummeled the forces of the Third Reich after lifting the sieges of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad at horrific cost to themselves and the Wehrmacht. In the west, having evacuated Rome, the German legions continued to retreat northward. After a state of stagnation in the hedgerows of Normandy, following the invasion on 6 June, the British, Free following the invasion on 6 June, the British, Free French, and U.S. armies had broken out in a dazzling sprint that carried them to the very borders of Germany. The columns of tanks, accompanied by swift-moving infantrymen, who were supported by massive artillery and incessant raids from the air, shattered disciplined ranks of German soldiers, destroyed huge amounts of armor and ammunition, killed and wounded tens of thousands of troops, and raked in hundreds of thousands of prisoners. At the German border, the only question appeared to be whether the rampaging advance would need to halt for a few weeks to allow adequate resupply of ammunition and fuel before administering the coup de grâce.
First Army forces had begun to probe the enemy defenses at Aachen, and on 6 September, the First Army commander, Courtney Hodges, having paused over a two-day span to sit for nearly four hours while the Marchioness of Queensberry painted his portrait for Life magazine, predicted the imminent demise of the enemy. According to Maj. William Sylvan, Hodges’s aide-de-camp, “The general said tonight that given ten good days of weather he thought the war might well be over as far as organized resistance was concerned.”
A sense of an approaching finale also infected some of the troops. Mike Cohen, a platoon leader in the 12th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 8th Infantry Division, recalled the coming of September. “We had led the advance to Rennes, then swung up toward Brest. It was truly brutal. The city was heavily defended by crack troops, granite walls, and lots of firepower. But when it was over, it was as if the war was over. The main force of the Allies had moved swiftly across France. The Stars and Stripes [military newspaper] reported that Patton had breached the Siegfried Wall in several places and the war was just about over.
“It was a time for rejoicing. It was autumn, the weather was balmy, the guns were still. The killing was finished. It was the time of the Jewish high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and a prayer session was called on a sunny slope outside of Brest with a view of the blue harbor and a cluster of hospital tents. Despite the sincerity of my grandfather and the not-so-enthusiastic exhortations of my father [who left nineteenth-century Russia with its anti-Semitic raids by Cossacks and czarist pogroms], I was never very religious but this was very different. This was a nonsectarian emotion of brotherhood for everyone still alive and deep sadness for the guys who had been killed—our guys that is. I never could bring myself to regret the death of the enemies.
“We had a big party for the company, hired the jubilant French townspeople to prepare a great feast, and we ate and ate and ate and ate. Then, suddenly, the peace was over. We were back in our trucks and moving east. We wound up in Luxembourg and discovered the war was still going on.”
The American commanders, the strategists and tacticians, had neglected a number of factors in their calculations of imminent victory. Only two days before Hodges’s prediction, Sylvan had noted in his diary that, after a conference with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, head of the Allied forces, and Gen. Omar Bradley, in charge of the 12th Army Group, which included Hodges’s forces, “Both the Supreme Commander and General Bradley also are extremely worried over the gasoline situation, which is becoming more instead of being less critical.” Sylvan reported that his boss was ordered “to curl up both the VII and XIX Corps,” which, the aide remarked, handed the British ally and rival Gen. Bernard Montgomery, the “best use of east-west roads. The whole plan is not altogether to the general’s satisfaction, since he believes he can whip the gasoline problem, and that while the Germans are on the run, there should be no halt even for a minute.”
Omar Bradley, in his well-after-the-fact autobiography, implied that if Eisenhower had not allocated scarce gasoline for Montgomery’s thrust to the north and given it to Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, the American armor early in September might have pushed well into the Rhineland, the very heart of the Third Reich, instead of halting along the outskirts of enemy turf.
By dint of Patton’s personality and the swift progress of his troops after the breakout at Saint-Lô, the Third Army’s actions led to banner headlines and major news stories during the summer months. But the First Army, which furnished the beachhead through which Patton was able to enter Normandy, had achieved just as spectacular results. In the six weeks after the July offensive that smashed the German defenses, the troops under Hodges liberated Paris and pushed northeast to the border while contending with the largest segments of the enemy forces.
Between the First Army and the Rhine River lay the vaunted Siegfried Line (the German name for what Americans referred to as the Westwall), a stretch of fortifications that in some areas amounted to only a thin, single belt of fortified emplacements and in others, particularly in the sector fronted by the legions under Hodges, was a parallel series of bastions. A swift strong strike could penetrate and sweep to the Rhine. Although the textbooks and manuals stressed the importance of the terrain, the strategists were confident that technology and manpower could readily overcome whatever advantages the enemy could muster.
On 10 September, desperate to delay pursuit, the retreating Germans destroyed the bridges that spanned the Our and Sauer Rivers, which ambled between Luxembourg and the Third Reich. On that same day, on the heels of Hodges’s assertion that all that lay between a final push and victory was “ten days of good weather,” Sylvan said that a First Army staff conference described the supply picture as “extremely discouraging,” and the situation mandated a delay in any concentrated attack on the Siegfried Line for a minimum of five days.
Nibbling at the border was the 5th Armored Division, a veteran force from the fighting in France. The combat log of the 71st Armored Field Artillery (AFA) of the division reported for 10 September: “The bridge across the Sauer River in Mersch was blown just as CCR [Combat Command Reserve, one of the three regiment-size units in an armored division] entered the town. [Battalion] registered by air OP [L-5 Piper Cubs flown by army pilots routinely as observation posts, spotting targets for artillery] and fired eight [battalion] concentrations. Expended 264 rounds. Many foot [infantry] and horses were killed and dispersed. Many horse-drawn vehicles were destroyed along with several automotive vehicles and guns. The Air Corps also had a field day attacking the retreating German columns as they raced east to the ‘Fatherland.’”
A day later, the log of the 71st AFA reported a march of sixteen miles that bore it beyond the Brandenberg Castle in the Brandenberg Pass. “[Battalion] registered by air OP at 1630, B Battery, 71st. AFA was the first arty [artillery] unit to fire on German soil. Battalion fired interdiction and harassing missions throughout the night and expended 230 rounds.”
On that same 11 September, around 4:30 P.M., the 85th Recon Squadron, dispatched six GIs and Lt. Lionel A. DeLille, a Free French officer serving as an interpreter, in a peep (the armored forces designation for jeep) and scout car to explore the territory between the positions of the 5th Armored Division and the enemy. The patrol cautiously moseyed forward to find out whether Wehrmacht soldiers occupied the pillboxes that threatened any advance.
Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger, leader of the group, recalled: “When we started out on our mission, we took my radio peep with us to keep in touch with the 2d Platoon and with headquarters. We worked our way down to Stolzembourg [a village on the Luxembourg side of the Our River]. From the citizens we learned there were no enemy soldiers in the vicinity. I have been thankful many times I could speak German.
“The enemy had blown to some degree the small bridge that spanned the Our River. Even at that, we were able to cross on it. We could have waded the river too.” A dry summer had left the stream shallow.
“On the German side of the river there was a pillbox camouflaged as a barn. It’s a good thing it wasn’t manned. Lieutenant DeLille and I talked with a German farmer. He told us that the last time he had seen any German troops was the day before. He also told us that if we followed the road up the small mountain behind his farm, we would be able to see the first line of pillboxes. So, Lieutenant DeLille, Pfc. [William] McColligan, the German farmer, and I went into Germany about one and a half miles, where we could get a good view. We studied the pillbox area with our field glasses. None of them seemed manned. We returned to Stolzembourg, where we reported the information [by radio] to Lt. Loren L. Vipond [his platoon commander].”
Subsequently, G-2 at headquarters of the 5th Armored Division scrawled a transcription of a brief radio message received from Combat Command B, one of its three regiment-size armored units: “Dismounted patrols crossed into Germany at … 1815 hrs.”
The frontier had been breached, but Holzinger’s patrol returned to its base without occupying enemy turf. Subsequent probes confirmed the paucity of German troops, although one expedition from the 5th Armored observed soldiers leisurely marching in from the north, bearing machine guns and taking up residence in formerly deserted pillboxes.
