A Stroll through the War in Western Europe 1944 -1945 by Rick Atkinson

Although a SHAEF consensus held that ‘Germany is unlikely to begin chemical warfare,’ never far from mind was the grim experience of World War I, when the warring powers used more than two dozen kinds of gas to inflict more than a million casualties. The  United States alone stockpiled 160,00 tons of chemical munitions for potential use in Europe and the Mediterranean. SHAEF had secret plans that called for retaliatory strikes with phosgene and mustard gas bombs, including targets described as ‘involving risk to civilians.’ At the time of the invasion storage bunkers at two British airfields held a thousand mustard bombs and five hundred more filled with phosgene.

As the days grew shorter Ike wrote to a friend in Washington that ‘Everyone gets more and more on edge. A sense of humor and a great faith, or else a complete lack of imagination, are essential to the project.’

The only place Ike could truly relax was at a five-room Tudor bungalow on Kingston road, a ten acre property with a bomb shelter near the front gate. There the Supreme Commander would slip on the straw sandals he had worn as a young officer in Manila under Douglas MacArthur, play bridge and badminton, or thumb through his Abilene High School yearbook, class of 1909. In nearby Richmond Park, amid purple rhododendrons, and the cockoo’s  cry, he occasionally rode horseback with Kay Summerby, his beautiful Irish driver ad correspondence clerk. Such outings fueled so much salacious gossip about them that she sardonically referred to herself as ‘a Bad Woman.” In the cottage in the evening a stack of cowboy pulp novels awaited Eisenhower; stories of gun-slinging desperadoes entranced him, he told Summerby, because ‘I don’t have to think.’

The British were predicting casualties casualties of up to 40% of an assault battalion, a bloodletting comparable to the Somme in 1916. The Americans had it at 25%; combat drownings alone, excluding paratroopers, were estimated at a grimly precise 16,726. To track the dead, wounded, and missing the casualty section used and early version of computer punch-cards.

Concerned about hitting the approaching invasion flotilla the Eighth Army Air Force ordered the bombardiers to delay dumping their payloads for an additional five or thirty seconds beyond the normal release point. Less than 2% of their bombs fell in the assault area and virtually none hit the shoreline or beach fortifications. Nearly all the pay loads tumbled a mile or two from the coast, and some fell further. Many thousands of bombs were wasted, no defenders were ejected  from their concrete lairs.

Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among the four infantry divisions in Normandy. No weapons was more feared than the mortar, described by one soldier as ‘a soft siffle, high in the air, like a distant lark, or a small penny whistle, faint and elf-like, falling’. The radar that that could backtrack the parabolic flights of rounds to the firing tubes would not be battle-ready for months.



The Brittany campaign soon proved bootless. None of the ports would be especially useful, in part because of their distance from the main battlefield- five hundred mile separated Brest from the German frontier and in part because Hitler ordered various coastal fortresses held ‘to the last man, to the last cartridge.’ That recalcitrance  soon neutered 280,000- German defenders along the European littoral, but it also denied several important ports to Allied logisticians for weeks, if not the duration. The siege at St.-Malo ensnared twenty-thousand GI’s for a fortnight and wrecked the harbor; Brest, with seventy-five strong points, and walls up to twenty-five-feet think, proved a particularly hard nut, causing ten thousand casualties among the seventy thousand Americans who would invest the citadel for more than a month in a medieval affair of scaling ladders and grappling hooks. Bradley insisted later that the Brest garrison was too dangerous to leave unchallenged in his rear, but the diversion of five divisions to Brittany reflected an inflexible adherence to the OVERLORD plan.. “’We must take Brest in order to maintain the illusion of the fact that the U.S. Army cannot be beaten’, Bradley told Patton, who agreed. The war ended with not a single cargo ship or troopship having berthed at Brest, which bombs and a half a million shells knocked to rubble. The synthetic harbor at Quiberon Bay was never built.’ It was one of the most colossally stupid decisions of the war’, in general P. Wood’s view,  but with most of Patton’s legions finally baying eastward both the swivel to the west and failure to fulfill the strategic ambitions of the Brittany campaign seemed like small beer. ‘Whatever the enemy may want to do will make no difference to us. We will proceed relentlessly,  and rapidly, with our plans for his destruction . . .our general situation is very good; the enemy situation is far from good . . .now is the time to press on boldly and to take great risks’, Montgomery told
his lieutenants.

By Tuesday afternoon, August 15, the assault on Falaise had become ‘a molten fire bath of battle. Fratricide once again shredded the ranks; only belatedly did anyone realize that the yellow smoke used by Canadian soldiers to signify friendly positions was the same color used by the British Bomber Command to mark targets. The more troops burnt yellow flares to show their position, the more the errant aircraft bombed them. Many casualties resulted from what the historian Russell  F. Weigley would later lament as ‘the absence of sustained operational forethought and planning on the part of both the principal allies.’ Nor was Eisenhower much help. The supreme commander had proved an indifferent field marshal in Tunisia, on Sicily, and during the planning  for Anzio, now at Falaise he continued in that deficiency, watching passively for more than a week without recognizing or rectifying the command shortcomings of his two chief lieutenants.

1st SS Panzer fought for its life to escape the closing pocket

As France was liberated rough justice flourished. The historian Robert Aron later calculated that as many as forty thousand summary executions of collaborators and other miscreants took place across the country, ‘a figure sufficiently high to create a psychosis that will remain forever in the memories of the survivors. ’

By the time of the liberation of Paris 134,000 Americans had been killed, wounded, gone missing or captured, casualties among the British, Canadians and Poles totaled 91,000. In half a million sorties flown during the summer, more than 4,000 planes had been lost. Of the four regimental and 16 battalion commanders in the 82^nd Airborne, fifteen had been killed, wounded or captured. By one tally, of the 3,400 Norman villages and towns, 586 required complete reconstruction. Through-out France , 24,000 FFI fighters would ultimately be slain or executed by the Germans; the 600,00 tons of Allied bombs dropped on occupied France – the weight of sixty-four Eiffel Towers-would be blamed for between 50 and 67 thousand French deaths.

The capture of Antwerp and the exploitation of its port had been stressed since the earliest Allied invasion plans in December 1941. But Antwerp had a topographical quirk that required more than seizing the docks and the monkey house. Communication with the North Sea from the port required control of the eighty-mile estuary at the mouth of the river Scheldt, including fortified Walcheren Island on the north side and the polders around Breskens on the south bank..  ‘though completely undamaged, Antwerp was as much use as Timbuctoo unless the entrance and other forts were silenced and the banks of the Scheldt occupied, first sea Lord Andrew Cunningham reminded the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Alas, yes . An Ultra intercept of a Fuhrer order on September 3, stressing the decisive importance of holding the Scheldt, was disregarded by the Allied commanders. This ‘incomprehensible’ error, the historian Ralph Bennett later concluded, was ‘a strategic error of such magnitude that its repercussions were felt almost to the end of the war.” Eisenhower’s messages to his top commanders about Antwerp had not specified capturing the Scheldt, and neither Montgomery nor Dempsey, the Second Army commander, attended the issue. Botched attacks allowed the Germans to evacuate Antwerp with most of their Fifteenth Army intact.. The estuary’s north bank fortification grew stouter and eleven thousand rear guards showed no signs of abandoning the pocket around Bresken’s. Montgomery told London on September 7 that he hoped to be in Berlin in three weeks but that was unlikely without the fuel, ammunition, food and other war stuffs that could arrive in bulk only through a big-shouldered port: ‘Antwerp  became a jewel that could not be worn for lack of a setting.

German V-Rocket attacks on Antwerp

Created in Britain in May 1942 to succor the logistical needs of the U.S. Army in Europe, the Services of Supply and been renamed the Communications Zone, or COMZ, on June 7 and now comprised half a million troops, or one in every four GI’s on the continent. Its head was Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee- John Courthouse Lee, Jesus Christ Himself Lee, and God A’Mighty Lee.  Son of an Iowa insurance agent, Lee had graduated from WestPoint with Patton in 1909, then made a career as an Army engineer doing river, dam and harbor duty in places like Detroit, Guam, and Rock Island. In mid-September Time magazine called him a a man of exceptionally friendly and attractive personality,” an encomium affirmed by almost no one who knew him. A fussy martinet who wore rank stars on both the front and back of his helmet, Lee was said to have a supply sergeant’s parsimony in doling out Army kit ‘as if it were a personal gift’, rewarding friends, of whom he had few, and punishing enemies, of whom he had many. Booted and bedizen, wearing spurs and clutching a riding crop, Lee kept Bibles in his desk and in his briefcase. He often press ganged his personal retinue of forty- including a chiropractor, eight correspondence secretaries and a publicist who had once worked for the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn- into escorting him to church, which he attended daily and twice if not  thrice on Sundays. He liked to read scripture aloud. Any approaching was to tender a salute at precisely ten paces and woe to the soldier whose helmet was cockeyed, Even the bedridden, one surgeon recorded ‘ had to lie at attention and the ambulatory had to get out of their chairs and stand at attention all the time he was on that war until he called at ease’. Excess slop in the mess-hall garbage pail sent him into a pale fury. Whipping out a spoon, he would sample the waste himself, declaring, ‘You see, I can eat it and you’re throwing this away.” His attempted take-over of Paris had the French complaining that the occupation of the Americans was worse than that of the Germans.

“Why didn’t somebody tell me some of these things?’ Eisenhower asked after finally hearing about Lee’s idiosyncrasies [ a modern Cromwell as Ike came to see him]?”



Lee’s ‘first priority duties’ required provisioning a huge fighting force four thousand miles from home with 800,000 separate supply items, eight-fold more than even Sears, Roebuck stocked. The tasked might well have over-matched the most gifted administrator, and certainly taxed Jesus Christ himself. Allied invasion architects had assumed that by D+ 90- September 4 – only a dozen U.S. divisions would have reached the Seine, whereupon a pause of one to three months would be imposed to consolidate the lodgement area before resuming the attack across France. No logistician expected to reach the German border until May, 1945. In the event, sixteen divisions were 150 miles beyond  the Seine on September 4 and barely a week later the Allied line had reached a point no one anticipated until D+ 350.

Battlefield exigencies disrupted and then demolished a supply plan two years in the making. The need for combat troops to fight through the brocage had been met at the expense of service units- mechanics, fuelers, railroaders, sutlers of all sorts- and the subsequent breakout from Normandy caused Ike in mid-August to pursue the fleeing enemy without pausing to shore up his logistics. The thrill of the chase held sway .Marshall and Eisenhower further accelerated the flow of divisions to the theater, advancing the schedule two months at severe cost in cargo shipments. Other afflictions impaired the supply system, the loss of Mulberry A, the demolitions at Cherbourg, Marseille, and Le Havre; the abandonment of the ports in Brittany, the allied bombardment of French rails and roads, the quick advance up the Rhone; and Hitler’s stubborn retention of Dunkirk and other coastal enclaves. Liberated Paris pleaded for an air delivery of 2,400 tons of emergency food, medicines, and other goods each day, of which Bradley conceded 1,500- the equivalent of the daily needs of 2.5 combat divisions.

Truck convoys that in July had required just four hours for a round-trip to the front now took up to five days to reach the battlefield and return to the beaches. The distance from American factories meant that items ordered in eastern France typically took almost four months to reach the front from home; at any given moment, two thousand tanks were in the pipeline. Prodigal waste, always an American trait, made the logistician’ life harder, ordinance losses were extremely high and Ike warned the Pentagon that every month he was forced to replace 36,000 small arms, 700 mortars, 500 tanks, and 2,400 vehicles. The need to fly fuel to bone-dry combat units meant that it was costing 1 ½ gallons of 100-octane aviation gasoline to deliver one gallon of 80-octane motor fuel to forward depots .PLUTO, a plan to pipe fuel under the Channel proved disappointing- ‘a scandalous waste of time and effort.  The Red Ball Express was begun in late August. Soon seven thousand trucks carried four thousand tons or more each day on one-way highways to the First and Third Army dumps but nearly seventy trucks on average were wrecked beyond repair every day. Thousands of  dead-lined trucks littered the French by-ways. Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts and tools hampered mechanics The daily ruination of five thousand tires- many shredded by discarded ration cans- led to desperate shortages. Pilferage from trucks and dumps grew so virulent that General Lee requested thirteen infantry battalions as guards, Eisenhower gave him five, with shoot-to-kill authority. Even as the French railways were repaired combat supply requirements  sharply outpaced the Allied ability to unload and distribute cargo, by mid-October more than two hundred ships anchored in Continental waters waiting berths.

128th Evacuation Hospital; loaded into 2 1/2 ton cargo trucks in preparation for its move into Belgian.

Gas by the can.

Operation Market Garden was lost on the very first day through failure to seize the bridges at Arnhem and Nijmegen and the failure was compounded by the ponderous overland advance. A titanic, often heroic battle was played out, with particular fates by the tens of thousands in the balance. But, through lack of command coordination, the margin of victory, always razor thin, was irretrievably lost.  The Airborne divisions repeated another one of the numerous disasters  they had throughout the War. Nothing was right except the courage of the GIs. The Autumn rains fell often, a winter war loomed. A slightly angry bafflement at continued German resistance pervaded the Third Army, a resentment that the enemy did not know he was beaten.

Hurtgen

Intelligence failures plagued the Allied Armies in the battle of the Hurtgen forests, real combat intelligence failures. In less than three months, six U.S. Army infantry divisions were tossed into the Hurtgen, plus an armored brigade, a Ranger battalion and sundry other units. All told, 120,00 soldiers sustained 33,000 casualties in what the historian Carlo D’Este would call ‘the most ineptly fought series of battles of the war  the West.’ Not even Hemingway could quite capture the debasement of that awful place. A soldier asked the correspondent Iris Carpenter to tell the folks back home that ‘their brave boys are living like a lot of fornicating beasts, that they’re doing things to each other that beasts would be ashamed to do.”

As fresh reserves came forward, legions of dead men were removed to the rear. Each field army develop assembly lines to handle the five hundred bodies a day. Great pains were taken to identify remains whenever possible. Innovative techniques allowed fingerprints to be lifted from bodies long buried and for hidden laundry marks to be extracted from shredded uniforms. Graves registration artisans meticulously reconstructed mutilated faces with cosmetic wax so that Signal Corps photographs could be taken to help identify those without dog tags. Reuniting a dead man with his name was he last great service that could be rendered a comrade gone west.  Operation QUEEN  sputtered and stalled. After more than three weeks, Ninth Army closed to the west bank of the Roer, but not the Rhine as Bradley had hoped. VII Corps of the First Army would not reach the Roer until mid-December, requiring thirty-one days to move seven miles, or fifty feet an hour. Together the two armies suffered 38,000 battle casualties. In the three months since Staff Sergeant Holzinger became the first GI to set foot on German soil, the Allies had nowhere penetrated the border by more than twenty-to miles Total American losses for the fall- killed, wounded, died of wounds, died of illness, died in accidents, missing, captured, sick, injured, battle-fatigued, imprisoned, suicides- climbed to 140,000.



 Winter always seemed to catch the U.S. Army by surprise. The Americans had been unprepared for winter campaigning in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia in 1942 and in the Apennines in Italy in 1943 and they were just as unready in 1944. Even before OVERLORD, War Department queries about cold-weather preparations had been mostly dismissed with a scowl by Eisenhower’s provisioners. Artic clothing tested at Anzio was offered to SHAEF but rejected as unnecessary. The Army’s quartermaster general in mid-August had predicted that ‘the war would not go on another winter'- as many other did. A late requisition for winter clothing was submitted to the War Department ‘as precautionary measure,’ but it included only enough to outfit one army of 350,000 soldiers at a time when four American Armies were fighting in Western Europe. Urged to expedite shipments of cold-weather kit, Bradley waved off the warning saying ‘The men are tough and can take it.’ Supply-line sclerosis and delays opening Antwerp aggravated matters, as did severe weather on all uniforms and equipment even as theater commanders in late September belatedly requested 850,000 heavy overcoats- double the number contemplated just a month earlier- quartermasters faced the need to re-clothe a million ragged U.S. soldiers, as well as 100,000 French troops and throngs of German prisoners. Instead, as official Army history conceded, ‘front-line troops fought through a large part of winter inadequately clothed.’

Four types of GI footgear were available in late all. None of which were entirely satisfactory. And so the soldier suffered. The first case of trench-foot – a crippling injury to blood vessels and tissue caused by prolonged exposure to cold, wet conditions- had been reported on September 27. Within weeks the syndrome was epidemic. In November and December foot and other cold weather problems hospitalized 23,000 men. Almost none of the afflicted soldiers would return to duty before spring, four in ten were eventually evacuated home as disabled.. Almost nothing had been learned from the Italian campaign. Nor had the Americans learned from the British or the Germans, who enforced prophylactic measures such as dry socks, foot massages, frequent inspections and soldier education. Many GI’s were told to lace their boots tighter, precisely the wrong advice.

The soldiers misery contributed to a spike in combat exhaustion, a medical diagnosis coined in Tunisia to replace the discredited shell shock. So many thousands now headed to ‘the kitchen’ that SHAEF censors banned disclosure of the numbers, the public would not know that the U.S. Army alone hospitalized 929,000 men for ‘Neuropsychiatric reasons’ in WWII, including as many as one in four during the bitter fall of 1944.

‘Morale is a darkling plain, littered with dead cliches, swept by pronunciamentos, and only fitfully lit up by the electrical play of insight,’ an AFF  study declared. The Army’s surgeon general recommended that  front line infantrymen be relieved for six months after completing two hundred days in combat, but the nation lacked enough replacements to effect such a solution. ‘Under the present policy no man is removed from combat duty until he has become worthless,’ a report to Eisenhower noted. ‘The infantry man considers this a biter injustice.’ One chaplain was reduced to suggesting that ‘sound mental health requires a satisfactory life-purpose and faith in a friendly universe’



Dolittle’s air fleets brought more of those big ,nasty bombs Patton favored – 1,300 heavies dumping 2,600 tons on forts in Operation MADISON. Dropped through dense overcast by bombardiers relying on murky radar images, more than 98 percent of the payloads missed their targets, often by miles. The infantry soldiered on, resupplied with rations, plasma, ammunition, and toilet paper tossed from the cock-pit doors of single-engine spotter planes flying ten to twenty feet, too low for German antiaircraft crews to depress their 20mm guns .For all his criticism of other generals, at Metz Patton deployed unimaginative and dispersed frontal attacks, forfeiting the single greatest advantage the Americans now held over the adversaries –mobility- by permitting his army to be drawn into a sanguinary siege .

Bombing Cities

By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of the sixty listed German cities had been ‘virtually destroyed,’ at a rate of more than two each month. These were mostly in the east: Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig  and Dresden. Air Chief Marshal Charles F.A. Portal argued in early November  that ‘the air offense against oil gives us by far the best hope of complete victory in the next few months.” Harris disagreed, and instead urged completion of what he called the ‘city programme’. Harris’s resolve to crack the enemy’s will and effect a surrender with terror raids would be found wanting  both militarily and morally.’ The idea that the main object of bombing German industrial cities was to break the enemy’s morale proved to be totally unsound, Harris acknowledged in 1947. Yet the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that ‘bombing seriously depressed the morale of German citizens. It’s psychological effects were defeatism, fear, hopelessness, fatalism and apathy.’


Less than a third of all the bombs detonated within a thousand feet of the aiming point, one out of ten fell within a half a mile of a target obscured by weather, ’precision bombing’ was intended in a relative, not a literal sense.’ The Eighth Airforce made considerable efforts to conceal the extent of such attacks and censors blocked any hint that precision bombing was often terribly imprecise. Repeated fire-bomb experiments led to the development of incendiaries that could punch through stout German roofs. The M-76 Block Burner, first used in March 1944, spattered incendiary gel in big, burning gobs. Aerial incendiaries probably caused as much death and destruction as any other weapon used in WWII.

The Army was pinned to the western slope of the Vosges Mountains, the failure to force the Belfort Gap near the Swiss border enabled the German Nineteenth Army to make a stand.

 Italy veterans in the 36th, 45^th, and 3^rd Divisions had little stomach for another winter campaign in the uplands, and alarming mental and physical lethargy was reported in at least one regiment. The season was marked by straggling and desertions; replacements were described as inept and poorly trained. Winter clothing arrived late, despite emergency shipments frown into Dijon aboard B-24s. Six hundred thousand men and almost a million tons of materiel had come through Marseille and Toulon and across the Cote d’Azur beaches by early November. But the long trek to the front, various miscalculations, and a thriving black market in the French ports – 20 –percent of the cargo unloaded in Marseille was stolen, often by Army freebooters- made for shortages of food, ammunition and food.

Even the Army official history, published a half century after the event and  disinclined to second-guess  the high command, found Eisenhower’s decision difficult to understand. The supreme commander had opted for an operational strategy of firepower and attrition – the direct approach- as opposed to a war of opportunistic maneuver. After encouraging a bloody attack through the Vosges, SHAEF possessed neither a coherent strategic goal for is southern wing nor the agility to exploit unexpected success. Even Patton believed Devers should have jumped the Rhine, yet little thought seems to have been given either in Versailles or in Luxembourg City to use the Third Army’s tank legions to exploit the bridgehead at Rastatt. In misusing 6^th Army Group, as one Army historian later charged, Eisenhower unwittingly gave the Germans a respite, allowing Hitler to continue assembling a secret counter-offense aimed at the Ardennes in mid-December. Crossing the Rhine after Thanksgiving might well have complicated German planning for what soon would be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Eisenhower’s provost marshal estimated that in December eighteen thousand American deserters roamed the European theater, plus another ten thousand British absconders. The equivalent  of a division of military fugitives were believed to be hiding in the Parisian demimonde, often joining forces with local black marketeers to peddle K-rations for 75 cents from the tailgates of stolen Army trucks- hundred of such vehicles vanished every day- or simply selling the entire deuce-and-a- half for $5,000. Eventually four thousand military policemen and detectives worked the streets of Paris, from September through December they arrested ten thousand people, including French civilians caught selling marijuana to soldiers.

The Army’s ability to replenish its ranks was in jeopardy. SHAEF predicted a shortage of 23,000 riflemen on December 8, enough to preclude any attack into Germany. Eisenhower ordered rear-echelon units to comb out more combat troops, and an eight-week course to convert mortar crews into 745s was truncated by two weeks. At least a few officers wondered whether the time had come to allow black GIs to serve in white rifle companies, but that radical notion found few champions in the high command.

To be sure, there were clues, omens, auguries. Just as surely, they were missed, ignored, explained away. For decades after the death struggle called the Battle of the Bulge ,generals, scholars, and foot soldiers alike would ponder the worst U.S intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor and the deadliest of the war. Only from the high ground of history could perfect clarity obtain, and even then the simplest, truest answer remained the least satisfying: mistakes were made and many men died. What might have been known was not known. What could have been done was not done. Valor and her handmaidens – tenacity, composure, luck- would be needed to make it right. The trial ahead would also require stupendous firepower and great gouts of blood in what became the largest battle in American military history, and among the most decisive.

 America forces were spread  thinly over an eighty-five mile front, among them some of the youngest and greenest units in Europe in addition to inexperienced rear-echelon converts.

An Army tally long after the war put U.S. battle losses in the Ardennes and Alsace from December 16 to January 25 at 105,000, including 19,246 dead. Thousands more suffered from trench foot, frostbite and diseases. Even as American losses in the Pacific spiraled, roughly one in ten combat casualties during WWII occurred in the Bulge, where 600,000 GIs had fought, fourfold the number of combatants at Gettysburg. More than 23,000 were taken prisoner.

HERBSTNEBEL hastened the demise of the Third Reich. Hitler's preoccupation with the west in late 1944- and the diversion of supplies, armor, and reserves from the east- proved a godsend for the Red Army, in the estimation of one German historian.  Half of the Reich’s fuel production in November and December had supported the Ardennes offensive, and now hundreds of German tanks and assault guns were immobilized on the Eastern Front for lack of gasoline. By January 20, the Soviet juggernaut of two million men tore a hole nearly 350 miles wide from East Prussia to the Carpathian foothills, bypassing or annihilating German defenses.

Bound for the Oder river, Stalin’s armies would be within fifty miles of Berlin at a time when the Anglo-Americans had yet to reach the Rhine.

When Admiral King complimented Soviet valor at Yalta, Stalin replied ‘It takes a very brave man not to be a hero in the Russian army

Approaching the Rhine GI’s viewed utter destruction, burning towns as far as the eye could see but nearer to it, the swift bounds of Allied Armies captured intact a gemutlich land of bucolic farmsteads and bulging larders.’ The cattle, no numerous, so well fed. Chickens and pigs and horses were running everywhere,’ Alan Moorehead wrote. “Every house seemed to have a good linen cupboard.” The reporter R.W. Thompson catalogued ‘fine stocks of ironmongery, metal goods, oil stoves, furniture and mattresses The paper in deserted offices was of fine quality.’ In a former candy factory, Martha Gellhorn found ‘vast stocks of sugar, chocolate, cocoa, butter, almonds,’ as well as rooms chockful of Dutch and French cheese, Portuguese sardines, Norwegian canned fish, and syrup by the barrel.

Here was a world of Dresden plates, pewter steins and trophy antlers arranged just so on parlor walls, of Goethe and Schiller bound in calfskin, of boiled eggs in brine vats and the smell of roasting goose. Here was a world of damask tablecloths and silverware in handsome hutches, of Third Reich motherhood medals for stalwart childbearing, and French cosmetics looted from Paris or Lyon. Every house seemed to display a crucifix or Christian texts over bedsteads; some flew Allied flags, or posted signs claiming that the occupants were Dutch or Belgian, and never mind that the discolored patch of wallpaper where the Fuhrer’ portrait had hung until the day before. “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was,’ Gellhorn wrote. ‘It would sound better if it were set to music. Then the Germans could sing the refrain.”

Here to was a world to be looted. ‘We’re advancing as fast as the looting will permit,” a 29th Division unit in Munchen-Gladbach reported. German towns wren ‘processed, houses ‘liberated’ from attic to cellar, everything from Leica cameras to accordions pilfered. A Corps provost marshal complained of ‘gangsterism’ by GI’s who were looting and bullying civilians’; some were caught exhuming a medieval grave in a hunt for jewels, while others ripped up floorboards or searched gardens with mine detectors. W.C. Heinz watched a soldier on a stolen bicycle with half a dozen women’s dresses draped over his arm carefully stow both bike and garments in a jeep trailer. Plundering MPS were known as the ‘Lootwaffe’: according to a soldier in the 45^th Division, a ‘typical infantry squad involved two shooting and ten looting. German cars by the hundreds were dragged out of garages . . .painted khaki and driven away. French troops hauled German motorcycles, typewriters, and Friesian cows back to Lorraine. British soldiers pillaged a hardware shop, carrying away screws, nails, and hinges simply from ‘a desire to do some unhindered shoplifting’.

That which escaped plunder often was vandalized in what one private called ‘ the chaotic air of drunken, end-of-the-world carnival.’ A Canadian soldier recounted his own rampage through a Westphalian house:

“First I took a hammer and smashed over 100 plates, and the cups along with them. Then I took and axe to the china cabinets and buffets. Next I smashed all the furniture . . .I put a grenade in the big piano, and poured a jar of molasses into it. I broke all the French doors and all the doors with mirrors in them and threw the lamps into the street. I was so mad.”

Allied commanders also found themselves struggling to enforce SHAEF’s ‘non-fraternization’ edict, which forbade ‘mingling with German upon terms of friendliness, familiarity, or intimacy’  but GI’s argued that ‘copulation without conversation is not fraternization’ and Patton advised, ‘Tell the men of the Third Army that so long as they keep their helmets on they are not fraternizing.’

On Monday, March 19, Eisenhower approved shoving nine First Army divisions across the Rhine in anticipation of forming a common front with Third Army once Patton jumped the river below Koblenz. ‘The war is over, I tell you,” Hodges repeatedly proclaimed in Spa. ‘The war is over,.” The war was not over, nor would giddy repetition make it so. But the inner door to Germany had swung wide, never to be shut again.

There was the airborne operation VARSITY which turned into another fiasco. Given the supine state enemy defenses, no objective seized by paratroopers would have long eluded a three-corps ground assault. No great depth had been added to the Allied purchase over the Rhine, nor had bridge building been expedited. The two airborne divisions incurred nearly 3,000 casualties, including more than 460 dead. In addition to C-46 and B-24 losses, some 3000 C-47s had been damaged and another 30 destroyed. Troop carrier crews suffered another 357 casualties, more than half of them dead or missing. Once again, airborne forces appeared to be coins burning a hole in the pockets of Allied commanders, coins that simply had to be spent. Soldiers soon  mocked the operation as VARSITY BLUNDER, and burial squads with pruning saws and ladders took two days to cut down all the dead. Fate is definite. The suit always fits.

Task Force Baum, sent to liberate Patton’s son-in-law from a German prison camp was obliterated, every vehicle lost and nearly every man captured in addition to the fifty-seven killed, wounded or missing. No one knows how many Allied prisoners of war perished in the escapade.. This was Patton  again abusing  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 the victory so near, his superiors had no heart for public rebukes’: ‘failure itself was George’s own worse reprimand', Bradley concluded. Eisenhower referred to the raid as ‘a wild goose chase; and ‘Patton’s latest crackpot actions.” He wasn’t the only one. Ike himself was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.. shouting and ranting like a crazy man . . on the defensive, guard up, worried, self-isolated, unable to concentrate. However, a week’s vacation in a villa at Cannes proved salutary.

 A war crimes investigation by Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski ruled that the shooting of Major General Maurice Rose when surrendering to Germans outside Paderborn was accidental but by then, reprisals had run their red course. Feral American troops smashed the villages south of Paderborn, burning houses and executing wounded German soldiers. Twenty-seven Germans, said to have been shot after surrendering, were later discovered behind the Etteln cemetery and eighteen more were counted in Dorenhagen. Some GI’s reportedly prevented the Germans from burying their dead and bodies lay corrupting in the sun and rain for days as a reminder to the living of what war had wrought. Carrion crows hopped about, stiff-legged and unsentimental. It came to this.

American planners had assumed a need for cages to hold 90,000 German prisoners by the end of June, by mid-April the number exceeded 1.3 million, and the final Ruhr bonanza would sharply increase that tally. ‘We have prisoners like some people have mice,’ Gavin complained to his daughter. A Guard from the 78^th Division who set out on foot with sixty-nine Germans in his custody reached the regimental stockade near Wuppertal with twelve hundred. Enemy troops throughout the pocket could be seen waving handkerchiefs, bed sheets, table linen, shirts- on this battlefield the predominant color was white. One unit rode bicycles into captivity, maintain precise military alignment to the end.. Another arrived aboard horse-drawn wagons, clip-clopping in parade formation. The men unhitched and groomed their teams, then turned them free into the fields as they themselves repaired to captivity. The official Army history described the surrendering rabble:

“Young men, old men, arrogant SS troops, dejected infantrymen, paunchy reservists, female nurses and technicians, teenage members of the Hitler Youth, stiffly correct, monocled Prussians, enough to gladden the heart of a Hollywood casting director . . . Some came carrying black bread and wine, others with musical instruments – accordions, guitars, a few bringing along wives or girlfriends in the mistaken hope that they might share their captivity.”

A single strand of barbed wire often sufficed for an enclosure. GI sentries cradled their carbines and stifled yawns. Within the cordon sat supermen by the acre. Singing sad soldier songs and reminiscing about better days, they scavenged the ground for cigarette butts and plucked the lice from their field-gray uniforms.

Yet for every enemy platoon that surrendered, another fought savagely, often unto death: In April, more than 10,600 U.S. soldiers would be killed in action in Europe, as many as in June 1944

“Why didn’t the silly bastards give up sooner? That enigma perplexed every Allied soldier at one moment or another. Imminent, ineluctable disaster had enhanced a perverse sense of German national cohesion, inflamed by terror, misery, and unhappy memories of the last, lost war. Lurid propaganda- regarding Soviet atrocities in the east, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, and those “Negro brothels”- fueled resistance. [ and, as Stalingrad showed, even in the most impossible situations, German soldiers always followed orders]

An expedition to Ohrdruf in the hopes of capturing Field Marshal Kesselring, bagging only a few Germans soldiers masquerading as patients in a local hospital but liberated a concentration camp in Germany for the first time- one of the more than eighty satellite camps of Buchenwald, more than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. A guard showed the liberators how the blood had congealed in the coarse black scabs where starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food. View the scene even old ‘blood and guts’ Patton threw-up. When a young GI giggled nervously, Eisenhower fixed him with a baleful eye. “Still having trouble hating them?, he asked. To other troops gathered around him in the compound, the supreme commander said, ‘We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.”

Half the nationalities in Europe were now on the march- a monstrous, moving frieze of refugees. Allied officers estimated that 4.2 million displaced persons from forty-seven nations trudged through the 12th Army Group’s sector in Germany alone. They were among  some 11 million unmoored souls wandering across central Europe in the spring of 1945. For the liberators, this great floodtide of misery was unnerving. “Its too big,’ and 82 Airborne paratrooper wrote home. “Personally I don’t give a damn . . .It makes you hard.' After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Severeid took inventory of his own sentiments: ‘A kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore – and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.’

The revelations of the vast criminality of Nazis regime in April 1945  sparked an enduring outrage in the West. Hyperbolic propaganda about World War I atrocities had left a legacy of skepticism. And graphic film footage from Europe had been suppressed because Hollywood worried about nauseating film-goers or creating ill-will towards newsreel companies. But photography and eyewitness accounts from Bergen-Belson, Buchenwald and other hellholes now filled newspapers and cinema screens. Even war-weary soldiers felt a new sense of purpose. ‘Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist,’ wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell, ‘but after the camps, a moral attitude was dominant and there was no disagreement about the main point. A rifleman in the 157 Infantry agreed. “I’ve been in the Army or thirty-nine months, ‘ he said, ‘I’ve been overseas in combat for twenty-three. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”

 [ the vision of Nazis atrocities also served to erase the Allies’ own from  public memory, if the public was treated to them to any great extent in the first place]

A British military maxim held that ‘he who has not fought the Germans does not know war.” Now the Americans Soviet and others also knew war well .Certainly it was possible to look at Allied war-making on any given day and feel heart-sick at the missed opportunities and purblind personalities and wretched wastage, to wonder why the ranks could not be braver or at least cleverer, smarter or at least shrewder, or prescient or at least intuitive. Yet despite its foibles, the Allied way won through. . .etc.

The entire war had cost U.S. taxpayers $296 billion – roughly $4 trillion in 2012 dollars. To help underwrite a military budget that increased 8,000 percent, Roosevelt had expanded the number of those taxpayers from 4 million to 42 million- yet the war absorbed barely one-third of the American gross national product, a smaller proportion than that of any of the belligerents. As a German prisoner complained, ‘Warfare like yours is easy.” It wasn’t. American soldier bore the brunt for the Western Armies in the climatic final year: the 587.000 U.S. casualties in western Europe included 135,576 dead, almost half of the U.S. total world-wide. Some escaped with superficial injuries, others less fortunate: 1,700 were left blind, 11,000 with at least partial paralysis, 18,000 with amputations, the full extent of the psychological damage remains ‘mysterious’.

  If the war had dispelled American isolationism, it also encouraged American exceptionalism, and a penchant for military solutions and a self-regard that led some to label their epoch and ‘the American century.’ ‘Power, as John Adams had written, ‘always thinks it has a great soul.’

‘Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends’, said Ike at Guildhall in London on June 12^th. It was inscribed on his tomb.