The Last Battle (39 page)

12
. Reynaud’s postwar account says May 1, but Weiter killed himself sometime between one
AM
and six
AM
on May 2. Nor was Weiter the only senior SS man to commit suicide in the vicinity of Schloss Itter. Just days after the Dachau commandant killed himself, SS-Major Hermann Müller-John, commander and bandmaster of the ninety-six-man orchestra of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler—the führer’s bodyguard regiment—killed his wife, his nineteen-year-old daughter, and himself in a farmhouse within a few miles of Itter. He apparently wished to avoid postwar prosecution for his involvement—and that of the band members he led—in the murder of some fifty Jews on the night of Sept. 18–19, 1939, in Blonie, Poland.

13
. Reynaud,
In the Thick of the Fight
, 653.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Ibid.

16
. The bulk of the information used in this volume concerning Schrader’s early life and wartime career is drawn from his ultimately unpublished postwar memoir, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse”
(“Memories, Thoughts, Insights”), and from Schrader’s entry in John P. Moore’s excellent
Signal Officers of the Waffen-SS
.

17
. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 5.

18
. Known in German as the Reichsarbeitdienst, or R.A.D., the organization had been created in 1931 as the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (Voluntary Labor Service) as a way to provide work for Germany’s many unemployed people. Structured along military lines, it undertook civic construction projects. Following the Nazis’ assumption of power, service in the renamed R.A.D. was made compulsory for all German males between eighteen and twenty-five. Upon completion of that service young men entered the military for two years.

19
. Schrader’s SS-number was 353 103.

20
. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 16.

21
. Ibid., 20.

22
. The date usually observed for the official formation of the Waffen-SS as a distinctly military organization is August 1940.

23
. Ibid., 28–29.

24
. Ibid., 30.

25
. Essentially the German equivalent of the U.S. jeep, the kübelwagen was an inexpensive, four-door convertible-top military utility vehicle designed by Ferdinand Porsche.

26
. Ibid., 31.

27
. Schrader takes pains to point out that it was a regular passenger train, not a military troop train.

28
. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36.

29
. Čučković’s reference to “Mühltal” can be confusing, as there are several small villages by that name within twenty miles of Schloss Itter. The Wimmers’ farmhouse was actually in an area now known as Itter-Mühltal, just east of Niederau.

30
. This exchange and the account of Čučković’s ride to Innsbruck are drawn from Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 51–53.

31
. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was encircled by the Germans at Bastogne, Belgium, in December 1944, McAuliffe famously responded to a demand for surrender with a one-word reply: “Nuts!”

32
. This man was apparently part of the 103rd Infantry Division’s military-government section; unfortunately, his name is lost to history.

33
. Reynaud,
In the Thick of the Fight
, 654.

34
. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36.

35
. This incident is recounted in Reynaud,
In the Thick of the Fight
, 654.

36
. Unfortunately, we have no first names for most of the soldiers who chose to join Sepp Gangl in protecting the people of Wörgl.

37
. While the vast majority of German military personnel who surrendered to U.S. forces in Europe survived the process, it was certainly not
unheard of for GIs to summarily execute prisoners—most notably in the days after the June 1944 Normandy landings and in the wake of the December 1944 Waffen-SS murder of eighty-four American POWs in Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. However, the Allied liberation of the Nazis’ concentration, extermination, and slave-labor camps led to a spike in the number of German prisoners—especially Waffen-SS and SS-TV members—killed while attempting to surrender or following surrender. On April 29, 1945, the day Dachau was liberated by elements of the U.S. 42nd and 45th Infantry divisions, between sixteen and approximately fifty of the camp’s SS-TV guards were killed by American troops, many after surrendering.

38
.
Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945
, 68–70.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

1
. An 1806 graduate of West Point—and its superintendent from 1814 to 1818—Partridge came to believe that the national military academy system exemplified by his alma mater had created and was perpetuating a closed military elite. He strenuously advocated the establishment of state militias led by officers trained in private, regional military colleges. He established seven such institutions himself, with Norwich being the first and ultimately most successful.

2
. Indeed, because its founder established the principles of what evolved into the Reserve Officer Training Corps program, Norwich University bills itself as the birthplace of ROTC, though there is some disagreement as to where the first ROTC unit was constituted.

3
. Though most Norwich graduates were commissioned into the cavalry branch, such an assignment was not a foregone conclusion. Graduates could request assignment to another branch, or their first branch choice might be turned down by the army if officers were needed in other fields. Of the seventy-nine graduates in Lee’s class of 1942, sixty—including Lee— were assigned to the cavalry, thirteen to the army air forces, and two each to the engineer corps, signal corps, and chemical warfare service.

4
. The U.S. War Department’s 1930 establishment of the mechanized force ensured that the horse’s days in army service were numbered. Mounted cavalry units were converted to mechanized organizations as quickly as funding and vehicles could be provided. While military horsemanship was taught in all four years of Lee’s time at Norwich, he and his fellow students also received instruction in the operation and use of armored cars and other military vehicles during their junior and senior years. As it happened, Lee and the other members of his Class of 1942 were the last Norwich cadets to receive horse-cavalry training. In March 1943 the school’s entire corps of cadets was taken directly into military service, and from then until the end of the war Norwich did not accept students, instead
acting as an auxiliary training school for army aviation cadets. By the time regular instruction resumed in 1946, the university had disposed of all its horses and officially discontinued cavalry training. From then on Lee and his classmates were referred to as the Horsemen of ’42.

5
. The woman’s maiden name remains unclear.

6
. Construction had begun in January 1942. The post was renamed Fort Campbell in 1950, and as of this writing remains the home installation of the 101st Airborne Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

7
. Organizational details for both the 12th AD and 23rd TB are drawn from Ferguson,
Hellcats
, and Francis,
A History of the 23rd Tank Battalion
.

8
. A coaxial machine gun is mounted inside the tank’s turret, alongside and parallel to the main gun. The machine gun fires in the same direction as the main gun and is used against such “soft” targets as unarmored vehicles and troops in the open.

9
.
Armored Force Field Manual
, 10.

10
. “Capt. Jack Lee, ’42, Rescues Daladier in Castle Battle,”
Norwich Record
(Northfield, VT), June 22, 1945, 5.

11
. Basse by all accounts was a very nice man. In a 2012 interview with the author, Calbert Duvall, a driver in Company B’s 2nd Platoon, related an example of Basse’s kindness: while the 23rd was still at Camp Barkley, Duvall’s young wife and infant daughter arrived from upstate New York for a very brief visit. Duvall was supposed to have guard duty, but Basse pulled the eight-hour detail in the young soldier’s place so Duvall could spend the time with his family.

12
. Built between 1913 and 1919 by Germany’s Vulcan AG shipyard and originally intended for service with the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the twenty-two-thousand-ton vessel was transferred in 1920 to Britain as part of the war reparations the Allies awarded themselves at the Paris Peace Conference. The ship passed to Canadian Pacific in 1921 and was initially named
Empress of China
but became
Empress of Australia
the following year. It reentered transatlantic passenger service after World War II and was scrapped in 1952.

13
. Francis,
History of the 23rd Tank Battalion
, 10–12.

14
. Some sources give the name as
Besotten Jinny
, but the version used in this volume is the one most commonly cited. The actual origin of the name is lost to history, but it may be a reference to the nickname of Lee’s first wife, Virginia.

15
. LST stands for “Landing Ship, Tank.” The large, flat-bottomed vessels carried their cargo of armored vehicles right up onto the beach and offloaded them through large bow doors. The modern U.S. Army uses an even larger variant known as an LSV (Logistics Support Vessel) to move armored vehicles and other cargo.

16
. See Francis,
History of the 23rd Tank Battalion
, 18, and Ferguson,
Hellcats
, 57–60.

17
. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs, a 1940 graduate of West Point, was twenty-four when he was killed. The scion of a family with a long military history, Meigs was the son of a naval officer. His own son, the future General Montgomery C. Meigs, was born one month after Lt. Col. Meigs’s death.

18
.
Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945
. For a full account of the Herrlisheim battle, see Edward Monroe-Jones’s excellent
Crossing the Zorn
.

19
. The “Easy 8” moniker came from the fact that the M4A3(76)W was also referred to as the M4A3E8. Second-generation examples of the Easy 8 were built with the Horizontal Volute Spring Suspension (HVSS) system and had wider tracks and other detail changes.

20
. Earlier Sherman models had carried the projectiles in the side sponsons above the tracks; the rounds would almost always detonate if the hull was breached by antitank fire, so in later-model M4s the main-gun ammunition was stored in bins under the turret floor. The bins were surrounded by a water-antifreeze mixture that greatly reduced the risk of the ammunition cooking off and catastrophically destroying the tank.

21
. General Orders 33, HQs., 12th Armored Division, April 19, 1945. Lee was also awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received sometime in March 1945, but the nature of the wounds and exactly how and where they were inflicted remain unclear.

22
. As World War II ground on in Europe, the army needed immediate reinforcements in its infantry units. When the numbers of white soldiers pulled from other tasks failed to fill the gap, the still-segregated army allowed black soldiers in Europe-based service and support units to volunteer. Some two thousand men did, and after truncated infantry training in France they were allocated to white-officered units in the 12th and 14th Armored divisions. While the black soldiers in the 17th AIB’s Company D proved themselves to be both brave and highly competent infantrymen, they did not—as some sources (including the author’s own 2005 magazine article) have erroneously indicated—participate in the Schloss Itter operation.

23
.
Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945
, 84.

24
. A few days earlier, as the 103rd had moved into Garmisch-Partenkirchen in southern Germany, Kramers had led his group of jeepborne civil-military government soldiers up the driveway of a particularly imposing villa. Intending to use the home as a command post, Kramers informed the residents that they had fifteen minutes to pack a single bag and leave. An elderly man walked slowly out of the house and up to Kramers, who was bent over the hood of his jeep studying a map. “I am Richard Strauss, the composer,” the man said, proffering part of the manuscript of
his
Der Rosenkavalier
and a certificate proclaiming him to be an honorary citizen of Morgantown, West Virginia. Kramers, a fan of classical music in general and Strauss’s work in particular, decided he could find a suitable command post elsewhere. After posting an “Off Limits” sign in front of Strauss’s villa, Kramers and his men moved on. This incident is recounted in Alex Ross’s excellent
The Rest Is Noise
, 373–374. Kramers also related this event to the author in a June 8, 2012, telephone interview. And, according to a postwar history of the 103rd Infantry Division, Strauss’s son, Franz, his Jewish wife, and their two teenaged sons had spent the entire war in the composer’s home. The elder Strauss told Kramers and his men that Franz’s wife “was the only free Jewess in Germany during Hitler’s reign.” Her safety, it seems, stemmed from the fact that Strauss’s popularity with the German people was so great that even the Nazis couldn’t touch them. See Mueller and Turk,
Report After Action
, 140.

25
. The actual term used in the Free French forces was Enseigne de vaisseau de première classe, but since Lutten was attached to an American unit, he went by “lieutenant.”

26
. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.

27
. Pronounced “Simzik.”

28
. The basic account of Lee’s initial recon to Wörgl and Schloss Itter is drawn from
Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945
, 68–70, and from
Resistance and Persecution in Austria
, 594–598.