War Stories III (36 page)

 

U.S. troops walk through battered Mortain.

Patton's armor reached Argentan on 13 August—and held up as ordered—waiting for Montgomery's 21st British/Canadian army to close the noose on the beleaguered columns of German Army Group B. Montgomery delayed long enough to bring up more artillery and pound the retreating Wehrmacht with air strikes, while Patton fumed as 40,000 Germans managed to slip through a six-mile-wide gap between the American and British lines.

On 15 August 1944 the 7th Allied Army—three U.S. divisions, four Free French, along with U.S. Rangers and Canadian commandos—stormed ashore in southern France on Operation Anvil. That afternoon, a furious Hitler, calling this “the worst day of my life,” fired von Kluge, replaced him with Walther Model, directed a retreat to the Seine—and ordered that Paris be held.

It was a flight of fancy. With more than 300,000 German soldiers trapped in the “Falaise Pocket,” the Wehrmacht in France was facing total annihilation. The once mighty Panzer columns had been reduced to fewer than 150 tanks. Tens of thousands of German wounded were being transported on anything with wheels—much of it horse-drawn. And on 19 August, Patton reached the Seine, twenty-five miles northwest of Paris.

On 21 August, after three days of furious battle against the 12th SS-Hitler Youth Division, the 1st Polish Armored Division—one of the many expatriate units fighting under the British banner—managed to close the bottleneck at Falaise. The carnage was horrific. More than 50,000 German troops lay dead and another 200,000 were taken prisoner—most of them wounded or shell-shocked. While touring the battlefield on 23 August, Eisenhower remarked that, “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”

All that remained now was the liberation of Paris. Though Hitler had ordered the city held, the French countryside was now up in arms. In Paris, resistance factions that rarely cooperated with one another began an uprising against the German occupiers on 19 August. Many of the French resistance units had been armed, trained, and equipped by British SOE and American OSS intelligence officers like French-born Rene Defourneaux. Rene's parents had emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 to escape the menace of Nazism. Shortly before America entered the war, twenty-two-year-old Rene enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was subsequently recruited by the OSS to help train Resistance fighters.

The uprisings in Paris and throughout the French countryside did indeed help the Germans decide that the French capital wasn't worth dying for. On 22 August, Hitler reiterated his order to hold the city—or failing that—to destroy it. But the broken army that straggled back into Paris from the disaster in Normandy had lost the will to fight. As Allied forces closed in on the French capital—German soldiers were taking “French leave”—and heading home by whatever means possible. Nearly 100,000—many of them wounded—deserted the Wehrmacht in those last days of August, only to be rounded up when they arrived at the German frontier.

 

Members of the French resistance celebrate.

Late on the evening of 23 August, the lead elements of the 2nd French Armored Division, commanded by General Phillippe Leclerc, entered Paris. The next day the remainder of the division fought their way, with the help of several resistance units, through the last German defenders. On August 25—eighty days after the landings at Normandy—Charles de Gaulle, who had made his own way to France without the help of the British or Americans, made a triumphal entry atop a Sherman tank carrying the French tri-color. Hitler's worst days were still to come.

CHAPTER 13

THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE 1944

B
erlin by Thanksgiving—Home by Christmas.
They were words none of Allied generals encouraged—but after the liberation of Paris on 25 August, more than a few GIs expressed words like these. The once mighty Wehrmacht was on the run. Many American soldiers—and even some of the war-weary British in Montgomery's 21st Army Group—thought the war might actually be over before the end of 1944. They had reason for such hope.

The Red Army was closing in from the East. Germany's cities and means of production were being bombed around the clock—by the American 8th Air Force during the day and British Bomber Command at night in Operation Pointblank. By 4 September, the British and Canadians had liberated Brussels and Antwerp, Belgium. On 15 September, the U.S./Free French 6th Army Group—having marched more than 350 miles from their AnvilDragoon landing beaches in southern France—linked up with the right flank of Patton's 3rd Army at Epinal. With all of Belgium and Luxembourg liberated, the Allies had a continuous front from the English Channel to the Swiss border.

Between Normandy and Belgium, Hitler had lost 400,000 irreplaceable soldiers killed and captured, over 1,300 tanks, more than 2,000 artillery
pieces and assault guns, and 3,500 aircraft. But he wasn't about to give up. And the Allies had a major problem of their own making: supply.

 

German soldiers mounting their last offensive in the Battle of the Bulge.

Though Antwerp—Europe's largest port—was in Allied hands, the harbor and the forty-five-mile-long Schelde River estuary opening on the English Channel were heavily mined and the low-lying Dutch offshore islands guarding the approach were all still in German control. Until the mines and German troops were cleared—no Allied ships could enter the anchorage—requiring all ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies to be trucked 400 miles from Normandy.

Montgomery believed that a quick breakthrough to the Ruhr River valley—Germany's industrial heartland—might hasten the end of the war and negate the need for a bloody fight through the marshlands west of Antwerp. Eisenhower approved a two-part plan Monty dubbed Operation Market Garden. It called for the British 1st Airborne—along with the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions designated as the 1st Allied Airborne
Army—to launch a surprise airborne assault to seize key bridges over which the British Guards Armored Division would charge across the Rhine and into the west German plain. It was a disaster.