De Lattre’s counter-attack into the Gambsheim bridgehead failed almost at once. The plan was for the American 314th Infantry Regiment to attack Drusenheim and Herrlisheim on the northern flank, of the bridgehead, while the French attacked Kilstett on the southern flank. The Americans kicked off first. For a while they met with limited success, but soon their luck ran out. A savage counterattack, carried out with the usual German verve, hit the advancing American infantry and put an end to their attack. The Americans either withdrew or dug in.
Then the French started their advance with infantry led by tanks. Almost immediately the tanks ran into the German anti-tank screen. Several batteries of 57mm anti-tank guns were dug in in the woods which bordered the Rhine. In quick succession, as the solid white blurs of anti-tank shells zipped across the fields, tank after tank reeled to a halt, flames spurting from the stalled Shermans. The French armoured attack came to a rapid halt.
Still the infantry persisted. Led by a battalion of the Foreign Legion, for de Lattre believed in bolstering up the mood of his weary soldiers with what he called ‘shock battalions’ of marines, paras and legionnaires, they pushed home their attack. Despite losses, the French succeeded in reaching Bettenhoffen on the southern quarter of Gambsheim. The Germans counterattacked. Grimly the men of the desert, half-a-dozen nationalities fighting under the French flag, held on under increasing German pressure. But by nightfall the legionnaires could hold on no longer. They fell back with serious losses. The French First Army’s clash with the Germans had been a total failure.
Meanwhile, the Americans were doing little better. Once more Task Force Linden attempted to storm Gambsheim and throw the Germans back into the Rhine from whence they had come. They pressed ever closer to the picturesque riverside village with its half-timbered houses and storks’ nests on the red-tiled roofs. But the Germans were not going to give up their precious bridgehead. The senior German officers knew and feared Himmler’s wrath. They threw the Americans back and in the end the men of the once-famed Rainbow Division gave up for the day.
That evening General Wyche called Corps Commander Brooks and told him he thought Task Force Linden’s chances of ever taking the place were very slim. ‘They’ve been in and out twice,’ he said grimly to his Corps Commander and drew the latter’s attention to the fact that the Rainbow Division’s men had suffered heavy casualties due to ‘their state of training, organization, and operation etc’.1
In fact, he said, they had been put in the line in what was supposedly a quiet sector to make up for their lack of proper training. Now the Rainbow men found themselves right in the centre of the action.
But General Wyche had other things to worry about besides the deficiencies of the untrained Rainbow Division that Saturday morning. A new threat had loomed up, which was directly affecting his own 79th Infantry. Two experienced armoured divisions, the 21st and 25th Panzer, supported by the paras of the German Seventh Parachute Division, were now breaking out in the north in a new threat, obviously intent on capturing the key town of Haguenau. There, it was clear, they would link up with the Germans attacking out of the Gambsheim bridgehead, and if they did, it would be a disaster for General Brooks’ Sixth Corps!
Now the 79th and elements of the 14th Armored Division prepared for the attack to come, as the tanks of the German strike force nosed their way down the snowbound trails in the no-man’s-land between themselves and the Americans. Cooks and clerks – anyone who could be pressed into service – went up front and worked feverishly and without rest to improve their defensive positions. Hasty minefields were laid, concertina wire strung out, trees felled to block trails, booby traps set up, as the afternoon wore on.
The GIs could hear the rattle of tracks to their front, the roar of tank engines labouring up gradients, the sharp angry bursts of machine-gun fire, whether friendly or enemy nobody knew. Tension was in the air. The infantry knew from bitter experience how one single Panzer could roll up a whole company. The tankers, for their part, knew just how ineffective their own tanks were against the mighty Tigers and Panthers. Their Shermans were underarmoured and outgunned. A Tiger could knock out a Sherman at a range of nearly a mile. A Sherman, however, would have to get within three hundred yards even to have a chance of knocking out an enemy tank!
The noise grew louder. There was the sound of snapping trees. Cries in German could be heard as their infantry advanced with the tanks. Then there they were, a line of infantry coming out of the gloom, supported by ten tanks, sixty-ton monsters, which nothing could stop! The GIs of the 79th’s 313th Regiment opened fire from their outposts of Aschbach and Stundwiller. But there was no stopping the attackers. They surged forward with the old elan, as if these were the great days of 1940 when nothing had been able to hold up the victorious Grossdeutsche Wehrmacht. Fighting desperately, the men of the 79th were forced to pull back. A platoon was cut off. Desperately it fought its way back, leaving the snow behind it littered with dead and dying.
The Germans hit the main line of the 3rd Battalion, 313th Regiment. Fifteen tanks rumbled into the attack. The first one hit the hastily planted mines. It rattled to a stop, its left track trailing behind it. A moment later another disappeared in a flash of blinding light. Now the defenders’ anti-tank guns opened up. Another and another German tank shuddered to a halt, gleaming silver scars suddenly appearing on their grey metal hides. Suddenly the steam went out of the German attack and the survivors started to withdraw, the enemy infantry falling back, leaving their dead and dying behind them. For the time being the ‘Cross of Lorraine’ Division men had held the enemy, but soon they would be back. For here was soon to begin what General Devers would later describe as ‘one of the greatest defensive battles in Europe in World War Two.’
Indeed, on the whole length of General Devers’ long front the only successes the Sixth Army Group could record after a whole week’s bitter fighting were in the hotly contested villages of Philippsbourg and Wingen. At the former the Germans attempted a counterattack at four in the morning. A Pfc Saeger of the 70th Division spotted the infiltrators sneaking out of the woods. ‘German patrol,’ he hissed to his men. His section dropped as one. For his part Seager hid behind a wood pile, but a German spotted him there and told him to put up his hands. Seager pressed the trigger of his weapon and the German fell, as if poleaxed, three slugs stitched across his stomach. Seager recorded, ‘He started groaning louder than hell and then the rest of the Heinies tossed a hand grenade. It landed on his prone body. I didn’t hear a whimper after that.’2
With that heady confidence that all new units feel once they have had their first taste of action and before they become jaded and fearful, the men of the 70th now went into the attack. They rushed what they called ‘88 Corner’, hit a road block, and had overwhelmed the Germans before they knew what was happening. They started climbing the hill beyond, but, as Sergeant Links remembered afterwards, ‘There were Jerries on the hill and we soon walked right into them. They opened up and the fight was on. We gained the upper hand and kept on going. . . . The Jerries ran for their holes as we closed in.’3
The Germans rallied and counterattacked. A hand-to-hand struggle developed. A German appeared to be surrendering, hands raised. He had just thrown a grenade which had killed two of the attackers. Now the men of the 70th made as if they were going to shoot him. His face contorted with fear, the German pleaded, ‘Nein, nein, ich habe Frau und Kinder!’
At the last moment, the Americans let him go. But now their blood was up, carried away by the crazy death-wish of battle. Another prisoner appeared. Sergeant Kelsey of the 7oth raised his rifle. He was going to shoot the German. Impassively the prisoner waited for the end, but the rifle refused to fire. In his rage, Kelsey ripped out the magazine and flung it at the bemused German!
At Wingen things were also going well for the Americans. Young Private Hy Schorr, a machine-gunner from New York, going into action with the 274th Infantry of the 70th Division, had just spent the night in a foxhole with his buddy bleeding to death next to him. Now he advanced with the rest of his company, seeing ‘houses aflame and the surrounding countryside well lit’. He passed a ‘dead German identifiable by his coal-scuttle helmet. Both arms were straight up in the air. He was frozen stiff!’4
The attackers pressed on. Below, Wingen seemed remarkably quiet, perhaps too quiet. Had the Germans gone?
They hadn’t. As they approached the first houses, the slits in their basements started spitting fire. It was a furious and bloody fight at close range. The Krauts battled desperately and refused to give up, while the men of Fox Company continued to pour in the grenades. Pfc Soper was hit and fell right by one of the windows.
Brush, the medic, moved calmly to where Soper lay. Four shots passed between Brush’s legs, knocking the bayonet off the rifle of a man nearby. Soper kept yelling, “Get the rats out of their hole… get’em boys.” Sgt Renzaglia yelled, “Watch out, Soper, we’re going to throw some grenades.” Hearing this, Soper used his one good arm and grabbed a grenade from under his shirt, pulled the pin with his teeth, and threw it through the window.
A loud explosion followed, and then a surviving rifleman stuck his rifle out the window, against Soper’s chest and fired twice. Dieckman grabbed a German medic and shouted for him to get inside and tell the remainder that a tank was coming up to “blast all hell out of them.”
There was no tank, but the dodge worked. The final eleven Germans ran out, yelling ‘Kamerad’ and surrendered. But Soper was dead. Another leader had fallen in the attack.
The mood of the attacking Americans was becoming savage and the Germans had to surrender swiftly if they wanted to live. Sergeant R. Armstrong of A Company, whose first experience of combat the day before had been the sight of a major running wildly through the woods, waving his .45 and yelling, ‘Take to the hills, men, the Germans are coming!’, now found himself lodged in a ruined house observing the unsuspecting Germans. A little earlier a burst of enemy fire had shot one of their medics, ‘Doc’ Moore, who had gone out to help a wounded infantryman. He raised his rifle and fired eight shots at the Germans and missed each time!
‘Hey,’ he yelled to Platoon Sergeant Bob Brewer, ‘I’ve spotted the bastards who shot Doc.’
Brewer shouted back, ‘Move aside boy and I’ll show you how to do it.’ The platoon sergeant waited patiently for two of the Germans to reappear and then shot them both.
A German medic came out into the road beyond the church waving a Red Cross flag. Armstrong raised his rifle. Brewer put his hand on his colleague’s shoulder. ‘Don’t shoot, Dick,’ he hissed. ‘Wait till he gets a little closer. Then you can’t miss.’
A little later Armstrong saw another German zig-zagging down the street. He felt that the ‘Kraut should at least be scared’, so he glanced down the rifle barrel and ‘touched one off’.5 To Armstrong’s amazement, the German dropped dead next to the medic and his platoon cheered.
The killing of the German and American medics was typical. The battle had been too fierce, too intent, too murderous for either side to care about the niceties of conduct and the Rules of Land Warfare. Little quarter was given or expected.
Following up the first attack, the new boy, Hy Schorr, burdened with his machine gun and boxes of ammunition, noted the trail of destruction his comrades had left in their wake, the pathetic pieces of flotsam and jetsam which had once been men. ‘I saw a GI lying flat on his back,’ Schorr recalled. ‘Someone had evidently tried first aid, for bandages were tied loosely around his head. Strewn about him, too, were V-mail letters and other personal items. We stopped behind a knocked-out American half-track. Inside were six dead Germans, some of them with their feet dangling over the side. We followed the route which Fox Company had attacked that morning. Here was a sight I would not forget. We trudged slowly by and the sight sickened us to complete silence. In the ditches on both sides of the road were numerous bodies, all of them American. They lay frozen as they had fallen.’6
Schorr set up his position in a two-storey house ready to cover the next stage of the advance and again he encountered nothing but horror. As he set his gun up on a table, he didn’t notice at first, ‘but under the table was the half-naked body of a German soldier. He was a blond young fellow and good-looking. Around his bare chest was a strip of cloth used as a bandage. He had been severely wounded and died right there. No one seemed inclined to remove him. In fact, his body served as a brace to keep the table from moving. There were at least another dozen dead Germans in the house. In the next room lay an enormous Kraut, his body whitened with fallen plaster and half covered with debris. The smell of death was all through the house.’7
Still the killing went on in Wingen. Heavy firing from the direction of the cemetery was now holding up the advance. Lieutenant James Haines decided to make a dash for it. He shouted back to his senior NCO, Sergeant Petty, ‘Pass the word back to break out one at a time through the door.’ He gripped his carbine. ‘I’m going now!’
He pelted across the street, pursued by bullets, but he made it. Another man followed, and another. Haines began to think the whole platoon would make it, but that wasn’t to be. One of his platoon named Goode had just started his dash for safety when there was a burst of machine-gun fire. Goode tottered and fell back into a ditch.8
Casualties were now mounting steadily. In Colonel Cheves’ Fox Company half its complement of 120 men had been killed or wounded in the first three hours of the attack. Now Cheves heard that Lieutenant Mahon, commanding the Company, had just been killed. It gave Cheves a cold feeling to think Mahon was dead. A wife and two children awaited his return. Then he heard that Pfc Morningstar, the radio operator, had just been killed too.
‘Who is in command of your company now?’ he asked the messenger who brought the news.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Do you have many men with you?’
‘No, sir. Most of my platoon have been hit, sir.’9
Cheves threw in his G and E companies. At dusk the surviving SS men launched a fanatical counterattack into the flanks of G Company. Sergeant Kirk of G Company said afterwards, ‘It was almost dark and fires from burning buildings furnished an eerie light as we went to work setting up a defense, evacuating the wounded and herding prisoners to the rear. Suddenly all hell broke loose! There was the chattering of machine guns, followed by terrific explosions, one after another, jarring the buildings and sprinkling broken glass. Through the noises a voice screamed, “I can’t see. I can’t see!”
The voice died away. Almost immediately another shell exploded nearby. Sergeant Wilmoth dashed by, headed towards the rear with blood streaming down his side. Pfc Kliever let out a blood-curdling yell and his bloody arm dangled by his side. ‘God, it was awful!’10
The Germans came running down the street ‘whooping like a bunch of Red Indians’. In an instant all was confusion. Bazookas fired. Hand grenades were tossed back and forth. An American machine gun opened up, slow and sedate, unlike the high-pitched hysterical hiss of the German MG 42 which could fire 1,000 rounds per minute. But it did the job all the same. The German line faltered. Next moment the SS were running back the way they had come, leaving their dead and dying behind.
The end was near for the SS now. During their week of combat in the West, the two battalions employed in the battle of Wingen had lost 650 men out of the original 900. As Lieutenant Zoepf recalled: ‘Both sides were exhausted. A lull ensued and during this temporary lull, the 1st and 3rd Battalions started to disengage their units carefully from the enemy.’11 Distributing the last of their ammunition among the survivors, releasing their 400 enlisted men prisoners, but taking ten officer prisoners with them, the SS set off into the woods through which they had come in what now seemed another age.
With the aid of a captured American map, Zoepf led the way for what was left of his decimated battalion. But this time the 22-year-old veteran was not destined to escape. Quite soon they ran into a tank, almost buried in the snow. Someone tossed a grenade into its open turret and it started to burn at once. Nearby dug-in American infantry opened up and Zoepf was hit in the leg.
The SS scattered in confusion and Zoepf found himself struggling on alone. He stumbled across a foxhole. At first he thought it was empty, but then a GI appeared. While Zoepf stared transfixed, the GI raised his rifle and fired. At ten yards’ range he missed! Later Zoepf discovered that he had lost his glasses and was as blind as a bat. He didn’t give him a second chance. Hobbling forward, he slammed his clenched fist down on the GI’s helmet, knocking him to the bottom of the hole, just as American mortars opened up close by. While the bombs howled down all around, Zoepf knelt on his terrified prisoner, his Walther pistol in his hand. His wounded leg started to stiffen. He stretched it out, to encounter something soft! Cowering next to his first prisoner there was another GI alive and very frightened! Time passed slowly. Once he heard shouts in German. He waved his ski cap furiously. But the SS crept by without noticing him. He tried his school English on his two prisoners, who were no longer so frightened. One of them was from Texas. He offered to bandage Zoepf’s wounded leg. In return the German offered them looted US cigarettes.
Now, as the first light of dawn filtered through the trees, Zoepf found himself in the middle of a dug-in American company. About this time a sergeant came across and ordered the man without glasses to help collect the dead. Under cover of a GI blanket, Zoepf pressed his pistol into the helpless American’s back and told him to find a good excuse for not going away. The GI began to sweat and said he was not feeling so well, which was quite true. The sergeant bought the excuse the first time, but not the second. He came across and snarled, ‘If you crazy sonovabitches are too lazy to get up, then gimme ya blanket!’ He reached down and snatched it away angrily to reveal Zoepf!
For one moment there was total silence. The sergeant stared down at the SS officer and Zoepf stared back. Then the SS officer tossed away his pistol and pandemonium broke out. Immediately he was surrounded by GIs, clamouring for souvenirs. His black leather coat, his decorations, his shoulder patches were ripped off and only at the very last moment were the souvenir hunters stopped from snatching away his wedding ring. Zoepf’s war was over.
For the 400 prisoners of the Germans in Wingen it was all over too. 250 of them were locked up in the Catholic church, which had been strongly defended the previous day. Now Sergeant Dyes and PFC Dubose of the 70th Division approached the building cautiously, grenades in their hands, ready to toss them in through a shattered window. Suddenly the door swung open and a horde of Americans rushed out. All of them had one single question on their lips: ‘Where’s the rear?’ And that’s the direction in which they headed immediately they were told!
At the next village, Zittersheim, there was a tremendous reunion celebration as old buddies of the 45th Division spotted each other, hugging one another and clapping each other’s backs, tears streaming down their faces. One of them was Ben Stein, free at last. He remembers sharing K-rations and water. ‘It never tasted better!’12
General Herren, the commander of the 7oth Division, was also interested in the prisoners. He asked Colonel Cheves in Wingen, ‘How many have you rescued so far?’
Cheves replied, ‘Approximately one hundred and fifty.’
Herren then asked, ‘Did you find any Germans dressed in American uniforms?’
Cheves said he had a man checking on it, and then, wanting to get rid of the General, who of late had always seemed to be cluttering up his battlefield, he suggested Herren should take shelter in a large foxhole nearby, which he did. Now Cheves left him and watched his excited, unshaven men enjoying the fruits of their victory. One of them had found a quart of Schenley’s and was passing it round among his buddies, who were taking great swigs straight from the bottle. An army photographer came up to record the victory and took pictures of men breaking down doors with their rifle butts. The usual exhibitionist, always found on such occasions, had his photograph taken, riding around on a rickety old bicycle, wearing a looted top hat. But there were sad moments, too. Hy Schorr, the machine-gunner, remembers, ‘It was snowing heavily when I stepped outside. There were several dead German soldiers scattered around and I noticed a GI from another outfit examining the bodies very closely. I hesitated to approach him, but finally touched his shoulder.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He looked at me. ‘“Are you Graves Registration?”’13
Schorr learned that the man had a brother-in-law in Fox Company who had been reported missing in action. Now he took every opportunity to dig bodies out of the snow to look for him. Schorr left him searching in the snow. In fact, the brother-in-law had been dead nearly two days.
Colonel Cheves felt sad and depressed in spite of his victory. He allowed the army camera man to take his photo, pointing to the smoking village in the background and ‘felt like a heel. I was no hero and I had not taken the town. The real heroes who had done the job were my men who had slugged it out toe to toe with the best soldiers in Hitler’s Army and had won.’14
He left the photographer and wandered through the village. His men seemed ‘so tired and there was an apathetic expression on their faces’.15 But the dead soldiers affected him most. ‘I had to choke back my feelings when I saw them lying dead in the streets and ditches. There were dead everywhere, men I knew, stretched out on the cold ground, surrounded by Germans, frozen into fantastic positions. Everywhere I looked, in the middle of the streets, in the ditches, in the buildings, on the embankments, on steps, everywhere there were dead frozen soldiers. I never again saw so many dead together in one small area. It seemed such a shame, and it was hard to realize that they were actually dead, especially the ones I had known, the ones I had talked with a day or so before. War had always seemed so useless to me, and now it seemed even more repugnantly futile.’16
General Jacob Devers had had his first victory, however small, in this first week of the battle of Alsace. But the price had been high. In Philippsbourg alone the 275th Infantry Regiment had suffered over 1,000 casualties; just short of one third of its total strength the day it had gone into the line. The butcher’s bill was indeed high, and as always it was the young who paid it.
The Battle of Wingen was over, too, and the survivors started their painful trudge up the heights away from the battered town back to where they had started in what now seemed another age.
They had been promised a rest, but it never came. As the weary men plodded by him, Colonel Cheves received new orders for his battalion. They read: ‘Assemble your men in Puberg (a nearby village from whence they had started their attack). Trucks will arrive there. Proceed to Oberbronn, arriving there before daylight tomorrow.’
To an exhausted, sick Colonel Cheves, the order ‘didn’t seem possible, but it was. And so that night we were on the road again.’17
The survivors of the 70th Division were needed elsewhere and on the horizon the sky flickered the ominous pink of a fire fight. The battle went on.