THREE

The long-anticipated attack on the new Moder Line came on the night of 24/25 January as six German divisions struck across the river in three prongs. The worst hit was 42nd Division’s 222nd Regiment, guarding a tremendous front of 7500 yards (normally a division would have been used to hold a front line of this length). Standing in their foxholes, some of them knee-deep in water, the men waited tensely that night, for Intelligence had warned them the Germans were going to attack. What Intelligence didn’t know was that the 3000-odd men of the 222nd were going to be hit by elements of five German regiments drawn from three divisions, one of them the 25th Panzer Division.

At six o’clock that night the enemy guns opened up, running a creeping barrage along the American positions in the river valley that ran between Neubourg and Schweighausen. For one hour the guns plastered the 222nd’s line; then suddenly they fell silent.

‘We waited,’ the Regimental History recorded, ‘Sweat. THEN! All bammed and clattered, streaked and crashed around us until 2000 shapeless blobs started to poke up out of their positions, moved around and started towards. ONRUSH! Spit on your muzzle, sweetheart, here comes the devil!’¹

The first wave of German troops easily forded the shallow Moder. They struck the Regiment’s positions at Schweighausen, Neubourg and in the Ohlungen Forest. Desperately the defenders sprayed the ranks of the advancing Germans, their bodies outlined a stark black against the lurid unreal light of the blood-red flares. Still they came on, ‘half drunk, spurred on by desperate and guttural commands’.²

Here and there the Germans broke off the fight, although superiority of numbers was on their side. But as the 24th gave way to the 25th they forced a gap between E and K Companies and immediately started to pour troops into the gap, swinging round behind the American positions. The 222nd’s E Company was completely surrounded and cut off. Still it continued to fight on.

Communications from front to the rear began to break down and the harassed battalion commanders could only guess what was happening to their companies. In the end the companies made their own decisions. What was left of E Company fought its way through the Germans and joined K and F Companies which had withdrawn to form a new defensive line. They fought all night and well into the next day until they were exhausted and it became ‘an effort to squeeze a trigger or to move, either forward or backward’. In the end the 222nd Regiment stopped the German attack in their sector and as the regimental history records, proved ‘something to ourselves: 1. War is hell. 2. We were no longer green. 3. Americans could fight with a cold passion and fury even without that unlimited supply of material which so many believe is responsible for American success in battle.’³

The 222nd men were not the only ones who could claim a success in this new battle. That night the men of the 103rd Infantry Division, dug in between Bischoltz and Muhlhausen, were attacked by a battalion of the Sixth SS Mountain Division ‘yelling, cursing in English, screaming like madmen’.⁴ The Germans’ Intelligence was good. They knew exactly where every important American installation was located. They hit the message centre and the local battalion command post. Communications went. The Americans’ main line of resistance was broken. Now something akin to panic broke out. Lieutenant Leonard Doggett scraped together an emergency squad. He threw it into the confused battle around the battalion aid station, fighting off the SS until the wounded and medics could be evacuated. One of this squad was ‘a happy-go-lucky kid’ named Dennis Bellmore. He and four other men were ordered to guard the crossroads with a light machine gun. The Germans rushed them, but their gun jammed. It was frozen solid. The SS were less than forty yards away. The other four turned to make a run for it, but not Bellmore. The sergeant in charge spotted him on his knees in the snow, his pistol raised.

‘What’s the matter, kid?’ he asked.

‘I’m hit,’ Bellmore said. ‘You guys take off!’⁵

There was not time for arguments. The Germans were almost on to them. The other four ran for safety towards the aid station. As they ran, they could hear the regular spaced-out shots from a .45 pistol, followed by the answering chatter of German burp guns. One last shot and then silence. Dennis Bellmore ‘had paid with his life for ten minutes of time . . . precious time during which the aid station and the remainder of the Americans safely left the village’.⁶

There were grimly humorous moments, too, in the fighting on the banks of the Moder that night. In Schillersdorf, which was hastily evacuated just before dawn, three men of the 103rd, not dreaming that they were being attacked by a whole battalion of SS men, decided to ‘outflank’ the enemy. In the lead, Texan Pfc M. Jacobs bumped into an SS man. The German was too slow on the draw. Jacobs fired first and the German fell into the snow. Now, aware suddenly of their danger, the three ran into a courtyard. Jacobs spotted a door to the street and tried to open it. Suddenly he heard cursing in German on the other side. An SS man was trying to open it too! Jacobs fled. He hid under a wagon and the other two in an outhouse. While the SS questioned the civilians as to the whereabouts of the Americans, a mongrel came up and started to lick the Texan’s face. Later the three Americans hid in the attic of a building in which the SS then set up their command post. But after two harrowing days the three were at last rescued.

On the morning of 25 January, the Sixth Corps’ line was under attack everywhere. The Germans brought up reinforcements and for the first time in the ETO American troops faced up to attacks by German ski troops, who succeeded in penetrating the village of Muhlhausen.

General Brooks threw in his sole remaining armour, that of the 14th Armored Division. Its 68th Armored Infantry Battalion, supported by tanks of the 25th Tank Battalion, counterattacked in the 222nd Infantry’s sector. But although the weary men of the 14th Armored were prepared for another slogging match of the kind they had experienced in the Hatten-Rittershoffen salient, they were in for a surprise. Admittedly here and there the Germans fought to the end and their jet dive-bombers were as active as ever; but the fanatical resistance they had encountered the previous week was absent. They made steady progress without too many casualties, fighting the terrain and the weather as much as the enemy. By that evening they had restored the main line of resistance on the Moder and were actually allowed to leave the front and hold a memorial service for their dead.

Indeed, although a prisoner captured that day declared that the new offensive was intended to capture Strasbourg which would be ‘offered to the Führer as a present on 30 January’ (the twelfth anniversary of his seizure of power in 1933), Hitler had already commanded that the attack against the Lower Vosges and in Lower Alsace be suspended because the forces being used to attack the Moder Line ‘were needed as reserves behind future defensive efforts’.⁷

There would still be fierce local attacks along the Moder Line, but, in essence, the Germans had shot their bolt in France. Now it was up to the Americans to make the running. It was time for them to wipe out the Colmar Pocket. But before that could be done, Eisenhower had to carry out an administrative chore that was to become his most controversial decision of the Second World War, of a kind not carried out by an American commander since the Civil War ended in 1865. The Supreme Commander was to have one of his soldiers shot for desertion.

The young men who fought in Eisenhower’s armies were no saints. They led short, brutal lives, at least if they were in the infantry. Junior officers in combat survived, on average, six weeks. Enlisted men could expect twice that long before they were killed, wounded, or evacuated due to illness. When they were lucky enough to get a furlough to ‘Pig Alley’ (Place Pigalle) in Paris or the Rue Neuve in Brussels, their wants were simple – ‘booze and dames’. ‘The feather merchants’ and the ‘canteen commandos’ of COMZ – ‘one man in the line and five men to bring up the Coca-Cola’ – might well provide them with movies, USO shows and pretty Red Cross girls serving coffee and doughnuts. But that kind of fare could not help them to forget the horrors they had undergone and which undoubtedly they would soon have to return to, once their ‘forty-eight’ or ‘seventy-two’ was over.

In the event some of them lost their nerve and simply didn’t go back when the time came – they ‘went over the hill’. By December, 1944, there were an estimated 17,000 US deserters in Paris alone, living off their wits, by robbery and the French black market. In virtually every big European city behind the lines, where there were willing whores and B-girls to shelter a soldier, Americans ‘took a dive’.

And it was not only when they went on leave. In that winter of 1944/45, with the Germans attacking all the time and the war seeming to go on for ever, an infantry commander might go up into his front at night expecting to find a hundred men manning the line only to discover that half that number remained. The others had simply walked away. There was an epidemic of ‘section eight’ and ‘combat fatigue’. Men made pacts to shoot off each other’s big toes, shielding the muzzles of their M-1s with loaves so that there would not be the tell-tale black powder burn of a self-inflicted wound. Older men threw away their false teeth; a man who can’t eat, can’t fight. Others exposed their feet to the elements in order to get those nice pinky, pulpy toes which indicated ‘trench foot’. Some rubbed diesel oil into their chest to produce an incurable itching eczema.

Divisional commanders swore at psychiatrists and in every stockade of every fighting regiment there would be a score of men who would soldier no more, seeking a court martial and a prison sentence as a sure means of evading combat. As we have seen, even when Eisenhower offered in December to erase the sentences of men accused of desertion if they would return to the front and fight again, only a score or so out of the many thousands in confinement took him up on his offer.

Now with thousands of American soldiers on the run all over Europe – one sergeant of the 28th Infantry Division managed to desert from the front line that winter and make his way back all the way to the States! – Eisenhower was faced with a dilemma. His rifle companies were down by ten percent and there weren’t enough infantry replacements coming across from the United States to make up the deficiency. Combat fatigue was on the increase and making the gap even bigger. How was he to clear the Colmar Pocket and then launch his armies against what would probably be fanatical resistance in the Third Reich itself?

The infamous ‘Massacre at Malmédy’, immediately and well-publicized by the Army and the media, back in December, 1944, had helped to steel the resolve of the fighting soldier in the Ardennes. ‘Was it any use surrendering to the Germans?’, was the message that the Supreme Commander had managed to get across to his soldiers. If you did, they simply slaughtered you in cold blood. It was better just to keep on fighting, even if it was to the death.

What measures, he must have asked himself that January, could he take to combat the rising desertion rate and the lack of will to fight in some of his rifle companies, especially those which were now largely made up of replacements, who knew they were more likely to be killed in their first action than the ‘old heads’, who stuck together and looked after one another in combat?

On 25 January, 1945, the same day that the Germans made their all-out attack on the Moder Line, Eisenhower made up his mind. Out of the forty thousand deserters apprehended by the military police, of whom 2864 had been tried and sentenced to anything from twenty years to death, he must pick one man and make an example of him. Of the forty-nine American soldiers currently waiting for their death sentence for desertion to be carried out, he picked one man: Private Eddie Slovik of the 28th Infantry Division.

In November, 1944, the 28th Infantry Division had been fighting a desperate battle in what became known as the ‘Green Hell of the Hürtgen’. There in the forest which straddles Germany’s border with Belgium, the Division had lost 248 officers and 5452 enlisted men. Reinforcements were rushed in in such large numbers that it was impossible to reorganize the badly hit infantry battalions. On 8 November, for example, 515 replacements were integrated into the 2nd Battalion, 112th Infantry, more than half the original strength of the battalion. Companies refused to go into action. At least two battalion commanders were relieved for the same offence. Once it was thought that even a regimental commander was deserting his regiment when he was spotted by the commanding general, General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota, wandering around behind the lines (in fact he had just been wounded twice).

It was not surprising, against this background, that General Cota, the hero of Omaha Beach, who had himself been twice wounded in combat, sentenced Eddie Slovik to death for desertion. Not only had this frail soldier, who had served time for petty crimes before the war, deserted in France, he had also refused an unofficial deal just before his court martial. If he would go into the line with his regiment, the 109th, all charges against him would be dropped. He refused and on 11 November, Armistice Day, 1944, the court of the 28th Division, convened by General Cota, sentenced him to death. General Eisenhower confirmed the sentence of death on Private Slovik on 23 December 1944, when the Battle of the Bulge was at its height and the Americans were reeling under the impact of the German attack. One month later the Supreme Commander ordered that the death sentence should now be carried out in the ‘regimental area’ of the 28th’s 109th Regiment from which Slovik had deserted. Two days later, on 25 January, 1945 when General Cota received that order, the 109th’s ‘regimental area’ was in the grimy Alsatian mining town of St Marie-aux-Mines, not unlike Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the 109th had been raised. For in the last week of that January the 28th Infantry Division, newly moved from the Ardennes, formed part of General Milburn’s 21st Corps, ‘borrowed’ by ‘King Jean’ for the coming assault into the Colmar Pocket. As a warning to the thousands of young replacements who now filled the ranks of the ‘Bloody Bucket’ Division, as it called itself, (during the Battle of the Bulge the Division had again suffered severe casualties, one of its regiments being practically wiped out), the execution of Private Slovik could not have come at a more timely moment.

On the night of 30 January a snowstorm raged throughout Alsace, but in his château at St Marie, General Frank ‘Shrimp’ Milburn noticed little of the heavy snow. The undersized Corps Commander, hence the nickname, was nice and snug in the big 18th-century house, which was his Corps HQ. That night he gave a dinner for his divisional generals, with no less a person than Army Group Commander General Devers as guest of honour. The food was good. There was wine and the talk was expansive and confident. Soon the Americans would show the French just how to get rid of the last Germans on French soil!

Near the end of dinner Milburn turned to the head chaplain of 21st Corps, Colonel Edward Elson, who one day would number President Eisenhower among his congregation at Washington’s National Presbyterian Church. ‘Chaplain,’ he said, ‘tomorrow morning the 28th Division is going to execute a private soldier by firing squad for desertion. I wish you to attend as my representative and give me a full report.’⁸

The Chaplain acknowledged the order and the dinner continued to the accompaniment of the hearty laughter of successful, well-fed officers, who knew, for the most part, that their lives would not end violently. Indeed, all of them present that night would die in bed, including Colonel Henry Cabot Lodge, liaison officer to ‘King Jean’, the last to die in 1985. ‘While the generals ate, a weapons carrier that had made the long journey from the US Army’s Paris stockade stopped outside a farmhouse which had been commandeered by the Army. Two of the four MPs in the vehicle got out and went into the farm house for coffee and food. A little while later, refreshed and warmed, they returned to relieve the other two. Only the fifth man didn’t get out. He couldn’t, for he sat on the back seat in handcuffs and with his ankles bound!

The first two ‘white mice’, as the French called them on account of their white-painted helmets, brought the prisoner sandwiches and a mug of coffee. They unlocked Eddie Slovik’s handcuffs so that he could eat. But the prisoner was not hungry. He toyed with the food and said, ‘Come on fellows, give me a break. Untie my feet and let me run out there in the snow. You can shoot me with your carbines and get it over with.’

One of them shook his head. ‘No Eddie, you’re a good guy, but we can’t do that. They got a big party planned for you over there in St Marie. The full dress treatment. After they get through with you, these dogfaces are supposed to think twice before they take off. Just relax and drink your coffee. It won’t be long.’⁹

In his well-known account of what happened to the only American to be shot for desertion in the Second World War, The Execution of Private Slovik, written in 1952, seven years after the event, William B. Huie uses the contrasting scenes of the hearty, well-fed Top Brass, warm and jolly in their château, and the skinny little man, bound hand and foot in the truck, pleading to be shot. The reader is expected to have sympathy for Eddie Slovik, who believed he was being executed because once he ‘stole a loaf of bread’. (This sent him to reform school, gave him a criminal record, and so he felt, prejudiced General Eisenhower against him.)

Yet, although there is the shock caused by the realization that of the ten million men who served in the US Armed Forces in the Second World War, only one man was executed, the thought also comes to mind that many other young men were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their country, whatever their private fears and wishes: ‘the happy-go-lucky kid’ Dennis Bellmore; Lieutenant Mahon with his wife and two children waiting for him back in the States; and the rest of the seven-thousand-odd Americans who had been already killed in Alsace alone. They had not run away or thrown away their weapons.

But if he had been a coward in life, Private Eddie Slovik died, it seems, bravely enough. At ten-thirty on the morning of 31 January, 1945, he was taken out into the courtyard of 86 Rue de General Dourgeois,¹ where, in the presence of General Cota and a firing squad made up of men from the 109th Infantry Regiment, the charges against him were read and he received the General Absolution from a Catholic priest. Then he was led forward to the firing post and his hands were tied. As he was tying Slovik’s bonds, Sergeant McKendrick said: ‘Take it easy, Eddie. Try to make it easy on yourself and for us.’

Slovik looked at him calmly and said, ‘I’m okay. They’re not shooting me for deserting the United States Army. Thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid and that’s what they’re shooting me for. They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was twelve years old.’¹⁰

One firing-squad member, Private Morrison, recalled afterwards how, the night before, the twelve men assigned to kill Slovik had discussed the business ahead of them. Most of the men hated the job, but one man said, ‘I got no sympathy for the sonofabitch! He deserted us, didn’t he? He didn’t give a damn how many of us got the hell shot out of us, why should we care about him? I’ll shoot his goddam heart out!’¹¹

Morrison silently agreed with the man. Now, as they lined up their weapons on Slovik, Morrison ‘watched him closely for any sign of emotion, but brother, there was none. He was standing there as straight as could be.’¹²

A few minutes later it was all over and Father Cummings of the Third Infantry Division, who had confessed Eddie Slovik, thought: ‘Slovik was the bravest man in the garden that morning.’¹³

Minutes later a top-secret, high-priority message was transmitted to Eisenhower’s headquarters. It read: ‘Pursuant to GCMO 27 Headquarters ETOUSA 23 Jan 45, Private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, formerly Company G, 109th Inf, was shot to death by a firing squad at 1005 hours, 31 Jan 45 at St Marie aux Mines, France. Cota.’¹⁴

Cota later told Mr Huie: ‘During the Second World War I was privileged to lead 36,000 Americans into battle and I saw many of them die for the principles in which we believe. Given the same conditions of those hours, I do not see how I could have acted differently in the Slovik case and remained faithful to my responsibilities.’¹⁵

Now as the last day of January began to draw to a close in St Marie-aux-Mines, Cota prepared to lead another 15,000 young Americans into a new battle, many of them as raw as Eddie Slovik had been. His order to Eddie’s old regiment which was going to kick off the 2 Division’s attack was simple and optimistic, as befitted the nature of ‘Dutch’ Cota. It read: ‘WE GO TO COLMAR!’

 

1 The villa has since been demolished and an apartment block built on the site; even the street name has been changed.