THREE

‘Germany passed its last night in France,’ King Jean wrote in February, 1945¹¹ The German 19th Army, what was left of it, held four small villages on French soil: Rumersheim, Bantzenheim, Ottmarsheim and Chalampé. After four and a half years of occupation, France was nearly free. As patrols from his First Army started to probe the German strongpoints on the west bank of the Rhine, de Lattre told himself that the words of the great 18th-century French commander still held true: ‘No man of war should rest while there remains a single German on this side of the Rhine.’²

But if the end was near for the Germans, the patrols of his Second and Ninth Divisions treated the defeated enemy with care as they circled the first three of the strongpoints, trying to find their weak spots. There were mines everywhere in the mud and melting snow, and the defenders fired at the first sight of any movement. At this stage of the battle, de Lattre’s infantry, whose losses in the rifle companies had reached a staggering 35 to 40 percent, were taking no unnecessary risks.

For most of that night the men on patrol could hear the constant roar of traffic fleeing across the bridge at Chalampé, the last German escape route. Then just before dawn the noise ceased and there was a strange echoing silence. What was going on? Were the Huns going to play another dirty trick on them?

The men of the Ninth infantry crept ever closer to the great last water barrier, tensed for the first burst of enemy machine-gun fire. Were they walking into a trap? Why had the firing ceased so abruptly?

The breeze coming from the river to their front was warm and balmy, no longer that freezing blast straight from Siberia. It seemed to herald the spring, a sign of hope and renewal. But the weary French infantry stealing through the barren, shell-torn fields, criss-crossed by irrigation ditches, remained hesitant. Yard by yard they approached the bridge at Chalampé.

At eight o’clock that morning the horizon to their front was split by a burst of violet flame, followed by the hollow boom of high explosive. The men of the Ninth Infantry knew what had happened and relaxed at once, knowing that on this day, at least, they would not die. The Boche had blown the last bridge at Chalampé behind them. The Colmar Pocket existed no more. The enemy had fled.

A few minutes later the infantry of the 2nd and 9th French Infantry Divisions reached the banks of the Rhine to see the smoking remains of the Chalampé railway bridge straddling the great river in twisted confusion. As far as the eye could see, there was no field-grey uniform in sight. The enemy had gone to ground in his own country, waiting for the new battle to come – the attack across the Rhine.²

The Allies had lost 18,000 casualties in reducing the Colmar Pocket, but it was calculated that the Germans had suffered 22,000. Of the eight German divisions engaged in the final battle, only one, the 708th Volks-grenadier Division, escaped reasonably intact. The German 19th Army virtually ceased to exist. For the top brass it was a victory. As always on such occasions, they issued grand-sounding victory communiqués. On that day de Lattre, for example, told his triumphant troops: ‘On the twenty-first day of a bitter battle during which American and French troops have rivalled one another in enthusiasm, tenacity and manoeuvrability, the enemy has been driven from the Alsatian plain and has been forced back across the Rhine. The Allied forces of the French 1st Army are lining the river throughout its length in their sector. They have kept to the words of Turenne: “No man of war should rest while there remains a single German on this side of the Rhine.”’³

One day later, on the 10th, General Devers issued his own statement, full of the rhetoric and purple prose beloved by top brass in moments of victory: ‘You have freed the imperial city of Colmar, the name of which is scattered through the pages of French history and is dear to the heart of every Frenchman. You have given independence to thousands of civilians of a noble land filled with love of liberty.... To the officers and men of the French 1st and 2nd Corps, to the American 21st Army Corps, to the Service departments of these corps and of the army, I say: “Well done! Let us all go forward to our new task more determined than ever to destroy the forces of evil. I say to you: Forward to Germany.”’⁴

Eisenhower was, naturally, not to be left out of the flood of congratulatory messages which were winging their way back and forth between the triumphant generals. Although only nine days before, he had rated Devers so low in his list of commanders, Eisenhower cabled the Commander of the Sixth Army Group on 9 February: ‘I beg you to accept my congratulations... on the splendid realization of your troops in the liberation of Colmar and the elimination of the enemy’s bridgehead west of the Rhine. This victory, achieved in the face of difficulties of weather and terrain, is an exceptional example of the Allied fighting team work.’

In spite of the fact that he thought that ‘French divisions are always a questionable asset’ and that the ‘French continue to be difficult... I must say that next to the weather I think they have caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor’,⁵ Eisenhower ordered Devers ‘to transmit to General de Lattre, commanding the French 1st Army, and to all the forces under his command, my congratulations on this great achievement’.⁶

There were parades, parties and decorations handed out by the basketful. Although most of the local menfolk were still fight stoutly in the Wehrmacht on the other side of the Rhine’³ de Lattre felt, ‘what an outburst of joy there was. At all the windows the plebiscite of flags was triumphant. All the villages stirred themselves to welcome their liberators and, despite the agony of many forced absences, made worse from that moment by complete silence, all the houses were opened to those who had given them their homeland. Never in its fiery history had Alsace known such a fever. Doubtless because it had never suffered nor hoped so much.’⁷

Naturally General de Gaulle was not slow to make political capital out of the victory in order to bolster up his shaky position in France. Although in this week of victory he asked Eisenhower to allow him to pull back three of de Lattre’s divisions to train new units and ‘to assure contact between certain regions of the country and its organized Army’⁸ – in other words he was having trouble with the communists of the French resistance once again – de Gaulle hurried to Colmar to take part in the victory parade.

Colmar’s Place Rapp, where the Hellcats had seen the French standing on the dead bodies of the defeated Germans to get a better view of the victorious French armour, was hastily cleaned up. French and American flags went up on all sides. The eighteenth-century houses, pocked by shell-fire, were hung with bunting and decorated with spring flowers. The weather had turned very mild and the sun shone fitfully.

The clarions shrilled, the kettledrums rattled, the brass blared, as the crowds cheered wildly. Men straight out of the line, hastily cleaned up and drilled on how to march ‘in a soldierly fashion’, paraded through the cobbled streets. Speeches were read out. Medals were presented. Every one of the top brass received something. De Gaulle even presented Leclerc with the Cross of the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, after de Lattre had received his Grand Cross. Like Napoleon before him, Charles de Gaulle was liberal with shiny baubles. General ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel, who had had his first taste of combat not far from there as a young officer with the 11th Infantry, was made an honorary private first class in the French Foreign Legion.

But for the ‘dogfaces’, as they called themselves a little wearily, there were few decorations and no celebratory dinner-parties. For them the whole weary business was about to begin yet again.

While the Third Infantry Division rested for a month before beginning its long race across Southern Germany, before the US 101st Airborne and Leclerc’s Second Armoured, filling in the gaps left by the 4500 casualties suffered in the last three weeks, Cota’s 28th Infantry returned to the front in Germany almost immediately. Once more the ‘Bloody Bucket’ Division went back to ‘Heartbreak Corner’ in the ‘Green Hell of Hurtgen’ where it had suffered so grievously in the bitter fighting of the previous autumn.

General ‘Slim’ Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, which had taken part in some severe fighting during the Bulge, went up with them. Travelling in his jeep, accompanied only by his driver, he followed the abortive advance the 28th Division had made six months before, to find ‘all along the sides of the trail there were many dead bodies, cadavers that had just emerged from the winter snow. Their gangrenous, broken and torn bodies were rigid and grotesque, some of them with arms skywards, seemingly in supplication. . . . As darkness descended upon the canyon, it was an eerie scene, like something from the lower level of Dante’s Inferno. Some little while later the trim young airborne commander came upon one of his battalions, filled up with replacements, resting in that grim forest. One of his men, he observed, ‘began to turn pale, then green, and was obviously about to vomit’.⁹

Even as they celebrated at Colmar and those few of the 103rd Infantry Division fortunate enough to do so watched Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight or Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette in the crude frontline cinemas set up in barns and local schoolhouses, the fighting in Alsace-Lorraine continued. On the same day that they held the victory parade in Colmar, the US 44th Infantry Division which had been so badly hit on the first day of the offensive, was attempting to retake two fortified farmhouses they had lost. In the course of what was just a local action, they lost over a fifth of an infantry battalion, 145 men killed and wounded.

Not far away the green 70th Infantry Division, which had suffered nearly 3500 casualties in its first taste of combat in January, was also back in the line, fighting in the Saar. Again it suffered heavy casualties.

Typical of those anonymous young men who fought, suffered and died that February while the top brass celebrated their victory was the young officer in the 70th Division, whose men called him ‘Little Boy Blue’. His real name was Harold D. Wilson. He had failed West Point and had joined the artillery as an enlisted man. But he had always wanted to be a combat soldier and had somehow succeeded in having himself transferred to the infantry. Now he commanded an infantry platoon in the 70th.

‘Although he was twenty-one, Wilson looked about seventeen or eighteen,’ one of his men wrote in 1945. ‘He had blond hair, baby blue eyes and about as much of a beard as yours truly. His voice was high and his enunciation clear. When he intoned “Column right, MARCH” in his high little voice you had to smile and shake your head. He was very precise and GI. He was soon to fall heir to the name of ‘Little Boy Blue’ and the name fitted him well. I liked him, but the thought of this almost ridiculous little character leading a platoon of men into combat was too much.’¹⁰

But ‘Little Boy Blue’ turned out much better than anyone expected in the Division’s first taste of combat. He was wounded, but refused to be evacuated. He encouraged and chivvied his men all the time, keeping up their morale, rarely letting them rest, always maintaining, ‘We’ll keep busy up here if it’s doing nothing but melting snow to wash our feet.’¹¹

Now he was in a company which marched straight into two German machine guns. One platoon was cut down immediately. Little Boy Blue’s own platoon was pinned down by murderous enemy fire and stayed crouched low till dawn when the rumour passed from man to man that they were going to pull out soon.

‘The men were on the verge of panic,’ wrote Private Kevin Corrigan of his platoon after Little Boy Blue was dead. ‘Up stands Wilson and ignores the enemy fire and runs all over the place; gets protection on the flanks and gets the rest of the company and tells them they’re going to attack with him. Everything is pretty active with heavy mortar and machine-gun fire, but he’s running around to the platoons, shouting “Here, here, you men, where are you going? You come right back here! Over there, Sergeant. Bring those men by you up here. We’re going to attack these woods!” His way from the first to the third is barred by a stream of machine-gun fire. He simply hurdles it. He got things organized and by a miracle wasn’t killed. He was hit in the face and leg by a Panzerfaust shell, but as usual, if a wound didn’t kill him it couldn’t stop him. He led the company into a smashing assault which led the division. Do you get the picture? This gentle guy with no fear.’¹²

Three weeks later Little Boy Blue was dead, shot in the head by a sniper, while peering from a window during an attack. He said to the two men with him, ‘Now, don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’ He started to fade and asked them to slap his face. Little Boy Blue wasn’t the type to accept death without a fight, but when he realized he was dying, he said, ‘God help me through this’, kicked a heavy oaken table across the room and fell dead.

Another lieutenant in the house took over his platoon, but as Private Corrigan recorded in 1945, ‘our leader was dead and our spirit died with him’.¹³

So it ended in France and the young men who had survived reformed to attack into Germany. Audie Murphy, waiting with the rest of the Third, noted: ‘One day the leaf buds appear again on the trees; and in the rear area, where we have been stationed since the fall of the Colmar Pocket, French villagers begin spading their gardens. The men grow restless. With an uneasy eye, they watch the coming of spring. They see the fields drying in the warm winds and know that the ground will soon be ready to support armor.’¹⁴

Murphy noted too that ‘Hope and fear walk hand in hand. We can see the end now, but we are going back up. And always in a man’s mind is that one lead pill, that one splinter of steel, that can lose him the race with the finish line in sight.’¹⁵

‘Each of these men wanted desperately to live because of something like the picture in his wallet that constantly reminded him a child was relying on him,’ Private Corrigan wrote in 1945. ‘Yet time and time again these same men made the decision to sacrifice their lives because it was their duty. In making that decision they resolved that death with their faces in the mud and a bullet through their heads was not the future they wanted for their children. They don’t want granite memorials and sweet words; they want peace. Although many of them might not know what UN means, they died for its success.’¹⁶

Forty years later Mister Kevin Corrigan could write on the same subject to the author: ‘Our glory is not our GNP. We can and should be proud of the accomplishment it represents. But it is not, in the current cliché, the bottom line. We must recognize, I feel, that we are a community of free citizens whose freedom has been won and defended by brave men and women. . . . It is something which goes far beyond the cash nexus. The only “price” which can be attached to the Last Full Measure⁴ is the one set specifically by Lincoln: that we resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.’¹⁷

 

1 This was not strictly true. There would be German troops in isolated fortress ports such as Le Havre, Dunkirk and Lorient right to the end of the war.

2 See C. Whiting, Bounce the Rhine, for further details.

3 At the time of writing this, the local Alsatian papers headlined the news that Russia had finally admitted that many hundred of Alsatians fighting with the German Army had died in that country long after the war was over, presumably in the forced labour camps of the Gulag.

4 The name Private Corrigan gave to his tribute to ‘Little Boy Blue’.