CHAPTER 13

The Alamo

“However grave the crisis may be at the moment, it will, despite everything, finally be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice and by our abilities.”

Adolf Hitler

“Message from Troop C, sir,” said Stewart’s radio operator. Captain Stewart had been taking a few minutes rest on a bed inside the wing of Hostau Castle that the Americans had taken over as a temporary task force base.¹ The Troop A Headquarters section, which Stewart was using as his own task force HQ, was set up in the castle, including the administration, supply, and mess section.

Stewart was exhausted—he had been on the go since Colonel Reed had appointed him to command the task force. There was so much to do. Trucks and half-tracks still thundered up and down the road from the 2nd Cavalry Group headquarters just across the border in Bavaria, bringing in supplies to Weissensulz and Hostau and carrying out those liberated Allied prisoners-of-war who wanted to leave. Two half-track loads of Germans had also been removed, with the remaining German prisoners who had not volunteered for Stewart’s Foreign Legion still under lock and key in six cellars throughout the town.²

Stewart had visited all of the positions prepared by Captain Carter Catlett’s Troop A both in and around Hostau. Now snatching some much-needed shut-eye, Stewart was jerked back into reality by the signaler’s urgent voice. He sat up in bed, fully clothed and with his boots still on.

“What time is it?” asked Stewart groggily, running a hand through his tousled hair.

“Oh-one-forty hours, sir,” replied the signaler. A new day had begun since Stewart had hit the hay—April 30, 1945. Though Stewart and the other members of the US Army occupying Hostau would not even remotely suspect it, today was the day that Adolf Hitler would die.

“What’s the message?”

“It’s from Troop C’s CP. The MSR has been cut, sir,” replied the signaler, referring to the Main Supply Route back to Bavaria.

“Show me,” demanded Stewart, following the man back through into the makeshift radio room where a tactical map was pinned to the wall. A stout block of felled trees had brought all vehicular movement to a halt on the road between Hostau and the American front line.³ Troop C’s command post (CP) was now cut off from its 1st Platoon at Weissensulz.

The sudden establishment of the roadblock during the hours of darkness demonstrated to Stewart that the American presence so far from their own lines was well known to the Germans, and that hostile forces were attempting to pinch off that bulge into their lines. Closing down the MSR, the route over which all supplies and fuel arrived for Troop A at Hostau, also meant that the liberated prisoners and German POWs could not be evacuated. Was it the prelude to an attack?

It was decided not to try to remove the roadblock until daylight, as the Germans routinely booby-trapped such obstacles and combat engineers would have to be sent up to deal with it. For the time being, Hostau was effectively marooned.

Stewart took immediate steps to alert Captain Catlett, who in turn warned all of his patrols and guard positions to keep their eyes skinned. Something was definitely brewing. Stewart stepped outside the darkened castle and put on his steel helmet. He looked up at the overcast night sky, rain falling refreshingly on to his face. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch—daylight in about four hours. Hostau’s main street was deathly quiet—just the occasional cough from an American on sentry duty. The stillness was almost eerie—it was too quiet for the experienced combat soldiers of Troop A. It wasn’t normal. What the new day might bring for Stewart’s beleaguered command was anyone’s guess.

Confirmation of the presence of an SS unit in the area arrived by radio from 2nd Cavalry Group HQ shortly after sunup on April 30, 1945.⁴ It made for chilling reading for Captains Stewart and Catlett and their fellow officers. XII Corps had learned of the presence of the III Battalion, SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment “Deutschland,” logging it as an advance guard for the fearsome 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich.”⁵ The regiment had been sent west following heavy combat against the Red Army near Vienna to the Passau region of the Austrian–German border to help hold off the Americans. Passau was lost on April 29 and the remnants of Regiment “Deutschland” appeared to have scattered into rudimentary combat groups, with one moving northeast into western Czechoslovakia.

Compared to General Weisenberger’s ragtag assortment of army and Volkssturm formations, these SS were very much in a league of their own. The formidable 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich,” renowned as the best division in the entire German armed forces, had earned an appalling reputation for brutality during the Normandy campaign, most infamously the killing of 642 men, women, and children in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944.⁶

SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment “Deutschland” had its own horrific reputation for bestiality to add to its genuinely impressive military feats of arms. In Normandy, the regiment had shot fifty-seven civilians in cold blood following an Allied attack on June 11, 1944. The Panzergrenadiers had gone on to kill eleven in the little village of Trebon; nineteen, including two young children, at Pouzac; and twenty-five, including eleven women, at Bagnieres. The unit epitomized the Waffen-SS—it was suicidally brave and coldly efficient in combat but inhuman towards its enemies, making for a terrifying combination. And now those selfsame soldiers were close to Hostau and the men protecting the world’s most valuable horses.

By now, Colonel Reed and most of the 2nd Cavalry had withdrawn from their positions and headed south towards the Eisenstein Pass, northeast of Regan, as per Patton’s order. Only Troop A remained at Hostau along with the two Chaffee tanks from Company F and the pair of Howitzer Motor Carriages from Troop E. Occupying the 2nd’s vacated positions was the 97th Infantry Division’s 387th Infantry Regiment, its three battalions moving into position during the night of April 29/30. They would assume responsibility for guarding some of the MSR, with Captain Catlett’s Troop A taking over some of the responsibility for the area around Weissensulz and through to Hostau, as Troop C was gone, further stretching Stewart’s already thin manpower reserve. The 387th was now responsible for furnishing supplies to Stewart’s task force.⁷ Also, the regiment provided flank protection, taking over the towns and villages just inside Czechoslovakia that the 42nd had liberated a few days earlier.⁸

The roadblock that the Germans had set during the night of April 29/30 was investigated in daylight by a patrol from the 387th Infantry and discovered not to be booby-trapped. It was broken up and hauled aside, allowing for the trucks to Hostau to resume running again.⁹ But the fear remained that the Germans might try the same tactic again, perhaps in multiple places simultaneously.

Further enemy activity was reported close by along the line, demonstrating to Stewart that the enemy was far from beaten. Nine miles northwest of Hostau a reconnaissance squad from the 386th Infantry Regiment was ambushed, losing two killed and several wounded during an ugly exchange. At the same time, a battle broke out on the road to Klenc, eleven miles from Hostau. The 3rd Battalion, 358th Infantry suffered two killed, thirty-eight wounded and Panzerfausts knocked out two supporting tanks. The question was: would the Germans also strike in the middle, at Hostau?

“I’m sending Verry to the 387th CP to make arrangements for gasoline and ammunition resupply,”¹⁰ stated Captain Stewart to Troop A’s commanding officer Carter Catlett. The route back through Weissensulz and on to Colonel Rose’s command post had been pre-arranged, and patrols from both the 42nd Cavalry and 387th Infantry were posted along it at strategic points. It should be a milk run for Captain Verry, a staff officer from 42nd Squadron HQ.

Verry climbed into the front passenger seat of his jeep, which was driven by his radio operator, inevitably nicknamed “Radar,” with the bulky transmitter stowed in the rear. It was still early morning and unseasonably cold, with scattered snow showers predicted for later in the day.¹¹

Captains Stewart and Catlett stood on the front stoop of the castle’s main entrance, battered tin mugs of steaming coffee in their hands. Behind them came the sounds of radio operators talking with distant patrols, or the clack-clack of manual typewriters as clerks filled out combat reports.

“I’ll be back in a couple hours,” said Verry to Stewart, as Radar started the jeep’s engine, which coughed noisily to life.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” quipped Catlett. Verry grinned, touched a finger to his helmet brim in a casual salute and told his driver to go, the jeep swinging around and heading for Weissensulz. Captain Catlett took a sip of his coffee and looked up at the leaden sky. It was still very quiet, with no enemy activity reported around Hostau. He shivered before going back inside, Stewart following behind.

The jeep carrying Captain Verry sped out of Hostau. As he passed a couple of checkpoints he noted that Stewart’s Foreign Legion appeared to have everything in hand. American soldiers covered all exits with their weapons, while Germans, Cossacks, and some former Allied POWs worked alongside of them, digging foxholes or camouflaging positions. The tanks, Howitzer Motor Carriages, and M8 armored cars added their firepower to the defenses, being dispersed around the positions. Then Verry and his driver were hurtling through open countryside, the cold wind chilling their exposed faces beneath their helmets.

Verry’s jeep slowed down and passed through Weissensulz, where American troops saluted or raised their hands in greeting as he passed. Just beyond Weissensulz was another small hamlet. The jeep slowed. There were no American soldiers around, which was Verry’s first intimation of trouble. The jeep turned a corner. A German soldier, a camouflaged smock over his field-gray uniform, a rifle in his hands, stood in the middle of the road. He turned at the sound of the jeep, his jaw dropping in surprise as Verry’s vehicle squealed to a halt.¹²

“Back up!” yelled Verry at Radar, the enlisted man mashing the gears in panic. “Alarm!” yelled the German, as he raised his Mauser rifle and fired, the bullet whizzing past Verry’s head. Time seemed to slow down. The German recycled the rifle bolt at the same moment as the jeep stalled. There was the sound of breaking glass as the German’s second shot shattered the American vehicle’s windshield. More Germans, all heavily armed, started to emerge from buildings up ahead, running to the aid of their comrade. A fusillade of shots cut the air around the jeep or smacked into the vehicle’s body with metallic thuds. Verry grabbed his M1 carbine and with his right hand pulled Radar down.

“Take cover!” he shouted above the din of German fire and shouting. The two Americans exited the vehicle crouching low and took cover behind it as bullets continued to bounce off the road surface or slap into the damaged jeep.

“Get on the radio for help!” yelled Verry, “I’ll cover you!” Verry popped his head up, shouldered the M1 and unleashed a fusillade of rapid shots at the advancing Germans while Radar reached into the back of the jeep and grabbed the microphone. He had to shout to be heard above the din, sending an urgent request for assistance to the 387th Infantry’s command post, before dropping the radio mic and opening fire with his own carbine. Verry ducked back down and quickly reloaded. They couldn’t stay here, of that he was sure. They needed to find cover and wait for relief. It had all happened so fast. Where in the hell had so many SS come from? The route was supposed to be secure. He popped back up and unleashed another fifteen-round volley that temporarily kept the Germans’ heads down. Then he dropped back to his knees and reloaded again while Radar fired his weapon, his eyes staring around madly for some suitable cover.

“Get in there!” yelled Verry, pointing to a nearby two-storey house. “I’ll cover you.”¹³ Radar needed no encouragement. As Verry opened fire again, the enlisted man jumped to his feet and sprinted the few yards to the front door of the house, forcing his way inside. Verry ceased firing and ran after him, German bullets impacting all around as he barreled through the front door, kicking it shut with his feet as he lay on his back in a panting, sweating pile in the hallway.

“Upstairs,” he said breathlessly, and the two Americans quickly stumbled up a nearby staircase, reloading as they went.

The SS had managed to quickly throw up a roadblock at another point close to Weissensulz at the small hamlet of Rosendorf. It was encountered by a patrol from Troop A soon after Captain Verry had passed on his way. The American cavalrymen advanced on foot towards the block, unsure of enemy numbers. But suddenly, rifle and automatic fire opened up, sending the American patrol diving for cover. The sergeant commanding the patrol decided to pull back into the trees and regroup.

“You see that house over yonder?” said the breathless sergeant to Private First Class Raymond Manz, who was two weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. Manz, at 6 foot 2 inches the tallest man in the patrol, nodded seriously. “Set up a base of fire on the second floor,” ordered the sergeant. “It should give you a perfect defilade of the Kraut machine gunners behind the roadblock. We’ll cover you.”

Manz nodded, taking in his orders. In his hands was the patrol’s most powerful weapon, the Browning Automatic Rifle or BAR, a light machine gun with a bipod at the front. It used 20-round box magazines, carried in pouches on Manz’s webbing and was lethally accurate in the right hands.

The sergeant readied his men. Once Manz was set and keeping the Germans’ heads down, he would lead the rest of the cavalrymen and outflank and destroy the roadblock.

“Cover!” yelled the sergeant, and the Americans opened a brisk fire at the roadblock, bullets peppering the logs and clipping branches off the surrounding trees while the Germans temporarily ducked down. Manz was on his feet a second later and charging towards the house, his mind focused entirely upon reaching the building and making it up to the second floor. The Germans noticed the move, and tried to cut him down as he ran, but Manz’s long legs powered him on. Suddenly, he fell, winded and shocked. It felt like someone had struck him on the shoulder with a baseball bat. He lay momentarily stunned amid the leaf litter and dirt. There was no pain as yet, but when he touched his shoulder his hand came away bloody. A flesh wound. German bullets continued to zip past. Manz got back to his feet, picked up the BAR and charged on, oblivious to his wound, focused once again on the house and safety.

Manz quickly stormed upstairs and wrenched open a window that partly overlooked the German position. He jammed the BAR’s bipod onto the narrow window frame and loosed off a volley at the Germans, hitting one or two, who crumpled to the ground dead, while the rest crouched down further and tried to return fire at the window while also attempting to hit the rest of the American patrol as it began maneuvering through the trees to outflank the position.

Manz popped up every few seconds and aimed a controlled burst into the German position, the ejected cartridge cases rattling on the room’s wooden floor. Then German fire would force him to drop below the window and reload, as enemy slugs chewed wood off the frame or thudded into the ceiling above Manz’s head, sending down a shower of plaster and dust. Seconds later, locked and loaded once more, Manz would bravely stand up and begin the process all over again.

“Frag out,” yelled a corporal moving up with the rest of the American patrol as he wrenched the pin from a fragmentation grenade and hurled it in the general direction of the SS roadblock. It detonated with a crump, smoke and debris pluming into the air, before the cacophony of American and German small-arms fire continued unabated. The Americans down below could still hear the reassuring hammer of Manz’s BAR as they closed in on the SS.

In Hostau, all hell had broken loose about the time that Pfc. Manz was working his BAR and Captain Verry was scrambling into a house under fire. Reports had arrived from several Troop A outposts of large numbers of SS moving through the trees around the town and into the open fields. There had been no preliminary German artillery bombardment or even mortar fire, which indicated that the SS were without proper support and acting in a desperate measure. But they were advancing with their customary fearlessness and clearly intent on taking the town,¹⁴ firing as they walked. Captains Stewart and Catlett and their officers immediately assessed the unfolding situation. It appeared that the SS, though strong in infantry, lacked any armored vehicles or artillery in support.

Groups of SS, dressed in dirty camouflaged smocks and helmets, advanced across the fields towards the US positions where they were brought under intense small-arms fire from not only the American troopers, but also their German, Cossack, Polish, British, and French allies. They were all fighting to protect both themselves and the horses, and it was vital that the SS did not achieve a breakthrough into the town just as other parties of Germans were trying to isolate Hostau with roadblocks and incursions into the surrounding hamlets.

The SS attacks were being broken up by American mortar fire, the 60mm tubes being worked furiously by the cavalry troopers, the 3-pound bombs impacting into the heavy soil, white-hot shrapnel cutting down the SS, while machine-gun and rifle fire stitched across their ranks. The American and Allied positions were peppered by German bullets, but the Americans had the advantage of prepared positions and armored vehicles while the SS repeatedly attempted to advance on the town over open fields or through scattered nearby woods. The SS fire was heavy though inaccurate.¹⁵ The deciding factor for Captain Catlett and his multinational force were the two Chaffee tanks and pair of Howitzer Motor Carriages, whose fire was lethally accurate, with the SS held beyond the range at which their Panzerfaust rocket launchers could have proven decisive.¹⁶

At the Hostau Stud and the two satellite farms the horses were terrified by the explosions and the constant rattle of small arms, whinnying and crashing around their stalls as the grooms, themselves now armed with rifles, did what they could for them. Fortunately, the skirmishes around the American perimeter were far enough from the horse stables that the animals were out of range of the flying lead.

The SS continued to probe the Hostau defense ring, attempting to find a weak spot which they could immediately exploit, but Captains Stewart and Catlett had planned the defense carefully, and though short of troops, the deciding factor was the high level of firepower that the defenders could deploy, particularly the vehicles, which were driven from point to point as each new crisis unfolded. The SS suffered hundreds killed and wounded, with the fields and woods around Hostau littered with bloodied corpses, blackened, smoking mortar craters and burning trees.

Captain Verry and his radio operator had none of the advantages in firepower and weaponry of their comrades at Hostau. They crouched, breathless and sweaty inside an upstairs room of a shot-up house waiting for rescue. The firing had quieted down outside as the SS moved in on their position.

At the 387th Infantry’s command post, the frantic radio message had been received and help was on its way. The 387th’s CO, Colonel Long, immediately dispatched a platoon from 1st Battalion who piled into jeeps and, led by the mechanized troop commander, blasted up the road towards the small hamlet where Verry was trapped.¹⁷

Inside the house Verry and Radar crouched on the floor, their weapons at the ready. Downstairs there were sounds of movement, followed by hushed talking.¹⁸

“They’re inside the property,” whispered Verry to his companion. They exchanged looks and raised their weapons towards the door of the room.

At Rosendorf, the sergeant commanding the Troop A patrol led the charge on the SS roadblock with several of his men close behind. A barrage of grenades thrown by the attackers landed in front of or behind the makeshift barricade, the detonations mixed with the horrible screams of the dying and wounded. Then the troopers were among the SS, shooting and clubbing them down until the position was overrun.

With the SS eliminated, thoughts turned to Pfc. Manz. Some of his comrades hurried over to the house from which Manz had been firing and climbed upstairs calling his name.

They found Manz lying on the floor of the room surrounded by brass cartridge casings and empty magazines, his blood mingling with the dust, the BAR still gripped in his hands. A neat hole had been drilled through his forehead, killing him instantly. He had been killed raising his head to give his comrades covering fire. For his gallantry that day, Raymond Manz would receive a posthumous award of the Distinguished Service Cross.

Other casualties had been sustained during the firefight at Rosendorf. Sergeant Owen W. Sutton from North Carolina was mortally wounded and later died in hospital. Staff Sergeant Fred R. Foyles was seriously wounded but managed to pull through, while Technician Fifth Class Malcolm E. Rhodes and Corporal Samuel Fletcher were also wounded, though less seriously.¹⁹

The German voices and footfalls that Verry and his companion could hear were coming closer to the room in which they crouched, weapons at the ready for their last stand. Their eyes were on the back of the closed door and its brass handle. Both men expected a stick grenade to be flung into the room at any minute. But then other sounds cut in—firing from the other end of the hamlet. Verry listened—it was unmistakable. Mixed in with the thump of German weapons were the familiar sounds of American M1 Garands and BARs. It was the relief, and just in the nick of time.

The platoon from 1st Battalion, 387th Infantry, went straight into the assault, catching the SS patrol by surprise. They worked their way through the hamlet, house by house, street by street, beating back the SS who took a hammering before breaking and fleeing back into the forest, leaving several of their comrades behind dead or wounded. The hamlet was taken. Verry and his radio operator gingerly emerged from the house where they had taken cover, shaken but unharmed after their harrowing experience. Order was soon restored.²⁰

The SS attempts to take Hostau were shot to pieces. After five hours of determined assaults the fight drew to a close in the late afternoon of April 30. The surviving SS simply melted into the countryside, while American patrols moved out to collect prisoners and deal with the many enemy wounded.

About the same time that American soldiers at Hostau were checking the dead bodies of SS men or carefully searching the more than one hundred prisoners they had taken, hundreds of miles to the north one of the final dramas of the Second World War had already played out.

At around 3.30pm Adolf Hitler, palsied and broken and sitting beside his wife of less than twenty-four hours in the sitting room of his Berlin bunker, had crushed a vial of cyanide between his teeth and simultaneously pulled the trigger of the Walther automatic that was pressed to his right temple. As Hitler’s SS lay in bloody and smoldering heaps across the fields before Hostau, so in Berlin the Führer’s body was consigned to a shell hole in the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline and unceremoniously burned. But Hitler’s death did not end the fighting in Berlin or the wider war. A new Nazi government was even then forming in the north of Germany under Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, and the German forces in Czechoslovakia and Austria would continue to resist fiercely. The horses that the Americans had bravely rescued were still in as much danger as before, perhaps more so as the situation in the region continued to deteriorate.

“Stewart’s Foreign Legion” had beaten off the SS on this occasion, but Hostau still remained a tiny and isolated American island in a sea of shifting German military power. And the horses were going nowhere, with foaling season under way. For now, the Americans had simply to sit tight and protect that which they had endeavored so hard to obtain.