CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CHAMPAGNE CAMPAIGN
Thunderbirds from the 157th Infantry Regiment take a rest in Pertuis, Provence, on August 21, 1944, after a six-day march in pursuit of the retreating Germans. [National Archives]
THE THUNDERBIRDS’ MARCH TOWARD the Third Reich resumed the next morning shortly after dawn. They pushed farther inland, past seemingly endless vineyards where fat grapes ripened. Despite four years of conflict, the pastel-shaded houses and lovingly tended orchards and gardens gave the impression of a prosperous region little affected by world war.
As they moved north, men started to practice their high school French.
“Avay voo des oeffs?”
“Voolay voo cooshay aveck moi?”
“Avay voo champagne?”
“A la Victoir!”
Villages and towns fell in quick succession as the Thunderbirds conducted their own Provençal blitzkrieg through Salernes along the D561 to Varages, north to Pertuis, and on to Apt below the Grand Luberon Mountains. It was a dreamlike rush through bleached fields dotted with neat bundles of drying lavender, its scent strong in the hot mistral winds, and along dusty roads shaded by plane trees. Photographs taken during the giddy advance showed Thunderbirds ducking their heads into yellow-stoned fountains, surrounded by excited French boys in shorts and sandals. In some villages, partisans greeted them, feverishly smoking sour Turkish tobacco cigarettes, their pomaded hair glinting in the sun, as vengeful crowds gathered to slap and kick black-eyed collaborators and watch the Germans’ French mistresses have their heads shaved.
Unlike in Italy, there were no shoeless children begging at the mess tents at chow time. No more widows clad in black scavenging in the dirt with bony hands for cigarette and cigar butts. Local partisans provided key intelligence about the Germans and their movements, and often eagerly joined forces with the Thunderbirds as they advanced, flushing enemy snipers like sangliers—wild boars—from cedar forests and gorges of the Luberon Mountains. Some would stay with the regiment until the end of the war.
One day, as he charged deeper into France, Sparks apparently learned from scouts that a key bridge was undefended and decided to check it out. As he approached the bridge, he began to feel distinctly uneasy. It was far too quiet for his liking. Nevertheless, he continued down a hill toward the bridge in his jeep. A dozen Germans suddenly appeared. Sparks put his hands in the air to surrender. A German walked over to the jeep. Then a fist flew. Sparks’s driver is said to have knocked the German to the ground and gunned the engine. Before the startled Germans could react, he and Sparks had raced around a corner and disappeared from view.
Sparks joked that he now must hold the record for the shortest time spent as a prisoner in World War II. But the near escape left him determined to be better armed in the future in case he had to blast his way out of trouble. What he really wanted was a shotgun, like the one he’d used to hunt with back in the Arizona. It wasn’t long before his men had found an old French farmer, paid him for his buckshot-loaded scattergun, and handed it to a delighted Sparks.
Sparks kept his Colt .45 in a hip holster and carried the shotgun up front in his jeep. In one village, he found a craftsman who replaced the pistol’s standard grips with transparent plastic taken from a downed American bomber’s windshield. Sparks set a photograph of his son, Kirk, and wife, Mary, under one grip and a favorite pinup under the other. From now on, beauty would be his lucky charm.
THE CHARGE THROUGH Provence continued. The 45th Division’s exotic caravan, including dozens of requisitioned and hastily improvised vehicles, left a trail of dust and empty wine bottles that stretched as far back as the beaches of St. Maxime. There were battered Dodge trucks with their white stars masked by dust; coughing Renault vans driven by French peasants with FFI (French Forces of the Interior) armbands; jeeps dangerously overloaded with duffel bags stuffed with fresh fruit and bottles of White Lightning, as the local eau de vie was called; German vehicles with their white crosses painted over; Sherman tanks with sometimes an entire rifle squad of a dozen men sitting on top smoking Lucky Strikes, beginning and ending every sentence with “fuck,” warning the eighteen-year-old replacements with nervous smiles: “Just wait until our lines are overextended.”
With a new commander, First World War veteran Colonel Walter O’Brien, leading the charge, the regiment motored a hundred miles northwest in early September, to Grenoble on the Swiss border, and from there due north to Voiron, in the foothills of the Alps, where Carthusian monks made their famous Chartreuse liqueur. The Coloradans in the regiment gazed from the trucks at the snowcapped Alps to their east and at the sturdy dairy cattle in the high pastures, as they talked of Swiss cheese and watches, and felt more homesick than ever.
The next objective was the city of Lyons at the intersection of the rivers Rhône and Saône. There were fears it would be fiercely defended, but as the Thunderbirds approached from the east, an estimated ten thousand German defenders evaded capture by slipping out of the city at night like frightened rats. Even old-timers began to wager that by October the war would be over. News reports indicated that the Allies were advancing fast on all fronts. September would be “victory month,” said some. Survive its thirty days and one would survive the war.
Sparks had meanwhile resumed his role as second in command of the First Battalion with the return of Colonel Krieger from the hospital. The regiment’s aim now, he learned, was to close the Belfort Gap, a plateau between the northern end of the Jura Mountains and the southernmost Vosges, which provided the last escape route back to the Fatherland for several retreating German divisions in the upper Rhône valley. Lying in wait for the Thunderbirds was the German Nineteenth Army. Walter Bosch, its chief of staff, was a canny tactician, able to get the most from his depleted forces. When he studied the maps, those indicating the 45th Division’s path worried him most. To buy time for other forces to pull back through the Belfort Gap, the Thunderbird blitzkrieg had to be stopped. “The thrust of the 45th U.S. Division north was the most dangerous,” he recalled, “and most critical potentially for us of all the different attacks launched by the French and the Americans.”
On the afternoon of September 11, as it approached the Belfort Gap, the regiment’s Third Battalion seized the small village of Abbenans ten miles north of the Rhône River. The Germans counterattacked, determined to delay the American advance. That evening, Sparks learned that Third Battalion commander Major Merle Mitchell and some of his staff had been ambushed while on reconnaissance. Patrols were sent out that night, but they found no trace of the missing men. Two days later, however, scouts stumbled across an abandoned jeep with two working radios. It was a macabre scene: Several helmets and packs had been arranged in a neat pile; and nearby lay a group of dead American officers, among them Major Mitchell.
Sparks moved from the First Battalion and took charge of the Third Battalion. Remembering the example of leadership set by Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily, he made a defining decision that set him apart from many other battalion commanders in World War II. He would stay as close as practically possible to his men, either in a forward command post or in combat with them if necessary, and leave the day-to-day management of the battalion to his second in command. He knew that the closer he got to Germany, the harder the fighting would become. As the battle to break into the Third Reich loomed, he believed he would need to lead the advance if his men were to succeed in taking the next objective, be it a town or a mountain.
THE LOSSES AT Abbenans were repeated throughout eastern France that September. Casualties mounted as the leaves at higher elevations began to fall and winter threatened. Mountains and deep forest stretched along the German border from Switzerland to Holland. As soon as the Allies tried to penetrate this difficult terrain, which afforded precious little mobility, the fighting intensified and turned to bloody attrition—just as it had in Italy.
Allied planners tried to get men and matériel where they were most needed, but supply lines were badly overextended, stretching several hundred miles to Normandy and southern France. When vehicles broke down, they had to be abandoned because of the shortage of spare parts. Gas reserves began to run perilously low. The Allies were consuming more than a million gallons a day. Armies competed for the remaining stockpiles.
At Aachen and Metz and other cities close to or on the German border, the Allied advance ground to a halt. Indeed, from the flooded banks of the Schelde in Holland to the tightly bunched firs of the “Death Factory,” as the Huertgen Forest on the Belgian-German border soon became known, the fighting grew more lethal, each yard costing more in men and matériel. Generals like George Patton, who had been rehabilitated after the slapping incident and was now in command of the Third Army, were increasingly frustrated by the situation and quarreled violently over strategy and supply issues. Hopes of victory by Christmas, which both Eisenhower and Montgomery had predicted, began to fade.
One of the greatest problems was manpower. Unlike the Soviets, the Western Allies were running out of cannon fodder, having badly underestimated the number of men needed to defeat Hitler. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s failed attempt to cross the Rhine at Arnhem that September—the Allies’ only major defeat in Europe—had cost the British six thousand of their finest paratroops. After five years of war, the British Army had, in fact, reached the limit of its human resources, with Americans now outnumbering British soldiers in Europe by almost three to one. Yanks, not Tommies, would do most of the dying from here on out.
An increasingly marginalized Churchill feared his country’s immense sacrifice might be forgotten as the United States assumed the dominant role in ending the war in Western Europe. Distant indeed was the summer of 1940, when the British had stood alone, the English Channel being the only barrier separating Hitler from total European domination. How many Englishmen, Churchill asked, had died since 1939? The answer was sobering indeed, even for a legendary tippler like Churchill: 1 in 165 Englishmen and 1 in 135 Londoners had been killed, compared to 1 in 775 Americans.