CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BLACK DECEMBER
Thunderbirds approach a house in Bobenthal, looking for German snipers, December 16, 1944. [National Archives]
THE COMMAND CAR WOUND through the thick pine forests of the Vosges, followed by several vans and a trailer stocked with high-quality liquor. It was December 3 when the car pulled up near the 45th Division’s headquarters and thirty-seven-year-old Major General Robert Frederick stepped out of it. He had arrived to replace General Eagles, who had been injured by a mine near Strasbourg on November 30.
It was not a good time for a change of command. The division had returned to combat on Thanksgiving Day and then suffered heavy losses in a nearby town called Sarrebourg, where time bombs left by the Germans had exploded every few hours, causing severe trauma. No one in the division headquarters had slept properly. Everyone was on edge, wondering where and when the next bomb would go off. The Germans had also opened up with 88s on replacements entering combat for the first time and left them splattered on the walls and rafters of a nearby factory.
Frederick’s predecessor, Eagles, had been a popular and highly capable figure, and many Thunderbirds were not overjoyed at the news that the thirty-seven-year-old was taking over. The celebrated cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who was covering the 45th Infantry’s advance now in the pages of the Stars and Stripes, met with Frederick shortly after his arrival. “It will take these men,” Frederick confessed to Mauldin, “an inordinately long time to get used to me, partly because of my age, partly because I replaced a well thought of leader.”
Frederick had led paratroops with exceptional skill and panache. No less than Winston Churchill believed he was one of America’s finest combat leaders of the war: “If we had [had] a dozen men like him, we would have smashed Hitler in 1942. He’s the greatest fighting general of all time.” However, taking up the reins of a hard-pressed infantry division of more than ten thousand men, just as they tried to break into Germany, was an immense challenge. Did he have sufficient tactical experience to react decisively, like Patton, to fast-moving events, setbacks, and openings? Or would he be hesitant and overwhelmed by the sheer scale and weight of his responsibilities?
SNOW FELL AS Sparks led his Third Battalion toward the Siegfried Line, the fabled defensive installations stretching along Germany’s western border for 630 miles, from Holland to Switzerland.
That evening, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Funk of the 158th Field Artillery contacted regimental commander Colonel Walter O’Brien.
“Colonel,” said Funk, “from where we are now we can put a barrage across the border. Say the word and we can toss a concentration into Germany!”
“What are you waiting for?” O’Brien shouted into the telephone. “Fire away!”
The first man to step into Germany four days later was a muddy Thunderbird who came under fire and took cover behind a stone road sign dated 1826. Machine-gun fire raked the nearby fields. The tired soldier waited for a break in the firing, then rolled to the side, got to his feet, and moved into the Third Reich.
Sparks and his battalion soon followed and set up on a hillside north of the German village of Nothweiler. From his forward command post, Sparks could see the concrete dragon’s teeth and pillboxes of the Siegfried Line in the gloomy distance.
IT WAS JUST after dawn when the uneasy silence ended in the Ardennes Forest, two hundred miles north of Sparks. Along an eighty-mile front, the Germans launched their heaviest barrage of the war in Western Europe. An hour later, a brutal SS spearhead followed by some two hundred thousand Germans pierced the American lines, and dozens of Panzers and Tiger tanks began to storm toward the river Meuse. Hitler’s desperate attempt to change the outcome of the war in the west, code-named “Watch on the Rhine,” was underway. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
The German surprise attack was the most serious intelligence failure of the war in Europe for the Allies. The ensuing struggle would rapidly become the largest battle, in terms of participants, ever fought by the United States, with more than eight hundred thousand men involved and almost ninety thousand casualties, including nineteen thousand dead. By nightfall on the first day of the battle, hundreds of German tanks were rolling through Belgium, their commanders hoping to reach the Meuse, cross it before bridges could be blown, and then press on to the strategically vital port of Antwerp, thereby fatally splitting the British and the Americans.
To the south, meanwhile, Sparks and his division had made a significant advance in the opposite direction, into Germany, penetrating over three miles and opening a gap in the German lines four miles wide. The breach had involved fierce fighting by some fifteen thousand men. The Stars and Stripes trumpeted: SEVENTH SMASHES INTO GERMANY. But few in the United States would notice. All the major headlines would now be about the fighting farther north. Once again, the Thunderbirds had gotten to their objective, and once more events elsewhere, as in June with D-Day, had robbed them of recognition. The Thunderbirds had been the first Americans to enter Germany from the south. No force in history was thought to have freed so many people and marched so far to do so. But no one back home now knew or cared.
IT WAS THE most critical meeting during the entire Allied liberation of Europe. Early on Tuesday, December 19, General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied supreme commander, gathered his senior generals in a Maginot Line fortress in Verdun. Fifty miles away, fanatical SS troops were still advancing toward the river Meuse. If they succeeded, Hitler would in theory be in a position to negotiate terms to end the war in the west and then be able to turn all his forces toward the east.
Verdun was indeed a fitting location, being the site of some of the bloodiest carnage and costliest bungling by Allied generals in World War I. The dank, cold atmosphere matched the generals’ mood as they sat sullenly nursing their cups of tepid coffee on the second floor of the French barracks. Several tried to hide their embarrassment and shame, knowing their intelligence had failed spectacularly. “The meeting was crowded and atmosphere tense,” recalled Sir Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence. “The British were worried by events. As so often before, their confidence in the ability of the Americans to deal with the situation was not great. Reports had been reaching them of disorganization behind the American lines, of American headquarters abandoned without notice, and of documents and weapons falling into the hands of the enemy.”
Eisenhower entered the room, pale and tense, chain-smoking as usual. He took one look at his despondent staff, huddled in their coats, forced a smile, and then announced confidently: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.”
Eisenhower’s career was on the line. He had no option but to buck up his deflated staff. His strategy of advancing into Germany along a broad front, stretching from Holland to Switzerland, now looked like a mistake, as the ever more surly and arrogant General Montgomery had long argued, much to Eisenhower’s great irritation.
One of the generals seated in the Maginot Caserne building needed no cheering up: America’s last great cavalryman, General George S. Patton. He too had argued that summer against the “broad front strategy,” maintaining that a series of bold thrusts at perceived weak points in the German lines would be much more likely to end the war before Christmas, less than a fortnight away.
“Hell,” Patton said, “let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ’em up and chew ’em up.”
Eisenhower dragged on another Lucky Strike, then turned to face Patton. He had saved Patton’s career after the slapping incident in Sicily. Now he needed Patton to return the favor.
“George, I want you to go to Luxembourg and take charge of the battle, making a strong counterattack with at least six divisions. When can you start?”
“As soon as you’re through with me.”
There was laughter, especially from some of the British officers who believed Patton was being typically brash but also unrealistic. To pull off his counterattack, Patton would need to move 133,179 gasoline-powered vehicles over 1.6 million road miles in atrocious weather.
Patton was not bluffing. He had already drawn up not just one but three plans for a Third Army counterattack in the Ardennes.
“I left my [HQ] in perfect order before I came here,” said Patton.
“When will you be able to attack?” Eisenhower asked again.
“The morning of the twenty-first,” replied Patton. “With three divisions.”
The assembled officers’ reaction was now “electric.” “There was a stir, a shuffling of feet, as those present straightened their chairs,” recalled one aide. “In some faces, skepticism. But through the room the current of excitement leaped like a flame.”
“Don’t be fatuous, George,” said Eisenhower. “If you go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second.”
“This has nothing to do with being fatuous, sir. I’ve made my arrangements and my staff are working like beavers at this very moment to shape them up.”
Patton outlined his plans and then turned to face fifty-one-year-old General Omar Bradley, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, who had served with him in Sicily.
“Brad, this time the Kraut has stuck his head in a meat grinder.”
Patton closed his fist around his cigar, held it aloft, and then made a grinding motion.
“And this time,” he added, “I’ve got hold of the handle!”
Even the dour and increasingly dyspeptic Bradley, whose forces had been split almost in two, now had to laugh.
The conference broke up, the attendees filled with renewed confidence, at around 1 P.M. that December 19, 1944.
As they left the meeting, Eisenhower and Patton shared a few choice words.
Eisenhower mentioned that he had just been given his fifth star.
“Funny thing, George, every time I get a new star I get attacked.”
Without missing a beat, Patton fired back: “And every time you get attacked, Ike, I pull you out.”
Among others leaving the conference at Verdun was fifty-seven-year-old three-star general Jacob Devers, who commanded the U.S. Sixth Army Group, which included General Sandy Patch’s Seventh Army, to which the veteran Thunderbirds belonged. The handsome and highly capable Devers, a classmate of Patton’s at West Point, was no favorite of Eisenhower’s. In fact Ike, the supreme politician, had unfairly criticized Devers for providing inaccurate evaluations of the fighting in his sector.
Eisenhower now issued Devers fresh orders. His Seventh Army was to abandon its push against the Siegfried Line. Instead, it would now fill in for Patton’s divisions heading to the Ardennes. Indeed, the Seventh would replace the Third along Germany’s frontier. Eisenhower also told Devers that he must at all costs prevent the Germans from reentering “those mountains [the Vosges].” If that entailed giving up hard-won ground to hold a firmer defensive line, then so be it. There was to be no repeat of the Ardennes crisis. There could be no second successful German counterattack, not if Eisenhower was to retain the confidence of his political masters.
One can only imagine how Devers felt that cold December day as Eisenhower left Verdun to return to Paris. He had just received extraordinary orders: If the Germans attacked in force in his sector, he was to do what no other American general had yet been asked to do in Europe. He was to retreat. It was a shameful thing for any American soldier, let alone a proud and talented three-star general, to have to contemplate. And in the meantime, Devers would have to make do with just six divisions to man almost a hundred miles of the most difficult terrain on the entire Western Front.
THICK FLAKES DRIFTED down, covering the woods and hills outside Gandersheim labor camp in central Germany. Twenty-seven-year-old Robert Antelme, a French writer and resistance worker, made his way to a latrine through the fresh snow. It was now almost six months since Antelme had been arrested in Paris, interrogated by the Gestapo, and then deported into the Reich’s vast gulag of labor and concentration camps. He wondered whether he would ever again see his thirty-one-year-old wife, fellow French writer Marguerite Duras.
Antelme walked over to a rail beside a trench and untied the strings holding up his pants. The pants dropped, revealing torn underwear and a sickly mauve coloring on his thighs.
Antelme began to defecate.
Tomorrow it’s Christmas. Maybe there’ll be a truce for the ovens at Auschwitz tonight?
“Tonight we don’t kill. No, not tonight. It’s off until tomorrow.”
It was too much to hope for and Antelme knew it. It was just wishful thinking. Not until the Americans, British, or Soviets arrived would there be an end to it all. Until they appeared, there would be no reason to hope, no reason to do anything, just suffering and “shit, true shit; true latrines, true ovens; true ashes.…”
THREE HUNDRED MILES to the southwest, the snow fell on Sparks’s positions dug into the rock-hard soil on a bleak hillside. The leafless hardwoods’ topmost limbs were coated in a fine ermine. The whiteness made everything appear fresh and pure.
There were no carols, not even a murmured “Silent Night” that evening. Men shivered, huddled three to a hole, limbs numb, faces drained of color, a crude, snow-crusted canvas cover over them if they were lucky. No playing soccer in no-man’s-land with the enemy, no tidings of joy for the men just over the ridge somewhere, waiting to kill or be killed. “We exchanged Christmas greetings with the Germans,” recalled Sparks, “in the form of artillery fire.”
Sparks knew that his men’s morale was at an all-time low. Desertions from the Thunderbird Division and others had never been higher as men endured their second Christmas away from family and loved ones, sharing cigarette butts and defecating into their helmets in freezing mountain foxholes all along the Western Front, from the besieged Bastogne in the Ardennes, to northern Italy, where men now cursed whenever they heard Mark Clark’s name. “I sure wish I could see my darling wife so I could cry on her shoulders,” wrote one Thunderbird to his family. “There are only a handful of us ‘old fellows’ left. Maybe my luck will change for ‘better,’ let’s not even think of worse.”
Another Thunderbird recalled how the living now shared that Christmas with the dead: Frozen American and German bodies were piled high on trucks near one command post, stacked on top of one another like so many uniformed boards. Everyone swore about the Germans, the Allied generals, and the press, and scoffed bitterly at the flag-waving back home and at the politicians’ false promises made to keep a naïve American public buying war bonds. “I don’t owe my country a damned thing” was one refrain. Hope had given way to the universal foxhole religion of cynicism, marked in the most devout by outbursts of piercing black humor. The optimistic rallying call “HOME IN FORTY-FOUR” had become “STAY ALIVE IN FORTY-FIVE.”
The day after Christmas, Sparks was on the move again. His Third Battalion seized two towns, Niedersteinbach and then Obersteinbach, where they dug in and awaited further orders. He knew his men were increasingly vulnerable and they knew it too. It didn’t take a military genius to wonder what might happen if the Germans launched a fierce counterattack as they had to the north, in the Ardennes. Sparks had fewer than a thousand men to patrol and defend a front that stretched almost ten miles. It was a job for a division, numbering ten times more men, not a depleted and demoralized battalion.
When Sparks walked through his positions near Obersteinbach, within striking distance of the Siegfried Line, he could sense his men’s growing anxiety. To break the tension a little, he announced that they were all to fire their weapons at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Sparks himself would fire first, opening up with his trusted shotgun to mark the beginning of his third year at war in Europe. His entire battalion would follow suit, shattering the frozen silence.
HITLER WAS UNDERGROUND once more, in his latest headquarters, colored crayons in shaking hands, beside a map table. Increasingly, he spent his days strung out on amphetamines, needing to be brought down by sedatives to be able to sleep. He had withdrawn from public life, having made his last speech before a crowd in 1943. He refused to visit bombed areas as he moved from one troglodyte’s lair to another, preferring fevered fantasy to reality. He could not even bear to look at his own troops, ordering his valet to pull down the blinds in his carriage when his train passed them.
The Battle of the Bulge was still raging, but the German attack had been stalled. Hitler’s forces in the Ardennes were, in some places, being pushed back toward the Fatherland. Yet the Führer was not downcast, even though his “last great gamble” had clearly not paid off. Instead, he was convinced that one more surprise strike at the Allied lines, this time in the Vosges, would decisively change the course of the entire war. The German First and Nineteenth Armies were to strike in three days’ time, break through the lines of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army in Alsace, and then destroy them before taking on Patton’s Third Army and wiping it out.
Before Hitler ended the day with his standard post-midnight snack of tea and cream buns, he addressed a group of field commanders.
“This is a decisive operation,” stressed the Führer. “Your success will knock out half the enemy forces on the Western Front. We will yet be masters of our fate.”
Operation Northwind, the last major German attack in the west, was about to begin.
THE SONGS GREW louder and more drunken as midnight approached. The young men in gray uniforms, the symbol of a black Edelweiss mountain flower on their caps, SS runes on their lapels, sang along to the radio and tried to forget the war for one night at least. Among them was twenty-year-old Johann Voss, a machine-gun squad leader in SS Mountain Infantry Regiment 11, “Reinhard Heydrich.”*
Having joined the SS at age seventeen and fought in Finland against the Soviets, Voss had spent the last few days wandering the Norwegian island, stealing kisses in a barn from a skinny blue-eyed farm girl, and learning how to operate his unit’s new MG42 machine guns. “I remember us singing more and more loudly,” Voss recalled, “and that at midnight [a comrade] fired a whole box of tracer ammunition in the air with the new MG42 he had mounted in an anti-aircraft position. We switched off the radio when we heard some Party big shot speechifying. We wanted none of that.”
Voss was one of more than four million German soldiers sworn to support Adolf Hitler and to defend their homes and families that winter. He and his comrades had not fought for four years simply to lay down their weapons at the borders of the Reich. Despite heavy losses, Voss and his fellow German soldiers were far from physical and moral collapse: There were still 168 infantry and 25 Panzer divisions intact. The Waffen SS, to which Voss belonged, could boast twenty-three well-equipped divisions, seven of them armored. All were supplied with superb weapons, like the MP40 submachine gun, manufactured in huge quantities from stamped steel and ideal for use in forested terrain like the Vosges.
Voss and his comrades in his Black Edelweiss Regiment had long become inured to the empty phrases of politicians, just as Sparks had long since stopped paying attention to the jingoism that was interspersed with radio broadcasts of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller tunes. But that did not mean that men like Voss, having spent their entire adolescence in the golden years of the Third Reich, were not still fiercely committed to Hitler and, more importantly, to one another. In fact 62 percent of captured Wehrmacht soldiers still professed loyalty to their Führer. The percentage among the SS, who had sworn a solemn blood oath of allegiance to Hitler, was higher still.
THE SNOW FELL on the drunken revelers, on Buckingham Palace, and on Nelson’s Column at the heart of Trafalgar Square. Standing among the throngs, counting down the last seconds to 1945 was twenty-four-year-old American reporter Marguerite Higgins, hoping she might finally get to the front lines before the war was over. She would in fact do so, encountering Sparks in the most extraordinary circumstances, but as bells rang out across London that night the prospect of filing even one decent story seemed remote. For months now, the talk back in America had been of the war ending in Europe.
The ambitious Higgins had arrived in London from New York a few weeks before aboard the Queen Mary. Among other reporters crossing the Atlantic had been the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, who vividly recalled Higgins’s arrival on board. Higgins had missed the sailing and reached the Queen Mary as it actually steamed out of New York Harbor. Flanner had watched as a ladder was dropped to a tugboat and then a slim, blue-eyed woman in army uniform climbed onto the deck, her helmet falling back to release a cascade of blond hair. “She looked so sweet and innocent,” recalled Flanner. “I immediately thought of Goldilocks and wanted to protect her.”
The headlines that New Year made Higgins even more aware that she was missing the “Big Show”: U.S. FLYERS BLAST NAZI ARMOR FLEEING BULGE. BRITISH IN GERMANY, 29 MILES FROM DUSSELDORF. TWIN DRIVES IN HOLLAND BREAK NAZI LINE. BRITISH LAND IN GREECE, NAZIS WITHDRAWING. 3RD ARMY SMASHES THROUGH SIEGFRIED LINE.
THERE WERE ALSO stories about the Red Army on the front pages. It had stalled in late 1944 in its advance toward Berlin but by New Year’s Day was advancing once more. As it did so, it liberated concentration camps hastily abandoned by the SS in the face of the Soviet onslaught. Few prisoners were found alive. Most had been killed or were being marched west, ahead of the Soviet advance, deeper into the gulag of six-hundred-odd camps in the Reich, where seven hundred thousand people still languished, caught between life and death.
Twenty-one-year-old Jack Goldman was one of fifty-eight thousand Auschwitz prisoners marched west from Poland, where some four million European Jews had been exterminated in the Final Solution, including most of Goldman’s German family. His father had in fact been shot in front of him in retaliation for the assassination of SS general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.
To avoid Allied planes, the SS made Goldman walk at night in the cold and snow. He and his fellow survivors, marching in rows of five abreast, sometimes managed a few minutes of sleep, held up by the men around them. Then they were ordered into open freight cars and taken to a transit camp in Germany, where Goldman was placed in a barrack that looked to him to be no bigger than a doll’s house but which was soon home to fourteen other men. Fifteen thousand of his fellow prisoners from Auschwitz had not survived the journey to Germany.
Soon after, Goldman fell ill with typhoid fever and became delirious. One day, the SS ordered him and his fellow survivors to get ready to march once more, and Goldman could not move. He was too weak.
A German guard approached him.
“Shoot me,” said Goldman. “Do what you want.”
“Get up!”
The German hit him with his rifle butt.
“Go!” said the German.
Goldman somehow found the strength to get up. Those who couldn’t were shot.
GOLDMAN AND OTHERS being forcibly removed from the territories closest to the Soviet advance were joined that winter by hundreds of thousands of German civilians fleeing the Red Army, clogging the iced roads with their carts loaded with meager possessions, desperate to find sanctuary from “Ivan,” the murderous Slav rapist invoked by Nazi propaganda.
The Red Army liberated mostly women as it swept into eastern Germany that January—the men were either dead or away fighting. “Women, mothers and their children,” noted one Soviet officer, “lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.”
The mass rape often ended with the victims being mutilated and bludgeoned to death. Such was the indiscriminate vengeance of Stalin’s warriors. “We are taking revenge for everything,” wrote one Soviet soldier to his parents. “Fire for fire, blood for blood, death for death.”
No wonder that at least fifty thousand traumatized refugees were arriving in Berlin each day—a pathetic fraction of the eight million civilians fleeing west, their future dependent on the speed of the Western Allies’ advance. Indeed, the faster Sparks and his battalion pushed forward, the more women and children they would be able to save from rape and enslavement under Stalinism. The quicker they destroyed all German resistance in their path, the more Jews like Jack Goldman and other victims of the Nazi terror like Robert Antelme might survive. Every setback and delay now cost more than ever.
ON NEW YEAR’S Day 1945, Johann Voss and his regiment, part of the 6th SS Division “Nord,” sailed for the mainland of Norway and the following day left by train for Germany. He and his fellow SS were about to face their greatest test yet. The last of Hitler’s elite, they were headed to fight in familiar winter conditions, this time in the mountains of the Vosges, where an increasingly nervous Sparks and his men were huddled, trying their best to fend off frostbite, in their dugouts and foxholes.
* Voss is a pseudonym.