CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE LONG DAY CLOSES
We live in a free world today because in 1945 the forces of imperfect goodness defeated the forces of near-perfect evil.
—MICHAEL DIPAULO, FRENCH CONSULATE STAFF MEMBER, ADDRESSING U.S. VETERANS IN 2001
Dachau inmates celebrate their liberation. [National Archives]
DARKNESS FELL ON DACHAU. At 7.03 P.M., Sparks learned that other companies from the regiment were moving toward the camp. He and his men would soon be relieved, and he would then be able to re-form his task force and push on to Munich.
Later that same evening, General Frederick’s chief of staff, Kenneth Wickham, heard mention of Dachau at a briefing.
“What is Dachau?” Wickham asked Frederick.
Frederick didn’t reply.
“Well, what did you see?” Wickham persisted.
Frederick did not answer because to describe what had happened there might lead to him breaking down. He did not want that, not after seeing so much. There was nothing that could excuse what the Germans had done there. That was all that could be said.
Back at Dachau, as the long day finally drew to a close, nineteen-year-old Dan Dougherty of C Company was one of many Thunderbirds who struggled to make sense of the horrors that day: “We knew we had seen something mind-boggling.” That afternoon, Dougherty had entered the coal yard and discovered the bodies of the SS men who had been killed. One of the sergeants in his platoon had crawled over a “mound of corpses two or three feet high and fifteen feet across” and whipped out a hunting knife and cut off a finger. “He wanted an SS ring for a souvenir.”
It would be a cold and sleepless night for other Thunderbirds, “the most sickening and devastating we had ever experienced,” remembered Private John Lee. “The stench, the smell of death … permeated the air to the point that no one could eat his rations.”
Lee’s squad was assigned that night to guarding the camp’s bakery to prevent any hunger-crazed inmates from raiding it. He was sick all night. “I don’t think there was a guy who slept that night,” he recalled, “and I don’t think there was a guy who didn’t cry openly that night.”
Now, at least, Lee and his fellow Thunderbirds knew what they had been fighting for. As the 45th Infantry Division News would soon declare in a headline above gruesome pictures: THIS IS WHY WE FOUGHT. Unlike thousands of others who had died on the long journey to Germany, Sparks and his men had seen why the sacrifice had been necessary. “I’ve been in the army for 39 months,” a Thunderbird would tell a reporter. “I’ve been overseas in combat for 23. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, trucks loaded with food and medical supplies entered the camp, sent from Seventh Army supply depots. The piles of dead bodies had not been removed and were green- and yellow-skinned, rotting in the crisp spring air. Tears flowed from many who saw the camp that day. “We cried not merely tears of sorrow,” recalled rabbi David Eichhorn, who also arrived that morning. “We cried tears of hate. Combat-hardened soldiers, Gentile and Jew, black and white, cried tears of hate.”
By midmorning, Sparks had left Dachau and was again leading his task force toward Munich. On a narrow trail through a dense forest, he came across a group of German forward observers. They pointed their rifles at him and the other men in Sparks’s jeep.
“Don’t move,” Sparks told his men.
Sparks had to think fast.
“Hands haut!” ordered Sparks.
A German lieutenant stared at Sparks.
Anxious moments passed.
The Germans put their bolt-action guns down. “They knew it was over,” recalled Sparks. “Turned out they were lost.”
Sparks and his men pressed on, past orchards where the first buds appeared on fruit trees, the Tyrol Mountains looming to the south, the first flowers showing in pastures, the peaks a jagged white, far higher than Webster Mountain and others to the north of Miami, Arizona, when Sparks was a boy. Then it was on into the suburbs of Munich.
Jack Hallowell, traveling with the regimental headquarters staff, recalled how many Thunderbirds now felt as they entered the birthplace of Nazism: “They wanted to kill. Probably for the first time they realized the full evil of the thing they were fighting.… The urge for revenge was in each man’s trigger finger.” It was just as well that Munich was not fiercely defended, as Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg had been, “for the resulting slaughter would have been historic if the feelings of the riflemen were any guide.”
ADOLF HITLER TOOK one of his two Walther PPK pistols, sat down at a table, placed the barrel to his right temple, and squeezed the trigger. On the wall behind him was an oil painting of Frederick the Great, whose great military feats Hitler had invoked to inspire his generals in the last months of the war. The air was heavy with the scent of bitter almond—cyanide that Hitler’s wife of just a day, Eva Braun, had just swallowed. She lay dead on a couch a few feet from her husband, her eyes open, wearing a blue dress with white collar and cuff.
Throughout the bunker, the news soon spread:
“Der Chef ist tot!” (“The chief is dead!”)
IN CENTRAL MUNICH that evening, the Thunderbirds finally reached the end of their long, bloody march across Nazi-occupied Europe. Sparks commandeered an apartment building for his last command post of the war. It began to snow as the guns fell silent that evening. Soon, a three-inch blanket covered the fields of rubble in the city where Nazism had been conceived. With an eye to history, Captain Anse Speairs, the regiment’s roving adjutant, managed to find an apt place for a headquarters that night of April 30: the famous Munich beer hall, the Hofbräuhaus, scene of Hitler’s failed attempt at revolution, the “Beer Hall Putsch,” that had occurred in November 1923.
A white sign was jauntily daubed above the Hofbräuhaus in large letters so all could see: CP—157TH INFANTRY.