I Marched with Patton, page 11
A couple of German soldiers in heated rubber suits were caught swimming toward one of our bridges. With large rubber fins, they had on special breathing apparatuses that allowed them to breathe underwater. Equipped with explosives, they were obviously out to blow up our bridge. Fortunately, our soldiers spied them and hauled them in. Another German ploy that failed.
The Fourth Armored Division met only scattered resistance. In some of the little towns, the police and a few citizens with small arms put up opposition, but the real story was the number of prisoners of war we were taking. In one day, we hauled in 18,800 POWs. Nothing was stopping us. We were on the move to Berlin.
Much later, we learned about an argument that occurred in the backroom. England’s Twenty-First Army Group was in a position to race forward and take Berlin. However, General Dwight Eisenhower believed the German capital was an easier reach for the Soviet army approaching from the East. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported this idea, assuring Ike that in a postwar situation, the Soviets would be cooperative and amenable. Man, oh, man alive! Would Joseph Stalin ever have gotten a laugh out of that idea!
23
Letters From Home
I hadn’t forgotten about my family or Alice Anderson; I just hadn’t heard from them in quite a while. The pressure of the war kept my mind elsewhere—particularly on survival. We had just pulled into the little town of Boppard when the mail caught up with us. Boppard is in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, lying in the Rhine Gorge. A quaint, beautiful area, the town was a good place to receive mail from home. I had five letters from my mother and four from Alice. Believe you me, the men grabbed their mail and devoured those letters.
Mom’s first letter updated me on my brothers and sisters. Since she had seven children, including me, there was plenty to report. Buck and Bob were doing fine with school. Of course, Mildred and Faye were married and gone from the house. Mother said they were all worried about me and prayed every day for me. She said the news from the war front sounded positive and only hoped I was doing fine. I guess she had no idea how cold it had been.
As for my girl, she kept me up on all the doings around school. Sounded like the basketball team was playing all right, although no one in Weleetka got that excited about bouncing a ball in a gymnasium. Alice wrote about her friends and what they were doing, who was going with whom—that sort of thing. Sitting there in the middle of a war where anyone could get killed at any moment, I found most of Alice’s report a little childish. But she told me how much she loved me and hoped we’d be back together soon. Alice said she’d love me forever. Her letters always had a faint scent of perfume. I think I reread all four of them at least three times sitting right there in the middle of that little town of Boppard.
“Okay, men!” Sergeant Maddox called out. “We’re loading up and moving out. Let’s go!”
The soldiers started poking their letters into their gear and moving toward the trucks. Mr. Dobson was already in the driver’s seat of the truck carrying spools of wire. I walked toward him. In my shirt pocket, I kept one of Alice’s letters handy—the one in which she promised to wait for me forever.
The truck roared to life, and we were on the road again. By this time, the Germans had figured out what we were doing and begun counterattacking. The strikes were relatively small, though. I gathered that they had discovered they no longer ruled the sky, and that we were in their backyard and coming on full steam ahead.
The Fourth Armored Division drove twenty miles, bypassing Darmstadt. However, the Ninetieth Infantry Division came behind it and cleaned out the town. By March 20, all units of the XII Corps had crossed the Rhine and were soon on the doorstep of Frankfurt. The primarily industrial city offered resistance mainly from police, firemen, and air raid wardens, and only a few military troops. It fell quickly to us. At the same time, the Germans were improving their defensive positions on the east bank of the Rhine. When the VIII Corps made a landing in assault boats, its men came under heavy fire but got across successfully. Light artillery fire and mortars didn’t really make a dent in their landing. The next day, another beachhead was established at Saint Goar by the Eighty-Ninth Infantry Division. In both of these crossings, fire support came from the Seventy-Sixth Infantry Division on the river’s west bank. In the next day or so, we came roaring across both the Rhine and the Main rivers near Mainz. The enemy threw up stiff resistance, but with only moderate artillery support.
Our trucks came to a halt, and Sergeant Maddox appeared at the rear of the unit’s truck.
“Okay, men. We’re setting up the howitzers right now. We need to get that wire strung up the hill. We’ve got to blast the Nazis out of their socks. Get up to that hilltop and give us a reading on where we’re shooting and what we’re hitting.”
Mr. Dobson jumped into the smaller truck that hauled the wire for communication. Our unit grabbed its rifles and quickly started stringing wire. Walt Brandon took the lead along with Snuffy Smith. Snipers were always a possibility, so Al Jackson stood guard with his rifle poised. Of course, he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We could hear the artillery and mortars firing closer than was comfortable. No one was wasting time.
Once we got to the top of the hill, with a large rock outcropping, we could look down on the fortifications far in front of us. No question about it! The Nazis were giving us all they got. We began digging in, making a foxhole in case of an attack.
“Look, Corporal,” Mr. Parker said to me. “We need only one man up here observing. You’re good at it. Why don’t the rest of us go down the hill and make sure no one cuts the wire?”
No one argued. Getting off that hill was one good idea. The top was like a perch where a parrot could get his feathers blown off. I hooked up the wire to the transmitter and prepared to make my reports. I could soon see our artillery making adjustments and hitting the enemy more squarely. Abruptly, a Messerschmitt circled overhead and made a swooping dive just above me. I was relieved when the surveillance plane didn’t return, but I was sure he’d spotted me.
For the next forty minutes, I kept sending reports down the line. My binoculars told me we were right on target. I could see the enemy soldiers scurrying around. Suddenly an explosion shook the hill. Almost before I could move, another blast exploded just below me. I had become their target.
Mortars began blasting in. No reflection was needed to tell me that the Messerschmitt had reported us, and the enemy decided to blow me off the top of the rise. I made one last call on the line, telling the unit down there with the big guns that I was their new target and was signing off. I held my helmet on tight and dived into the nearest foxhole. I slapped my hands over my ears and hoped I wouldn’t go deaf. Huddled up in a prenatal ball, I started praying. Psalm 91 came immediately to mind. I’d looked at it so many times that I didn’t need to take it out of my pocket. I just kept repeating the promise “I choose the God above all gods to shelter me.”
I could hear trees splintering and falling. I felt the dirt flying through the air and dropping on me like giant raindrops. After what seemed like an eternity, the explosions stopped. I guessed they figured no one was left. Possibly, our howitzers had knocked out their cannons. I didn’t know, but I was just glad to still be alive. The German bombing had destroyed my transmitter and blown the wire off the rock outcropping. Nothing was left to do but crawl back down the slope, with my ears ringing.
The men were crouched behind bushes and rocks. Upon spotting me, Jack Postawaiet looked like he’d seen a ghost. Snuffy Smith stared at me too. “We thought maybe they’d blown you off that crest,” he said.
“They certainly tried,” I answered. “Next time, one of you can sit on the perch and see how you like it.”
Mr. Parker stood up and surveyed the long field in front of us. “They’ve stopped firing,” he reported. “Not sure what that’s a sign of.”
“Maybe they’re hotfootin’ it out of there,” Al Jackson suggested.
“I don’t know, but we need to go back and see if we can find out who’s in charge to tell us what to do next.”
“Maybe Sergeant Maddox is down there by the cannons,” Mr. Dobson said.
“We’ll find him,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We worked our way carefully along the edge of the field and through the brush. The roar of our cannons kept shaking the earth and was loud enough to make one deaf. Once we got back to the road, we could smell the acid of the howitzers still firing. The sergeant came walking up to us.
“Good job, men,” he said. “I think we flushed them out. We think they’re now in a retreat.”
“Excellent,” I said.
“You want to watch out, though,” he warned. “The enemy is coming at us in a new way. Ever hear of the Volkssturm?”
The men shook their heads.
“The Volkssturm is apparently a new idea Hitler’s come up with. Means ‘the people’s storm.’ It’s a national militia established by Nazi Germany. It was not set up by the German army, but by the Nazi Party on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. He’s been talking about them protecting the Nazis’ rightful gains in war—if you can believe it. I hear they are rounding up everyone from sixteen to sixty who isn’t already in the military. They slap a pistol in his hand and tell him to shoot every Yankee he sees. They are also capable of setting off mortars. We now have orders to summarily shoot any civilian caught with a firearm. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is promoting this wild idea that the Nazis can overcome us by their force of will. A little on the goofy side with our guns sticking down their throats, but that’s about all they’ve got left.”
“Don’t they know that their boat is sinking?” Walt Brandon asked.
“I guess if you’re gonna drown, doesn’t make much difference what you say.”
The men laughed.
“What’s ahead?” I asked.
“We’re still figuring that one out,” Maddox replied. “We ought to know soon. You boys sit down and take a smoke. You’ve earned a breather.”
We sat down and started rereading those letters from home once more. Alice’s perfumed pages sure smelled good.
24
The Soviets
We didn’t know the Russians that well until the war was over. In Weleetka, Oklahoma, we knew as much about the Soviets as we did about how to make a Swiss watch tick. We knew that they’d had a bloody revolution of some kind twenty-however-many years ago. Sounded like a lot of people got killed. From what we heard on the battlefield, we figured the Nazis had really whacked the Russians hard with an invasion aimed at capturing Moscow and ultimately turning Mother Russia into the Fatherland’s personal plantation, with the hated Bolsheviks as slaves. Picking up the rest of the war story helped us realize what a stupid mistake Hitler had made by attacking everybody in sight at the same time, including the Russians. Small countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were one thing. The Soviet Union, which he attacked in June 1941, breaking a nonaggression pact signed less than two years before, proved to be quite another. Overnight, Hitler turned the USSR, with its enormous and ferocious Red Army, from an Axis Powers sympathizer into part of a mighty triad with England and, a short time later, the United States.
Two years earlier, the Germans suffered a humiliating defeat at Stalingrad. The six-month-long conflict had raged on with both sides taking terrible losses. By January 30, 1943, one estimate suggested that the Germans had forty thousand to fifty thousand wounded soldiers without bandages or medications. Field Marshal Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus directed the Wehrmacht ground attack. Their assault was vicious and without mercy. Day and night, heavy artillery pounded everything in sight. Children suffered greatly. Many were separated from their parents, and a frightening number never found them again. When the unexpected bombing in Russia began in 1941, many families were still out on holidays. Many children had just started in pioneer camps, like Boy and Girl Scouts, where youth learned self-development. The chaos of evacuations caused millions of parents to end up far away from their children, with no way to find them. Often the only hope of the youngsters was to be taken in by strangers. The cry of these native children was “Who will take care of us?” Horses were fed to unsuspecting orphans. The loss of parents ended up a loss of memory. Questions such as “Tell me about the day I was born” could never be answered. The Nazi attack left a mark on multitudes of children that would never be removed.
Overcoming insurmountable odds, the Soviets not only hung on but also outmaneuvered the Nazis. With Soviet troops breaking into the German headquarters, the Germans were forced to surrender ignominiously. German casualties exceeded 150,000—with another 90,000 POWs. Humiliation was showered down on the entire German war effort. The loss stung.
Two years later, on January 12, 1945, the Soviets launched the biggest offensive of the war. Across the Belorussian and Ukrainian fronts, tanks, artillery, and soldiers came rushing at the Nazis. In two days, the Russians made tremendous advances and began to pressure the German defenses in East Prussia. Recognizing the serious assault, Hitler transferred the Panzer Corps four days later with the intention of mounting a flank attack on the Polish city of Poznan. All he accomplished was depriving East Prussia of much-needed defensive manpower.
By January 17, the Soviets’ Forty-Seventh Army had encircled Warsaw, the Polish capital. Along with the northern forces, the steady move toward the coastline from Danzig to Königsberg created a new frontier. The Nazis couldn’t stop them. Warsaw had witnessed the worst horrors of war. Holed up in the horrifically overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, the city’s struggling Jewish population rebelled against the highly armed Nazi soldiers but finally was overwhelmed by the German army. There were just too few of them, with almost no weapons. The Jews had fought valiantly, but the tide had turned. The Soviet army began applying highly forceful pressure, and although the Nazis tried to scramble, the SS’s dominance had come to an end. The Soviets liberated Warsaw.
By this time, the Nazis realized they had lost the Battle of the Bulge and started repositioning their forces. Hitler moved the Sixth SS Panzer Army from the Ardennes to Budapest, Hungary. While it wasn’t possible for us to know exactly what the Germans were thinking, a realist couldn’t help but recognize that these were moves of desperation. A few days later, Hitler began renaming his units. For example, Army Group A became Army Group Centre. Again, such moves appeared to be more out of desperation because of the enormous numbers of troops lost and having to retreat than out of any sort of significant strategic planning.
On February 1 Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, the Soviet general and marshal of the Soviet Union, began the advance toward Berlin. However, his First Belorussian Front, composed of several armies, ran into a determined German resistance at Kustrin. The Germans fully recognized what was at stake and knew they must stop Zhukov or face horrendous consequences. Zhukov made an unexpected move and joined up with the forces commanded by Ivan Koven, waiting on the Oder River—which was all that separated Poland and the Third Reich. The Russian front now extended from Zehden, south of Stettin, Pomerania, all the way down to the Czech border. Pomerania existed in the northeastern part of Germany and had been in one of those areas that shifted back and forth between Germany and Poland. The Soviets were pushing hard.
The Germans had seriously underestimated Russia as an opponent. Many of the German soldiers came from tranquil farm communities and were infuriated by the barbaric behavior of Soviet soldiers. Word spread quickly that the Russians would take revenge on the Germans in every way possible. When a village fell, surviving German women were raped. Naked women might be nailed to a barn door and left to die. There was no end to the stories about what the Soviets would do. The Germans had brutally butchered the Russian citizens, but now the tables were turned.
I came to the conclusion that members of the Roosevelt administration, sitting in their padded chairs on the other side of the world, never grasped how cruel and crude the Soviets could be. Because they were allies, I think the truth was soft-pedaled by American propaganda people. In reality, the Soviets came on like a throwback to the Dark Ages.
General Patton, on the other hand, got it! He let it be known that he was ready to take on the Russians when we got through with the Germans. Later, we learned he was warned to keep his mouth shut, lest his comments start World War III. With all the problems the Soviets caused after the war, how can anyone deny that Patton had profound insight?
Near the end of February, the Ukrainian Front took the area around lower Silesia, and the whole territory fell into Soviet hands. In the middle of March, the Soviet Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts began their assault along the Danube River. The armies pressed their way through Hungary and took Budapest. They were on their way into Austria and Vienna. Of course, after the war was over, Hungary ended up behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviets had driven out the Germans only to leave a dark shadow over the Hungarians that would last for decades.
The battle for Budapest proved to be a horrible confrontation with the Germans. Hitler did not listen to his generals’ recommendations and ordered the relief of Budapest, now held by the Red Army. The capture of Budapest gave the Soviets a unique opportunity to quickly advance into the Balkans. When the Russians sent two officers carrying white flags to negotiate a surrender of the Germans, the Nazi garrison shot them dead. The bloody battle continued.
The Germans reached the Budapest airport. Hitler demanded that the army fight to the last man. However, the Soviets formed a special Budapest Group Corps to spearhead their attack. The fighting continued street by street, house by house. The Germans’ final attempt to take the city came with the Sixth SS Panzer Army attack. Because the Soviets already held the city, all the Germans could muster was six operational tanks, while the Red Army took back the airport. The truth is that the Germans fought hard. They simply could not overcome the Soviets. The price paid: thirty-five thousand killed and sixty-two thousand captured. In the end, Hitler’s insistence on holding Budapest ended up compromising the flanks of the Reich.
