No Woman’s World

From D-Day to Berlin,
A Female Correspondent Covers World War Two

IRIS CARPENTER

Review

From Five Best: Books by Women Writing in World War II by Judith Mackrell, Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2021.  

3. More than 200 female journalists were accredited to the Allied forces by the end of World War II, but it wasn’t until the final months of the war that a select few were allowed to report from the front. Writers like Iris Carpenter had found their own illicit ways to the fighting, but did so at their own peril. “No Woman’s World” is a coruscating indictment of the system against which they had to battle. Nonetheless, it covers the struggle impressively, from the Battle of Britain on through V-E Day. The power of the book derives less from its coverage of battles than its unsentimental honesty. Carpenter records her own confused emotions on first entering Germany and having to decide how to view ordinary German citizens—as suffering victims, or the enemy, or both? She is no less forthright in her descriptions of the American soldiers with whom she traveled—many of them poignantly young and courageous but also brutalized by years at war. Her bluntness make this memoir a riveting read.

Grade Level and Copyright 

Grade Level is 10.8 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with three sample chapters.

First edition published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946 without maps or photographs.

Electronic edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2022. This electronic edition contains maps and photographs not included in the 1946 edition.

This ebook is in the public domain, and is free of all copyright restrictions. It is also free of digital rights management protection so you can distribute copies to your students, their parents, and your colleagues. 

The cover photograph is in the public domain through the U.S. National Archives and is available here. The correspondents from left to right are Ruth Cowan, Associated Press, Sonia Tomara, New York Herald Tribune, Rosette Hargrove, Newspaper Enterprise Association, Betty Knox, London Evening Standard, Iris Carpenter, Boston Globe, and Erika Mann, Liberty magazine.

See our other biographies, novels and popular history at ebooksforstudents.org. See all of our titles on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3brofzU.

Comments  or questions to support@ebooksforstudents.org or (202) 464-9126.

To:

First Army’s Operations Officer ‘Red’ Akers (my husband), in acknowledgment and appreciation of all he has done to integrate ‘No Woman’s World’ into the military background of war in Europe.

Preface

Stumbling into the white-carpeted drawing-room came people disheveled, bleeding, and covered with soot and mortar dust. One carried a baby whose face was mashed. There was no question of getting a doctor or taking anyone to a hospital. Three parachute mines had fallen within a few hundred yards of the house, one exploding, the others making the only two roads out of town impassable. Until bomb-disposal squads could move them in the morning, this first house to stay whole, on the edge of several acres of homes that looked as though they had been earthquaked, had to be casualty-clearing station, mess hall, and warden’s post.

Nearly a hundred people were washed, first-aided, and bedded-down for the night. Somehow features were found in the baby’s face, though nobody knew if it would ever see again. ‘It’s Esme’s,’ said the woman who had brought it in. ‘We got thrown out and buried in the garden when the bomb came down, but I don’t think she got out, or Joe either—the shelter roof came in on them.’

Wardens came and went, reassuring, consoling frantic inquiries, ‘Is Jim all right? Have they found Mary yet?’

From the cupboard under the stairs there came a cry, ‘Mummy!’ Mummy rushed. On her mattress among the sandbags, her ten-year-old daughter sat straight and wide-eyed with something that bit deeper even than fear of the raid. ‘I’ve been awake ever since the big bang,’ she said, ‘and I’ve just heard Daddy say that Uncle Joe and Esme are dead.’ The two looked at each other a long moment in which there was suddenly no years between them. ‘I know,’ her mother told her. ‘We haven’t been able to tell Aunty yet. Peggy and June were in the shelter, too. They’re all right, but very frightened. Will you take care of them if I put them in here to bed?’

From the time Joe’s wife first voiced her fear that her husband and daughter were trapped, she had sat staring straight in front of her, Peggy on one side and June on the other. Suddenly, she swayed to her feet, walked unsteadily into the hall, and began shouting, ‘You know, whether they’re all right or not, and you won’t tell me, you won’t tell me, you won’t tell me!’ Wardens held her, soothing while hysteria mounted. Then somebody grabbed her and shook. ‘Very well,’ clipped a firm voice, ‘you’re going to know, you’ve got to know, if you’re ready for it—but are you?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, and followed very calmly out into the night to the place where men, working with flashlights, were struggling to lift the tons of concrete which had suffocated her daughter and broken her husband’s neck.

That was my house in Kent at the end of the phony war in September, 1940.

Outside the rubbled office building, a policeman grabbed a shoulder with a Take it easy there now, son. We don’t like this any better than you do.’ Sweat glistened on his face, in the flickering glow of the fire surrounding them, but the sweating, as he said, was not all because of the fire—not by a long way. ‘How much longer?’ demanded the man under his hand. ‘Another hour? God! You can’t let her wait that long. Haven’t you got a gun? Give it to me. I’ll do it myself. No, I won’t. I’ll get her out. It must be possible!’ He turned to the huddle of wardens staring helplessly into the debris and pleaded, ‘You’ll help me, won’t you? We won’t give up yet, will we? We mustn’t give up yet.’ He sank on his knees on the pavement, and scrabbled a hole in the wreckage to put his head in, and sobbed, ‘Mary, Mary, darling. Don’t worry. We’re going to get you out. We’re going to get you out!’

The policeman watched him for a minute with as much compassion in his face as Christ Himself could have portrayed, then pulled out his truncheon and clipped him smartly on the head.

For there was nothing to do for Mary, fully conscious and pinned down with her child in that basement, but wait until water from a broken main lapped over her head.

That was Gray’s Inn Road, London, in March, 1941.

‘Mum,’ announced Richard, bursting into the kitchen a good three hours before his usual time out of school, ‘they can’t get Joan out. Come and help.’

Mum, panic clutching at her and with no time to more than appreciate the white, sick look on Richard, stampeded with the other mothers and fathers to the school building with a big hole cut right down through the middle of it.

While the children were at lunch, a German plane zoomed in and dropped bombs to blast three floors down on them. Wardens and nurses, and we newspaper correspondents who were sent to cover the story, brought out bits and sorted them into sacks, and carried jackets and satchels and little inanimate things like fountain pens and pencil boxes, across the street to the social center where parents waited to identify them.

One of the schoolmistresses, burrowing for three hours, found her own child, literally a piece at a time. ‘Maybe it isn’t all Caroline,’ she said, ‘but I’ll feel better thinking it is, and I guess nobody else will mind.’

That was Lewisham, London, just a little while before D-Day.

1

‘GOD!’ objected the General, ‘I don’t mind dying, but at least I’d like a say in how I send other men to die.’

The General was Clarence Huebner, of the United States 1st Division, chosen to command American assault troops on Omaha beach in the operation top secret orders classified as ‘Bigot,’ Command Headquarters knew as ‘Overlord,’ and the rest of the world spoke of as invasion of Europe. The comment was made to the First Army Operations Officer who gave him the final plan. In accordance with that plan, two-thirds of Huebner’s assaulting ‘Force O’ were to be carried over the English Channel in the big oceangoing liners which for this one trip had personnel landing craft instead of lifeboats swinging from their davits. These men were to arrive at their assembly areas about three A.M., transfer into personnel craft for the trip ashore around five. Remainder of ‘Force O’ were to follow them in on tank landing craft and landing craft infantry, supported with fire from weapons mounted on the ships and the new secret swimming tank which was making its debut for the occasion.

Huebner wanted more men in the liners. He had room aboard and work ashore, he claimed, for twice the number of men carried. He did not get them because General Omar Bradley thought it better to keep men and vehicles in the supporting waves equally balanced. There was no point, he maintained, in dumping thousands of bodies on beaches without adequate supporting weapons and there was lift for only so much. Much as it was, it was less, much less of everything than was needed, though it utilized just twice the number of men and twice the amount of material envisaged when the invasion of Europe was first planned for the spring of 1943. That first planning was in 1942 when General Marshall sent General Eisenhower to the European Theater of Operations. British lack of enthusiasm for the invasion project soon promoted a radio message from Marshall to Ike which, through the stilted phraseology of Army coding, amounted to this—’Find out why the British are holding out on us. Is it a shortage of material or men, or haven’t they got what it takes?’

At that time the Americans had only two divisions in Europe—the 1st Armored and the 34th Infantry stationed in Northern Ireland. British regular divisions were still slowly building back what they had lost at Dunkirk. Tree trunks; concrete emplacements which would not have stopped a jeep, let alone a tank; with concrete pillboxes at main crossroads and barrels of oil at strategic points ready to be poured across roads and ignited—made up their defenses. Along the entire coastline there were men enough to repel attack on only one sector—that held by the Canadians. Elsewhere Home Guard units, with only one or two weapons per unit, kept watch and prayed.

When the first United States division arrived to relieve the one British division, thin-spread along the Dorset coast, the British officer relinquished command with one look at their equipment and a fervent ‘Thank God, to see something else for victory at last besides a spirit for it.’

Some humorist christened this first proposed invasion operation, ‘Roundup.’ Planning was begun for it notwithstanding the fact that a roundup of everything the Allies had in all their wishful thinking could not have provided enough to mount attack on a successful scale within the year’s time limit. Some action, however, was inevitable.

Russia was rampaging across Europe in the longest battle line in war history. Headlines were demanding something better to set type to than the undistinguished meanderings of the British armies in Libya and losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. Churchill, champing on his inevitable cigar, reminded that good invasion build-up time was being wasted in sending ships around the Cape instead of through the Mediterranean, pleaded, ‘Let’s make the Mediterranean safe, at least, and start from there.’

Reluctantly, Washington conceded. Operation ‘Roundup’ became Operation ‘Torch’ and an amphibious landing in Africa instead of France. And how fortunately! The Americans had enthusiasm and an urge to get going and get it over with, to pace the best panzer divisions. They had, also, radio batteries enough, they discovered when their divisions put to sea, for only three days’ fighting. They sailed, too, on the decision that there was no room aboard for Graves Registration personnel, so that when they got into action they could not properly bury their dead. There was Kasserine and all the bitter rest it took to point the difference between war this time and war in World War I. The British cracked, ‘How green is my ally!’ ‘Yep, just green suckers,’ the Yanks cracked back. But by the time they were through with Africa and Sicily, no more letters were being sent home like the one from the officer who wrote, ‘The British fought heroically—the Americans are still learning to make the most of their magnificent weapons.’

Came the day when General Bradley, jeeping along on an inspection tour, got zoomed on. By that time our fighter-plane cover was almost as good as the Germans’, but a leap to the ditch still preceded any attempt by the well-trained combat soldier to determine whether it was one of our planes or one of Jerry’s. Having ditched, Bradley saw that the plane was one of ours and wiggling wings. ‘I’m on somebody’s wanted list,’ he told his driver. It was Ike's.’ Bradley outranked the messenger from his seat and flew into Headquarters to learn that he was to go directly to Britain to start preparations for the Allied invasion of Europe across the English Channel.

So, just about a year to the day, plus enough experience to make them ‘know at least how much they hadn’t known before,’ as one of the planning officers put it, the staff of what subsequently became the American Plans and Operations Branch of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces, prepared to take up work on a new version of Operation ‘Roundup.’ Only this time they called it ‘Overlord,’ and they found that their planning had to be integrated into much which was much more difficult to cope with than the military problems involved.

During the time they had been away fighting, much work had already been put in on ‘Overlord’ by ‘Cossac,’ code word for Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Command. Those plans provided for the big crack at Hitler’s Fortress Europa, with a mere four divisions—one American, one British, one Canadian, and one airborne. How many divisions could the Germans have put against them? Around fifty!

Bradley got to Britain to start work on his plan in September, when his comment on this was a one-word one. He could not say it where it would do any good, though, until the following January, by which time Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery had arrived in London.

Bradley’s assertion that it was ridiculous to try mounting the attack on a four-division scale found immediate support with Monty whom he first approached, and subsequently with the Supreme Commander. ‘No doubt about it. We must get more stuff,’ declared Ike.’ The problem was where?

We were short of ships and supplies, but it was still, at that time, planned to invade Europe simultaneously from the north and south. Operation ‘Anvil’ from the Riviera was to hit as hard as Operation ‘Overlord’ across the Channel. Just to help out, British shipbuilders had a strike. Behind already on invasion craft, the planners found themselves a further twenty landing craft a month back of schedule.

There was only one thing to do—scrap the southern landing for the time being, bring up all available ships and supplies from the Mediterranean, and divert ships, planes, and supplies en route from the States to Southern France to Britain. Washington, however, was loath to do this. General Marshall sent Colonel ‘Abe’ Lincoln, with a group of experts from the War Department General Staff, to Britain for a quiz on plans and loading schedules. They checked and worked on alternatives until they were exhausted and the iron came through the Bradley cloak of quiet imperturbability. ‘Let’s face it and not kid ourselves any longer,’ he told the conference. ‘We’ve none too much of anything we need. No use having two or three cracks, not knowing if either will stick. The show on the north has got to stick. Then we can hit ‘em in the south or any place else we please.’

Bradley’s reasoning carried. Early in January, the commanders of American and British naval, air, and ground forces, working in the big, sprawling Saint Paul’s School, London, which was planning headquarters, learned that all the invasion strength we could muster would be hurled on five beaches in Normandy—three British and two American.

There were only three possible sites for a landing along the French Channel coast. The first was Brittany, with good ports, but with the disadvantage of being too far off for the Air Forces to keep up an air umbrella. The second was Normandy (still far away for air cover, since fighters could not stay for more than half an hour over the target zone), but having the advantage of being less heavily defended than any other bit of coastline. The third and obvious choice was the Pas de Calais, which had every possible advantage to be derived from a short sea trip and constant air protection, but was rejected because of extremely heavy defenses and the fact that it was where the enemy expected us.

Supreme Command used this rejection for a brilliantly conceived and superbly executed cover plan which had the Germans completely fooled, so fooled that when we finally invaded, they were so confident that the army transports moving up Channel were heading for Pas de Calais, that fighters sky-circled there all night long ready to attack, while the lone operator of the radar station near the actual landing tried all night to warn German Headquarters at Cherbourg without being able to convince them that the ships speckling his screen were anything more tangible than the figment of a drunken imagination. ‘Yes, we know there are ships coming in all right,’ they told him, ‘but not on your part of the coast. Go back to bed.’ ‘Bed!’ ‘phoned the indignant Kraut, I’m just giving myself up as a prisoner.’

Rommel was expected to start counter-attacking by the third day, throwing in all he had to try to fling us back into the sea by D-Day plus 6. Late as a month after our landing he had still not moved his main reserves down from the Calais area because he was still convinced that the Normandy attack was a feint, with the main effort coming across the Straits of Dover and the North Sea from Britain’s east coast.

Directing brain behind this cover plan, which was so much more successful than the most optimistic ever dared to hope, was a chubby, blue-eyed English lieutenant colonel called Strangeways. He was assisted by America’s Colonel ‘Bill’ Harris.

Between them they mounted and directed what was actually a secondary invasion made to look like the primary one. Nothing was too elaborate or too much trouble for the ingenious pair. Everything they did was designed to appear entirely logical to the enemy on the score that nobody would take that much trouble for anything except the real thing. So, in perfect good faith, Germans received messages over the radio network and hookup which existed for nothing but their deception. They got information on troop movements and invasion drill and build-up of units all along the east and southeast coast, where our troops were as convinced as the Germans were, of course, that they would be going over in the first assault waves. Much of this information was relayed by spies supposedly working for the Nazis. One of them actually received an Iron Cross with a personal message of thanks from Hitler for ‘the very valuable assistance he had given the Reich.’

Invasion barges and material were stacked up in the east-coast ports and ammunition dumped along the hedgerows in East Anglia just as they were in Devon and Dorset. Two bombs fell on the Pas de Calais for every one dropped in Normandy or Brittany. When invasion ships finally nuzzled their way out into the Channel, one force went Calais-ward, zigzagging a pattern of ships far in excess of their actual number, while on Headquarters ships of the real attacking force, commanders kept their fingers crossed and their eyes glued on radar screens. Would it really come off? It seemed altogether too much to hope for, but come off it did! All night long their screens recorded fighter planes taking off from the airfields around Le Havre to circle until their gas ran out, waiting to deal with the armada sailing serenely a hundred miles west.

Many factors and thousands upon thousands of hours of research, computing, and planning went into the preparation for, and selection of, sailing time for that armada. All of it was based primarily on the tide.

Tides in the English Channel flow fast and furiously. Every ship trying to get ashore on the ebbing tide would have grounded before troops could be disembarked. At low water some of the beaches chosen for landing were so uneven that troops would have had to traverse patches where the sea would have been deep enough for swimming. Flooding tides, though most advantageous for landing, meant ships had to take the worst possible chances on mines and beach obstacles.

Army ground commanders expected to land under cover of darkness as they had done in Africa and Sicily. The Navy announced, to their dismay, that they could not be sure of landing craft at the proper beaches or of pouring observed fire on coast defenses unless they had light. The Air Forces, after a night of bombing dispersed targets all along the coast, wanted the hour after dawn for saturation bombing ahead of landing troops. Also, in order to make the maximum use of our cover plan, we wanted the enemy to see convoys heading up Channel presumably toward Calais. It was planned that our liners carrying first assault waves and their landing craft would turn off the presumed route just after dark in order to arrive at the assembly areas in time for debarking troops into assault craft so that they could hit the beach an hour after dawn. Finally, the airborne divisions needed moonlight.

With all these factors taken into consideration, the best compromise that could be made as to timing was three hours before high water and one hour after daylight on a spring tide. The best date was reckoned to be the second of May.

Regretfully, but firmly, the men working at the desks at Saint Paul’s and elsewhere said, ‘No. It would be at least a month after that date before everything could be ready.’ The ready date was made, therefore, the thirty-first day of May, and designated ‘Y’-Day. ‘D’-Day—to be decided at the last moment to give attacking troops the benefit of the most favorable weather conditions—was to be set as soon after ‘Y’-Day as possible in a series of dates of which June 4 offered the best tide conditions.

Anything as vast and complex as an operation of this size, involving as it did so many headquarters, so many staffs of different services and different nationalities, could not be expected to proceed without friction. And did not.

To begin with, there was the natural concern of various commanders for everything appertaining to their own responsibility. Admiral Ramsey, whose job it was to see that the invasion fleet got safely across the Channel, thought nobody paid nearly enough attention to the ease with which the Germans could have parachute-mined all port exits, then destroyed our whole imprisoned invasion effort with fire and buzz bombs.

Monty had the bocage country and Rommel’s panzers driving down from Calais to contend with, and wanted tanks and still more tanks to cover his left flank.

The Canadians were embittered because their size limited the sound of their voice; the French furious because Allied trust and comradeship did not extend to the point of letting them in on any of the conferences.

Bradley kept plugging away at insistence on two landings instead of one for the Americans. He wanted a force landed on Utah on the west side of the Carentan Estuary as well as one on Omaha on the east. And he got it. It was a gamble. The Germans had flooded all rear approaches to Utah beach, and from the air, water defenses—never mind anything else—looked almost insuperable. Bradley still thought them worth assailing. His idea was to take Cherbourg, thus protecting his main landing from troops who would otherwise most certainly be moved in to attack. How right he was is now history.

He also wanted the 101st Airborne Division dropped between Utah and Carentan and the 82nd Airborne Division strung out across and completely cutting off the Cherbourg Peninsula. He got his airborne divisions, too, though not cutting the peninsula, because just before D-Day the Germans moved one of their divisions, and the 82nd had to drop in much closer to support our landing infantry.

Getting the airborne divisions involved Bradley in quite a verbal war. The British Navy were strenuous in their objections to such air strength flying over them when they had, as they said, ‘plenty else on their minds’. We can’t take a chance of being bombed,’ said Ramsey. ‘If anything flies over our ships, we shall have to shoot.’

Since they had already lost twenty-odd C-47’s to Navy shooting in much the same circumstances in Sicily, the Americans were much concerned that this hazard should not be added to the rest. Eventually, Bradley’s calm persuasion prevailed in this as it did in all else he set his mind on—even to the extent of flouting Monty in the matter of Headquarters.

Like the Twenty-First Army Group and the British Second Army, Bradley’s D-Day Command Post was picked out for him on the British side of the Channel. ‘Since radio operates quite as well from the British coast,’ said the British, ‘there is no sense setting up Headquarters right in the middle of the fighting,’ Bradley agreed. Then blandly announcing that ‘he liked to see what was going on,’ sailed on Admiral Kirk’s Headquarters ship,

U.S.S. Augusta, which took him ashore, incidentally, so soon after H-Hour that soldiers recognizing him let out an incredulous ‘Christ!’ And then a concerned ‘Somebody oughta get him outa here.’

Getting those two airborne divisions and an infantry division for Utah, in addition to the divisions scheduled for Omaha, meant practically doubling all the air and sea lift available. ‘Can’t be done,’ said the experts. But it was. Americans, moreover, because of their systems of loading and utilizing fewer and more efficient vehicles, managed to get two reinforcing divisions into the same tonnage the British took for one.

Next came the difficulties of persuading the British to keep liners transporting assault troops anchored long enough for personnel craft to make several trips to shore. Unwilling to risk losing their big ships from bombing by Jerry planes, they wanted to load and cast their boats away as soon as they arrived at the assembly areas and then head for the British coast. Heated discussion arose before conviction came that these big luxury liners were more secure on D-Day in a transport area than singly heading for home, and that getting three times the number of first assault troops to the beaches per liner was more important—much more important—than loss of tonnage.

Heaviest strain of all on Anglo-American relationship came the afternoon at Saint Paul’s when the Americans discovered that without consultation their sailing zone had been moved around shore a few hundred miles. The Navy, fearful of the bombing target presented by the tight-jammed ports and assembly areas, had decided that, instead of sailing from Portland, Weymouth, and half of Southampton, the Americans were to leave from Torquay, Brixham, Plymouth, and Falmouth with assault support troops coming all the way round Land’s End from the Bristol Channel. ‘Bombs or no bombs,’ announced Bradley firmly, we leave from ports first scheduled for us.’

Then, just when everything seemed to be running really smoothly, there was a terrific scare because somebody doubted—and with scientific evidence to support it—that armor and vehicles would get over the beaches without bogging down.

All through the planning phase specially trained volunteers had been assembling data from beaches all along the French coast. They crossed the Channel by midget submarines which would then anchor for them to swim ashore and collect information on everything from local garrison strength to samples of sand from the foreshore. Saint Paul’s had its scare when somebody decided that the sand sample from the chosen invasion beaches at Omaha had a peat subsoil likely to collapse under the weight we intended putting over it. That decision cost hours of last-minute exercises by men who must have wondered why in God’s world they had to slew tanks and bulldozers, trucks and guns, through slushy ooze where Britain goes down to the sea at her worst.

Ultimately, when everybody was convinced that all possible eventualities had been foreseen and contended against, air reconnaissance photographs showed up new formidable underwater obstacles ordered by Rommel along the sea side of the Atlantic Wall. Combined Army and Navy demolition teams were given the job of blasting a path through for assault troops—and one week’s rehearsal as late as April 26 for what turned out to be one of the most unsatisfactory and suicidal jobs of the war.

Any one of a thousand and one hitches might have occurred, any one of a thousand and one mistakes might have been made in this intricate command pattern. In fact the vast project moved to jump-off point with nothing deviating from plan except the arrival of world shipping due to berth at British ports around D-Day. These ships had to stay at sea nearly a week longer than they need have done because the British Ministry of Shipping got all mixed up. There are those who will forever insist that the fact that they did was a mere bit of prankishness on the part of the British Navy. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the British Minister of Shipping failed to get notification of any date for invasion beyond the Y-Day one. He went ahead with plans in the belief that Y-Day was D-Day and kept incoming ships at sea from May 31 until berthing space could be found in the jammed ports for them after the invasion armada sailed.

Troops were alerted on the first of April and went to their marshaling areas about the fifteenth of May. Most elaborate measures were taken to keep them in camp and preserve security, but still, one of the most incredible things about the whole incredible invasion operation, was the fact that secrecy was generally kept. Assault troops had to be briefed three or four days before sailing, with the fearful risk that, having been briefed, bad weather would postpone the attack. Had that happened, those hordes of men would have been left with the world’s biggest secret on their minds for at least two weeks, possibly a month.

Units, however, had to be broken for shipment. Men and their vehicles had to land separately and every man had to know his coordinated place so he could do his part in reorganizing with the least possible confusion. It was decided, therefore, that there was nothing for it but keep the men confined to camp and hope that the show would be on at the first try.

Brigadier Williams, of Monty’s Headquarters, wanted to make every camp a concentration one—wired in. I’d like nothing better myself,’ confessed Bradley, ‘but there isn’t enough barbed wire in Britain to do it.’ As April blossomed into May, battle preparation became so much a part of the everyday backcloth to southern English life that even the children had the edge blunted off their interest. There had to be a skyful of planes and gliders to excite an upward glance. Vehicles which lumbered or slithered or negotiated their way through the narrow, tortuously winding streets had to get themselves into an accident or tear a house down rounding a corner to get people interested. It’s the darnedest thing in this whole attack zone,’ marveled GI’s; all hell about to break loose around here any time now, yet from the way these folks go around you’d never think there was anything more exciting on hand than tomorrow’s sunup.’

It was in this same part of the country on Sunday morning, September 3, 1939, that I heard Prime Minister Chamberlain’s declaration-of-war speech. ‘It is evil things that we shall be fighting against. Brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

An Air Force officer fished on the floor of the hotel lounge for his respirator and strode off without daring even a goodbye look at the girl whose knuckles shone so white on the hands clenched on her bag. The woman in the hotel desk said, in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘We’ll have to get to hate the Germans. Won’t that seem funny? I wonder how long it’ll take?’

In the villages people stood in groups at their cottage doors while roast beef burned and potatoes and cabbage stayed in the kitchen sinks. A Territorial soldier going to join his unit pushed a pram on which his kit bag was perched behind a baby. A jolly, curly-haired baby it was, chuckling and beating enthusiastically on a tambourine. Beside them the mother walked with a taut, set face that stayed in the mind’s eye much too long. The general attitude was summed up in a ‘So it comes to war. Too bad!’ Fortunately, for peace of mind, few knew how little, how pitifully little, we had to back up the Prime Minister’s certainty ‘that right would prevail.’

Now, in this last week of May, 1944, everything was at last ready to fight those evil things with something more substantial than devout conviction. The countryside back of the invasion springboard was a fantastic sight. For mile after mile grass verges before hedges snowed with May blossom were invisible under stacks of ammunition. Every road was sign-posted to war with the myriad-colored disks and code signs of units hidden completely in the countryside verdant, lovely, in its new summer green. So peaceful, so far away from war it looked, that the notices on the big watertanks by the roadside, saying, ‘Do not drink this water without halogen tablets!’; the signs in the hedges telling convoy drivers, ‘Know your distances. This is sixty yards from the last sign’; the side roads cut out for transport parks—seemed unreal. Unreal as vistas through woods, misty with the sheen of bluebells against which red crosses glimmered—hundreds and hundreds of red crosses on tents and ambulances waiting to take the first casualties back, ready to move over the Channel as soon as the bridgehead was established.

Every tree and hedge played its part in a great camouflage. Woods and hedgerows were spiky with guns and jammed tight with vehicles. Towns and villages bristled with men and armor and equipment. Yet from the air southeast England looked unmenacing as Maytime.

The only chance a newspaper girl had of talking to troops was by touring camps with the Red Cross doughnut girls. Every day their clubmobiles lumbered away into the beechwoods to give the boys, sweating it out for the toughest mission of all time, something to think about other than what was ahead.

No girls, any time, anywhere, had a warmer welcome, for it was heaven just to hear ‘Hello there’ in an American accent, to have coffee almost right and doughnuts which made home seem nearer even without the victrola records of favorite jukebox numbers. So, scrambling out through the woods, the boys came, their mess tins jingling, to join the long, long line the girls hated but couldn’t help, because it was the only way of serving that many men quickly enough. Having grabbed their coffee, their two doughnuts (‘Sorry, not enough for more than two, boys’), and with any luck, at least a brief answer from the girl behind the counter to the inevitable ‘What part of the States you from?’ off they went to lean against the tree trunks, dunk and gulp and talk...

They talked of baseball, letters from home, the abomination of British beer, what was for chow, and girls. Mostly about girls. Dialogue like, ‘So you think they’re lousy as that? Not all of ‘em. I’ve met some mighty fine British girls. Besides, you gotta be fair. You tell ‘em you love ‘em—you wouldn’t get far if you didn’t anyway—and maybe they think it’s all right because they think you really do love ‘em. Or maybe they’re dumb, or sorry figurin’ all we got comin’. Or maybe they’re just that way. Anyway, they’ve given us a pretty good time, you gotta admit.’

‘Fair enough,’ his buddy agreed; all I can say is, though, I hope to Christ when we get back home we don’t find our gals have been givin’ guys a good time the same way. I’d break my woman’s neck.’

They sure gotta lot of nerve, these men,’ commented one of the doughnut girls. ‘Raising all hell ever since they left home, and here they are expecting to go right back and find their women just the same, never having looked at anybody else all the time they’ve been away. Suppose the British men are thinkin’ just the same about their women. Or were Englishwomen always the way they act now?’

‘Not where my mother came from, anyway,’ said her colleague. She went on filling coffee canteens in the long line of outstretched hands, and when it finally trickled out, propped her elbows on the serving counter, knuckled her fists under her chin, and soliloquized: ‘You know, four years is a hell of a long time to have your man away; more men around every day than you’d otherwise meet in a lifetime and all of ‘em lonely and woman-hungry. Maybe we’ll get some shocks about our own women; so will our boys before we’re through with this thing. My mother was a nurse last war. She told me nobody began to realize what war cost till they found out what it had done to the women. Plenty, by all accounts. This time it’s going to be plenty more.’

‘Well,’ said her wagon mate, ‘if you see any signs of me wanting to slap out my bedding roll along the path to perdition, you can come right on over and bat me on the head. Meanwhile, get those fists from under your face and come on over here and help me clear up or we’ll never get home before curfew.’

There was nothing to tell us that this would be the last curfew to race in this or any of the surrounding camps. Vehicles, after all had been ready packed and waiting, snugged under the trees for several weeks. Soldiers were no more tense or casual, devil-may-care, hilarious, serious, or matter-of-fact than usual. They were no different from any happy-go-lucky bunch of dog faces on any other day when dusk was not to engulf them in a convoy flow to port and everything to come thereafter. Somehow, despite security consciousness, one expected them to be.

One expected that some reflection of all each man felt must show up in the mass. It did not. They clambered into their trucks, cursing over the weight of ammunition belts and making cracks about how much of it they’d get time to use, God-damning the sons-of-bitches that made it a day instead of a night landing, Krauts, K-ration, and the long hours of waiting as their convoy trickled into its appointed place in the bigger and still bigger, sluggish and still more sluggish, rivers of armor, meandering their way to a coast so tight-jammed with craft that the feat of walking on the sea would have been no miracle.

British assault troops sailed from Southampton, Portsmouth, Newhaven, and Shoreham with a reinforcing division out of the Thames Estuary.

The Americans left from Portland, Weymouth, Southampton, Brixham, Torquay, and Plymouth, with reinforcing divisions coming round Land’s End from Bristol and arriving, incidentally, so seasick that many of them claimed they would have been happier to lie down and die than have to stand up and fight.

D-Day was alerted for June 4, and in spite of seas which had the men licked without sight of the enemy, the first shiploads got away on time on June 3. They had been six hours at sea when the Navy caught up with them to order them back to port on the score that General Eisenhower had decided there was enough else to contend with without that kind of English summer day.

Those days in port were tougher, insist the men who endured them, than any combat. Two hundred were crammed into LCI’s and fifty into LCT’s. There were no cooking facilities, and, on the smaller ships, no shelter of any kind from wind or rain. Expecting every hour to be buzz-bombed, or burned to a crisp by the Luftwaffe, they read, munched K-ration, debating whether sweet pork loaf, the cheese, or the biscuits got worse with familiarity, and whether H-Hour was twelve or forty-eight hours away, or whether this was to be another dry run, with the whole nerve-tearing thing to be gone through again in a month’s time.

On the first two tides after H-Hour, 105,000 men and 10,000 vehicles were to touchdown on the five beaches.

Monty planned to get to Caen on the third day, using the 6th Airborne to protect the left flank on which he was certain Rommel would hurl panzer divisions from the Pas de Calais. He meant to move quickly over the beaches, seize the line to Caen-Bayeux as his initial anchor, then pivot on Caen to drive south to protect the United States flank, to extend the line as far as possible. His troops for the assault were the British 3rd and 50th Infantry Divisions, the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, and the British 6th Airborne Division.

Bradley’s forces had to assault Utah and Omaha beaches on either side of the Carentan Estuary and link forces with the 101st Airborne Division who had Carentan as their objective with orders to hold it until the 7th Corps, driving up after their landing on Utah beach, and the 5th Corps, fighting in from Omaha, could gain contact. The 82nd Airborne, at first slated to land on the west side of the Cotentin Peninsula, were moved in to land just behind Utah beach at Sainte Mere Eglise, thus preventing the Germans moving reinforcements to drive our landing troops back into the sea. They were to link with the 101st at Carentan and continue with left-flank protection for the 7th Corps fighting toward Cherbourg. Bradley planned to take that port in fourteen days (it took nineteen), then turn and link up with Monty and drive down south to Rennes and the mouth of the Loire, where we intended to build our first major supply port in Quiberon Bay.

Utah beach landing was under command of Major-General J. Lawton Collins of the 7th Corps, with Major-General Barton, commanding the 4th Infantry Division, spearheading the attack. On Omaha, Major-General Gerow’s 5th Corps were going in with forward elements of two divisions—the 1st and the 29th under command of Major-General Huebner of the 1st.

When, on June 6, invasion finally bannered the London headlines, it had folks surging around the newsboys, refusing, for once in their war-disciplined lives, to queue. Hands, over and above the tangle of other hands, thrust pennies, dragged a paper from the melee and held it high enough for others to read it too. Apart from that, the biggest news of the war to date broke and lapped into the routine of eight million lives without much apparent disturbance of the normal day.

Appreciation of all it meant was there all right. People felt the way they do when a storm breaks. Glad, but a bit sick in the stomach thinking of the thunder and the lightning. At Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s more visitors invaded the dim quiet than the great churches had held since Dunkirk. Nobody doubted that the landing would be successful, with the people of France fighting as hard against the Germans as we were fighting. Or that the war would be over in three to six months.

They would not have been so optimistic had they talked to the wounded streaming back into southern English ports. Men came back to tell of the muddle and confusion which they were convinced, on Omaha beach at least, must mean retreat. ‘Better make room for a lot more of us—and not all on stretchers,’ they said as the medics slid their litters into the ambulances. ‘Jeez, it’s murder over there. They’ll never make it stick.’

Ships came in crammed with wounded. In one, in which doctors had worked non-stop for thirty hours, the cook said, wearily wiping an arm over his galley table, ‘Medics had to grab even this to operate on. For three days I’ve been fixin’ chow on the floor.’

Wounds were unbelievably terrible—hardened as we had grown to horrifying wounds in more than two years of war-reporting on civilian battlefields. There was a boy whose trouser leg and jacket arm had been hacked away so the medics could field-dress the mess a mine had made of him as he crawled his first few yards into France. His face was ghastly with burns which had taken from him, among much else, the power to see. When asked how he felt, he said, ‘Mad as hell. I guess all that training was just a waste of good dough.’

There was a kid with fair, tousled hair, that jutted through his bandages, and no right hand any more. ‘What gets me,’ he said, ‘is I didn’t get a chance to get the son-of-a-bitch that got me. Got me before I got out of the water, he did. Gosh! I hardly had time to get scared.’

On the British beaches, Monty’s forces were ashore in good time for a foothold firm enough to lift the nag of anxiety from even the most pessimistic of red-tabbed shoulders. Monty did not make Caen as planned, but landing went according to schedule, and casualties, apart from those suffered by the 6th Airborne, were well below estimate. The 6th had a bad time. They were dropped along the marshy banks of the Orne for ‘duck shooting,’ as one of them put it, for Germans sitting along the high ground back of the river.

American airborne divisions had a bad time, too. Dropping west of the main road between Carentan and Cherbourg, they were badly split by the Merderet River and landings which straggled them all the way across country from Cherbourg to St. Lô. Resupply for both divisions was set for the night of D-Day and three hundred and twenty-five missions were flown by pilots who came back to their bases frankly confessing that they had just ‘dumped the stuff for the poor bastards and hoped, because they’d no more idea than the Army had where they were.’ Two days after landing, the 82nd Airborne reported only twenty-one hundred effectives—less than half their division. It was not so bad as that because half the men reported missing were really holed-up in enemy-held territory waiting for the chance to rejoin their unit, and actual air-drop casualties were nothing like as heavy as first feared, though they were heavy enough, God knows.

Mud, incongruously enough, caused nearly as many casualties as the Germans. Paratroops landed in the marshy ground west of Carentan to find themselves shoulder-high in rushes and ooze which first entangled, and then, after they had struggled to exhaustion point, slowly sucked them down to drown. Others landed in trees, to hang as helpless targets for Germans who did not care where they shot as long as the shooting meant a long and hurting way to die. Among the paratroops who managed to land in a tree without getting shot was a newspaperman, who was asked subsequently what he thought about as he struggled frantically to free himself before a German could pull a bead on him. ‘All the way down through the sky and all the way down from that god-damned tree I was thinking the same thing,’ he said. ‘There must be easier ways than this to make a living.’

Glider fleets followed paratroopers in. With them came medics and the first Civil Affairs detachment to land in France. Their initial task was arranging for local labor to bury the dead. Nobody expected many happy landings for glider troops. Fields were short—much too short—or marshy. Germans also had cords slung between the poles which bristled on every stretch of country where aircraft might land. Cords were attached to 105-mm. shells. Ground in which poles were planted was, of course, heavily mined.

Gliders smash when they land badly, spilling bodies in no way to see—bodies split and splashed and strewn—twenty-odd in one hedge. A very lovely hedge it was, with wild roses blooming joyously and a nest of young birds with beaks wide-yawning above something that had been a man’s head...

Heavy as the cost was, however, it was justified, as nearly as such spending can ever be justified, by results. The airborne divisions, in spite of the almost suicidal nature of their mission, accomplished it. As Bradley had foreseen, their diversionary interest contributed vastly to the success of the Utah landing. The other factor which lessened the purchase price for Utah to a mere fraction of the estimated casualty tagging was the fact that troops came ashore in the wrong place. Their three-thousand-yard front was fifteen hundred yards south of the stretch of sand marked on the landing maps, and was one of the luckiest mistakes of the war. Men wading in found the beach practically clear of menace. Better still, a causeway across the flooded beach defenses was still intact. ‘Better take care of our flank,’ decided Commanding Officer Colonel van Fleet, and sent a task force to do it—up to the bit of beach which had been scheduled for the landing. That task force ran into the toughest fighting of the day against dug-in defenses and bitter opposition. Nevertheless, by dusk they had fought their way ten thousand yards into France for what looked like the only American foothold. For across the Carentan Estuary on Omaha beach, 5th Corps and General Huebner’s 1st and 29th, were finding the going grimmer than even Huebner had expected.

2

IT WAS crisis at Omaha from H-Hour on, with practically nothing developing according to plan.

To begin with, resistance was heavier than we expected. Rommel had fifty divisions which he could have moved up against us, but only one of them, so Intelligence informed us, was manning the beach defenses from Carentan across Omaha toward the three British beaches. That was the 716th Infantry. Intelligence, unfortunately, knew nothing of the German 352nd Division dug in the Atlantic Wall behind Omaha waiting for us, or so our soldiers thought. Prisoners stated that they were there for invasion rehearsal and were astonished when it became the real thing—or part of the real thing, for they were still certain that the big show would come from farther north across the Straits of Dover. That this was also German Command conviction was proved by the fact that Rommel made no serious attempt to reinforce his divisions on Omaha for more than a week after the landing.

The underwater obstacles, which had become obvious as a major force to be reckoned with only a short time before D-Day, proved a bigger hazard—much bigger—than anyone had foreseen. Navy and Army engineers in teams were sent in to clear just ahead of the first-wave troops. The Navy had to cope with obstacles under water and the Army with those above. Vicious seas, a tide race with a twenty-foot drop between high and low water, and withering fire poured from the cliffs, made the job, without question, the toughest of the entire war. Casualties approached the hundred-per-cent mark. Beach exits could not be opened, nor could ships, men, or supplies be landed on schedule. Troops got intermingled or landed on the wrong beaches with their assault craft smashed and not a chance of getting supplies in or wounded out. Craft carrying men and vehicles ashore got dumped into the sea so far out that they had to throw their weapons and equipment away to swim in, while their vehicles and supporting weapons just sank. Part of this was due to direct hits on vessels, part to the frank anxiety of the naval crews to cast away their cargoes and get to hell out of the place as fast as they could. Thirty out of the sixty swimming tanks—the secret invasion weapon of which we had such high hopes—were drowned without being able to fire a single round of their so desperately needed supporting fire. Such stuff as did manage to get in milled around hopelessly in fine target practice for Krauts holed in cliffs with visibility that enabled them to be choosy enough in their shooting to pick off almost every officer and NCO the minute he hit the beach.

This tangled time schedule, caused by heavy seas, and even heavier opposition, threw out the entire early build-up program. Small craft were unable to unload and start ferrying according to plan. On top of crowded conditions and faulty organization at Southampton, the entire reinforcing machinery through this main exit port broke down so completely that for several vital days nothing moved.

Wherever troops hit France on those Omaha beaches—Dog, Easy, and Fox—they took terrific punishment, as, feet slipping in the shifting sand, men stumbled through gray wave caps which raced over them to slap them down with their too-heavy equipment, toss them on the beach, suck them back, toss them on again among the nightmare seaweed of jumbled equipment, smashed boats, drowned and broken bodies...

Brunt of the punishment fell to the 16th and the 116th Infantry detailed to take the beach marked on the invasion map as ‘Easy Red.’

It was a small beach at the mouth of a wooded gully through which ran the Ruguet River and later one of our four exit roads from the sea. Gun emplacements laced the slopes on each side, with summer villas converted into pillboxes. Woods were tunneled under and fortified so the Germans could and did fight their way back through them for miles without ever having to come into the open. The whole gulch—’Dead Man’s Gulch,’ the boys called it because it cost more in lives to take than any other bit of the entire beachhead—was an enemy warren. It was the Atlantic Wall, unfinished, but as impregnable as Goebbels had ever claimed.

From the sea the view across the Wall was as unmenacing-looking as the Normandy landscape into which it fitted as naturally as the apple trees and much less noticeably. It was only when the boys with the big red ‘I’ of the 1st Division and the blue-and-gray patch of the 29th on their combat jackets arrived that it became visible—visible as a wall of fire so withering that it cut men down in drifts which will forever haunt the memories of those who had to fight their way in over them.

One of the big tank landing ships attempted to beach—there were only ten allowed on all the Omaha Reaches on D-Day because that was all we dared risk losing—finally made shore as a machine gun in the cliffs above chattered while the big doors in her bow yawed slowly open. When, eventually, the first trucks and tanks debarked, drivers cried and vomited as they had to drive over the bodies of their buddies.

Having got ashore there was still no way off the beach. ‘God, for a bulldozer!’ prayed the frantic engineers. When it came, the driver got his head blown off two minutes after he hit the beach. The only officer the Germans had missed looked at the muddle of stuff which had to be tugged clear and cursed. ‘I can drive her, sir,’ said a soldier called Lee Presley, and climbed aboard. He pushed the headless corpse out and the clutch in, and for hours, which never stopped being an inferno, drove back and forth across the mouth of that gulch, dragging stuff out of the way as soon as it got hit so that reinforcements could be kept flowing and reorganization completed.

In a pillbox and a tank ditch under the cliffs, the 61st Medical Battalion set up their first first-aid stations. It was only first-aid because none of their equipment could be landed. But ten doctors still operated for a day and a half without a break, and medics worked calmly under fire for thirty hours in which thirty men out of eighty became casualties.

Out in the bay, Lieutenant-General Courtney Hodges, with First Army Headquarters on the U.S.S. Achenar, hunched over his maps in the operations room with every line in his usually genial face deep-etched with anxiety. Every passing hour, he knew, meant an hour more for Rommel to bring up reserves, an hour less to build up and brace for the counterattack which he believed inevitable by the third day at the latest.

Beyond the fact that things were going badly—just about as badly as they could go—very little information on the flow of battle was reaching the U.S.S. Achenar. Men ashore had plenty else on their minds besides communiqués. Within an hour of H-Hour it was decided to speed reinforcements. The 18th Infantry out of General Huebner’s floating reserves had been scheduled to go in about noon. Instead, it was ordered in immediately to take over the mission of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 16th, who were still struggling desperately to fight their way up Dead Man’s Gulch.

Fire was raining down on these men from both sides of the cliffs; their losses had been catastrophic. The 1st Battalion landing to support the 2nd had only added to the general confusion. Units became inextricably intermingled without gaining ground or materially reducing the opposition. Farther left, the 3rd Battalion of the 16th had landed to find themselves confronted with an almost unscalable bluff. They succeeded in climbing it and working their way inland while the remnants of the other two battalions eventually managed to get themselves sorted out, blow a gap in the heavy wire, and push up onto the high ground toward Colleville-sur-Mer. Driving hard behind them the reinforcing 18th finally crossed the beach to work their way, too, up the cliff and into Colleville. By midnight they had cut the Vierville-Colleville road and were fairly well entrenched.

Colleville-sur-Mer is a French village just beyond Omaha Beach.

It was a toehold instead of the firm foothold which the British and Canadians and the United States 7th Corps had gained. Precarious as the situation looked, however, General Gerow of the 5th Corps went ashore that night and set up headquarters in a captured German pillbox. His whole beachhead was well within small-arms range of the enemy and a mere two thousand yards deep instead of the twelve thousand planned. Out on the Achenar, Headquarters Staff were trying not to remember what Churchill had said at Conference ‘Thunderclap,’ the first big meeting at Saint Paul’s School to which all commanders were called to review their plans. ‘I never liked this idea of invading France across the Channel,’ said Churchill, ‘but since we’ve decided to do it, we want no commanders with Anzio minds.’ For two days and nights that seemed interminable to men keeping their fingers crossed in the First Army Command, Omaha looked frighteningly like another Anzio.

Luckily, the counterattack expected for the third day never eventuated. Expecting the major attack on Calais, the Germans were loath to move troops any farther than Caen, reckoning that we should want that city, hub as it was of a major rail and road net, whether our main attack came north, south, or from both north and south of the Seine.

Monty’s insistence on tanks and still more tanks proved to be thoroughly justified. Without doubt it saved the day for Americans on Omaha, and edged anxiety off many days for those laboriously striving to consolidate Utah. What would have happened to the men and supplies trickling in against first the jam-up at Southampton, and after that the incredible misfortune of the storm which wrecked their artificial harbor with all its months of work in a single day, is not pleasant conjecture. As it was, their batteries had to receive a ‘Hold-fire’ order while ammunition was flown in.

Monty meanwhile absorbed pressure by engaging three mechanized panzer divisions. Cream-of-the-crop divisions they were, too. There was the 21st Panzer, the 12th SS, the Panzer Lehr, and, just to give him something to set his beret at, the 17th Panzer Grenadiers coiled up ready to spring at his first weakness.

While he and Rommel relentlessly and stubbornly slogged it out in the perfect panzer country beyond Bayeux, the American 2nd Division, moving in from Omaha, cut its battle teeth on Trévières. They found it painful chewing on the lesson that the 1st Infantry Division on their immediate left learned in North Africa—that there is no point to assaulting any position frontally when you can take it less expensively by fanning around.

By D-Day plus 4, we had our first air strip in France on a slice of sand which ran like a yellow ribbon between the two gullies which had demanded such effort to take—Easy Red and Easy Green. Such an unbelievably short bit of ribbon it looked that it was obvious, without the urgency in the tone of the pilot’s ‘Now’ for touchdown, that there was not an inch of runway to spare. Too little ground had been taken for anyone to be critical about choice of site. The strip was a must. Ammunition had to be got in, wounded had to be got out, so pilots flew out over ‘Dead Man’s Gulch,’ thanking God for every foot of its width. Even so it was barely enough to give them the necessary lift. They took off with a prayer and their toenails scraping their flying boots.

It was my privilege to be one of the first women to land on that strip. Very quiet and tense the pilot was as we came in low toward smoke puffs mushrooming just inshore. Below us the great bay, like blue velvet brushed against the pile, was littered with ships—hundreds and hundreds of them, big ships and little ships, aggressive battleships, lithe cruisers, sleek destroyers, tubby-looking invasion craft, elegant-lined yachts, squat tugs, blowsy-looking barges, and from each and every one of them a silver balloon yawing in slow and rhythmic menace.

In Dead Man’s Gulch they were talking of building a memorial chapel to the four-thousand-odd casualties. ‘Aw, hell,’ said a GI, what’s the point of it? The whole darn beach is hallowed ground if dying on it amounts to any kind of sanctification. But does it? Not for my money.’

Down by the sea, Graves Registration had just started excavating bodies from the first temporary to the first permanent cemetery. In the white sand, white as the shrouds in which men were being slid unceremoniously as though they had been carcasses of meat, were long lines of sticks. From each there swung a little canvas bag containing dog tags and such few personal possessions as were deemed precious enough to send to next of kin.

Colored troops were spading the sand gingerly to uncover 30 men, four at a time, unwrap them from the blanket, or whatever else it was the burial squad had been able to muster up by way of a shroud, hustle them into new ones, and carry them up the hill for reburial.

Negroes are superstitious about handling corpses and none were ever more unhappy in their day’s work. Said one, ‘Ah pray de good Lawd’ll hab mussy on all dese po’ souls and mussy ‘nuff on me to get de sergeant to give me a new job, fo’ Ah sho to sartin’ cain’t stand dis one long.’ He said it with tears streaming down his cheeks.

Returning to Britain with a planeload of wounded, our C-47 only just cleared the hilltop cemetery, honeycombed with open graves dug in meticulous precision. Dozens of men working like beavers were still digging. About the field were drifts of shrouded figures—at least a dozen of them. Total casualties were well below the figure estimated. Folks spoke of total deaths for the whole landing as being ‘only a few thousand.’ A pity more of them could not have seen them in shrouds instead of headlines, thought of them in terms of all that had to be buried, apart from the mangled flesh—all that had to be lost in loving and enjoyment and achievement. A pity they could not think, too, of all that could not be ended with the regulation six feet four of earth—the grief that goes on and on and on, yet never seems to add up to enough to stop the futility of the same thing happening all over again.

The American Bar at the Savoy, just two hours later, was even more tightly jammed than usual. ‘No chips? Whatever is this place coming to?’ grumbled a middle-aged businessman who had long denied himself nothing—not even a sense of restraint. Over in the curved window, overlooking the river, some air corps boys, safely back from the airborne part of the invasion, were having a party. One of them overheard a disparaging ‘We don’t seem to have got very far today’ from a suave-looking brunette reading the evening headlines. He thereupon blew up, to indicate what went into getting anywhere in Hitler’s Europe, to her very great resentment and other people’s profound amusement. Finally, he was piloted off with a placating ‘Come on, Bob, you’re not on duty now,’ from one of his pals and an acid ‘Pity’ from the lady.

The Savoy became rear press headquarters, more or less, for war correspondents commuting back and forth from Normandy. After the first shock, the staff became almost inured to our arrival back after a few days of foxhole living, to hand over our combat clothes with a ‘Clean and delouse, please.’ There was no excuse for the lousing-up of uniforms with DDT powder to prevent it, but somehow or other it happened, and anybody who thinks high-explosive is tougher to take than lice just doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know.

Commuting at that time was inevitable. Such transmission as existed in France was available only to correspondents who had landed with assault troops. Others had to get their stories back to the cable head and through censorship in London. If they were unlucky enough to be women, they had to fight copy through. Combat started with getting orders, proceeding through skirmishes in which no holds and no tactics, including wolfing, were barred, to get the lady air or sea lift to the far shore, a good story when she got there, transportation back to file it, and finally transmission whilst it was still news.

British and American War Departments differed officially in their attitude toward that most horrific of all the horrific developments of modern war—the woman war correspondent. The British War Office, voicing the dictates of Monty, who regarded women in the field as bad luck, bad business, and something to be scotched vigorously as an enemy advance, said flatly, ‘We will not tolerate them.’ In vain did women, who had been conscripted to war for everything but the description of it, plead their cause. Uselessly did they invade, as did this correspondent, the well-polished and well-guarded portals of the War Office to point out to Lord Burnham, Director of British Public Relations, that they had been reporting war on the British battlefront through years of blitz war anyway.

Americans, on the other hand, admitted that ‘certain phases of war should be covered by women.’ They issued them with uniforms, inoculations, the simulated rank of Captain, the handicap of military discipline, and the alleged status of a fully accredited correspondent. According to Congress, the fact that they were women was in no wise to minimize their right to do their job. It was generally conceded that sex could be a handicap, but had better not be, since ‘womanhood’ as such had no place on a battlefield.

Sex handicapped all right—but not because of frailty due to the weak physical gender. Women could hump duffle bags with any GI—and did. That was plain ordinary war. It got total for eventualities like the one which brought a certain merchant captain back to his cabin after he had ensconced a girl reporter there with an enthusiastic ‘Sure, we’ve got room aboard to take you to France—you can have MY quarters.’

Not all American generals, thank the Marxian gods, pursued determination to keep distinctive gender in war reporting with the full-blooded vigor of Georgie Patton. Ruth Cowan of AP and Rita Bellingham of Reuter’s, assigned to his ship with properly cut orders for transportation to Normandy, were greeted with a stentorian ‘These women can’t come aboard here,’ on arrival for embarkation and sailed only because the Navy insisted on its right to do as it liked aboard its own ships. Doing as it liked, incidentally, involved offering the hospitality of the wardroom, in which the Army were not invited to participate.

Most American commanders would concede, if forced to, that there were angles of the war picture which could better be written about by women. Some would even go so far as admitting that since a man’s viewpoint and a woman’s differed so widely, no picture could be complete unless it carried both. Invariably, however, they preferred to have it done on somebody else’s territory, and always they came back to the conviction that, no matter how good or how necessary the reportage, it would still never make up for the embarrassment of having women in the front lines. They might get hurt. And nobody wanted that happening in his command. Apart from getting hurt, there was still what the British War Office persisted with nice reticence in referring to as the cloakroom question’ and the Americans bluntly described as ‘the latrine business’.

Both British and Americans visualized the difficulties involved along lines once etched by my Daily Herald colleague, Charles Bray. Charles had been a Wing Commander with the British in Africa, and one memorable day found himself assigned to public-relations duties, necessitating escort of a woman correspondent into the desert—where she leaped out of a car to give a soldier, fundamentally occupied with unaffectedness common to men secure in the belief that they are habitating a purely masculine world, a bigger shock than he ever got from the enemy.

The woman’s reaction was probably as matter-of-fact as Dixie Tighe’s would have been. Dixie, of I.N.S., with her flair for individualizing even her uniform to the point where it drove military police to a frenzy and her reputation for being the only woman in the world who could make other women laugh before breakfast, arrived one day at an air station after a long ride out from London. The big doors at the back of the bus swung open to reveal a party semi-circled in welcome. Correspondents filed out to shake hands with officers, the least junior of whom appeared to be a colonel, and wait while somebody cleared his throat to indicate the program ahead with a ‘First of All—’ ‘First of all,’ cut in a clear voice, ‘I shall need a little girls room and a sentry’. Then, with a dazzling smile at the colonel, ‘Guess you’d do’. When women got to the front they took good care that this would be no more of a problem than anything else which concerned them in combat zones. As for embarrassment, how could it exist in the exigencies of a situation like the one confronting an officer on the beach who hollered, ‘Hey! stand right where you are,’ to a woman about to take steps to privacy into a hedgerow across a mined road verge? Or when a soldier had to wait outside a command post with a matter-of-fact ‘Follow right behind me. I’ll have to guide you across the field on account we haven’t gotten around to tapin’ a path through the mines yet’. Covering the war, under the ‘short-term facilities’ which were SHAEF’s compromise between the War Department ruling which stated that women could go to war to cover the war and the commanding attitude of mind which said, ‘Hell, they don’t anywhere on my sector,’ turned life into a fantastic, beyond description, hodgepodge of flying or sailing between rocket-bombed London and shell-rocked Normandy.

From the danger point of view there was little to choose between diving to shelter under one’s office desk or leaping to it in the dust, the diabolical dust of the beachhead. From the viewpoint of nerve stress and strain, the rocket bombs had it on Normandy on all counts, because a rocket bomb, at least, could not bring SHAEF slapping down for a court-martial with disaccreditation if they could prove violation of orders on the part of hapless correspondents forced to begin with interpreting those orders to the utmost if they were even to try to do the job their editors expected of them.

Accommodations being hard to find on the scrap of territory we had to date, women correspondents usually stayed the night on the Liberty ships or LST’s, but even the most blitz-hardened found it next to impossible to sleep. Lack of night fighter cover over the beachhead, due to bad co-ordination of Allied Air Forces and the fact that bases were too far back, enabled the Germans to mount an air raid every evening in addition to occasional E-boat attacks. There were not many nights, thank God, when climbing into bed meant scrambling from a bobbing Dukw (‘Duck’) up a thirty-foot rope ladder and the side of a Liberty with all hell crashing around from the guns on every ship in the bay. But there was always justification enough as we hurtled down the sand into the sea for the colored soldier’s scolding ‘Darn gone it, what fo’ Ah you’ doin’ out heah at dis time? Doan you know dat Ah ain’t no combat soldier?’

Communiqués were enthusiastically splashing the rose-throwing and kisses of liberation, but, in the foxholes dug under Norman apple trees, soldiers were telling a different story. To say they were disappointed in the reaction of the first French they freed is an understatement. They expected appreciation of all that invasion had cost would be expressed some way other than in a six times the market value charge for cider and calvados. They expected a starving people. They found instead men, women, and children with more butter, eggs, and meat than they could eat. They discovered, of course, in due course of time, that Frenchmen had no cigarettes and tobacco. That children had not seen candy in so long they had almost forgotten what it was. They found the only reason for the dairy produce glut was that, because our pre-invasion bombing had knocked out all transport, the Germans had been unable to send their usual quota home.

Peasants, in the first towns and villages we overran, did not want to talk to Allied troops. Troops forgot that for more than four years these people had not dared to speak freely to Frenchmen, much less to strangers—strangers moreover in uniform. Troops forgot that uniforms for four years had meant only one thing to these people—the need to get into the house quickly enough to lock the door against new depredation. Throughout those four years, military discipline had meant nothing but heavier taxes to be paid, more food to be grown for shipment to other parts of Europe, shorter rationing, something else to be given up or done without to help the progress of a war they had done nothing to start or deserve. Now that war was being brought right into their own lush, lovely countryside, turning it into a battlefield. Four years of German occupation had been a bad thing, but not bad enough to smash their homes and kill their cattle. The French are a shrewd, practical, as well as a volatile, people. Wars cost a great deal. They reckoned liberation would cost a great deal, too. And they were not at all certain that it was going to be worth it even if the Allies did manage to beat the Germans back. In any case they thought we indulged in altogether unnecessary beating-up of their towns. And with justification. Montebourg and Valognes, for instance, were flattened in raids which gave the populace no more chance of seeking safety than the Luftwaffe gave Londoners. The United States First Army were so incensed at what they described as the utterly senseless and wickedly unnecessary bombing of Montebourg and Valognes as a prelude to their attack that they requested that no further Air Force softening be done for them thereafter unless they specifically asked for it.

The Germans had done enough to divide local opinion without our making invasion any costlier for the ordinary civilian than it had to be. There were Frenchmen only too anxious to believe that France had suffered enough; that having been forced to buy her peace pardon to the extent of surrendering, to become part of the Greater Reich, she should be left without further disturbance to work her way to the prosperity which was her due and would eventually be her portion.

Against them, often enough and tragically enough in the same family, would be members of the Underground Movement. Between the two, Civil Affairs officers had a hard time. Peace-wanters badgered them with demands, ‘Who would pay for their barn shelled that morning and when?’ And ‘Where could they graze their cattle now the Army had taken their land for a hospital or a dump or a gun site?’ Patriots, on the other hand, assiduously reported everyone they had ever suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. On top of all this, anyone and everyone who felt like taking spite out against somebody turned in a collaborationist report against him, and when liberation fever ran high and Civil Affairs procedure slow, some of the hotheads took retribution into their own hands as they did at Bricquebec.

In that rather nondescript little village, with its few tubs of dusty-looking bay trees pepped up with flags and window-boxes of petunias and geraniums, the emotional hangover had just begun to set in when down the street tripped a couple of girls who had not walked that street for many a day before that one except on the arm of a German soldier.

Boys, wearing the white armbands of the French Forces of the Interior, rather bored with the general flatness of things, gave chase and grabbed their quarry by the first thing they could hang on to—their hair. They dragged them by it, heels scuffling over the cobblestones, up the sun-glared street with the good people of Bricquebec streaming out of their villa doors to see what all the screaming was about. A housewife, with more presence of mind than the rest, did her bit to quiet the noise with a pail of water. Somebody else pelted a tomato. A woman with a black shawl on her head ran along behind the girls and began to kick. Others joined in and started to spit and cuff and slap. A man tried to drag off a young girl who was scratching and tearing at clothes and had to fight his own way clear. By the time the cavalcade reached the marketplace, villagers were battering each other to get near enough to pinch, pull, pummel, and yell invective.

The cry, ‘Cut their hair!’ saved the pair without doubt from being lynched. It was exactly what was wanted. A show! A fine idea! One should not, after all, hurt women physically. But this! This was just and right and proper punishment! The crowd was delighted. ‘Back, everybody,’ ordered the captors, ‘and bring scissors.’

The girls were pulled back on their feet. Tradespeople, housewives, laborers, who had known them all their lives, boys and girls who had grown up with them, semi-circled back to give the boys with the scissors room to work. They clipped slowly and with deliberate clumsiness, clawing the shining stuff apart, strand by strand, and gnawing the shears into it. As tufts fell, villagers in front dived for them to scatter them to those behind. Then razors were brought and the jagged clumps scraped at until each head was white and smooth and so unbelievably ludicrous that the crowd, hoarse with yelling appreciation and approval, became hysterical. ‘Drive them around the village!’ they yelled, and held on to each other to support paroxysms of mirth and wipe away the laughter tears.

A cart was brought. One of the girls broke down and pleaded, ‘No more. It is enough. Please, oh, please let it be enough.’ The other clambered in and stood there staring back at the mob as she had stared from the moment the scissors first slid against her scalp. She held her head high and her scratched, bruised face was set in an expression of disdainful scorn. As the cart creaked off,’ pulled by the frenzied villagers, a boy of about seventeen hurled a handful of manure.

All things considered, there was very little fraternization between the French and German soldiers stationed in France. Soldiers in fighting divisions of the German Army were encouraged to be as brutal as the exigencies of war would permit. By official order, German troops garrisoned in the occupied countries were supposed to behave themselves. After the first loot lust had been satiated, it was their duty to work as ‘ambassadors for the Reich,’ encouraging citizens to work for, rather than against, the Nazi regime.

There would have been more converts to Nazi ideology if the Germans had garrisoned slave countries with Nazis trained as ambassadors instead of men trained as Nazi soldiers. For men trained to throw overboard every fundamentally decent thing achieved in twenty centuries, men who have raped and robbed and tortured and murdered, men who have been stripped of first the right, and finally the desire, to look into their own souls, do not become different by order—even by order of a Führer.

Knowing there must come a day when the rest of the world would know as much about Nazidom as they knew—and, knowing, no longer tolerate it—they made the most of everything life offered them. They lived for the day on a scale which history has never paralleled. How could it? When no robbers or pirates ever had anything like the luxuries and plenty of more than half the entire continent of Europe to plunder and grow decadent on?

Cherbourg first showed us the scale of that plunder and decadence.

Under the arsenal and nine feet of concrete, to keep them safe from air attack, the Nazis built themselves a fortress city. Through it, the men of the 9th Infantry Division, after their triumphant ‘fifty miles in ten days’ advance to cut off the entire Cherbourg Peninsula, fought to find storehouses and living quarters that almost took their minds off battle.

Rooms were central-heated, fitted with hot and cold running water and electric light, furnished with silk tapestries, fine rugs, and still finer furniture. Storehouses carried enough food to keep the garrison for a year. And what food! There were cases of chocolate, biscuits, vegetables, and cereals. Drums of butter, kegs of caviar, tins of chicken, beef, veal, pork, fish, and sausage. What the 9th boys had to say about C-ration was nobody’s business!

When they got to the first liquor store, a devout ‘Christ! Why wasn’t I inducted as a Nazi?’ went up from the platoon leader, and an urgent ‘Watch your step,’ from the men following him, who had spotted the trip wire among the bottles. After the engineers got through taking out the mines, thirty two-and-a-half-ton trucks were loaded from that one store with cognac and champagne. They did not bother to transport liqueurs and other wines and spirits. Thereafter, whenever the 9th Division advanced, it was always to the crack, ‘Liquor-hogging again’. They retaliated by maintaining that the only reason for the American Army’s swift surge across the rest of Europe was that other divisions, hearing of the Cherbourg haul, raced to be first to reach objectives—and new Nazi wine cellars.

The boys of the 9th had other eye-openers besides the quantities of food and drink. They found wardrobes full of women’s clothes. For in the fort at Cherbourg, men as well as officers were apparently allowed to keep mistresses—and everything necessary for other kinds of sex diversion.

Before his surrender, the German commander gave a party in his headquarters. Bottles of cognac and champagne and wines of priceless vintage, with necks knocked off and the contents half drunk or spilled, littered the table. Chairs had been tipped over and smashed. There was a flagellation whip and bloodstains among the wine and food spatters on the tablecloth.

That was defeat as we first saw it in Europe. It looked uglier still in the Cherbourg hospitals which the Germans had taken over. In the Pasteur Hospital, just across the road from the fort, three hundred German wounded were found lying in what must certainly have been the worst hospital conditions which have prevailed since Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea.

For days the city had been without water. Fighting had been heavy on the outskirts and there were a great number of casualties. Just before our three divisions, the 4th, the 9th, and 79th, converged, the enemy managed to evacuate all but three hundred men who were too ill to be moved. They were left to be taken prisoner by the staff of our 12th Field Hospital, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel G. L. Wulf.

The nurses, doctors, and enlisted men of that hospital had been trained and were equipped to set up and run a four-hundred-bed hospital in the field. Instead of stopping among the hedgerows and pitching tents as they expected, their ambulance convoy rolled clear into Cherbourg to the back gates—fighting was still going on at the front—of one of the biggest hospitals in all France. A hospital, moreover, which had to be cleaned before they could as much as strip the wrapping off a roll of gauze.

It was cleaning the like of which has never been seen in hospital annals since Sebastopol. The three hundred enemy wounded were lying in various wards on three floors in misery and filth beyond description. There was still no water. Every bed in the hospital was soiled. Every latrine choked. The refuse of days of non-stop operating was strewn around the one underground operating theater. Back of the hospital were stacks of amputated limbs and mangled bodies.

Nurses, doctors, and orderlies set to hauling water by pailfuls from their trailers up those three flights of stairs—there were no elevators. They moved the Germans into two wards, cleaned them, dressed their wounds, sent the German nurses back through our lines with safe escort, and then for three days and nights they scrubbed and cleaned so they could be ready to receive our own casualties on schedule.

When they had finished, the stench of death still hung so heavily you could almost reach a hand out and touch it. A freckle-faced nurse, named Irene York from Nebraska, stripped the garden of lilies and orange blossoms to mass great crocks of them in the wards so the men could bear to breathe.

Back in London, story filing was interrupted with a summons for court-martial. There had, declared SHAEF, been violation of orders!

Court-martial was set at the London Ministry of Information in a huge room furnished with wall maps and a chair-flanked table that seemed half as long as eternity.

Right in the middle of it sat Chief of the British Public Relations, Brigadier General ‘Bill’ Turner. Next to him came Chief of American Public Relations, Colonel ‘Ernie’ Dupuy. Lesser ranking officers and stenographers faced me at sparse intervals down the table. On my left sat Public Relations Officer and Defense Counsel, Major ‘Jim’ Boste.

Brigadier Turner opened the proceedings with stern military demeanor and a puckered frown on his cherubicly pink brow. ‘Your orders were issued,’ he said, ‘for the beachhead, with specific request that you should not leave that area. Instead, you went into Cherbourg, without proper military escort and without reporting to the Port Commander. We require explanation of this conduct, which may, as you are well aware, result in your disaccreditation as a war correspondent’.

Feeling very dry in the mouth, I passed my orders across for inspection. Very imposing orders they were, typed in triplicate—I never did discover why, since of all the orders ever issued to me I never had occasion to part with more than one set—and authorizing me to travel to, but not leave, the area of the beachhead.

What, then, was the beachhead? Did it mean the few square yards of sand on which my Dukw grounded after debarking me from the Liberty ship? Did it mean that one particular bay in which the ship anchored? Did it mean a bit of country inland from that bay, and if so what bit of country and how far inland? Did it mean all the beachhead in the American Command, or, since I was traveling under orders issued by SHAEF, did it mean all the beachhead under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Allied Command?

For several, very long-feeling seconds, neither Brigadier Turner nor Colonel Dupuy would hazard a definition. Then Brigadier Turner vouchsafed the opinion that the beachhead, in so far as my orders were concerned, might be taken to mean the beach in the area of bay in which my ship had anchored. In fact, of course, the area of the beachhead was the area in the command of the commander of the port to which my ship had sailed—a Colonel Richard Whitcomb, to whom I was deeply indebted for definition of the area of that command, ‘Four miles inland from Omaha to Cherbourg,’ for provision of escort to Cherbourg and introduction to the Cherbourg commander. All of which knocked out SHAEF’s accusations. Most important of all, Colonel Whitcomb wrote orders for me to return to UK—something my SHAEF orders did not do, though I had to get back to file—and then go right back to the beachhead.

Thanking Brigadier Turner for his dismissal of the case, I asked that my office, who were raising as much fuss about the rules being broken as SHAEF, be immediately informed there had been no violation of orders, as I wanted to get back to France next morning. Veins bulged in the Brigadier’s forehead. ‘My dear woman,’ he expostulated, ‘it will be a long while before you get more orders for Normandy—a VERY long while’.

‘But I’ve got them,’ I remonstrated, passing them over for inspection. He looked, so did Colonel Dupuy, for almost half a minute before military bearing gave way to normal reaction.

Next day SHAEF changed their policy regarding beachhead visits for women, deciding that new tactics must be formulated or else female correspondents, determined to go to typewriter war on a par with the men, would be overrunning the entire Western Front.

3

Lieutenant-General John C. H. Lee, Ike's American deputy and SOS Commander, had by this time moved his headquarters from Grosvenor Square, London, to a château near Valognes. WAC’s went, too. It was exactly the opportunity the gentlemen at SHAEF required. It was decided to place women correspondents under the authority of Public Relations Division at Lees Headquarters. They were given ‘Permanent orders,’ valid for a month! And a ruling on the limits of their assignment. It was permissible to write about WAC’s, hospitals, and such other subjects as Public Relations Division considered desirable. They were not, without express permission of the Commanding Officer, to go farther forward than nurses or Red Cross girls.

Public Relations Division at Valognes was run by a Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bill’ Jones, WAC Captain ‘Hank’ Horak, and WAC Lieutenant Margaret Sherman. These three will forever be remembered with affectionate gratitude by the girls wearing the green patches and the words ‘War Correspondent.’ They worked themselves to the edge of nervous breakdowns trying to make it possible for women reporters to do their job so that it satisfied both SHAEF and their editors.

Source: US Military Academy at West Point. See Valognes to the southeast of Cherbourg.

It might have been possible had SHAEF accredited women to press camps as they did the men. Correspondents attached to such camps had jeep and driver as well as teletype and radio transmission. Censors traveled with them, so they knew what had been cut from their stories before those stories were transmitted. They were briefed twice a day. Huge maps on the wall of their briefing room marked the position of enemy as well as Allied units. They knew what the day’s objective was to be, where the ‘hot spots’ were, whether there was to be an air strafe or not. None of which made jeeping around in frontline zones safe, but made it infinitely less dangerous than it was for the women.

Women were farmed out, as it were, for short spells at a time to hospitals which were much nearer enemy lines than were the press camps—lines which moved fast, as did everything else about modern war, without giving any indication of where they had moved to. Headquarters were miles back, yet, no matter how fluid the fighting became, the women dared not officially put as much as a nose inside the press camp to find out where the line of our own fire was, to say nothing of the enemy’s.

Several made near trips through the enemy’s lines without realizing it until afterward. I found myself under our own air strafe on one occasion and heading fast for the still German-held village of Canisy on another. Why none of us ever got killed, hurt, or taken prisoner no one will ever know.

There were other handicaps. Women were not supposed to leave the hospital to which they were attached without permission from the Commanding Officer. They were also supposed to have officer escort whenever they left the hospital.

Transport is limited in a frontline hospital; so is personnel. It was difficult for commanding officers to be enthusiastic about furnishing transport and officers to go gallivanting around the front hunting for stories which neither benefited nor concerned their outfit. It was outrageous that reporters should be billeted where they were welcome only as long as they were charming and wrote what was expected of them. They had been sent to France, primarily, to give an unbiased report of hospital conditions. This was impossible to do under the circumstances in which SHAEF placed them.

Apart from having to beg for transport, cajole for escort, and risk necks by jeeping around in forward zones without briefing, copy had to be sent through ordinary field-message service.

In theory, the copy, in specially marked press bags, was rushed through to the nearest air strip and flown to a near London field. From there motor dispatch riders picked it up and took it to the Ministry of Information, where it was censored, cabled to America, or sent to various London offices.

In practice, papers got stories anything from four days to a week after they were written. If flying weather was bad, it took longer than that. Furthermore, when they did get them, they frequently made no sense because, with copy being censored in London, correspondents had no idea what was blue-pencil proof and what was not.

In such conditions, it seemed obvious that the women correspondent nuisance would be short-lived. Those who retained their SHAEF accreditations were unlikely to retain their jobs. Hospital stories were no longer automatic column fillers. Trying to get anything else meant breaking rules.

Associated Press’s blonde, dynamic Ruth Cowan, already hardened to the rigors of womanly war reporting in Africa, and I fought the first phase of this unequal battle from the Fifth General Hospital just outside Carentan. The Commanding Officer was Colonel Maxwell E. Keeler, and it is only fair to say that any toughness in fighting conditions encountered were most emphatically not of his making.

The Fifth was the first general hospital to be moved to France. And a most ambitious project it was. Too ambitious. Imagine taking ground without water, sanitation, or drainage, and in a matter of three to four weeks building a town on it to take care of between two and three thousand people. Then remember that everything for this town, from safety-pins to the most elaborate hospital equipment in the world, had to be crated, shipped, landed, motor-transported, uncrated, and fitted into its rightful place in the labyrinth of tents mushrooming over many kilometers.

Ambulance convoys arrived to find mines still being removed from fields scored with miles of open trenches dug ready for drains. As far as they could see were crates of all shapes and sizes, most of them labeled with the name of another hospital. The Quartermaster put in days of frantic searching for his equipment among mountains of it stacked on Utah beach. Eventually, he located half at Omaha and borrowed the other half from a hospital scheduled for later opening.

It seemed entirely ludicrous to suppose that fifteen hundred beds would be ready to receive patients at the time specified. They were.

Then the order came through to enlarge the hospital to accommodate two thousand patients. In less than a week, the additional five hundred beds with all it took to take care of them were ready, too.

Coping with all this, however, made the campaign break-in for hospital personnel far tougher than anybody ever expected it to be. For over a month no time could be found to pitch even a mess tent. There was a kitchen in one corner of the field with three bins of boiling water—one soapy, two clear—ranged outside. Everybody—nurses, orderlies, some of America’s finest specialists—lined up to have their food dolloped into their mess tins, sit on the grass to eat it, and line up again to dunk mess kit in the water bins and scrub clean. Grass may be fun to sit on at a picnic. It isn’t fun between six and seven in the morning when it is sopping wet with dew, or when it is teeming so hard with rain that no matter how fast you eat, food is watered out and cold before you’re through.

Nurses, who lived four or five to a tent and with no more than a camp cot, a bedding roll, a suitcase, and a few nails on the tent pole, somehow managed to make it look like home. Every tent owned a stove. Somebody off duty would start making fudge or coffee. Boys from neighboring outfits would wander in with a bottle of liquor and a sense of loneliness and straightway there would be a party.

There were air raids every night. Beautiful to watch, but very perturbing to anyone remembering that what went up had to come down.

Flak was deadly and a canvas roof scant protection. There were foxholes outside each tent, but there is a limit to the number of times in any given night that anyone will get out of a warm bed to cower in a cold foxhole. There comes a time when one just lies, debating on the bit of anatomy seemingly most vulnerable, be it face, chest, or stomach. Having reached a conclusion one claps a tin hat on it and returns to sleep.

That, too, had its risks. A wild shriek cut across one already discordant enough night, to convince us that somebody in our tent had been hit. She had, but only by a cold shower, as reaching for her tin hat she clamped it over her face forgetting that she had filled it ready for her morning wash. That yell, piercing as it was, though, was a pipsqueak compared to the one we heard when a nurse wriggled into her bedding roll to find she was sharing it with something else that wriggled—a large lizard!

The trait that anyone living in a frontline hospital would choose to borrow from nurses, could he choose anything he wanted to make the living easier, would be the way nurses can seemingly leave hospital in the hospital.

They work their shift in ward or theater, handling men hurt so horribly that just seeing men that way will turn the strongest ( stomach. The shift over, out they go to eat, sleep, write home, or dress for a party.

A blind drops in the mind over all they have left behind—or so it seems. It does not take many weeks of living in a hospital to find, however, that the blind does not shut the harrowing from a nurse’s mind any more than it would from anyone else’s, however often she drops it. The strain tells—tells heavily and variously.

Edna Blumenthal, just back from a spell of service in a field hospital outside Cherbourg, gave up writing home for a while. ‘Can’t stand to think about life going on normally,’ she said; ‘if I do I won’t be able to go on.’

We were sitting on the grass outside our tents.

‘They say that nurses are wonderful,’ comforted one softly. ‘Don’t let it get you down, honey. Take a drink’.

Edna tucked her knees up, nuzzled her chin down on them, and looked out over the trees etching the night sky between us and Carentan. ‘Gauguin landscape. Perfect one. I wonder why the French have to cut their trees so they fuzz all the way up the trunk and have nothing but a little tuft of leaves left on top,’ she said; and then, ‘No, taking a drink doesn’t help for long enough’.

‘I don’t think nurses on overseas service ought to drink anyway,’ came from outside the next tent.

‘I do, I know. We all do,’ as the chorus of dissents chipped in.

‘I still think we ought to quit when we come overseas. Why? Because we’ve too much else to take. We get along with it all right, we kid ourselves. Then we get to a bad day. There’s a party, and we get high. Look what happened last Saturday. Was anybody in the theater this afternoon? Four of the doctors worked for six hours on that one girl—swell kid she was, too. I knew her back in England.’

There had been an Air Force party on Saturday in a château near Montebourg. On the way home a jeepload of nurses had been driven into a convoy. They had been brought into the Fifth for patching up.

‘You can’t talk that way just because a few girls get high once in a while,’ objected somebody. ‘Everybody does, but that’s no reason to insist they live by a special set of rules. I object, anyway, to this business of putting nurses into a race of women apart. We’re not a bunch of Florence Nightingales, whatever the folks back home think. We’re just ordinary women doing a job, and when that jobs through with, we’re no better and no worse than any other women doing any other job. All this glamorizing, this business of being women with stronger minds, morals, and ideals than anybody else, makes me vomit. Why should more be expected of nurses than other women? Why should they have to live up to a whole lot of hooey just because it gratifies some folks’ sentimentality? If those folks knew what war is, what it does to the men when they get in it, they’d know it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to anybody if we were saints or harlots.’

It would that, insisted a firm, clear voice from the dark. It would make a difference to you yourself for a start. As for living up to a lot of hooey, leaving the folks back home out of it, these boys out here don’t think of it as hooey. If you had to write the letters for them that I do every day, you wouldn’t talk about its making no difference to them what kind of girls you are. They sure need something to hold on to. And for every one of them that something seemed a mighty long way off till they came into this hospital. You’re not a bunch of ordinary women and don’t ever think you are. You’re women picked for a job that is a whole heap bigger than any one of you is big enough in herself to do. Most of these boys have decent women belonging to them, believing in them. You owe it to those women—never mind what war has done to their boys—to send the boys on from here feeling that all the right and decent things they got into this mess to fight for are still there, and that they’re still part of them.’ .

It was our Red Cross worker, Lois Duncan.

‘Why, Lois, that’s more than I’ve ever heard you say at any one time all the time I’ve known you,’ declared Zippy, one of her tent mates. If we’re going to live up to it all, though, we’ll have to take a special training course for calvados. That liquor knocks out more inhibitions in a jigger than I knew there were.’

‘We ought to get some wolf training, too,’ somebody suggested.

‘Is it necessary?’ came the immediate retort. ‘After all, they don’t come in so many varieties, and we sure get plenty of chances to recognize them’.

‘My favorite,’ said a voice dreamily, ‘is the one who has a wife who is a good sport. “Just before I left, she said to me, ‘You’ll have to be unfaithful, but don’t tell me about it.’ “‘

The favorite, don’t you think, inquired a voice from inside the tent, ‘is the one about the overseas posting being the only way out. You know how it goes from there—“I’ll have to get things sorted out when I get back. I’d do it by letter, only I think it’s fairer to talk the thing out straight.” That’s fine and dandy, that one. Leaves the coast all clear for every new opportunity, and no blame on anybody if it doesn’t turn out to be worth breaking home for.’

‘What about the unmarried ones? They can put over some pretty luscious work, too,’ said Zippy. ‘“Darling, you know I love you so much it can’t matter because we’ll be married as soon as it’s possible,” and “We belong to each other—it’s so right Sweet, it is right. I wouldn’t ask you otherwise.” ‘

‘Come, now, Zip,’ somebody teased. ‘What are the poor boys to do? The Army issues them with contraceptives, and fines them if they proposition the mademoiselles. Some of the good ones, I’m told, use the things to keep their guns dry. Maybe the others just didn’t think of that.’

The moon floated up, round and deep orange-colored, over the apple trees in the next orchard. ‘Let’s,’ said Lois firmly, go down to the mess tent and get some coffee.’

There was some groping for mess tins in the blacked-out tents, then half a dozen of us went trooping down the hill to the far side of the meadow where the night-duty shift were just lining up for their dinner.

It had been a heavy night. Since dusk the red crosses on the ambulances had been flashing through the farmyard and up the yellow road through the little wood to the reception tent.

Chief Surgeon John Dumphy slumped wearily on the grass beside us, clutching a mess tin full of stew and halved peaches.

Somebody else flopped next to him with a ‘How’ll he do?’

‘Won’t!’ said Dumphy briefly. ‘Went out after three hours.’

Roy Swank—Major Roy Swank, psychiatrist from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, who did more for ‘flying fatigue’ cases among United States Air Corps boys than he will ever be given credit for, wandered up with a ‘How did it happen?’

‘Just nose-dived clean in,’ said Dumphy. ‘Smashed everything from waist up. I still thought, though, that we might pull him through.’

That was the way they worked. No case was ever too hopeless for the best work they could put in on it.

Somehow talk drifted back to the discussion of earlier evening, and went on until the moon was high over our meadow and mist-garlanded the long lines of tents and the still-arriving ambulances. And out of that talk emanated a word picture of all it takes to be a war nurse.

From the men, there came appreciation of the way nurses stood the long hours under blazing lights in the stifling heat of operating tents—for the way they could go on and on giving whole blood, plasma, dressing the hideous mess which high-explosive makes of human flesh. There was regret for hardening of disposition which resulted from war’s experience. And disparagement for spoiling which was inevitable when girls, who wouldn’t get more than one proposal of marriage in a lifetime in their own home town, got more dates in every day of the week than they knew what to do with.’

The nurses spoke of the restlessness which ate into them in the long months in which nothing had stability. Months in which the days were made up of meeting so many men, and seeing so many things they dared not think too deeply about. They talked of fatigue which sagged muscles, made bones ache in their very marrow, yet still kept minds sharp-edged as a razor and running round and round like squirrels in cages, to rob them of sleep.

They listed the things that were everyday, but could never be everyday enough for fastidious women to stop minding. First of all the smells—so many, and all so nasty. There was the smell of ether one never stopped tasting back of the throat, or the sweet, cloying smell of blood—one got that full on the tongue. Then there were the smells that made stomachs crawl, like the gangrenous ones, the smell of death, and the mixed smell of foetus and chlorine in the latrines.

They admitted the things they would never be able to see without minding—the moment when a limb severs, the way a boy looks when he finds that he won’t look any more, burn cases, the way bodies are handled.

Finally, came the small purely personal things that would feaze them no matter how long the war lasted—keeping everything in a duffel bag, suitcases, and bedding roll; always wearing a uniform; washing in a tin hat; having all food sloshed onto one plate—cereal, meat, eggs, jelly, bread and butter, cream and sugar, at breakfast; meat, vegetables, gravy, and pudding, at every other meal; drinking out of canteen cups or enamel basins, and never being alone, ‘not even in the latrine’.

This last grouse broke up the party. Tent quarters were sought to the soldiers’ version of Taper Doll’—’I want a place with toilet roll that I can call my own’—and some ribaldry about the day’s latrine news flash. There was one every day. This was a headliner. One of the nurses thought that what appeared to be a bit of tin sticking up on the far side of the tent looked like a mine. Sure enough it was, and eighty-three women had been trekking in and out of there for the better part of a week.

Casualties grew so heavy in the next few days that Colonel Keeler had to issue a special order forbidding nurses to work longer than their eight-hour shifts. Chief Nurse, Martha Sayles (also of the Peter Bent Brigham), had a hard time keeping it enforced.

Desperate German counterattacks to regain Carentan and its vital bridge had been stopped by the 83rd Infantry and the 101st Airborne Divisions. The time had come for us to move forward in prelude to the great battle of the beachhead breakout.

In the marshes, south and west of Carentan, the attack moved slowly with the Germans fighting like fiends from well-prepared positions, and our men paying top price for every yard they gained. Seventh and 8th Corps drove steadily forward to the south while General Pete Corlett’s 19th Corps struggled mightily in the hedgerow country toward St. Lô.

St. Lô, on the River Vire, was First Army’s key road center for any breakout to the west. It had to be taken. It fell on the eighteenth of July when a special task force, under Brigadier General Norman Cota of Major-General ‘Charlie’ Gerhardt’s ‘blue and gray patch boys’ of the 29th Division, pushed their way into town with the dead body of one of their lieutenant colonels who had sworn never to turn back until the city was taken. They put his body atop the rubble pile which had been the south wall of the beautiful cathedral and covered it with Old Glory.

Every yard along that road to St. Lô sign-posted all it had cost to take it Every villa had great cavernous holes in it, or looked as though a giant had taken hold of it and squeezed. Bedroom floors leaned crazily into space with bits and pieces of what had been homes spilled about the countryside. It’s odd, but in all the horror and hurt of war, there is still something quite shockingly indecent about the way the little personal things which go to make up the sacredness of somebody’s home get broken up and strewn about in a battle.

Sometimes, a house that war had left practically unscathed, portrayed what the passing had involved even more graphically than the rubble piles. Like Alfred Gardie’s house by the gray stone bridge at Pont Hebert. It was a neat, gray stone house with his name on the door. Whoever furnished it had good taste and loved blue. There were blue covers on the chairs, blue-bordered muslin curtains at the lattice windows, blue borders which exactly matched the blue shutters. Now curtains were torn. Chair covers were awry and bloodstained. There were nicks where machine-gun bullets had spat into the walls—then through the dresser, to splinter some of the blue plates. Floorboards were splintered, too. So was a round, brightly polished table, pushed over and rolled into the corner by some man trying desperately to use it for cover.

Alfred was a wine merchant. Under his villa there were great barrels of the stuff. Over it hung the heavy, musty, wine odor which was still not heavy enough to stifle the death smell.

Out in front of the villa were two completely burned-out tanks. One was a Tiger, the other a Sherman. Beside the Sherman was a small black object. It was a charred foot. Behind the Tiger were three gruesome piles in which heads were still only too recognizable.

There was no need for the engineers building a new bridge at the bottom of the hill to describe that last, bitter battle. ‘Wish the Graves Registration boys would get busy around here,’ finished the narrator. ‘This stink is getting us down. We buried a coupla dead cows yesterday and shoved the jerry stiffs under the porch there, but we daren’t touch that broken stuff—it might be G.I.’

Driving down from Pont Hebert into St. Lô, the road runs steep down the hill across the bridge spanning the Vire to angle sharply up toward the cathedral. Gray stone houses once terraced the hillside. Grapevines and flowers used to splash great blobs of color down to the bright, swift-flowing river. That was before anyone drew a ring around the place on an Allied map. As we drove in this time, lying under a fuchsia bush in full bloom at the top of the hill, was a dead American soldier.

He was lying on his face in a gateway with his legs tucked into his muddy combat boots that had scuffed the sand a bit before they stayed still. A coat over the top of him had sagged into the contourless, sun-dried mush. Hopping around him was a large, tame, white rabbit that had somehow escaped from the general holocaust. Browsing beside them was a donkey.

Had it been his own home, the futility of it might have seemed less pitiably futile. But the few yards of gateway this man had fought and died so untidily for meant nothing to him. Until a few months before his death, France was almost certainly nothing but a name on a map to him, and not a very important name at that. Then, in some command post, lines had been drawn with a grease pencil over a little bit of that map. A plan of battle had been drawn up. Orders given. ‘You advance to the line of the bridge,’ the orders had been in his case. And over the top of the hill he had gone, through the villa grounds, crawling on his stomach, trying to keep his behind low as he’d been taught, making a quick dash between the open bits between the trees, finally making the gateway, to peer carefully through, ready to rush across—to take a few yards of vital, precious main road. And for those few yards that could never benefit or matter much to his own country, or to those dear to him and to whom he was dear, he had to die.

When we passed the place next day, there was a large, oblong patch burned in the sandy ground. The fuchsia bush was a scorched skeleton.

Below, the desolation of St. Lô was something which beggars description. The stone houses, with their gay gardens and bright, painted shutters, which once outcropped the hill, had rubbled and slithered to the bottom of it—there to dam the River Vire so that it formed a black, evil-smelling lake. On this lake floated planks from floors, timber from roofs, furniture, mattresses, every household effect it was possible to think of, and an assortment of dead horses, cows, cats, and dogs. Everything was gray. Bulldozers, chewing a way through the rockery, had cut a few roads. Walls still remaining stood stark and jagged out of a scene unreal as the country of the moon.

St.Lô in July 1944

At the crossroads up by the cathedral were nine people with a couple of bags of personal possessions, and expressions you would expect in such circumstances but never visualize. We thought they had crawled out of some cellar. But no, they were the first civilians to return to the city and must have come in practically before the dust from the last shells had settled. Now they were staring down over the avalanched houses into the black, debris-scummed lake, at the bottom of which was all that was left of all they had in the world except each other and the contents of those two sacks.

There was François, who was a builder, and his wife; and Jean Marie, who was nearly twenty; Paulette Marie, who was fourteen; and then Josette, Jean, Jacqueline, and Georgette, going down in steps to Claudia, who was three, and, in all her dirt and weariness, adorable as a doll. Another step was evident in the nearest future. Meanwhile, all Mama could say, over and over again, wringing her hands and tears channeling the dirt on her face, was, ‘Mais ce n’est pas possible, ce n’est pas possible’.

They had, of course, no right to be there and, in a matter of moments, a couple of officers of the Intelligence Service were with them to find out how they had managed to get by the military police. St. Lô was no place for the few stray cats and dogs roaming dismally about the wreckage, let alone human beings, who were therefore being turned back at the edge of town.

François told an all-too-familiar story. They had waited until the guns shook their villa windows, hoping war would bypass their city. Then François had decided it was time to leave home. He would not, however, obey German orders given to civilians to move back behind their lines. He had, he said, no wish for François or his family to be used as a shield for the German Army and that was what had happened so often. Ever since the Allies landed, the Germans had ordered civilians back before their army retreated. When the proper time came, they would simply drive these civilians out as a buffer between them and our advancing forces. It would be horrible, said François. Wanting no part of it for his family, he had hidden them in fields and barns—praying that no shell or bomb would hit them, until news had come that St. Lô was safely in Allied hands.

The possibility that the family were spies was one that had to be considered. How did they get into town? An American officer, seeing them trudging along the road, had taken pity on them. The American officer must have known that St. Lô was out of bounds for civilians. Had François told him that he lived in the city, or had he told him that he was going through it on his way farther back? The American officer, explained François, did not speak French well, but in any case his road turned off at St. Lô.

Sunset color had monotoned in a sky already being starred with shell bursts. There was no water in St. Lô. There were no services of any kind. Few buildings in the city were safe to walk under, let alone live in. Many hundreds of bodies were buried under the wreckage, and the Germans were still assiduously bombing the place.

So, in spite of tears and pleas, the party of eleven went straggling up the road—the two American officers carrying the sacks, and Claudine hugging a stray cat.

Beyond St. Lô, the battle was creeping toward high ground to the south which the 19th Corps had to seize and hold, preparatory to advancing down the east bank of the Vire River for their part in the Battle of the Breakout.

It was still hedgerow country fighting, but the news flashes were exhilarating—men were saying that it was the beginning of the end and that the German Army was cracking. True, the cracking was pretty hard to see, but it was there all right. ‘We’ve got them on the run,’ the boys said gleefully. ‘It’s been a good day.’

It had also been an expensive one. Litters jammed downstairs rooms in the broken house which was a field dressing station, though casualties were not kept longer there than it took to give them plasma, oxygen, and rough-dress their wounds. Medics, running their ambulances over a bit of road as perfectly zeroed for 88 fire as any road anyone had the misfortune to travel, were still bringing them in.

Two staggered in, with an SS soldier and a muttered ‘emergency’. The doctor moved over to him, though there were men already waiting for his attention. ‘Thanks,’ said the Nazi in English almost without trace of accent. ‘I don’t need priority or anyone’s sense of duty’. ‘In that case,’ snapped the doctor, ‘it’s too bad I don’t have what it takes to leave you’. ‘It is,’ grinned the boy—and died before anyone could get a plasma tube in him.

‘Another good German,’ announced the kid on the next litter. He really was a kid, too, fair-haired and looking about seventeen. ‘That’s the only way they are good—dead. He sure was a plucky bastard, though. He’d have been all right to make good for Buzz. Son-of-a-bitch I got was yellower’n hell and hollered. Christ! How he hollered! Buzz got his through the guts. I give the Heine his through the guts, too, but he could’ve had another for the easy road if he hadn’t been such a squealer.’

‘Looks like you got yours same place, Joe,’ the doctor told him. He cut away hunks of combat jacket, slapped on dressings, and queried, ‘So you reckon you know when a guy hasn’t got what it takes? Boy, you know a lot more than I’ve managed to learn. Pretty hard to tell when a man’s being brave unless you know him mighty well. Maybe the thing you think he ought to get a citation for is something that doesn’t faze him a bit.’ He finished the dressing and put a hand on the kid’s shoulder with a ‘Swell.

You’ll do fine,’ and jerked his thumb to signal the medics to get him into the ambulance.

Not a twitch had moved his face all the while the doctor worked on him. When they slid his litter into the ambulance his face was tense as he said huskily, ‘Hey, bud, what about leaving that door open? I can’t stand bein’ boxed up.’

‘Can’t, Fella. She’ll swing and bust,’ the medic answered. Tell you what we will do, though, we’ll leave out the top litters, and you won’t feel shut in.’

Combat strain was beginning to tell on men who had fought their way from the beach through the hedgerow country without a day’s or night’s let-up. As the ambulances slid to a standstill, men would lurch out of them with no mark of battle-hurt, but gray faces, often streaked with tears.

Medics, the wonderful medics, invariably conscientious objectors, convinced that war is so wrong they will have no part in fighting it—yet working always under fire and often against greater handicaps than any combat soldier—were more gentle with them than they were with the worst belly cases.

Seeing, one remembered last war’s story of the little guy and the big guy waiting for zero hour.

‘Why, you’re trembling. You’re scared,’ scoffed the big fellow. ‘S’right,’ chattered the small one—’If you were half as scared as I am, you’d be runnin’ away.’

In a field collecting post, as nowhere else, you see just what war does to men.

I’m just about sick of seeing these beautiful boys coming in here all mashed and broken, and burned up,’ sobbed a nurse in a forward zone hospital.

‘Sister, you’ve seen plenty,’ the ambulance driver said gently, ‘but you still don’t know how much you can thank God you haven’t seen; till you work up where we bring these boys from.’

Somehow the roughest dressing makes a patient. Before that dressing is slapped on, he is a man the way men would never, but for war, see their fellowmen—mud-stained, exhausted, hurting. And minding more, showing more of that hurting, no matter how much they try not to, than they would ever care to remember.

Ruth and I hoped to get an ambulance lift back to our hospital, but found those from this particular collecting post were going to Cherbourg. We clambered out at the crossroads at St. Lô, expecting, within a matter of minutes, to pick up an ambulance evacuating to Carentan. We were greeted by a snapped ‘There’s a good big hole over there. Hit it!’ Then, as we went, a shout of ‘I said hit it!’ as the shouter, too, hit it—a split fraction of a second before we did, though he had at least twice as far to go.

As the bombs came down, I remember thinking, ‘How ridiculous of the Germans to waste bombs on this rubble pile,’ and then, ‘God, the crossroads! Our main supply routes. And we’re slap on them.’ We were pinned there for a twenty minutes’ plastering. Ruth was mighty perturbed because our shell hollow—it wasn’t nearly deep enough to be called a hole—was overhung by all that was left of the jail, one wall. Under it lay the bodies of at least fifty French political prisoners, whom the Germans had chained there and left to our bombing when they evacuated the city. The overhanging wall was fretted with wide fissures which gave a fine moonlit view of all that was left of the cathedral. No sooner had each wave of dive-bombers zoomed away than Ruth would be out of her hole, grumbling about the putrid smell and poking about the ruins opposite, with a petulant ‘There must be safer places to shelter than under this crazy wall’.

The shouter, a military policeman called Wilson, convinced her that though there was undoubtedly a ‘better ‘ole,’ this was no time to go looking for it. He finally convinced her just before the last stick of bombs came down to bury us all with the debris of a new hole.

Concussion deafened the lot of us so that I did not know until many hours later that it had also shattered my ear drum.

The wall, incredibly, still stood, though it swayed like a ship riding a heavy storm, as a command car full of officers drew up, at first highly suspicious and then highly indignant.

‘You mean you two out here at this time of night are having to thumb your way back to your hospital?’ they demanded. ‘War correspondents don’t have to do that sort of thing. They have their own jeeps and drivers.’

‘Check!’ Ruth answered. ‘But we happen to be women correspondents.’

4

ALTHOUGH British servicewomen had been in uniform so much longer, the American WAC’s beat the British ATS and WAAF into France by nearly a month, and there was a marked difference in the way publicity on the event was handled by the two war departments. Americans invited correspondents and photographers to accompany their girl soldiers into the combat zone; the British, despite the cain-raising of every British woman correspondent worth a by-line, sent theirs off with just one public relations officer. She, poor girl, had to write the story of all that had indirectly been responsible for the conscription of the womanpower of the entire British nation, as a press handout.

Several women correspondents, this one included, anxious in spite of the British War Office to give the girls in khaki and air-force blue a break, went over to the British sector only to hear that the British girls were not to be written about without special permission from Brigadier General Neville, commanding Public Relations for Monty’s Headquarters. Monty’s aversion to women in the field was so well known that nobody anticipated anything in the nature of a warm welcome from the Brigadier, but nobody expected permission would take days to come through during which time they would have to live on K-rations and resentment. The British press camp was in the Hotel Lion d’Or, where correspondents had organized a very pleasant mess. Visiting correspondents were not given the privilege of using the mess until their official permission to be in the area had come through. They were not able to eat anywhere else, because nobody in uniform was allowed to buy a meal in any café or restaurant in Bayeux. Before leaving the American sector we were assured that official permission to visit the British would be awaiting us. Permission came through three days later at the end of my second and last box of K-rations. Colonel Warrender, commanding the press camp, roared into the courtyard of the Lion d’Or on his motorbike, his face red-gold as his hair from the Normandy dust, to yell, ‘Okay, you’re a member of the family.’ Hashed bully beef and beans never smelled better than it did that night, but proved harder to take than the last greasy-sweet bit of pork loaf in the K-ration. It had to be eaten in an atmosphere of hostility that lumped the throat. Messmates were colleagues, most of them very old ones, though there was nothing in their attitude to indicate it.

Sol Harris of the London News Chronicle breezed in to disturb brooding on what had got into them all with an incredulous stare and loud and delighted laughter. ‘Carpenter,’ he said, you’ve a nerve after my own heart. Do you know that each and every one of us has sworn solemnly not only to slit your throat, but to drag your corpse by its golden hair, hang it to the nearest tree, and shoot? Every morning for three bitter weeks after D-Day, while we were cooped up at Monty’s Headquarters in England waiting to get across the Channel, we read your stuff from Normandy and cursed. Every morning either Warrender or Neville would promise us that come what may the War Office would get you back from the beachhead to Britain and keep you there. Now here you are, by God, right with us.’

Having spent so much time with American frontline hospitals, I was particularly anxious to write about British ones. As far as surgery went there seemed to be nothing to choose between them. Outside that there was a marked difference.

It began with the very attitude adopted toward patients. In British hospitals it seemed that the wounded remained soldiers even though they were patients, too. In American hospitals soldiers became patients, and pretty pampered patients at that, the minute they were casualties. Drugs and dressings were used, penicillin dusted or shot in with a profusion often criticized as wasteful. There was an abundance of cigarettes and candy, pretty Red Cross girls to bring books for the wounded, write letters home, and help solve their personal problems. No matter how fast-moving the battle became or how far-stretched the supply lines got, the food, generally speaking, stayed good and well served. Except in unusual circumstances, like the entry into Paris and the surge back at the time of the Ardennes breakthrough, boys in American hospitals only a mile or two back of the front line could ask for, and stand a very good chance of getting, anything from oysters to fried chicken, provided it was good for them. The kitchen equipment in those four-hundred-bed evacuation hospitals was excellent as the rest of their setup. Most of the cooks counted it a matter of personal pride that their ‘chow’ made up to the boys who got hurt for some of that hurting.

As for the way the men on the litters were handled—well, just watching medics could still catch a lump in my throat as late in the war as the fall of Leipzig. It was just something one never got used to taking as part of routine. Every movement made, everything they did for the boys, was geared to the way they’d say, Take it easy there, son, we’ll take care of everything.’ They certainly did. Often the boys had to wait for hours on litters jammed outside the operating tents. Medics couldn’t help that when casualties were flooding. But they helped everything else it was in their power to help, and one wished over and over again that the folks back home could have seen them doing it Just seeing it would have lifted so much of the worry and the breath-catching clutch of fear which followed those War Department telegrams.

I would like to be certain that it was that way in the British sector, though I am bound to report seeing little evidence of it And I did see wounded walking—hobbling off ships at Southampton and limping out of ambulances in Normandy as they would never have been allowed to walk in the American sector. There was most emphatically not the same prodigality in the way of supplies or comforts, for the very simple reason that those supplies and comforts were not available. The food was nothing like so good.

Such food as was available was not cooked or served as well as it was when the Stars and Stripes floated over the red-crossed tents. United States hospitals, even in the front line, were equipped with modern portable gasoline cookers. At British base hospitals far back, all cooking had to be done in old-type military earth ovens built up out of the field. Sunday lunch in one visited consisted of roast beef, cabbage, potatoes boiled in their jackets, suet pudding, and custard.

‘What about the seriously wounded men?’ somebody asked. ‘They surely can’t eat such heavy stuff.’

‘Oh,’ said the cook, ‘they ought to be having a light diet of minced chicken. We haven’t been able to get the chicken, so we’ve minced them some of the beef instead.’

Comment that this was not good enough for men who had been through all these men had been through and that food congealed and cold and so roughly served that it would scarcely tempt a fit and hungry man, let alone a sick one, brought the answer, These men are frontline soldiers, remember—not patients in a civilian hospital. This is war, bear in mind, and we are in the thick of it.’

Well, so were the Yanks, but they handled it differently. There was, for instance, that American custom of putting soldiers in the same wards, whether they happened to be colonels or GI’s. The personnel of one evacuation hospital are never going to grow tired of telling the story of one British batman who arrived with a bag full of his major’s belongings, to find him stretched on a cot next door to a buck private. The batman promptly searched for a nurse.

‘Don’t you have a ward for officers here?’ he inquired severely.

‘No,’ said the nurse sweetly, ‘they’re all just men to us.’

Whereupon the batman decided that, since American hospital procedure did not apparently accord his officer the care and attention his rank warranted, he would have to stay in the hospital and give it to him personally. There was some sharp interchange of opinion on the matter with the nurse and orderly inclined to resentment, the colonel commanding the hospital to amusement. The major was a little sandy-haired guy whose tunic flaunted every campaign and almost every honor ribbon that mattered. His batman brewed tea for him, sampled food before he fed it spoonful by spoonful to his patient. When time came for operation, he elbowed medics away and carted him into the theater, there to wait like an anxious spaniel while the surgeons patched up an arm and a leg which had seemed certainties for amputation.

By the time the major was due for shipment home, batman, orderly, and nurse were all firm friends and good working colleagues, and the batman had concluded that democracy, which insisted on treatment of wounded which couldn’t be bettered, no matter ‘ow many red tabs a bloke ‘ad on ‘im,’ was something worth fighting for.

All through this phase the fighting was bitter enough to keep hospitals so jammed men had to be sent back to base hospitals in Britain before the plaster casts had time to dry out on them. To speed the emptying of beds ready for new casualties, a new technique of plaster bandaging began to be developed. Almost every type of wound was penicillin-treated, wrapped in gauze, and then plaster set, so that men could be transported over the lengthening distances from front line to base hospitals without transportation too badly jarring their wounds. Thanks to penicillin and sulpha, such bandaging was an enormous and unexpected success. Busy surgeons in frontline hospitals would take a mangled limb, think ‘there’s just a chance it might heal if we clean it up and plaster set. If it won’t, hell! let ‘em amputate at base.’ Back at base, surgeons would discover that there was no need for amputation. The miracle drug penicillin, which some doctor back behind the lines had peppered in with a ‘Well, there’s just a chance,’ and a prodigality with which he would have liked to use time and surgical skill and so much else had there only been the opportunity for all those things, had somehow incredibly and wonderfully worked to make them all unnecessary. Thousands of bits of dirty red and black plaster were chipped off hands and arms and legs hundreds of miles and many days back of the hurting, with some nurse or doctor ejaculating an incredulous ‘Jesus! here’s another limb that’ll grow again in spite of it all.’

Up where the hurting was happening, the Americans were lining up ready for their turn at a crack to break out from the beachhead. Monty had already had one try. Being Supreme Commander of Ground Forces, he elected to attempt to hack his way out from the Caen bridgehead across the Orne toward Falaise. The attack jumped off in fine style, but fizzled out like a damp squib. Day after day, the eastern end of the Allied line stayed in the same place on the world’s news maps. Rumors flickered up and down the front concerning non-co-ordination of British, Canadian, and American troops.

Non-co-ordination between air and ground troops resulted in some tragic strafing of our own men. One Canadian unit got the daylight bombed out of them three times in one week—twice by the British RAF and once by the Americans. ‘After this,’ declared one enraged Canuck, ‘the bleeding Heinies can walk into my foxhole and out of the bloody thing for all I care. The guy I’m looking to fight is any guy in Allied bloody uniform without a Canada flash on his shoulder.’

Petty bickering and incompetence among officers, not yet weeded from command, made it tougher than it need have been for the men who fought from Caen to Falaise. Had they, however, had the support of completely coordinated Allied might, the purchase price in lives for those twenty-odd miles of bleak, desolate, brown-stubbled cornfields would still have been high. The German soldier defending there was a German soldier at his fighting best. And soldiers don’t come any better than that. These were not soft garrison troops. They were panzer and crack infantry divisions superbly positioned to use their tremendous fire power to its best advantage, and they were still completely confident of the invulnerability of the unbeaten German Army.

In day after unspectacular day of bitter, heartbreaking slogging, the British and the Canadians could do little more than yard their way through the tank and crater-scarred country which looked so like the battlefields of the last war. Until they got to Caen, there had been little enough in the hedgerow and apple-orcharded terrain in Normandy to remind soldiers of the last war. Caen looked like Ypres, only much, much worse—thanks to our bombers which pounded the city down on its unfortunate citizens so completely that numbers of them, trapped but not killed by falling debris, just starved to death, except one, a butcher, who was alleged to have kept himself going with steaks from a trapped neighbor. Sol Harris was determined to interview the man, although he knew perfectly well that the censors would never pass the story. He expected to meet a wizened, miserable creature on the edge of starvation, and swore to colleagues, hazing him on the best approach, that he would tackle the fellow with a direct and straightforward ‘Come now, is it true you ate your pal?’

Hardened war correspondent as he thought himself to be, Sol confessed himself more shaken than he believed possible when he was greeted by a ruddy-faced, hearty-looking man in his early forties, with the soft kind of flesh that stays dented when you press,’ who replied to Sol’s diffident ‘This story now of you—er, eating—?’ With a broad smile, he queried, ‘My neighbor?’—a shrug accompanied by the palms forward hand flourish which is so typically French, and a cheery ‘Yes, it is true that I did eat him. But he was a butcher, too, and my friend—he would understand.’

Through Caen, across the River Orne, the panorama became even more last-war-looking. Nobody driving along that straight road across the plateau to the high ground around Falaise would have dared criticize the British and Canadian rate of advance or compare it with the American. On all that dreary emptiness, nothing lived but the spirit of the men who had spilled there so lavishly all that could have been theirs of living. Dead animals, dead riven trees, dead broken villages. Smashed guns, burned-out hulls of tanks, discarded equipment littered everywhere. Everything was monotoned with the gray destruction of artillery bombing and some of the grimmest fighting in military history. Every yard gruesomely evidenced all it had taken to win. On the Caen side of what had been, before our bombers burned a German panzer unit out of it, the green glory of the Forêt de Quesigny, a couple of soldiers were kneeling beside a grave. It was one of many graves along that road, a mound of lumped earth with a rough wooden cross at the head on which the burying party had jammed a black beret The kneeling boys were nailing the beret safe from the wind’s waywardness, using a rifle as hammer. Tin hats crowning grave crosses were an all-too familiar sight. There was something about that jauntily sitting beret which, as the jeep driver put it, made your throat feel awful fulla lump.’

Falaise, birthplace of William the Conqueror, seemed little enough worth all it cost to take when the Canadians finally got in. A chorus of voices yelled, ‘Faster,’ with an urgency that had the effect of making our jeep seem suddenly airborne. On the road just ahead, a man crumpled and began frantically scrabbling his feet Our jeep somehow rounded him without overturning as a husky tanker bellowed, ‘Sons-of-bitches are shootin’ straight down the f....g street,’ in quite superfluous explanation.

In spite of machine-gunning from the usual suicide squad the Germans left behind when they pulled out of town and desultory mortar fire, the civilians were already dribbling out onto the streets. They bobbed up from their cellars or trickled in from the woods around town in the strangest-looking trucks and handcarts high piled with whatever bits and pieces they could grab and make off with before bombs and high-explosives began spattering hell around them. One old man came lurching in with a cart so long he wanted pretty well all the town square to turn it around in. Having at last managed to turn it, he began backing it into the passageway alongside his house, and then found the way barred by the body of an enormous, camouflaged jacketed German, who was lying on his back, his arms and legs jutting stiffly from the billowing green, paint-splotched folds around him. The old man jumped a bit, then stepped up and jabbed at him with his foot Having satisfied himself that he was dead, he began urinating over the body. He did it with the greatest care and deliberation, subjecting each feature in the gray, florid face to equally timed proportion of debasement. He then began laughing—high-pitched laughter that trembled and quavered into hysteria as first a blue-overalled youth about twenty, and then a ragged jerseyed kid of twelve or so, joined him.

A couple of Canuck soldiers came up with a ‘Quit it,’ and dropped a blanket over the corpse. A woman arrived to bestow a bottle of wine on the soldiers, a hearty cuff on the twelve-year-old and drag him off, sniveling.

At the corner of the next street, a blowsy-looking housewife kept making running lunges at a meager-looking little Frenchman, to throw her arms around him, kiss him ecstatically on both cheeks, and say over and over again, ‘My hero!’

The little Frenchman looked as pleased about it as any man has a right to look who has obviously long passed the age for hero worship from any woman, let alone his own wife, as was this woman. The couple had been, it seemed, among those who decided to stay where they were when the fighting moved into town. They hoped, as civilians who decide to brave out a battle always hope, that the fighting would bypass their particular house. Instead, hand-to-hand combat surged through it from attic to cellar with a Canadian and a German finishing up the last round in the cellar where Madame and her husband were cowering with the reaction proper to such circumstance. The German, moreover, was getting the best of things until the Frenchman shot him with a gun which, from the looks of it, had been issued for the Napoleonic wars.

Next door there was more hero worship going on, this time from a bright-faced mademoiselle. She, too, had been cowering in the cellar. Now a six-foot Canuck had one arm around her, the other round a quart of champagne, and was announcing happily, ‘Holds me personally responsible for liberation, she does. Jesus, this is going to be worth fighting all the way down that bloody road for.’

While they had been fighting down it, taking the better part of a month to drive from Caen to Falaise in the unspectacular, unsatisfactory slogging which, as the men said bitterly, ‘took everything but territory,’ the First United States Army had at long last broken out of the Normandy hedgerows. It was no longer a beachhead; they had established the Western Front. The breakthrough owed a great deal, however, to British and Canadians hammering away to the east, for without that hammering, the First Army would have certainly had to cope with panzer reserves thrown at them, which Rommel had to use instead in a vain attempt to stem Monty’s drive to Falaise.

The First Army called their breakout operation ‘Cobra’ because it looked like a cobra’s head on the briefing maps. It was designed as a strike with the striking columns parting to loop out round the enemy and was a beautifully coordinated and executed operation.

General Bradley chose 7th Corps Commander, J. Lawton Collins, to carry the ball with some of the pick of the American divisions. He had the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 30th Infantry as well as the 2nd and 3rd Armored. On Collins’s left, General Pete Corlett’s 19th Corps kept steady pace. General Middleton’s 8th Corps took care of the right flank, and General Gerow’s 5th, the left.

Bradley borrowed a leaf out of Monty’s book for the jump-off, which had to wait until everything in the support, including air weather, was right as it could be. The perfect air weather took several days to materialize. Then on the twenty-fifth of July, a steady stream of bombers throbbed a skyfull of awesome noise before unloosening the inferno of their bursting loads upon a six-thousand-yard-wide bit of country thickly occupied with German troops and some, unhappily, of ours.

The Germans came out of their holes dazed by the terrific bombardment, but fighting like avenging devils. The 9th and the 30th had to reorganize because of the share they took of our bomb loads, so our gains on that first day were nothing to splash headlines about. On the next, the 1st Infantry captured Marigny, the 2nd Armored mopped up Canisy, and all along the rest of the line the fanatic defense slowed, swayed, then broke, to let our troops through and force the Germans into pell-mell withdrawal. The boys of the 9th Tactical Air Force, fighting under General Pete Quesada, had a wonderful time. For the first time since landing they had the chance of showing that now that the Allies instead of the Nazis had superiority in the matter of holding an air umbrella over the battlefield, they could beat them at what had so long been their own game.

Hedge-hopping behind the enemy lines, diving down into tree clumps to burn out hidden tanks and guns, zooming down roads to send convoys careening into the ditches, they positively littered the fields and necklaced the roads from Coutances through Avranches and out toward St. Malo with burned-out tanks, guns, and gas and horse-driven trucks.

Six days, and it was all over, and Bradley had a gate out of the Normandy bridgehead. Through that gate he called old ‘Blood and Guts’ and the Third Army who had been waiting with considerable impatience in secret headquarters on the Cherbourg Peninsula.

They got their marching orders at noon on the first of August Taking over Middleton’s 8th Corps they were to push on south from Avranches to Rennes and the River Loire, thus isolating the Brittany Peninsula and the great fortress ports of Lorient and Brest. Orders given were ‘to contain Brest.’ So, to the boys wearing the blue and gray patches of the 29th, assigned the containing, it promptly became ‘the bra campaign.’

The sudden materialization of the Third Army on top of the terrific battering the First had given them caused complete consternation and confusion in the German High Command. Local commanding officers were under no delusions as to the vital import of this breakthrough. They knew it for the beginning of the end in the overall battle for France. On the last day of July, our forward elements captured the telephone journal belonging to the German Commanding Officer, Field Marshal von Kluge. His report to Lieutenant-General Speidel records that ‘as a consequence of the breakthrough of enemy spearheads near Cerences the whole Western Front has been ripped open, the key point, Avranches, has been taken by the enemy and Villedieu is threatened. Villedieu, springboard for the east and south as well as Avranches, the anchor point for Brittany, has to be held under all circumstances or else has to be recaptured. To accomplish this, on our own, with troops in their present condition, is impossible. The situation must be controlled under all circumstances because this is the decisive phase. The seriousness of the situation must be explained to the Army High Command.’

It was explained. General Warlimont, who was Hitler’s representative, was informed: ‘Losses in men and equipment are extraordinary. The morale of the troops has suffered very heavily under the murderous enemy fire, especially since all infantry units consist only of haphazard groups which do not form a strongly coordinated force any longer. In the rear areas of the front, terrorists, feeling the end approaching, grow steadily bolder. This fact and the loss of numerous signal installations makes an orderly command extremely difficult. Corps have reached a certain degree of disintegration. Fresh forces must be brought up from the Fifteenth Army or from somewhere else. Commander-in-Chief West (von Kluge) recalls herewith example during the first World War in which Parisian buses were used to bring up troops to the Allied front. Now, as then, all available means must be exhausted. It is, however, still impossible to determine whether it would be possible to stop the enemy.’

Deep behind the German lines the steadily bolder attitude of the terrorists,’ as von Kluge phrased it, began, at last, to be apparent as an integral part of the Allied campaign.

The terrorists fell into two groups, the French Forces of the Interior and the Maquis. The FFI, with their white armbands and makeshift uniforms, were groups of men who operated locally, sometimes working with the Maquis, but usually just doing a little sabotage as seemed expedient and waiting for the great day of liberation to become imminent before grouping to fight.

We had no list of their names, no way of checking on them. So their magnificent patriotism caused, in addition to the inconvenience to the enemy, considerable confusion to Allied liaison officers and unlimited opportunity for German counter-intelligence. Many were arrested as spies and collaborators. Several were lynched by their own countrymen before anyone who knew of their integrity could turn up to vouch for it.

The Maquis were organized directly from London and all the world knows how for months before D-Day contact was maintained with them by radio, by planes which dropped parachutists or even landed in enemy-held territory, and by midget submarines which called regularly on the Brittany coast to carry key personnel back and forth and shuttle back the crews of Allied aircraft shot down in Europe.

As soon as invasion troops began landing, the Maquis began work on the carefully planned series of railway cuts and road and bridge demolitions to delay any build-up of German forces in the beachhead area. That demolition delayed Rommel’s troop regrouping by at least a month.

Once ashore, we made every possible use of resistance groups. They cut enemy military wires so the Germans had to use radio, to the great satisfaction of our radio intelligence; they filtered through enemy lines obtaining information on fortifications. They even led our advancing columns. None of this, however, could stand the glare of publicity. Not until we got well into Brittany could the French emerge as the kind of people we hoped to find waiting for us—brave, proudly and passionately believing in the soul and the future of France, ready to die for that future as men of the invading Allied armies had to be.

See Brest at the far left about Brittany

There were several thousand such in the Maquis headquarters just back of Brest and Lorient. Cream of them were the paratroopers. These men, who had stolen away from their families to take ship to England, join de Gaulle and train for the trip back into France, were dropped just before D-Day with instructions to live off the land, execute key sabotage assignments, and report to local commanders, to work with ground troops in taking key objectives when the proper time for such action arrived.

Hervé Moribhan was typical of such commanders. He was tall, hawk-faced, fortyish, had fought for the French in Africa, and Herve was not his name. For two years before D-Day, he worked and organized for the Maquis Division assigned to his command. During that time civilian identification papers described him as an agricultural worker.

Soon after H-Hour, orders radioed from London instructed him to proceed to a part of the Forêt de Ploermel between Rennes and the coast to meet his men. There were eight hundred of them.

This Forêt de Ploermel is allegedly Merlin’s enchanted Forest and the scene of the adventuring of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. All their romantic legendry is nothing like as heart-stirring as the jousting of Herve and his men in the same setting.

The division went into action for the first time at San Marcelle, where a pocket of Germans reported at the strength of a few hundred men turned out instead to be three thousand—supported, moreover, by full artillery. Hervé’s troops had one gun, if you please, to each four men, very little ammunition, and even less of anything else. They took a bad beating and with it every scrap of equipment they could strip. Their next big fight was at Vannes, which, it will be remembered, was the first French city to be liberated by the French themselves.

Hearing that Georgie Patton’s Third Army was rolling down on them from Avranches in typical Patton style, German Headquarters in the biggest hotel in town decided that it was high time they had a few tanks around, and pending their arrival it might be prudent to withdraw to quarters outside town.

Herve decided that having got out, the Bodies should stay out. All night long he shuttled his men, thirty at a time, in the only transport the division had, a captured German truck painted with the Croix de Lorraine. By the time the German supporting columns moved up next day, he was positioned to give them such a reception they turned tail, convinced they had run head on into Patton’s armored spearheads.

There have been many stories of liberation, but it is doubtful if even in Paris there existed such mad exhilaration and excitement as that which possessed the citizens of Vannes when the shout ‘Liberté!’ rose as Herve and his rag-and-taggle army in battle dress, consisting for the most part of blue jeans hung about with captured German weapons, came marching back into town singing the Marseillaise.

They went first to the Hôtel de Ville to relieve the Nazi-appointed mayor of office. From there, accompanied by a wildly cheering, dancing, singing populace, they went to jail. Here Monsieur Marchais, who had been mayor until the Germans jailed him for suspected sabotage, received his freedom—so did eighty other political prisoners. A few Nazis and collaborationists were then disposed of, and by the time the American commander arrived, nearly a week later, the city was decorated and cleaned up, the proper and loyal officials were all back in office, the keys ready to hand over, and the inhabitants more or less sober.

Reporting such fighting was crazy, mad, and exciting, and quite dangerous. There was no briefing in the accepted military sense. No big wall maps to give phase lines, a combat picture, and an idea, at least, of fields of fire. One came on war any time any place, and the best one could hope for was luck enough to either bypass it or receive timely notice from the combatants. Like the night our car was stopped by three shaggy, untidy shapes which emanated (no other word accurately describes their appearance), with horrific suddenness, from the dark. We were well behind German lines with Huns as well as Maquis in possession of the woods. As the car skidded to a standstill, white patches gleamed mistily. ‘Armbands! FFI, thank God!’ They examined our identity cards carefully, then took us to an inn twenty yards or so down the road, where we must stay for the night ‘unless we wanted to be shot.’

The inn was one-roomed, low-ceilinged, and most inadequately lit by a couple of guttering candles. Around the table half a dozen men were drinking cider. They, too, demanded identity cards. Having satisfied themselves that, incredible though it might seem, people, otherwise apparently quite sane and cold sober, should be motoring through that part of Brittany at that time of night and that we had, moreover, every right to such diversion, they poured a drink and continued with their plans for the liberation of the village a couple of kilometers along the road. Liberation was due to begin at midnight. It was then almost eleven.

Every few minutes the door into the night would swing quietly open, and in would come a man who seemed more shabby-looking, more grotesquely uniformed, and more hung about with grenades, knives, and guns, than his predecessor.

The village butcher arrived. He was a gray-haired, granite-faced fellow in the army jacket he had taken off when he got home from the fighting around Dunkirk. His son had been arrested four months previously by the Gestapo on a sabotage charge.

Then came the village doctor who had been a group leader in the area for two years before our landing. Then three or four village youths in the captured uniforms of German paratroopers and three in our own. One had been a law student in Paris. One had studied law in the university at Rennes. One was a fisherman from a village just outside Lorient.

The doctor ran through a final briefing. ‘You, Jacques,’ he instructed, ‘have five men to hold the road between my house and the corner. You,’ he told the butcher, ‘had better take your men through the yard at the back of the Commandant’s villa. You, and you’—he nodded at the paratroop law students—’converge in from north and south. You know about moving through the street from house to house, and the doors will all be left open for you.’

‘What time do we attack?’ asked the butcher.

‘Ten after twelve,’ the doctor told him quietly. ‘There are not more than twenty Boches in the villa. Alphonse’—he nodded at the fisherman and at Pierre, one of the village boys—’can take care of the guards. It must be quick, though. No noise. Their weapons are better than ours.’

It was quick. But not quick enough for Alphonse and two of the butcher’s men...

This first trip into Brittany, so far ahead of our own troops that the Bretons thought several times that we were personally doing the liberating, was made with John Wilhelm, at that time writing for the United Press. We were taking a young French officer called Olivier to his château at Arradon on the coast near Brest. Olivier, a liaison officer with the British all through the African campaign, hoped to meet the mother and daughter he had not seen in five years.

Through St. Lô, Percy, Canisy, and out to Coutances we drove along roads which showed all that had gone into the hedgerow war until suddenly pace and weight of armor and air told.

Instead of foxholes in every hedge and fields pock-marked with shell craters and sputtered all over with mortar holes, there were long stretches of country serenely bereft of horror as a picnic location. Then for a couple of miles or so would come the strewn wreckage again with convoys piled up in ditches where their drivers had frantically tried to plunge to shelter. Round each was a litter of clothes and personal belongings. For the French, practical people as they are, never let a corpse get cold or the fire more than just die out around a vehicle, before they searched it—strewing what was of no use to them.

Cottages, instead of being broken into untidiness, became immaculate with flowers splashing about white-curtained windows and Breton women in their lace mobcaps sitting at their doors sewing. The sight of them caused Olivier’s big shoulders to shake so that for a second or two he couldn’t wear with the nonchalance of the soldier the reaction to all that the trip was meaning to him.

When we got out past Vannes, he said suddenly, ‘Let’s pull in here for a drink.’ And after he’d gulped it, ‘Five years! I’m afraid, you know, of what I’m going to find. My daughter will be twenty. My mother—my mother may not even be alive. If they’re all right every other way, they might’—he almost whispered it—’they might even be Vichy. I wouldn’t know.’

In the next village we were told that the château had been occupied by a coast-defense unit who had left a week before because they heard that the Americans had broken through at Avranches. Before leaving, they had fired antitank guns into the château, then set it on fire. Madame and mademoiselle had departed when the Germans took over. Nobody in the village knew where they had gone. Perhaps to Paris.

Olivier’s château must have been exceptionally beautiful even in country where beautiful châteaux are almost commonplace.

We drove through white wrought-iron gates along a drive winding down through pines to curve on a wide lawn, sea-lapped where the Breton coast is its loveliest. So indented is it, so dotted with rocky, pine and heather and gorse-clad islets, that it seems France flaunts into the sea there with a jade and gold and purple lace edge to her skirt.

We parked outside what was left of the big dining-room, climbed over smoke-blackened tumbled stone through the various rooms. Everything valuable had been stolen. Bits of silver, odds and ends of china, pictures, bric-a-brac, deemed unworthy of looting, trampled on. Outside the stables down by the beach were piles of books and papers. Neither of us had spoken since our first glimpse of the place. Now John and I, feeling more awkward than either of us ever want to feel again, watched while Olivier picked up a big family Bible, smoothed the fly-page, read down the list of names and ran a finger under his own.

He tucked the book under his arm and we followed his long, swift strides across the lawn to a tiny chapel under trees on the far side. That seemed to be untouched. But no. We got inside to find that the family vault before the High Altar had been broken open, supposedly by troops hoping to find treasure hidden there.

From the time he had been told that his château had been burned, the muscles in Olivier’s cheeks had twitched as steadily as a pulse and he had not opened his mouth. Surveying the broken flagstone, he crossed himself, got down on his knees to peer into the black cavern, and remarked with incongruous practicality, ‘We must get a ladder.’

The resistance movement in Brittany, stronger and more fervent than in any other part of France, exemplified all we hoped to find in reaction to liberation. It was the sublimation of the religion called patriotism—the one factor in the complexities of the drama which was France’s struggle to refind her soul and spirit, that carried no disappointment, no disillusion. Hard as their country, proud as a people have a right to be proud when they cannot be bribed or browbeaten or cajoled, the Bretons’ participation in the fight for freedom was something to lift the heart. And how they suffered for it!

There were no decorations in the armies of the Maquis and the FFI. No banner headlines to carry stories of heroism or citations to bravery. Yet those Stories will live so long as there is appreciation of the ultimate in valor and sacrifice.

One came across them in every village.

At Mordelles, for instance, a few kilometers outside Rennes, there was a doctor. He had been village doctor for twenty years. He was also chief of the Resistance Group, a secret he kept so well that the first his wife suspected of it was when he started burning papers one night after a man called at the house to inquire for the address of their younger son. Both sons were students at Rennes University. The fire had scarcely died out under the papers before half a dozen soldiers and some civilian police arrived. The soldiers posted themselves outside the house. The police entered, began searching for the radio which they alleged was hidden there, and when they failed to find it marched the doctor off to Rennes for questioning by the Gestapo. He left at seven. By ten that night his wife got news that her two sons had been arrested. At eleven the next morning the mayor came to tell her that her husband was dead. The Germans said that he had killed himself by cutting his thigh arteries with one of the tiny glass ampoules in which doctors carry certain drugs. Whether he did or not no one will ever know because any marks he could have made with an ampoule were jagged out with a bayonet before his widow received his body along with the news that both her sons had been sent to Reich concentration camps.

All that happened six months before the Americans began their drive into Brittany and the Resistance Group at Mordelles got their call to arms and held their first parade. More than a hundred of them turned out in their berets and blue jeans and the white armband of the FFI which told each of them what only their leader had known before. Several had worked on sabotage together and in consequence knew perhaps three or four men belonging to the group. Only the leader knew them all. All understood then why the doctor had died. ‘We are here,’ announced the man who took over his command, able to play our part in this time for which we have waited so long, because our doctor took care of us with the Gestapo as he has taken care of us in so many other misfortunes. We shall march first to his house.’

His wife, white-faced, her shoulders drooped with suffering and anxiety, told me in a flat, emotionless voice how they had sung the Marseillaise, then marched through the village to wipe out every German in it. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘he was of a courage to make one proud.’ Then she shrugged hopelessly, looked at me with her great gaunt eyes and said, ‘But, you know, thinking of my boys, the good God knows where in Germany, makes me think that courage is something this family had been better without.’ And there was nothing to say to her as she voiced so bitterly the query that anguish wrings first from so many bereaved—that futile, disloyal to so much for which the loved one died—’Why, oh why, should it have to happen to me?’

The Germans punished all acts of terrorism with a savageness which gave the world the first direct evidence it had of the true nature of the beast we were fighting. Censorship was stringent, and rightly so, on all stories of atrocities. They were passed, however, so long as correspondents were willing to take personal responsibility for veracity.

Verification was easy enough to find. In all conscience, though, one never did verify without wondering—it was the one reaction which numbed almost all other reactions—how in God’s world people could do such things to other people.

In one village an eighteen-year-old boy, suspected of sabotage, was shot in the leg as he tried to escape. The leg was shattered, the boy hospitalized. Every day of the weeks it took to heal he was questioned and left with the same threat, ‘Unless you tell us the names of the others in your group, you will dig your grave the first day you can walk and be shot into it.’

When the boy could finally limp to Gestapo Headquarters for what was described as his last chance to be sensible, he found waiting for him his mother, his sweetheart, and a few German soldiers. The women never returned to their village to tell what that boy had to see before he broke down to give four names. The Gestapo arrested the four that night, made the boy who had informed against them watch, as one by one they were told he had informed, and were then shot. Finally they shot him.

Some of Commander Hervé’s men were surprised by the enemy while they were in the middle of burying three comrades killed in action. In the fight that followed, twenty of Hervé’s men were taken prisoner and shot. Only before they shot them the Germans took out their eyes, cut off their hands, opened their stomachs with a bayonet slash, and castrated them.

Most diabolical treatment of all was reserved for the French paratroopers—they knew that if they fell into enemy hands they could expect to be tortured with all the perverse devilry of which Germans are capable before the benediction of death ended their sufferings. Moreover, anyone caught helping paratroopers got similar treatment.

One day three paratroopers came upon what added up to be the bodies of ten of their comrades. They had been tortured and pitchforked, and the butchered bits of them flung on a manure pile. Even harder to take than the sight of their comrades was the spectacle presented by the farmer and his wife and daughter. Both women had been violated before their poor naked bodies had been subjected to everything that the perverted sadism of frenzied bestiality could think of. Was it enough to dismember? It was not. Was it enough to slash and pound flesh and open up? No! To satisfy the lusts of members of the world-dominating race for that incredible orgy, only the sight of dismembered genital organs—Frenchmen’s, of course—still debasing the poor, piteous corpses was sufficient.

5

MARTYRDOM might have been expected to weld the people of France into complete accord. It did nothing of the sort.

In every community there are those who will make the most of circumstance for their own comfort and advancement. The Nazis exploited this to the utmost. Make people suffer enough, debase them enough, they maintained, and there will never be lack of those willing to ignore blood ties to bully and enforce any regime however hard and cruel it might seem. Throughout Europe there was abundant, sick-making evidence that they were right. In prison camps did Frenchman stick to Frenchman, Russian to Russian, Pole to Pole? No. For the sake of a couple of moldy potatoes and a husk of bread a week, added to their few liters of miserable soup, the wretched prisoners of Buchenwald volunteered to herd their own countrymen into the compound they knew led into the death house and the crematorium. ‘Nothing survives except the soul,’ wrote Whitman. Whatever else it may shadow, war certainly highlights the degree of soul possessed by every individual it touches.

Against the fierce patriotism, desperate courage, and volcanic hate of the Bretons, we got our first indication of what occupation had done to the soul of Europe. We saw how it had divided families against themselves; how it bred hate and fear, contempt and suspicion; made heroes and cowards, story-book characters out of people like Pierre, the village postman, and Alphonse, who worked in the garage, or Joseph, who worked, as his father and his grandfather had done before him, on the farm by the church. We saw how in quiet, dull villages, occupation made more exciting than romantic-fiction situations out of actions like switching the signals on the railway lines so that German supply trains never reached their destination, or picking up weapons parachuted in night after night by Allied planes, or wrecking bridges, or roads, or factories producing goods for Germany.

Such adventuring bred hooliganism as well as heroism. It destroyed normalcy inasmuch as people were unable to go rationally about their own business or think or feel rationally about anything. They were ultra-everything—ultra-patriotic, ultra-fearful, ultra-excitable, ultra-suspicious.

The Nazis built up a first-class intelligence service and never arrested anyone without leaving half the town or village fearfully suspect of the other half. One of their favorite tricks was to arrange that anyone they intended to arrest be tipped off about it. The tip to ‘get going while the goings good’ would be given to several people, some of whom inevitably would pass it along. Nazi agents would keep careful watch and when eventually the person advised to leave the district did so, he would promptly get caught. Meanwhile, everyone who had passed on the tip became automatically a suspect from then on to every friend or relative the unfortunate prisoner possessed. Nobody could ever completely trust anyone else. Members of the Underground who were contacted by other members never knew whether admission of membership would result in immediate seizure by the Gestapo. Many of them had to work in apparent accord with the Germans. Their service was well enough known and appreciated at London headquarters, but not, of course, in their own village. When Liberation Day came, scores of loyal partisans got jailed; some were lynched. People lost all sense of proportion when emotions pent up as theirs had been for four long years were suddenly released. In one village it was remembered that Madame Poiret in the small white villa where German officers were billeted had never gone short of food. Nor had her sons been conscripted for labor in Germany. For no more reason than that, the wretched woman was stripped, beaten, and reported as a collaborationist.

Other villagers decided that their mayor could have put up stronger opposition against Nazi rule, so they set fire to his home. Sometimes it was purely individual spite and opportunism, as in the case of the storekeeper who turned in his opposition on the count that he had always favored the Germans. In another town two lawyers got each other jailed until such time as somebody had time to get their different accusations sorted.

As soon as our combat troops got the Heinies and fighting out of a town, another scrap promptly broke out—a civil one, fought with infinitely greater bitterness and sometimes nearly as much bloodshed. Soldiers hated it. As one GI, watching the mob milling off down a street in Rennes rough-housing a couple of youths who had been working with the Germans, said, ‘Fairly turns my stomach to see ordinary folks clawing like they was mad beasts to pull somebody to bits. It’s worse’n any fighting I ever saw on a battlefield, and I wish to Christ we could do somethin’ about it.’

There was nothing much that anybody could do about Rennes for many weeks after liberation. If ever there was a city of a million secrets, Rennes was that city. Long after the fighting had flowed on toward Paris, it was still unsafe to walk in the streets at night. In addition to the FFI, the city was lousy with Germans remaining in hiding until such time as they thought it would be safe to escape, either to Germany or to some other part of France. Escape did not always go according to plan—escape procedure seldom does; then the sort of drama would be enacted that I watched one night from my bedroom window. The room looked into a courtyard which opened onto the main street. A shout, the sudden chatter of machine guns, and running footsteps took me to the window just in time to see three men dragging the body of a fourth into the courtyard. They dumped him in a shadow patch out of the moonlight and hurried off. Next morning he was gone, and all the gendarme had to say in answer to questioning was, ‘Three men were killed hereabouts last night, Mademoiselle—all Germans. Let us hope that tonight the brave ones will get as many more.’

How they got them was a matter of no more concern to the loyal French than the fact that any innocent bystander was apt to get mixed up in the shooting which broke out with no more warning than one gets from a rocket bomb. There was a bar on a corner, ‘one street down from the main drag’ in GI ‘slanguage,’ from which customers learned to emerge as carefully as they did from any foxhole. Coming out one night with a celebrating French nobleman who had that day seen the last Nazi frog-marched out of his château near Brest, we had the experience of flinging ourselves full length in as nauseous a gutter as ever serviced humanity, while bullets whistled over us as fast as the Counts vociferous French. ‘Pardon,’ came from the far side of the road as the FFI quit firing. But it didn’t help any, for no sooner did they stop than the somebody they had been shooting at began letting us have it from the dark ahead. No combat soldier, however experienced or well trained, did a better job of inching out in retreat with the fanny well down than this correspondent.

Yes, without doubt, Rennes was a strange and fascinating city. And to the casual observer, seemingly very far removed from the war. In the blazing August sun, oleanders and nasturtiums rioted color from tubs and brightly painted boxes outside of pavement cafes where smartly gowned women sipped aperitifs and coffee with as much apparent enjoyment as though the aperitifs had been martini and dubonnet instead of orangeade or white wine, and the coffee, real coffee instead of the mixture of roasted barley and acorns which passed for it under Nazi rule. Shops were stacked with merchandise, to the surprise and boundless indignation of American soldiers not allowed to spend a single franc, lest the spending make short supplies still shorter. Everyone looked so happy, everything looked so gay and carefree, and it was all so like the France one motored through before the war, that there seemed plenty of justification for one woman reporter’s bitter ‘These people make me sick. Here they are at peace, never mind what happens in the rest of Europe, and busily celebrating a victory they had no part in winning.’

In fact, there was no justification for any such statement. Rennes, for all its atmosphere of peaceful inconsequence, was very much in the war picture right up until the time that the headlines were splashing our march into Germany and people had forgotten that German garrisons were still holding out around Brest. The old city was focal point for guerrilla war which kept a great many ordinary families as much a part of war as any combat soldier. There was a story in every street. Drama in every other house. All of it seemingly much more in keeping with Hollywood than reality. And yet all of it so matter-of-fact feeling.

There was a café, for instance, on the Rue de Nantes, which my friend, Lady Margaret Stewart, had heard about from an airman who lived there for a while. ‘I’ve got an invitation for us to lunch there tomorrow,’ announced Margaret, ‘and it should be interesting, because it’s a sort of headquarters for the people who directed all the Allied escapes from this part of the country. An English schoolmistress is head of the group and sounds like quite a person. Anyway, she’s coming to lunch with another Englishwoman, provided she can get through. The second one has a house at St. Malo and might have a bit of trouble getting Civil Affairs to give her a travel order. They aren’t letting civilians wander around the countryside much yet awhile.’

The whole setup sounded, to begin with, like the plot for a spy thriller, and as we got our teeth into the story, atmosphere, setting, incident, and dialogue, built up on it until, as Margaret said, ‘The whole thing seems all so much too good to be true that there could be positively nothing left for us to invent or add to it except some way of making our subs believe we’re writing the truth.’ This, however, was a problem which was not to perturb us, for, as it turned out, the story was another of the many that had to stay in our notebooks until after the war.

The Rue de Nantes was full of good French atmosphere and the kind of cafes that a couple of girls on their own would normally avoid. On the way down the street a fracas broke out in an upstairs room. A woman’s scream made the pair of us decide that jeeping would have been better than walking to our lunch date as out of a door came a blue-overalled, scared-looking man of about thirty with a couple of gendarmes hustling him with revolvers muzzled well into his ribs.

Our café was red-shuttered, with a tired-looking box tree in a tub outside and inside half a dozen Frenchmen drinking beer. They waved in greeting as we sat down to be warmly greeted by Madame, then by her good-looking daughter, and finally by her husband, Pierre. They had a special martini for us and braised oxtail and, ‘Madame, the Englishwoman, will be along at any moment.’ She arrived before we had time to drink the inevitable toast ‘To liberation’—only nobody said that any more. They just raised eyes, an expression, glasses, and downed liquor.

Madame, the Englishwoman, was very obviously an Englishwoman, apple-cheeked, sixty, dressed in white straw hat and gloves and gray-and-white striped suit. Her friend from St. Malo had not, she apologized, been able to get a permit to visit Rennes that day, which was a great pity because she would have been so happy to hear from us about England. She was a soft-spoken gentlewoman, a schoolmistress who had retired to live in Brittany as the climate was good, and also because before the war one could live here very pleasantly and very inexpensively.’ She was naturally diffident about talking of her war experiences—even now, you must remember anything I tell you can implicate so many people—people all the way from here to Germany—so you must please, please, not write of this.’

Briefly, this modest, retiring woman directed the final phase of the adventure of getting Allied airmen who had been shot down in Europe back to their own base. From her house on the hill behind Rennes University, she shuttled men from all parts of France, Holland, and Germany as transport and circumstances became propitious. Sometimes they went down the coast and over the mountains into Spain. Generally, however, they were directed to the other Englishwoman’s house at St. Malo, there to wait for ships—often midget submarines—which would come inshore under cover of darkness and wait for the men to swim out to them, men who had sauntered into the dingy café in Rennes to order a beer with the same password, ‘I hear you have news of Pierre.’ Sometimes they stayed only for a meal, sometimes it was necessary for them to live at the café for several weeks before they could start out on the last phase of their journey. No record was kept of the number of American and British airmen who stayed, but there must have been quite a number. At one time no fewer than fourteen were sitting around the small scrubbed table in the back room, playing cards and waiting for Pierre’s next instructions. Occasionally he would send them on by train; often he cycled with them; sometimes they went in one of the carts which brought farm produce into the city. Only once did any of them fall foul of the Gestapo, and that, as the Englishwoman said, was entirely his own fault. ‘He was a British boy whom we had to keep here several weeks,’ she said. ‘He was anxious to go to a football match with Pierre, and got excited and began encouraging the players. Only he forgot to do it in French.’

None of the airmen who owed their return to their bases on the other side of the Channel met the Englishwoman. Nor did she dare visit the café except on very rare occasions. In spite of her efforts to avoid suspicion, however, the Nazis threw her into jail on a couple of different occasions. The first time they sent her to Rennes, where the wardress, a Frenchwoman, was as kind as she dared to be—so kind that the first thing Madame did after liberation was to go down to the prison to call on her with flowers and a bottle of wine. The second time they sent her to Fresnes, near Paris, where she spent the winter, wearing only a thin cotton dress, in a bitterly cold, unheated cell. They kept her on a diet of sour black bread and water for weeks, cross-questioned her for two hours every day, beat her, and threatened to put her to death. Still they were unable to prove anything against her, so they finally let her go back to the white house on the hill behind the University. From it, knowing perfectly well that she was under the closest possible surveillance from the Gestapo, she still worked for the Allies—’Although I was,’ as she modestly explained, ‘as careful as possible.’

Margaret had remembered to bring a package of coffee along with her. ‘Real coffee again!’ It made Pierre ‘feel more certain that liberation has actually happened than anything yet—even de Gaulle’s arrival!’

Like every Frenchman he was eager to hear all that could be told about de Gaulle. ‘Is he really as strong as they say? Is he really for France as we who love France would have her—strong, great, a world power again? Or is it to be another dictatorship with a Frenchman directing this time instead of the Germans?’

De Gaulle had assumed practically the status of a god to these men and women who had risked their very lives to listen in to his freedom broadcasts, but they were all of them worried, none the less, about the way he intended to implement the great power which had eventuated from his leadership. There were many, very many, who felt that the direction of France’s destiny should be in the hands of those who had remained in France. Many who said, ‘De Gaulle did much for France, but the liberation of France was not accomplished entirely by those who left her in her hour of greatest need. There are many who believe that Pétain loved his country just as dearly and served her ends as faithfully as did de Gaulle. So, let us hope that when he comes here to talk to us, he will remember this, remember that those of us who have the highest hopes for him will still not accept him as leader of France as though it were his natural right. We want first to see what manner of man he it We have to be very sure that all we have waited for so long will be properly used. We want no more leaders who will get us into the state we were in in 1940.’

De Gaulle’s first appearance in Rennes a few days later was a grievous disappointment. None of the qualities which stand out in personal contact were evident. He was much moved, and in consequence held himself rigidly in check, so that his manner was even more grim and his tone more declamatory than usual.

He verbally whiplashed the people of his country to a sense of responsibility in the fight which had yet to be fought before victory was theirs and for the still harder fight which must be waged before France was again France, worthy to rank as one of the great world powers. He made no mention of the part which the Allies had played in liberating his country. He was not, in the opinion of local patriots, nearly appreciative enough of the part they had played during four years of oppression and since the Allied landings. He was hard, cold, and looked, the people decided, as though he had all the strength France needed, but not the sympathy, tact, and appreciation of other people’s viewpoints to weld the incredibly complex, disorganized political structure of the country into anything which would stand up to all it would have to stand up to before elections could determine the form of government Free France desired.

When the speech was over, an American woman came up to ask if de Gaulle was always ‘so stiff-necked.’ She was tiny and slim with white hair above a face which looked years too young for it. She had lived in Rennes throughout the Nazi occupation, and, as she said, ‘There is nothing remarkable in anything I can tell you, for thousands of people have had similar experiences.’ Her son, a student in Rennes University, and her husband, a railway executive, were both in Nazi prison camps. Robert, the son, had been arrested over what was locally known as the ‘signals affair.’ Twenty-three other men went to prison as a result of it, and after having successfully interrupted German troop movements over a wide area for many months. Her husband was implicated, and trying to prevent him from giving himself up in place of Robert did nothing to assuage the mother’s peace of mind. It was prevented, but her agonized pleading made no difference to the ultimate outcome, for the Gestapo still got’ him for helping Allied airmen to escape over the Spanish border. She had not heard from either son or husband after their arrest and had no hope of ever seeing them again.

This American woman did more with a few words to illustrate the effect that Gestapo terrorism had on people than anything I had previously seen or heard. ‘After Robert was arrested,’ she said, I could not visit any of my friends. And if they saw us on the street, they would pass us by without a hello, because they were so afraid of being hauled off for questioning.’

The Germans began pulling out of Rennes several weeks before Allied troops came in, leaving it in the hands of the Gestapo and Vichy militiamen, which accounted for all the lynchings and shootings which went on so long after we freed the city.

For these militiamen were worse, far worse, than the worst of the Nazis. They were riffraff of the prison camps of Europe, renegades from every country, many of them Frenchmen—God forgive them—who were able to use the excuse of maintaining law and order for the most shocking examples of brutality and injustice, in a country where brutality and injustice had become so routine as almost to lose power to shock.

Suspected sabotage was all the excuse they used or needed to break into people’s houses and drag anyone they wanted off for questioning, terror, torture, and rape. There was no trial. No appeal. So it was small wonder that the minute our troops entered the city, the populace set upon the militiamen who failed to get out fast enough, with such fury that those caught became, in a matter of minutes, nothing but a bloody smear in the road.

That was popular justice in its grimmest form. It wasn’t nice. Neither was the system of jailing anyone and everyone suspected of collaboration until such time as they could be tried by War Criminal Courts. Two hundred such prisoners were incarcerated in the jail at Rennes. Visiting them was something which left one asking oneself disquieting questions for a long, long time.

The prison at Rennes is an enormous stone structure designed, by the look of it, in the days of the Spanish Inquisition. Two butterfly-shaped wings open off a central paved corridor, one for men, the other for women. Each wing has three floors linked by iron staircases, and cells opening off the balustraded, oval-shaped galleries with pews by the corridor on each floor to give guards an uninterrupted view.

Through the four years of occupation the Gestapo had taken everyone suspected of sabotage in this part of Brittany, first, to the bloodstained dungeon under their headquarters in one of the University buildings for interrogation, and afterward to this prison.

It was here that the doctor from Mordelles took his life. Here that the American woman’s son, Robert, had been beaten to insensibility before deportation to Germany. Here all the dozens of people, whose stories of martyrdom I had heard in the weeks I spent in Brittany, came to languish between torture, before execution, or dispatch to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, or other parts of Germany.

They arrived at the big iron-studded prison gates to have them unlocked for them by Monsieur Phillipon, the director of the prison. Monsieur Phillipon was dapper, short, plump, with smooth black hair, brown eyes that darted and twinkled, and a dimple. Having unlocked the gates, he led prisoners with their guards to the half of the prison which the Nazis had taken over, turned them over to the official in charge, and then retired to his own half of the prison to hope that he would not hear the screams which presently would come searing across the quiet. To hope also that the cleaners would not hear them, because when they did they left, and cleaners were hard to get!

‘Now all that is over, the good God be praised,’ said Monsieur Phillipon, as, having met me at the big gates just as he had done Nazi prisoners for four years, he conducted me into the Nazi half of the prison and the dungeon from which the screams had come. He showed me the dark splotches under the newly whitewashed walls which were bloodstains, the drain, the hoses, the big hooks on the wall. Then we went upstairs to look at the prisoners, most of them still Frenchmen as they had been in the days when the Nazis were in charge, only these were Frenchmen who liked the Nazis and had worked with them, or so their fellow citizens said.

In the first cell were three men; two of them were youths of seventeen, one a man of nearly thirty. They were without collars or braces, and lumbered clumsily to their feet as Monsieur Phillipon threw open their cell door. Indicating the taller of the youths, a wavy-haired, red-headed lad with as sultry an expression of hate as any human face could hold, he said, ‘He was an informer for the Germans.’

The boy merely muttered, ‘I Russian. I was German Army, but escape. I no spy.’

The other boy said, I demand to know who has placed me here. Have my parents been informed?’ And to me, ‘I am a student in the University here and loyal as anyone in this whole city. Somebody has made a terrible mistake. Can you not at least find when we are to be tried?’ He began to cry.

The older man reached over, cuffed him with a curt ‘Stop that,’ Monsieur Phillipon said hastily, ‘We are not here to answer questions,’ and pulled the door shut.

In one cell were four men from the department which had run food rationing for the city under the Nazi regime. In another was a man who had been assistant to the mayor. There was a woman who was going to have a baby almost any time, and another with a fifteen-year-old daughter whose crime was sheltering a Nazi soldier. She listened to Monsieur Phillipon’s recital of this and then spat at him scornfully: ‘He has been good to us, that one. I would do the same again for any good man who had to go out of my house to his death.’

Sometimes prisoners got to their feet as we opened their doors, to stare curiously back at these people who could walk where they wanted, see something else besides four whitewashed walls, somebody else besides a guard or fellow prisoners for the few minutes’ exercise each was permitted in the course of the day—people who could eat what they liked, read what they liked, talk about what they liked. One man began screaming hysterically, ‘No, don’t close the door yet. Let me look through it just for another minute. I’ve done nothing to deserve being shut up like this.’

For the most part, however, they stayed sitting on their rough, frame beds, looking imprisoned with the dumb, hopeless, sagged look which is so heartrending, so haunting and horrible a thing to see. You don’t know how horrible until you’ve seen it, or how desperately embarrassed you can feel—being free, shutting a door on those who are not. The restless pacing of a caged lion prompts pity and resentment that even animals should be confined to one small bit of an unnatural world. Imagine, then, closing a door on a fellow human being, closing it, moreover, with the conviction they’ve probably no more right to be there than you or their jailer, and knowing that months must pass before they will get any kind of trial to determine whether they deserve to be jailed or not.

We had toured two floors, and then Monsieur Phillipon stopped outside a door at the end of the corridor, delved down into his pocket to find a special key, and say, with a smile, ‘This is our most important prisoner.’ He opened the door with a flourish and introduced, ‘The Chief of Police of the City of Rennes.’

The chief was an elderly man with drooping shoulders, boots which, without laces, flopped incongruously down over his ankles, and trousers without braces which he had to clutch to stop them from slipping down as he stumbled to his feet. He asked my pardon for his appearance, then clamped his mouth into a tight, pinched line as he glowered at the smiling Phillipon and demanded, ‘Could you not have spared me this?’ To me, his shoulders shaking, his voice trembling with emotion, he said: ‘Mademoiselle, think well and write fully of all you have seen here. Monsieur Phillipon was director of this prison under the Nazis. I was director of the police. Neither of us liked working for the Germans, but there was nothing else for us to do. Dozens of others like me are here behind prison bars. It may well be that we did not do our duty as patriots as we might like to have done, but’—and here he pointed a tremulous finger—’we are no more collaborationists than Monsieur Phillipon there.’

Monsieur Phillipon reddened and for a moment looked as though he would strike the man. Instead, he broke into a stream of indignant abuse that the chief of police should dare to place him in the same category with those who had actually worked with the enemy, whereas it was well known that he, Monsieur Phillipon, had merely allowed them to run part of the prison over which he had no power to interfere, anyway. Why, he had even permitted one prisoner to escape! The police chief became quite as strenuously abusive, until his rage took him almost across the threshold of his cell, whereupon Monsieur Phillipon gave him a hearty push, snapped, ‘This is a matter to be determined at the trial, not here,’ and slammed the door.

Against all this the battle for France had been moving into its final phase. The United States First Army, under Hodges, was driving toward the Seine dead along the British Army boundary. Their progress on situation maps looked like herring-boning. Advancing meant arcing out ahead of the British and cutting in over their line with all the ensuing complications of air and artillery support consequent on such maneuvering, and incidentally with much bitterness when the wrong divisions got credited with taking the objective. When in doubt—and they so often seemed to be—the British Broadcasting Corporation unhesitatingly gave the honors to the men in the Monty berets. My own BBC weekly broadcast to America got an unforgettable barrage of raspberries from a bunch of GI’s who came across me lying on my stomach under the apple trees, clutching the mike and trying to describe the extremely fluid situation. How we ever got to the Seine without fighting breaking out between Tommies and Joes is one of the war’s miracles!

This herringboning, accompanied by the relentless driving of the British and Canadians from the north, paid dividends those who saw them will never forget. Hitler personally ordered that his armies attack toward Avranches, thereby cutting off our Third Army. It was a failure and a classic example of the futility of entrusting command to an armchair general out of touch with his troops. The troops, however, obeyed the order with the fanaticism of the best panzer traditions, and on the morning of August 7, they sheared into General Leland Hobbs’s 30th Infantry Division at Mortain with a vigor that, as the General said, ‘brought out the best they had in them and a hell of a lot more they’d never given themselves credit for.’ The General personally joined the fray from the first-floor window of the hotel which was his headquarters, but, as he remarked, ‘Why not? Cooks, clerks, and drivers had to shoot their quota, so why not me?’ Barrels of antiaircraft guns had to be depressed to fire straight down the village street, and for several hours the 30th hurled back attack after attack from troops every bit as determined to break through as the Yanks were to stop their doing so. Both sides knew exactly what the score was—the chance of roping off the entire bridgehead for the rest of the summer on the German side; on ours, the opportunity of imprisoning and exterminating the Nazi Seventh Army between Argentan and Falaise.

The enemy knew he was beaten by the twelfth and began the hopeless task of extricating himself through the ever-narrowing gap. By August 17 his situation had become so desperate he began retreating with columns in formation—in daylight. Our air and artillery just poured fire on them until fields for miles around were blackened with corpses of men and animals, the burned-out hulls of tanks, guns, and vehicles, and the stench and sight of death had become something to sicken men hardened by two months of seeing the worst they thought there was to see.

On the nineteenth a Canadian artillery officer near Trun radioed, ‘Hey, don’t shoot us,’ at forward elements of the United States First Army. Fifty thousand prisoners and an incalculable quantity of equipment were thus captured after the death of the first of the great German armies to meet defeat in Europe. Said a Canadian, ‘I never thought that there would be a day when I would see ditches running red with blood and exult at the sight.’ It was one of the wickedest slaughters of this or any other war.

While this was going on, Patton, with his objective the cutting-off of the Brittany Peninsula to take Quiberon Bay, nevertheless had gotten his forces to Mantes Gassicourt and Fontainebleu by D-Day plus 74. Like everyone else, Georgie was asking, ‘What now?’ and, never mind what his orders said, he had his eye on Paris.

In the initial planning, the Allied armies were to reach the Seine by D-Day plus 75 and stay there to reorganize until D-Day plus 90. Thanks to Avranches, Argentan-Falaise, and the French Resistance, however, the only reorganization that needed to be done was by the enemy—and he seemed determined to waste no time doing it on the French side of the Siegfried Line. Incredibly, planning never went beyond that D-Day plus 75 stand on the Seine. Even after Paris was taken, nobody knew where anybody was to go from there. Would the United States First Army and Third Army go on through the Metz Gap? Or would they yield to the steadily mounting political pressure concerning V-bomb sites and swing north to help the British and Canadians by wiping them out? Nobody knew. Nobody knew anything, except that the ‘red-hot rake of war,’ as Churchill phrased it, was not to be allowed to mar the beauty of Europe’s most beautiful city. Paris was to be bypassed, even though Georgie was sitting almost at its gates a day ahead of his time schedule, and, according to his headquarters, had ‘his trailer littered with Paris street maps.’

Then, on the twenty-second of August, a cub plane circled the woods at Couterne and settled beside the river running alongside an old stone château which was First Army Headquarters. It was General Bradley’s plane.

‘Get Hodges,’ he ordered.

Hodges had to be fetched from his trailer, since, as usual, he scorned the luxury of such living accommodation as the château offered. When he arrived, Bradley said, ‘Courtney, Resistance chiefs came out from Paris to see me last night and we’ll have to go in. The German commander there wants to quit. The Underground have been fighting there like nobody’s business these past three days. Now they’re light on ammunition and needing help.

I can’t get in touch with Ike on these lousy field telephones, but we’ll have to go in, I guess.’

‘Fine,’ said Courtney. ‘We’ll get “Gee” right away and get it set.’ ‘Gee’ was Major-General Leonard T. Gerow, commanding the 5th Corps. Staffs worked all night preparing the plan of assault Bradley wanted troops to enter the city as close to noon the next day as possible. It was decided to give the honor of entry to the 2nd French Armored Division under Le Clerc, who was at once contacted and asked to alert his troops for immediate action.

That, however, was more than Le Clerc could do. His troops, with their American uniforms and brand-new tanks and trucks and guns, were not on a battlefield. They were ‘Home’—for the first time in years! And rounding them up to go into action was something which took so long that, instead of their being in Paris at noon next day, it was ten in the morning before they got started.

They rumbled off then in the August heat and dust, along roads on which the populace just went wild. At first sight of French armed might since the bitter defeat of 1940, they danced, they cheered themselves hoarse, they pelted flowers, they clambered aboard the vehicles to kiss the soldiers, and whenever and wherever the division halted, there was immediately a party. By dark, the division were no nearer Paris than Coignieres, just west of Versailles. It took them another twenty-four hours to get to Sèvres at Gentilly, by which time Gerow and Hodges—both of them militarists of the stickler for tradition variety—had almost succumbed to apoplexy. Each informed his staff as the hours proceeded his opinion of the French in no uncertain terms. Each was in wholehearted agreement with the British definition of a good Englishman—’a man who fears his God and hates all Frenchmen.’

The 4th Infantry Division had gone into an assembly area just north of Arpajon to await marching orders after the French entry. By the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, orders crackled out of Headquarters from an irate Hodges that ‘If that damned French division can’t be gotten in, then get the 4th in southeast of Arcueil and to hell with the honor.’

Gerow issued orders for a simultaneous advance which whipped the French up to getting in to the Port of Gentilly next day by nine o’clock with the 4th entering at about the same time. The story was never adequately told. Those who tried to compass it into words either ran foul of censorship, like the broadcasting boys who seized the radio station and began an uncensored talk to the world, or else their copy got embroiled in the disgraceful muddle over transmission. Copy which should have been flown to Britain by specially waiting plane and then cabled from the London Ministry of Information got lost. ‘Via Press Wireless,’ said the tag on the sack, so some inspired menial in London, deciding that press wireless had an office in Paris, sent it back there. Hal Denny, late war correspondent of the New York Times, had a beat on the story as usual. He had been in the Montparnasse Station to lend his typewriter for the typing of the surrender of Paris which German Commander General von Chöltitz signed. Throughout the rest of the war, Hal, recalling the fact in illustration of what he described as ‘the bumbling criminal incompetence of SHAEF Public Relation officialdom,’ would quiver all over and lose his voice as he got to telling how his story had been handed to him for retransmission days after Paris had been liberated.

Women correspondents, thanks to SHAEF, were denied the tremendous experience of participating in the liberation of the city. We were rounded up and kept under the custody of Public Relations Officer Major Stephen Miller, a rangy-looking six-footer from California, with eyes like a sun-splashed trout stream, a hard mouth, and every need for it, for he had a tough job. There were upward of a dozen of us shut up together in a small hotel in Rennes. We were required to sign in and out and to report our destination every day. Should one woman be late getting back from reporting the day’s siege story at Brest or Lorient, the others were convinced that she had taken off for Paris. One woman went so far as to report two others to SHAEF for going to Paris with de Gaulle, which would have been fair enough but far less embarrassing for the informant if the two, instead of making their way on to Paris, had not been discovered by the frantically phoning Miller calmly having dinner in the town to which he had that day given them a pass. In spite of all SHAEF’s precautions, however, two women did get to Paris to see it liberated. Helen Kirkpatrick went in with Le Clerc, and Lee Carson with the 4th Infantry.

‘Unbelievable! It could never be written—at least not by us,’ was their summing-up. Most correspondents felt the same, though few carried it to the extreme of the Australian correspondent who cabled his paper:

DATE LINE PARIS STOP STOP BURP BURP BURP THAT IS PRESENT PARIS STORY STOP WE’RE DRUNK WITH JOY AND GETTING DRUNKER EVERY MINUTE STOP BURP BURP END MESSAGE

Paul Gallico, who was at Notre Dame when the shooting broke out, climbed into his jeep when it was all over and drove straight back to Rennes. At dinner that night he elbowed the table, propped his great shaggy head on his hand, and talked for almost two hours about all he had seen. ‘It’s the practicality of the French in contrast with everything else about them that gets me,’ he said. ‘We were lined up outside that Hotel de Ville with the cheering and folks crying, and then the shooting started. The machine guns were spewing hell at us from the roofs and everybody ducked quicker’n thought under the nearest tank. An old lady who’d been standing next to me, a gentle-looking little old thing with white ruffles and white hair, had flung herself flat between a couple of tanks before I could get started. But did she keep her head down or look scared? Not a bit of it! She had her head out inside a minute peeking around to make quite sure she didn’t miss a thing of what was going on. An old lady in my country would have passed out from sheer shock. Not this one. The minute things quieted down, up she got, dusted off her dress, and went off to help lug some of the wounded into a house they were using as a dressing station.

‘I never dreamed,’ Paul went on, ‘things could happen as I’ve seen them happen today. I never dreamed people could react the way I’ve seen them react today. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going right back to the States now to write about it, for if I stay out here another day after this I won’t be able to feel any more. I shall go home tomorrow.’ And he did.

Roads were still avenued with cheering people when we drove in past Versailles, looking lovely as ever. We followed tank recovery vehicles laden with the first of the white flour consignments, American flour, being hauled by the British whose drivers, with nice appreciation of propaganda value and to the vast indignation of the Americans (‘Lease-lend and in the city we liberated!’), had scrawled slogans like ‘Winnie (for Winston Churchill) remembers,’ on the sides of the trucks. As we passed the Palace one of the sacks rolled off and burst. In the split seconds before we were out of vision, three women and a child were lying where they had been knocked down by the mob stampeding to scoop some of the precious stuff into aprons, hats, bags—even into their shoes.

6

PRESS correspondents and censors were installed in the Scribe Hotel where the downstairs bar promptly became the scene of the greatest party of all time. Champagne corks popped with the monotony of a machine-gun barrage. Every few minutes somebody would come in from some far distant front. Never mind whether they had any right to cover the story or not, this was the Paris Party and everyone in war correspondent’s uniform was determined to be in on it. Somebody remarked, ‘It only wants old Paul Bewsher to drop in from Rome now to make us one complete and happy family.’ There was an incredulous, ‘Christ! There he is!’ And there, sure enough, was the London Daily Mail’s beloved Paul, stuttering how he’d left the Eternal City the day before to hitch-hike in by plane and jeep ‘b-b-be-cause this w-w-was too g-g-good to miss,’ and saying, ‘Y-y-you know I I-I-lived here in 1940 and left my o-o-overcoat behind w-w-when the Germans came in. The hotel boss just m-met me in the lobby and told me, “We’ve g-g-got your c-c-coat, Mr. Bewsher.” I c-c-call that j-j-jolly g-g-good management, don’t you?’

There was no food except K-ration. And what a diet of K-ration, cognac, and champagne can do to digestion is just nobody’s business! There was fuel in the city for only an hour’s light and cooking a day, and so little to cook that it was incredible that the Parisians looked as well as they did. Three weeks before our entry, the Germans had stopped all transportation that had not already been stopped by our bombing and virtually no food had come into the city. What the situation was like in homes can best be judged by the menus in the most expensive restaurants. Luncheon in one on the Champs Elysées consisted of radishes, beetroot, a few shreds of cabbage, and an apology. Dinner at the Ritz was soup, creamed spinach with a little sauce, and six raspberries in liqueur. Major Paris, Public Relations Officer of the 8th Air Force, took careful note of this scant menu and retired to talk business with the manager. The result of that conversation was that eighteen specially picked journalists, invited to Paris to make a ground survey of the damage done by 8th Air Force raids, were billeted for ten days in the most luxurious of the Ritz suites for little more than eighteen cases of C-ration. Most of us, however, would very willingly have forgone the turquoise blue or ivory satin draped splendor of our living quarters for more of the C-ration. Demaree Bess, of the Saturday Evening Post, estimated that the entire party’s consumption throughout the ten days could not have amounted to more than a couple of tins or so of stew, used as sauce for dinners, with one or two tins of the ham and egg sliced thinly for breakfasts. Surveying a bottle of Montrachet, perfect as ever matured for due and proper appreciation, at dinner one night, he said sadly, ‘The times I’ve longed for perfect wine to go with my food, and right now I’d trade that bottle, and all the others they’ve got in the cellars here, for just one honest-to-God plateful of something I could get my teeth into.’ There were no drawn, cadaverous looks on the faces one saw in the street, none of the distended stomachs and misery of actual starvation, because prior to the stopping of transportation all but the very poor got along fairly well by shopping on the black market. Three weeks’ stoppage of supplies closed that down like everything else, and when food did begin flowing in, the populace went crazy. So much so that covering the first Saturday afternoon’s shopping in the Rue Lepic up in Montmartre developed, from the purely physical point of view, into far and away the toughest bit of war reporting done by this correspondent on the entire Western Front.

I thought war in Britain had me pretty well inured to queue-wrestling. The Paris queues were longer, much longer, and volatile as many other things Parisian. On this afternoon they snaked away from every shop to wriggle into one another energetically and inextricably as though they really had been snakes, tipped into the street by the basketful. Suddenly, there would be a frantic squirm and surge—a truck had arrived with the first consignment of cabbages for that part of town. Women fought like beasts, clawing the long black shawls off each other’s backs, bashing baskets in one another’s ribs in the mad, desperate necessity of getting near enough to the truck to hold out their francs and plead, ‘Me, please—you must give to me for my children. I have nothing for them. Nothing.’ Madame Cescou, who had six children all under fourteen, and a husband who was a clerk able to give her forty dollars a week to spend on food, was one of the many women who sat down on the pavement edge and broke into sobs when the lorry emptied without one of its cabbages finding a way into her basket. ‘Do you know what it is like to have a child cry to you because it is hungry?’ she asked. ‘Can you imagine keeping children in bed all day because they do not miss their food so hurtingly as they would if they played? That is what we have been doing here.’ Wild honking of horns made her scramble hastily to her feet, as cars with the flags of the FFI nudged their way through the crowds to close their ranks and crush everybody’s shopping basket into everybody else. Behind them came a cavalcade of trucks, almost a dozen of them. Unbelievingly, the women stared and then began to run. Potatoes, pears, cabbages, carrots, celery, and apples were piled high in them with FFI and peasants sitting atop, waving and cheering and singing the Marseillaise. On they went up the street, with the mob of women, most of them long past the age and well out of condition for such exertion, in hot pursuit. When the procession finally halted, FFI tried desperately to organize a market in which purchases could be made without casualties. ‘There is enough, mesdames—enough for all. Keep calm or we must move to another part of the city,’ they kept shouting. That dire threat was insufficient to create order out of the chaotic rabble. Eventually, incapable of allocating the food with any semblance of fair dealing, the drivers had to obey the order to move on. The howl which floated down that street as the trucks started away is something which it was hard to believe could emanate from human throats. Those who had strength enough for it ran on in pursuit, the rest remained to fight with those whose baskets contained more than theirs, or else to sink down and sit where they were in the street, hands over their faces, ribs aching gnawingly as their hearts and stomachs.

They did not sit long. From near-by roofs came the crackle of gunfire and down the street tore an FFI car. Eight or nine youths tumbled out and rushed into the small shops on either side of the street, up the stairs, and out onto the roofs for another of the battles that kept Paris hectic days after it was at peace again according to the communiqués. Why Germans left in Paris always seemed to get themselves embroiled in combat on the roofs is something I was never able to figure out, even after a night devoted to Hun-hunting with the FFI, in the course of which I swear to personally crawling over most of the steepest, most decrepit roofs in the entire city.

It was estimated that at least fifty thousand Germans had been left behind to hamper mopping-up operations and the starting of a new government and administration. The FFI Commander, Captain Jean, whose nocturnal hunting party included me, said that this force had been carefully chosen from Germans who spoke French well enough to pass as Frenchmen. They had been given civilian registration cards and civilian clothes at Neuilly soon after D-Day. Soldiers, he assured me, had been seen marching into the barracks in their field-gray uniforms and marching out in jeans and tweed jackets and berets. ‘Mark my words, these men will come out of the pattern of French life, of which they are now a part, as a Fifth Column with a bigger mission than any Fifth Column ever had yet,’ said the Frenchman. He was an officer in the regular French Army before Dunkirk. I thought of his words and how right he was several months later when Skorzenny’s army of saboteurs rose behind our lines at the time of the breakthrough in the Battle of the Bulge.

We caught no Germans during this night operation, but we did arrest a couple of youths who had no right to be wearing the white FFI armband. Many such donned it in the first days of liberation and then proceeded, to the great embarrassment of the FFI proper, to cash in on such authority as it gave the wearer to loot and terrorize. In addition to this, the white armband offered any Germans who might be trying to escape an easy to procure, and almost foolproof, passport to getting on the right side of suspicion. So, as Captain Jean said: ‘Keeping track of personnel and their activities was much more difficult than keeping clear of the Gestapo had been.’ Twelve men were in his company for the raid and he insisted on getting another two to escort me. The manhunt, which was in the Montmartre area, began in a small café with the only good meal I saw served all the time I was in Paris. We had toasts—so many that words alone were head-spinning—then a wild car ride and a fantastic half-hour of creeping into houses, up precipitous staircases, and in and out of attics, onto and across roofs, each of which seemed more terrifyingly dizzy-making than the last. My escorts—Paul, a nineteen-year-old student, and François, who was sixteen and still at school—shoved and dragged and urged, ‘Look straight ahead, Mademoiselle, not down, and you will be all right’; and somehow or other we all got back to Headquarters without anybody getting shot, or, even more miraculous, breaking a limb. I still wonder which was the worst moment during the whole evening—the embarrassment of my transit unannounced through a certain bedroom when, ‘By god,’ breathed the Frenchman (as nearly as I dare translate), ‘is there no sanctuary?’ or the filing of the innocuous dispatch which told nothing, because of SHAEF and censorship, of so much that I wanted so badly to write.

After the shabby desolation of London, with its crumpled houses and streets you could hunt in to find just one home that hadn’t windows at least boarded up, the chic elegance of Paris hit hardest as a first impression. It was still, at casual glance, the same lovely Paris on which four years of German occupation seemed to have settled lightly. There were frilly muslin curtains looped at the windows and boxes of gay plants splashing color down the walls of the big apartment houses, flower-sellers in the streets with great tight-packed sheaves of lilies and carnations and roses, and people at bright-colored tables on the pavements endlessly sitting and talking and sipping and watching the world go by.

There was no transportation, of course, so everyone rode a bicycle. Being Paris, no mundane hue for bicycles would do—they were red, and blue, and silver, and the big stores on the fashionable shopping streets fixed smart stands for them with hoods colorful as the piled flower baskets. A few horses and carriages of the kind Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias rode around in were available for hire, but for short distances only because the poor, scrawny-looking horses were too weak to do more than bowl slowly along the level boulevards. The only way to get any place in a hurry was to take a velo taxi, a homemade vehicle between a rickshaw and a perambulator which was hitched on the back of a bicycle pedaled at such pace as to make Paris streets dangerous to ride or walk in as they ever were before the war. A couple of GI’s, rash enough to hire one for a sightseeing tour, got decanted breathlessly outside the Cafe de la Paix and told the driver, ‘Brother, you ought to be up front with Patton. He could sure use you.’

Paris was determined to stay queen of the fashion world, Nazis or no Nazis. So, with typical French practicality, the leading designers got together and made a deal. They created clothes for fortunate fräuleins to whom the ‘Made in Paris’ tag of a famous couturier was still further proof that Hitler knew what he was about. The fräuleins, or those buying for them, got first choice in all models made from the special consignments of cloth allotted. In exchange, Paris had the satisfaction of maintaining her fashion business and retaining national customers.

Frenchwomen received thirty-six clothing coupons a year unless they were able to pay the prices demanded by the great fashion houses—anything from three or four hundred dollars for a simple dress, and six hundred dollars for the plainest suit. Those who could afford this got a card of ‘haut couture’ from the mayor, after which they could buy anything and everything they wanted coupon free. Others made the best of thirty-six coupons and their chic, and did very well by both in spite of the fact that it cost thousands of francs to get a pair of shoes soled. They made big bright-colored felt or straw handbags and matching wedge sandals, covering the same foundation dozens of times to stay beautiful and smart in their general appearance, as the women of Paris had always been.

Soap was practically unobtainable in France. Chemicals were in as short supply there as in every other part of Europe. But in the hairdressers’ shops shampoos were as good as they ever were before the war. ‘A perm? Certainly,’ said the assistant. Asked about shortages, he shrugged, turned his hands out in the inimitable way Frenchmen have, and smiled, ‘We took care that the Boche did not get everything.’

So Frenchwomen were wearing their hair blue-black, silver-blond, and a wonderful chocolate shade of henna, and hats on it which had to be seen to be believed. Whatever else it might have quelled, Nazi occupation did nothing to quench the spirit of the Paris milliner. Hats were preposterously, deliciously, crazy as ever, and hard on the soldier’s reaction as anything he had ever run up against in his life—not excluding D-Day.

Once he got the hat separated from the woman, to get to the point of analyzing it, which took a bit of doing after more than two months of living in foxholes, he invariably decided that in his own country it would be grounds enough for divorce. Meanwhile, whether he approved of a hat which towered pretty well a foot above a woman for no better reason than the support of a yard or two of floating drapes, or bonnets whose brims were designed to carry anything from a bunch of flowers to a stuffed parrot, mattered not so long as Frenchwomen were as uninhibited in morals as they were in millinery. And they seemed to be. In fact, their determination to reward soldiers for driving the Germans out, in the way they thought soldiers would most appreciate it, got pronounced enough to be a nuisance. It was impossible for men to walk across the Place de l’Opera, or anywhere around the Boulevard de Capucines, without women importuning them with a ‘Please! It cost you nothing. I love you just because you American.’ It did not, however, take the boys long to discover that being loved for their nationality did nothing to keep down the prices of merchandise. Within a few weeks of our entering the city the soldiers were having to buy back cigarettes they had given away, at the black-market price of thirty francs a pack. And no sooner was the ban taken off sales, so the boys could buy gifts to send home, than prices soared to double and even treble what the Germans had been asked to pay.

Apart from food, there was plenty to buy. Paris was a world shop-window and the Germans had been clever enough to keep it well stocked. Denise, in her arcade of shops in the Ritz Hotel, could even produce nylon hose. ‘It is not quite so good as before the war,’ she apologized, ‘but the Germans who stayed here liked always that I keep good stock. So, there are still many lovely things to buy.’

There certainly were—watches, jewelry, fountain pens, exquisite glass, pictures, the kind of lingerie one had forgotten existed. Fifth Corps had made the Ritz their headquarters and some of the officers were having a wonderful time. One walked up and down window-shopping for an hour—’Just remembering and imagining’—and finally bought his wife a negligee which he intended to use as a morale-raiser from then on out. ‘All I’ll have to do when I’m feeling like hell,’ he said, ‘is think of her in it. Then I’ll feel so bad that nothing else will matter, anyway.’ He watched Denise tie it up in gold-striped paper and ribbons, remarked that it didn’t look much like war around, and bore it triumphantly into the cocktail bar where it looked still less like it.

Everybody in Paris who ever made a rendezvous at the Ritz Bar tried to get in to drink with and meet the Americans. Everyone in a United States uniform received hundreds of party invitations. Everyone got hundreds of warnings about people who had collaborated with the Nazis. About the only two things to be certain about were a hangover and the fact that the most of the chic women gaily talking and flirting with Allied officers had been doing the same thing a week previously with Germans. Louis brought me my first champagne cocktail with a headshake and ‘If I could only keep some of them out! Elsewhere in France they shave their heads. Here I have to bring them champagne and watch your brave officers buying presents for them!’ And in the course of quite natural conversation a socially prominent French hostess informed me, ‘We had to put the Allied flags out and take them in again twice before we saw your tanks and dared leave them flying.’

If Paris on the face of things seemed untouched by war, however, the first friendly mission made to Paris by the 8th Air Force produced abundant evidence to the contrary. We had seen plenty of air reconnaissance pictures of damage done by Allied bombers, but nothing to prepare us for the ground survey. At the huge Renault Works raids had sandwiched whole floors of machinery so they looked like currants squeezed in a cooky. Even more interesting was lunch with Monsieur Renault and his answers to questions. ‘Nobody likes to be bombed. But I can truthfully say that the majority of workers here were glad when raids arrested production. Why did we work for the Nazis? In the first place, there was no option—it was a case of work or go to concentration camp. Secondly, it was a matter of economic necessity. People had to live. Somebody had to pay wages.’ Although for months we had read with monotonous regularity, ‘Heavy bombers bombed communications and marshaling yards in Northern France,’ it still did not prepare us for the devastation of the big yards on the Versailles road. It did not prepare us for the acres of desolated houses and the way the little people in those houses felt, and how naturally, about being bombed—people like the woman outside the ball-bearing factory we smashed at Bois Colombe, who said sullenly, ‘Allies! Pshaw! Anyone who can do what you did to my house is an enemy! Why could you not have left us alone? The Nazis paid good wages and France prospered under Hitler. Now what do we have? Nothing but carnival and confusion! Only fools shout “Vive L’Amerique!” for that won’t put a pay envelope in my hand this week or next or afterward.’

It was while listening to Manager Gustafson’s description of the two raids on his factory that Air Force Intelligence experts in our party had their first intimation that bombing had been so successful that after the second raid the Nazis put the factory underground.

Gustafson was a Swede. Finishing his recital of the damage the Fortresses had done, he said, in his funny broken English, ‘The Germans tell me never mind what I haf to go on making the bearings, but I tell them it no good in the cave they give me because it too damp and too humid. They say then they air condition and central heat for me.’

Half a dozen men interrupted him with a simultaneous ‘What cave?’

‘At Taverny,’ said Gustafson. ‘You not know you drive us below ground? We should see it? Yes?’

‘Let’s go,’ said Colonel Boyd, in charge of the party.

And into our jeeps we crammed for a twenty-kilometer drive northwest of Paris which ended beside a hill bright with sunshine and rowan berries and bristling with FFI, trigger-happy as usual, and highly delighted at this unexpected opportunity of showing us around.

We walked, swinging lanterns and treading carefully because of mines, into the hill along a wide tunnel into dark so black it squeezed. Joe Evans of Newsweek made the cheering suggestion that we could easily be walking into a pocket of Germans, as we came out to the first of the big caves which the Germans were using as a factory. It had taken thirty trucks ten-thousand-odd trips to move the eight hundred machines installed there. Two thousand people carried daily on a special train from Paris into the bowels of the hill had been working there just a month when our arrival in the city persuaded them to call it a day.

We knew that the Germans had been making planes underground, though the extent to which they had transformed the Paris subways into aircraft factories was a surprise—almost as big a surprise as the fact that so few factory directors left the city when we came into it. With a very few exceptions, they were in the forefront of the welcoming parties. I asked one who had been making machine parts for the Germans if he did not fear arrest as a collaborationist. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘but not greatly, for if you are going to reckon all those who worked for Germans as traitors, you will have to jail half of Paris.’

Duffel bags had little more than found parking space among the champagne bottles after our arrival before it began to be evident that delighted though the French were to welcome us, it was as guests. They saw no reason for General Gerow’s 5th Corps remaining in command of the city and wanted it turned back at once to their own General König. He got it on August 28.

It was decided to leave Le Clerc with the 2nd French Armored Division in Paris to establish peace. As this left Gerow only the 4th Infantry Division, his 5th Corps was reinforced with the 28th Infantry and the 5th Armored. The only bridges available for their movement over the Seine were the Paris ones, still intact despite the Luftwaffe’s efforts to knock them out, and SHAEF decided to make the journey through the city the occasion for a parade.

General Gerow was charged with the responsibility of personally inviting de Gaulle to attend. His reception of the invitation can best be judged by Gerow’s subsequent inquiry to General Bradley, ‘Does the show go on whether de Gaulle comes or not?’

‘Sure,’ said Bradley.

Fighting was still going on in the northern outskirts of the city as the 28th and 5th Armored got new clothes issued to them and special ‘Look snappy now’ orders for the march through. The head of the parade was entering the battle area almost before the tail had passed the reviewing stand, with the Arc de Triomphe in the background in the scene which is now so familiar on the special issue of the three-cent stamps. None of the populace cheering and pelting flowers knew that these boys were moving up into action, or realized that for them it was anything more than it seemed, a spectacularly mounted demonstration of the might behind the Stars and Stripes. They never guessed that most of the marching men were thinking, ‘Jeez, so this is Paris. Hope I get back some day to give it the works.’ Few did.

British papers carried some criticism of the American failure to make a colorful Allied demonstration of the occasion, and the boys with the blue pencils in the big censorship room at the Scribe Hotel slashed everything which could have given the true picture and the story of divisions so fully engaged that there would have been no show at all except for the fact that these two had to go through Paris anyway. Nor did they permit comment on the fact that de Gaulle, offended because he considered insufficient recognition had been accorded him as leader of France, did not attend the demonstration given primarily in his honor. He sent König.

De Gaulle announced his new government two days afterward and with the announcement the net began tightening on those suspected of Nazi sympathies. As might be expected, the wave of spiteful informing which lapped across the city was the biggest yet. It had a great dirty head on it which engulfed thousands in a matter of hours. Many were herded into a bicycle track to await trial in conditions worse than even the guilty deserved. Jails were jammed and headlines announced special editions for long lists of citizens arrested. In bars and pavement cafes the old political discussions raged as in 1939, and all in all the heart of the beautiful city seemed set for pulsing black as it had done when I left it just before the outbreak of the war.

After prolonged discussion, Allied commanders had by this time settled into agreement for the next strategy phase. The surge of the First and Third Armies through the Metz Gap, which, it was tacitly understood, would preface their entry into Germany—even though D-Day planning never got beyond the Seine—was scrapped because Monty had V-bomb sites to wipe out. He had to stop war hammering the heart out of southern England before he was in any position to take it on into Germany, and meanwhile had to have his right flank protected. Accordingly, Georgie’s Third Army was authorized to roll on toward Metz while the First Army, with the 19th, 7th,and 5th Corps, turned abruptly left and headed northeast toward Belgium.

By the end of the month they were advancing in a fifty-five-mile front extending from Coullemelle, just west of Montdidier, to Rethel, on the Aisne, against German units in utter confusion. Remnants of five German armies that had goose-stepped and swaggered until the breakthrough at Avranches, were now scrambling off the soil of France in an untidy rout. Lasso-throwing of our armored columns had German commanders complaining that they were not informed of the American advance and had no idea where they were or what was happening. A patrol picked up one general driving hard as he could toward our lines—not as they first thought to surrender, but to organize the defenses on the Somme, which he did not know had been well behind us for many days.

Monty’s Second British Army had fought steadily to Amiens while the Canadians were painstakingly clearing the coast north and south of Dieppe, and Monty, conscious of the impressive swath that the Americans had cut across France, thought that the time had come for a bit of British headlining. He asked, and got,Ike's permission to preface what he hoped would be the first entry into Belgium by the British Second Army with an airborne drop in the area around Tournai, Lille, and Cambrai.

Bradley thought that the airborne effort might advantageously be saved for later if the First Army cut into Belgium via Cambrai. He quietly jeeped up to Hodges with this suggestion. As a result, General Pete Corlett’s 19th Corps (with the 79th and the 30th Infantry Divisions, paced by the famous ‘hell-on-wheels’ 2nd Armored) ‘got going’ as Hodges ordered, and in two days had advanced almost eighty miles to move into Tournai, and force Monty to call off his now unnecessary airborne drop.

What the British thought of it can be guessed from the fact that General Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, promptly took to his caravan to write to the London Times, complaining that American troops in Tournai were delaying his advance toward Brussels!

Not for long, however. Monty’s famous ‘Guards Armored’ entered Brussels on September 4, to receive an ovation which more than made up for the fact that the Yanks had beaten them across the border. Not content with that, on the same day his armored columns captured Antwerp. He got his headlines then—and splashed!—for in four and a half days he had advanced two hundred and twenty miles, had succeeded in isolating all of the Channel ports south of the Scheldt Estuary and driven on across the Albert Canal to link with the Americans. This left the Canadians the necessary, unspectacular, grueling task of laying siege to the harbors so desperately needed along the French and Belgian coast. They captured Ostend, surrounded Dunkirk, and smashed into Le Havre after combined sea, air, and land hammering which had the enemy accepting their surrender ultimatum with a slickness the citizens themselves could not have beaten.

General Collins’s 7th Corps, in the interim, was busy fighting one of the most important and least publicized battles of the war...the Battle of Mons, World War II. It was complete reversal of the battering Germans gave the Allies on August 23, 1914, when the British, heavily outnumbered, retreated to the Marne. General Maurice Rose’s ‘Spearhead’ 3rd Armored Division got to Mons with Huebner’s 1st just behind him at Mauberge, and the 9th Infantry, after winning the honor of being first into Belgium, about twenty miles east Moving eastward from the British sector and completely unaware of the American advance, came the German Seventh and Fifteenth Armies. At first, neither side realized the full significance of the battle unfolding. The Germans thought their way blocked only by scattered patrol groups. The Americans dared not believe that they had succeeded in cutting off an enemy force of at least thirty thousand. Rose and his Spearheads held tenaciously to Mons while Huebner’s 1st hustled north from Maubeuge to close the gap, at the same time launching attacks westward through the Forêt de Mormal to Bavai. Twenty-seven thousand bewildered and desperate Huns scrambled to surrender, hopeful that they would escape the fate which befell thousands of their comrades as ‘Pete’ Quesada’s 9th Tactical Air Force fighters hovered like buzzards over the forest, tight-packed with enemy supplies, and roads and fields so jammed with the debris of war that bulldozers had later to scrape a path for passage of Allied vehicles.

Thereafter it was just a rat race back to the first line on which the enemy could stand and reorganize—the Siegfried. Only once did he put up any worthwhile resistance, that was at Dinant on the Meuse where the 9th Infantry had a tough crossing against flamethrowers, nebelwurfers, and some stubborn fighting.

Southward, the Third Army had, during the month of August, surged their triumphant way over three times the amount of ground gained since D-Day by all the other armies combined. From the Seine, south of Paris, Patton’s armored columns had sheared eastward to Verdun and Commercy. With Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, and Nantes all under siege, Georgie anchored his south flank along the River Loire as far east as Orléans and from there proceeded to fight south and east. Tanks as well as men were showing the strain, but the long, thin supply lines were the only thing permitted to slow them down—and that not by the wishes of their commander. Determined that nothing should stop him, he demanded, and got, airplanes to fly gas to his forward elements, enough of it, thin trickle as it was, for them to take Nancy and cross the Moselle. The nag of responsibility concerning his flank had been lifted from him by the Seventh Army, which, landing in the delayed but, thanks to the delay, vastly successful ‘Operation Anvil’ in the south of France on August 15, had pushed up on Georgies right as far as St. Die. There was absolutely nothing then to prevent his tanks eating into the kilometers over the Moselle plain but the simple, bitter fact that they were just that much too far from the supply beaches. What gas could be hauled was rationed to the three armies, and Georgies share was not enough to allow him to roll on. What he had to say about it as he set about hoarding his supplies for his next offensive could have carried all the way into Germany. Perhaps it did. At any rate, the people in Metz knew the reason for the halt the day it was made.

The First Army in the arrowhead of the thrust now had the liberation flags flying across five countries—France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg. ‘Through the Siegfried Line,’ ran the jubilant headlines when, on September 11, patrols of the 5th Corps crossed the dragon’s teeth near Binsfeld and Wallendorf to be first to spit on the sacred soil of Hitler’s Reich. The same day, Rose’s 3rd Armored trundled through Eupen. For the first time there were no welcoming cheers for the men crouched in the tanks and armored trucks. Citizens stayed indoors to peer resentfully through the windows. ‘No,’ said officials, ‘there are no buildings suitable for hospitals or for any other uses for American troops.’ Civil Affairs detachments posted Eisenhower’s declaration for Military Government as the 7th Corps fanned on out toward Stolberg. This was enemy territory. The Battle of France had, at last, become the Battle of Germany. And we were out of gasoline.

Since Paris, armies had been moving much faster than supplies could possibly keep up with them. The First Army alone were burning seven hundred thousand gallons of gasoline a day, brought all the way from the beaches, without counting food, ammunition, clothing, and other necessities which had to be transported. The famous ‘Red Ball’ express truck route was organized by General Lee’s supply boys from Normandy to Chartres. Engineers worked like crazy men to build airfields apace with the armies so supplies could be flown as well as trucked. In spite of this, by September 5, the First Army had only two days’ supplies on hand. On the ninth, every available source of ration issue was being utilized, including stocks of unbalanced B-rations, to feed troops for the current day. During the subsequent forty-eight hours troops had to be fed on captured German food. Ironically, the men who first set foot in the Reich proper fortified themselves for the thrill of it with cans of Nazi meat which they ‘hoped to Christ was beef—not horse.’ There were no doubts about the fish and dill pickles which were pronounced good as if they’d come from the good old U.S.’ ‘Competition for what gas there was necessitated a system of rationing,’ declared the Army report in fine understatement. Actually, the situation around the far forward truckheads got so bitter one supply officer requested German prisoners be given the job of allocating such slender supplies as there were—’On account that they’re the proper guys to come in for all the cussin’ and beefin’ goin’ on.’

Back in Paris, the ear drum which got shattered in the bombing at St. Lô had me hospitalized with two fears eating into the monotony of hours in bed. One, that an operation for mastoid might be necessary. Two, that the war would be over before I could catch up with it again. The first fear was swept aside for the time being with the assimilation of enough sulpha to turn me purple. The second, nurtured by the fact that Major Hinton, hospital ear specialist, insisted on more treatment, and SHAEF were determined that Paris, for the time being at any rate, was as far forward as women correspondents were to go.

Then into my room one day came Nurse Sparkle Brown—yes, that really is her name—with a tin of Nescafe and the suggestion that we brew some coffee. Brewing done, by pouring a couple of spoonfuls into our toothbrush glasses and letting the hot water from the wash basin run on it, we settled into the first stage of a firm friendship.

Sparkle, in hospital with a poisoned and impacted wisdom tooth, was mighty anxious to get it healed because her hospital, the 91st Evacuation stationed at Versailles, was to be one of the first three to move into Germany. They were leaving any day.

Her Commanding Officer, Colonel Paul Hayes, grinned like a schoolboy when I put the proposition to him, If Hinton would agree, would he allow me to move up with his hospital into Germany?’ I had long wanted to do a broadcast on an evac hospital moving and thought that the move from Paris to the Siegfried Line from a radio viewpoint could not be bettered. Very gravely he agreed, went off to see Major Hinton, and returned to inform me that, provided I could get SHAEF’s permission, he would be glad to take me along with the rest of the hospital—as a patient, as my ear would still be needing medical supervision and attention.

SHAEF Director of Personnel, Colonel Thor Smith, listened without any change of expression to my request for the necessary permission. He dictated orders and passed them across his desk with a ‘Hope you are soon fit,’ and, as I reached the door, a quiet ‘By the way, when you want to change from the status of patient to war correspondent at the hospital, don’t bother to let me know. Those orders will take care of it all right. We wouldn’t want you getting mixed up in another court-martial.’ Not a muscle twitch disturbed his facial composure, but laughter devils danced in his eyes...

7

IT seemed impossible that everything four hundred people needed to carry around to set up hospital for four to six hundred patients could be crammed into sixty-eight trucks, but it was. Nurses rode in six-by-sixes, and it was rough riding. It was bitterly cold, and so bumpy teeth seemed loose for weeks afterward, which was not surprising, for three hundred miles over those neglected cobblestoned roads would have been body-bruising enough in a well-sprung car. Food was C-ration, which we ate cold and straight out of the tin, despite the lurching of the truck which swayed like a Nautch girl. The only halts scheduled were strictly for ‘blanket parties.’ Men took one side of the road; women the other. Privacy was achieved by the very simple procedure of holding blankets stretched to form the walls of a tent.

At dusk our convoy pulled into a field of wheat stubble outside the small French village of Marie. Chief Nurse Ruth Schwing told us to pitch our pup tents in two lines and that there would be hot coffee.

Have you ever, in biting wind and rain, tried looking at a piece of muddy field to think, ‘This is where I go to bed’? You don’t know how good a room can seem—any kind of room—until you have. The Angelus rang out from the church on the hill as we ate more C-ration, hot this time because about five hours previously somebody had remembered to give it to our truck driver to pack around his engine. We helped it down by dream dining. Most of us imagined steak and French fries and hoped for enough strength of mind to stop us from eating ourselves sick. Dottie Holstein, a diminutive scrap of a woman with a face like a china doll and enough in her when she got mad,’ according to her colleagues, ‘to lick twice her own weight in wildcats,’ gave a mental order for hamburgers as she had been doing for the two years in which the 91st had been in Africa and Sicily. Then, looking across the miles of rolling country, without a sign of habitation except for the small village huddled around the church, she said: ‘You know, we’ve been given an awful bum steer on this Europe deal. When I came over here, I imagined folks so crowded for living space they had to fight for enough of it to live on. Now here we’ve been riding all day long over country empty as our own Middle West. Why, they’ve no more call to go starting up wars over here than we’ve got back home, and I think it’s downright wicked our poor boys have to come over and get all bashed up sorting things out for them. We ought to leave them to find their own way out of the fix they got themselves into. It’s none of our business, anyway.’

‘Mickie,’ Nurse McKendrick, looking like an Indian squaw with an Army blanket hunched over her shoulders, dug a bit of frankfurter out of her mess of beans, and reminded: ‘But we’re not fighting for their living space, Dottie. We’re fighting for their rights as people, and they certainly aren’t what they are in the Middle West or any place else, I reckon, except where there are Nazis.’

‘We’ve been told we’re fighting for their rights as people,’ put in Sparkle. ‘Let’s wait until the war gets over with and we see what’s going to happen to the Germans who aren’t Nazis and our own boys who did the fightin’ before we try to figure the way things add up. Anyway, beating up a guy is no way to getting him around to your way of thinking.’

Martha, stretching into her bedding roll, drawled: ‘I don’t see what else we could do but come in and beat the Germans around. We did try to leave them alone as long as we could.’

Pearl said, in a somber voice: ‘I guess it’s just too bad the world’s gotten too small for anybody to stay out and mind their own business. Folks talk about our getting forced into war to help Britain. It’s silly. It’s just as much our affair to see things get run right as Britain’s. More, I reckon, ‘cause we’re bigger.’ The four girls—Sparkle, who just did; Mickie, homely, serious-minded and, in her own words, ‘the kind of gal nobody troubled to date’; blond and lovely Martha, who did not drink or smoke and was never heard to say anything stronger than ‘bother’; and Pearl, with sleek black hair and magnolia skin, always a little apart and engrossed in her own work or thought-analysis—had shared the same quarters and discomforts of campaigning since their ship left the States, and held a regard and respect for each other which women seldom achieve.

Before the stars were down, we were roused by the lusty shout, ‘Hit the air,’ from a GI called Shorty Rees. Shorty was one of the hospital’s characters—one of the rare breed of civilians who gets along well in the Army. He never let authority bother him and did things the way that he thought they should be done—orders or no orders! Not every man, of course, could get away with such an attitude. Shorty did. Having appointed himself ‘Striker’ to the hospital’s Commanding Officer, he even got away with being discovered reading his mail.

‘Shorty,’ gasped the scandalized officer who interrupted him, ‘you know perfectly well you ought not to be doing that’

The culprit looked up, unperturbed, and inquired calmly ‘If I don’t read the stuff, how in hell am I goin’ to know what to sling in the trash box?’

Our trucks had rolled through Liège, with nurses and doctors scrambling out of them like eager children, to buy and lick happily fistfuls of the first ice cream they had seen in Europe, before we learned our destination. We were going to Valkenburg, near Maastricht in Holland, a few miles on the Dutch side of the German border. And in view of the coming cold weather were to set up in a building instead of tents.

The building chosen for the hospital was one of the best-equipped and most modern schools on the entire continent—a Nazi school for sons of members of the National Socialist Party in the occupied countries. We arrived to find everything as the boys left it when the order came to pack bags and leave for the Rhineland. Lying on desks in one classroom was an English translation of Gerhart Jensch’s book, The End of the European Balance of Power. Blue-pencil-marked on the open page was this paragraph: ‘The regime of, the Balance of Power, whose chief champion was Great Britain, is a thing of the past. History has no longer any use for it. When historians survey the breakdown of that system of states and the collapse of the political regime which was inseparably bound up with it, they will contemplate the tragedy of Great Britain—the island kingdom which rose to greatness because of its insistence upon the Balance of Power, which collapsed when that policy ceased to work. They will, perhaps, be able to discover the real reason underlying that tragedy and register the fact that Britain, blinded by her primitive instinct, went to war for the preservation of a regime which had become obsolete and which no longer fitted in with the realities of the twentieth century.’

Twenty-eight such books were lying on desks, each of them scored at the same page. Sparkle, moving the desks to make room for cots, chuckled as she read, and said, ‘So that’s how the war got started. Wonder how they’ll teach the finish?’

A few hours in that school gave a mind-jolting picture of Nazism and the subtle, brilliant fashion in which it had been presented and exploited. Art, music, literature—everything, from the courage of the Spartans to the daring of the men who discovered America, could be studied here in the language of the country to which it belonged as well as in German. Nazi education, apparently, did all that could be done to burnish the luster of the great names of the world. But as he learned of them, the student learned, too, that the greatest names and the greatest exploits of all were German ones. He was taught, but not too obviously, that his own country alone possessed the will and the virility to pattern this rich fabric of historic accomplishment for the better future of mankind. ‘It’s only a question of a few years,’ one boy had written in a schoolboy scrawl, ‘before the world realizes that the outlawry of war was only made possible by the predominance of the Axis and the rebuilding of Europe on new foundations by the Führer and the Duce in a perfectly orderly way.’ That boy had no reason to doubt anything he was taught, in the atmosphere surrounding him, as he absorbed his carefully poisoned curriculum. There was nothing in the magnificently furnished building, with its views over the country crumpling up toward the Rhine, to give him any idea of the misery existent as a result of the rebuilding of those foundations. No. From the white-tiled kitchens in which double rations were cooked for these young international eaglets of the Nazi Party to rooms in which any student would count it a privilege to study, everything was blended into an atmosphere of security, well-being, and comfort in the best of all possible worlds—a Nazi world!

It was a world in which war was glorified—with murals of keen-faced men at the turrets of tanks or in the cockpits of planes, and storm troopers in battle dress silhouetted against a panorama of panzer might; a world in which parents were rendered out of date—very thoroughly and with infinite subtlety. One’s parents were good people, these boys came to believe, but not to be expected to understand the feelings and attitude of mind of a generation like theirs. They were not to be expected to appreciate that the Europe of the future was not to be held together as the Europe of the past had been, by the sentimentality of family life supported by religion and national sentiment. No. Nazi youth was being brought up in the conviction that the State would take the place of old ties and traditions. Boys had no duty beyond growing into the type of men from whom, as Hitler said, ‘The world would shrink back in fear.’ They were to be strong, relentless, healthy, and virile enough to beget a race of supermen to people the world which Germany would dominate.

The duty of peopling the world with German blood was not, of course, reserved for the teaching of special Nazi schools like this one at Valkenburg. It started, literally, in the kindergartens — very delicately at first, and progressing from clouds of apple-blossom pink against the blue May skies through pollenization to the harvesting of the fruit; or with the meeting and mating of creatures of the wild, which Disney could not have portrayed more exquisitely. As children grew older, pictures of swimming and hiking, skiing and mountain-climbing, replaced the flowers and animals. The duty that each individual owed the State, in the development of a perfect body, was stressed with gradually increasing emphasis on the individual responsibility of producing as many children as possible. Such children were not to be born of parents in the old-fashioned, out-of-date, state of wedlock. They were to be love-children, engendered in romantic impulse and regard for the rightful needs of the State. Boys were taught that there was no wrong in licentiousness unless it impaired virility. Girls were taught that there was no virtue in virginity kept after the natural age for conception.

With insistence on fostering conviction that they belonged to the super race, Nazi teaching infused—and again with inspiration—contempt for the people of other nations. They carried this to the preposterous point of rewriting school textbooks to vilify such peoples. In a small school in one village we took, for instance, the math problems given were those which would be set any children anywhere of like age, except that instead of working them out in terms like ‘take so many apples away from so many’ or ‘a man had so many cows and sold so many for so much,’ these mites were being asked to consider their math in guns and tanks. Instead of subtracting, they had to think of so many being stolen. And the thief was a Britisher, a Frenchman, or a Jew.

All of it, however, made for color and imaginative appeal in lesson time. Children mentally nurtured on such exciting stuff would be unlikely to assimilate with much enthusiasm the teaching of new prosaic textbooks. To offset anything that they had imbibed from the Nazi regime, new teaching under Allied Occupational Command would need to be more colorful than Goebbel’s best, more appealing to youthful ideas, more subtle in insistence that young Germans have a responsibility as world citizens instead of mere denizens of Hitler’s Reich. There was no indication that it would be any of these things. As we swept into Germany, SHAEF was too busy winning the war to do anything but confiscate all Nazi textbooks, close the schools, and leave the children to run wild through the desolated streets. Afterward, the breaking of the country into four separate command zones successfully precluded all possibility of German children getting anything more from Allied educational supervision than a sense of frustration and bitter resentment.

All along this border country which we were making the springboard of our drive into the Ruhr, the Dutch had been having a hard time. They showed more evidence of four years of war diet than any others we had seen since our arrival in Europe. Without realizing it, we had been expecting the Dutch to look like the Dutch. We expected jolly-looking men, with big pipes and well-filled suits, and the rosy-cheeked, comfortable housewives of a Frans Hals interior. We found pipes jutting from faces thin enough to be cadaverous, pipes that were very seldom alight at that, because tobacco was practically impossible to get. Suits, generally speaking, were too shabby-looking to seem worth the filling, but still mended often and beautifully, to prove that though the Dutch woman wasn’t comfortable-looking any more, she was still as good a housewife as ever. Sewing cotton, like everything else, was rationed, and a very meager ration it was, too. How far they had to make it go can be judged from the raincoat belonging to Valkenburg’s premier architect. For a quarter of an inch along both sides of the belt and for nearly half an inch up from each cuff, no warp and weft was left to the material which had not been put in with a darning needle. His wife had one pair of shoes to her feet. These were so splayed-out with wear that she walked upstairs on her toes so she wouldn’t turn her heels over.

Food was so short that even the poorest were forced to buy bread from the black market. Unless rich, or a member of the Nazi Party—and in that part of the country that usually amounted to the same thing, because a man couldn’t stay rich and still be a good Dutchman—no one could afford to buy more than bread, because everything else was too expensive. Just one egg cost three gulden, butter was seventy gulden for two pounds, meat about the same price, chicken and rabbits cost about forty gulden each, sugar sixteen gulden for two pounds, and bacon seventy gulden for two pounds. The pre-war rate of exchange was roughly three gulden to the dollar.

The official bread ration allowed no more than five thin slices a day. However, the Dutch still managed to spare food for ‘divers.’ These were the men and women who lived in hiding from the Gestapo. Patriots called regularly at the house of every loyal Hollander to collect ration stamps for them. Many lived without ration cards of their own for two or three years.

Prominent among this group was the burgomeister of Maastricht, Mynheer Kesselricht. After the Nazis had deprived him of office and threatened to arrest him for non co-operation, he lived in a cupboard in his own home for two years. Every week during that time his salary was pushed through the letterbox by grateful citizens, determined that his lovely wife and their ten children—all under the age of thirteen—should not want. And yet, when the first newspaper of liberated Maastricht came off the printing presses, its front page headlined a demand for election of a new mayor!

Madame Kesselricht had tears in the largest pair of blue eyes encountered in this correspondent’s lifetime, as she read the demand. The burgomeister just chuckled and comforted, ‘My dear, this is liberation—ability to express what we want, the right to criticize and present new viewpoints. This is what we have been fighting for, waiting for, longing for, all these past four years!’ Quite a man was Mynheer Kesselricht.

Occasionally, during the two years of his hiding, one of his children would catch sight of him around the house, and that, his wife assured me gravely, ‘was the worst part of the whole thing, because we had to tell them that if questioned they must say they had not seen him.’ The family were good Catholics, and the necessity for making their children lie distressed them greatly.

The burgomeister spent a busy time in his self-imposed imprisonment. Maastricht with the surrounding country was the focal point in the dispatch service which shuttled pilots, who had crashed in the Ruhr, back to their bases on the British side of the Channel. Mynheer Kesselricht helped direct that service.

Resistance in Holland was divided into two categories—active and passive. The active organization maintained radio contact with Britain, organized sabotage, and took care of billeting and safe transit of pilots across the Continent. The passive organization took care of the provision of identification papers and ration books for their journey. They had their own photographers, who could have a pilot’s picture ready to fix in his identity cards in a matter of an hour or so. Where did they get the cards? They printed them, borrowing their names from the dead. To quote Mynheer Kesselricht, Towns hereabouts have citizens who died many years ago who are now living very active lives. We’ll return the records, though, and give the dead back their peace, when we get ours!’

The burgomeister had other problems besides those concerned with getting Allied pilots back to base. A mile or so outside his Hans Andersen story-book city of jumbled rooftops and quaint, tight-packed streets were hills honeycombed with caves. In them were eight hundred paintings by Dutch masters—the first things we had seen since D-Day which were none the worse for four years of Nazi rule. The pictures were placed in the caves by the Germans in specially built air-conditioned and electrically heated strong-rooms, under supervision of experts from the museums from which they had been moved. When the Germans moved out, they went without the pictures, thanks to these experts and Mynheer Kesselricht.

The most valuable picture was Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch,’ which took twelve men to carry. Knowing these Dutch masters, imagine going to see them across fields of sugar beet, down through a green door in a hill along half a mile of arched tunnel, with an old man who burst into tears at being given a slab of chocolate and became violently sick after the first mouthful. ‘You see,’ he apologized, ‘my stomach cannot endure such excitement.’ We walked through double steel doors in the tunnel side into a room about twelve feet square. Instruments built into the walls recorded the temperature, while the show of weapons carried by the guard was in due proportion to the contents of a treasure-house worth the price of several kings’ ransoms. A gallery opened off through another set of steel doors in which the pictures were stored on specially built racks. We turned them over and canvases like Frans Hals’s ‘Singing Fool’ looked debonairly back; the muted loveliness of Rubens’s ‘Mary Magdalene’ stared serenely.

The old man at our side licked at the edge of his chocolate, surreptitiously, because he wanted to keep it all to himself. ‘I should save it for the grandson,’ he said shamefacedly, as we came again into the open. Big tears welled up when pocket-rummaging produced another bar.

With the exception of the children of Greece, no children in Europe suffered as much from war as the Dutch. Long undernourishment had made them white, puny, and utterly without vitality. Schoolchildren walked slowly and listlessly like old men and women. They had not even the strength to play.

We did not expect the phlegmatic Dutch to flame into anti-collaboration fever, but found them as ready to arrest on any neighbor’s testimony, more hostile in their attitude, and still rougher in their handling of collaborationists than even the French had been. In border country such as this, one shopped in the currencies of three different countries. Families were separated into those same nationalities, and it was even harder than it had been in France to be certain that the unfortunates grabbed by patriot enthusiasts deserved to be clapped into custody. Such custody, too. The jailed ones were lucky, because for the most part people suspected of Nazi sympathies were herded together wherever the Freedom Group found it most convenient to keep them. Two hundred out of the four thousand inhabitants from one town near Maastricht cringed in two small attics. Most of them, throughout the three weeks they had been in captivity, possessed not even a coat to spread for a bed on the bare boards.

Forty of the group were women. One, well north of sixty, explained: ‘I was arrested because two of my nephews who are pilots in the Luftwaffe came to visit me. Certainly they are Nazis, those boys, but I can’t help that!’ A haggard-faced girl pleaded for information about her relatives—’At least let my father know that I am here, so he can help me.’ Beside her a less-sparsely fleshed woman than most said bitterly: ‘They say I have a double ration ticket, which means I am a member of the National Socialist Party. What would you do if your children were hungry?’

In the whole group only one admitted party membership. He was very gray of face and hair, neat, in spite of the weeks he had lived and slept in his shabby suit. ‘Yes, I am a Nazi and hope that Hitler will succeed in his ideals. Otherwise, what is there? Nothing but Communism.’ He gazed with scorn on the young officer in his orange armband and declared: ‘You are very brave now that the Germans are gone, very brutal to these people who have been your neighbors and some of them your friends, but you will not be brave for long. The Germans left Maastricht because every American seemed to have a tank, but they will be back sooner than you think—much sooner than you think!’

Mustering their Home Guards of old men and boys, the Nazi High Command counted on time to recover while the First and Third Armies were bogged down by lack of supplies. They reckoned without Monty—who got the supplies Hodges and Patton wanted.

That redoubtable warrior managed to convince Ike that the Germans were weakest where the Siegfried Line petered out toward the North Sea, and that the easiest way into Germany was to strike north through Holland, across the Rhine, and push on to the Zuider Zee while turning east across the flat plains into the heart of Deutschland. Such was the Arnhem plan—simple, daring, ambitious, dependent for success on continuation of the disorganization which had marked German Operations since Falaise. Had it worked, it would have saved all the subsequent hammering through toughly defended sectors of the Siegfried Line, and thousands of Allied lives.

Unfortunately, disorganization no longer existed in the German High Command. Defending their home soil had hardened and coordinated Nazi armies until now they were a fighting force comparable to their Afrika Korps at its best.

Of the three airborne divisions Monty used at Arnhem, two were American and one British. These paratroopers and glider riders had to provide a road for Dempsey’s tanks to hurtle through to Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and Arnhem. Having secured the road, with all bridges intact and side roads under their command, they were to keep the enemy from cutting this long, narrow, and extremely vulnerable corridor until it could be fanned out and secured.

As it was a Monty-inspired show, the British 1st Airborne Division got the responsibility of securing the most distant and difficult objective—Arnhem itself. The American 101st were to drop near Eindhoven, closest to Dempsey’s mired-in front, while the American 82nd landed in the middle to grab Nijmegen and its vital bridge over the Waal.

This attack through the air was the biggest ever attempted. Before the sky troops began dropping on the seventeenth of September, Allied planes battered forty-four hundred tons of explosives on airfields and gun positions in the area of attack. Twenty-eight hundred transport planes and sixteen hundred gliders were used in the first two days to deliver men and supplies. A hundred and eighty-eight of them were shot down, according to the boys who got back, ‘like sitting ducks.’

At first the air assault looked as though it would be as successful as it was ambitious. Dempsey’s armored units made record time across the only built-up roads over Holland’s dismal marshes, to join the 101st Airborne at Eindhoven on the eighteenth, and the 82nd at Nijmegen on the day following. We had our thin corridor pipeline for supplies through to the River Maas. Beyond, it was a grimmer story.

North of the Rhine, at Arnhem, the 1st British Airborne had not a dog’s chance. Armored columns, driving to their support, became mere scrap iron on the straight, swampy roads under relentless fire from German eighty-eights. In addition, weather closed in so tight two days after the operation started that half the airborne sorties had to be canceled. Pilots who did get through and back landed at bases to say like one veteran of Ruhr bomb raids, I’d rather take all the flak and night fighters Fritz can put up at me than have to go over and take another look at those poor doomed devils down there. Food! They won’t be needing that long, or the ammunition we’re dropping ‘em either.’

News that such pilots brought back was all there was except for 1st Airborne Division messages which radioed assurance that, split up though they were and despite being counterattacked unceasingly, they would continue to give ‘damn good account of themselves.’ Desperate efforts were made to ferry food across to them. As fast as the barges put off, the enemy blasted them to the bottom of the river. Finally, after eight days of stubborn fighting, the weary groups, surrounded by overwhelming odds, got the order to pull out. Twenty-eight hundred out of six thousand got back, one of them to explain defeat for all with the earnest assurance, ‘We’d a’ done all right, if they’d only a’ put the bleedin’ armor on us and the f...g wings on the tanks!’

Arnhem was tragic for Britain, and equally tragic from the strategic point of view for all the Allies. It represented failure of a plan that might then and there have ended the war. Instead, it forced acceptance by us that the struggle must continue throughout the winter and following spring, to end only after costly battering through reorganized and immensely strengthened defenses.

Monty’s practice of inviting the Almighty’s blessing of his battle enterprise has been often enough reported. It was also reported that what he had to say when he learned that the Nazis, by sending swimmers with submarine charges, had managed to blow the precious Nijmegen Bridge across the Waal, shocked the Omnipotent into never wanting to stand on his side in battle again. Be that as it may, Monty held on to the bridge in spite of opposition which would have pried loose less tenacious holding, and, disappointed but determined, set about cleaning up the vast area of Holland which had been so criminally inundated by the Nazis between Antwerp and the Rhine.

‘Igloo country’ his troops called it, in the only language they used concerning it which was fit to print. All they suffered in it as winter advanced never could be got into print, no matter how hard one tried. The igloos were huts in the mud, which were all the shelter men could contrive from enemy fire and arctic winds whistling in across the dreary swamps. Ground was too soggy for foxholes. Gray day followed gray day, in flat, depressing country which was just a world too full, much too full, of sky; men lived and fought and slept in clothes which were never dry but always half-frozen; dragging vehicles from the viscous ooze gave them their only chance of ever getting warm. According to Tommies, it was all that kept the entire British Army from dying of pneumonia.

To keep pace with the casualties, an entire American hospital was drafted to the Nijmegen area. But casualties still overflowed into other frontline hospitals in the area—ours included.

You need to live in a frontline hospital, with time enough to talk to the wounded and the men and women who take care of them, to begin to appreciate what war is and what it does to people. And it doesn’t take long to appreciate! Every few minutes of every day evidences, dramatizes, highlights it. You could expect that after so much to blunt emotion, and with so much to cram into every hectic hour, personnel would become stultified and matter-of-fact about it all. They do. But only to a certain extent. Few of them ever succeed in quite sealing themselves inside the chrysalis of complete detachment. How could they when any time, any day, an incident would occur like that prefaced by the apology from the boy with the belly wound? It was an untidy wound. As the nurse, in her olive-drab dungarees and her very obvious fatigue, reached his litter, the boy put his hands down to cover the mess of entrails with a ‘Gee, I hate to have you see this.’ ‘Why’—she groped for adequate words—’you, you son-of-a-gun!’ and bent down and kissed him.

In Sparkle’s ward one day, twenty-three out of twenty-five patients had lost a limb. The twenty-fourth was a fair-haired, blue-eyed youngster from V.M.I. who, instinctive as reaction, became ‘Baby Face.’ He was brought in with the twenty-fifth, his buddy, a professional baseball player, about to lose his right arm. It looked as though ‘Baby Face’s’ right arm, too, was a certainty for amputation. So he shouldn’t see what that meant when his pal came back from the operating theater, he was put down for transfer to another ward.

‘I won’t go,’ he informed Sparkle. ‘Maybe knowing that I’ve likely got to go through the same thing will help my buddy.’ Sparkle did her best to talk him into moving. When that was impossible without ‘making the poor kid feel worse than he did about losing his arm,’ she turned her talking on Commanding Officer Paul Hayes and got his laconic ‘If you think it’s best, Sparkle, then okay.’ ‘Baby Face’ was allowed to remain.

That night and next day, Sparkle and the rest gave all they had to try to save his arm. By evening it was evident that it wouldn’t be enough. Paul Hayes’s quiet voice had got only as far as ‘You know, we’ve done all we possibly could,’ when ‘Baby Face’ cut in with ‘I know, sir. I’ve been expecting it all day. I’ll be quite all right, sir.’

Sparkle, hardened veteran as she insisted she was after two years of campaigning through Africa, Sicily, and France, strode out of the ward ostensibly for some fudge. (She made fudge for patients in her funny little squad gas cooker in every ‘setup’ from Oran to Berlin.) It didn’t fool ‘Baby Face.’

‘Why, you softie,’ he teased as she came back red-eyed; ‘and I was always sold on the idea that nurses were tough.’

Across from him was a German, so mashed it had taken surgeons four hours to patch him up and set all that was left of him in a plaster cast that made him look, as ‘Baby Face’ said, ‘like a swastika without the ends turned out.’ Casualties were such that litters, in which our men were lying waiting for operating tables, had necklaced the vaulted corridors leading to the theater for as long as a day and a night. Fixing up this Heinie had taken precious hours which several of the boys in the cots thought were four too many.

‘They wouldn’t do it for us. Why should our boys wait for treatment because of ‘em?’ inquired one GI hotly.

‘Beats me! Too bad they took that Lüger off me, I’d sure in hell know what to do with it,’ put in another; then, as the Heinie waved his plate of food away, ‘I wouldn’t even feed the sons-of-bitches after what I seen.’

The orderly persisted in offering the food with a ‘Come on, Fritz, I got too much to do to stand here all night.’

An indignant ‘Not good enough for ‘im, I guess,’ came from the guy who had lamented the loss of his Lüger.

Beside him was a wan-faced youth in a ‘spiker’ cast—able to move only his head as he lay there, legs splayed apart in the plaster which would make a statue out of him for months, while smashed legs and a broken pelvis grew whole again. Wearily, he said, ‘Aw, quit it for Christ’s sake! The poor bastard was maybe doin’ what he thought right like the rest of us. Maybe he hadn’t any more interest in fightin’ than we got.’

The plate of food still lay untouched. But the German was eyeing it so that it suddenly occurred to the boy who had opened the discussion that the reason he had waved it away might have been that he was unable to feed himself. He picked up the spoon, dug it into the hash, and held it out inquiringly.

‘Danke,’ said the German.

A sleek-haired, gaunt-faced, cynic of bare graduation age quoted Walter de la Mare’s ‘And the pigs made a wondrous grizzling and guzzling and greedy sound.’

‘Hell! Stop it!’ ordered the guy next him. ‘We’re all hospitalized, remember! It’s all Geneva Convention now and no combat feelings!’

With only one nurse and only a couple of orderlies to take care of every thirty patients, there was always plenty that the less seriously injured could do to help the others. In fact, there was always plenty that anyone, including war correspondents, could do to help. This one took over the Hun feeding while this particular argument continued. It culminated with the arrival of Colonel Hayes, who contributed the Chief Surgeon’s attitude of mind with a chuckle, and ‘Well, I guess he figures the way all medics should. When a guy gets in his theater he says he doesn’t give a damn about the time and place of his birth; all he thinks or cares about is that he has nothing to do with his dying.’

Hospital personnel cracked that dying was ‘hard to do’ at the 91st. No matter how hopeless recovery might appear to be, it was always ‘We might pull him through—’ unless the white envelope swinging at the cot end carried the diagnosis ‘irreversible shock.’

This ‘irreversible shock’ was the one condition which the miracle penicillin and sulpha drugs and all the resources of modern battle casualty treatment left untouched. Little was known about it, except that those who died from it belonged invariably to the same blood group—the rare group whose blood would not mix with other blood, either in whole form or plasma. Strangely enough, men suffering from irreversible shock died, whether they needed blood or not, and no matter how lightly they were wounded or how desperately they strove to live. One young major fought to get better, to go home to his wife and baby, with everything he had in him. He lost out, although he was a magnificent specimen of masculine virility whose only injury was a mere broken arm.

Even harder to take than the boys who did not want to die were those who had no wish to live. Mickie put up a memorable fight for several—the toughest, for a boy who in civilian life had been a boxer. He had severe head injuries, in addition to the arm they tried in vain to save for him, and night after night Mickie would come on duty to find that he had stripped his bandages. She reasoned, cajoled, pleaded, and finally fumed. ‘All I’ve got to do! Yet you go making all this unnecessary work for me again,’ and then she burst into tears.

‘Gee, I’m sorry, sister,’ the boy said, ‘but why fuss? You don’t have to care what happens to me.’

‘But I do,’ Mickie told him.

Gradually, in the nights when he lay just looking into space, she told him why. No human soul, in her opinion, had the right to decide whether or not he was to live or die.

Haltingly, he told her about his wife; how much he loved her, and how little he wanted to go back ‘just half a man,’ Mickie coped with that, too, with the kind of reasoning the soldier had not heard expressed, as he said, ‘since he was a kid in Sunday School.’

The most tragic part of being maimed was always fear of the reaction it was going to have on other people. Over and over again, nurses heard, ‘Suppose I can take it—I have to, anyway—but what about my wife?’ Much as boys wanted to believe the brisk ‘Don’t be a sap! Your wife loves you, so she won’t let it make any difference.’ Many, so very many of them, knew that it would make all the difference.

‘Jeez! As if it wouldn’t be tough enough taking ordinary life up again after two or three years, without this,’ groaned a boy, blinded and so horribly burned that no woman, however much she cared about him, could look upon him without steeling herself for it.

‘Well, one good thing, he’ll never be able to see how she feels,’ observed Sparkle. ‘She’s one of the lucky ones on that score, and so is he.’

Pearl had put in a long, tiring shift in the theater and looked as white as her surgery cap. ‘I can’t help thinking we’re wicked to work the way we do to save some of these boys,’ she declared. ‘It would be kinder to let them die; kinder to everybody, and better for everybody.’

‘When I get somebody like Rennick’s “special” in, I think so, too,’ drawled Martha. ‘Cept look how much we’d never know and never be able to help other folks with if we just let boys like him go without botherin’.’

Rennick’s ‘special’—who was really no more Brain Surgeon Captain Charles Rennick’s special case than Chief Surgeon Stuart Welch’s, or any of the other half-dozen people who had worked on him—was a miracle case. Medical orderlies carried him from the ambulance to the shock ward, with the quiet comment, ‘Emergency.’ The shock ward was no place to see reaction, no matter in what state patients came in. Personnel had seen it all. Nothing surprised them any more. Nothing was new any more. Cases were all bad or they wouldn’t have been there. And routine for treating bad cases was very much a matter of routine. It had to be.

So Captain Edgar Hyde gave this one a quick look, and said, ‘An ampoule of caffeine.’ Nurses Emmy Smith and Mary Hodgeson covered the distance across what had been a schoolroom many, many times in a few seconds, as the patient took a last gasping breath—and died! Captain Rennick and Stuart Welch strolled in from the theater next door and promptly took over. ‘Open up his veins,’ ordered Welch and poured in blood—quarts of it. Within minutes, the corpse seemed to have tubes stringing out from all over it and its gray-marble immobility was warming back to color. Less than an hour after this man had been put on what had been his deathbed, he opened eyes like glossy chestnuts and said, I’d like a drink’—which was wonderful, except that medical science would never be able to do a thing about the spine that would forever be paralyzed.

Imagine that great hunk of twenty-eight-year-old man going back, helpless as a baby, for his wife to have to look after him all the rest of his life,’ reminded Pearl. I'm sure sorry for the women back home. They don’t know what they’ve got comin’ to them.’

‘And the worst of it won’t be taking care of the boys without limbs,’ said Sparkle. ‘I reckon those gals will have the best break. They’re always gonna stay sorry enough to get by, leastways the decent ones are. I’m sorriest for the ones that are gonna have to take care of the guys who look okay, but are hurt so they don’t think straight any more. And the tough part of that is their women won’t know enough about how they got that way to understand enough to help out.’

‘Don’t you think the men will be all right again, once they get back home with their own families?’ asked Mickie. ‘They’ve always settled down all right after other wars. I don’t see why this one should be any different.’

‘Let’s hope it won’t be,’ replied Sparkle, ‘or the whole thing’s gonna seem as stupid always as it does when I pull a blanket up over some poor guy’s face—and that’ll give me a nice, bitter old age to look forward to.’

Pearl, brushing sleek black hair into a fluffy cloud, smiled one of her slow, rare smiles as she told her, ‘You couldn’t be bitter five minutes, no matter what, Sparkle, and you know it,’ and then, ‘They’ll settle down all right just so long as the women will help them, as long as women don’t expect their men to come back the same as they were when they went away, just so long as they don’t nag them and try to find out too much about what they’ve been doing and thinking and feeling.’

Martha, curled on her cot—with the pink-and-white cheeks that her patients always wanted to pinch to make sure ‘it was really honest-to-God without makeup,’ snugged on an arm—yawned, stretched, and contributed a disparaging ‘I think that’s awful unfair on the women back home.’

‘Of course it is,’ snapped Sparkle. ‘War’s unfair on everybody—specially women. That’s why it’s up to women to stop it. Maybe we can now, so many of us know what war is. And there sure as hell have been enough of us in this one to know!’

‘Not enough of us to keep peace surely, Sparkle. You COULDN’T think that,’ objected Martha.

‘Let’s hope awhile longer this time than ever before,’ replied Sparkle. ‘Anyway, I’ll have to think so or go nuts,’ and out she marched.

Mickie, sitting up on her cot with her arms locked around her knees in her favorite squaw attitude, remarked that so many amputee cases at one time were too many even for Sparkle, and Pearl said, ‘Yes, I’m awful glad I work in the theater. The patients never get to be people to me. If they did, I don’t believe I could stand it.’

‘How would you like to do Marie’s job or Olive’s?’ asked Mickie. ‘Those girls really get the rough side of war—that is, if you think as I do, that the rough side of war is what it does to the folks in it, and I don’t mean just the way their bodies get beat up. Remember that young tank gunner, the one who was burned so about the face? I haven’t had time to talk much to him, but Marie has been breaking her heart these past two days trying to get him to fight along with his treatment. Just before he died tonight, he gave her his wife’s last letter to send back. You ought to see it.’

Next day, silver-haired, usually bright-as-her-own-eyes, Red Cross worker Marie, chewing a pencil in scowling cogitation, tossed the letter over with a ‘How am I going to write anything to enclose with that?’

For a page and a half the wife had written of the presents which her nextdoor neighbor had gotten every other post from her husband in France. She concluded: ‘You never sent me as much as one souvenir. You better wake up to the fact that a year is a long time to have your husband writing love and kisses, when there are plenty of guys around to give you the real thing.’ ‘The boy’s been in action every day since he landed,’ said Marie. ‘But what really eats into me is that there are so many other women back home who don’t know any more what it’s all about than this one does—and they’re the gals we’re sending these poor beat-up boys back to. The boys are scared of it, too. It’s the thing that frightens them most. Over and over again, they tell me they’re afraid of going back, afraid they’ve grown way out and beyond the understanding of folks back there. They want to go home, but not to have it all bust up around ‘em. And that’s what’s going to happen. And when the bust-up comes, the wives are going to say it’s all because of some woman their guy met overseas. A lot of marriages will break that way, but not nearly as many as the wives themselves are going to end just because they don’t know how much they don’t know.’

‘Then we ought to run schools for ‘em,’ suggested Harry Myers, ‘but first you gotta help me out on this.’

Harry was hospital registrar. With lips tight-pursed in seriousness and brown eyes twinkling, he held a field medical tag out for her inspection. Marie examined it with its tick against the recommendation for the Purple Heart, and a ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Wrong! Why, he’s a Heinie,’ explained Harry. ‘The first ever to get the award of a Purple Heart, I’ll bet.’

‘How’d it happen?’

‘Oh, some guy in a hurry up at one of the Medical Aid Stations just ticked it automatically without noticing the uniform. What I want you to do is go down to the ward and break the news to the guy that I’m whitewashing the recommendation.’ ‘You’ll go yourself,’ declared Marie firmly. ‘I got real troubles to take care of.’ If they had been her own she could not have taken them more to heart.

8

ARNHEM having failed, Monty’s primary task became the clearing of the port of Antwerp, menaced by the hostile occupation of the Dutch islands at the mouth of the Scheldt. By the end of September, the whole Allied effort was held up for want of supplies, despite the miracles performed by engineers, transportation corps, and other service troops in building and repairing railroads, extending fuel pipelines, and running high-speed truck convoys to forward areas. Ike reported to General Marshall in Washington: ‘Right now, our prospects are tied up closely with our success in capturing the approaches to Antwerp. All along the line maintenance is in a bad state—reminiscent of the early days in Tunisia—but if we can only get to using Antwerp, it will have the effect of a blood transfusion.’

The Canadians got the job of making that transfusion possible, and a grim one it was for them. In the Scheldt Estuary, yard by yard along the flooded causeway to Walcheren, they sounded an all-time low to the misery to which modern fighting can subject the combatant, and an all-time high to the courage with which he can subjugate it. From Caen on, the Canadians got more than their share of the rugged, dogged fighting which punished them almost as much as they were able to punish the enemy. None of it cost them as much or highlighted as magnificently the historic contribution Crerar’s small but great army made to victory as the bitter struggle which made it possible for Allied supply ships to tie up along the Antwerp quays by late November. Harbor machinery had strangely enough escaped enemy demolition, but V-bombs, dropping at the rate of one every twelve and a half minutes, caused thousands of civilian and military casualties, and made commanders wonder anxiously whether or not we should be able to continue using the port, badly though we needed it and much as it had cost to take. High Command took the view of the cockney soldier who figured that ‘so long as a bloke ad to die wiv ‘is boots on, it didn’t matter the bleedin’ ‘ell where or ‘ow ‘e done it’—and unloading continued. Aachen, first big German town to come within range of Allied artillery, had, meantime, become focused in the world’s newseye.

Rallying every German able to wield a weapon to fight to the death to keep the enemy from devastating the Fatherland, the Nazis issued orders that Aachen was to be defended at all costs. Equally conscious of the advantages of seizing this strategic gateway with its vital road net, Ike ordered it taken by the First Army and allocated them priority in the still meager supply tonnage.

Our brand new Ninth Army—with the secrecy wraps so tightly bound about it that it fooled everyone but the enemy, whose Lord Haw-Haw referred to it with derisive constancy as ‘Allied Public Secret Number One’—crept up to take over the 5th Corps’ Luxembourg sector, allowing the 5th Corps to move up north and give greater strength to the 7th, holding central place as usual. To the north, around Heerleen and Sittard, hard on the Dutch-German border, the 29th Division, finally, and to their great relief, had stopped being ‘the bra boys containing Brest,’ to reinforce the 19th Corps.

General Hodges decided to take Aachen by penetrating the Siegfried Line with the 19th Corps near Sittard, then turning this thrust south, link with the 7th Corps to ring the city.

The 30th Division, out of the 19th Corps, had the penetrating to do at the small village of Palenberg on the Wurms River. Colonel Wally Johnson, commanding the regiment to go in first, issued an order of the day which was brief and to the point. He just said quietly: ‘Good luck, guys. We all know what the score is. I know you can make it.’

Roughly fifteen pillboxes to each square kilometer were built into fields and houses in this, the first bit of the real Siegfried Line we had come up against. Until then, the GI’s had been thinking Hitler’s famous West Wall was made up of dragon’s teeth which they dug up and jeeped off with as souvenirs. The boys of the 116th and 117th Infantry Regiments of the 30th Division found something much sharper than dragon’s teeth when they crept over the rim of the shallow valley to take a look at Palenberg. Before them was the kind of country you can look out of the window at most any time, rolling country with a small town of red-brick houses snugged under the opposite hill—and the pillboxes. Some of them were built into the hill, some under the fringe of the woods, some in houses like the one in the house belonging to the family called Mingers. Frau Minger must have been a trusting as well as an orderly woman. ‘Please do not disturb,’ she had written above a big pile of mending before she took shelter from the guns.

To get to the pillbox in her garden—the first pillbox our boys took that October morning—they had to creep through a tomato patch and under trees still laden with pears, undisturbed by the general destruction, to storm their way into a dungeon-like room littered with gramophone records, books, and bottles. It was one of the few pillboxes taken and held. Most of them had to be taken a second or even a third time in the three days it took our troops to fight their way across that valley and up over the hill—one of the few hills, incidentally, which never had a fighting name. There wasn’t time for anyone to coin one during that battle, and afterward no one could think of one suitable and at the same time fit to repeat.

The tactical plan—a very simple plan—called for a breakthrough by the infantry on two fronts, which were a matter of two or three fields wide. They had to break through, as their General Leland Hobbs said, with their bodies and all it took to use ‘em that way, and don’t anybody forget ever what that meant.’ One regiment beat its way through Palenberg, the other through Rimburg and the grounds of the family castle of von Brauchnitz—a lovely castle with priceless furniture, a library to keep boredom at bay for a lifetime, great galleried rooms, and everything to fit in with ones most romantic imagining, except that the only things left living and unspoiled were a couple of swans who, despite the racket of the guns, sailed the moat with their accustomed, aloof serenity.

Both regiments joined with the armor which had come in on their left flank at Ubach, where the Germans continued to counterattack in considerable strength. One small handful of men under a sergeant, called Leno, found themselves almost out of ammunition on one side of the street with a couple of hundred Germans on the other. They eked out their fire power as long as possible, then Leno called a conference.

‘Seems we’d better call “arty” to plaster ‘em,’ he said, ‘‘cept were likely to get it as hot as Jerry ‘cause we’re as much under it as he is. You guys game?’

‘Sure,’ they told him.

They called for artillery fire and started digging. When it lifted, that sector of Ubach was theirs.

In spite of the heroic job those two regiments of infantry did in making the breach, the going was slow. ‘Old Gravel Voice,’ Major-General Ernie Harmon, moved his ‘hell on wheels’ 2nd Armored Division through the break and, for the first time since his arrival in Europe, found that wheels made no difference to the hell—’in either the giving or the taking.’ For he had to dig in up to the vizors against equally well-dug-in eighty-eights, in order to engage in a slugging match which, try as he might, gained nothing for him but the fact that he held his own.

Aachen was now surrounded except for the few kilometers separating General Pete Corlett’s 19th Corps on the north with General Collins’s 7th Corps to the south. Hobbs’s 30th ‘Old Hickory’ Division of the 19th Corps, tired but stubborn, drove slowly, oh, so slowly! it seemed to the impatient Collins, to close the gap. Only a few kilometers! But the Germans fought to keep them, and the two American corps from linking, with vigor and tenacity. It was their first major city to be threatened. They gave the best they had to defend every yard and every stone. Finally, Collins, unable to endure the inactivity forced on him by the slow rate of the 30th’s advance, had General Huebner’s 1st Division deliver an ultimatum to the Commander of Aachen. Stripped of verbal niceties, it ordered, ‘Quit within twenty-four hours or we’ll blast the daylights out of you.’

A couple of soldiers went into town with the ultimatum while fighter planes dropped copies for the civilians, who promptly besieged German Headquarters begging futilely for its acceptance.

As one of Germany’s key cities, Aachen had already received its full quota of attention from American and RAF bombers. The hammering they had given it was nothing to the pounding which now began for ten thousand citizens who had disobeyed the German evacuation order issued on September 12 and remained within the city. The heavy bombing threatened was spared them, for the simple reason that the heavies and mediums rejected Aachen as a target, and ‘Pete’ Quesada’s fighters had too many other offensive missions on hand to be able to allocate more than a few fighters at a time, and most of these working with the artillery. Bombers could well be dispensed with, however, with the amount of artillery by this time positioned to reduce Charlemagne’s once beautiful city to the rubble pile which was to impress upon the Nazi people that retribution had at long last caught up with them. Saucered into its surrounding hills, the city made a gunner’s dream target. They just lobbed all their guns could hurl—for the first time since Paris there was enough ammunition and to spare. Aachen was finally surrounded on the sixteenth of October, but it was five days after that before the 1st Division mopped their way into the heart of the city to receive the surrender of four thousand defenders and about seven thousand of the ten thousand civilians. Most of the other three thousand had trickled out through lulls in the gunfire to surrender to the 7th Corps. They were installed in the big Nazi barracks at the edge of town, where they immediately became a much bigger problem than anything the corps had ever encountered in their worst days’ fighting.

These people were officially enemies. They had no food, precious little clothing, and all the distress to be expected of thousands of people suffering the misery of advanced combat exhaustion. ‘Most of ‘em ought to have medical care,’ declared a harassed major, ‘and here we are in the middle of a battle having to take care of ‘em.’ In the fields on both sides of us, salvo after salvo of guns crashed. Ahead were great white columns of smoke, mushrooming slowly to spread and hover for the seconds before they dissipated all that remained of somebody else’s home. A woman came up crying, and the officer’s eyes darted in frantic quest for somebody to speak German.

Tell her no, we are certainly not going to allow her daughter to be raped,’ he snapped, when the reason for the tears had been explained to him. ‘Holy Jeez! what does she think we are?’ Then, with even greater vehemence, ‘My God! Well, if that’s the case, then turn everybody else out and make that room the maternity ward.’ Somebody else came up with an empty jug. ‘We’re going to give you soup, yes,’ he explained very slowly and laboriously. ‘You’re gonna get it as soon as we can fix it for you,’ and then helplessly, ‘Jesus Christ! Enemies! I’ve never had to bother this much about the folks that matter most to me.’

Military Government, and an earnest, hard-working man from the Red Cross, eventually sorted these people into different rooms in the big cold barracks, and did what they could to make them comfortable. All were bitterly resentful of our bombardment; all insistent that they were people who had lived and longed for the day of our coming.

‘Why do you think we did not go back into Germany when Hitler ordered it?’ asked one woman. ‘Because we have ached for this day when you would come and liberate us from the Nazis. Now look!’ and the tears runneled her dirty, mortar-caked face, as she stared forlornly through the window, across cabbages to the desolation in which were, somewhere, a husband and a couple of children she had not seen since the shell brought her house down on top of her, to set her running anywhere to escape the next one.

Nibbling at a raw cabbage leaf, an old man, who had been a scrap-metal merchant in Aachen, explained that nobody in his right senses wanted to be a Nazi. ‘Nazidom might have worked out,’ he said, ‘if there had been no Gestapo. That was a dreadful mistake. It made life bad for everyone.’

His wife, a fuzzy-haired brunette in the very late forties with every line in her much-lined face down-dragged with discontent, looked straight ahead with bitter brown eyes and said: ‘I had four sons. Two were killed in Russia. One is fighting in Italy, and I haven’t heard from him in eight months. The fourth worked on the railway here and went back into Germany because he would rather die for the Nazis than live for me.’

Her sister, crouching on a straw mattress beside the pair, had also lost two sons to Hitler. For ten years we have had to obey orders from the Gestapo. Surely, people realize we could not help the war,’ was her comment; and from the woman next to her an earnest ‘Why do you think us any more guilty than the men and women in Britain who send bombers over to kill us in our homes?’

Thus were we confronted with this intangible thing we had been hating for so long as an enemy, only to discover that it wasn’t an impersonal, intangible thing at all—that it was made up of people, looking and talking and querying, and generally behaving like ordinary decent people do anywhere. Our ‘Well, you started the war. You started bombing civilians, you know, in Warsaw and Belgrade and Rotterdam and London,’ somehow seemed suddenly very futile and inadequate in justification of all that lay under the smoke saucer ahead.

‘Helluva thing, isn’t it?’ said the MP detailing working parties to fill more mattresses. ‘Here we are all burned up about these Nazi bums and ready to knock any of ‘em off and like it, and what do we find—a bunch of folks lookin’ no different to any bunch in our own home town and seemin’ they hate old Hitler and his gang worse’n we do.’ He broke off to give a reassuring thump to a woman, flinching at guns which made the whole place quiver, remarking, ‘Poor old gal. Cripes! This sure as hell makes me feel like a heel.’

When quiet finally came to Aachen, any street scene in the entire city would have satisfied the most embittered person who ever suffered from war—anyone who ever had his world sink away from him as he looked at a telegram with a War Department signature; any of the men and women who waited with such desperate, heart-clutching anxiety while excavators scooped and wardens picked away piece by piece of debris from someone trapped; anyone who had to cope with the soot and mortar dust and the miserable scrabbling through a rockery of rubbish to salvage the precious things that made home.

The city was as dead as yesterday. Dead with the stark ugliness of death which burst and broke and spilled all it touched—buildings, streets, sewers, animals, people.

Over and above all this was appreciation of the fact that the civilians, digging about to salvage something of their homes, had no claims for relief of any kind as had civilians we had seen doing the same thing over the rest of Europe. There were no rest centers for Germans, no money grants, no food kitchens—not even the chance of getting help from their relatives in other parts of Germany.

As we bulldozed our way through the buildings sprawled across the streets, an elderly couple hurriedly dragged out handkerchiefs and started desperately flagging them. An officer of the 19th Corps Intelligence got as far as a puzzled ‘Now I wonder what—’ then said incredulously, ‘God Almighty! White handkerchiefs! They actually think that we might shoot them!’

A few yards farther on, an old lady waved at us to stop. When we did, she said, ‘Can you tell me, please, when they will take the dead from my house?’ There wasn’t much left of anything else to take. It had been a gracious house in the best part of town. Now the two halves leered apart in a grotesque ‘V/ A shell crater, with the grisly remains of a dead horse strewn around it, practically filled what had been the front garden. In the street before it was a battered gun, a helmet, some letters and photographs, playing cards, and several other small things which told poignantly enough all that had happened on the bit of ground they littered. The old lady was sixtyish, white-collared, and as graciously poised as if she had been asking us in to admire her rose garden.

Her husband had died many years before; her son had been killed in the early fighting in Russia. When the evacuation orders were issued on the twelfth of September, her three servants had obeyed them. The old lady stayed because ‘Nothing can stop what is going to happen to Germany. Running away is no good. I thought I might as well stay where I was and hoped that perhaps the Commander would give up before’—and she looked out across the ruins and finished grimly—’before all this.’

‘All this’ had taken twelve days. Days which the old lady had spent in the cellar, except for the spells in which she crept upstairs to measure the progress of the battle. Her home faced the opulent Hotel Quellenhof which was Nazi Headquarters. At first there was the dull crump of bombs falling. These did not much perturb the old lady because she had heard them many times before. Then shells began crashing in. Trees in the park running down the middle of the road got ripped up, and every time she peered through the gap in the middle of her own house, it was to notice that another one of her neighbors’ homes had slewed sideways or broken open or sagged down. Gradually, the size and number of the shell craters increased until the street was pockmarked with them. At night a dull red mist hung over the city, which shimmered here and there as fierce new fires were added to the old. Then men came into the combat scene. They came after the machine guns had begun chattering across the park. Finally American voices broke out in the house, and she became too frightened to make any more trips upstairs. Things had been quiet for many hours before she eventually found courage to ascend to the dining-room, where the first thing to catch her eye was a man’s leg without anything else belonging to him attached.

The old lady asked how the end had come, and we described how the German Commander had surrendered, telling his men, ‘I am not able to give you the “Sieg Heil” or “Heil, Hitler,” but we can still do it in our hearts.’ Her comment on that was a curt ‘Pity that he can’t see into the citizens’ hearts here.’

The old lady’s ordeal had been grim, but it was nothing compared to that of citizens who took refuge in the government-constructed air-raid shelters in the city. They jammed into the big fort-like buildings till there was scarcely room to move. After the first few days, there was no water, no electric light, no practical sanitation, and, at the last, no food.

A woman described how people broke down. ‘It was worse than the fire of the bombs,’ she said. ‘They had to beat us to keep us quiet. Everyone started to fight. Some had to be shot.’ On the day that Aachen surrendered, Bradley issued instructions which were to take the Americans to the Rhine. Supplies for the first time in many weeks were flowing to keep pace with demand. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had told their people and the enemy that winter was not to halt the Allied drive.

Bradley had three armies under his Twelfth Group Command—the First, which he hoped to hurl across the Cologne Plain; the Ninth, still on the secret list, which he intended ramming into Koblenz; and the Third, which was all set to take Metz and shear into the Saar. He had also a fear which perturbed him as much as the enemy—that Monty, away to the north, would get Ike's sanction to annex an American army to outflank the Siegfried Line and thrust into what the Supreme Commander was still inclined to believe might be the best way into Germany. If that had to happen, Bradley was determined that he would not lose his veteran First. Accordingly, he told General Simpson to forget his plans for Koblenz and push up to the north between Hodge’s 1st and Dempsey’s 2nd British. This he did, leaving the 8th Corps in Luxembourg for Hodges, and picking up in exchange Corlett’s 19th Corps north of Aachen. The Ninth Army moved as quiet as thought to Headquarters at Maastricht, but before their trucks could be unloaded, the Germans were dropping pamphlets on our troops telling them that their position was so hopeless they might just as well give up. Sketched above bits of broken men tangled in barbed wire was the warning, ‘You’ve seen your girl, soldier, for the last time. Your commander knows what the score is, or why do you think he moved the Ninth Army in? Better say prayers and write your last letters home, brother. You’ve had it!’

Bradley intended the First Army to strike for Cologne and Bonn, with the Ninth protecting its northern flank, while Georgie Patton went for Metz—all three armies striking at the same time. Hodges with his customary caution, however, wanted more men. The only reinforcements in sight were Terry Allen’s ‘Timber Wolves’ (104th Infantry Division) getting their baptism of fire with the Canadians in Lieutenant-General Crocker’s British 1st Corps, and not expected back in the American fold much before the 10th. Hodges, therefore, delayed his attack until the sixteenth. Patton jumped off on the eighth.

For almost two months prior to that take-off, life had been anything but quiet on the Third Army front, pinned down as they were, by shortage of supplies. Metz, with the ring of fortresses which had kept it impregnable for fifteen hundred years over the most fought-over ground in all Europe, was no easy objective to secure, particularly by direct frontal attack as Georgie first tried to take it.

His boys had realized what they were up against on the seventh of September when they tried to cross the Moselle. The 11th Infantry of the 5th Division launched their attack then, at a point where the banks of the river frowned down opposite a couple of forts manned by fanatical Hitler-jugend cadets. Dominating the high ground, these youths put all they had learned from their textbooks into actuality with such effect that our troops had to withdraw and establish a bridgehead three thousand yards farther south. This was Arnaville, and a terrible time they had getting and holding it. They got light weapons across on rafts and infantry across in assault craft during a night attack, but when dawn broke, opposition was so fierce that there was only one thing to do—give the troops a cloak of invisibility with smoke.

A company of the 84th Chemical Battalion wrapped it around them and with great courage. Led by a young lieutenant, called Lamb, the company—colored troops they were—had to ferry their smoke-pots across the river under direct fire from an enemy looking, quite literally, directly down their throats. Three times in the next two months he managed to knock the bridge out despite the smoke curtain kept hung over it. Engineers putting in the new bridges dubbed the place ‘Eighty-eight Junction,’ and cracked that no matter how many he slung in, the river was still more likely to lick them than the enemy. It nearly did, too! For the very day after Georgies attack started, the water rose fifty-seven inches in the highest recorded rise ever, to knock out the bridge on which Georgie was relying to get armor and supplies into Metz itself. Difficulties were further enhanced by the fact that the River Sielle, which was normally no more than a trickle, had also surged up to a raging torrent which washed bridging material away almost as fast as it could be got into position.

Georgie finally abandoned his frontal assault tactics in favor of pinching out the city and reducing the forts one by one. After his troops had bludgeoned their way through the labyrinth of impenetrable dungeons in several of them, he decided that this, too, was much too costly and time-wasting. The forts had ammunition and food enough to stand siege for months. ‘Leave ‘em,’ said Georgie. ‘They can surrender to the rear area boys when they feel like it.’

With the 90th and 95th Divisions squeezing in from the north and the 5th Division from the south, he had Metz encircled within ten days of the launching of his new attack. What it cost cluttered the bleak fields with more ugly debris of war than anything else we had seen since Normandy. Time was taken out to bury the men, but carcasses of cattle were everywhere. I don’t know why the sight of a flock of sheep bowled stiffly on their sides, or a cow with the soft, flabby folds in her neck stretched taut to the sky, or a horse with his four legs jutting from a bloated belly, should seem more sadly to highlight the horridness of war than anything it does to men. I know only that it did. Maybe it’s because animals are so unresponsible for it all. Against it, the final artillery battering of Metz ought not to be described as exquisite. As it was.

The old city sprawls untidily around the symmetry of its green-roofed and fine-etched cathedral. Behind it, blue hills roll with the forbidding menace of a sea in heavy swell. From them jabbed the vicious red licks of flame from guns in the still defiant forts. Our own guns and mortars were throwing smoke and white phosphorus. Fast as pearls slip through fingers, the bursts rippled around the outskirts to glimmer in the sun and then swell and surge together to hang in a solid mist curtain or else erupt lazily in tall, hovering pillars of silver smoke, lovely in ludicrous contrast to all they represented.

It was raining miserably when ‘Bokky,’ John Arthur Bockhorst of News of the Day newsreel service, and Johnny Morris of Life magazine, and I set out to follow the shells into their objective. ‘Thank God!’ said ‘Bokky.’ ‘Those bastards in the forts won’t trouble us.’ The statement meant nothing until it became evident that the dead-straight road we had to traverse ran between the two forts which had yet to give us best. Both had their guns zeroed in. ‘Keep your heads down,’ advised our driver as we came within range, and the prickles in the back of my neck sprouted so they felt they were pushing my collar back.

As we pulled up outside our most forward command post, a patrol party came in with the German city commander, a tight-lipped, arrogant-looking fellow called Meyer, who left his leaving a little too late. ‘Another ten minutes and I would have been away,’ he told the men who arrested him. Nobody had any clear idea where anyone else was. Troops were pinching in from three sides and the general impression was that things this side of the River Sielle were pretty well in our hands, though there was still plenty of shooting on the far side around the cathedral, where patrols of the 90th and the 95th Divisions might be expected to link up with our 5th some time in the afternoon.

Around the corner from the command post, a dead German lay on his back with hands up to his face in instinctive reaction, too late, to what he had seen coming. The street was quiet, ominously quiet. ‘Better step on it,’ ordered Bokky, and our jeep tore up the hill as though it had been jet-propulsed. We had to leave it at the river, where engineers, working with unhurried precision despite the shells lobbing in, did not hope to have the much-needed Bailey Bridge across before three in the afternoon—and only then if the Heinie fire stays off the beam.’

Our party crossed the narrow, swaying, and only just completed, infantry footbridge, with the patrol whose mission it was to mop up and establish the next command post. The lieutenant in command muttered a running commentary into his walkie-talkie as we edged warily on, keeping under the lee of buildings, peering around corners, to jump back, peer again, and then run like mad across the open street praying that no crackle of fire would shatter the quiet.

Things were made more difficult because our street maps were all printed in French and the Germans had renamed all streets in their own language. Eventually, we reached the railway line about five hundred yards above the station. ‘We’re on the beam,’ announced the lieutenant happily, ‘so over we go as I give the okay.’ The track looked wide as forever as we crouched by a shed in somebody’s back garden to watch one after another make the crossing to scramble up the far bank. A colonel from Chemical Warfare Service in the party, Colonel Walter M. Scott, picked up his feet so slowly to lift them over each railway line that they seemed to hang in mid-air. I knew why when I followed him. Feet reacted routine-wise to running and walking. It wasn’t until you tried to lift them that you realized how knees were feeling.

Across the line were a couple of GI’s kneeling with a machine gun covering a long, straight street. ‘Our own fellers are at the other end, we think,’ they told us, ‘but, thank Christ! it ain’t our job to go down there and find out.’ Again we made it without sound of gunshot, to find the first patrol of the 95th Division just setting up their command post in a school. ‘We’ve got things pretty clear as far as this, except around the cathedral. If you’re going down there, get on that jeep,’ they advised. We crowded on, with half a dozen other correspondents who had come in from the north with the 95th Division, and set off down the Avenue Serpenoise, which had now become the Adolfhitlerstrasse.

Our first stop was Gestapo Headquarters. Civilians had already looted the place and released any prisoners who might have been left behind by the Nazis. The treatment these captives had received can be judged by the dungeons in which they were kept—all of them dank, lousy, and with no more concession to comfort than a straw mattress and a latrine pail. One featured a chair, a whip, and a heap of sand. Two others had been used for solitary confinement. They were so small that the smallest man could not stand up or lie full length in them. The time men were kept in these conditions was evidenced by the intricate and elaborate scratching with which they had decorated the walls.

Several buildings had cascaded into the streets in the middle of the city, but, on the whole, surprisingly little damage seemed to have been done by our shelling. The cathedral itself appeared to be quite intact. We parked the jeep in the big square and prepared to make closer inspection. An elderly woman and a small pigtailed girl, humping a keg of water, preceded us down the narrow hill which circled back of the church. Somebody in the party had got as far as a relieved ‘It must be all right around here if civilians are strolling about,’ when the sound came we had been dreading to hear for so long.

‘Ouch!’ said the jeep driver, not four feet from me, and cuddled a suddenly bloody hand.

From the curve ahead belted one of the correspondents. ‘Snipers!, he panted. ‘It’s lousy with ‘em. Beat it to hell outa here!’

In the garage a couple of blocks back where we dressed the jeep driver’s hand, one thing distressed him far more than his own injury. ‘If SHAEF hears about Carpenter being in this show, they’ll discredit her so fast it’ll make her head swim,’ he said.

Solemnly, my colleagues, bless them, advised that I write the days story without eyewitness mention of the cathedral scenes, and they swore that if it came to a showdown, each would deny having seen me. When, in spite of all this, the news looked like percolating to Colonel Hunter, Commander of the Third Army Press Camp, Bokky bought silence with his best radio set—that day looted, at grave risk to life and limb, from the well-booby-trapped Commandant’s room at Gestapo Headquarters.

Most of the seventy thousand inhabitants remained in the city throughout the fighting. When it stopped, the empty streets filled with the strangest crowds we had seen in all Europe. There were no half-measures about their expressions or attitudes. They greeted us with more enthusiasm than we had ever seen before—or more hostility. Even GI’s, who knew their geographical borders and their history, were wondering whether it was liberation or military occupation. Sergeant Vernon Car lock found himself an elderly horse from somebody’s stable and took time out from the war to ‘gallump’ up and down the streets—’just for the hell of it, and because it’s fun seein’ whether I’m gonna get hissed at or cheered.’

9

BACK at 5th Division Command Post, in the last fort we took before entering Metz, the city was not reported captured until about three in the afternoon, which was a good two hours after we had left it. Squashing through knee-deep mud of the consistency of thick pea soup came General Patton displacing more of it than anybody else in his party, and pinning me, as bad luck would have it, right in the entrance to the fort. This meant that ‘Old Blood and Guts’ had literally to squeeze his way past, no matter how far I shrank back against the wall. His objection to women in the frontline areas had been as well publicized as everything else about his army. All I could do was stick my chin well into the collar of the GI coat borrowed to hide my feminine gender, and hope that none of the blond curls so carefully pinned up under the tin hat would escape to give me away. I should have known better than think that Georgies eagle eye would pass up anything like the spectacle I presented on his battlefield.

‘What you doin’ here?’ he barked gruffly.

‘Seeing what your boys are doing—and it’s sure plenty to be proud of,’ said I, with a sangfroid I was far from feeling.

‘Hmmm,’ said Georgie, and then, ‘It’s been pretty tough, though. Even for my army!’

He knew just how tough it was, because he was always far forward enough to see for himself. His boys might grouse and gripe about many things, and they did, but having a chairborne commander was not one of them.’ “Old Blood and Guts”—my blood, his guts, but he’s all right for my money,’ they cracked, as they went rampaging on to seize bridgeheads over the Saar.

General Devers’s Southern Army Group had pushed the French First Army through the Belfort Gap to the Rhine near Mulhouse, where it immediately turned north toward Colmar. Patch’s Seventh Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division spearheading, got into Strasbourg to turn south for the attempt to link with the French First and eliminate the Colmar pocket.

In the north, Monty had finally made Antwerp into the supply port of the Allies most devout hoping, and, in addition to running the Germans north of the River Maas and east of the Meuse, had withdrawn to high ground around Nijmegen only when his men, to use their own words, ‘‘ad to swim their f...g way into battle because of the f...g floods.’

It’s strange how completely at variance soldiers of the two countries are in their swearing. The British use obscenity where the Americans hurl profanity. ‘Christ’ and ‘Holy Jeez’ might be harder on the immortal soul, but are undoubtedly easier on the mortal ear—especially if it happens to be feminine.

On Hodges’s First Army front, nothing had been going according to plan and the reason can be given in two words—Hürtgen Forest.

Surprisingly, few people have even heard of the battle of Hürtgen Forest; fewer still appreciate what it cost. Yet, of all the bitter struggling in Europe, that in Hürtgen Forest hurt Americans the most. It was the longest sustained and bloodiest fighting of the whole war. And the most unjustifiable. In it, the better part of the fighting strength of four divisions was, in the opinion of those who saw and could not write, and commanders who appreciated and could not say, practically thrown away.

Why? Because nobody at first appreciated that this fifty-four-square-mile triangle of pineland lying between Aachen, Monchau, and Dueren was the key sector of the whole Siegfried Line. It was key sector because it enveloped the great lakes where the rivers Roer and Urft concertinaed into the canyoned fastness of the forest. The dozens of picturesque fiords welled among the crumpled hills to bosom at their biggest and most menacing into the Urftalsperre which was the dammed-up Urft, and the Schwammanauel which was the dammed-up Roer. Each of these, apart from harnessing enough water to power the major towns of western Germany, constituted a threat to all armies north of them and a protection of the northern gateway into Germany through which Monty hoped to crash. Because of these dams—the ‘damn dams’ we came to call them—the Siegfried Line did not peter out to the north as it appeared to do on the maps. It could be flooded to menace and delay our troops more effectively than they could ever be menaced and delayed by mere dragons’ teeth and pillboxes.

Nobody saw that in time for it to save the thousands of lives and the time and slogging which went into the capture of the dams in later months, except one officer. Major-General ‘Ted’ Brooks soon after we reached the German border, presented General Hodges with a plan which would have outflanked the dams and Hürtgen Forest in a sweep to the south to capture Gemund and Schleiden. The following February both Bradley and Hodges wanted to take them as Brooks had suggested. Unhappily, at the time when its adoption could have enabled us to drive straight through to Cologne, to prevent any likelihood of von Rundstedt’s breakthrough as well as the losses taken in the forest itself, Hodges was forced to turn it down. With supplies so short, he had to allocate all he had to the still untaken Aachen.

The drama of Hürtgen Forest opened up on the thirteenth of September, when Hodges, rushing his armored columns Cologne-ward, after their entry into Germany near Aachen, saw it merely as a right-flank menace. The 9th Infantry Division was given the job of penetrating and mopping up toward the high ridge which overlooks the wide, desolate plain before Dueren. It did not take long to discover that, far from mopping up the forest, the forest was destined to mop up them. Nothing in military training or military experience had prepared the men for what was ahead of them. According to a German document captured from the 183rd Volks Grenadier Division, ‘In combat in wooded areas the American soldier showed himself completely unfit.’ That was a piece of absolutely factual reporting.

Two 4th Infantry Division soldiers move deeper into the woods during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest on the Belgian–German border. The division fought in the battle from Nov. 6 - Dec. 3, 1944. The Ivy Division suffered more than 4,000 battle casualties during that time. Source: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/

The Germans appreciated fully the tremendous natural defenses of this part of their Siegfried Line and utilized and strengthened its resources with brilliant ingenuity. The terrain was difficult enough, steep hills, thick woods, innumerable creeks, and roads which were little more than cart tracks. Across the front stretched belts of mines completely undetectable under their thick carpet of pine needles and barbed wire rigged with booby traps. Pillboxes and dug-in machine guns were set up to spray the entire area with interlocking fire. Artillery fire, because of tree bursts, became a much more deadly hazard. Troops had no way of determining when they were out of range or when the ominous silence of the dripping wood would become an inferno of flying metal and branches.

Weather was pure misery, constant rain, snow, and near-freezing temperatures. Men had to live for days in water-filled holes without escape from cold and wet. Wherever they stood, the icy ooze would come creeping up over the tops of their combat boots.

The forest itself was the haunted forest of children’s nightmares. For mile after mile, pines were so closely interlocked that high noon on the brightest days never lifted the gloom beyond a heavy twilight. The forbidding menace of the interminable brown trunks was broken by dense thickets of undergrowth which only an alligator could have traversed happily, and by fire-breaks which swathed a ribbon of merciful daylight fraught with the certainty of most unmerciful death. Each was a devil’s causeway of mines and booby traps, apart from the fact that troops emerging on them were promptly in a field of enemy fire.

Germans knew every yard and every hazard of this treacherous territory. They had been using it for maneuvers for years; their troops could set foot with confidence, infiltrating behind our positions to stalk their enemy, silent as ghosts, until the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns or dull crash of exploding mines or sharp crack of shellfire split the eerie quiet. Our boys felt they had a jinx on them. It was jungle warfare that could be appreciated only after the freezing hand of fear clutched the back of the neck and tickled the pit of the stomach to turning-over point, as it did mine the day we jeeped along a forest track in what was, according to the maps, still well within our sector. A hundred yards ahead lay a welter of equipment—ours—and bloodstains in the snow. ‘Not frozen yet. Better get the hell out of here,’ said the driver grimly.

This furtive creeping behind lines, cutting them off to hack them piecemeal, unnerved our men. ‘Ever have to walk down a dark corridor when you were a kid, expecting somebody or somethin’ to jump out on you every step you took?’ one asked me. ‘Well, that’s how we guys feel every minute of every goddamned day. Christmas trees! If ever I get out of this jungle hell of ‘em, I pray Christ I never set eyes on one again!’

The 9th Division was covering a fourteen-mile front through the forest from Stolberg down through Lammersdorf to Monchau. The fight belonged to the PBI’s (poor bloody infantrymen) as fighting had never belonged to them since H-Hour on D-Day. It was impossible to give them the accustomed artillery support because targets could not be seen and the mortars were about as much good against the emplacements as peashooters. The Nazis defended about half the pillboxes to begin with, and then brought up reinforcements who filtered through the woods to reoccupy pillboxes we had already overrun. There was one way only, the 9th found, to knock out the pillboxes, and that was to bring up the 155-millimeter self-propelled guns and pound the concrete and steel to bits at almost point-blank range. Getting those guns into position meant cutting roads through the mined forest and then dragging the guns over ground which was the consistency of melted chocolate.

By the twenty-sixth of October, the 9th Division had been fighting forty-four days in the forest and had suffered 3836 casualties. They had had enough, and a new division, the 28th, was moved in to continue the battle.

Hodges, with his forthcoming drive on the north to prepare for, needed more roads. Those leading east from Rotgen, Eupen, and Aachen were too few and too poor to carry the necessary weight of armor and equipment. The newly arrived 28th was told to clear the forest and capture the important road center at Schmidt.

The full significance of this road center, in view of its proximity to the River Roer dams, had still not been appreciated. The main purpose of the 28th’s attack was seen then merely as an advance to gain roads and prevent movement of German troops from south to north while Hodges, without regard to the dams, launched his forthcoming grand attack from Aachen toward Cologne.

H-Hour for the keystone men of the 28th Division was nine o’clock in the morning of November 2. Paced by the 2nd Battalion, the 112th Infantry Regiment, which was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Peterson, crashed out of the trees into Vossenack and Germeter. Kommerschiedt was taken, and with only eight medium tanks and seven self-propelled guns able to follow them, the infantry fought its way across the precipitous ravine of the Kali River and into Schmidt itself. The Germans watched them in and then unleashed the fury of an all-out counterattack. The men who did return through the Kali Valley—and there were precious few of them—left their dead, their wounded, and most of their equipment to the enemy. To the left and right of the 112th, the 109th and 110th Regiments struggled ahead through shelling and small-arms fire so bitter and intense that ordering men to go on was, as the commanders said, ‘just sentencing them to death.’ ‘I’ve condemned a whole regiment of the finest men that ever breathed,’ said one. ‘I tell you frankly, I can’t take much more of it.’ And he wore an expression that made everyone look at something else.

After fifteen days, this division, too, had had all it could take, and was relieved by the 8th Infantry Division. The Army report stated: ‘The 28th Division in action at Schmidt and Vossenack had been in close combat for fifteen consecutive days and had suffered heavy casualties. From the first through to the fourteenth of November, 141 officers and 3634 enlisted replacements had been sent to the division.’

The 8th renewed the attack on November 21, to clear the forest and capture the town of Hürtgen. ‘I lost equipment enough myself, God only knows,’ said Tom Cross, the Commanding Officer of the 121st Regiment, ‘but I picked up enough abandoned by the 28th Division to more than double my own losses. As for their dead, we were collecting them for days.’

The 8th managed to ring the town of Hürtgen by November 28, and took it the day after, to push on across ridges which were so exposed that everything that moved on them stood out like a black eye on a curate. The 8th Division casualties amounted to just over two thousand.

Cruelest of all were the losses of the 4th Division, which had been thrown in to fill the gap between the 8th Division and Hodges’s main Cologne drive. Their killed, wounded, and missing tallied over five thousand, which did not include casualties due to wet and cold. These hospitalized more men than wounds. Combat Team 22—which was the 22nd Infantry Regiment—suffered 2575 casualties between November 16 and December 3. Nothing could more graphically portray what fighting conditions were than the following coldly factual extracts from their report covering the battle:

‘Anticipating the difficulties of maintaining communication during woods fighting,’ logs the report, ‘detailed arrangements were made to augment the combat team communication system. A surplus of wire and radio equipment was accumulated and communication personnel of the rifle battalions were doubled and in some instances tripled. Throughout the whole campaign double telephone wires were laid to battalions, and paths through the woods were marked with blazed trees or engineer tape. Severe casualties and tremendous losses of equipment caused by enemy shelling resulted in uncertain communications despite these precautionary measures. Special attention was also given by each of the battalions to anticipated problems in evacuation of casualties, and additional litter squads were formed.’

Through the first two days of attack, Combat Team 22 pushed forward against heavy fire to dominate the main north-south road through the forest. The plan for November 18 was a jump-off by the 1st and 2nd Battalions abreast, with the 3rd in reserve, to cross the road and seize hills ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ on the farther side.

The report says: ‘Fighting hard, the 1st Battalion crossed road, advanced five hundred yards to seize objective “Y.” Second Battalion was held up by heavy and extremely accurate mortar fire, and in addition encountered an extensive minefield. Company F, which had beaten off an enemy counterattack in the early morning, started to move forward and in so doing lost both contact and direction. The company was not located until late afternoon. Finally, the battalion commander, the battalion operations officer, and the communications officer were all hit and evacuated. The executive officer moved forward with a new operations officer to assume command. Within five minutes after reaching the command post, the new battalion commander was hit and the new operations officer killed. The regimental intelligence officer was then ordered to go forward and assume command of the battalion. By the time he arrived at the command post, no member of the battalion staff remained. Assisted only by one runner, the new battalion commander jumped off the attack and reached objective “Z.” At this point he was joined by a former officer of the regiment who had just returned from the hospital and who was to act as his executive. The 1st and 2nd Battalions tied in and secured for the night on their objectives.

‘As the Combat Team was once more fighting with both flanks and rear open with a frontage of more than three thousand yards of dense woods, the nightly buttoning-up procedure of the rifle battalion approximated the idea of the British hollow square. All-around defense was particularly emphasized. A two-day supply of food and ammunition was kept moving forward to within each battalion’s perimeter. These supplies were to make a battalion self-sustaining if cut off by the enemy, until physical contact could be regained. A thousand yards of forest were gained at the cost of one hundred and fifty enlisted men and thirteen officer casualties.’

So much for one day’s fighting. Of the next, the report narrates:

‘Although plans called for resumption of the advance, this was impractical and Division directed the attack postponed. Reasons for this were: (1) That portion of road “A” had not been opened and was still in enemy hands as attack of Combat Team 8 had not developed in accordance with expectations. (2) Trail “E” had been so heavily mined that engineers were not able to clear it...after the trail had been swept twice, vehicles still hit mines in the deep ruts, and a third sweeping disclosed additional mines. (3) Hand-carry of wounded and supplies was so long by this time that a further advance was an impossibility...even replacements were being used as carrying parties. (4) The bridge across the swift mountain stream near the road junction had been blown out...the bridge site, together with the valley was under such heavy and continuous mortar and artillery fire, including railroad guns, that it had been impossible to bridge the stream. Carrying-parties and litter-squads were forced to ford the icy stream which had flooded out its banks and was neck-deep. (5) The 3rd Battalion was also experiencing difficulties. Company I had not been relieved, although relief had been ordered twenty-four hours earlier. Company L had been seriously disorganized by loss of key personnel and by failure of mop-up parties to return.’

As the attack progressed, ‘The one available motor route was an axle-deep quagmire which had not been cleared. Along this trail, into which vehicles were canalized by the thick woods, the enemy had buried mines three deep—some so they would not be discovered nor exploded until deep ruts had been cut in the road by traffic. Box mines were found along the shoulders and ditches bordering the trail. Anti-lifting devices were attached to the great majority of mines and this necessitated destroying the mines in place, and additional work to fill the resulting craters. As a result, a hand-carry of more than fifteen hundred yards was necessary to supply forward elements and evacuate casualties, and armor and antitank weapons were unable to get forward.’

In spite of all this and counterattacks which swayed our lines back and forth to force us to take and retake ground until, as the men fighting said, ‘They would have gotten to know every tree by heart if they’d only been able to live that long.’ November 27 found elements of Combat Team 22 on the edge of the small town of Grosshau.

The report states: ‘Company B attacked to retake ground west of Grosshau over which Company C had fought the day before. The bitterness of this fight typified the action in the battle of Hürtgen Forest. Company B, under direct artillery fire, attacked with one hundred and five men against Germans firmly entrenched on a dominating hill. Enemy automatic fire covered all feasible routes of approach. The company was pinned down almost immediately by withering machine-gun fire. Individual heroism accounted for the company’s seizure of the high ground, as soldiers worked up the hill knocking out automatic-weapon positions one by one. In one instance, Private First Class Macario Garcia, after being wounded, continued on alone and destroyed two enemy machine-gun nests. For this action he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Company E aided by pushing to the north and remaining 35 [italics mine] of Company B assaulted across the open ground to their objective. Armor and tank destroyers were reluctant to go to the support of this force, owing to the possibility that the road was mined and covered with direct-fire weapons. First Lieutenant William P.

Jordan, realizing the urgency of immediate antitank support for this depleted force, ordered the crew of his half-track out of the vehicle and, alone, moved it and an antitank gun into position, proving the road was not mined. As a result of this example, armor and tank destroyers moved forward.’

One of the most dramatically graphic paragraphs of all is the one sponsored by a call from the Operations Room at Army Headquarters which went as such calls mostly did, by way of a grouse to Division, something like this: ‘What? They haven’t got that objective yet? Tell them, by God, to keep at it until they do get it. We want it and pretty damned quick.’

The phone message, translated into action in the report, records that:

‘In the late morning, the Chief of Staff of Division called the Combat Team Commander, and in the name of the Division Commander, directed that Grosshau be taken that day. This superseded the previously approved plan of encircling Grosshau and then calling for its surrender under a flag of truce. In accordance with the new order, the 2nd Battalion was given the mission of assaulting Grosshau from the west. At 1250 hours the 2nd assaulted with Companies E and F. Simultaneously, with this attack tanks located on the right flank were to assault the town from the south. Immediately upon jumping off, Company F (on the right) received a counterattack which it repulsed. Company E advanced slowly against heavy German small-arms fire. Fighting was intense and the attack had carried only seventy-five yards beyond the first house in the town by 1635 hours [4:35p.m.]. In the meantime, the tank attack from the south had run into heavy minefields and two tanks were lost. The attack was further canalized by a bog, but the tanks continued probing to find a route into the town. The battalion was ordered to continue the attack regardless of nightfall and the infantry-tank attack from the west progressed slowly. By 1915 hours [7:15 p.m.] the town had fallen. Later examination disclosed that Grosshau was fortified. More than one hundred prisoners were taken from the town. During the day the Combat Team sustained one hundred and fifty-eight men and four officer casualties, received seventy-eight enlisted men replacements and captured one hundred and fifty-five Germans.’

Well, that’s the way it went in those days when no advances worth speaking of headlined the papers, and no inkling of the story as it was percolated through censorship.

Many divisions shared the effort to slog through this forest, strongest bastion in the whole West Wall. In addition to the four who took the heaviest losses, there were seven others which counted their dead and wounded in the gloom of those close-knit firs. The American cemetery at Henri Capelle, near Eupen, opened for Hürtgen casualties, rapidly became the largest in Europe.

While this futile massacre, which could have been avoided by our flanking the dams, continued, United States First and Ninth Armies jumped off simultaneously, on November 16, for the big thrust to Cologne. Combined forces of RAF and 8th Air Force ‘heavies’ softened up, and with unprecedented effect dropped between them ten thousand tons of bombs in the heaviest air support for any single ground action to date. Feeling at higher Headquarters was that the Germans were as good as licked and that one solid punch would send them reeling back to the Rhine. Bradley was so confident he even told Hodges to keep his eyes open for crossings over the river near Bonn.

The Germans reeled all right, but, once the air bombardment stopped, were out of their holes to fight like fiends. By early December, all that the Ninth Army had managed to do for Simpson was to win a hold along the River Roer on a six-mile stretch between Linnick and Jülich, while Hodges, to the south, was having a rougher time still. Terry Allen’s Timber Wolves’ did manage to keep abreast of the Ninth Army, but other First Army units were so badly mauled between Weisweiller and Dueren that they had to be relieved.

By the end of the month, it was obvious that the First and Ninth Armies were not going to swathe a triumphant way into the heart of Germany. The Germans were going to make a stand on the River Roer. Moreover, with this discovery, the importance of the dams was at last fully realized. Commanders and staffs now woke up to the fact that, while holding them, the enemy menaced our entire northern front. All he had to do was blow these dams and hundreds of thousands of men would flounder in mud while exposed to annihilation by counterattack. No force dared cross the Roer in face of such a threat. The Germans held the potential of not only flooding out the Americans on the northern sector of their front, but of also flooding the Meuse to arrest Monty’s progress.

Hodge’s solution for the elimination of all that the dams implied was a knock-out by air. Assiduous bombing by the RAF, with heavies dropping over a thousand tons of explosives, produced no more than some pretty splashes and a couple of nicks in the causeway where bombs bounced, apparently with no more effect than as if they had been rubber balls.

As gradual significance of all this worked its way into command appreciation and strategy, a ridiculous situation regarding it built up in First Army press camp. Any armchair war reporter back at his paper’s headquarters had only to get out a map to see that there were dams hidden in the Hürtgen Forest. The Germans, having built them in the year 1904, could very well have been expected to know of their existence. Yet they had to be kept a deep, dark secret by the unfortunate reporters whose job it was to tell the folks back home about the war. They were forbidden by censorship so much as to mention bodies of water in the vicinity. The situation became so farcical that when the London Daily Telegraph came out with a long article on the dams by their military commentator in London and cabled Peter Lawless, their correspondent on the spot regarding them, he was able to cable back only that, according to best official sources here, no such things exist.’

By this time SHAEF had yielded to the suggestion that the way for this particularly womanly transgressor with a typewriter having been made hard long enough, they forget the feminine gender in Carpenter and grant her full accreditation at the First Army. She had been covering the war since D-Day against the overwhelming handicap of being a woman, making her own arrangements for briefing, billeting, and transport, sitting back whenever there was a big story, to be scooped by colleagues because, being men, they had priority in transmission. Neither of her papers had a man correspondent with the First Army. Each thought that since they considered a woman, handicapped as she had been, adequate to the job, SHAEF should, too. They made application accordingly.

When permission eventually, and incredibly, came through that I was to be a fully privileged member of the First Army press camp with the right to a jeep seat, to go into the news room and browse over the maps, to listen to briefing, to transmit copy the minute it had been censored instead of having to wait until all the men’s stories were away, to eat in the same mess—even to have an official cigarette ration—there was still one vexed question. It was, ‘How far forward were women to be allowed to go?’

Lee Carson, of International News Service, the only other permanent feminine member of the First Army camp, and covering for Dick Tregaskis, who had gone home sick, had already more or less settled the matter unofficially. For during the days she had been competing, in place of Dick, against the other news agencies, she had obviously not been able to stay back while the opposition went on.

The Camp Commander, Colonel Flynn Andrews, had given her frontline jaunts a chuckled unofficial blessing. ‘Andy’ had instigated ‘hog-calling’ in Normandy, where he took his propaganda radio van so close to the Germans to urge them to surrender that he was practically in their lines. Six feet of genial good humor and brave as a lion, he ‘could see no reason to find fault with anybody’s share of what it takes just because she happens to be a woman.’ So he now officially defined combat lines, for war-reporter women in his camp, with a forthright ‘They can go wherever their reporter’s conscience drives them—same as the men do—and if they get a beat on the story and scoop the pants off the men, it’s all right with me.’ To Lee and me, he advised earnestly, ‘Now don’t go making it harder for yourself than you need. Remember you’re going to be no darned good to your paper if you get hurt, and you’ll be one hell of a big embarrassment to me. So, for Christ’s sake, gal, don’t get hurt!’

A grand guy. His loss, when the Germans, during the Battle of the Bulge, dive-bombed our press camp at Chaudfontaine to kill him and our colleague Jack Frankish, hit us harder than any of us realized we still had it in us to be hit.

Bombing having failed to open the floodgates on the dams, we were compelled to maintain a rigidly, censor-dictated silence concerning them lest the Germans guess that our next move might be to try to capture them with a renewed drive through the Hürtgen Forest. So, day by day, we ignored this sector of First Army front and jeeped to the edge of the Dueren Plain to peep down from some high spot, there to dispatch highlight the battle for Dueren. In truth it was quite a battle!

General Maurice Roses ‘Spearhead’ 3rd Armored Division had finally beetled their way out onto the Plain in an armored tussle which was so exactly what an armored fight should be that it was hard to realize it was real and not something movie cameras were grinding away at. Strange how that ‘it-can’t-be-real’ thought persists after so much indicative of the fact that it not only can be real but is. A big notice read: ‘Front line a hundred yards. Dismount and fight,’ as we clambered out of our jeep to scramble on our hands and knees up the steep path to the lookout post on top of the hill, taking good care to keep within the white tapes, as the entire wood was scattered with mines.

Before us the three villages of Echt, Langerwehe, and Mariaweiller were being reduced, shell puff by shell puff, to rubble. Out on the purple plain, fountains of cerise and orange-colored flame kept spurting. Through them inched the tanks. Their progress really seemed no faster than that, as they spewed flame at Germans dug in on the flat-topped hill which erupted between us and the river. Maurice Rose, watching beside us, uttered a long ‘Ahhhh!’ every now and then as a tank would apparently be swallowed in a shell burst. That anything could go out on that plain and live, seemed incredible.

When Hal Denny and I went out on it the next day, it was very apparent that mighty little had gone out on it and lived. Eighty-eights were still whining across it to make it no place at all to fritter time away, and our wounded in the barn at the crossroads were saying that crossing the plain and the river beyond it was something they were glad they were going to be out of. A hundred or so of them were herded into this, the only semblance of a whole building in miles. The farmhouse belonging to the barn was smashed, but still being heartily shelled. Mangled carcasses of pigs, sheep, cows, and horses strewed the yard as medics picked their way through them. Every time another crash shook the trembling structure, the surviving animals burrowed into the hay among the wounded, squealed and whinnied and bleated. A youngster with a dangling bloody mess of coat-sleeve where his left arm should have been had the other one firmly around a frightened pig. ‘Silly, isn’t it?’ he cracked. ‘Me, with pork my favorite meat!’

It was in these villages cluttering the Dueren Plain and its approaches that we first saw the combat GI’s feeling for Germany harden into enough to make him want to take spite against German possessions. For the first time, soldiers moving into houses left untenanted by the fleeing civilians ignored the fact that, provided shells and bombs permitted, these were places somebody would be hoping to come home to. The boys deliberately turned furniture out into the street to be rain-soaked and mud-splashed by our passing convoys. They spitefully smashed glass and china. They looted.

One little town, however, remained unscathed—Monchau, where our first permanent contingent of Military Government ran things in a way which made the soldiers fighting near-by wonder what they were fighting for.

Monchau, on the southern end of Hürtgen Forest, is a Rhineland honeymoon town of pink-and-white oak-framed houses serried into a steep ravine beside a fast-flowing river, chattering by cobblestoned streets, which looked as though Hansel and Gretel might come walking hand in hand down them at any moment. One side of the ravine was still the Nazi front line. The Landrat, which is the German equivalent for sheriff, beat it when our troops arrived, but his assistant, a wealthy Rhine industrialist, was still holding office to run the town for us. He was a miserable-looking little man who held his hand out for us to shake as we were introduced, though he knew as well as we did that such was forbidden under fraternization laws. In one breath he told us that he had believed in Hitler and thought that his regime held promise of the best future for Europe. In the next, he was apologizing for his membership of the Nazi Party and explaining that he had to be a party member in order to stay in business. Every other man in town who had held public office under the Nazis continued holding the same office for us, including the food officer, who was able to give the housewives a bigger food allowance under American Government than he had been able to do under the German. A few miles away the Dutch had no more to support their heroic fight for victory than eleven hundred food calories a day against a minimum health rate of two thousand. In Monchau citizens ate practically all they wanted. Butcher shops were festooned with sausages and well stocked with beef and veal. Queues outside the bakers’ shops were shorter than they had been under the Nazis—and for much better bread.

Troops fighting around town had to pay a fine which amounted to a month’s pay for the privilege of saying ‘hullo’ to a fräulein, yet had to watch our soldiers attached to Military Government making friends with the folks in whose houses they were billeted; had to see them devoting all their time to putting the town into a state of order which the war-torn towns of Britain and the rest of Europe might well have envied. One of our mud-caked, bewhiskered, weary fighters from the heights above Monchau walked around for a bit in a daze and then said: ‘I don’t get it. I just don’t. A mile or two up the road they’re carrying good American guys out packed down face first in the jeep trailers, and looka here! Are we fighting the bastards just for the privilege of getting into their towns to tell ‘em.

“Don’t get scared now. It’s only nice, kind Uncle Sam come to take care of you.” Jeez! I could vomit! ‘

It is only fair to Military Government to report, however, that their kindly treatment paid some good dividends. For when the Germans swept through during the Battle of the Bulge, paratroops dropped in the Monchau area were promptly reported to United States Headquarters.

Real hatred of the enemy, even as an intangible force, was a rare thing to encounter in any American soldier up to that time. Not until the Germans began to commit atrocities during the Battle of the Bulge did our men, generally speaking, have any strong personal antipathy to the enemy. Not until the horror camps were overrun did they really hate.

Up until then, the average individual soldier’s fighting urge was very much like that of a certain Sergeant Ehlers—Staff Sergeant Walter D. Ehlers of L Company, 18th Infantry of the 1st Division. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor to top off a Silver Star and Bronze Star with clusters, for deeds which read like a one-man war. In Normandy he wiped out seven Germans in one hedgerow nest before leading his squad on to their objective. After this he personally knocked out an entire gun crew and the crew of another mortar which was breaking up his men. Next day, finding his squad in a hotter spot than they could cope with, he went to the extremity of his line and then stood up to attract fire on himself while his men could withdraw. One bullet wounded him and knocked him down, whereupon he at once got to his feet to fire back at and hit his attacker. He then discovered that one of his gunners had been wounded. Despite his own wound, he carried him to safety and returned over the field now so covered with lead and steel that for any living thing to exist there seemed unbelievable. He refused to be evacuated and continued to lead his squad all across France to Stolderg, Germany, where it became involved in a street fight with some tanks. Enemy riflemen climbed to the top of one of them, whereupon Sergeant Ehlers ran to the middle of the street and, with bullets whipping past him, stood there picking the men off the tank as calmly as though he had been shooting at bottles at a fair.

Until he joined the Army, he was a twenty-two-year-old kid from Manhattan, Kansas, who ‘just helped Dad on the farm.’ General Huebner, Commander of the 1st, read the citation commending him, in the small front room of a cottage which was his command post. As he did so, Ehlers rumpled one hand through his shock of dark sleek hair and flailed the other back and forth over a stove which, hot as it was, burned less, apparently, than his embarrassment. There was a question session to give us all a chance to fill in on details of the kids fighting prowess, and Captain Maxie Zera, Public Relations Officer of the 1st Division (and one of the few men anywhere big enough for the job), took the brunt of it when it was evident that Ehlers was much less nervous facing the enemy than a bunch of war correspondents. One correspondent, however, was bent on an answer to one particular question. It was, ‘Do you hate the enemy and do you like killing Germans?’ Maxie blocked it. But after the conference ended, it was repeated. Ehlers parried a bit, but the questioner persisted. Finally, the soldier looked at him squarely, reddened, and blurted: ‘Sir, I don’t hate anybody, and I don’t like to kill anybody. But if somebody gets in my way when I have a job to do so I have to kill him so I can get on with it, why, then I kill him, and that’s all there is to it.’

Reporting, which highlighted the dams as an objective, was still forbidden. Day by day, it seemed our jaunts to the front involved more harrowing, uncomfortable miles for less news. No end appeared in sight to the useless sacrifice of men in the forest, and we could not even try to write adequate tribute to it.

Pondering this one night at the Portugal, I was hailed with a ‘What sort of a day have you had?’ from a red-headed colonel. It had been anything but a good day. It was then past ten o’clock. I had only just finished a story which by the time the censors had finished blue-penciling it wouldn’t be worth its cable cost. Casualties had seemed even more heartbreakingly sickening and futile than ever. Long as it had been, the day had still not been long enough to give me time to eat, comb my hair, or wash the mud off my face. So my first reaction was an indignant ‘God, is there no respite from this interminable wolfing?’ In fact, I started to protest that I was much too busy and too hungry to be bothered with talking to somebody I didn’t know, when the expression warned me that here was somebody I did know and should remember. He was Operations Officer of the First Army, and had been to our camp to brief the press on several occasions when the war picture needed extra clarification. That, however, was a fact I couldn’t call to mind until some time after my recovery from the very ungracious reception I gave the man who is now my husband.

We talked of the dams, and he suggested that, even though I couldn’t write about it for the time being, it might be a good idea to go down next day to the crossroads in the forest which were then holding up our entire drive.

These crossroads had been the scene of bitter fighting by our 2nd Division for several days. It was now vital that they take them so the rest of the Army could get rolling. Second Division Headquarters was in a cottage in a forest clearing at Wirtzfeld. General Robertson, in command, was very well aware of the urgency of taking the objective. He was also inclined to bitterness at what he felt was inappreciation of all he was up against on the part of Army Headquarters. ‘It looks easy enough on a map,’ he said, ‘but maps don’t show what my boys have to contend with out here.’ Then, jabbing his finger on the big one spread out over the kitchen table which was his desk, he began talking of the hazards which were not to be read in anything the cartographers had charted.

He described the long, narrow causeway which was the road running several feet higher than the swampy pine thicket on each side of it. He told us of the fifteen pillboxes trained on the crossroads, described how the terrain on each side of the road was thickly mined and laced with booby-trapped wire. And how the road itself was cratered, then blocked with pine trees chopped so they fell interlaced across it, then cratered, then pine-blocked again. Said the General: ‘I’ve already thrown away practically one whole regiment of men trying to drive straight through this thing, and I’m not throwing away another. The only thing to do is to cut a way around, which is what I’m doing now. Furthermore, I don’t like the way the Germans are holding so hard in this neck of the woods. They’ve ample opportunity to be up to any kind of mischief here. It wouldn’t surprise me to find them breaking out of here any time in such force we’ll get the shock of our lives.’

That was lunch time on Friday, December 15—just eighteen hours before von Rundstedt did break out of those woods to end the first phase of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and begin the Battle of the Bulge.

10

THIS breakthrough was, in fact, a breakout through our two great thrusts into the Reich heart, between Hodges driving for the Ruhr and Patton for the Saar. Those who demanded to know how it happened that von Rundstedt was able to achieve what Army reports described as complete strategic surprise were told that thirteen days of bad flying weather had kept our reconnaissance planes grounded to enable the German Commander to muster his troops without our being aware of it. This statement was as incomplete as it was unsatisfactory. Intelligence officers in Hodges’s First Army and, incidentally at Monty’s British Headquarters, were expecting a German counterattack. They just made the mistake of not expecting it in the right place and at the right time. It was as simple as that!

According to reports from First Army’s Chief Intelligence Officer, Colonel ‘Monk’ Dickson, the first inkling of the shape of things to come was evidenced by information obtained from a captured document about the first of December that the Führer had ordered the formation of a special unit of a strength of about two battalions for employment on reconnaissance and special tasks on the Western Front. Such men had to be physically suitable for special tasks, mentally keen, with strong personality, fully trained in single combat, able to speak the English language and use American dialect, and have an expert knowledge of military technical terms. All volunteers, said the order, dated October 30, were to be sent immediately to H.Q. Skorzenny at Friedenthal, near Orienburg. In the meantime, all captured United States clothing, equipment, weapons, and vehicles were to be collected and reported for the use of these special troops.

That was the first indication we had of the existence of the Skorzenny Army of saboteurs who infiltrated behind our lines ahead of the big attack.

By December 7, ‘Monk’ was reporting, ‘Otto Skorzenny has now organized a school for the purpose of “individually training people for special assignment of importance,” and has established “Headquarters Skorzenny” at Friedenthal. English-speaking soldiers (with American dialect) and captured United States clothing and equipment are being gathered at his school.’

Monk’s summary of this situation read:

‘A captured order for a comb-out of selected personnel speaking the American dialect to report to H.Q. Skorzenny by November 1 obviously presages special operations for sabotage, attacks on command posts and other vital installations by infiltrated or parachuted specialists. An extremely intelligent prisoner of war, whose other observations check exactly with established facts, stated that every means possible is being gathered for the coming all-out counter-offensive. It is notable that morale among prisoners of war freshly captured, both in the Army cage and at Communications Zone cage, recently achieved a new high. This has been expressed by attempts to escape and avowed eagerness on the part of the prisoners to return and rejoin the battle for Germany. It is apparent that von Rundstedt, who obviously is conducting military operations without the benefit of intuition [nice smack that for Hitler], has skillfully defended and husbanded his forces and is preparing for his part in the all-out application of every weapon at the focal point and at the correct time to achieve defense of the Reich west of the Rhine by inflicting as great a defeat on the Allies as possible. Indications to date point to the location of this focal point as being between Roermond and Schleiden, and within this bracket this concentrated force will be applied to the Allied force; judged by the German High Command to be the greatest threat to successful defense of the Reich’ [italics mine].

‘Monk’ concluded:

‘That (1) the enemy is capable of continuing his defense of the line of the Roer north of Dueren, his present front line west of the Roer covering the dams, and thence south along the West Wall; (2) the enemy is capable of a concentrated attack with air, armor, infantry, and secret weapons at a selected focal point at a time of his own choosing; and (3) the enemy is capable of collapse or surrender.

‘Capability (1) is current. The exercise of capability (2) is to be expected when our major ground forces have crossed the Roer River, and if the dams are not controlled by us, maximum use will be made by the enemy of flooding of the Roer in conjunction with his counterattacks.’

The report records that ‘There is no disposition to retire behind the Rhine except where he has been forced to do so. The continual building-up of forces to the west of the Rhine points consistently to his staking all on the counter-offensive as stated.’

Intelligence officers at General Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group Headquarters received—without using—this information. So did Brigadier Williams, who was Monty’s Intelligence Officer, and was allegedly in complete agreement with ‘Monk’s’ findings, that the attack would come after we had launched our attack across the Roer River and on a thirty-six-mile front, stretching north from Schleiden to Roermond.

Instead, the focal point of the attack stretched south from Schleiden. And instead of waiting for us to cross the Roer, to flood us out and then hurl us back, von Rundstedt’s armies left us waiting while he jumped off to pour through and veer around behind the weak link between our First and Third Armies. And what a weak link it was—eighty-six miles, held by only three divisions and elements of a fourth. Two of those divisions—the 4th and 28th—were already worn out from their struggle through Hürtgen Forest, and the third (106th Infantry) had never been in combat. Yet, so little did the grievous potentialities of this lightly held sector disturb Bradley’s Headquarters that they actually considered pulling out one of these three divisions to strengthen Hodges’s northern drive!

Eventually, however, they decided that if there was to be a big counterattack to the north, the best way to combat it would be to threaten a counterattack from our side—from the south through Trier with the idea of pulling von Rundstedt’s troops down there to give us free passage to the north. The First Army was ordered to prepare plans. Troops with hitherto unseen patches were brought up in trucks and vehicles marked with the insignia of a new corps. Markers were put on roads, and general provision made to convince spies and German Intelligence officers that we planned to make our major attack on the strip of barren country below which Patton was driving into Germany. Well, we got the troops down there all right, though not as we hoped to get them, and certainly not as a result of our feint. First Army Headquarters Staff cracked ruefully, ‘Well, that was one cover plan, at least, that worked—so damn well it backfired on us.’

No tremor of trepidation, however, disturbed First Army or any other Headquarters before December 16, when those gray-green waves broke out of what we firmly believed to be the wall of steel with which we had them encircled for final annihilation.

On the day before they attacked, the First Army Intelligence Report read: ‘Reinforcements for the West Wall between Dueren and Trier continue to arrive. The identification of at least three of four newly formed divisions along the Army front must be reckoned with during the next few days. Although the enemy is resorting to his attack propaganda to bolster morale of the troops, it is possible that a limited-scale offensive will be launched for the purposes of achieving a Christmas morale “victory” for civilian consumption. Many prisoners of war now speak of the coming attack between the seventeenth and twenty-fifth of December, while others relate promises of the “recapture of Aachen as a Christmas present for the Führer.” ‘

Twenty-four hours later that ‘limited-scale offensive’ was being described in the current Intelligence reports as ‘the greatest counter-offensive launched against Allied forces since the beginning of the campaign in Europe.’

Before dawn, eight hundred parachutists were dropped in one group between Eupen and Monchau. With the dawn, fifteen divisions—after a pep talk by von Rundstedt which urged that every man should do his best in this last all-out do-or-die effort for the beloved Fatherland—jumped off across the thickly wooded, tightly folded Ardennes hills between Monchau and Echternach. ‘We gamble everything now—we cannot fail,’ he told his men in a dramatic order of the day. And, at first, it seemed they would not.

Von Rundstedt had two armies making the main attack, the Fifth and the Sixth. They were made up of four SS panzer divisions, five other panzer divisions, one paratroop division, two infantry divisions, and three of Volks Grenadiers. Broadly speaking, the Sixth Army was to capture St. Vith, with its vital road net, then head northwest to take Malmédy, Spa, and Liège, capturing supplies from our main dumps there and cutting off the entire Ninth Army. The German Fifth Army was to drive through Houffalize to seize Bastogne, and then turn toward the Meuse and Namur to fold around our northern armies to take Antwerp.

In conjunction with this attack, a special operation known as ‘GRAB’ was to be undertaken, using American equipment, American weapons, American insignia, and American, uniforms, and evidencing only too clearly the purpose for which Skorzenny’s Headquarters had been originated.

According to a captured document this operation was to commence as soon as the high ground west and southwest of St. Vith had been reached. Its mission was to seize American supply installations between St. Vith and Dinant. The enemy planned to keep his tanks rolling with our gas and his soldiers fed with our rations. Furthermore, he had organized a tank brigade equipped with our tanks, marked with our five-pointed stars, and carrying personnel dressed in our uniforms complete even to dog tags which had been taken from our prisoners and dead. There were about seventy tanks in this brigade, broken into three groups, whose duty it was to infiltrate through our forward positions to cause confusion and disorder in our lines, so that other enemy units could penetrate and exploit with minimum losses. Once the breakthrough had been made, these tanks were to dash for the Meuse crossings, there to join up with units of the long-range sabotage formation known as ‘Einheit Stielau.’

This group consisted of thirty jeeploads of Germans dressed in our uniforms who had made their way through our lines at various points. Some were to tap our telephone cables, intercepting messages, and acting as communications link to the others. Another bunch were to sabotage supplies and reinforcements, while the third were to reconnoiter crossing sites on the Meuse in readiness for the panzer brigades.

The Germans breached our line with four brilliant infantry and tank thrusts, each of which evidenced the perfection of their Intelligence Service. They hit the four weakest points on our whole front. The northernmost and main thrust was at Loscheim between the 99th and 106th Divisions around what came to be called ‘Hot Corner.’ The second around St. Vith connected with the first and pincered out two-thirds of the 106th Division. The third came through Wiltz to force back the twenty-five-mile front thinly held by the 28th Division, while the fourth was a secondary attack by the Seventh German Army toward Luxembourg against the 4th Infantry and the 9th Armored.

In the first hours the break that mattered most was the five-mile gap driven at Loscheim which sundered our 99th and 106th Divisions. Through it the enemy avalanched tanks and men to divide our armies in two.

Around St. Vith, the poor 106th Infantry, after only five days in the line, were doing their best on a twenty-six-mile front. They knew they could never hold against all that was pouring through it. Only a few months before these men, now hearing their first shots fired in anger, had been civilians in the States. Their most realistic approach to war until that morning had been military exercises.

The 422nd Regiment, commanded by Colonel George L. Descheraux, and the 423rd Regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles C. Callender, were unable to withdraw as ordered and all perished or were taken prisoner. Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Umanoff, commanding the 424th Regiment on the high ground between the two lost regiments, managed to march his men thirty miles through experiences, ‘none of which,’ as Umanoff said, gave a fellow any satisfaction except maybe the way the men reacted to ‘em.’

They did well, these boys who so briefly beforehand had been salesmen and clerks and mechanics back home. There was a signal officer called Earle Williams with a Sergeant Clyde Foster. They were moving down the road from St. Vith to Schoenberg to repair communications when a patrol, legging it as fast as they could up the road, informed them that Germans were just around the corner. Promptly, officer and sergeant shinned up the nearest telegraph pole to tap it and inform Division Headquarters. The Germans rounded the bend and started shooting before they could get back to their jeep. The warning enabled defense to be alerted, records destroyed, and, most important of all from the GI’s point of view, it enabled the cooks to save a couple of field kitchens and some of the Christmas rations. They staggered out with them on their backs and under fire—breakthrough or no breakthrough, there was turkey for Christmas dinner.

The advance telephone switchboard in Schoenberg was run by a cool quartet, Seymour, Leonard, Allen, and King. The four got their baptism of fire when a shell tore off one complete side of their building. The next tore out the front, the third stripped the roof. Subsequent shells came in too fast for tabulating, but the messages kept coming in, too—and going out to the two cut-off regiments. Only when it was obvious that there was no further advantage to be gained by remaining did the four pull out. And they blew up their switchboard before they left.

Back at First Army Headquarters at Spa, only a few miles away and in the direct line of the enemy’s main thrust, the only troops available for defense were the ‘Palace Guard,’ a tiny group existent for policing duties and consisting of a small number of armored cavalry troops supported by twenty-five military police and a few patriots of the 5th and 6th Belgian Fusilier Battalions, six ‘ack-ack’ guns, five half-tracks, and three assault guns. Into action with them went cooks, drivers, engineers—everyone in uniform ready and willing thus suddenly to become a combat soldier. Even the censors from our camp got mustered. They marched off under the command of Major Jean Nute, trying to look as though they were as used to the guns they were holding for the first time as they were to their blue pencils.

Engineers labored frenziedly to build roadblocks and mine roads on which we had no more equipment and men to stop the enemy than the British had back in 1940. All there was at Malmédy, for instance, to guard the main road through to Spa and Liège, was one small company, Company B of the 291st Engineer Battalion. While they heroically prepared the town for what little defense was possible, to enable our hospitals and other installations to pull back, came news of the worst atrocity of the war to date. A mile and a half east, a column of the 1st SS Panzer Division had just murdered close on to a hundred and fifty prisoners. They were medics and service troops who were lined up in a field, ordered to run, and then shot down like dogs. Undismayed by this and the news that other tank columns were coiling in from all directions, Company B continued to send out reconnaissance and demolition parties to do all they could to gain time. Every minute was precious, and fabulous feats of courage were performed. One squad of half a dozen men were sent to prepare and hold a roadblock at Stavelot. Tanks approached. Private Goldstein could not decide whether they were ours or the enemy’s, so he challenged the leading tank with a rifle. Subsequent fire left no doubt whose they were, but the squad drove them back. At Trois Points a bridge was blown by Sergeant Miller while under heavy fire from German infantry who were in the act of removing the demolitions.

The best feat of all, I think, concerns Private Bernard Michin, of the 15th Engineer Combat Battalion. Michin, in the direct path of an approaching tank column and subjected to heavy mortar, small-arms, and tank fire, was armed with a rocket launcher which he waited to fire until the leading enemy tank was only ten yards off. He completely destroyed the tank, but was blinded by the flash of the explosion. In spite of this he managed to crawl to cover while Germans infiltrating to within a few feet of him mounted a machine gun and proceeded to fire upon the rest of his squad who were hiding near-by. Unable to see the gun, Michin managed to locate it by sound accurately enough to hurl a grenade which knocked out the entire crew.

Weather, which had favored von Rundstedt by remaining leaden throughout his preparation for attack, favored him again with clear skies in which, for the first time in many months, the Luftwaffe held an adequate air umbrella over German combat troops. Flying close support missions after the Allied style, they did their best to break up what frontline troops concentration we had. All day long, the drone of planes throbbed to the crash of artillery. The sky overhead got so full of vapor trails, it looked as if people had spent the day ice-skating over it.

Our official press camp at Spa was in the Hotel Laaken. Most of the correspondents, however, preferred the greater comfort of the Portugal, where Madame and her sons, Charles and Robert, made the place home for us at prices aimed to convince our various financial editors that they were buying the joint.

Briefing was very brief that night of the seventeenth. ‘No,’ said the officer sent along from Headquarters at the Hotel Brittanique to stall off the fevered questions. ‘There is nothing much to say except that the Germans have broken through at several points. The situation is extremely fluid.’ We filed the meager words censorship permitted and went out into night being made hideous with the sound of a curfew bell—all citizens were to remain in their homes, Spa was once again in the front line.

It is only three minutes’ walk from the Laaken to the Portugal. Those minutes were enough to indicate that no matter how hard First Army might try to keep the seriousness of the situation from the correspondents, there was no possibility of their being able to fool the Belgians. Every citizen in Spa knew exactly what the score was and how far away the Germans were. Frantically, they hammered up the shutters on the shops which had been displaying almost as many things to tempt away the soldiers’ pay as the big shops in Brussels and Paris. The few people in the streets were hurrying home as fast as their legs could carry them. Faces were white and scared. Nobody wasted time with as much as a ‘Good night.’

Robert, at the Portugal, had already battened the place up to withstand a siege. ‘No, there will be no dinner,’ he informed the ravenous correspondents, ‘because the cook has run away so that Germans shan’t get him.’ Eventually, Madame and Robert cooked for us. Even Chambre Six—which was ostensibly the bedroom shared by Pete Carroll of Associated Press and Johnny Florea of Life and Harold Sigman of Acme, but in fact did duty as our press club—was gloomy. Signs on the big double doors said, ‘Here we grow the biggest and most beautiful hangovers in the world,’ and, ‘Anything can happen here.’ We thought everything had until that night, when we crowded in to drink and talk about the one thing that none of us had ever thought could possibly happen—retreat.

Lee Carson, with her tawny hair in a red bow and her lovely legs absorbed into their usual preposterous, shapeless, combat pants, boomed, in her throaty contralto, ‘You mean I’ll have to go clear out all that junk in my room? Goddamn the Germans!’

Hal Denny, late New York Times man captured in Tunisia and long time a Nazi prisoner, said peevishly, ‘I thought I’d done with retreating.’

Jack ‘The Beard’ Thompson, of the Chicago Tribune, ‘father’ of the press camp and like Hal Boyle of the Associated Press, a veteran in retreat technique, soberly advised us to ‘be ready to pull out and take darned good care to leave no notebooks and papers around.’

Johnny Florea gazed at the monstrous swastika flag which did duty for curtains around the bath in the corner and announced firmly, ‘Well, I’m gonna take that, even if we do have to bathe from here on out in a tin hat.’

Pete Carroll, shirt pulled out as usual over his trousers as he crouched in front of the wardrobe with a deck of cards, suddenly flung them down with an ‘Aw, hell! Not even the heart to play poker! Come on, everybody, glasses up for the First Army press song!’

Johnny and ‘Sig’ sprang to their feet and in their accustomed fashion followed Pete as he marched briskly up, over, and across the bed, and around the room, with everybody bellowing a quite unprintable ditty, beginning with the innocuous statement, ‘Monday I kissed her on the ankle...‘

Next day, on the eighteenth of December, the Germans came closer to creating a complete catastrophe for our forces than any Allied commander would ever care to admit. Had that handful of makeshift ‘Palace Guard’ troops not held for long enough to enable us to reorganize to block, and finally turn, the enemy’s effort, the Ninth Army would have been cut off and forced into pell-mell withdrawal across three miserable, inadequate bridges over the Meuse. The First Army would have been completely gobbled up. The supply dumps around Liège, which were the greatest ever assembled in Europe, containing as they did pretty well everything necessary for the final subjugation of Germany, would have been lost. Finally, loss of Antwerp, apart from its being our primary supply port, would have forced withdrawal of Monty’s Second British and First Canadian armies, making them give up their hard-won Holland territory and all they constituted by way of invasion threat to Germany from the north.

Briefing that morning at the Laaken gave no indication of what was happening beyond the fact that parachutists were thick in the woods for miles around, and German tank columns shearing ahead so fast nobody knew where they could be expected to arrive next.

Nevertheless, ‘Casey’ Dempsey, Assistant Camp Commander and the best friend in the world to every correspondent, said that he would try to hold the camp in Spa until five should it be necessary for us to pull out. In spite of parachutists and having no idea where the enemy was, some correspondents decided to risk trying to get to Malmédy, while the rest of us jeeped over to 5th Corps Headquarters at Eupen, to see if they could give us a better idea of the score.

The road from Spa to Eupen winds in a series of hairpin bends between pines in some of the most beautiful country in the Ardennes. There were other things to keep eyes open for, however, besides the scenery. Twice, machine guns chattered across the peace of what had, until that morning, for many weeks been very back-line area. As we got to the dam, with its great stone lion which looked so much like the London Daily Telegraph’s Pete Lawless (who was later killed at Remagen), an armored car leaped out in front of us. ‘Better stay close in behind,’ snapped the driver. ‘This road is lousy with parachutists.’

Ten minutes later, we skidded into the forecourt of the big barracks which was Corps Headquarters at Eupen. General Gerow greeted us with a ‘Hello! Where did you come from?’

We told him. ‘Which road?’ he demanded. We told him that, too. ‘Well, get back to Spa as quick as you can if you have anything to pick up, but not on that road—go out through Verviers,’ he ordered, ‘and don’t waste time in Spa either. The whole Headquarters are pulling out.’

Planes grazed in over the hilltops to make us hit the ditch seven times on the few miles back to Verviers, where the shutters were already up outside the shops. Back through Pepinster through Theux to Spa, the road was a fantastic sight. Bumper to bumper, the First Army Headquarters trucks were jammed, loaded with supplies and pulling out as fast as they could.

Some of our biggest dumps of gas and ammunition were located just around Spa. That more was not lost was a matter of a quirk of fortune which caused a German tank commander to decide to turn west just three miles from our main three-million-gallon gas dump, and to the Army Quartermaster, Colonel MacNamara. Losses were grievous enough, Heaven knows, but they could have been so much more calamitous. No one will ever know quite how ‘Mac’ got the stuff out or how he kept supplies flowing, but he did, and with service troops, most of whom had never before been under fire.

In Spa, on that eighteenth of December, we found there was no question of waiting around until five in the afternoon. Casey, like everybody else left in the press camp, was helping to strip the place, carting transmission, maps, rations, and all the other paraphernalia into the street to be loaded into trucks for ‘a château on the road to Liège—pack up and come on out unless you want to transmit tonight, in which case you’d better go to the Ninth Army at Maastricht or to the British at Brussels.’

Madame, at the Portugal, said a brave ‘Oui’ to a request that she keep my room, as I would soon be back, and embraced me, heaving her breath into great sobs. ‘Mouse’ (we called him that because he was quiet and darted like one to clean our boots and bring our breakfasts) rushed out of the room to return with two glasses, tear off the beret (which he wore so consistently we were convinced he had slept in it all his life) and toast ‘Vive Allies!’ On the streets, the people who had become our friends in the long weeks we had been among them, gave us liberation in reverse. It was much more moving than the welcomes had been and very shamedfaced-making. Here and there were expressions that no longer tried to stay affable. At one window a woman reached out to haul in an American flag so fast the rope must have burned her fingers. At the schoolhouse the children lined the playground to sing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ The imperturbable Jack Thompson came nearer to finding something he couldn’t take’ than he had done all through the war when a Jewish woman, crying hysterically, came up to his jeep to beg, Take my child where the Germans can’t hurt him.’

At Headquarters, in the massive, gloomy-looking Hotel Britannique, the First Army Operations Staff heard that a column of German tanks was only two miles away. They received this highly disturbing piece of information from a Major Bristol, piloting a cub plane. Bristol had managed to maintain contact with the enemy column all day despite a cloud ceiling which had closed in so low the tank drivers could have almost reached up to poke their fingers through it.

General ‘Pete’ Quesada, commanding Hodges’s air support, was phoned at Verviers with a terse ‘Get your boys up.’ ‘Can’t fly in this stuff,’ objected Pete—until he heard why he’d better. His fighters went up then, and fast, and searching around in poor visibility among the roads winding tortuously along the valleys, they unfortunately located and bombed some of our troops leaving Spa. Twice, trucks immediately ahead of us were hit. The first time a dirt shower fountained suddenly to clear and leave two men spattering the road. A few minutes later, another shower engulfed a truck. Troops thought that they were being either shelled or bombed by enemy planes. ‘Any minute now, and we’ll be getting strafed,’ announced a GI grimly. ‘Christ! What a setup for it, too.’

From the viewpoint of the strafer, it could not have been bettered. One side of the road was crammed with trucks and vehicles pulling out of Spa. The other side was equally burdened with the 30th Division, summoned down from the Ninth Army to roll as fast as they could make it to hold the Germans at Malmédy.

General Bradley had put in an urgent phone call to Ike,’ and managed to get the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions—who were then back at Rheims waiting to drop between Cologne and Bonn as their part in our projected Rhine crossing—to move up, instead, to stem the breach in our line. They were expected to arrive by nightfall.

Despite the proximity of the Germans, General Hodges was in no hurry to leave Spa. At noon, ‘Monk’ Dickson invaded his room to urge ‘Save yourself, General—it’s bad enough if we get overrun without your getting captured.’ The General decided to move back to set up Headquarters in a small hotel at Chaudfontaine near Liège, and leave his Operations Officer, ‘Red’ Akers, behind to give orders to Major-General ‘Jimmy’ Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division and to maintain the only communications First Army could keep with its units, until the new command post could be opened.

It was eight o’clock that night, however, before Hodges finally left for the ride to Chaudfontaine. He knew then that the Germans had wedged through and that there was nothing between them and the Meuse except service troops manning supply installations. A small arc around St. Vith was still being held by the newly arrived 7th Armored Division, reinforced by salvaged bits of the 28th and 106th Divisions, although by this time the Germans had pincered around this vital road sector, while to the east of St. Vith, the 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments of the 106th Division were hopelessly surrounded.

Hodges’s one consolation was that ‘Pete’ Quesada’s fighters, guided by Major Bristol’s lone cub plane, had found the German tank column just as it was about to roll over the hills into Spa. They delayed it long enough for the 30th Division to get to grips with it near Stoumont. South of Spa, this division and the ‘Palace Guards’ straggled valiantly, but oh, so thinly, across country from Malmédy to Stoumont.

Before Hodges left, he called back the 1st and 9th Divisions from their first rest since D-Day to hold the hot corner at Butgenbach. He also ordered reorganization of the 2nd and the 99th Divisions which had been hard hit and forced to give ground near Elsenborn and left instructions for the 1st Division to fight west to link with Hobbs’s 30th at Malmédy.

West of the 30th, the 82nd Airborne was expected to close in at Werbermont that night. They, too, were vital in strategy which dangled and extended our right flank to keep pace with the Germans driving west.

As Hodges left Spa, Middleton’s 8th Corps was reported to be hopelessly disorganized. His 7th Armored Division, all that remained of the 106th Division, and the 112th Regiment of the 28th Division, were north of the main German breakout. The rest of the 28th and elements of the 9th Armored were giving ground below the main thrust to the northeast of Bastogne. Near Luxembourg, the 4th Infantry was having a hard time against a secondary attack launched by the German Seventh Army. Hodges ordered the 101st Airborne to stop at Bastogne—Middleton’s Headquarters and key road center.

The next day, Major-General ‘Matt’ Ridgeway, ex-Commander of the 82nd Airborne, took over command of his newly formed 18th Corps. Hodges gave him the 30th, 82nd Airborne, and Maurice Rose’s ‘Spearhead’ 3rd Armored, the 84th, and the job of racing the Germans to the west until such time as he could counterattack.

It was at this point in First Army’s recovery that Hodges received a phone call from Bradley to tell him that Ike had decided to turn over everything south of the breakthrough to him, and that he had already called upon Georgie Patton to stop his attack across the Saar, turning that part of his front over to the Seventh Army to enable him to charge to the now virtually surrounded Bastogne. Georgie had the Germans so groggy that the biggest victory of his life was practically his except for headlines, and what he had to say about giving it up strained even his superb vocabulary. Good soldier as he was, however, he obeyed orders. North of the breakout, said Bradley—with a pause by way of shock-absorber—was to be Monty’s command! He was to take over at one o’clock on the next day.

On the stroke of one, his big green Rolls-Royce, preceded and followed by jeeploads of red-capped British military police, pulled up outside the hotel at Chaudfontaine, which was Hodges’s command post. Unwrapping the bearskin in which he was enveloped, he picked up his box of sandwiches, his thermos jug of tea, and his situation map all chalked over with grease pencil, and marched inside looking, as those who saw him, said, a hell of a sight more like a country doctor paying a call than Britain’s greatest commander hitting his all-time high.’

Hodges had lunch ready for him. ‘Oh, no,’ said Monty. ‘I’ve got my own.’ And proceeded to munch away at his sandwiches to the extreme discomfort of First Army staff officers, thereby deprived of luncheon, Hodges being unwilling to strain Anglo-American relationship to the point of going off and leaving his guest to eat alone.

On the wall were magnificent maps, 1 to 50,000 and 1 to 100,000, complete with lights and marked to the last possible scrap of intelligence. Monty ignored them completely, unrolled his own 1 to 250,000 map, propped it on a chair in front of him, then rubbed his hands and said brightly, ‘Now let’s review this situation.’

He said, quite frankly, that he was surprised to find that First Army had things so well in hand, and then suggested straightening the line from Monchau to Malmédy, thus saving troops and giving up the hot corner at Butgenbach.

Hodges demurred at this, explaining that the positions held there were the strongest obtainable, and that to fall back meant rolling thousands of troops and vehicles over one single road across the big swamp south of Eupen, which obviously could not be done without terrific losses. Monty said, ‘Humph! Better stay where you are, then.’ He stirred admiration, however, in the men, who were feeling soul-sick at being ‘handed over to the British just as they had things in hand,’ by outlining defense steps he had already taken in the British sector. Already he had his famous 30th Corps concentrated for defense west of the Meuse from Namur, south to Givet. By way of welcome to the Nazi tanks hurtling toward the river, a regiment of fifty British tanks were waiting at each of the three main crossing-points—Givet, Dinant, and Namur. In addition to that he had instructed his ‘Hell-in-Kilts’ (51st Highland) Division, to move to the south of Liège in case Hodges needed help in protecting this vital supply point.

On the First Army front, he decided on reorganization to release and reconstitute Collins’s 7th Corps for counterattack. So that Collins could move his headquarters far enough west to permit assembling his force without interference from the enemy, Monty had Simpsons Ninth Army take over Collins’s former front, east of Aachen, and ordered Collins to prepare to assemble the counter-attacking force in the area around Marche and Hotton. The 2nd Armored and 84th Infantry Divisions and the green 75th were moved from Ninth Army to Collins’s corps for an attack to be ready for jump-off by midnight, December 23. Saying that there was to be no attack until he gave the signal and that he would be back next day around the same time, Monty then rolled up his map and departed.

During the next three days, von Rundstedt’s troops failed to exploit the surprise of their attack as planned. Seizure of supplies of fuel and rations did not materialize. The northernmost thrust which split our armies in two around ‘Hot Corner’ had been stopped. Sepp Dietrich’s vaunted Panzer Army, against the magnificent defense of the 1st, 2nd, and 99th Infantry Divisions, failed to capture the vitally important Elsenborn Ridge, or to crash through our lines around Stavelot. The 106th Infantry and 7th Armored Divisions held for long enough to delay the Sixth Panzer’s use of the road net at St. Vith, and then retreated on Monty’s orders. In spite of everything the entire German Sixth Army could do, that northern shoulder held. Farther south, however, on the Fifth Panzer Army front, it was a different story.

The third thrust toward Bastogne, while not taking that key city, thanks to the epic stand of 101st Airborne, veered through the gap between our armies to outflank completely the First. Von Rundstedt took Rochefort, then drove on to the Meuse, cutting the main road between Dinant and Cinay. Collins, instead of assembling for counterattack as ordered by Monty, had to fight for room to park his tanks.

First Army Headquarters beat another hasty retreat, moving out of their hotel at Chaudfontaine to a barracks at Tongres, some ten miles the other side of Liège. The press camp, buzz-bombed to the miserable discomfort of not having a single window left in the château they had occupied since leaving Spa, were ordered to move into the abandoned headquarters hotel at Chaudfontaine.

Next day, on the twenty-fourth of December, around noon German planes zoomed in over the hill to dive-bomb the place with a thoroughness which left no doubt that they were under the impression Headquarters were still there. Jack Frankish was killed outright, ‘Andy.’ Colonel Flynn Andrews, our Camp Commander, got a fractured skull from which he died soon after his arrival at base hospital in England.

Only the night before, Jack, Lee Carson, and Bill Boni (A.P.) had been discussing the advisability of continuing to go forward while the situation remained so fluid. At briefing, in fact, Jack Beldon of Collier’s had complained about the inadequacy of the picture correspondents were being given. Nobody knew which was our territory any more. Nobody knew where the Germans were. The big situation map on the wall in the camp newsroom was such that nobody could be sure where our command posts were, not to speak of which roads were safe to use getting to them. Beldon said, ‘If we have to go sticking our necks out the way we have to every time we go up front, were entitled to every scrap of information that the Army can give us.’

‘You’re getting it,’ the briefing officer informed him tersely.

It was after this that the advisability of going to the front next day came up for discussion. Said Jack Frankish, who had jeeped until then with Lee and Bill. ‘I don’t think I’m going out tomorrow unless the picture clears. I’ve got a wife and a couple of kids. I guess I owe something to them as well as my paper.’

‘Okay,’ Lee told him. ‘That’s right, if it’s the way you feel. I guess that I’ll go out, though. I figure if you got it comin’, you get it.’

So Bill and Lee, for the first time in many days, left for the front without Jack, and came back that night to find he had it coming.’

11

THIS same day—Christmas Eve—the decision was made which turned the breakout into a break-back. As Monty climbed out of his Rolls to enter the dreary much-bombed barracks which was now First Army Headquarters, the situation could scarcely have looked worse. German panzer columns had penetrated right to the Meuse to engage the tanks of the British 29th Armored Regiment, fortunately placed to guard the bridge at Dinant. Collins, fighting against time to assemble his counterattacking force in the Marche area, as Monty had ordered, had been outflanked by German armored columns driving toward Namur. The Bulge looked like a giant Christmas stocking with the toe jagged out of it—a very ugly Christmas stocking for the Allies. Monty traced it with a slow forefinger on his worn map, and told General Hodges that he was authorized to withdraw to the line Andenne-Hotton.

Such a withdrawal meant giving up the east bank of the Meuse from Andenne west to Namur and then south down to Givet. Monty was prepared to take over the defense of the area with his 30th Corps, but that meant committing another reserve to defense and permitting the enemy still greater freedom to reorganize for another thrust. Collins, moreover, was already in contact with enemy forces around Marche. Withdrawal for him would have meant tragic losses in men and material besides the long delay in launching the vital counterattack.

Hodges, quiet and a little gray as well as grave-faced, in face of this first occasion for going backward instead of forward since D-Day, looked at his maps—and stayed looking long after Monty had left and despite buzz-bombs which rocked the place every few minutes. He looked at the line he had built up in such record time from Monchau to Marche. He thought of the two hundred and fifty thousand men and the fifty thousand vehicles which had been moved to build it into its present solidity. He thought of the mere nine miles which was all that separated his firm northern shoulder (his armor was at Cinay) from the British tanks at Dinant. And he wondered should he order a withdrawal, as Monty had authorized, or should he gamble on the bold stroke of attempting to close the gap and anchor his right flank to link with the British.

As usual, Hodges put the problem to his staff officers, who debated it with heat in due proportion to its significance, until the General decided that the man to have the last word ought to be the commander on the spot. He therefore nominated his Operations Officer, Colonel ‘Red’ Akers, to go down to Collins’s Command Post and give him the full picture and permission to call the next play.

Collins, in a château near Marche which bristled with family portraits, dripped with crystal chandeliers, and was colder than charity, drank hot buttered rum as a gesture to Christmas Eve as he listened to the story and fingered the map. ‘So I please myself?’ he queried when it was finished, and then reached for his phone. ‘Give me General Harmon!’ he ordered; and having got him, ‘Ernie, I want you to jump off tomorrow morning and link up with the British tanks at Dinant. You know about that German 2nd Panzer Division you’ll bump into, but you’ll have priority on air support. All set?’

‘Hell, yes,’ bellowed Ernie, in a voice which caused Collins to jerk the receiver way back from his ear. ‘The bastards are in the bag!’

And they were. ‘Old Gravel Voice’ and his ‘Hell-on-Wheels’ 2nd Armored Division came upon the 2nd Panzer Division out of gasoline near Celles. By the time Christmas Day was over, Harmon’s armor and ‘Pete’ Quesada’s fighters between them had pounded it to an inglorious memory. What little equipment escaped our destruction, the Germans burned themselves before they footed it forlornly eastward. Fields were black-hummocked with corpses and mangled machinery, and over a thousand prisoners were taken. Much more important, thousands of Allied lives had been saved and the Bulge contained. Hodges was now joined with the British at Dinant. Farther south, patrols of the British and the Third Army had linked to give the Allies a continuous line which again had the Nazis caged—though not yet back on their own soil.

To insure the success of Collins’s counterattack, Monty pulled yet another division, the American 83rd, from the Ninth Army. He moved the British 43rd Division to replace it, and had Hodges keep the American 5th Armored in reserve near Eupen in addition to the 51st Highlanders, already waiting for all eventualities just south of Liège. So the Germans should not again succeed in stubbing through the toe of the Bulge, he moved the British 53rd Division across the Meuse to take over the area west of Marche and shorten Collins’s front, and then backed all this up by putting the famous 6th Airborne along the Meuse. The Yanks, watching divisional command posts sprouting up like lace all over the situation maps, said, ‘You gotta hand it to the little guy for taking no chances,’ and then wondered, as the build-up still went on, whether Monty intended leaving them room to fight.

Patton, meanwhile, had stabilized the southern flank of the Bulge, although his air support was handicapped mightily by some of the worst storms on record. Whether from belief in the righteousness of his cause, or whether, as so many of his men said, it was just that ‘Georgie wouldn’t let Monty get the better of him on anything—even on the chance of a prayer,’ after several days of having his support planes grounded, Georgie dictated and had printed and distributed two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the following: ‘Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee of Thy great goodness to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously, hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.’

The clouds broke with Patton speed. Whereupon, Georgie called up the Army chaplain and had him print and give out another one hundred thousand copies. His army drove north with all the enthusiasm it had saved for the crash through the Saar. By the day after Christmas, a task force from the 4th Armored Division had fought its way into Bastogne, and by New Year’s Eve, twelve of Patton’s fifteen divisions were helping to slash conviction into von Rundstedt’s troops that they had fought and lost the last chance of changing the pattern of the battle for Germany.

There was one subsequent sporadic thrust which, though diversionary, developed into enough of a threat to give Allied commanders some anxiety—that was on the Seventh Army front near Weissenbourg; but, broadly speaking, the containing of the Bulge was the end of the German Army as an attacking force. The breakout was, as von Rundstedt said, their ‘do-or-die’ effort.

Thereafter, it was a question of defense, punctuated by fanatical counterattacks employed to make defeat as costly and long delayed as possible. Needless to say, we should have felt considerably happier had we appreciated this at the time. As it was, the outlook on our front seemed about as depressing and hard to combat as the conditions which covered our news-gathering. Our press camp, with First Army Headquarters, had now been moved to Tongres to a convent where the only concession to warmth was the smile of the Mother Superior. Comfort there was none. It was so cold that water brought us for washing froze almost before we could pour it into the basins. Corridors were long and unlighted, and the anxiety of wondering, as you stumbled along, whether you were going to bump into a nun, a fellow correspondent, or a statue of the Blessed Virgin was something which should not have been added to the normal hazards of war. The front at its nearest point was three hours’ jeep ride away—three hours, moreover, which entailed our finding our way through the maze of streets which was Liège. These streets were being buzz-bombed with a monotonous half-minute regularity which caused Johnny Florea of Life to crack bitterly, ‘This is as bad as all the trips that add up to a pilot’s “back-to-the-States” score. One mission through this, and I reckon we oughta get to go home.’

Blizzards whipped eighteen inches of snow into drifts eight to ten feet deep, or else skinned roads to sheets of ice. We jeeped forward through columns of vehicles which were much more frightening than the enemy, for there is nothing, believe me, more terrifying than a tank sliding crabwise toward you, unless it is a heavy truck doing a christie in the same direction. Smash-ups became so routine that it needed Lee Carson to smash up three jeeps in a single week to cause comment, and then it was a mere ‘better take care, Lee, we’re getting short of jeeps,’ from Casey.

Skorzenny’s troops were still making life tough for military policemen and everyone else behind our lines. At the main crossroads at Maastricht, where Simpson’s Ninth Army joined the British, a German dressed as an American military policeman stood on traffic duty giving wrong directions for two days. He would have been there longer than that had it not been for a colored truck driver who accepted his routing and then remembered that it differed from that given the last time he had driven his truck that way. He stopped at the next policeman and complained that the ‘guy back there was giving guys bum steers,’ and the guy back there’ was duly discovered to be a German.

To combat this sort of thing, everyone had to have a password—invariably a word starting with a w’ because Germans wuzz their w’s.’ Crazily, one had usually only to say, ‘Sorry, but I forgot to pick the password up on the way out’ for an obliging GI to give it with a ‘Better have it, because the MP’s farther on might be tough.’

In the opening days of the campaign, military police were loaded into jeeps to tear madly about the countryside with a frightening flourish of weapons, and the right to stop every other car and question the occupants. They had a wonderful time quizzing their superior officers, to the vast detriment of what small vestige of respect the average American civilian in uniform ever acquires for Army ‘brass’ as such. And before their jeeps were taken off the road (to the vast relief of other users), there were many incidents like the one that so nearly ended this correspondent’s war reporting. Hal Denny was jeeping back with me from Malmédy after a nerve-racking enough day of shelling, when we were cut in on as we rounded an S bend by a jeepload of military police bent on discovering whether or not we were authentically American. A tank and two trucks rounding the icy bend at the same time had circled us a couple of times, missing us by their draught and ending up, facing us halfway down the hill before the awed military police had recovered their breath from hearing what our jeep driver had to say to them. When they did, it was to gasp a respectful ‘Holy Jeez, brother! I guess you come from the right part of the world all right.’

If it was tough for correspondents, there are no words to describe adequately what the soldiers suffered.

In a last desperate effort to break the clamp we had put on him, the enemy on New Year’s Day launched the greatest concentrated Luftwaffe effort of the war. It cost him several hundred planes, but that didn’t make the boys feel any better as they shrank into the ground while planes screamed over the treetops strafing. Until that day I did not believe that it was possible to lie in the snow to melt it to steaming point with perspiration. Walter Farr, of the London Daily Mail, who was with me, declares that while flattened by one roadside barn I put up a smoke screen which successfully blotted out the building, the jeep, and the entire party.

Patton successfully repulsed the Germans’ final effort to recapture Bastogne, and at dawn on January 3, Monty at last gave the word for us to start our offensive to drive the enemy back to annihilation in the place where it would do most good—in Germany itself. Collins, spearheading with Ernie Harmon’s 2nd Armored and Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Divisions, jumped off between the Ourthe and Salm Rivers to drive down to Houffalize to link up with the Third Army. He had Ridgeway’s 18th Corps on his left and Monty’s 30th Corps to the right and weather which had to be felt to be believed. Snow was deep on roads, rutted with heavy traffic, and then frozen hard as iron and topped by sheet ice, across which tanks slithered and slewed in a thick white mist which froze every twig until it looked as if it was wearing a white fur coat.

In order to maintain surprise, units did not assemble until the last possible moment. How they ever did assemble, much less get anywhere near their objective, is something no one will ever know. Tanks and every kind of tracked and half-tracked vehicle skidded and slithered helplessly as a beginner on skis. They slid into ditches ripping out the signal wires as they did so to such an extent that, before zero hour, units found themselves without communications and with half their vehicles still en route.

Tank losses were terrific. In conditions where you could come across a couple of GI’s pushing a huge tank around a hairpin bend easily as though they were pushing a log across a frozen pond, such losses were inevitable without the other factors contributing to the heavy casualty rate. One of these was the country, where even the Germans did not expect us to attack with armor. The other was the tank itself. America gave her tankers a poor deal. They had to fight out-gunned and out-armored and knowing it, ending the war with the tank they started it with, and it wasn’t a good enough tank at the beginning. The only chance our boys stood in denting German tanks with their inadequate seventy-five-millimeter guns, was by waiting till the enemy was practically on top of them. He, on the other hand, could open up with his eighty-eights at extreme range and keep right on firing until he knocked our tanks out, invariably setting them afire in the process. Tanks were designed so that escape from them in that eventuality was almost an impossibility. One of the sights that nobody ever gets over seeing is a tank crew burned to a crisp. It was seen altogether too often.

Nowhere was this more graphically and tragically illustrated than in the Battle of Samree, the first full-scale tank battle in this country of razor-backed ridges, dense forests, deep snowdrifts, and swift-flowing streams now sluggish with ice. Samree straddled the junction at the top of a ridge to dominate about nine miles of one of the only two roads left the enemy by which he could supply his troops still in the toe of the Bulge. Both the enemy and ourselves were lamming everything across the mountain ridges into the forests and snow, which, as one GI grimly said, ‘is good for one thing only, it makes a helluva fine bed to die on. You can do it in about twenty minutes.’ Plenty did. Our tanks could not move more than a mile an hour on slopes often so steep that the tread simply would not grip and the tanks just slipped back down the hillside to wait their turn to be pulverized by enemy fire. The woods and roads around Samree became a tank graveyard, and yet the tankers still found spirit to wisecrack. One bunch were trying to back one, named ‘Basher,’ out of a snowdrift. At the side of the road lay one of their buddies without a head. Yet they still managed to thumb toward the name on the tank and yell, ‘We’re gonna rename the son-of-a-bitch Badger.’

As we squeezed in on them, the Germans pulled pretty fast out of these picturesque resort villages, but still found time to sack and pillage before they left. For the most part the villagers, hearing the story of Parfondruy, where over thirty Belgians were butchered and burned, managed to escape before the Germans arrived. The village of Lierneaux, which practically consists of a home for insane and neurotics, was an exception. Over five hundred patients under the care of Doctor Charles Massaut stayed in the asylum throughout days in which the place was being pulverized as rapidly and completely as shelling from both sides could pulverize it. When we finally entered the place, German dead, with dead and wounded patients, were still lying where they had fallen. The living were either huddled in the basement or wandering aimlessly around the grounds, utterly unable to comprehend what was happening. One old lady took me aside to show me how her room looked with nothing between her bed and the winter landscape. Blasts from our guns were ruffling our clothes as we stood there, and she said, ‘Big bangs, then something falls down. I can’t understand it.’

‘Well, if that’s all war means to her this close to it,’ said an envious soldier, ‘then I wish to Christ I was balmy, too!’

No American soldier fought through the Ardennes offensive and felt the same about fighting and the enemy as he had before. To the men who fought through these bitter Belgian snows war was no longer something which was just impersonally ‘somebody’s bad luck—take care not yours.’ Nor were they content thereafter to be what they had always so proudly claimed to be before, no soldier, just a civilian in uniform.’ They were soldiers and proud of it, and proud to be the toughest and the best that came. For the first time they really hated the enemy whom they had seen torture men, women, and children; the enemy they knew had shot down helpless American prisoners, donned American uniforms, and used American equipment to kill their buddies. For the first time the Yank soldier was not in the war to settle somebody else’s grievance. He had one of his own, and he was mighty sore and plenty mad.

The slide through, because it was just that, rammed our northern shoulder closer, at no more than a thousand yards a day, to the junction with Patton at Houffalize. It didn’t sound much in the communiqués and didn’t look very much on the maps, but it represented fighting courage and tenacity for which it was hard to find adequate description.

Tank crews watched their infantry buddies storm hills for vital artillery observation, take those hills for their tanks to fire from, only to find the bitterly won objective useless because vehicles could not reach it. Red-eyed, stumbling men, so weary they had scarcely strength to lift feet burdened with heavy combat boots, fought in conditions in which only Eskimos and polar bears could find life tolerable. Cold burned fingers touching metal or weapons. Mist seeped down to blot visibility to a few yards and freeze all it touched. Snow flurries made artillery observation impossible, mine detection impossible, and in fact, as one GI put it bitterly, ‘Every goddam thing impossible except fighting the goddam battle, anyway.’ Only a few of the tankers had cold-weather uniforms. The rest wore cotton combat jackets—read it again, cotton combat jackets! They thought war couldn’t come any worse. And then the sun came out, beautiful beyond imagining, to throw long, blue shadows over the glinting slopes, to sparkle pine trees fluffed like cotton wool against the steep ridges, and highlight our boys like an ink splash on a bridal gown. For we had no winter fighting equipment. We did not know enough to paint our tanks white until the Germans painted theirs. Von Rundstedt’s soldiers fought in special white winter snow-proof uniforms. Ours, if they were among the lucky ones, got a cotton snow cape made from a shroud by several hundred Belgian girls rushed in for the job by the camouflage division.

Having failed to break out of his West Wall cage and menaced by the Russians in the east, von Rundstedt soon found his troops sticking out in the toe of the Bulge awkward as a bandaged finger. He had begun to pull back almost as soon as we attacked. But it was a pull-back which cost us plenty. The Germans fought for every shrub and tree and every foot of ground, and they fought like demons. Even the Volks Grenadiers, left to cover the withdrawal of the panzer divisions, fought as though they belonged to the Afrika Korps.

Every road and every forest track was laced with mines. As we took a piece of road, the Germans would infiltrate back through the woods to fell trees to form an interlacing block which they would then booby-trap.

Linking with Patton at Houffalize developed into a race—if anything as slow and painful as advance over such terrain could be thus described—between Harmon’s 2nd Armored and Rose’s 3rd Armored Divisions, and General A. R. Boling’s 84th Infantry. When the 3rd Armored finally got down to take the vital crossroads just outside the town, they found that the 2nd Armored had already beaten them to it. This followed a magnificent fifteen-hundred-yard dash into the village of Samree to put artillery into an observation position to close the gap, which was credited mistakenly by Stars and Stripes to 3rd Armored. General Rose’s reaction to that was to lift his phone and suavely acquaint the infuriated Ernie with the fact that ‘The 3rd Armored, of course, did not need credit for what they didn’t do.’ All of which caused General Boling to chuckle a warning into his phone to the infantry column which finally made Houffalize first, ‘Keep an eye open for those armored boys now as well as the Heinies—for they’re quite as dangerous!’ As it happened, ‘those armored boys’ were all the 84th Division needed to keep their eyes open for, because the Germans had made a clean getaway.

Monty, to the chagrin of Bradley and Hodges, took the utmost time in the launching of his counterattack and acted upon his conservative decision of driving back the toe of the sock to link with Patton’s Third Army at Houffalize, rather than following the more daring course advocated by both Bradley and Patton. They wanted to snip across the base of the Bulge, effect a junction at St. Vith and cut off the mass of men and material pulling back across only two usable roads. Bradley was confident of being able to pocket the major part of von Rundstedt’s forces. Instead, he had to see them retreat unmolested except for strafing from the air.

Ike had assured Bradley that he would get back command of his First Army once contact was made at Houffalize, although Monty was to retain operational control of the Ninth. So, at midnight January 17, First Army reverted to Bradley’s command with a mission already planned to tie in with continued attack toward the Rhine. First and Third Armies were to drive abreast between Monchau and Prum to south-flank the famous dams, after the pattern recommended by Major-General ‘Ted’ Brooks before the tragic dissipation of Hürtgen Forest.

Slowly, despite magnificent air support and our new ‘pozit’ fuse, which, to quote one of the frightened prisoners, ‘is more uncanny and more terrifying than our own rocket bombs, as it hangs in the air until it finds just the right place to explode,’ we bent the Bulge back. The 1st Division fought one of the hardest and least important appearing of all their tough fights in a gulch which carried the road which the 7th Armored Division needed to get back into St. Vith. They fought three directions at once, all of them hand-to-hand, all, as the guy I found looking at red-mushed snow with a rather green-tinged face said, making a guy wonder why any bit of country anywhere should have to matter that much.’

Seeing the 7th Armored Division re-enter St. Vith after all they had taken in those bitter days before they had to pull out just a month beforehand might have made the green-faced GI feel a bit better about it all. Only he never got the chance to see anything like that. In general, GI’s—the ones who stay clear of combat exhaustion—don’t query, like the green-tinged one. They know they dare not. Instead they wisecrack and gripe and curse and stay in the frame of mind of the one who’d taken all there was to take of Hürtgen and, wet through and tired through and sick through, was asked by a visiting general, wanting to be kindly, ‘Chow all right, son?’ Without looking up, he answered, ‘What the f...k do you care? You’re gettin’ yours, aincha?’

With St. Vith retaken, both armies now charged abreast toward the Siegfried Line and Bonn. First Army had the smallest front it had ever had, and the greatest reserve strength.

Headquarters came back to Spa just a month to the day after their undignified retreat. Correspondents came back to the Portugal—to special steaks and the biggest party Chambre Six had ever held. And in the Hotel Britannique, General Hodges gave a press conference. ‘We shall continue bending the bulge backward right into Germany,’ he said. Somebody asked him what the objective was. His stick traveled toward Bonn.

Leaving von Rundstedt’s troops no time to more than sweep snow from their reoccupied pillboxes, our boys waded off through four feet of snow to hammer their way completely through one belt of the Siegfried Line and push hard against the second. First Army was having its retribution, and Patton’s Third Army joyously shared it. Then the blow fell! Ike called Bradley to inform him that the attack was to be stopped immediately, because Monty, moving his British Second Army up alongside Simpson’s Ninth, was to get the green light for an attack in the north. The Canadian First Army was to start this from Nijmegen toward Wessel on the Rhine. Simpson’s Ninth Army was to attack across the Roer River and join up with the Canadian First Army along the Rhine, while the British Second Army, initially remaining west of the Meuse, would cross on Monty’s orders near Venlo to clear the area between the Canadians and the Americans. The United States First Army was to stop outflanking the dams and its drive to the Rhine. Instead, it had to take them. When they had been captured, First Army’s role was merely to protect Simpson’s right flank.

Georgie, too, was to go entirely on the defensive, a piece of news he received as might be expected. Staff officers, with the warmth of their Anglo-American feelings severely frostbitten, recalled how in the first days of the German breakout Monty had recounted an interview with Ike in which he had maintained that the best way into Germany was still from the north. He informed the Supreme Commander that he would need fifty divisions—mostly American—to do the job, and doing it would not wish to be embarrassed by any further recurrence of the nature of the battle of the Bulge. In making an attack from the north, therefore, it would be his wish that the remainder of the front would be ordered on the defensive.

He got his wish. The battle of the breakout ended with our lines about the way they had started, and with First Army embarked on the second phase of the battle of Hürtgen Forest and still trying to take the ‘damn dams.’

12

BAD as terrain had been in the rest of the Ardennes, it got worse than ever as we neared the dams. The whole countryside became broken into a pattern of inlets, fast-flowing rivers, precipitous gorges, and vast expanses of water strung along the tortuous meanderings of the Roer and Urft Rivers. Getting up front each day became an ever-worsening nightmare that left correspondents reacting to but one impression, the miracle that war could still progress.

We thought snow had prepared warriors for the worst there was. That was before the thaw and the mud came. Almost overnight hard-topped roads, over which supplies had skimmed at fifty miles an hour if there were no military policemen around, broke up into potholes that looked like an endless succession of shell craters. Engineers did the best they could with whatever materials were at hand. Several combat divisions, to their bitter indignation, were turned over to the job of road repairing, all of which produced some strange-looking highways. There was one stretch on the way to Schmidt which the boys christened the ‘Burma Road.’ To begin with, it was nothing more than a narrow shelf winding along the side of a ravine. Enemy shellfire and the spinning wheels and tracks of countless vehicles produced holes into which boulders were tipped to form a base and then shale poured in for what might have been a firm top for the first few days. After that, the wheels revolving desperately for traction slewed the boulders up among the shale until the whole track looked like the bed of a fast-flowing mountain torrent.

Through the forest, repair squads tried cutting pine logs to bridge the roads or else mattressing them with pine boughs. The first rocked and bumped drivers till they thought they were riding wild horses instead of truck seats. What they had to say about the second, after the branches pinned them down by spiking through wheels and chassis already hub-deep in slime, is best not recalled, let alone repeated.

The roads came in a gamut of color and consistencies divided into three types. We took our chance of getting bogged in all three of them in any given kilometer. The first was a loathsome gooey caramel at the near-setting stage and had a color range of beige to chocolate. Trucks could usually ride it all right. Jeeps, however, had to ride the top edge of the rut with their tires squeezing down enough to cut a grip. Sooner or later down the rut they would skid or else plow to the point where the chassis would suck. Best to be said for that type was that one could at least see what was coming.

Next came the mayonnaise sort of mud, ranging from the color of the sauce to chocolate. It covered entire roads to depths of anything from six inches to three and four feet, and made of those roads rivers of viscous ooze through which everyone squelched and slewed and slithered, not knowing what lay beneath the next yard. We kept trying not to think of the moment when the thrashing wheels would do no more than spew plumes to mud-bath passengers—and worse than that, involve them in the fearsome necessity of putting feet into the stuff, to have it rise well up over boots so they sank to their knees, there to push, slide, and shove, always with the fear that each new step would leave them too weak to drag their feet from the leech-tight hold in order to take another.

The third, and worst, was the soup variety, encountered usually in a color range of saffron. It completely displaced all second-class roads, which could be identified only as gleaming rivers of the stuff between trees and hedgerows. Here and there a hump would erupt to mark the edge of a crater, but for the most part what lay before the traveler was evidenced only by the acrobatics of the vehicles in front. These would slap in to negotiate a succession of holes so big and so deep that one perpetually expected to see all in transit through them disappear for good. In a jeep, fear of the moment when a torrent of slime would come oozing in over the side became engulfed in appreciation of the fact that it was an inevitability, so one adopted much the same attitude as one adopts toward being heavily blitzed in a small target area—’We have to take it, so let’s get it over with.’ No amount of experience, though, ever hardened us for the moments when we literally hung in the balance! These were the moments—and there were so many—when, having reached the top lip of a deep crater, the jeep would hang there while wheels spun madly, leaving occupants to wonder in anguish if they would bite down, slide back, or plunge over and down into and through the next!

Roads in the vicinity of the dams were all like this. Most of them were nothing more than fire-breaks through the pine woods, and all were heavily mined. All were so narrow that meeting an oncoming truck meant edging into sides on which the signs read, ‘Road shoulders not cleared.’ Every few kilometers there were trucks which had been forced to edge in at the wrong place. One morning one did it to blow up not fifty yards ahead of us.

The monotonous discomfort of the rain-filled days succeeded each other with very little change on the battle maps. Deep snowdrifts thawed to the point where things were sticking through that nobody wanted to look at too closely. Nobody wanted to pick them up either, heavily mined as the forest was. When they did, there were German corpses piled twelve feet high. It was shocking to see them like that—old men and middle-aged men, a boy who could not have been more than fourteen, their arms and legs and heads all tangled stiffly and incongruously among each other, just so much war debris. The fact that it happened to be human was something to perturb the stalwart sergeant in charge of corpse removal only because it was a risk of good Joes.’

‘Too bad we can’t leave every one of the sons-of-bitches just where they dropped,’ he said; ‘instead of that, we’ll have to process the bastards to get their records straight before we turn ‘em under. And I don’t mind tellin’ you we’ll be goddamned careful doing it—just so none of ‘em’s mined.’ He spat distastefully, and continued: ‘What ya gonna do about guys that’ll pull stuff like that on their own dead?—Can you be sorry for ‘em? I can’t! I’d leave ‘em to rot just where they got what was comin’ to ‘em. After all, that’s what’s happenin’ to plenty of our guys in this God-awful forest. Hundreds of ‘em are never gonna be found—unless it’s by the wild boar.’

If fighting was stubborn in the forest, it was still more so as we reached the various small German towns. There the war literally became a fight for buildings, so much so that a whole one became something to remember as a landmark, though not for very long, because if our guns spared it the Germans would not. As soon as they pulled out, they would drench them with artillery and mortar fire, because they were determined that if they could not have their houses, then nobody else should, and they liked the thought of our soldiers living in wet foxholes infinitely better than the thought of their living in German houses.

All the buildings in that part of Germany follow the Black Forest village pattern. All are colored pink or green or yellow against their black oak beams, and look as though they had been propelled into the landscape in the middle of a Disney symphony. As we moved up to them and through them, shellfire produced a battlefield unlike anything seen before. No matter how heavily they got pounded, the oak frames held and still stood. Plaster was blasted clean out from around them, and furniture and household effects scattered over half the countryside, while the house frames slumped, grotesque, incongruous skeletons, on ground which looked as if a giant had been digging it.

The first few villages we came to as we beat on toward the dams were deserted except for a few mewling cats, starving dogs, and terrified horses, cows, sheep, and pigs. There was very little poultry, much to the soldiers’ disgust, because the Germans invariably found space for it on the handcarts on which they piled the most precious of their possessions before high-tailing it back of the fighting line.

By the time we got to Dreiborn, the citizens had not received enough warning to do any high-tailing. They were as much in the battle as the soldiers. Nobody had bothered to warn them to get out, and when our shells began falling on the quaint moated castle which dominated the town, all they could do was cower in their homes and hope that the castle would stay the objective.

Taking it was like storming castles in story-books, except, as Pfc. Clem Mokal, shoveling blood-caked snow from the drawbridge entrance, said:

‘There was nothing story-book or romantic about what happened here. Sounded fine when I was a kid reading all that stuff about stirring fights they had gettin’ these kinda places. Take a look round! You can see there’s no more cover for anybody movin’ up on the joint than there are whiskers on a baby. Well, we had to move up just the same. Time we made it, the Jerry colonel inside was standin’ in the courtyard with his revolver pickin’ off his guys who were tryin’ to swarm over the walls to give up. I lost some of my best buddies getting this bloody place. And I tell you straight, if ever I get through this I’ll see my kids don’t get any fancy ideas about fightin’. I’m gonna tell ‘em what it’s like, see? I’m gonna tell ‘em what it’s like to get so nothin’ gives you a lift or makes you feel as good as you do when you get a bead on a man and you get him. And what it’s like to see one after another of your pals get it—all of ‘em different ways and most of ‘em hurtin’ like hell. And I’m gonna tell ‘em what it’s like to get to wonderin’ how much longer it’s gonna be before it’s your turn to get it, too. And how much longer you’re gonna be able to hold out without anybody seein’ how scared to Christ and jumpy you’re gettin’! And what it’s like to hate yourself so bad you’d give a month’s pay for liquor enough to get drunk enough to forget the whole damn thing! Oh! I’ll see my kids don’t get any kick out of war! I’ll see they never get the chance to even play with a toy soldier or gun.’

He rested on his shovel and berated: ‘Trouble is, nobody tells the truth about war. We poor guys can’t as much as say where we are till it’s so long afterward—there’s no damn point to it, anyway. And you folks make it sound easy as eatin’ ice cream ‘n cake. You write long spiels about how much ground we got today. But, do you tell ‘em what you saw on that ground? Do you tell ‘em their brave boys are livin’ like a lot of fornicatin’ beasts, that they’re doin’ things to each other that beasts would be ashamed to do? Do you tell ‘em any of those things? Not on your sweet life! But you ought to! We wouldn’t have wars if folks only knew what war is—what it can do. Take a look’—he swept an arm over the desolated landscape and finished earnestly, and then, Miss, go on up to the church and maybe you’ll understand me soundin’ off this way.’

Hundreds of civilians had already been collected from the blown-out houses. Rain, which had thawed the snow to saffron-colored sludge, was hissing down to soak them to the skin, as they were bundled, gibbering with fright, from the remnants of their homes into our trucks. Our men tried to keep families together and to assure them they would be taken good care of, but nobody had too much time to spend on reassuring, and nobody could help the rain or the hysteria or the fact that fear-crazed children were seeing things which children should not see anywhere at any time.

Our soldiers were taking refugees back to Monchau for Military Government there to take what care they could of them. The civilians did not know that.

When the shelling got bad, the priest had gone out under fire to shepherd a large proportion of his flock into the church. Some hundreds were still cringing among the welter of statues there. The priest, whether from sheer force of habit, the effect it was likely to have on the attacking soldiers, the moral boost it would give his congregation, or from all three of these factors, still wore his white surplice. It was his best one, trimmed with a deep border of handmade lace, and now exceedingly grubby and rather bloodstained. His face sprouted a several days’ growth of beard and was gray and haggard. His voice, rough-edged with fatigue, but assured, was the only thing approaching the normal in the building, with the exception of the statuary gazing with bland benevolence upon this fantastic distortion and disruption of everything it symbolized.

There had been no food. Such medical attention as was possible had to be given in a corner by the font, where a baby was born, to add to the general havoc and disturbance. As the bombardment increased, and wounded men, women, and children were brought in for such meager care as could be given them, fear of the thing which was happening to them grew and spread. By the time our soldiers arrived, their best assurances in German could make no more impression on the people than the pent-up emotion in the place had made on the statues of the Saints and the Blessed Virgin.

Our men backed the trucks up to the church door and, grabbing mothers with small babies first, proceeded to hustle them out of the church to swing them up into the trucks.

The dim and crowded nave was already hideous with the wail of dozens of terrified, cold, and hungry children. Over all this now drifted ear-piercing screams, as, bundled out through the throng in the entrance, the women saw the waiting truck, the crying occupants, and the soldiers.

An officer and a couple of enlisted men kept saying over and over again in their most patient German: ‘We shall not harm you. We take you only where it is warm and safe and we can give you food.’ It was so much waste of breath! Every soul who left that church was convinced that the Americans were transporting them for one of two eventualities—death or rape, possibly both.

As they got to the door, each would cry out, or perhaps just hurriedly put hands over face for a second before turning to make the sign of the cross, and say an agonized goodbye to somebody who had invariably been swallowed up by the melee at the door before the last desperate look could register.

Inside the church the priest and German-speaking soldiers, specially rushed in for the job, tried to sort the fear-crazed rabble into family contingents and to tell them that the truck trip was only to the schoolhouse or some other warm building in near-by Monchau. Not until the hundreds had thinned to dozens was there anyone willing to listen, let alone believe.

One poor soldier, with sweat streaking down his dirty face, up to the ears in mud, soaking wet and terrifying-looking enough to scare anybody in his battered combat rig, had a girl of about eighteen on one arm and her mother on the other. Both of them were sobbing too hysterically to take the slightest notice of his painstaking German. He walked them first to the big statue of the Virgin, which produced an even wilder outburst of sobbing, and then caught sight of the priest.

‘Here, Father,’ he shouted, ‘tell these dames, for Christ’s sweet sake, that I’m not wanting either one of ‘em. My mother, tell ‘em, is as Heinie as they are and from this part of the country, too. I’ve told ‘em in my best German that the Mother o’ God herself couldn’t be any safer than they’re gonna be, and all they do is holler worse’n ever.’

The crowd had thinned sufficiently by this time for the priest to do what might have stopped hysteria in the beginning, had he been able to arrange things that way. He took the two women, and himself escorted them out of the church and into the waiting truck. Through the lashing rain he bawled sternly for everyone to stop crying. He himself would be following on the next truck and would continue to care for everybody in the place to which they were going as he had cared for them in the church. ‘The only difference,’ he thundered, ‘is that there will be hot soup.’ That quieted folks, who then docilely waited their turn to be swung into the trucks. The priest clambered in last, and, just before the truck moved off, a soldier pelted across the street with an outstretched umbrella.

‘I’m afraid it’s loot, Father,’ he said, ‘but I guess there’s so little left of the rest of the house, this won’t hurt anybody’s conscience.’

‘Thank you, my son,’ said the good man gravely, as he opened it and thrust it down where it would keep the rain off a mother suckling her baby.

Credit for finally reaching the ‘damn dams’ first belongs to Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmie Allgood’s 47th Regiment of the 9th Division. They reached Urftalsperre, on the fourth of February, after seizing Hitler’s famous school for training of military leaders. Incidentally, those in residence there took off before it became necessary for them to translate the theory of war into actuality. When our troops moved into the impressive building in its Valkyrie-like setting among the mountainous pinelands, it was deserted except for a few Germans who were interested only in surrender. As in neighboring towns and villages, however, the enemy were determined to keep us from enjoying the shelter of German walls. No sooner had we taken over than they began plastering the place with mortar fire, to the extreme discomfort of several of our correspondents and photographers who were cellared there all that night and half the next day.

Schwammanauel, largest of the seven dams, could not be taken until we again had the town of Schmidt, won by the 28th Division and lost in one of the most calamitous counterattacks of the war.

For the second attempt to take the town, we put down one of the fiercest concentrations of artillery ever thrown on a target of that size. Seven hundred guns hurled metal into the place in an inferno which stripped forest pines cleaner than larches are stripped by the first frost and made of the small town itself little more than a memory.

In spite of it all, the Germans held and fought frenziedly for every minute they could delay our 78th and 9th Divisions from driving down to reach the north end of Schwammanauel. By the time the 78th did reach it, just after midnight the morning of February 10, the road was pretty well as corpse-strewn as Omaha beach.

We now, after all these months of rugged struggle, held one end of both of the big dams. We had tried to get to the far end of Urftalsperre, but failed, because the ice was not thick enough to bear our men, the top of the dam had a spillway that couldn’t be crossed, while below the dam the river roared into a narrow, deep gorge down which water poured so swiftly it carried everything away that entered it.

At Schwammanauel we found that the Germans had destroyed the bridge over the spillway to block our crossing. Engineers, with commendable courage, immediately went inside the big dam, to find to their astonishment that this one, like Urftalsperre, did not appear to have been mined.

The probability was, we decided, as we sat on opposite sides of these two enormous bodies of water waiting for the Germans to climax the long struggle, that they would blow the dams by remote control.

They did nothing of the kind.

There was an explosion all right—on Schwammanauel. The last Germans to retire to the far side opened the big gates at the base of the dam and then blew up the means of closing them. But there was no surge down the valley of millions of tons of raging flood waters, sweeping all before them, as we had anticipated. Such a torrent would have created flood conditions to delay us only a minimum length of time. With infinitely greater ingenuity the Germans released the water gradually. While Schwammanauel drained slowly through the base gates, they started the release of water in Urftalsperre through a conduit which led from near the base of this dam across country on their side of the Roer to flow back into the river below Schwammanauel. This enabled them to utilize the discharge capacity of both dams for the longest possible period of time. And yet the dams—with all they meant to the powering of Roer industry—still remained intact.

So ended the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, with all it had cost America to take. Many factors had added to the responsibility of the price paid for this no longer important neck of woods, and none of them, seen in the floodlight of history’s perspective, are likely to burnish any reputations.

In the first place, the forest had been seen only as an area where the enemy could concentrate for counterattack, instead of as a key sector in the Siegfried Line defenses made possible by the ‘damn dams.’

Secondly, Command elected to drive through rather than outflank. So division after division was hurled in to smash through the hard way, while the Germans just sat back and used the fewest possible number of men to exact the greatest number of casualties. In spite of this reckless dissipation of manpower in mopping up the forest, the main thrust was still the drive through Aachen and Cologne, which made no provision to take the dams—and not until that drive bogged down was it fully appreciated that to continue across the Roer without the dams meant military suicide. A knock-out by air was then deemed to be the solution of the problem and, not until this failed, did we set out to take them, only to be caught off base and stopped by the Battle of the Bulge.

While we slowly drove back to recover all that had been lost, territorially, at least, American commanders finally realized that the best way to the Rhine was to bypass the dams to the south, as had been suggested in the first place. Both the First and Third Armies at this time were sitting pretty for a major thrust south which could have cut off the dams and all that they involved.

Monty, however, saw it differently. He wanted to take the offensive. To do it, he needed fifty divisions (mostly American) and the dams in Allied hands. He got his way.

All troops to his south were ordered to hold. Hodges was told to take the dams and then proceed on across the Roer as Monty’s right-flank protection. So sure of himself was the British Commander that he started the Canadians from Nijmegen toward Wessel on the eighth of February, which was two days before the dams were released, because he figured that both Simpson’s Ninth Army and Hodges’s First could cross by the fourteenth, with Simpson driving northeast to link with the Canadians while the First Army tagged along to protect. Monty reckoned, however, without the ingenuity of the German engineers, which kept the Roer in flood for thirteen days instead of the three or four expected, keeping the Canadians bogged down, as well as the First and Ninth Armies waiting, with what tolerance they could muster, for the long-anticipated crossing of the Roer with all it presaged in threat to Cologne.

Simpson was to cross the river with an army to the north. Hodges attacked at Dueren with a mere couple of divisions, the 8th and Terry Allen’s 104th ‘Timber Wolves.’

It was to be a night crossing, for nothing else was possible against an enemy who had been waiting on the river bank for us for two and a half months with artillery zeroed in on every crossroad and on every building suitable for housing any unit. Added to the withering fire which could be poured, as easily as one could flick a garden hose, on anything that moved on the plain, there was the river itself to fight. Not a very imposing-looking river when we finally got down to get a good look at it, but still flowing at a much faster rate than the maximum which engineers would choose for bridging.

Sporadic fire flashes of the routine artillery barrage lighted the dreary plain, as we jeeped, around midnight on the night of attack, down the Cologne Autobahn toward the First Army’s objective, the town of Dueren. Columns of infantry trudged along the road verges, second-wave troops whose mission it was to follow the assault companies over to mop up the town. The autobahn, like all the other roads across the plain, was burdened with trucks laden with craft and heavy bridge-building equipment rolling furtively toward the river. Movement of men and machines and assault boats through the long black shadows flung by the moon would have been eerie and dramatic, even without the spine-chilling knowledge that, at precisely a quarter to three, the quiet would be riven with all that two thousand guns could spew into Dueren and other towns along that stretch of river, to prelude what all knew must be a grim crossing.

We were to breakfast before jump-off with one of the assault companies in a factory by the river bank. There was a loud ‘Christ!’, when the correspondents walked in. Somebody asked derisively, ‘Wanna know how we feel?’

There are times when the biggest story in the world dwarfs to insignificance against just one reaction of any ordinary person. There are times when the most enthusiastic reporter feels that observing that reaction is something which should never be allowed to happen to anybody who has to try to write about it. Seeing men in the last minutes before they have to go out to kill or be killed comes under that category. The fact that you, like them, are risking your neck to do your job might have made it seem right enough way back—up front it was different. In all humility one felt one had no business to be there.

These men, close-meshed in the companionship of all that combat involves, were here together for just a few more minutes for the last time. Some were going to get through again this time all right. Some were going to get hurt. Some were going to die. There was nothing that any of them could do about it. They were irrevocably a part of the inevitability of what the next little while would bring. Each had to go out alone, into a moonlit street where fear-freezing after fear-freezing second could shut out all the tomorrows. Each had to live, over and over and over again, the panic that beset the child when it rushed screaming out of church because it had suddenly thought of forever as something with no world left back of it—something it couldn’t escape.

These men couldn’t escape either. The best they could hope for was that it would be easy if it had to be, and that they’d behave as well as the next guy, no matter what happened. Interviewing them would have been an indecency.

There was very little light in the big low room which must have been used, by the look of it, as a storeroom of some kind. What little there was came from candles. The query, ‘Who made them?’ seemed fatuously inadequate and irrelevant. But then everything did. ‘Sergeant made ‘em,’ they chorused and eagerly launched into fuller explanation. ‘See what they are, don’t you? Just empty C-ration tins filled with melted fat. The wicks are bits off our bootlaces. Makes ‘em a bit short, but what the hell! We’ll get around to some new ones sometime.’

Coffee was good and the hot cakes even better. Only one man seemed unable to cope, and kept cutting his food into tiny bits and turning them over and over. ‘Hell, Joe, eat the stuff,’ he was told. ‘Bet it’ll be another twenty-four hours ‘fore we get any more hot chow.’

To judge from general conversation—and there was mighty little of it—the toughness of the crossing concerned everyone less than the probability of falling in the river. ‘Jeez! and the waters gonna be cold,’ they told each other. ‘Christ! if we have to fight this way, why can’t we wait till summer?’

Men were tense, but so well controlled that the general atmosphere didn’t reach out to touch more poignantly than you would be touched by a group of men waiting for a train. Every now and then one would glance at a watch. A few played craps. One bunch were engrossed in a game of poker.

Nobody wrote home. Men don’t at such times. For one thing, home seems too far away to spring to mind very readily for most of them. It is hard for a frontline soldier to remember that there is a place called home, or a world where nothing within eye-range is broken and spoiled—a world of baths and home-cooked food, of beds and deep chairs and genial glowing warmth; a world of normalcy, of wives and children, mothers and sweethearts. After a time—and it is incredible how little rime it takes—that world fades into a dream. Only the world of battle stays real. Death, hurt, dirt, and weariness are the familiar. And the longer the men stay in combat, the harder it is to recall or visualize anything else.

Whether there would be plenty of liquor left in Dueren and the chances of finding undamaged houses where they could light fires, heat some food, and dry out was about as much as they dared hope for or as far along the road to reasonable, normal living as they could visualize. Or wanted to visualize right then.

Nobody had any illusion about the job ahead. Nobody doubted that the objective would be taken; meanwhile, the way it was to be taken was, as usual, a matter for griping. ‘Too bad the old man hasn’t got to be with us ‘stead of sitting back some place with a map,’ said one. Another put in a disgruntled ‘If it has to be a night crossing, why a night like this? Why, the moon’s bright enough to catch lice by!’

Discussion floated off from gripes into a series of ‘Remembers.’ ‘Remember how they mortared that liquor shop in Weissweiller?’ reminisced Jim, who had now given up the struggle with his hot cakes. ‘There we were, with all the booze in the world and no chance to drink a drop of it before the Heinies brought the place slap down on top of us.’

‘Didn’t you get out with any?’ asked his buddy commiseratingly. ‘I got a couple of bottles. Only wine, though! Sour red stuff you could drink yourself sick on and never get drunk. They’d knocked off all the cognac.’

‘Let’s hope they’ve left some where we’re going,’ a GI hoped earnestly. ‘We’ll sure as hell be able to do with it after a dousing in that river.’

‘Save your hoping, brother,’ he was advised. ‘The time that barrage is through there won’t be a brick left intact in that place, let alone a bottle.’

The glances at watches had been getting more frequent. Now an officer stuck his head under the sack nailed across the door. There was no need for his ‘Okay! Let’s get going.’ Already the men were on their feet and shrugging into their heavy equipment. They ducked under the sacking ten paces after each other, and kept that distance as they crept, stealthily as cats, out on the black-and-silver roadside, and down to the shadows of the buildings along the river bank, where their assault craft lay parked for jump-off as soon as our barrage lifted.

It has been written and said many times that no soldier ever expects to get killed in a battle and that, no matter how bad a situation looks, he is sustained by the conviction that the other guy will be the unlucky one. Anyone who ever watched the faces of men going into action would comment on that in one word.

The enemy, it seemed, had no idea of the activity before their lines until, at two-forty-five to the second, the rim of the sky opposite them flickered into a vast semicircle of flashes.

Our command post was within a few hundred yards of the area on which the shells, which had just been hurled from these hundreds of guns, were to fall. We held ourselves braced taut, thinking we could appreciate what it would feel like and look like; but, as the noise hit us, our knees folded under like jack-knives. Without conscious volition we were flat on our faces.

Against the dark, the town of Dueren went up in a series of fire fountains which reared in magnificent spumes of white and purple, orange and blue and red, to subside, then ripple and flow to rear again and again and again as building after building swayed or toppled or burst against a blood-red haze which throbbed and shimmered and pulsed in hellish rhythm with the crash of the guns.

Somebody on our side had captured a few hundred German mortars and had conceived the bright idea of letting the enemy have them back, twenty at a time. They blew up almost as much on our side of the river as they did on the German. So, after several salvos had gone off with the whoosh that a bomb makes when it is near enough to be the last thing one ever hears, orders went out, to the vast relief of correspondents and soldiers alike, that no more were to be fired.

The barrage lasted half an hour that seemed forever. By the time it had slowed to a slow, continuous rumble at jump-off time, the din had pulverized bodies as well as nerves and ear drums. We ached as though heavily bruised and quaked like bowls of jelly. Only minds refused to ache or be dulled. They quivered with an awareness that spared nothing. Never had emotion, impression, reaction, registered with such razor-edged clarity. One kept wishing, ‘If only I hadn’t noticed that,’ because one knew so well how long it would nag memory.

Engineers fought all night to get bridges across without ever being able to decide which was hardest to fight, the river or enemy fire. The river washed away cables the minute they hit the water. Enemy fire was such that just working on the bridges automatically qualified a man for a decoration...

Initial crossings were made in assault boats and ferries made from two boats pulled across the river on a cable. The enemy, dug in all along the opposite bank, had fire zeroed in on everything that moved. How anyone ever did move long enough to get across, scramble up the mud flats to fight through the blazing factories on the far bank, is accounted for merely by the fact that however much firepower there is it is never enough to kill quite everybody. However many fall, some get through if they’ve got what it takes to keep going. These men had.

A log of conversations in the Command Post, a shallow cellar a few hundred yards from the bank, gives some idea of the difficulties. My notebook records:

‘3:35 a.m....Boats launched in first waves. Current carrying 200 yards downstream. Two over weir.

‘4 a.m....Three echelons of assault boats go over in fours. Only two make it. Personnel of others trying to make bank, but in confusion and heavy fire few succeeding.

‘5:05 a.m....Company’s boats still in trouble and can’t get even a cable over. Mortar fire terrific, but can take that better than the river.’

Into our cellar, dripping wet, stumbled Engineer First Lieutenant Bob Waller. For four hours his men had been ferrying assault platoons in craft that bobbed crazily as corks. They had been trying to get a cable across for a footbridge so that the men being plastered to hell in the factory on the far side could get some support.

‘Last wave had a hundred men in the water at one time,’ he said wearily. ‘Lifebelts are keeping losses down some, but, Mother of God! it’s grim going!’

Every few seconds the phone reports came in of progress made or not made as the case might be. The Colonel commanding the regiment sat anxiously over his map lighted with a candle stuck into the neck of a champagne bottle. Ruffling silver hair, he followed his battle with terse queries into the phone—and quick steps to the wall map with its blue-and-red penciled phase lines and objectives scrawled all over with statements like ‘Heavy Mortar,’ or, ‘Fierce small-arms fire.’

Over his shoulder came clipped brisk orders in support of all the men out in that inferno were doing to run these red-and-blue penciled phase lines deeper into their objective. They were orders like the one which made the artillery officer pick up his phone and say, ‘Hey, Mac! Company C are almost up now under that stuff you’re laying down on the crossroads. Push it forward a bit.’ Or a major called Sandy Bush, barking into his phone, ‘Next waves! You hit the water in two minutes. Hold till everybody’s over, then move up to the line of the first objective and hang on till I tell you.’

Over in the corner somebody called ‘Norm’ Willey cooed into his receiver soothingly, as though he were talking to a fretful child on the other end instead of an officer delayed in storming a machine-gun nest by the necessity of collecting his men a few at a time like drowned rats from the river—’Yes, I know we need more boats, fella. They’re on their way, and we know just how you feel.’

The diabolic world of black, silver, and fire had grayed to dawn before we heard the words we had waited so many hours for—an eager ‘Oh! great work! By God! that’s the best news we’ve had all night,’ from Sandy Bush as he heard the first footbridge was over. The Germans had it out again almost at once and kept knocking it out, but the men worked on undaunted under what scant protection a not too effective smoke haze could give them.

A Timber Wolf Company, led by a Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Fernold (who I heard was killed next day), spearheaded entry into the town. They had boat trouble like everybody else, and by the time they grouped on the German bank, it was to find that their fighting strength consisted of twenty-one riflemen and twenty-three men with light machine guns. Nevertheless, on they went into the town to mop up seven blocks. Another group, almost as severely depleted, took the barracks on the edge of town which was a German headquarters, and there was a particularly bloody fight in an apartment house which the enemy had rigged up as an observation post. Our boys fought through it floor by floor, and then climbed to the lookout. The entire plain with every town on it, every one of our observation posts and every road, stretched out before them in minutest panoramic detail.

Their ‘Whew-ew!’ could have been heard for miles. But the ‘Christ Almighty! How did we ever make it?’ which followed was hushed and incredulous. And the ‘Guess we must have gotten to be pretty good soldiers,’ said without trace of self-gratulation.

13

HEMMED in by tanks rolling into position to begin the assault across the Cologne Plain, we were at the river without knowing it, until the MP signaled stop. Ahead, swaying on the rubber pontoons, with metal runways only just wide enough to take the tank tracks, was the first treadway bridge across the Roer. Our own dead had been moved, but there were still several German corpses lying dankly stiff on the gray mud. One at a time the vehicles lumbered over with MP’s, engineers on duty, and GI’s all crossing fingers every time another earth spume shot up near-by without damaging the precious structure.

As we waited our turn, tankmen behind us discovered blond hair with a whoop which the Germans could have heard. ‘This is one time when we’ll ask the questions,’ they bellowed. And short though the time was, they got in a surprising number before the MP gave us the high-sign with a commiserating ‘Okay, get going—it’s all right for these guys, they only gotta go one way, but you’ve gotta get back and file your story. Jeez! I hope the Heinie sons-of-bitches don’t knock the bridge out before you get back.’ ‘So do we!’ we chorused devoutly—and for reasons that mattered considerably more than filing the story. The shaping of the entire battle pattern for Cologne depended on how fast we could get armor and supplies over the bridges in those first few hours. Every minute was worth a year. As fast as a bridge was hit, engineers tore into repairing it. Stuff streamed over at such speed and in such quantity that German prisoners told us subsequently they couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it ranged against them. As one officer put it, ‘It seemed as though every road out of Dueren onto the plain suddenly became alive with tanks and trucks. We thought they must have swum the river, since nobody could ever bridge enough to carry so much so soon.’

Dueren, second largest town to fall into our hands, was a fearsome sight. Aachen had been bad enough, but it was tidy compared to what our jeep now burrowed through and clambered over. Everything smelled of death—burning death. Flames licked among buildings still standing. German shells were still coming in to increase the incredible destruction. Bulldozers scraped a road through the heart of the town which was little more than a smouldering rockery. Shell craters were so numerous that the rims of them ran into each other. Without the signs which the Signal Corps promptly stuck into the debris piles, it was impossible to tell where one was. Even in the most severely smashed objectives there was usually something to give a bearing—a ruined church, or a particular store, or a certain house. In Dueren there was nothing but an expanse of holes and debris piles.

Through them Hodges hurled his forces in a build-up which flung his armor and infantry out on the plain in a series of looplike thrusts, which fanned out and forward to gobble up territory so fast there was no keeping up with it.

The press camp was still back at Spa, three jeep hours away—long and miserable jeep hours. Weather was bitterly cold, with the wet raw cold that nothing would keep out. Most of the time it rained, too. We were all willing to suffer as long as was possible, however, because getting back from the dreary desolation of ruined Germany to the picturesque, untouched-by-war Belgian town among its wooded hills was worth it.

Briefing at nine-thirty and five-thirty, six hours’ traveling, a war picture to get between those hours, and a story to write afterward, then fight through censorship and get transmitted, left little enough time for anything else. If we were lucky, however, we could by ten or so at night congregate at the Portugal for a meal—usually our first of the day. There was certain to be a talking session, plenty of cognac, and a party in Chambre Six. Water might even be hot enough for some of us to get a bath!

This going right up into the fighting zone and coming back every day to complete normalcy was hard on nerves, but good for writing. We stayed seeing war starkly. It looked now, however, as though the days of a comfortable bed to sleep in, restaurant-cooked food—even though it did cost the earth—electric lights glowing in windows of a gay, unspoiled town, shops, and, over and above all, friendly people to talk to, would soon be over. Any day now we thought, sadly, it will be goodbye to the Spa we have loved. From there on out it would be living with ruins and desolation, chlorinated drinking water, bedding rolls, tent latrines, hostility.

There could be no question of moving camp, however, until we had taken Cologne. That looked as though it might be any day.

Bradley and Hodges had insisted, ever since the First Army reached the Siegfried Line in September, that once across the Roer they would break through the Reich crust to have the Germans at their mercy. Once over, the Germans, too, saw the beginning of the end.

The plain, except for a line of hills along the Erft River (not to be confused with the Urft belonging to the dams), was level as a billiard table. Our plan called for armored columns to bypass towns and villages leaving them to be overrun and mopped up by troops riding tanks, trucks, half-tracks—anything, in fact, which would carry them.

This combination of mass armor and infantry attack carried us forward so fast that command posts never stayed in one place more than a few hours. Even though we had been there the day before, and though the division would be marked on the briefing map in such and such a village, it was certain to have run past its own code signs by the time we had driven from the press camp to the front. Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored ‘Spearhead’ Division was so determined to get to Cologne first that the only way to keep up with it was to stay up.

Nor was the Cologne Plain any place to go running around on for voyages of discovery. Roads were narrow, and the enemy had observation enough on them to keep fire to within inches of every given yard. There was little he could do to stop our armored columns except maintain fire. This he did with an insistence which involved driving while sensing the feeling of a cold and clammy hand gripping the back of the neck so hard it hurt.

We ran truck trains filled with bricks from rubbled Dueren out on the plain to fill craters as fast as the Germans made them. And that was so fast that in one short stretch twelve fresh ones were made in the ten minutes we spent chatting among the foxholes with our forward artillery. ‘Don’t count, for God’s sake,’ urged jeepmate Stanley Baron of the London News Chronicle. ‘I’m pretending not to notice!’

The shelling hurt the Germans, though, far more than it hurt us. These villages spattered across the thirty-mile-wide plain were jammed with refugees who had crowded back into what they had believed would be the inviolate German hinterland. Most of them had not even the protection of a cellar. They seethed into the churches, stuffed their cottage windows with bales of straw against blast, and took what shelter they could under kitchen tables piled with mattresses, as the civilians in other parts of Europe had to do when war suddenly engulfed the ordered routine of their living. And when villages became so smashed there were not enough buildings left for villagers and our troops, too, out the villagers had to go to manage as best they could.

They were Germans, but that made them no less pitiable; as, crying bitterly, pushing the sick and those too small to walk in perambulators and trucks, and dragging what few possessions they had managed to grab in the half-hour given them to leave home, they stumbled along to various collecting points.

These were usually small cottages. Nothing else was left standing. Guards segregated refugees into working parties, setting some to latrine digging, some to foraging among ruined houses for food, and some to cook-house duty. Our men were not deliberately unkind. Generally speaking, they were sorry for the folks as though they had been the victims of some catastrophe in their own community; but with the best will in the world it was just not possible to do much toward achieving order, let alone comfort, the way things were.

Collecting points were invariably like the one at Mersenich, where nearly two hundred people were jammed into the garden of a crossroads cottage. It was raining. Not more than a dozen had coats. Shells were plastering from German positions along the line of the Erft River. Such rooms as were left standing were big enough to accommodate only the wounded, the very old, and mothers with tiny babies. The rest just stood—women with bright kerchiefs above faces sagged with misery, men with hands crammed into pockets and shoulders hunched, children with blankets and shawls wrapped around them. Hour by hour they stood, staring in unbelieving wonder at the mighty river of our metallic power thundering by in this last place in the world any of them ever expected to see such a spectacle. Every road was an unending column of tanks and supply vehicles. The shattering din of the tracks and wheels was enough to make the head spin—without the crashing of the guns. Outside the gate of their compound was the top half of a German soldier which nobody bothered so much as to cover up during the several days we passed the place.

In one village refugees crowded into the church, where they were wedged so tightly that several of them almost suffocated. There was no sanitation, no water, no food, no hope. ‘It would have been easier to bear, perhaps, if we had ever thought such a thing might be possible,’ one woman moaned. ‘But we had no idea that Americans were near until the Volksturm was called.’

Having been called, that worthy body of old men and boys, mustered as the last defense bastion of the much-vaunted Reich, decided that if the German Army couldn’t stop our advance, there was no reason to suppose that they could. So they marched to the place of assembly and promptly surrendered.

An old farmer, with his wife and daughter, looked out over the turnip fields at the smoke puffs and the enemy armor and thought death preferable to such dishonor. So he scrawled a note and propped it on the table in his modest and immaculately clean living-room—’This shame of German defeat is too much to bear.’ We found the three dangling from ropes with chairs kicked from under them. From a fourth rope hung their dog.

Troops had a grim time forcing and consolidating bridgeheads across the Erft and then fighting through the coal mines on the far side, where the battlefields looked like the drear, unreal country of the moon. Infantry stolidly mopped their way through, with armored columns flanking round to squeeze in on the long-awaited, glittering objective—Cologne, third largest city in Germany.

Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Division won first foothold and marked the spot with a colossal sign—pine tree on yellow ground, which is the Division sign, and the slogan, ‘You are entering Cologne by courtesy of the Spearhead Division.’ Men had stayed up all night painting it, and their handiwork was almost more than the ‘Timber Wolves,’ fighting side by side and only just behind, could bear.

We entered, to find that the once proud Rhineland capital was the now third largest rubble pile in the Reich.

‘The Hohenzollern Bridge is supposed to be knocked out, but we won’t know ‘till we send a task force up to take a look,’ Maurice Rose informed us. ‘We’re going up around two o’clock and it should be quite a good fight. If you’re scouting around the city, meanwhile, keep away from the area around the cathedral, because, even if the Germans have pulled back across the river, they’ve got observation on everything that moves around the bank on this side.’

The fringe of the city already in our hands had escaped serious raid damage. Tanks rumbled through the streets. Combat soldiers either jeeped like mad or else crept carefully, as you would expect a man to creep who expected to hear a sniper’s shot ring out at any moment. Yet the streets were full of citizens—citizens, moreover, insistent upon treating us as liberators instead of victors.

Nobody knew how many there were. Refugees and prisoners put the numbers anywhere between twenty and fifty thousand. Through all the months we had bombed Cologne they had lived a nomadic, vagrant life in cellars and basements. Now they saw our arrival only as an end to the raids and as an opportunity for further looting.

‘It’s the damnedest thing! Fire a few shots down the street and see if that’ll help,’ said one harassed sergeant trying to get a dozen people down into the cellars while our tanks tracked through. The shots made them dive into doorways, but half a minute later they were back again on the street watching as though the whole thing had been a stage show.

Outside Willi Beueham’s wineshop on Venloer Strasse a couple of dozen Cologners were far more interested in looting wine than the fact that they might be mortared at any minute by their countrymen just across the river.

The number of men well under forty, pushing barrows stacked with possessions, cycling, or just looking on as interested spectators, was extremely perturbing for anybody whose mind flashed, as readily as ours did, to the probability that they were soldiers. It was so easy for them to change uniforms for blue dungarees and battered tweed jackets and homburgs, and then stroll into our lines to let their commanders know how the battle was going, where our command posts and troop concentrations were, and so on. Apart from this, there was the fear that walked with one down every street—that any of them could have carried, and used, a gun.

There were no military police in town to take care of such problems. Meanwhile, the CIC were picking up as many suspicious-looking civilians as they could. As we got on toward the cathedral, they were just ushering into their jeep a character who looked as though he had stepped straight out of a Balkan musical comedy. He was from the Balkans, too, but certainly not from comedy. He had a bundle of assorted rifles under one arm and swung a pistol from the other. His story, told with much gesticulation to the dubious-faced GI, was that he had shot a German officer from his window that morning, and had then persuaded a group of young Germans to surrender their rifles and accompany him. ‘They in cellar,’ he announced proudly, ‘waiting to give up to Americans.’

A major who had joined the group surveyed the small, twinkling-eyed, jack-booted figure with his red scarf floating jauntily in the wind and looking as pleased with himself as though he had taken Cologne personally, and grunted, ‘Phoney! phoney as hell.’

At this, the Balkan produced a Yugoslav passport to substantiate his claim that he had fought with Tito before being captured by the Germans, to escape after nine months in prison camp and come to Cologne as a barber. ‘Better hurry and make up your mind about me,’ he advised. ‘There’s a sniper up in that corner building!’ They decided at that to give the little man the benefit of the doubt, and, sure enough, there were his nine prisoners just where he said he had left them.

By the time we reached the underpass at Cologne West Station, the damage done by our forty-two thousand tons of bombs was so evident that it had produced in Stanley, Mac, and me an awed astonishment that anything could exist that was so much more shockingly disintegrated than anything we had already seen. ‘What makes me feel so bad,’ observed Stanley ruefully, ‘is thinking of the way I’ve so loosely been using the phrase “wiped out” to describe this sort of thing. Why, we never knew what it meant until now!’

In one of the craters in the inner city, an RAF flyer was sprawled with the shrouds of his parachute still billowing out over the debris. God knows how many other bodies were lying around—the place stank enough for there to have been hundreds. Wherever we went, the civilians crowded to talk to us. Along by the old market, which was recognizable only from a scrap of the blue-enamel street name left on one bit of still-standing wall, a colony of them warmly invited us to go down to their cellar to take a meal. They had plenty of food they told us, all of it looted from shops and factories and storehouses hit by bombs, and their homes were well furnished, also thanks to the bombs.’ Sanitation was as primitive as it had been in the Middle Ages. What water there was had to be collected out of the bomb craters. Wood to boil it had to be garnered, like everything else, from the wreckage of somebody else’s property.

It did not, apparently, distress them. Nothing did. All emotions had long since become subservient to the necessity of merely getting out every day to scavenge for whatever was available in the way of food, drink, and clothing. Even fear of the Gestapo seemed to have been wiped out. Stoic acceptance of such a way of life seemed suddenly more horrible than anything seen in all the misery of all the other bombed cities...

The cathedral, from what we were able to see of it, looked as it had always looked in the guidebooks. It was two o’clock, but Rose’s Task Force had not yet reached the inner city ring. ‘Mac’ looked at his watch and thus appraised the situation: ‘We’ve got the better part of four hours’ jeep ride back to camp. By the time we get back, the city will be ours, and with any luck at all we’ll make first editions. If we get mixed up in this battle, there’s no telling what time we’ll be able to file, so I vote we leave now.’

‘But if they don’t release the news that the city’s fallen tonight? Furthermore, Lawless, Troughton, and Farr are staying,’ Stanley objected.

‘I’d still rather miss the fight than the first edition on Cologne being taken!’ declared Mac. ‘So let’s get going.’

Cologne did fall, and there was an immediate release on the story.

‘Others not back yet?’ queried Stanley, when, after getting his third take away he noticed that London Telegraph’s Pete Lawless, Daily Mail’s Walter Farr, and the Express’s Bill Troughton were not yet in the newsroom.

‘No,’ said Casey, and I’m getting worried.’

Bashing away at our typewriters in the absorption that only a first-magnitude story can produce, we were still not able to shut out of our minds the fact that the others’ chairs remained empty. Each of us under the pretext of nipping into the censors’ office to clear up a point of censorship, kept drifting into ‘Casey’ now frantically phoning every command post.

‘Not been heard of since they left their jeep driver at the cathedral around two o’clock,’ was all that ‘Casey’ could discover.

The jeep driver arrived back just after dark. He had waited for the trio for almost an hour, by which time shooting having become distinctly unhealthy, he had ‘Beaten hell out of the place.’

By the time our stories were finished and filed, it was eleven o’clock. Robert, seeing us come into the Portugal wearing what he called ‘our hungry look,’ bustled off to fix an omelette. Stanley, Mac, and I abandoned all pretext of hiding our mutual anxiety and told Robert firmly, ‘No, thanks—no omelette, just a drink a big one! ‘

Nobody tried to talk. Then, after twenty miserable minutes, the phone rang. Leaping to answer it, Stanley came back with a radiant face and a relieved ‘They’re all right and just phoned their story in from 3rd Armored CP.’ ‘Thank God!’ we said with one voice, and then—such is the reporter virus—out shot our arms to look at our watches, and three voices as one crowed jubilantly, ‘But they won’t make the first edition!’

The three returned to be ragged over their scooping with good grace and a stoutly maintained ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ To Peter, the eyewitness story of the fight around the cathedral was such a good one that a couple of days after the city has fallen, it will still be more than worth its space.’ An even better story, he declared—’Too bad I can’t write it. I’m sure the Daily Telegraph readers would love it’—was the one he had just picked up from the censor’s room on his way back to the Portugal.

It was his own story of a couple of days before which, from pressure of work, he had not had an opportunity of looking over after the censors had finished with it. Now, chuckling, his great genial frame quaking as he flicked pages with one hand and jabbed at a bit of chicken with the other, he read his own words with a delight which was, as Stanley sternly informed him, ‘Positively indecent.’

‘I know, old man,’ Peter apologized, ‘but it’s excusable. Just see what those censors have done. I’ve heard of some crazy cuts, but this beats all.’

Like the rest of us, writing with a ‘Before Cologne’ by-line and doing the best we could to satisfy the news hunger for details of conditions within the city while still miles outside it, Peter had been interviewing prisoners of war and refugees. Like the rest of us, Peter had written reports of the shambles they word-depicted. Then, being Peter, he had launched into an imagined guidebook tour of the place. He took his reader into the cathedral and around the inner city, paused with them to admire the opera house, and then wondered what it was all like at the moment of writing. Word-picturing what he had been told that it was like now, he reminded his readers that beautiful though Old Cologne had been, most people thought of the place only in connection with the toilet water which had been given its name by the gentle, gracious lady who first made it there. Peter concluded by imagining the ghost of the gracious lady—Jean Maria Farina—sprinkling her sweet-scented herbs, and particularly rosemary for remembrance, over the rubble piles...

All of this had been too much for the harassed censors. Back and forth along the lines of Peter’s neat copy the blue pencil had traveled. Blue dots here and there told where it had rested, while they puzzled through the welter of writing and at last arrived at the name, Jean Maria Farina. Here was something they could cope with. Never mind history! Names in connection with battles, unless special okay had been given, could not be transmitted. Farina was not on the okay list. So security routine was promptly evidenced with a vigorous pencil scrawl. A hundred years dead or not, the name of the ghost was out!

As we finished dispatches on the cathedral city that night, ‘Casey’ handed us a sheet of background stuff on Bonn and Bad Godesburg which the 1st Division had also taken that day. ‘They might at least have waited till we’d finished with Cologne,’ we grumbled. ‘This Army’s moving so fast there’s no keeping pace with it.’

What had been scheduled as merely right-flank protection for Monty’s northern driving armies had become a major breakthrough to the Rhine. All along the river the Germans were in rout, with but one idea in mind—to cross by the fastest means possible.

North of us Monty’s attack had been completely successful. Simpson’s Ninth Army were linked with the Canadians. Allied Airborne, consisting of the United States 82nd and 101st, were all ready for the drop near Wessel which was to preface Monty’s grand all-out drive to Berlin, outflanking the Ruhr to link with the Russians. To the south, Patton was doing his part as usual. He had almost reached the Rhine. When he did reach it, his mission, like First Army’s, was to mop up and then remain on the defensive and available for reserve, while the northern armies went on to finish the fight.

That was the plan. Then came Remagen.

Britain’s deliciously cynical political humorist, Sagittarius, in the Statesman and Nation thus described its impact on preconceived strategy:

‘ACCIDENT IN THE ALLIED CAMP’

(After Robert Browning)

You know Remagen Bridge was seized

A week or two ago—

The High Command was hardly pleased,

It almost wrecked the show,

The bridge they thought as good as blown

When Ike's assault began;

Allied Headquarters had their own Supreme strategic plan.

They said they scarcely would expect

An independent line,

Although their plan did not neglect

The crossing of the Rhine.

Remagen Bridge should have been wrecked

According to design,

For things in warfare are not done

In this haphazard way.

Shaef courier galloped to the ridge

Where Hodges with his troop

Stood looking on Remagen Bridge,

And cried, ‘Regroup! Regroup!’

The spearheads that advance too far

Imperil all the flank—

Blow yonder bridge while yet you are

Upon the Western bank.

The whole concerted war machine

Together must advance,

You dare not take an unforeseen

And accidental chance.

The Field Commander must not flout

The Allies master plan:

Shaef will arrange a news blackout—

Retire now while you can.

O then the eagle eye flashed fire

Above that scene of strife,

And General Hodges barked ‘Retire?

No, not on your sweet life!

Great snakes; I’ve crossed the Rhine,’ he cried,

‘There lies our new bridgehead.’

And sinking at the General’s side,

The man from Shaef fell dead.

14

Patrols of the 9th Armored Division, fighting down toward Koblenz to link with Georgies Third Army, expected, as did everyone at High Command, that the Germans would blow the old Ludendorff Railway Bridge across the Rhine long before our troops could get anywhere near it.

Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Engeman, commanding the 14th Tank Battalion missioned to take Remagen, came out of the woods above the town early in the afternoon of March 7 to ejaculate a softly astonished ‘Jeez!’ Strung from the face of a five-hundred-foot black cliff to the cream-colored huddle of houses which was Remagen Village, across one of the most breathtakingly beautiful stretches of waterway in the world, was the bridge—quite intact and still, it appeared, carrying German troops. Engeman whipped out his binoculars. Yes, there, sure enough, were German tanks and German troops snaking back to the east side!

Immediately he sent a platoon of tanks beetling down the hairpin-bending road into Remagen. They were commanded by Lieutenant Johnny Grimball, and followed by Company A of 27th Armored Infantry. While fighting their way through toward the river, they heard from a prisoner and a civilian, apparently anxious to be helpful, that the bridge was to be blown at four o’clock. It was then three-fifteen.

Brigadier General William M. Hoge, commanding the Task Force, also received this report and promptly radioed Colonel Engeman, ‘You’ve just forty-five minutes, boy. Get to the bridge as quick as you can.’ Engeman told Lieutenant Grimball, who radioed back, ‘Sir, I am already there.’

When the 27th’s Company A raced up to the objective, it was ten minutes to four, and the enemy were frantically trying to blow the charges before the time set. They did manage to detonate two. The first blew a crater in the roadway on our side, and the second charge, which was touched off just as the 27th’s men started their dash, blew a hole about two-thirds of the way across, knocking out a support pier and destroying a large hunk of the bridge floor. Three engineers—First Lieutenant Hugh Mott, Staff Sergeant John Reynolds, and Sergeant Eugene Dorland—feverishly cut wires connected to forty-pound explosive charges below deck, then sped across to cut the main cable. It was too tough for their pliers, so Dorland fired three shots into the cable to smash the main hookup.

Infantrymen, meanwhile, were being sprayed by machine guns from the towers from which the bridge was partially hung. Two sergeants detailed themselves the responsibility of mopping up the gunners while their men, with Sergeant Al Drabik in the lead, raced on across to brace themselves for the battle of Flak Hill. This battle was fought under a Lieutenant Burrows, who took his platoon sheer up the cliff face, to hold there for several hours while the Germans rained down everything they could shoot. When the shooting failed to dislodge Burrows’s men, the Germans rolled rocks down and then brought up a flak wagon to open up from the rear with four twenty-millimeter guns, but our men still clung until after dark, when our first tanks and tank destroyers began crossing. One of the first of these slipped off the bridge roadway (which was only a series of planks laid across the railway tracks) and hung there, perched precariously on two supports, powerless to move under its own power, and holding up traffic behind it for miles. Every second of these first hours before the enemy could react in strength was naturally precious beyond all reckoning. What the driver of that vehicle, and other drivers behind it, had to say before they finally managed to get it towed off the bridge, will, according to those whose ears were blistered, forever constitute the all-time swearing high in anybody’s language in anybody’s army.

As soon as he heard that we had a bridge over the Rhine, Hodges at once called off the 9th Armored rendezvous with Patton. ‘Never mind driving down the west bank, get everything you’ve got over,’ he ordered the 3rd Corps, and then he phoned Bradley. That usually suavely placid commander almost hit the roof when he heard the news. His ‘Fine work, Courtney! Great work! Pour everything you’ve got across!’ carried a quality of vocal excitement which astounded his staff officers. Said one of them, ‘After all he’s been through, I didn’t think the old boy had it in him to be so hepped up.’

His enthusiasm was quickly blighted by SHAEF’s reception of the coup. A bridgehead in the impossible-for-fighting country around Remagen could be a useful diversionary threat, they said. It would be catastrophe, however, to allow it to divert strength which might be needed for the drive in the north. The War Gods’ gift was all very fine, but must not interfere with the execution of Monty’s long and carefully planned offensive. So, Hodges was told to put no more than three divisions across, and correspondents were informed that censorship would deal harshly with any attempt to write up exploitation of the bridgehead apart from its value in forcing the enemy to dissipate his forces.

Getting down to Remagen from our press camp at Spa meant a four-in-the-morning start. It was colder than ever—which always seemed impossible and unhappily never was—and raining dismally, when Stanley, Mac, and I piled ourselves sleepily into our jeep and set off. Only one bright reflection sustained us at that ungodly hour—we had ‘Shanks,’ our favorite driver and one to be entirely relied upon if fire got as hot as we expected it to get. Germans would obviously have been moving stuff up all night ready to knock us back with the first light. For anything else but crossing the Rhine I’d see anybody in hell before I’d let myself in for such a day,’ declared Stanley sourly and then went to sleep until we got to Euskirchen.

Here he woke up, wet through to the skin as we all were, and covered all over with yellow ooze slewed at us from passing vehicles, to comment bitterly, ‘I suppose there could have been a time when I was more uncomfortable, but I’m sure I can’t remember when.’

Thereafter there was no time for any personal reaction which was irrelevant to both our news stories and getting through the close-meshed river of armor and supply heading toward the river. The few roads that wind down from the Ardennes Mountains across the Dueren Plain are narrow, twisting, and dirt-topped. Now they were cratered, too, and bursting with the load rolling over them. Unbelievably, the German civilians were out filling craters for us to move over. Nobody asked them to! They just grabbed shovels and barrows and set to work.

Looking back, it is still hard to believe that trucks and tanks ever got through such terrain. We did—thanks only to ‘Mac,’ who kept leaping tirelessly out of the jeep to plead in his Scots burr to drivers ahead, ‘Come on, lad, make way so we can squeeze through here.’

It took almost seven hours from Spa to the hill above Remagen and our first sight of the bridge. The narrow road looped steeply through woods and vineyards to bring us opposite twin gray stone towers, and a long ribbon of boardwalk that disappeared into the black cliff face on the far bank. ‘Leave your jeep this side,’ said the MP. ‘Park it under the railway bridge and then foot it with the infantry—but keep ten paces between you and the next guy—it’s hot around here.’

Negotiation of the loose-laid planks over the first shell crater kept us too occupied for the first few minutes to think of anything else. After that, there was the incredible loveliness of the Rhineland—schloss-crowned hills, hummocked into each other in the contouring that belongs to it so exclusively. There were terraced vineyards, and cream-and-yellow villages looking like bunches of primroses tucked into the country’s corsage. Then there was Stanley looking back and saying, ‘Don’t look at his face, Iris,’ as we had to step over the body of a fair-haired German boy in the narrow footpath above the steely gray and swiftly flowing river (does it ever, I wonder, look as blue as that German boy’s eyes?).

In the tunnel at the far end, ‘Mac’ said, ‘We should shake hands, I think.’ We did, very solemnly, and then became involved in such a spate of interviewing we had barely time to say ‘Hullo’ to 9th Armored in their cottage command post down the road, which they claimed was the most shelled building on the entire Western Front.

Recrossing took what seemed a long half-hour, and was in fact a bare ten minutes. We had been lucky so far with shellfire. As we came out under the towers, however, on our side of the bridge, the Germans began lobbing in eighty-eights. Foxholes were full. With several truck drivers we took what shelter we could under the railway arch over the road which ran alongside the river, and prayed that the enemy gunners would stay off the beam. As soon as there was a lull, the four of us sped jeepwards.

I got in as my colleagues heard the next one coming and flattened. The glass, not six inches from my nose, was suddenly crackled all over, but, miraculously, it didn’t splinter—or cut. Four times we tried to make our jeep. Finally the MP put his foot down. ‘Don’t like to do this to you,’ he apologized. ‘But you got to get outta here. ‘Tain’t no place for anybody to stay around right now and it’s gonna get worse. I’m routing you out along the river road ‘cos the sons-of-bitches are dropping so much stuff on the other one we’ve gotta keep it one-way traffic.’

We took a look down the river road—several miles of it, with the enemy sitting up on the hills on the opposite bank and banging away at everything in front of him—and nobody said a word.

Shells burst, and kept on bursting, in the fields between us and the river as we tore along, curveting crazily round tree trunks knocked over the road and skidding through the town of Sinzig, so hushed and quiet it could have been a place of the dead but for the scared faces which peered through hastily lifted curtains to stare at our racing jeep.

Beyond town, at the junction where we hoped to turn right to get back on the road we had come in on, there were a couple of smoking tanks, half a dozen grimly unpleasant bodies, and a small group of combat GI’s, who advised tersely, ‘Nope, you can’t cut back on that road. It’s not cleared. None of it is around here for that matter. Keep on going like hell, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get through OK and meet our tanks coming down in about another eight miles.’

Keeping on ‘like hell’ meant following the line of the Ahr River, with wide open meadows on our left which spiked sharply into hills that looked like the backdrop of a stage-set. It seemed a long way from the Rhine, and suddenly I lost the feeling of being charged full to bursting point and then frozen.

I turned to indicate the magnificent scenery with an enthusiastic ‘Oh, look!’ From the hill on our left there was a flash, from over the jeep a sharp crack, and then ‘Mac’ snapped, ‘Get down far as you can, everybody.’ To Shanks he urged, ‘Drive like hell, lad! Were the target.’

The hairpin bend a couple of miles or so farther on, around which we careened into the shelter of banks blotting us from enemy view, will remain for the four of us the most beautiful bit of roadway in the world. Nor will any of us easily forget the expressions on the faces of the boys in our tank column when we finally met up with them a few kilometers later. Every mud-caked stare registered startled incredulity more graphically than the one before!

The day had been so tight-packed with extraordinary incidents that we were convinced we had run the entire gamut. Then, waiting our turn to weave around shell craters across a treadway bridge in the ruins of Euskirchen, the piled debris of the house on our right began to heave and quake. Hands and legs sticking stiffly through the rubble were a commonplace. This hand wasn’t stiff. It moved. It weaved. Weakly, it began scrabbling. Then a head and finally the whole body of a German soldier, followed by another, emerged and crawled through the aperture out onto the street. There, white with mortar dust and swaying from weakness after the hours they had been buried, both stared in dazed astonishment at the road jammed with American vehicles and swarming with United States troops. As our traffic column moved, two of our soldiers grabbed them to march them off for interrogation.

Getting back to Spa was even more difficult than getting forward had been. Everything that Hodges could pull up to throw over the bridge or protect it was on its way and nosing back through it all in time to get our story out had us braced tense with that tenseness which makes muscles ache for days afterward.

We had several flat tires to eat into our narrow time margin. Then at Eupen, the thing we’d been dreading happened—with coughs and splutters our jeep bumped to a standstill. ‘Oh, God!’ groaned Stanley, and within seven miles of transmission for the biggest story of our lives! We’ve got to get her going, Shanks! We’ve got to make it.’

A truck came hurtling out of the darkness, paused for our frantic flagging, went on, and then came back to push and pull and eventually get us on our way. Not until Shanks skidded around the Casino in Spa, with the big clock on the church registering seven o’clock, did anyone break the taut silence. Then Stanley exclaimed exultantly, ‘We’re going to make it!’ ‘Mac’ said, ‘Almost fifteen hours since we last saw that clock. I wonder how much of the story they’ll release tonight.’

They released only the fact that the First Army was across the Rhine, without allowing us to say how they got there. Ivan ‘Cy’ Peterman of the Philadelphia Inquirer grumbled disgustedly, ‘Damn nonsense! As though the Germans don’t know darn well how we got over. And I’m much too tired after a day like we’ve had to go inviting my readers to play guessing games how we crossed the Rhine with dry feet!’

Above the thunderous clatter of typewriters battering at full blast were absorbed faces which were barely recognizable under their coating of thick mud. Nobody had taken time out to do more than sling off caked top coats. Lee Carson, hammering away beside me, asked tersely, ‘How many takes? Seven? So’ve I. Whoever gets through the eighth take first stops and buys the other a drink.’ And then, ‘If it’s going to taste like anything except mud, we’d better take it through a straw! Jeez! I never thought anybody could collect so much dirt.’

As nearly as it was possible to determine in the fearsome sight we all presented, everybody was back all right except Jack ‘The Beard’ Thompson and Hal Boyle. ‘Casey’ fussed back and forth to the phone making inquiries, and eventually, trailing rivulets of mud and looking as miserably bedraggled and wretched as it is possible by the wildest stretch of imagination to picture any two men looking, in they marched.

Announced Jack: ‘The jeep gave out. We had to walk the last three miles.’ Hal peeled his coat, dried off the typewriter he’d hoofed so far, and began pounding. For the one and only time on record, he was incapable of making a crack.

That we should all come safely through a concentration of fire such as the enemy built up in that tiny bridgehead was too much to hope for. Nor did we.

Next day, standing under the cliff face on the far side of the river, Pete Lawless, Walter Farr, and Bill Troughton flattened for an incoming eighty-eight—but not quite fast enough. Peter was killed, Bill wounded in the leg, and Walter had his greatcoat ripped from shoulder to spine by a shell splinter which, miraculously, merely grazed his skin.

The press camp was to move next day. In the atmosphere engendered by news of Pete’s death, ‘Casey’ inquired prosaically who would be able to take time out to go through and pack his things. ‘There are Bill’s things to be gone through, too, and sent on to him at the hospital,’ somebody reminded. We did our own packing and those who got through first coped with Pete’s, remembering how he had liked Spa so much that he never wanted to leave it, and trying not to remember anything else.

As the days went by the bridgehead became more and more like Normandy on D-Day. The river banks bristled with guns and searchlights. Hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots flew suicide missions over the bridge. Floating mines, men on barges loaded with explosives, and swimmers towing deadly charges were all sent down the river on wrecking missions. At the same time Germans kept our bridgehead drenched with fire and subject to constant and savage counterattacks.

Despite everything that censorship could do, the drama and import of our having seized first foothold on the far side of the Rhine had captured and thrilled the imagination of the entire Allied world. Muzzling of frontline correspondents had fortunately no effect whatever upon top-flight analysts and editors back home. The significance of this first bridgehead across the last barrier to the Reich heart was seen and played editorially as a coup which altered the Western Front military situation overnight, to shorten war by months, and synchronize perfectly with the new Russian offensive on Berlin.

Field Marshal Kesselring referred to our fantastic break in the fortunes of war with an order of the day which referred to the situation as ‘Catastrophic.’ ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘every soldier has to bear and endure whatever may happen, and must be willing to shed his last drop of blood while fighting with the greatest bravery.’

It was time, SHAEF decided, to reconsider existent strategy. A few days after getting the order limiting him to only three divisions in the bridgehead, Hodges received the glad news that Remagen was to be exploited to the utmost. He was to get nine divisions over the river as fast as he could, with all the build-up necessary for a major breakout and subsequent thrust into the hinterland to link with the Russians. The attack was to be timed as nearly as possible with Monty’s drive from the north.

As the build-up proceeded, Ludendorff Bridge slipped into the Rhine. It went with a suddenness, described by one who was there when it happened as ‘So unnerving that if I’d had a drink at the time I swear to God I’d sign off liquor for the rest of my life. One minute it was there, the next it was gone.’

SHAEF, back in Paris, told a news conference that it was damaged. And then had it rebuilt in time to make world-shattering engineering records before they got word that it was gone beyond all chance of being retrieved. They had to admit then that ‘Yes, it had fallen, it was not repairable, but it had not plunged into the river until its period of usefulness had ended.’ No official reason was given for the accident beyond the fact that demolitions and shelling had damaged the structure so that it was incapable of standing up to the heavy loads being run over it. The men whose buddies had gone down with the bridge, however, were doing some pretty bitter querying as to why engineers had fooled around so much repairing the road over the bridge and yet had done nothing apparently to prevent the main support cables dragging out from anchorage.

Monty’s big attack opened on the twenty-fourth of March with the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropping the night before. The Germans expected them. They made the going tough enough for the troops who took Wessel to have to fight one of the most valorous battles of the entire war.

Once established on the eastern bank, both Bradley and Monty were for the first time completely happy. Neither had to bow to the greater strategic need of the other. There was no question of either having to talk Ike into any kind of priority. Both were running free, with all Germany ahead of them and all the punch and power they needed. Southward, the Third, Seventh, and First French Army were all driving hard on a Germany now finally reeling as it waited for the final punch.

While the First Army were supposedly ‘contained’ in the bridgehead, they had, in fact, gotten their entire army, with all it took to keep it rolling, over the river in readiness to charge as Monty’s first waves completed their crossing. Dispatches day after day had spoken of a bridgehead being gradually elongated and squeezed toward the Frankfurt-Cologne Autobahn. All eyes and all interest had been purposely focused on the northern effort. Headlines and conjecture featured the certainty of complete disintegration of Germany only when Monty’s forces were positioned and ready to roll.

Neither Germans nor anyone else expected that disintegration to start from the Remagen bridgehead—and within twenty-four hours of Monty’s strike. Nobody foresaw what the divisions ready positioned for attack on the east Rhineland would do to the situation maps once they got under way.

When they did get under way, their lines fanned out to fret into the heart of Germany like fine-pointed lace. The greatest story of the war—the story of the final Nazi break-up—started off to move so fast there was no keeping up with it.

On the jammed roads it took a day and a night’s traveling to get five minutes with the forward elements. The only way adequately to cover the story was by cub plane—provided one could get one. I did one day, and spent three hours being buffeted in a storm which did everything but turn the plane upside down. We made two forced landings, got lost for more than an hour over German territory, and finally touched down on our home strip with a fervent ‘Thank God’ from the pilot and no more gas left than would have filled a cigarette lighter.

The trip did, however, give a magnificent panoramic picture of what had been achieved in those first few days after the jump-off; and rough as it was, it was easier on nervous strain than trying to keep up with the armor, paced by Maurice Rose’s 3rd Division. He moved his command posts two and three times a day, and always, it seemed, right under enemy fire. One day we caught him early enough to stay with him during two moves, which was all very well, as Stanley said, ‘Until we have to think about getting back.’ Villagers scuttled into their houses as they saw our tank columns beetling through their narrow streets. Stray German soldiers were also careful to take prompt cover, but they could not be counted upon to pay such respect to one lone jeep.

Our third stop that day was at a farmhouse which seemed quiet enough when we arrived for the Division Intelligence Officer, Major Haynes Dugan, to decide to give us a briefing. He spread his maps out on the bonnet of his jeep, but by the time he’d twice been bumped badly by tin hats as we hit the ground for incoming shells, he said firmly, ‘Let’s go indoors. I can’t concentrate like this.’

Indoors, Maurice Rose joined us to run a finger over the map up to Marburg and then across to Paderborn. ‘Second Armored of Ninth Army are driving down to Paderborn,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna drive up. Inside there’s the Ruhr. The whole darn hunk of it!’ His dark, eagle-like face looked thoughtful for a second, and then he grinned, queried, ‘Be nice to zip it off, wouldn’t it? Coming along with us to try?’

We decided not. But Bunny Austin of the Sydney Morning Herald, Bill Heinz of the New York Sun, Tom Henry of the Washington Star, Gordon Fraser of Blue Network, Andy Rooney of Stars and Stripes, and Jack ‘The Beard’ went along—for what turned out to be the greatest armored drive in military history.

They did over a hundred miles in just one day’s rolling, and finally linked with the Ninth Army, to seal off four thousand square miles of the Ruhr and trap three hundred and sixty thousand prisoners which included von Kesselring and many other top ranking commanders.

Unhappily, that lucky drive was the end of ‘Lucky’ Rose. He had led a charmed life, and took the charm so much for granted that, as Jack Thompson said, ‘The only thing to be wondered at was that he didn’t get it before. But God! What a man to have to lose!’

Whenever his men were held up, it was his habit to leap into a jeep and drive forward to see what the trouble was. Investigating after this fashion about three miles from Paderborn, Rose found himself under fire from a group of tanks burrowed into a pine clump. He surrendered to troops of the Westphalian SS, was ordered to give up his arms, and shot as he reached for his pistol holster. These youths were students at the SS School in Paderborn. They were called into this, their first action, to try to halt our columns while Kesselring’s troops, now being zipped into the Ruhr pocket (it should have been named after Rose who cut it), fought their way out. This, of course, they never managed to do.

We had jumped off on Sunday morning, March 25, for the first act in what was to be the final drama of Nazi Germany. In the beginning, the breakout had been pretty rugged. The enemy had dug himself in and achieved a new high in the number and variety of mines laid. For the first twelve miles or so it was a case of blitz-bashing every village until there was nothing left of it but a feeling of resentment on the part of the folks who wouldn’t be able to live there any more. The enemy was encountered in relatively small units, but they fought hard to make that thin crust—that last thin crust of resistance—hold. It had been a many-layered crust. We stripped the last stout husk by crossing the Roer River and the Cologne Plain. We got a gift from the Gods in the matter of disposing of the Rhine to gain foothold on the skin of the Reich heart proper. Now we were through that, too, and all set for the second act, and then finale!

We knew it would be a short second act, but none guessed how short.

The military problem which confronted those destined to direct the drama in these final scenes lacked parallel in the history of warfare. First of all, Hodges had to contain and squeeze in on the south and east flank of the enormous Ruhr pocket. The enemy expected him to drive up the east bank to link with Monty’s armies driving from the north. This accounted for the strength in which von Kesselring had disposed his forces in this sector and for the phenomenal number of prisoners we took.

Instead of following expected strategy, Hodges’s armored and infantry columns sheared straight inland, to the point where Rose veered left to join with the northern Allied Armies behind the German Army. Central columns mopped their way through the fastnesses of the Hartz Mountains to beat Germans hidden there out to the north where the Ninth Army was waiting to deal with them, while right-hand spearheads of fanning armor rolled their way through Kassel and Leipzig for a join-up with the Russians on the Elbe.

All this meant attacking east and west at the same time with fronts as much as two hundred miles apart, at the end of supply lines far and away beyond all limits ever visualized by any commander in any army. Gas, food, wounded, had all to be hauled by air. Dense flocks of C-47’s perpetually clouded the spring skies to terrify Germans who were convinced that they were all on their way to bomb a town—they prayed not theirs.

The trapped German Army fought to burst its pocket seams with the fanaticism everyone expected. In a few villages civilians armed with panzerfausts joined the fight, but it was obvious that with seven armies, excluding the Russians, assiduously cutting the country to ribbons, the end was not far off.

The ‘squeeze-in’ produced colossal prisoner scores. For the first time our cages began to be too small, and our interrogation staffs hopelessly inadequate. Prisoners had to march or drive themselves to assembly points. Only around Seigen did the enemy hold so that it hurt. There ack-ack guns were used to keep us at bay, a very poor idea from the GI’s point of view. Griped one, ‘Flak’s bad enough when you’ve got a whole skyful of it to dodge around in. It’s a helluva thing to meet when it’s zeroed in on you on the ground.’

Telling the war story became difficult, as it had been during the Battle of the Bulge. The battlefield, racing off in all directions, was as fluid as it had been in the Ardennes days at their worst and much faster-moving. Over it all, and behind it all, were brigand bands of troops operating in addition to those regimented into organized resistance. Conviction had not yet been crystallized in the average German’s mind that this was anything worse than a catastrophic breakthrough which would ultimately be contained and dealt with by armies coming down from the north. Those who had heard rumors of the trapping of the Army were convinced that given time they would fight their way out. Meanwhile, it was up to every man to do his best to hold on as long as possible.

We were overrunning territory faster, much faster, than we could clean up or police it. German soldiers, realizing that they lacked the strength to arrest our charging columns, simply let them through, then sneaked back into their ammunition dumps to resupply, ambush and pick off such troops as we were able to leave behind pending the arrival of our mopping infantry. Riding around in a single jeep or truck became a most hazardous business even on main roads miles behind the front zone, there being no such thing as a front line any more. Whether a German soldier wanted to stay fighting or merely grab the quickest means of getting back to his own fireside, there was no more desirable form of transport than a vehicle painted olive drab and white-starred. So they lay low on the road verges, or in the woods with which the whole countryside was clumped, and shot drivers of all lone vehicles. The situation got so that, unless in convoy, it was infinitely safer to go on forward with the armored columns than to drive back from advance press camp at Marburg to rear press headquarters at Bad Godesburg.

During these first few days civilians persisted in their thought that the situation was merely a temporary setback. Once they got over their first reaction of dazed bewilderment, their attitude was something that nobody wanted to take chances on. The contrast between it and the feeling evidenced by the natives in the West Rhineland, which was Catholic and therefore strongly opposed to Hitlerism, was most marked.

Women wearing the picturesque national costume of the district—full petticoats and braid-trimmed, gaily colored pinafores—scowled their hostility with a bitterness we had not seen before, even where war had hurt Germans most. In Kirchain, a musical-comedy town of cobbled streets and vividly colored houses, a woman told us scornfully that SS troops would quickly end ‘this defiling of a soil which will never be conquered.’

In this same village two days later, our jeep got traffic-jammed outside pink cottage walls laced together by black timber. A couple of German hausfrauen stood crying and wringing their hands. Around them were broken dishes, bits of furniture, torn cushions, curtains and bedlinen, and, as we watched, eight very dirty, angry men came tumbling out to grab the women’s shoulders, shake them as a terrier shakes a rat, and bawl, ‘Food! Understand? We want food! If we don’t get it, we break up everything!’ The men were DP’s—Displaced Persons—on their way back home.

Our zipping armor columns and mopping doughboys cut the victory pattern, but the bitterness of defeat was first burned into the German people by quite another army—the rabble army of Poles, Czechs, Russians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, and Danes whom the Nazis had enslaved.

As we overran, these victims from prisons, factories, and farms realized that at long last all their hopes and dreams had crystallized into the reality of the unbelievable—they were free again!

Their first reaction meant only one thing—they were free to get onto the roads to start the trek back home. They had nothing for their journey except the shabby, invariably lousy, clothes they stood up in. They had no locomotion but their own two feet. They needed food, clothes, shelter each night, and, if it was possible to find it, some means of transport. There was only one way to get all these things—take them away from the Germans. It didn’t take very long for them to discover they wanted to take revenge as well!

Fighting began to be interrupted by frantic appeals for help from villagers who found themselves suddenly at the mercy of vagrant hordes determined to execute ‘Popular Justice’ and having no intention of showing the slightest degree of that benign quality which falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.’

One American officer, interceding for a German family who had been imprisoned by Polish workers, found them ensconced in a stable and waiting on the Poles. Said the Polish leader of the group: ‘We’ve worked for five years on this farm without ever having had an egg to eat. We’re eating all the eggs we want for a bit, and wouldn’t it be a good idea if you went away and left us alone?’ The officer agreed it would be.

DP’s were supposed to make their way back to the camps in the rear areas (where UNNRA would eventually take care of them) in organized groups. On their way back, it was the duty of the burgomeister in each village to provide food and shelter. Our advance moved at such pace and DP’s were released in such masses that there was no keeping track of what was happening to the German population in forward areas. Soldiers had something else to think about. Our territory was already far beyond the bounds ascribed to our Military Government by the Yalta Agreement. Officials, however, did all they could. They printed, and had dropped by air, leaflets urging the slave army to stay where they were until Allied officers could get in touch with them. Naturally, however, it took more than a leaflet to hold a Frenchman who had not seen apple blossoms in Normandy for four springs past, or a Norwegian who miraculously had been given the chance to see summer come to his beloved fiords! They couldn’t wait for our tanks to roll on past their prison, never mind anything else, before off they set. The first thing every group acquired was one of the small hand trucks found in every German outhouse. Into it was stuffed pillows, bedding, cooking pots, clothes, and usually ammunition. About a third of the trudgers were women. They marched, unkempt, pitifully undernourished, but cheerily giving the V sign. Often one of the party with high color and emaciated face was being drawn along in a cart—the prevalence of tuberculosis was one of the most shocking aspects of the whole trek.

In Marburg the main street was fringed with a cavalcade which remained constant day in and day out for weeks. A captain in the Military Government office there, whose responsibility it was to move them all back into displacement pools where they could be handled properly, told me wearily that they were doing everything in their power to keep down the incidence of death and disease and to see that fair and just treatment was meted out to the German people once they had laid down their arms.

Military Government appraisal, however, of what was fair and just treatment differed materially from that held by the people who had suffered the German version of fair play and justice for three or four years. As they straggled back to civilization, these vengeful nomadic tribes of liberated people reduced Germany to something redolent of the Middle Ages. They exacted a price which the victorious armies would never have wanted to levy. Germans got the worst that any country could ever have feared from being conquered—defeat as total and terrible as the war they made—and it wasn’t a pretty thing to see.

The lust and looting and licentiousness that occurred could not all be laid to the conscience doors of the DP’s. It may make citizens feel better to think that their soldiers are above such things. The fact remains that war changes all it touches! War brings out the worst as well as the best in every man. And the worst usually comes out strongest—and first! Outside the press camp at Marburg an elderly woman stopped me one morning with the question, ‘Have I the right to refuse my daughters to your soldiers?’ To an astonished and forthright ‘But of course!’ she said, ‘In that case, then, I can perhaps register a complaint?’ It seemed that two of our combat soldiers had calmly knocked on her door on the previous evening and informed her that they were spending the night with her daughters. In the morning they walked out with all the liquor in the house and the best of the jewelry.

In fairness to the American soldier, however, he was, for the most part, as decent to the fräuleins as though they’d been the girls back home. He resented, and bitterly, the rule which forbade fraternizing. Most held the realistic approach to that subject which was ascribed to General Patton who reputedly declared, If the boys want to, let ‘em—fornication without conversation is not fraternization in my army!’

In spite of war’s brutalizing, there were mighty few, thank God, who behaved like the American boy near Kirchain, where a German hausfrau panted up one afternoon with an agonized expression and an urgent ‘Soldier woman! Please come! You must come! You woman, you must help!’ The distress was so evident and so acute it cut through nationality, through enmity, through everything to make us just people—faced with desperate emergency and responsible, as are decent people everywhere, for doing all that could be done about it. I expected to find somebody badly wounded. Instead, a girl’s screams came from behind a locked door and an American voice ordered gruffly, ‘Stop clawing, you little bitch, or I’m gonna break your bloody neck.’

Banging and kicking, I bellowed an imperious ‘Hey, quit that and open the door!’ Incredibly, the scuffling stopped and the door opened—just a chink—as a man about twenty-five peered out to demand, ‘What the hell do you mean, squawking orders at me?’

What I said I shall never know, any more than I shall never know what possessed me to stand there arguing with him instead of beating it to get somebody who could have thrown him out. At the time it seemed that it would be possible either to appeal to his sense of decency or else frighten him into leaving the girl alone. With a matter-of-fact brutality, which was more shocking than her sobbing, he told me, ‘I’ve got a pistol and there ain’t nobody going to stop me having her or any other German gal I want. And why not? We won ‘em, didn’t we? What the hell can they expect of an army that licked ‘em?’ Then he slammed the door.

There was no American unit in the town, so this lad was probably a truck driver on his way through. My driver had forgotten to pack his gun—’An just as well,’ he said. ‘Else I’d be in the brig for shoo tin’ a fellow Joe.’ Nor was he anxious to become involved in a row over a German woman which might easily result in this fellow soldier shooting him.

‘Won’t take us many minutes to find either an officer or an MP to take care of it,’ he counseled. It didn’t.

The officer we flagged set off to the rescue as though his jeep had been under fire, with a distressed ‘Hell! The most stinking part of this whole stinking war business is that there should be women anywhere near it.’

15

THAT American officer had no more idea than had anyone else in the Allied armies at that time, just how stinking this whole war business was. We thought we had seen the ultimate in horror, suffering, and misery. That was before we got deeply enough into Germany to overrun the concentration camps.

The First Army took their initial shocked measure of the extent to which German brutality would go at Nordhausen. Our troops fought their way into the big aircraft works and barracks on the edge of town, expecting to have to clean up the last shreds of resistance. They found instead miserable skeletons of dying men and women who explained that the German guards had fled fifteen days before to leave them to starve, unless killed by bombs and shells. Most of the beds contained two or three people who were so emaciated that there would still have been room for a fourth. Living and dead were lying together as they had been for days. Around the factory ruins were hundreds upon hundreds of corpses of starved slave workers lying just as the Germans had left them, though the citizens of Nordhausen knew perfectly well that they were there.

General Collins, commanding the 7th Corps which took the town, chose a green hillside overlooking the factory, and ordered that the leading citizens of Nordhausen, properly dressed as though they were honoring members of their own family, should bury these dead with their own hands.

To the Major in charge of funeral arrangements the burgomeister sent a representative to point out that the ground chosen could not be put to such use, as it was private property. For a minute the astounded and outraged Major stared at the affronting one unable to believe his ears. Then he recovered to inform him in no uncertain terms that the burgomeister had better appreciate the fact that, thanks to Uncle Sam, there was no more private property as such in that part of Germany and unless he hurried and got those citizens out on the job, by God, he’d bury him with the rest!

The fantastic funeral spectacle lasted two days. Twenty-four long graves serrated the hillside in regulation Army pattern. Above them on the hilltop were three little graves which had not been drawn into the Army blueprint. One was dug for a fifteen-year-old Polish boy called Kostuk, who found the bodies of his mother and his sister, Stephanie, and asked that they be given separate burial. The other two were dug by a husband and son who recovered the bodies of their wives. Refusing to allow any German hands to touch them, they buried them and finished their graves off with pansies and laboriously cut wooden crosses.

American soldiers stood guard over the lines of black-suited men digging so assiduously and looking, as they speckled the hillside, about as incongruous as anything seen in the whole incongruity of war. They dug uncomplainingly and submissively with expressions that showed no trace of feeling, until the time came to handle the dead. Then their revulsion and loathing broke out into pleading which, according to the guards, would have melted hearts of stone in any other conditions.’

Their burgomeister interceded for trucks at least to carry the corpses up the hill. Collins ruled that no piece of American equipment be allowed to ease the weight on souls or bodies by so much as a single kilo. The citizens were, he ordered, to carry the dead on whatever they could find, handling them with their bare hands, and bearing them in procession up the half-mile or so of road which curved up from the factory to the cemetery. So, for hour after hour, lawyers and schoolteachers and doctors and shopkeepers wrapped the pitiful bodies in what shrouds they could muster, then bore them on bits of wood, doors torn off cupboards, or anything else that could be improvised as a bier, to lay them in long ordered rows in the open graves. When they had finished, there were two thousand and seventeen of them—Poles, Dutch, French, Russians, Belgians, even a few Germans. Prayers were said and the graves filled, raked to a fine tilth, and then sowed with grass seed before the cavalcade of citizens were finally released—until such time as they were as Collins said ‘to come here to build a monument to forever commemorate this infamous incident, and the fact that there is no greater shame for any German than to be a citizen of this town.’

It was, we discovered, merely a part—an infinitesimal part—of the misery and death evidenced a couple of miles outside Nordhausen in the ‘Lager Dora,’ the secret factory for the production of rocket and flying bombs. The suffering caused by these diabolical weapons at their receiving end had been well enough documented for history. What could not be known until our troops got to Nordhausen was that everything connected with the production of the vile things caused just as much suffering and even more horror.

Nothing we had seen up to that time had prepared us for the warped perversion of minds which could conceive and implement a two-way extermination system whereby those making Hitler’s secret weapons eliminated themselves as surely as their handiwork wiped out those against whom it was directed.

V bombs were made by slave workers—political prisoners of all nationalities—who were condemned to a starvation diet and living conditions which insured, but for the coming of the Allied armies, that the world would never have known anything more about flying and rocket bombs than the damage they did. Twenty-five thousand slaved in this one camp until they collapsed. When beating and torture could no longer drive limbs and spirit to the twelve long hours of every working day, they were sent to ‘hospital.’ Here, with no medicaments and no medicinal care beyond what foreign doctors among the workers could give, they died—to be carried into the crematorium built on to the hospital and burned.

The factory was tunneled into a foothill of the Hartz Mountains. Stanley, Mac, and I drove to it through a camp made up of hundreds of wooden huts built among the greening woods. Electrified wire ran around the place; otherwise there was no indication of its being anything but an ordinary Army camp. Railway lines snaked off in all directions, and for what looked like miles the ground was covered with warheads of V ones blanketed with camouflage netting.

‘Almighty God!’ burred Mac in his most devout tones, ‘be thanked that we got here in time to stop those at least from being launched.’

Said Stanley in awed voice, ‘Why, they’ve got enough of the infernal things here to blow the whole darned world to bits!’ And that was before we’d had even a glimpse of what they had got there!

Two tunnels ran parallel to each other clean through the hill. Each was cut through at regular intervals with connecting passages like the rungs of a ladder.

‘Better drive your jeep in,’ the guard advised. ‘It’s a coupla miles from here through to the other side, and you better be mighty careful how you drive out there, too, cause Jerry’s still got observation from the hills opposite.’

Stanley assured him that nothing would be more exact than the care we should use to emerge at the far end—if, indeed, we found it necessary to emerge at all—and in we went.

Ahead of us the tunnel arched, to contain electric lights and ventilation, a road and a railway line. On the railway line, stacked from floor to ceiling for over half a mile, were V ones loaded onto cars all ready to be moved out to their launching sites. At the end of the half-mile, the cars became an endless-seeming assembly line. In nightmare reality of the world Wells envisaged—but more symmetrical, more ingeniously efficient, more scientifically developed, and more barbarous in its reason for being than anything Wells ever thought up—were miles of electric machinery, hundreds upon hundreds of electric pressing, welding, and processing machines, all, incidentally, made in Cincinnati, Ohio! There must have been millions of dollars’ worth of them, silent for the first time since their installation almost two years before.

Beyond this, a brick wall sealed off the part of the factory in which the warhead was assembled—an eye-boggling place despite the fact that we were convinced by this time our eyes were no longer capable of reacting that way. As nearly as I can word-picture, the eerie cavern ahead enclosed an organ so vast that its pipes went on and on, it seemed, forever. Among the dully gleaming aluminum pillars were vast piles of stuff that looked like foam and felt like glass, and strange-looking football-shaped canisters and ten-foot-long steel tubes. The side tunnels held more machinery and the most lavishly stocked machine-tool warehouse that could ever have existed. One of them also held a body—a very brutally maltreated body.

‘What in the world has happened to all the workers?’ asked Stanley wonderingly. We had left the jeep by this time, and the quiet pressed in until I, for one, found it quite hard to breathe. It seemed impossible that the Germans could have left the place unmined, yet here was Stanley growing more fascinated every second as he plunged deeper and deeper into the bowels of the hill.

Panting along behind him, Mac and I decided that he was in one of the worst of his ‘lace-collar moods’ and that we would put firm feet down and drag him out before we all got blown up. This ‘lace-collar mood’ had grown out of my telling him irritably one day that sometimes he was old woman enough to wear one. There is no closer comradeship, I suppose, than that of correspondents working as we had to work. Each of us had our own idiosyncrasies. Stanley’s was a habit of hunching his lean lithe shoulders, furrowing his brow, and shutting the rest of the world entirely away from him. If a particular scene absorbed his interest, he would study it with rapt attention and a faraway look in his blue eyes. If he was interviewing he would pursue his inquiries with meticulous and unhurried determination in order to extract the last fine crumb of detail. He was like a schoolmistress who coaxes the best answers possible out of a favorite pupil. Time meant nothing. Circumstance—war or otherwise—ceased to concern him. That he lives to write as deliciously as ever is entirely due to the fact that he jeeped with colleagues who were devoted to him.

Mac’s long legs caught up with Stanley eventually as he was feverishly scribbling notes and peering and probing amongst the fearsome-looking tubes. Mac managed to divert his interest with the suggestion that we go and see if we could discover what had happened to the workers.

There had been eighteen thousand of them eight days before the Americans arrived. All but a thousand (too sick to be moved) had been marched into the woods for transport east. There were several thousand too many of them for the trucks available, so the SS guards lined them up in columns and ordered them to start marching. One of the truck drivers, a civilian from Nordhausen, told us, ‘They ordered some to turn left and some to turn right, and then shot all those on the left. The bodies are still there, if you’d like to see.’

‘Nothing we can do about them,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s take a look at the poor devils they left here.’ He said ‘poor devils’ pityingly, knowing that after working underground as slave prisoners on German concentration camp diet they were bound to be in bad shape. He had no idea how bad. None of us had.

The hospital building was topmost of the huts which filled several acres of hillside. We climbed up a winding path through the beeches, to be met, as we neared it, by a stench which turned the three of us as green as the trees. A long corridor ran down the middle of the hut. Opening off it on either side were rooms filled with double-tiered bunks and more human misery than can be compassed into words.

As we entered the first room, eighty eyes stared at us unbelievingly. They were eyes bright with fever and looking out of cheekbones over which the skin was stretched so taut that, as we watched men trying to speak, we were fearful that the effort would split their cheeks apart. They lay on straw mattresses, with one blanket apiece, and no more medical care than could be given by doctors who were themselves prisoners, who had no medicaments, and who could not prescribe the only thing that would have helped any one of them—food!

All were in the final stages of starvation. Some lay still—so still, so gray, they looked already dead. The others said, ‘Americans!’ and then in a babel of different languages and, recklessly dissipating what little strength was still lambent in their poor emaciated bodies, they tried to tell us their stories.

Trying, they shouted over each other. Those with enough energy crawled over the others to tug at us and plead with us to listen. As they crawled, there were groans and curses and here and there a cuff or two from the ones traversed. In one room a pummeling match broke out between two men each insistent that his story was the more important and so must be heard first. Having gained hearing, both collapsed to wrack their puny bodies into great convulsive sobs.

Heartbreaking stories they told—stories of wives and children raped, shot, and tortured before their menfolks’ eyes; stories of mass arrest, mass transportation in appalling conditions to even more appalling terror camps. Each was more horrible than the last, and the most shocking part of it all was the sudden realization that the world had been hearing these stories for years without ever really appreciating all the suffering that had been going on, without ever quite believing that these dreadful things were actually happening! For years, refugees had been coming out of Europe to tell of them. But it took actual sight of the men whom those stories concerned to make them live. Stanley, Mac, and I had to admit to ourselves that, despite all we had seen, all we had been told during these months of war, way back in our minds there was doubt that things had, in fact, been as bad as people said they were. Facts, we thought, had probably been twisted by propaganda. Without being conscious of it until then, we had doubted whether the frightful conditions we had heard described about certain concentration camps really existed, or, if they did exist, we thought they must be merely isolated instances of sadism not reflective of Nazi policy in general. Well, we knew differently now.

A Doctor Elias Litz from Limburg, in Poland, recounted how the eight men who arrested him had raped his wife and small daughter before him, then beat them to death. He had no right hand. It had been amputated because of frostbite sustained during his eleven-day journey by open cattle truck to the camp. Every man of the forty in his room had lost either a hand or a foot in the same way.

A Hungarian Jew, called Bericoirt, weakly gave us the routine working day enforced—seven days a week for as long as men were able to work. Labor began at nine-thirty in the morning and continued until nine-thirty at night with but one break period. That was at three in the afternoon, when workers ate a slice of bread and margarine. The only other meal in twenty-four hours was a liter of soup which they queued for at six-thirty in the barracks square. Bericoirt had been a prisoner ever since the Nazis marched into Vienna. He, too, had been forced to see his wife and son tortured and killed.

None of these men had expected to live to be liberated. During the eight days since the Germans had left they had been waiting for the SS guards to return, as they had threatened to do, to shoot them. A Polish boy described how they had come into the hospital to tell patients, ‘Were too busy to bother with you now, because we’ve got too many others on our hands, but we’re coming back to take care of you just as soon as we can get around to it.’ We must have looked our inability to believe that the Germans would have killed the thousand of them in cold blood, because the boy suddenly began saying quickly and excitedly, ‘They don’t believe it. Look! They don’t believe that men could do such things!’ His voice rose higher and higher. ‘That’s been the trouble. Nobody ever would believe men could do such things. Do you know how many men have died here in two years? Twenty-five thousand—twenty-five thousand—twenty-five thousand!’ He was practically screaming. The man next to him reared himself painstakingly on one elbow, shook him, and then began talking in a low, earnest voice. It was difficult to understand what they were saying, because everybody spoke a different language, and the few able to translate into English for us all wanted to do it at once.

Amid the bedlam a man in an upper bunk, who had been lying as though dead, stirred a hand to beckon. His voice was a whisper—but an English one. ‘It is too late for me! It is too late for most of us here,’ he said, ‘but, thank God, you have come in time to see what they have been doing to us—to thousands and thousands of us in just this one camp. And there are many, many others like it.’ We told him that doctors and proper medical care and, above all, food would be immediately available. And he asked had we been to the crematorium. ‘Then g—you must go,’ he told us.

A path, a well-worn path, led to this place, where, except for the Allies’ arrival, every man in the thousand in that hospital would have gone. The door on the left opened to a garage-like space which our troops found stacked to the height of a man’s shoulder with bodies—bodies on which the skin was so tightly stretched over so little flesh that they scarcely resembled human bodies at all. They were packed head and feet alternating with methodical precision like so much cordwood.

Leading from this was a room labeled ‘Sektionsraum.’ There were bloodstains on the green walls and on the white surgeon’s coat hanging beside the frilled-muslin window curtains. There was blood on the floor around the white porcelain table on which bodies were cut so that five of them could be put into the furnace at the same time.

Before each furnace stood a pile of charred bones eighteen inches high. Along one wall lay blood-caked steel stretchers on which bodies were slid into the ovens. Beyond this were staff rooms, one with a bed in it, with daisy-sprigged coverlet and window curtains and pictures of mountains.

Even worse than Nordhausen was Buchenwald, and after that Dachau, Oświęcim, and the rest. It was hard to write of it all without yielding to the temptation to color-sweep and word-picture one’s own emotion and reaction. Accordingly, correspondents agreed to document what they saw in baldest statement of plainest fact. We chronicled the fantastic, dreadful narrative of what Nazidom was and what it did to hundreds of thousands of innocent, helpless men, women, and children who opposed it—and there were many Germans among them—in the simplest language and with the most carefully authenticated evidence we could find. Pictures were shot, films taken, visiting parties of German civilians as well as government and press representatives were organized, to give the world an indictment which shocked it to real appreciation of what all the fighting had been about. We had been told over and over again that we had gone to war because it was necessary to free the world of Nazi oppression. Nobody believed it until we uncovered the horror camps.

The questions everybody then asked, and nobody could answer, were, ‘How can any human being treat other human beings like that? What happens to people to make them capable of such cruelty? How do they get that way?’

One of our interrogators spent seven hours on just one prisoner trying to discover that—and much else. Commenting on his report, which follows, he said, ‘The prisoner has been interrogated at such terrifying length because he is the first professional Nazi so far encountered by this interrogator and because he spoke honestly and quite freely.’

‘It is often said that the terms good or honest are incompatible with the word Nazi. Yet, it is a fact that a good many Germans joined the Party, especially before 1933, because they sincerely believed in its professional ideals; and that there are Nazi officials who themselves never dirtied their hands by corruption or by personally abetting the atrocities committed by Nazis in concentration camps or in occupied territory. Moreover, it seems to this interrogator [T/3 Samson B. Knoll] that the extent of ignorance and uninformedness of the German people, and even of the Party members, as to the atrocities committed, is greatly underestimated. Given the flair for blind faith and obedience, and that tantalizing lack of inquisitiveness about anything done on official orders, such widespread ignorance is by no means astonishing.’

This prisoner was forty, married, and had three children. Before he joined the Army, he had attended the first course ever given for the training of Nazi leaders at the Ordensburg Vogelsang, the Hitler school we took in Hürtgen Forest.

As far as his activities with the Party went, he seemed to have been a very little fish in a very big pond. He was chief clerk from Koslin in Pomerania on a salary of just over five hundred Reichmarks a month—not a high salary, he explained. The best he could afford by way of vacation for himself and his children was a two-week trip to a near-by village on the coast, where his wife cooked only two meals a day instead of the usual three.

He was transferred to Brest-Litovsk, where between fifteen thousand and sixteen thousand Jewish civilians were killed between September and December, 1942. The prisoner, named Ulrich Pandikow, worked at collecting and disposing of their property. While on the job one day, he heard shooting elsewhere in the ghetto and walked over to look through a gate in the yard from which it came. A group of between thirty and forty Jews—men, women, and children—were lined up in front of a grave which Pandikow believed they had dug themselves. They were not tied and they were quiet. Even the children did not cry. A squad of four or five policemen received a command from the Polizeimeister and began firing into the group with their rifles. Pandikow took one look and left without asking any questions.

Asked why he simply turned away from the scene of the incident, why it never occurred to him to ask what these people were shot for, he answered, ‘What was the use of asking questions? If these people did it, they had the order to do it. I could not have changed anything. After all, I had no authority over them [the police].’

This attitude of obedience so blind that it did not even question from simple curiosity was discussed with the prisoner at length, who stated that he never thought anything but that it was an order, and admitted that he never thought about what it might mean to the individual human beings.

‘That’s just the thing about an order. An order from above must be right. The only thoughts I had about it were: it was ordered from above, and those who ordered it must have had their important reasons.’

Asked if he himself was capable of carrying out such an order, he reflected for a long time and said, ‘Yes, though I can’t say I’d have fun doing it, even the least little bit. It would only be the compulsion of an order—but to volunteer for it, that I could not do.’

‘The whole thought process on which the prisoner now entered was evidently quite new and painful to him, as he had to work himself through to various conclusions,’ stated the interrogator. He instanced it thus: ‘I can imagine that the policemen did not like to do it either, and perhaps think of it more often than they care to. Every man now and then has his memories—when a man has done something like this, because he was ordered to, then he shuts off his memory. But whether he can do that all the time...?’

The prisoner’s final comment on the shooting of other people, after half an hour’s patient questioning, was, ‘That is an extremely hard job — perhaps the hardest there is.’ He said he had never thought of these things before, and explained, ‘By now we have been educated in such a manner that we not only no longer discuss given orders, but agree to them without questioning.’

This prisoner’s belief in the Party was profound. ‘I have given my oath on Hitler,’ he said. ‘You, too, have taken an oath, and I believe that the honest ones among you will not cast their oath aside either just because things look bad for a while.’

When Hitler’s foreign policy was discussed and its many discrepancies pointed out, Pandikow said, ‘Those were important decisions about which we were never told anything.’ And then he added, ‘The idea would never have occurred to me to ask such a question — quite instinctively not.’

This blind confidence in and obedience to the leader exemplified at once the strength and the weakness of the German people. How completely they differed from Americans, British, or other nations of individualists could not be better exampled than by the prisoner’s comment on the fact that the Nazis kept Germans in a state of complete ignorance about all matters important to them as people. ‘A government is supposed to be the will of the people,’ Pandikow said. ‘Therefore, I do not think it necessary that the individual learns about important affairs or is told about them earlier than necessary.’ He had no concept of democratic procedure and naturally no belief in its value. ‘It may be more satisfying for the individual to participate in the government; but the question arises, whether the individual can judge whether a thing is good for his country or not.’ Then he declared forcefully, ‘It is better if the common man does not know of great decisions, for one must be able to rely on someone and have the confidence he is doing it right.’

Several days of captivity jarred his complacency, even though it seemed to have had little effect upon the clichés which Nazi indoctrination had fixed in his mind. He confessed to having had sleepless nights thinking about the concentration camp atrocities which he claimed he knew nothing of until he was taken prisoner. He was hurt when the sincerity of his belief in Nazi ideals was questioned, so much so that his voice trembled with emotion as he told the interrogator, ‘When in those days we joined the Party, we were young and we believed its propaganda. We wanted to help our people in peaceful labor, abolish unemployment. In those days we made an image of the Party to which we still cling. All this is being rubbed out. We are told, “You are swine. You are murderers!”‘ Then, with a hopeless shrug, he finished, ‘If all of a sudden your entire picture of the world is shot to bits without much ado, it is all the same whether one had known it before or not. You get here, and they try to reshape you. But that cannot be done in a few days. For that a man needs the entire second half of his life.’

Wherever one spoke to Germans one found the same thing. Their minds had shutters that clicked to close out all vestige of personal responsibility. If things were wrong, it was the fault of somebody who gave orders higher up. ‘But why should they be wrong,’ they would query, ‘whets the man higher up must obviously know what he was doing or he would never have been there?’ That was the sort of mental alibi encountered everywhere.

The hausfrauen maintained, with an insistence that was hard to disbelieve, that they knew nothing about the conditions in places like Buchenwald. Typical of them was the woman whose house we took at Naumburg for our press camp. She was a spare, gracious woman in her first fifties who came out of the house to strip a branch of magnolias and ask if it were true the things she had heard about Buchenwald. I asked her, and without any graciousness, having been there only the day before, what she had heard. She said the townspeople were saying that there were thousands of bodies stacked there of prisoners who had been starved to death. It seemed so utterly incomprehensible that the townspeople could not know of what had been going on, less than twenty miles from them, that this one at any rate had received a full and very brutal word-picture before I could regain my self-control. When I did, the woman was crying—standing very erect and big tears welling up out of her eyes and running down her cheeks without any screwing-up of face or handkerchief-dabbing.

‘I had two sons,’ she told me. ‘One was killed in Russia; one a little more than three months ago in Holland. I comforted myself with pride that they had died for their country. If what you say is true, then I can never have pride any more. None of us can.’

In all Germany the only ones who had courage enough to rebel in any way against the Nazi regime were a few thousand seventeen-year-old youths belonging to the ‘Edelweiss’ freedom movement. They were careful to keep their rebelling pretty well underground and operated in small groups without one group having apparently very much to do with the other. We came across our first members in Kassel. They looked like the youths you can find hanging around any street-corner any time in any town, staying out later than their parents like and getting mixed up in any excitement available.

Their party aims were hazy. Many of them joined the movement for no better reason than the fact that it gave them a chance to defy authority and generally raise hell. They did, however, have what it took to break away from Hitlerism enough to wear an edelweiss embroidered on a belt or pinned under a lapel, and to beat up unpleasant Party members in a special way. First, they sang their victims a song ‘to keep their spirits up,’ and then they showed them the small white mountain flower, which was often the last thing they ever saw.

We wondered, as our armies smashed on, what the reaction was going to be from the men who could not plead, as the ordinary soldiers and the ordinary civilians pleaded, ‘But you can’t blame us. You can’t hold us responsible, because we had no idea such things were going on.’ What would those who were responsible — the Party members in authority — do, we wondered, when they knew that the jig was up?

Well, they played the finale to the drama of the Nazi regime in a series of suicides — the first of them in the town hall of Leipzig.

We had some difficulty getting into Leipzig because the German commander decided that it was not to go without a fight. They depressed the barrels of one of the greatest ack-ack concentrations around any German city (part of the outer defenses of Berlin) to train them directly on our attacking troops, and for a few days war broke out all over again in full blast. The 2nd and the 69th Divisions were both determined to be first in. The 2nd Division got over the canal on the city fringe, and it looked as though they’d win the honor. Then Lieutenant-Colonel David T. Zweibel, Commander of the 2nd Battalion, 273rd Infantry Regiment, of the 69th Division, was astounded to receive an order to race straight to the heart of the city and take the city hall. He got it, but at a heavy price.

‘To capture it,’ said Zweibel, ‘we had to break through the outer defenses by firing everything we had. The way men rolled off our tanks was enough to break your heart. Resistance was worse still around Napoleon’s statue and in the city hall itself. At the bottom of Napoleon’s statue the Krauts were dug in with antitank guns that had ninety of Company F’s hundred and eighty men casualties in a few minutes. We fought till dark around the city hall here, then buttoned up and started in around nine this morning. We’ve just taken our objective with close on a hundred and fifty prisoners, and there’s the mayor and his wife and daughter, and God knows how many more Nazi town officials up there, lying around like a waxwork show.’ ‘What’s the matter with ‘em?’

‘They’re dead—very dead,’ Zweibel informed us. ‘Suicides—damnedest thing I ever saw!’ He called a soldier and ordered, ‘Take these folks up there and let ‘em see,’ then yelled after us, ‘And watch the panzerfausts—I’ve never seen so many lying around in all my life!’

There were other ugly things besides panzerfausts—at least half a dozen bodies to be stepped over, for one thing, as we picked our way through the litter of broken stone and discarded equipment and up to the first floor.

Behind three sets of steel blast doors in a vaulted room were a row of telephone boxes. Ear-pieces dangled from each phone and the sticky-sweet smell of blood was so heavy it hit like ether. Curtains divided the rest of the room into cubicles. In one was an oval table with a great congealed puddle of blood on it that ran past Hitler’s picture, an empty bottle of cognac, empty glasses, identity cards, and a machine pistol, down to the body of an officer. He had been shot through the eyes to sink to the table and eventually slew sideways to the floor. Opposite him, another body with a bullet wound through the stomach had toppled backward with its head under the sideboard. The officers had killed each other.

In the cubicle next door a third officer sat bolt upright on a leather couch facing us, dead, and staring with wide-open eyes. He, too, had an empty cognac bottle on the table in front of him and his pistol still clenched in his hand. Seeing it, ‘Cy’ Peterman said, 1 always wanted a Lüger pistol, but I sure in hell don’t want that one.’

Up on the next floor the last of the civilian resistance had at least died more tidily. In one room, at his desk, his head bowed over his hands, sat Assistant Burgomeister Droto Liss. Opposite him, legs crossed where brown ankle socks rolled over brown shoes, her head sagging back into a big armchair, sat his wife. She wore a black tailored suit, and her sleek, graying, blond hair was dragged up from a face smoothed in a tranquility of death, a rare thing to see on a battlefield. Behind her, lying as though asleep, with her head flopped back against a hide-covered sofa so that it tilted her little Red Cross cap into incongruous coquetry, was their eighteen-year-old daughter. She was exquisite as a Dresden doll, and much more beautiful.

Next door to them was the body of another man in uniform. And next door again the bodies of the burgomeister and his wife and still another eighteen-year-old daughter. Open in this girl’s hand was a note—an Easter note from her soldier sweetheart. In the top left-hand corner he had stuck a small cut-out paper egg. It was flower-decorated, and folded to contain a pressed primrose.

The glasses from which they had drunk the poison were still before them. The burgomeister had taken his in cognac, the women theirs in lemonade. Whatever it was they took was’ very kind. They died in their sleep without a tremor to disturb the placidity of pose or expression.

A pop-eyed Nazi official who did not choose to end his own life filled in the details of the story. While our tanks had parked themselves around the building on the previous night, the burgomeister, his assistants, and their families, had gone down for a last dinner together in the big restaurant under the city hall. The burgomeister was quite distraught and said that rather than see Leipzig occupied by the enemy he would kill himself.

Our Nazi informant wrote on a cigarette box, ‘One does not desert one’s country in time of need,’ and tossed it over to the burgomeister, whose retort was, ‘It is done. It is all over with Germany.’

The party finished their meal about midnight and then left the restaurant, a typical German Ratskeller with polished oak tables, gay cloths, wine kegs, wall murals, and lots of scroll ironwork, to go upstairs to settle their estimate of what was due them.

Theirs were not the only suicides. Herr Budin, the man who invented thermos flasks and put their principle to making panzerfausts, blew himself and his family to bits, too, rather than live through the shame of defeat.

While he was doing it, Nazi guards just a few kilometers away implemented that shame in one of the most horrible of all the atrocities. With rescue only an hour or two distant, three hundred political prisoners were herded into one long wooden barracks. After locking the doors and covering the windows, the guards threw incendiary grenades upon the roof. In a moment the whole structure was a roaring inferno filled with screaming human beings. Some broke out into the open, only to be met with a hail of rifle fire. The few that miraculously managed to escape did it by smashing their way through thick rolls of barbed wire. Naked, charred, and lacerated bodies were scattered across an entire field. Troops who found them ended their report with this statement, now incorporated into 5th Corps history:

‘So here, on the outskirts of one of Germany’s greatest cities, world-famous for its beautiful buildings, its culture, its monuments to great men, there stood a monument to a new type of culture that the world should never forget.’

16

THE day after Leipzig was captured, under trees foaming with blossoms, we came upon a lieutenant colonel of the German Army busily issuing discharge papers in exchange for his men’s ‘sole’ (Army pay) book.

There had been so much desertion by individual soldiers that General Model had put out an order that any man away from duty for more than twenty-four hours would be shot. Legalizing of discharge by responsible officers signing papers in exchange for pay books was something we had not seen before. Roads were so jammed and prisoner cages so crowded, however, that if groups of German soldiers chose to disintegrate and go quietly home, there was little that we could do about it. A few changed into ‘civvies.’ Most of them did not bother to take even that precaution to evade capture. They figured that our MP’s would have their hands too full keeping the traffic moving to bother about individuals.

Fighting had been on the all-out’ scale both east and west, with the Ruhr pocket being gradually shrunk to yield a prisoner bag out of all proportion to anything foreseen in our most wishful hoping. Armor columns, ‘swanning on,’ as the British said, had covered so much territory that some of the hardest fighting of every day went on in towns far behind our lines, which didn’t make any kind of sense until considered in terms of the huge distances involved. Infantry made advances like fifty miles in two days by clustering on literally everything they could find that rolled, including captured German Army vehicles, civilian cars, tradesmen’s trucks, in addition, of course, to their own. Gas was being hauled by air at a cost of four hundred gallons for every six hundred delivered. Mileage added enough to excuse weariness in ace-trained combat troops, not to mention war reporters who were practically dead on their feet trying to keep up with the armor and yet get back to follow briefing and communications.

Every day the fruits of victory made a stranger-sounding news basket. We were capturing the synthetic war plants of the Reichland, their airfields, their weapons factories, and freeing their prison camps so quickly that there was no time to see it all and no space to give anything more than a few lines.

Obvious as it was that everything was finished, detachments of SS troops and werewolves’ held out, however, with fanatic determination in the wooded and hilly country between our troop concentrations. Only main roads were marked with our signs, and these would frequently be changed to direct the luckless jeeper towards the enemy. Stanley, Mac, and I were so directed one halcyon spring day and were saved only by the fervent pleading of a Frenchman whom Mac, in his forthright Scots way, was inclined to ignore. We were lunching off K-ration and a bottle of wine from the cellars of Leipzig City Hall, and Mac, his long legs stretched out among the buttercups at the road verge, his sandy mustache wiggling as it always did when he was in a quizzical mood, had invited the Frenchman to join us. There was no mistaking the hunger shine in his eyes, but he refused to eat until we promised to turn the jeep around and go back by another road. We promised him that we would, learned that he was walking back to Paris after four years in prison, and then had the enormous satisfaction of giving him the first cheese he had eaten in that time. He had a wife and baby, and no idea of what had happened to them in the years of his captivity. He hoped to find them where they had been. If not—if the good God was good—someone would be able to tell him where they had gone.

By this time half a dozen other refugees had wandered up to share what remained of the K-ration, all of them reiterating the same warning, ‘Not this road! Germans in wood over hill!’

We were on our way back from Duderstadt after a tour around a camp there in which the Germans had kept American and British prisoners of war. It was the first Allied prison camp we had seen and what we had seen had badly shaken us.

Prisoners were kept in a brickworks during such time as it took the enemy to break them down to the point where they would volunteer to work. Maximum breakdown time was two weeks, and few could hold out that long under the conditions imposed. Normally, between two and four thousand men were held at Duderstadt. When we arrived, there were but a few hundred, too sick with dysentery and starvation to move. All of them had walked to this camp from Silesia.

On arrival, they found the kind of thing which has often enough been described by prisoners of war, but still has to be seen to be believed. Imagine a four-storied brick building, with only one door and one staircase, on the ground floor enormous kilns looming up out of the gloom, floors above slatted so that the filth and stench from hundreds of men, too weak from sickness to move, were added to the misery of those below. The place crawled with lice. The only comfort concessions men got were straw to lie on (after the first two weeks), and one meal of watery soup a day. This was served from tubs in which the filthy scum was inches thick.

Nobody could live long in such conditions. When prisoners became too sick to stay in the main building, they were moved to a shed where a generator and workbench made up the sole hospital furnishings. They died there at an average of several dozen a day.

Every man in the camp was suffering from beri-beri and edema. A soldier captured at El Alamein, and a prisoner nine hundred and ninety-nine days, pressed a thumb in his leg to show what that meant. The thumb mark stayed cratered, as any pressure would, until he and the thousands like him could get proper food and vitamins into their meager frames.

Carrying victory to men like that made up for pretty well everything else that was war according to Private First Class Earle Howard, first to shake hands and hand out cigarettes. ‘But, jeez!’ he said. ‘It was awful to see grown men mob our jeep and then start bawling like a lot of kids.’

The first intimation of the proximity of the Russians came from German civilians fleeing from them.

From Leipzig to the Mulde River, the country is the wide, rolling sort from which a jeep seat gave as wide a panoramic picture as one would normally get from a plane. Narrow roads ribboned over it to become filled with as astonishing a collection of humanity in transit as the world has ever seen. Months of passing refugees, in varying parts of Europe and in varying stages of wretchedness, had convinced us that there could be nothing new to the picture—until the days when our dispatches began measuring the distance in less than a hundred miles between our own and the Red Armies.

Roads then, as far as the eye could see, became a slowly—oh, so slowly—flowing river of people who had grabbed everything they could stuff into or onto anything that moved, in a desperate try to get out, to get anywhere, just so long as they ended up in the American Zone of Occupation rather than the Russian.

Entire populations of towns and villages joined the trek. Families with all their possessions were crammed into farm wagons hastily roofed with straw or curtains or blankets, looking for all the world like the covered wagons that trekked their way across American prairies. Some of the women and children crowded into dilapidated cars. There was no gas to drive them, so their menfolk pushed. Many had only a handcart in which to stuff children, old folks, and such worldly possessions as they deemed most precious in starting life all over again. A few had bicycles on which they festooned everything from the baby to cooking pots, and hundreds upon hundreds just walked, hung about with bundles and down-dragged with hopelessness.

Such an invasion could not be allowed to flow unchecked into and through our lines, so a harassed Army decreed that all civilians and German soldiers on the Russian side of the Mulde River must stay there, with the exception, of course, of Allied prisoners of war and all Allied ‘displaced’ persons en route back home.

The prisoners and DP’s were required to cross at given sites where doughboys checked their identification at pistol point. The pistols, moreover, had to be used, for hordes of fear-crazed Germans tried to swim over the river or slip past the guards at the crossing places.

Typical of these gateways into our zone was Eilenburg. After a battering by seven thousand rounds of artillery fire, buildings were in poor shape and the bridge over the river was missing a span. Our engineers bridged it by running a stepladder down from the brink of each side of the gap and linking the two with planks at water level. Half a dozen GI guards stood on our side. On the other, the bridge was a milling, seething mass of humanity which fought for hours to get through to the front ranks to bawl their plea to be allowed to cross. When the guards were satisfied that the pleader had a right to do so, they would shout, ‘Okay, come on!’ and down the ladder on their side, over the planks, and up on ours, somebody would come to have identification checked and be allowed to continue his journey.

Those who had no chance for an Okay fought frenziedly to keep their places in the front ranks, hopeful that by some miracle the Americans would change their minds and lift restrictions. The burgomeister of one little town arrived in full robes and regalia and leading all his townsfolk, to ‘beg in all humility that the Americans will be gracious in their victory and allow us to escape the terrible fate which awaits us when the Russians overrun our homes.’ Men, women, and children, unable to gain place in the narrow confines of the bridge itself, sat patiently on the river bank. They sat there for days without food, and in a condition of despair which upset our soldiers. ‘A damn sight worse than any battle,’ they said.

The first we actually heard of the Russian troops was in the living-room of a cottage about twenty miles from the Elbe. They were fighting their way toward us in sounds that boomed out of a field radio set and in words which were first recognized by our boys as Russian, ‘because they had so many rolled Vs” in them that they couldn’t be anything else.’ ‘Straylag,’ boomed the voice, and then ‘harasho’ and ‘travia.’ ‘Fire,’ ‘good,’ and ‘over’ translated Private Andrew Damon of Chicago, of Polish extraction, and pleased as a dog with two tails at a chance to try out his Russian.

The radio on which we were receiving our first confirmation that the Russians were only a few miles away was propped on a kitchen dresser among jars of salt, flour, and coffee, with Signal Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Given sending the message.

‘Hello, Russian Army Forces, this is American Army Forces. We can hear you if you will acknowledge our transmission.’ There was no acknowledgment to this or to other calls from installations manned by specially selected Russian-speaking soldiers, who stood by twenty-four hours a day trying to gain contact.

Planes were not allowed to fly over the Russian lines, and absurd as it may sound, the only inkling we could get as to the Red Army’s whereabouts was by listening to the German radio.

Ike at Supreme Headquarters was no better informed than anybody else. He was ready and willing to go and take Berlin if the Russians requested it. They didn’t.

The Ninth Army, by this time, had a bridgehead over the Elbe near Magdeburg. They were ordered to hold here while stretching their front to the north to relieve British troops west of the river and allow Monty to clean up still farther north. The Ninth Army, too, were counting on making the Russian link, and so confident were they of doing so that they alerted the 2nd Armored Division to head into the German capital as soon as the Reds gave the word.

Georgie’s Third Army, meanwhile, in true Patton style, had forged ahead so fast that they had almost—against orders—captured Chemnitz. Still nobody knew where the Russians were, and in order to avoid incidents, it was decided to keep the plateau between the Elbe and Mulde Rivers a ‘no-man’s-land.’ Our troops were ordered to give up the ground they had taken east of the Mulde and hold along the line of that river. Planes were forbidden to fly beyond it. Artillery was to be fired only at targets recognizable as definitely German. Orders were so explicit, in fact, from a SHAEF worrying that the Americans and Russians would end up fighting each other, that patrols were permitted to cross the Mulde for local protection only.

Those ‘local protection patrols’ turned no-man’s-land’ into ‘every man’s land.’

Each corps, each division, each regiment, each platoon, wanted to be first—but badly. Protection patrols began to exceed anything that military teaching had ever envisaged. And news—covering the great event lapsed into a positive nightmare.

Our camp difficulties by now had reached their all-time high. Our beloved ‘Casey’ had left us, much against his wishes, to take over command of the Fifteenth Army press camp back on the Rhine. ‘Andy’s’ place as Commanding Officer had been taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Courser, who had the main press camp back at Bad Wildungen with Army Headquarters, while our advance camp was at Naumberg, still three jeep hours away from the Elbe, but so far ahead of Army and the main camp that our briefing officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bill’ Fuller, had to fly back and forth by cub plane to pick up information for our briefing. Telephone lines were usually so bad that it sometimes took hours to get through and, the setup being what it was, it frequently happened that Bill’s briefing from Army would be so far behind that of correspondents just back from the forward elements that he’d brief with a laconic ‘You tell me, and if I’ve got anything to add to it I will!’

There was no knowing what time of the day or night the great merger would occur, whether the two armies would come together in one place or lap into each other at several points along the front. The important thing was that wherever or however they did it, we had to be there. This was one story on which there could be no scooping.

Correspondents had their own ideas on coverage. Some held the view that it was best to stay up with one of the divisions, some that it was best to go back at night to advance press camp in the certainty that wherever and whenever the meeting happened, they would be immediately notified, and that there would then still be plenty of time to jeep to the contact point and back again in time to file the story. Whichever school of thought one followed as to the best place to spend the nights, there was only one thing to do with the days, tour up and down the entire front contacting every division and praying that one would not be too far from the right place at the right time.

First meeting of the two forces, when it came at long last, was between a patrol of the 3rd Battalion, 273rd Infantry Regiment, of the 69th Division, led by First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue, and one lone Russian cavalryman at Leckwitz on the afternoon of the 25th of April. The Russian answered Lieutenant Kotzebue’s questions as to where his headquarters were by pointing to the east and then procured a Polish DP to guide the patrol there. They crossed the Elbe at Strehla and proceeded to Krunitz, where the American officer was presented to Major-General Vladimir Rusakov, Commander of the 58th Russian Guards Division.

This, however, was not the story that the newspapers headlined or that the 69th Division briefed reporters to tell. Credit for first contact was given to Lieutenant William D. Robertson of Los Angeles, whose lone jeep with a corporal and a couple of enlisted men got down to the river at Torgau a little later in that same afternoon. Both parties were, of course, violating orders in being that far in front of the Mulde River, but whereas Kotzebue had six jeeps and twenty men, a force which would require some explaining away if the Higher Command began asking awkward questions, Robertson of 1st Battalion of the same regiment, with his one lone jeep, might very plausibly have penetrated farther than he had realized until too late.

Corporal Jim McDonnell, who was in Robertson’s jeep, told me with solemn voice while fisting dust out of brown eyes alight with devilment:

‘We just found ourselves at the edge of Torgau, herding prisoners! We were sweating it out against fire which the Lieutenant thought might be German. It turned out to be Russian, and there was plenty of it. What Germans there were around were a lot more anxious to give themselves up than they were to fight, so we got down to the river without much difficulty, and then thought we’d better let the Red boys know who we were. We went in a store and found some paint and a big sheet of white paper and painted four big red stripes, and a blue field with a few stars on it. Then we climbed the tower in the castle by the bridge and dangled it in front of the Russians.

‘Were they impressed with Old Glory? Not a bit of it! They fired the hell out of it. A GI, who’d been a prisoner in a concentration camp a few hundred yards down the road, suggested he cut along and get a Russian buddy of his who would shout across the river. We got him. And mighty pleased he was to be helpful. He stood there and let out a yell that could have been heard in Moscow and the Ruskies stopped firing long enough for our lieutenant, waving his flag, to go out to our side of the bridge.’

Corporal McDonnell’s description of the meeting itself went into very few words. ‘A Russian lieutenant came up to me,’ he said. ‘I said, “Rusky?” He said “American?” and we went into a clinch.’

Another member of the party, a soldier called Frank Huff, filled in a few details. ‘We swapped rations a bit. We had cigarettes. They had chocolate. A carload of Germans were taking off with a load of liquor and apricots. We told ‘em right there that their journey wasn’t necessary and had a party, and what a party!’

It was still in full swing when the convoys of press jeeps raced tortuously across the maze of narrow roads over the flat pastureland between the Mulde and the Elbe. The roads were mined and nobody knew where or cared. None of the territory had been cleared of Germans. It made no difference to the hurtling jeeps, careening through cornfields and past lakes and through woods, and doubling back on their tracks so often because of broken bridges and cratered roads that correspondents felt as though they were members of a mechanical rodeo.

Torgau itself seemed a dead town as we drove under newly green chestnuts, hawthorns, and limes, past yellow and white and green stucco houses not too badly the worse for war, to reach the banks of the Elbe and our Red Allies.

There was no doubt about their delight at meeting us. In seconds, everyone had been offered drinks enough to get drunk with alcohol as everybody was with excitement. There was only one way of negotiating the slate-gray, swift-flowing stream. That was by racing skiff. Plenty of people were making the crossing and getting into the river in the process, but nobody seemed to mind, not even the mother of the baby Stanley fished out of the river in the nick of time!

Russians, in their mud-gray, high-collared uniforms were dancing and singing and embracing everybody in olive drab in sight, to say nothing of the spearhead elements of the madly vociferous Russian slave army who (complete with accordions looted from a Torgau factory) had gotten into touch with their troops even before we did.

The impromptu celebrations were followed by a luncheon party which was the first of several formal meetings between commanders. Red Army soldiers of feminine gender waited to greet guests on the eastern Elbe shore—first of them a trim figure in Cossack coat and black pleated skirt and high Russian boots, in charge of an ack-ack gun, though not a very impressive gun judged by our standards.

The mile or so of road between the river and the village in which the party was held was lined with guards holding flags. Every third or fourth was a woman chosen from various units of the Red Army and all wearing the much-prized ‘guard’s star’ awarded to volunteers of more than four years’ service.

Lunch was served in the garden of the small villa which did duty as Divisional Headquarters. We walked past saluting guards under flowering magnolia, threading through foxholes onto a small patch of lawn set with nearly every chair and table the village possessed. There was a dance floor in the garden made up of seven different rugs, because the villa was too small and unpretentious to have one big enough for the job. On a plum tree on one side hung a crepe-framed picture of Roosevelt. On an apple tree on the other was a picture of Stalin. A red banner with greetings to the Americans floated between them above an orchestra consisting of three (looted) accordions.

General Baklanov, commanding the 34th Russian Corps, welcomed General Huebner of the 5th Corps and General Reinhardt of the 69th Division by presenting them with the red silk flag of the 34th Corps which flew over Stalingrad throughout the battle. There was more food than any of the Americans present had ever seen on any table at any one time—and more liquor. Women soldiers brought the steaming dishes first to the officers’ table and then took them to the enlisted men’s party across the street. Enlisted men, however, were served with a kiss and embrace and a toast. Those toasts—bottoms up Russian style!—the GI’s found harder to manage than they ever found the enemy.

Lunch over, officers, guests, and women soldiers danced on the carpet square with Caucasian vigor and tremendous enthusiasm. Between dances Russian officers seized interpreters to ask eagerly about conditions in America. ‘When will we get radios and sewing machines?’ was the question most asked.

When we asked how they were going to treat the Germans, Major Alexander Krivitsky, correspondent of the Red Army newspaper Red Star, said, ‘Plans for administration of occupied territory were agreed upon at Yalta and are probably, therefore, the same on this side of the Elbe as the other.’ General Baklanov narrowed his eyes a little, let a smile lurk for a split second around his handsome mouth, and said softly, ‘As they treated us. I was at Stalingrad.’

Baklanov consented readily to the suggestion that we tour towns and villages in his command to see how Russian occupation differed from the American, and invited us to make the trip the next day. ‘Come for an early lunch. Afterward, I will arrange an escort to show you everything you wish to see,’ he suggested.

Judge of our surprise, therefore, to arrive at the river bank next morning to be met with guards and orders to stay on our own side. Bill Stoneman of Chicago Daily News and the New York Herald Tribune’s Russell Hill explained in their most fluent Russian that we had a lunch date, but to no avail. Finally, Bill, in his most forthright manner, insisted that the guard telephone his general.

‘Either he wants us or he doesn’t!’ declared Bill truculently. ‘Tell him we want to know which it is.’

Back came the guard, a Russian major, ‘He says he does want you and that he is sorry, but that orders have come from a very high source, and there is nothing he can do about it.’

There was nothing that anybody could do about it. After two days of the most joyously spontaneous partying ever, the boundary was to be crossed between the two zones by invitation only.

The ruling came as a tremendous disappointment to GI’s and Russians who had been blithely ferrying back and forth. It came as a blessing from heaven for German citizens in Torgau, many of whom had had experiences like the one who rushed up to our soldiers one day pleading that they help save his wife being raped by a Russian soldier who would kill him if he went back alone to interfere.

To several dozen Allied war correspondents it was easily their worst experience of the war.

They had been notified by Supreme Allied Headquarters to leave their existent assignments and take off immediately for Torgau. Some had come from as far north as the Holland coast, without the slightest idea of what they had to report, but expecting, naturally, that it was to go into Berlin.

Instead, they found that SHAEF had invited them to witness the Russian link-up three days after it was all over. And now, to make matters worse, they were not allowed to cross the river for as much as a sight of a Russian Command Post.

Various reasons were advanced for this sudden cessation of commuting. The one most generally accepted was that the Russians, not allowing war correspondents to wander unescorted through their lines, had clamped down when they found several jeeploads of our correspondents had taken off through their territory with the idea of getting to Berlin. Two of them actually managed to do it—one a woman, Virginia Irwin. With her jeep mate, Andy Tully, she took off from General Baklanov’s luncheon party and didn’t stop until her jeep hit the German capital.

Perhaps the most disappointed man on the whole Western Front over the Russian meeting was General ‘Terry’ Allen. A patrol of his 104th Timber Wolf’ Division had been in Torgau half an hour before Lieutenant Robertson’s. It was just half an hour too soon. Not a Russian was in sight!

While this forging occurred, Georgies Third Army were driving to link with the Red Armies at Linz. Nobody knew what had happened to Hitler, but the general feeling was that he was in his National Redoubt at Berchtesgaden for the last grand stand and Patton had to deal with it. West of him, Patch’s Seventh Army drove through Innsbruck to capture the Brenner Pass, while the First French Army driving up the east bank of the Rhine had reached the Swiss border.

Some of the most bitter fighting of all switched to Prague in the war’s last five days. Czech partisans, who had to wait longer than had any other Allied partisans for their chance to get even, released the pent-up fury of six years of oppression against small groups of SS troops trapped in the city battling for what they knew had to be a fight to the finish.

The partisans opened hostilities on the Saturday before the peace declared the following Tuesday. On Sunday, Hermann Frank, German State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia, broadcast that since the Reich had been destroyed Prague must be destroyed also. Following his broadcast Germans bombed the city.

Partisans, seizing radio stations, urged citizens to fight, and all Sunday afternoon and evening thousands of men, women, and children toiled like beavers building street barricades, mainly of German plane fuselages which they dragged from the local factory.

That day ninety thousand Germans began streaming out of Prague toward the west. General Vlassov, commanding the White Russian Army which had been fighting for the Germans, hearing of the proximity of the Red Army, decided that this was the right moment to switch sides. He, therefore, offered the Czechs the services of twenty thousand men under his command, but General Karel Kutivask, commanding the Czech forces, said a firm ‘Thank you, but, since we can offer you no Allied protection in return, we think it wiser you stay out of the fight.’

On Monday, while the rest of the world waited with bated breath for the cessation of hostilities, SS troops were marching down the streets of Prague using old men and women and children as shields against the partisans’ fire. They massacred and tortured fifty Czechs at the Massary railway station and burned down the city hall. Fighting raged through the streets all day and all night. A handful of Czechs fought thirty SS troops in one building from room to room until they killed every one. Then, on Tuesday night, General Toussaint, Wehrmacht Commander, surrendered to General Kutivask with the provision that sporadic fighting was likely to continue among the SS over whom he had no authority, since they were holed-in where they would have no option but to continue fighting Czechs, who would kill them if they came out to surrender.

News of the cessation of hostilities was carried to German forces in Czechoslovakia by Colonel Robert Pratt, Assistant G-3 of 5th Corps. Accompanied by an interpreter, a cavalry escort, and a representative of the German High Command, he spent two days behind the German lines, delivered news of the German surrender to the German Commander and got back safely to Headquarters.

Colonel Pratt traveled as far as Pilsen by plane, where he organized a forty-man guard and awaited the arrival of Colonel Meyer Detring of the Planning Section of the Wehrmacht High Command, who was representing Dönitz, the new head of the German Government.

The German colonel arrived early in the evening and the entire group drove through the darkness to Prague, arriving just before midnight. Word had been sent on that the Americans were coming and Czech guards were at every intersection excitedly motioning the way to the city. In spite of the late hour, every town and village en route had its own welcoming committee out with red, white, and blue flags and masses of flowers.

When they finally arrived in Prague, it was to learn that Field Marshal Schörner, Commanding General of the German Forces in the area, was at Welchow, a small town on the Polish border. Off they went, with Colonel Pratt and his interpreter riding on the outside of their sedan in order to protect the German colonel from Czechs who could visualize only one fitting fate for him. Fifteen kilometers from Welchow the party was fired upon by a group of Russians, but nobody got hurt and after a brief halt and some explanation Colonel Pratt was allowed to continue.

He got to German Headquarters (nearly two hundred miles from his own) in time to breakfast on fresh eggs and sausages, and having completed his mission, returned to the 5th Corps.

Monty accepted surrender of all German units on his front so quietly that it was all over with before most of the correspondents had even heard of it. From our particular camp, Bill Downs of the Columbia Broadcasting System kept up his reputation for always being in the right place at the right time, and had the unusual distinction for a radioman of having the London papers use his broadcast as their lead story.

Two days later, on May 7, SHAEF sent out word from Rheims that a representative of the German High Command had signed unconditional surrender of all land, sea, and air forces. Hostilities were to cease at midnight on May 8.

So it was over.

We sat in the press camp now in a small hotel back at Weimar, and wrote our last dispatches. How, in the command posts, officers and men were cracking bottles of schnapps and wine and cognac, under battle maps marked with their little flagged squares and the crosses and numbers which meant corps and divisions and regiments. We could remember what we never dared to allow ourselves to think about before, that they meant men, too. We could think of the scrawls on the maps which no longer indicated strongly held enemy positions and heavy fire to be encountered before objectives could be taken. We could look at phase lines as one commanding officer did with a ‘Thank God, I don’t have to reckon those in men’s lives any more.’ We could look at the brown splotches and green splashes and blue lines which only yesterday were terrain features which added into the accounting of so many thousands of yards lost or gained. They wouldn’t have to be reckoned that way any more. They weren’t hills which the enemy held with perfect observation over our troops, or forests which we had to fight through, or rivers which had to be bridged by infantry under heavy fire. Now, those terrain features on the maps were just woods, green and exquisite in spring, and hills, heat-hazed for a perfect May day, and rivers, sparkling in the sun.

The end came with incredible scenes from the German Army once Dönitz had let them know over the radio that it was finished. Nazi officers raced one another in from their positions for the privilege of surrendering—asking our soldiers to take pictures of them doing it.

To the civilians, V-E Day was one of resigned thankfulness that the war was over—never mind how. It was an end to Hitler, to the Gestapo, to husbands and sons and fathers going into the Army, to bombing...

In the Brehemistrasse in Weimar, a German hausfrau was arduously delving possessions from a crater which was all a bomb had left of her home. Her two children, a boy of two and a golden pigtailed girl of five, were searching with her. So was an old man who was all that was left of the male members of her family. Her two brothers, her husband, and their two older sons had all been killed in the war. She dug out a silver candlestick which had been flattened when the top floor of her house caved in on it and began beating it back into shape. ‘War is a very dreadful, terrible thing,’ she said. ‘We did not know it would be like this.’

Soldiers opened their Stars and Stripes to read the headline, ‘Nazis Quit,’ without much more by way of comment than a fervent ‘Thank Christ!’ When the great moment came, to most of them it was as flat as champagne with the bubbles gone. There was nothing about it that would go easily into words. The stirring, heart-catching wonder of it, and all it meant, belonged to emotion—and there was precious little elasticity left to anybody’s emotion by that time.

The press camp decided that the occasion called for a party.

We swept typewriters off the tables in the copy-room. We rolled up the maps. We filled great jugs full of lilac boughs snapped most unwillingly from German front gardens by Stanley and Don Whitehead of the Associated Press, who thought ‘looting—even for flowers—ought to stop now that the shooting has.’ Everybody put on his ‘class A’ uniform. Lee fully intended to wear a skirt, only she hadn’t anything but boots to wear with it, so finally compromised with pink trousers and her best jacket. With ‘The Beard’ as host we then received General Courtney Hodges and his Headquarters Staff, Division Commanders and their staffs, and all our devoted friends and colleagues, the Public Relations and Intelligence Officers. We were even friendly to the censors. War in Europe was over!

And I promised to marry First Army’s red-headed Operations Officer.

17

NEXT morning, Stanley put his head around my door with a ‘Come on, Carpenter. We’re going to Prague.’

Camp was already breaking up. Some correspondents were awaiting Russian permission to reopen their paper’s Berlin bureaus, some were going back to Paris, a few to Britain with their war-reporting days done. The rest of us planned merely to transfer activities. We were sailing to America with First Army Headquarters en route to the Pacific.

Meanwhile, it was the first day of peace—a golden, glorious day, with apple blossoms patterned pinkly against the blue skies above our speeding jeep, and air heavy with the smell of lilacs and noisy with the song of the birds.

We were dropping Maxie Zera, Public Relations Officer of the 1st Division, who had come up for the party, at divisional headquarters at some unpronounceable village the other side of the Czech border. ‘With any luck we’ll get there in time for lunch,’ said Maxie, and forthwith bellowed into song. Maxie, fantastic fellow, bellowed everything, prefacing it with a ‘Listen, kid.’ The 1st Division was his idol. He adored it. It adored him. So did the correspondents. The life of all our parties, whether in Chambre Six or anywhere else, he would roar into song without the slightest provocation, making up words and music as he went along and bludgeoning everything else out, even the heaviest bombardment. Racing along the Autobahn, he was giving out his favorite, ‘When the Yanks come rolling along.’ ‘We’ll take the Hit out of Hitler, the Mussol out of Lini...‘ he bawled lustily, as a ragged-looking figure ran into the road to wave madly to us to stop.

He was a British prisoner of war and wanted to know if we had any gas that he could take to his pals a few miles farther back. Seven of them had picked up a German car from the prison from which the Russians had freed them. It now lacked wherewithal to run.

We had no spare cans, but we piled the soldier and his bike on the jeep with Maxie’s assurance that he’d get some from a truck by the time we fetched up with the rest of the party. He got it and also a case of rations. The ex-prisoners, swarmed all over a German Volkswagen by the roadside, were ravenously eating raw potatoes and did not know that the war was over.

‘Shanks,’ our jeep driver, hauled off the bike and then dug about under the welter of stuff on the jeep floor until he produced a couple of bottles of wine. He handed them over with a ‘Jeez, brothers! It sure does me good to be able to say, “Have this one on me.” ‘

Division Headquarters, when we reached them in time for lunch, which included chicken and ice cream, had just taken one of their most distinguished prisoners of war to date, Konrad Henlein, Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter of Czechoslovakia, the man who roused the Sudeten Germans to start the trouble in Europe which eventuated in the war, the man who first indicated to the world what the term ‘Nazi Gauleiter’ meant to the unfortunates under his rule.

By the time we got down to the cage, he was already on his way, with dozens and dozens of other truckloads of prisoners, to 5th Corps Headquarters at Pilsen, where we followed him—fast as Shanks could drive.

The 5th Corps had just finished their first interrogation of Hermann Frank, German Gauleiter of Bohemia and Moravia, who had driven in that morning to surrender with his whole headquarters staff and their wives and children. But they had no record of Henlein.

It took several hours of questioning and traveling between various prison cages and headquarters before a GI informed us that he rather thought the guy we were asking about was in the hospital next door. ‘A couple of medics took him in a few hours ago.’

Nurse Christina Ostermeyer of Stuttgart said a quiet ‘Yes, come with me,’ when we asked if Henlein was in the hospital. She led the way into a small washroom, where a white sheet was spread over what looked like a bundle of linen. Seizing a corner of it, she dragged it back to display to Stanley and myself—neither of us in any way prepared for such a sight—the unmistakable and extremely bloody corpse of the man all Czechs had hated so hard for so long. The big ears, sunken gray cheeks, and whitening hair appeared even less kindly-looking in death than they had in life. The garden, with its broad borders of black, dazzling white and sky-blue pansies, seemed very good to stare long and hard at when we got outside.

Prisoners were being caged in staggering quantities. There were so many that a few in each group had to be allowed to retain their arms to keep the others in order. Through an oversight, Henlein was put in with ordinary prisoners instead of being given quarters competent to his rank, and, shrouded by men too concerned with their own condition to notice anybody else’s, he was able to slash both wrists.

Nurse Ostermeyer told us that they had worked for an hour to save his life, but it was too late. She wanted to know what would become of her country now that it had surrendered. ‘Are you going to make us hate you as you did the last time, so one day we have to go through it all over again? Or will you just go away and leave it to the Russians to slowly annihilate us?’ she asked. Then, without giving us time to reply, she put clenched fists under her chin and said, with impatient, bitter vehemence, ‘Oh, of all stupidity war is the very greatest.’

A Czech patriot leaped aboard the jeep as we ran through our lines and out over the thirty-mile stretch of country between our boundary and the oncoming Russians. It was getting dusk. Roadblocks in every village were manned by armed partisans. These fell back hurrahing wildly as we approached with our guide screaming ‘Americanos’ at the top of his voice.

Though it was peace, desultory fighting had been going on all day in Prague between partisans and SS troops holed-up in different parts of the city. As we arrived, the vanguard of the Russian tanks came pouring through amid scenes of rejoicing which dwarfed anything we had seen—even during the liberation of Paris.

Going back through the Russian lines—twenty kilometers from Prague by that time—worried us. The Russians had already picked up and kept imprisoned several of our correspondents, including Lee and Don Whitehead. To be sure they let them go again after several days, when they had satisfied themselves that their credentials were in order, but we had no desire to add imprisonment by the Red Army to the rest of our war experience.

Troops, coiling up for the night, stared curiously, but we were not stopped. Their bedding-down was very different from the way Allied soldiers ‘hit the hay.’ There was no question of rigging camp, as such. Men, riding anything that would roll from German tradesmen’s trucks to captured tanks and guns, just poured into the fields beside the road and curled up by their transport. Nor were they the trimly uniformed troops who met us at Torgau. These men personified in manner and appearance all that one ever envisaged of the Mongol hordes that ravaged out of the East in earlier history. No wonder the Germans were afraid of them.

And they were mortally afraid.

Against their fear, in that fifty miles between Prague and Pilsen, was all that went into defeat in scenes that could never smudge memory if one lived to be a thousand.

For all those miles, the road was full of Germans trying to get to our lines rather than surrender to the Red Army. We had edged through them going into Prague in daylight, past a regiment of cavalry, riding with colors dipped; past a sea of soldiers’ faces with thousands of thousands of pairs of blue eyes broody with despair; past a soldier of not more than fifteen being half-carried along by older men on either side of him, and crying, not because his country was beaten, but just because he was too tired to go on walking and had to.

It was worse, much worse, as we struggled back through them at midnight, our headlights sharp-pointing their misery, the mothy and warm night filled with the dragging shuffle of countless weary feet.

There were whole hospitals fleeing, nurses arming men along or pushing them in hand-trucks, men hobbling on crutches or plodding with arms stiffly akimbo in plaster casts. Interspersed with the walkers were vehicles of every description, so tightly packed that when one stopped to pick up a cripple no longer able to get along under his own power, nurses and soldiers had to shove with might and main to wedge him in. At least four men rode on the axle of every truck. Horse-drawn carriages, years old, were burdened wherever there was space for even a handhold. Perambulators were piled high with everything but children. Bicycles carried as many as three or four passengers.

People bunched in and all over everything that moved, and clung on to it and to each other so that the momentum could help them drag their own weight forward. When they could go forward no longer, they stumbled to the roadside and sagged in great unhappy drifts to pray that enough strength be given them to move before the Russians caught up.

When we got back to the signs which said, ‘Limit of advance for American troops,’ the headlights flooded road verges littered deep with every imaginable variety of weapons and equipment. Men just dropped everything as they lurched on, to be turned finally into the meadows on either side of the road between the pine clumps. There, with women and children, they flopped to spill themselves into great lakes of wretchedness and degradation which the most war-hurt soul in Christendom could never be bitter enough to wish to see.

That was conquest. That, without knowing what it would look like, or ever thinking about it very much, was what we had been fighting for.

And as the weary GI guard, shooing the conquered into custody like so much exhausted cattle, said, ‘Where do we go from here? What are we gonna do about all these folks? We won the war all right, but this sure makes you scared as hell of all it’s gonna take to keep the peace.’

THE END

About the Author

Iris Carpenter, the daughter of a cinema entrepreneur, was born in England in 1906. She became a journalist and worked as a film critic for the Daily Express. After her marriage to Charles Scruby she retired from journalism for a time and raised two children. During the World War II, she joined the Daily Herald, covering the Blitz in London. When she was refused permission to cover the war in Europe, she moved to the United States and became a war correspondent with the Boston Globe. Carpenter, accredited to the First United States Army, arrived in France four days after the D-Day landings. Soon afterwards she got into trouble with the authorities after visiting the Cherbourg beachhead without a proper military escort. As a result, Carpenter and other women reporters were placed under the command of the Public Relations Division and were told they could not visit the frontline. This directive was later changed, and along with Tania Long, Ann Stringer and Catherine Coyne, she was allowed to travel with the 1st Army and reported the war in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany.

Carpenter was also at Torgau when the Russian Red Army and the U.S. Army joined up for the first time. Jack Hazard of the Boston Globe later commented: “She has made several scoops of real news that men missed, because of her daring, enthusiasm, originality and scorn of personal comfort.” She was also with the troops when they liberated the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. According to Time magazine: “Her reports from the front lines and hospitals in France and Germany described in graphic prose some of the bloodiest fighting on the Western front, including the Battle of the Bulge as well as the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.”

After the war, she married Colonel Russell F. Akers of the First United States Army. Her book describing her wartime experiences, No Woman’s World, was published in 1946. Iris Carpenter passed away in 1997 at the age of 93.

Source: https://spartacus-educational.com/

 Additional Sources

Additional Sources

1. See U.S.  Army Center of Military History at https://history.army.mil/index.html

2. For information about World War II European Theater, see https://www.westpoint.edu/academics/academic-departments/history/world-war-two-europe

3. See war diaries at https://www.normandywarguide.com/war-diaries

4. Some of the cities where the Allies staged forces for the invasion of Normandy had been severely damaged during the Blitz earlier in the war. See https://www.keymilitary.com/2018/08/10/obliterated-the-blitz-on-plymouth

5. More information about crossing the Rhine is at https://history.army.mil/brochures/rhineland/rhineland.htm and http://genealogytrails.com/ww2/tadftr.html