Scenes from the End : The Last... | Buy

Chapter One

BAPTISM OF FIRE

By Christmas eve 1944 the German offensive through the Ardennes had penetrated almost sixty miles beyond the Allied front lines, creating a salient six miles wide. Rundstedt's surprise attack in mid-December had turned Paris into a hotbed of wild rumors. Stories circulated that German spies were being dropped into the city by parachute. Anyone with a German accent became suspect, and foreign-born members of Allied prisoner-of-war interrogation teams were frequent targets of mistrust. But boys in uniform will play, and some of our officers were picked up and hustled off to centers where their comrades, straightfaced, subjected them to questioning and practiced their clumsy techniques for hours on end, while the victims sweated it out, bewildered by their seemingly earnest erstwhile friends.

I was among the new American arrivals from England and was quartered in the elegant suburb of Le Vésinet, where streets led off in diverse directions from a roundabout with a bronze stag in the middle of a small plot of grass. Rail service to Paris was frequent; returning tipsy late at night I had only to follow one of the streets that branched off from the stag to reach my billet. But from which part of the stag -- that was the question.

On December 22, still ignorant of the enormity of the German Bulge, which cost us seventy thousand casualties before it was rolled back, I had written to my wife: "Some sort of game is on ... France is not what it seems like in the States. It is hard to communicate the furtive glances. It may be said that many Frenchmen prefer our occupation to the German. The tenor is Directoire. As far as the real show, one has a feeling of being swallowed up in something vast and Germanic in its enormity. Anyway, I did get here when they needed me most." The next day I was told that I was being attached to a newly formed Twenty-first Corps soon moving into action. "I have eaten in an officers' mess in Paris," I reported home, "and now I understand why those who have it hot and cold hate the embusqués , the guys holed up far behind the front. As under the Directorate, for him who has the paper, everything is available -- which was not necessarily so in England. The honeymoon of liberation has not endured for long. I am having my last elegant meals with some indifference. It would have been good to carry away images of a city you felt had some living force behind it, rather than the spectacle of women perched on high-heeled wooden shoes and crowned with two-foot Directoire coiffures dyed blonde."

On the twenty-sixth I characterized as "gay-sad" my Christmas in Paris. "I had excellent drinks -- in all a rather grotesque background for the real show, which ought to be coming on any time now. The cold is preferable to the English rain, but when there is nothing to burn except for Louis XV fauteuils you freeze. There is a story that the rooms where I am quartered were once occupied by Field Marshal Rommel. It feels peculiar to lie in a canopied bed where a German officer slept, with good cold air rushing in through the broken window." Before the year was out my mood changed. "Paris has been rather pleasant, at least there is plenty of cognac and good wine. The world is compressed for me from now on out. I know little and have nothing to write about. Well, nothing for a few days now."

On New Year's Eve, I wrote again. "While waiting to have my jeep fixed I drop you a little note. Yesterday I had much bubbly water in Paris with some of the embusqués . Boy, it's a good life, really better than London if you have any rank. Everything is so remote and yet so near. Soon comes retribution for the easy time I've had for six months. Tomorrow a new year and a new life for me."

While I was amusing myself at the Moulin Rouge, I later learned, the American troops were suffering in the area around Bastogne in one of the worst European winters in years. Despite warning signals from our intelligence officers, we were caught unawares by twenty-five German divisions that the Wehrmacht had managed to assemble secretly. Hitler's last spasm bewildered the American command. We paid for our hubris in blood.

My interrogation team set out from Paris on New Year's Day 1945 in a jeep that dragged along a trailer in which a large, four-door filing cabinet, meant to be stuffed with interrogation reports, rode in solitary splendor. As soon as we came to a running brook, we lifted the cabinet out of its trailer and heaved it into the water. Having performed this act of emancipation from the clanking dinosaur, we proceeded to Baccarat, our first stop, where we dallied while officers bought cartons of crystal for shipment home. In my mind's eye I saw mountains of expensive glass shattered by enemy shells. Information about the Battle of Bastogne raging in the north was still murky, and we had no idea precisely where the front line was. The army kept us in reserve for a period, with nothing much to do except listen to local tales about the collaborators who had worked with the Germans when they controlled the area. We were not commissioned to arrest miscreants. If we had been, we would have had to incarcerate half of any town through which we moved -- only we didn't know which half. On a clear day, watching an armada of our planes as they flew in formation toward Germany, I was convinced that the war would soon be over, a pleasant prospect. French refugees from the shifting border with Germany were not that sanguine.

Without much prior notice we were ordered to cross the Vosges Mountains in a snowstorm. I spent my first night in the field sleeping on the floor of a farmhouse amid a score of other Corps officers who snored in disunison. To sleep under all conditions is the mark of a hardened soldier, which I was not.

As it turned out, the Twenty-first Corps did not move in the direction of the Battle of the Bulge, but had been sent southward to the Seventh Army area in order to counter the Germans' "Operation Nordwind," designed to extend the perimeters of their Alsace pocket centered in Colmar. On January 13, the Twenty-first Corps became operational and assumed the defense of the left flank of the Seventh Army. It had been decided on high that the conquest of the lost province of Alsace would be commanded by the Free French under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. The First French Army opened an offensive to eliminate the pocket with two divisions, the Fourth Moroccan Mountain Division on the west and the Second Moroccan Infantry Division on the east; and on January 25, the Twenty-first Corps Headquarters and Headquarters Company were transferred to the command of the French Army, taking tactical control of a new zone between the French First and Second Corps. Our mission was to assist in the reduction of the Colmar pocket by attacking in the direction of Brisach.

The joint operation with our French allies instilled in me a lasting prejudice against all such common ventures. I spoke both French and German tolerably well, and became a useful jack-of-all-trades as long as we were under the orders of de Lattre. At a midnight session de Lattre presented to the officers of our Corps his plan for capturing Colmar, preceded by a rambling, long-winded exposition of the political and military situation in the various other European theaters. At first I translated his pompous speech sentence by sentence; but as my fellow officers showed increasingly visible signs of boredom and drowsiness I condensed my summaries of his remarks more and more until they were reduced to laconic phrases and then grunts. Somehow the irritation provoked by de Lattre was directed against me, his hapless mouthpiece. Finally he stopped and turned with a flourish to our Corps commander, General Milburn, a genial ex-football coach: "And what do you say, mon général ?" To which de Lattre received a terse reply that freed the assemblage from his oratorical envelopment: "Tell him we'll be there."

Although the recovery of Alsace was a sideshow of the major war in the west after Bastogne, casualties were heavy. Nothing went right during the campaign for the Colmar pocket -- a rather simple operation -- and on more than one occasion the French and American troops, heading in opposite directions through somebody's foul-up, were stuck in a gridlock on a narrow, crooked Alsatian street. The French goumiers (North Africans), laughing hilariously, frolicked around the jeeps and tanks. During one such tie-up the Germans sent from across the Rhine a few planes that strafed the entangled columns. While it was permissible for ordinary soldiers to duck under the jeeps in which we were riding, I judged it to be conduct unbefitting an officer, and endured the ordeal as a hero in a state of fright. If the Germans had had any air power left, our snaking line of troops and equipment would have ended in a massacre. But despite the gamble of the Ardennes offensive, the Third Reich was collapsing.

Communication between the French and American forces had its comic moments. Our Corps once used "cotter key" as its code name, and since telephone connections were less than adequate, my yelling " C'est cotter key qui parle " was to no avail. In exasperation I began to spell out the letters of the incomprehensible object according to the accepted formula. This only compounded the bewilderment. In extremis, I improvised a spelling scheme of my own: "C comme cul, O comme onanisme , T comme teton , E comme érection ." The sexual allusions enlightened my French counterpart, though clearly neither he nor I knew what a "cotter key" was. We were city boys.

When Colmar was captured from the Germans the interrogation team warned our general in vain against moving Corps headquarters into the city, since it was obvious that the enemy would have left behind spies who, speaking Alsatian German, had easy access to information and could transmit the precise location of our installations to artillery on the other side of the Rhine. On its own authority our team established itself at some distance from the city center, apart from Corps headquarters. We occupied a farm, where the housewife cooked up a delectable stew from the ingredients of our tins of K rations. The prisoners of war whom we dragged along with us were put under guard in closed rooms and everything was tranquil until nightfall. Then, once they were fed, their voices rang out lustily in patriotic songs. We worried whether our small contingent of military police would be able to restrain them if they should make a dash for it.

By that time I was beginning to feel the effect of the "pantherpiss" (Kirschwasser), and I went up on the roof to survey the area, now brilliantly illuminated by bombs bursting into Colmar and igniting fires. Transfixed, I watched the display and turned philosophical, ruminating on the madness of war, listening to the chorus of German prisoners, hoping that our guards would stay awake, secretly troubled lest the German artillery miss its target and hit our farmhouse instead. The next day, when we returned to Colmar headquarters, we found that the Germans had lobbed a bomb right into the war room, making the situation map look crazier than usual.

Telephone lines became so hopelessly intertwined that I was sent to deliver a message to the French command in person. As I approached, wading through a sea of mud, shells began falling all around us. My hand trembled when I lit a cigarette and I felt ashamed standing before the seasoned warriors of the Free French. To cover my embarrassment I tried to jest about the cache of French brandy we had discovered and consumed the night before, to account for my shakes and colossal hangover. I was not convincing.

The lunch to which I was invited by the French lasted a full three hours and provoked in me a flood of puritanical, self-righteous reflections. We who were fighting for the liberation of their country never indulged in such Lucullan feasts in the midst of battle. We deferred our debauches until after-hours, when the generous liquor allotments we had awarded ourselves encouraged staid majors and colonels to swing from chandeliers after swilling a concoction of champagne and gin. The special officer who had been deputed to transport cases of the stuff from Antwerp, an active Allied port since November, was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery in defense of the potions that won us a citation.

After the elimination of the Colmar pocket I was quartered for a while in the house of a widow whose young son had been picked up by the Germans and shipped off she knew not where. "To die for the motherland is sad enough," she wept, "but to die for the enemy! And all the time they hated him and called him Frenchman. My bubele , my kindele , in the ss! Maybe you'll find him and send him home to me. Such a handsome bubele; here is his stuhlele ." The widow's beds were large and soft, there was plenty of Alsatian wine and Kirschwasser, but my virtue was not assailed. My German, never free of a Boston Yiddish accent, was close enough to the Alsatian dialect to make conversation easy. The daughter of the house confided to me that she wished the next time around the stork would deposit her somewhere deep in France or in the heart of Germany. Being shunted back and forth between the two countries had become unbearable. I promised to look for their bubele in the prisoner-of-war corral. He probably was killed on the eastern front.

Elimination of the Colmar pocket was as significant a political as a military venture. When the Twenty-eighth Division of the Twenty-first Corps had reached the edge of Colmar on February 2, it had been ordered to pause, allowing the tanks of the French First Armored Division to enter the city ahead of us, a bow to the political sensibilities of the Free French. The Corps and its interrogation team were relatively new to combat and my baptism of fire had occurred under de Lattre, who, along with Generals Patton and Montgomery, was among the most temperamental leaders with whom Eisenhower had to contend. But like a first love, the battle of Colmar taught me more about the modern profession of arms than I have learned since.

By February 8 the Twenty-first Corps had completed its mission and eight days later reverted to the control of the Seventh Army. On February 9 and 11 I could announce triumphantly to my wife: "By now it is public record that we have been in on the elimination of the Colmar pocket. As a mission it had much in its favor -- plenty of Riesling, Sylvaner, and Kirsch. The towns are all stage-set imitations of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , and the miracle of supply consists in the passage of two-way traffic up and down the narrow streets, without crashing into a house. A number of towns were smashed like those in Normandy; others got off more lightly.

"The warriors are sitting in their tents recuperating from the hardships of battle. The tents happen to have featherbed covers; the Boche got out too quickly to destroy all the wine cellars; we have the services of a pretty good cook; and we endure the boredom of each other's company. Walking up and down the former Adolf Hitler Street is our principal Colmar diversion."

On February 28 the Seventh Army under General Patch was regrouped: the Twenty-first Corps was placed on its left flank and we were ordered to hold the line abreast the Saar and the Moder. The plan was to mop up the Rhine-Palatinate area, destroy the pillboxes of the West Wall, cross the Rhine near Worms, and begin our drive into the German interior, moving southeast and due south to the Alps. We reached Weilheim and Bad Tölz in a rapid advance and occupied the whole of the southern front. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide, followed on May 6 by the surrender of German Army Group G under Field Marshal Kesselring. The next day, what was left of the German High Command signed the surrender of their army at Rheims. Instead of dashing to Berlin, which by arrangement was left to the Russians, we were ordered to Leipzig, scene of the last of my exploits.