"So he died."
BY MARCH 28 First Army had broken out of the Remagen bridgehead. General Rose's 3rd Armoured Division led the way, headed for the linkup with Ninth Army. That day Rose raced ahead, covering 90 miles, the longest gain on any single day of the war for any American unit. By March 31 he was attacking a German tank training centre outside Paderborn. Rose was at the head of a column in his jeep. Turning a corner, his driver ran smack into the rear of a Tiger tank. The German tank commander, about eighteen years old, opened his hatch and levelled his burp gun at Rose, yelling at him to surrender.
Rose, his driver, and his aide got out of the jeep and put their hands up. For some reason the tank commander became extremely agitated and kept hollering while gesturing towards Rose's pistol. Rose lowered his arm to release his web belt and drop his holster to the ground. Apparently the German boy thought he was going to draw his pistol. In a screaming rage he fired his machine pistol straight into Rose's head, killing him instantly. Maurice Rose was the first and only division commander killed in ETO.
In most cases the retreating Germans did not stop to fight. Generally they passed right through the villages, rather than use them as strong-points. First and Third armies were advancing in mostly rural areas, spending their nights in houses. The GIs would give the inhabitants five minutes or so to clear out. The German families were indignant. The GIs were insistent. As Major Max Lale put it in a March 30 letter home, "None of us have any sympathy for them."
The rural German homes had creature comforts-electricity, hot water, soft, white toilet paper-such as most people thought existed in 1945 only in America. On his first night in a house Private Joe Burns spent five minutes in a hot shower. Fifty-one years later he declared it to be "the most exquisite five minutes in my life. Never before or since have I had such pure pleasure." Private David Webster recalled washing his liands at the sink and deciding, "This was where we belonged. A small, sociable group, a clean, well-lighted house [behind blackout curtains], a cup of coffee-paradise." Things were looking up, even though there was still a lot of Germany to overrun.
Chapter Twelve
Victory: April 1-May 7. 1945
EASTER CAME on April 1 in 1945. In many cases the celebration of the Resurrection brought the GIs and German civilians together. Sergeant Lindy Sawyers of the 99th Division and his squad had moved into a house that was big enough to allow the frau and her two small girls to remain. He remembered that on the day before Easter, "I entered the house and heard a wail from the mom and kids." He asked what was wrong and was told that some of his men had stolen the family Easter cake. Sawyers investigated and caught two recruits who had done the deed. He returned the cake to its owners. "There was great rejoicing and I felt virtuous, for a second at least."
Sergeant Oakley Honey recalled that as his squad left the house they had slept in, "the old lady was handing something to each guy as we left. As I got to the woman, I could see tears in her eyes as she placed a decorated Easter Egg in my hand. We had treated them well and not disturbed the main part of the house. For this they were thankful. There was an unwritten code. If you had to fight for a town, anything in it was yours. If we were allowed to walk in unopposed, we treated the population much better."
On Easter Sunday, 1944, the US Army had had no troops or vehicles on the European continent north of Rome. One year later there were over 1 million GIs in Germany, most of whom had been civilians in 1943, many of them in 1944. Tens of thousands of American trucks, jeeps, DUKWs (amphibious vehicles), armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and more rolled down the roads, covered by thousands of aeroplanes ranging in size from Piper Cubs to B-17s and B-24s. In the villages and towns civilians stood on the sidewalks, awestruck by this display of mobility and firepower. Few had any illusions about how the war was going to end. The older German civilians were delighted that Americans, rather than Russians or French troops, had come to their towns and could hardly do enough for them.
The youngsters were different, and not just those teenagers in the Volkssturm units. In one town Sergeant Honey stood next to an elderly German man and a ten year-old boy. As the Shermans and brand new Pershings (America's first heavy tank, armed with a 90-mm cannon) rumbled by, the boy said, "Deutsches Panzer ist besser." Honey looked down at him and asked, "If German tanks are better, why aren't they here?"
But the GIs were surprised to find how much they liked the Germans. Clean, hardworking, disciplined, cute kids, educated, middle class in their tastes and lifestyles-the Germans seemed to many American soldiers to be "just like us." Private Webster of the 101st hated the Nazis and wished more German villages would be destroyed, so that the Germans would suffer as the French and Belgians had suffered and thus learn not to start wars. Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. "The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people," he wrote his parents. "In Germany everybody goes out and works."
In some cases the GIs mistreated the civilian population, and they engaged in widespread looting, especially of wine, jewellery, and Nazi memorabilia. Combat veterans insist that the worst of this was carried out by replacements who had arrived too late to see any action. Overall, it is a simple fact to state that the American and British occupying armies, in comparison to other conquering armies in World War II, acted correctly and honourably.
So the Germans in areas occupied by the Americans were lucky, and they knew it. Thus the theme of German-American relations in the first week of April, 1945, was harmony.
CORPORAL ROGER Foehringer was in the 106th Division and had been captured along with four buddies. On Easter Sunday their guards began marching them east, to flee the oncoming American army. Foehringer and his men dropped out of the line, hid in a wood, and thus escaped. They started moving west. Near the village of Versbach someone shot at them. They ran. Up on a hill they saw two elderly gentlemen waving their arms, motioning for the GIs to come their way. They did. The Germans showed them a cave and indicated they should stay put. They spent the night. They could hear and see the German army heading east.
In the morning, Foehringer related, "two young boys came into the cave and brought with them black bread, lard and ersatz coffee. Hot!!! We couldn't communicate with them, but they let us know we should stay put. Late in the afternoon of the 6th, the boys came running up to the cave yelling, 'Die Amerikaner kommen! Die Amerikaner kommen!' So we and the boys raced down the hill towards Versbach. The whole little village was surrounding a jeep in the centre of the square and on top of the hood of the jeep was an American sergeant waving a .45 around in the air."
The sergeant was a mechanic with a tank destroyer outfit from the rear who had got to drinking and decided he was going to the front to see what it was like. So he stole a jeep and took off. He had no idea where he was and hoped Foehringer did. For his part, Foehringer wanted to thank those who had helped him. "Every jeep in the world had a foot locker with all kinds of stuff," he remembered. "Candy bars, rations, bandages and medical supplies. So we opened the foot locker and threw everything to the people." Then all five GIs scrambled onto the jeep. "There wasn't much to us," Foehringer explained. "I was down to 100 pounds, so were the others. So we were only about 500 pounds."