Forgotten heroes who fought the last battles of WW2
The great American literary and cultural historian Paul Fussell once wrote an essay for Harper’s magazine about his wartime experiences fighting with the 103rd Division in the US Seventh Army. Like any infantryman fighting in Western Europe in the last 11 months of the war, Fussell had a terrible time of it, although had been partly sustained by the thought that he was “making history”. Post-war, however, he was peeved to find no one seemed much interested in what he and his fellows had gone through. “Liddell-Hart’s 766-page History of the Second World War never heard of us,” he wrote. There was not one mention of his entire division or the brutal fighting that saw so many of his men get killed on March 15 1945.
This magisterial new history has sadly arrived too late for Fussell, but if he is looking down from above he will surely be delighted by what he is reading. Peter Caddick-Adams has done full justice to the vast range of the fighting in the west in those last months of the war, in all its complexity, brutality, awfulness and, frankly, pointlessness, for the Germans were long done for by this point. Hitler, though, had always promised either a thousand-year Reich or Armageddon. With the former ambitions kicked into touch, Armageddon it was to be.
Much of the period covered in the book is, I suspect, unfamiliar to most readers of the Second World War, who are generally sated by works on the big events (usually earlier the subject of a successful movie) and which rarely go beyond the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. Perhaps some will have heard of the bridge at Remagen (another movie) or the major Rhine crossings, but Caddick-Adams not only covers these events in detail but also does so with genuinely new and convincing perspectives. To a large extent, this is because he clearly understands all facets of how the war was fought; while most popular narrative historians focus on the strategic level (high command decisions) and the tactical (the coal-face of war and experience of those at the front), he also deals with the all-important operational level, which is the how and why combatant nations fought in the way they did, giving the reader a far greater understanding of what on earth was going on.
It also gives Caddick-Adams an authority that oozes off every page. He has a particularly enjoyable habit of suddenly ducking down rabbit holes of anecdote, often personal or which delve into deeper history. In
writing about Operation Veritable, the British and Canadian assault across the Reichswald in February 1945, he writes about Captain Ian Hammerton of the 22nd Dragoons. “I walked the ground of Hammerton’s attack with him on a British Army staff ride one December, during real Veritable weather. Of necessity, we started the day with mugs of hot chocolate rather
than sweet tea, but the climate and terrain instantly transported him back to 1945.” Side by side with such personal experiences of walking the ground are quotes from Victor Hugo, references to Napoleonic battles and asides about the history of well-sited schlosses. One feels in extremely good hands and these asides lend the book a compelling energy.
Yet it is not just forgotten battles and formations that are brought to the fore, but many forgotten commanders too. The US Sixth Army group, so often ignored, as Paul Fussell knew all too well, takes a far more central role, as does Jake Devers, the general in charge, and as do Generals “Sandy” Patch of Seventh Army and De Lattre of the French First Army. All three emerge as rather brilliant and inspiring Allied generals who clearly deserve better recognition. So, too, does the superb General Bill Simpson, commander of the US Ninth Army – a man, Caddick-Adams points out, who would, without fail, talk to each of his corps commanders every evening before turning in.
Along with the revelations of the Nazi camps, one other episode lingers in the mind long after reading. In Aschaffenburg, a town in south-west Germany on Seventh Army’s patch, both troops and civilians
Soldiers had a terrible time in the final months, but post-war, no one seemed interested
were commanded by Major Emil Lamberth, a brutal Nazi, to fight to the last on pain of death. It took the Americans six days of house-to-house fighting until April 3 to seize the town. “It wasn’t a case of cleaning one room and having the rest of the house surrender,” writes Caddick-Adams. “Each room had to be cleared in a separate operation.”
Amidst the rubble of the wrecked town were many Germans, hanged by Lamberth for desertion. The insanity and mounting Allied frustration at the ongoing fighting is vividly portrayed in this fine, balanced and superb account. It deserves to be read for many years to come.