A Cause Greater than Self by Ochs Stephen J.;

Author:Ochs, Stephen J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

10 Götterdämmerung

THE FINAL BATTLE FOR GERMANY

Southwestern and southern Germany, March–April 1945.

During the last months of the war, as the Allies drove into the collapsing Reich, survival was constantly on Daly’s mind, and on the minds of American troops in general. They faced shattered but often still fanatical elements of the Nazi Party, the Waffen SS (whose numbers actually increased to 830,000 by the beginning of 1945) and the Hitlerjugend. These in turn attempted to strengthen the resolve of the Heer (army [land forces]) and the Volkssturm (home guard) to fight to the death. In looking back on those final months, Daly noted that although many German units consisted of Volkssturm, “There were good specimens among them.” The SS, he said, “remained formidable often even at the end.” That the German army faced inevitable defeat made their bullets and their 88s no less deadly. The last months of the war saw emotionally and physically exhausted American troops in pursuit of despairing, yet still dangerous remnants of German units, all amid a shocked, terrified, and suffering civilian population—each group seemingly locked in a nightmarish spiral of death and destruction even as the war moved inexorably to a conclusion.1

In that context, every casualty took on added poignancy for Daly, but especially those involving men who had served in combat for a long time. Yet he realized that to end the war as swiftly as possible and thereby get himself and his men back home required keeping the pressure on the Germans, which paradoxically meant American casualties. With Germany obviously defeated yet still unwilling to surrender, Daly faced a daunting leadership challenge: motivating his men, none of whom wanted to die fighting a crumbling foe, especially in the last weeks of the war. That foe was still extracting a painful toll on the Americans. For example, Patch’s Seventh Army Diary noted that between March 15 and March 23, battle casualties had been “very light, amounting to only 7,000.” [Emphasis added] Patch clearly believed that the casualties represented a relatively small price to pay for, in the words of one author, “rolling up a major part of the surviving defenses of central Germany.”2

The grim reality of that task filled Daly and his men with a sense of foreboding every morning as they awoke. Troy Cox recalled: “Every day was a dread . . . because we knew there was another town to take. I dreaded every day. Would I get it today? There seemed no end to it. . . . In town, there would be an intersection that you dreaded because the Germans had zeroed in on it. Even if we were designated as the reserve platoon and got a brief break, we dreaded being called back up.” Dread operated like a black hole in the pit of the stomach—sucking the light from each soldier’s day.

And death came capriciously. On Cox’s first day of combat, for example, the company encountered a house at a crossroads that the Germans had converted into a strong point.

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