The Last Hill by Bob Drury

Author:Bob Drury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Early on the unusually brisk morning of September 18, 1944, the 2nd Ranger Battalion lined up at a Brittany railhead to board a string of World War I quarante-et-huit boxcars—built to hold either forty humans or eight horses—pulled by an ancient French locomotive. Though twenty-four hours earlier the Allies had launched a huge combined air and land invasion of the Netherlands, and the U.S. Seventh Army continued to push toward Germany from southern France, the Rangers were destined to join neither. Instead, while Maj. Sullivan’s 5th Battalion was ordered attached to Gen. Patton’s Third Army—already a mere twenty-five miles from the German border—Big Jim Rudder’s Rangers were heading to the Ardennes region of Belgium for two additional weeks of rest and recuperation that would give Rudder and his staff an opportunity to restock the outfit’s thinned roster.

Near simultaneous to the Rangers’ departure, General Hermann Ramcke sent word to General Troy Middleton that he was prepared to surrender Brest. After nearly a month of fighting that cost close to ten thousand American casualties, including an estimated two thousand killed, Ramcke’s defensive enclave, surrounded and outgunned, had been reduced to a two-by-five-mile jackstraw refuge by the sea.*

Gen. Middleton chose the 8th Infantry Division’s assistant commander, Charles Canham, to accept the official German capitulation. In the eighty-four days since Canham had led his troops to the relief of the Rangers atop Pointe du Hoc, he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general. On the afternoon of the ceremony, Canham, flanked by hundreds of officers and enlisted men, was waiting outside the Wehrmacht general’s headquarters when Ramcke emerged from his bunker. If anything, Ramcke’s submission superseded Lt. Col. Fürst’s for Teutonic pomp.

Ramke greeted Canham in his finest Fallschirmjäger uniform, apparently freshly pressed and festooned with ribbons and medals, including the Iron Cross, 1st Class, that he had been awarded in World War I. There was much boot-heel clicking, half bowing, and Seig Heil!-ing. When Canham finally read aloud the unconditional surrender terms, Ramcke, his face as pinched as an ax blade, demanded to see the American general’s credentials. Canham had had enough. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the throng of exhausted and dirty GIs.

“These are my credentials,” he said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.