Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II

V-E Day

Our feelings were mixed as we withdrew from the line “for the last time,” because we were not sure that it would be for the last time. We were delighted to move out of the range of enemy artillery; however, pockets of Germans holed up in small villages fought bitterly to the very end. Our answer was to overwhelm these villages with our highly mobile and devastating artillery fire.

The Germans’ resistance reinforced the idea that the war wasn’t over yet. There were rumors that Hitler and his entourage escaped from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, his summer hideaway. Previous experience had taught us that fighting in the mountains can be vicious and drawn out, and a relatively small force can extract enormous casualties.

The maintenance battalion headquarters company moved into an old sugar mill in Sangerhausen. For the next two weeks, we relaxed in relative ease. We lived inside covered buildings, and no one worried about digging foxholes every night. The maintenance battalion was busy getting our vehicles back in shape for whatever came next. There was a large German minefield on the forward slope of a hill in front of the sugar mill and the remains of an 88mm antiaircraft battery on a hill behind the mill. This battery had been neutralized by our artillery when we came through Sangerhausen the first time.

We cautioned the men about the possibility of booby traps in the minefield and the battery. Although the looting instinct was uppermost in the minds of some GIs, and the demand for Lugers, P38s, and other weapons was great, most of the men realized the danger of rummaging around in these abandoned German positions. The words of caution must have been taken seriously, because no one in my battalion was injured by these mines.

During this period, First Army sent ordnance intelligence people to Dessau to examine in detail the Luftwaffe research and development facilities we had reported. They searched the hangars, model shops, and drawing rooms. Several of the drawing rooms contained safes, and these were blown open. Anything that appeared to have any ordnance intelligence value was taken. Thousands of drawings, files, and models of all types and descriptions were crated and loaded on the trucks. Our men realized that anything left there would be turned over to the Russians.

Back at Nordhausen, the collection of ordnance intelligence data was on a much larger scale than at Dessau.

Colonel John Medaris, First Army’s chief of ordnance, immediately recognized the bonanza we had uncovered at the V2 rocket manufacturing and supply center. The group he sent to study the installations found that the underground plant was more extensive than we had thought. The tunnels extended in layers some six hundred feet below the surface, completely impervious to bombing. The V2 had been in full production, and thousands of them had been turned out. Prior to our capture of the plant, London and the south coast of England had suffered devastating damage from the rockets. Now, however, all the launching sites in France, Belgium, and Holland had been taken.

Medaris organized a massive effort to load fifty railroad cars with rockets and rocket assemblies. In addition, there were many truckloads of smaller rocket motors, parts, and documents evacuated before we turned the area over to the Russians.

After the war, Medaris was promoted to major general and organized the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Working with him in developing ballistic missiles and the nucleus of our space technology was the group of German rocket scientists, led by Dr. Werner von Braun, who had surrendered to our troops in southern Germany as we were evacuating the V2 assembly plant material from Nordhausen. Although the cost of capturing these facilities had been high, the action allowed the United States to win the Cold War and develop a space program.

Because the division constantly sent information to the troops, and we could pick up the BBC news broadcasts, we knew that the Russians had reached the outskirts of Berlin and had begun the final assault on the city. The rubble of a heavily bombed-out city can make formidable defense positions, and the Germans loyal to Hitler made the Russians pay dearly. We were glad that it was the Russians instead of us doing this fighting. Finally, we heard that the city had fallen to the Russians and that Hitler was dead.

My first reaction was that Hitler had been killed by the Russians; I learned later that he had died by his own hand. On May 7 we got the word that General Jodl had surrendered. On May 8 the ceremony was repeated in Berlin for the Russians. For the 3d Armored Division, the war in Europe had finally come to an end.

Darmstadt and the Army of Occupation

Shortly after V-E Day, the division was ordered south to Darmstadt. We proceeded down the autobahn over the gently rolling hills of western Germany south of Kassel.

The road was intact except for the bridges. Most of them had been blown; in some instances only one span going north was gone. Perhaps the Germans didn’t have time to mine both spans. It was a simple matter to cross over to the other lane of the road.

When we reached the northern outskirts of Frankfurt, it was obvious that the city had been heavily bombed but had not taken as much punishment as Cologne. The primary streets had been cleared of rubble, and we continued south past the railroad station to the Main River.

In moving through the northern part of the city, we passed near a large, low-lying brownstone complex that had been the headquarters for I. G. Farben, the largest chemical company in Europe. The complex was soon to become SHAEF headquarters. We crossed the Main River on a Bailey bridge, reinforced to take our M26 tanks. All the bridges across the Main had been blown, and our engineers were working feverishly to replace the major ones as quickly as possible with temporary bridges.

After crossing the river, we passed a large airport. The woods around it had numerous small indentures cut into them about two hundred feet wide and six hundred feet deep. The tarmac had been extended into the indentures, which were used to park aircraft. Although the airport had been bombed and strafed, more than two thousand planes, including Me 109s, FW 190s, and Ju 88s, had survived in these spaces completely unscathed. I was amazed that with this many planes intact, the Luftwaffe didn’t put up a better showing in combat during the last days of the war. Although there was a shortage of aircraft fuel, it appeared that the shortage of pilots was the main reason for the collapse of the Luftwaffe.

As we threaded our way through Darmstadt, I was shocked to see the degree of destruction. The British had bombed the city during a night raid in February. The target was the Merck Chemical Works, on the northern outskirts. On the night the raid took place, strong winds blew from north to south, carrying the flares that were dropped over the chemical plant southward over the center of the city. When the first bomber dropped its incendiaries and started fires in the center of the city, the remaining bombers dropped their incendiaries on the same flaming targets.

Once a fire of this size got started, the tremendous heat generated by the flames caused the smoke and other combustion gases to rise rapidly. This in turn caused air to rush in, bringing in oxygen to further accelerate the rate of combustion. This miniature hurricane, known as a firestorm, not only consumed all the oxygen from the area but replaced it with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. These combustion gases, being heavier than air, cascaded around the entire area surrounding the fire. In the residential area that we moved into, approximately a mile south of the fire ring, the people either suffocated or were asphyxiated by the falling gases. The effect was devastating. Of a total population of about sixty thousand people, more than forty thousand died in this inferno.

The maintenance battalion moved into a lovely suburban residential area about a mile and half south of the damaged city. We set up our shop in a large, modern brick and stone building that had been designed as a repair garage for the city streetcar system. Across the street from the shop was a handsome park with a large swimming pool surrounded by numerous playing fields. Adjacent to this was an arboretum of several acres with numerous walking trails.

Many tasteful homes surrounded this park, and we took them over as our living quarters. Most had been abandoned because the people who lived here were high in government and business circles, and with their Nazi connections they were afraid of American reprisals.

We lived in a large home near a swimming pool that was half full of water with a lot of dead leaves and tree branches in it; we were afraid to swim in it because of possible contamination. Battalion headquarters took over the largest home in the area, across the park from us. It had been the home of the Merck Chemical Works director general and was probably one of the finest homes in Darmstadt.

After ten months of combat, we tried to relax in our new quarters and take advantage of every amenity.

Captain Ellis, commander of headquarters company, obtained the services of two Latvian women to cook at the officers’ mess. They were both large, heavyset peasant women who had been taken forcibly from their homes and made to work as slave labor in German war plants. Not knowing the whereabouts of their families or friends, or if any of them had survived, they were waiting to return home. They soon became good cooks and learned to speak passable English.

One day a German woman in her middle thirties came to the back door of the officers’ mess. Although her dress was somewhat shabby, she looked neat and composed. She asked to speak to the commanding officer.

The cooks called Captain Ellis, and he talked with her. The army had imposed a strict ban on any contact with German civilians unless it was absolutely official. The nature of her request appeared to be official business.

She spoke good English and was obviously educated.

She said that this had been her home and that her father, now deceased, had been the director general of Merck Chemical Works. She was living with the nuns at the Catholic hospital nearby and was helping take care of wounded German soldiers. While living in this house, she had planted a vegetable garden in the backyard and wanted to know if she could tend the garden and take some of the vegetables back to the hospital to supplement her patients’ diet.

She seemed immensely grateful when Ellis gave her permission to do this. She came every day thereafter to weed and water the garden and keep the edges neatly trimmed.

Although we were not supposed to fraternize with German civilians, it was difficult to ignore her, and gradually her tragic story came out. Her father’s position was comparable to that of the president of a corporation in the United States. All high-ranking German industrialists were either members of the Nazi Party or were strong Nazi supporters. As the daughter of a relatively high German official, she had grown up in an aristocratic society. She had attended the best schools in Germany and as a young lady had gone to both France and England to attend finishing schools. She was fluent in French and English. After school in England, she returned to the ranks of high Nazi society. She married a young captain in the German army and had two daughters. While her husband was away on the Russian front, she and her young daughters lived in this house with her mother and father. They received word that her husband was killed on the Russian front a few months prior to the end of the war.

Her father had been convinced by Hitler and the continuous stream of German propaganda that Americans were barbarians. He was told that if the Americans ever occupied Darmstadt, he and his entire family would be brutally tortured and put to death. He, his wife, and daughter made a pact that if such came to pass, they would all take cyanide capsules before the Americans arrived.

In late February 1945, when the American Third Army crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, her father called the family together in the living room. He told the daughter to leave the two little girls, approximately three and five years old, in one of the bedrooms behind a closed door. He then distributed five cyanide capsules. The mother and father took their capsules and died quickly. She took the capsules for the children and put them in candy that she had prepared. She gave the candy to the children and stayed with them until they became unconscious. When she was convinced they were dead, she took her capsule and collapsed.

Shortly afterward, American troops reached Darmstadt and found the five bodies in the house. She apparently had regurgitated the capsule in her unconscious state and was still breathing when the troops arrived. The medics revived her, then took her to the Catholic hospital and turned her over to the nuns. When she finally revived sufficiently to realize what had happened, she was in a state of shock. How could she possibly have believed the Americans were barbarians when they instead had saved her life. She had become such a pawn of Nazi propaganda that she had killed her own children. This was more than she could cope with, and she cut her wrists with a razor. The German nurses found her in a pool of blood and managed to save her again.

It’s relatively easy to accept the fact that propaganda can be a powerful weapon among backward, uneducated people.

This young woman, on the other hand, had had all the privileges of an aristocratic upbringing in a modern nation and had even gone to school in France and England. How could she possibly believe Americans were barbarians who would torture and kill her little girls?

One would think that after ten months of combat, nothing would shock you. As I was fortunate not to have been a tanker or infantryman exposed to terror on a twenty-four hour basis, I was perhaps more sensitive to shock. In any event the death camps in Nordhausen, Belsen, and Auschwitz and incidents such as this were bound to shock even the most insensitive person. How could any civilized people, on the face of this earth, possibly have been brought to do what the Germans did in this war? Man’s inhumanity to man seemed limitless. To this day, I’ve never heard a reasonable explanation of how this could have happened in a modern civilized world. I have no answers to this terrible question.

After two weeks at Darmstadt, we had caught up on our maintenance and had time to relax. The photographic equipment we had found in the Agfa plant came in handy. We set up our own lab and started developing pictures, not just our own but also film that we had found in many captured German cameras.

One roll of film, apparently taken by a German guard in one of the death camps, showed the slave workers in the process of burning the bodies. The corpses were stacked in piles along the wall at the end of the crematorium vault. There appeared to be fifteen to twenty furnaces in the crematorium. The workers used large clamps to grab the head and feet of the naked corpses and drag them across the floor to a small conveyor in front of each furnace. They loaded the corpses on the conveyor head first and used a long poker in the crotch to push the bodies into the furnace.

As soon as the first conveyor was loaded, the workers would load the next one. By the time they had loaded all the furnaces, they would come back to the first one and start all over again. Any bits of bone or residue remaining on the conveyor were brushed into the ash pit. The workers’ faces appeared void of any emotion.

Several years after the war, a set of these pictures appeared in the holocaust museum in Atlanta, Georgia.

Major Arrington had us bring our final combat loss reports up-to-date. He told each liaison officer to review his records and those of the maintenance battalion shop work order clerk to make sure we had not missed anything. We went through all the records and tried to recount as accurately as possible every incident of vehicles being knocked out or damaged and repaired. After many hours, the final record was compiled and turned over to the division, which in turn sent it to the War Department for historical documentation. A summary copy of these records appeared in the 3d Armored Division history, entitled Spearhead in the West.

During this period, I received a ten-page V-mail letter from my Aunt Betty in Nashville, Tennessee. She was my grandmother’s youngest sister, and I had fond memories of the summers that she and the young grandchildren spent together in my grandfather’s house on the mountain in Huntsville. She would show us postcards of her trip to Europe many years before and would tell us stories about castles on the Rhine and knights and their exploits in great battles in the glorious past. Little did I realize as a little boy that I would someday be involved in similar exploits in this same land.

In her long letter, Aunt Betty described a trip she had taken with her father to Germany in the early 1890s, when she was seventeen years old. They had been invited to visit the family of a German music teacher in Rüdesheim, a small village on the east bank of the Rhine across the river from Mainz. The day they arrived in Rüdesheim on the train from Berlin, the Germans were celebrating the dedication of the Germania Denkmal (monument), a huge bronze statue cast from French cannon captured by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871. The statue represented Germania, the German goddess of war, and was the largest statue in the world at the time.

The American ambassador and his daughter, who had been invited to participate in the dedication, were supposed to arrive on the same train from Berlin but had missed the train. My great-grandfather and aunt were mistakenly identified as the ambassador and his daughter and were given seats as guests of honor. While the bürgermeister and other high German officials gave numerous speeches, my aunt was given a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a red, white, and blue cockade to wear on her hat. Not until the ceremony was over did she finally comprehend what had taken place.

After reflecting on this event for some fifty years and through two world wars, she felt that this statue represented the height of German-Prussian militarism and wanted me to blow it up. This was the purpose of her letter. I was shocked to read that the woman I had regarded as a sweet little old lady music teacher had harbored such aggressive thoughts all these years. I looked at my map and discovered that Rüdesheim was only about seventy-five miles from Darmstadt. I decided to go there.

My aunt had described in the most minute detail the layout of the village and gave me the address of the house where she had stayed, number ten Schmidthoff. I soon found the street and the little courtyard with a small chapel and a fountain, which my aunt had described; she remembered having seen it from her bedroom window. I went around to the front of the house and found the number ten almost covered by an overhanging thatched eave. I took several pictures of the house, clearly showing the address.

We found the road that wound up the hill through the Niederwald to the Germania statue, still standing in all its majesty. Including its large stone pedestal, the statue was well over a hundred feet tall. From the shell craters around it and from the blasts on the stone base, we could tell that the area had been subjected to heavy shelling. The statue itself did not appear to have taken any direct hits, but there was great evidence of strikes by shell fragments. Perhaps the Germans had used this as an observation post, and the shelling was an attempt to neutralize it. On the front of the stone base was inscribed in large letters Wacht am Rhein (“watch on the Rhine”).

I took several pictures of the statue, then found a number of battered postcards in the little tourist center at the base of the statue. I later gave them to Aunt Betty, who was angry that I hadn’t blown up the statue. I explained that a quarter-ton Jeep loaded with TNT wouldn’t have been enough to destroy it. That seemed to assuage her fury.

German soldiers were being repatriated as rapidly as possible. If their background and personnel data showed no possible record of war crimes or high Nazi connections, they were dismissed immediately. Many of the high-ranking officers, particularly in the SS, were held for further questioning.

Although the war had been over for about a month, we still saw groups of German soldiers in uniform walking along the road heading toward their homes. Even though they were disarmed, they had to wear their uniforms because that was their only clothing. The men were either very young, many in their early teens, or in their late fifties and sixties. There was an almost complete absence of men in their twenties, thirties, and forties; they had been killed or wounded long ago.

My Christian background told me that I should have sympathy and understanding for the defeated enemy, but the memory of the devastation they had caused made me feel hatred instead, even for the women and children. Although we had accepted war as a terrible barbaric tradition, the Germans breached all bounds of humanity: the machine-gunning of disarmed American soldiers at Malmédy; the wanton slaughter of Belgian civilians in Stavelot; the deliberate starvation, torture, and the killing of millions of innocent civilians at Nordhausen, Belsen, and Auschwitz revealed the ghastly genocide that Hitler inflicted on an entire generation. These terrors were incomprehensible to the American mind; there was no answer.

The First Industrial Survey of Postwar Germany

The joint Allied high command ordered a preliminary survey of all German industries to determine what each one made before and during the war and what it was capable of making after the war. The survey would produce a rough listing of German facilities, with particular emphasis on military technology, sources of raw material, and the status of utilities. It would seize and impound all documents and technical information.

The American sector of occupied Germany was divided into division areas. The primary function was to feed and clothe the civilians in each area and get industry and agriculture going as a productive enterprise as quickly as possible. The 3d Armored Division area was divided into three segments, one for each liaison officer. My area was a pie-shaped segment extending northwest from Darmstadt at the apex, with the Rhine River on the west and the Main River on the north. It included the cities of Gross-Gerau and Rüsselsheim plus numerous other small towns and villages.

Our liaison group reported to division headquarters to receive our instructions for the survey. We were given lists and locations of major German industries in our area and were told to be on the lookout for other industries not listed and to survey them if we felt they had any significant value. We received printed forms, several pages each, on which to record all pertinent information plus any comments we might choose to add.

In addition to my driver and my Jeep, I was assigned an American soldier who was fluent in German. We also had a copy of a SHAEF order written in both English and German directing German civilians to cooperate with us fully.

As a young engineering student, I could understand some of the intricacies and problems of organizing a major industrial economy for war. At Gross-Gerau I surveyed a medium-sized plant that manufactured 40mm ammunition for Bofors antiaircraft guns. The plant’s several rambling, older buildings contained about fifty thousand square feet of space. The roofs of several had been damaged by bombing, but the machinery, covered with tarpaulins, seemed intact. The director general and owner of the company took us through the plant and described in detail his production process. He opened his books and records and gave us all the pertinent information we needed to fill out our forms.

He said it was not until February, when the bridges across the Main River were destroyed, that he experienced a shortage of steel bar stock, which came from the Ruhr. He was able to operate with the considerable stock he had on hand, but in late February the bombing destroyed the roof and disrupted his main power feeders. Although the power was restored, he could not obtain materials to fix the roof. When his machinery started rusting because of the inclement weather, he had to shut down.

He told me that the 40mm Bofors shells he was making would fit our navy’s 40mm antiaircraft guns. I knew this to be true, because both the United States and Germany had licensed the design from Sweden. In good English, he offered to make a deal. If the U.S. Army could get him roofing material to make repairs, he would assemble enough men to start up the plant and manufacture shells. He seemed to have no qualms about producing shells to destroy his former allies, the Japanese, if he could make a fast buck doing it.

I explained that, although the United States had adequate shell production of its own, I would include his suggestion in my report. I recommended that the plant be tooled for automatic screw machine parts, because I knew that postwar Germany would have a great demand for them.

It took several days to complete our survey of the General Motors Opel plant, the largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, which had been taken over by the German government and converted to war production. Although the plant manufactured many items, its major products were trucks and the FW 190 fighter plane’s radial engine for the German Luftwaffe.

Because of the plant’s location at the confluence of the Main and Rhine Rivers just west of Rüsselsheim, it was easy to identify from the air. The bombing of December 1944 damaged the roofs of several production buildings, although making quick temporary repairs and moving some of the machinery to less damaged areas enabled full production to resume quickly. The plant operated continuously until February 1945, when bombing destroyed the Darmstadt gas works, which supplied the gas for the annealing furnaces and foundries.

All German plant managers had to be regarded with suspicion, because their position hinged on being Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. One of the Opel plant’s assistant directors, who worked with us on our survey, was cooperative in showing us all the records and documents (which we immediately impounded), but he appeared more interested in covering his tracks and protecting himself than in helping us. All the managers knew about the forthcoming war crimes trials and wanted to make sure that they would not be accused of atrocities against slave laborers. They wanted their names cleared. Although it was not our job to get involved in the politics, we did note whether or not the various managers were cooperative.

Each evening, all three liaison officers got together in our quarters at Darmstadt to compare notes. An air force team from SHAEF headquarters who lived in the house next door was also surveying the bombings; however, their focus was on the physical extent of the bomb damage as compared to the after-action reports from the flight crews.

From these surveys and earlier observations, I began to develop reservations about how and why the air force chose targets. There is no question that their efforts were a primary factor in the defeat of Germany. Strategic bombing had completely devastated all the major German cities and many of the industries. Severe damage to the infrastructure had made it extremely difficult for the Germans to move troops and matériel during the last stages of the war.

In spite of this, there were questions. For at least two years prior to the war’s end, both American and British bombers had made deep raids into central Germany. These flights passed right over the plants that contributed about 70 percent of all the electric power for the Ruhr and for German industry. The flights also bypassed the chemical by-product plants that manufactured lubricants for the army and briquettes to heat German homes.

During the deep raids, the air force suffered terrible losses, because they had to go without fighter protection.

Yet many of the more accessible large power plants went untouched. The large Fortuna plant at Oberaussem and many others around it were still operational two months before the war ended. The destruction of the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt, which was extremely costly to the air force, may not have been necessary if the power plants in the Rhineland had been destroyed and the Opel plant in Rüsselsheim had been shut down. The FW 190 engines manufactured at the Opel plant used ball bearings made at Schweinfurt.

Why these power plants remained operational until ground forces captured them was debated at length at the higher levels of command. There was, no doubt, a great deal of political maneuvering involved. Although the air force planners tried to do what they thought best, it appears that they made some serious errors in judgment.

Reflections on the Aftermath

The pain, suffering, and losses of our tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen, engineers, and other combat arms affected me deeply and profoundly. I came on active duty in June 1941 at Camp Polk in a cadre group of about four hundred officers. During the next three years of training in the States and in England, I got to know many of them and became close friends with some of them. Of all those assigned to the infantry, tanks, or engineers, or as artillery forward observers, I did not know of a single one who survived w ithout being seriously wounded.

As a young ordnance ROTC cadet in August 1939, I was shocked to find that our total tank research and development budget for that year was only $85,000. How could the greatest industrial nation on earth devote such a pittance to the development of a major weapons system, particularly when World War II was to start in two weeks?

Development of the M4 Sherman was further hindered by bickering and rivalry between the infantry, artillery, and armored officers about the characteristics of this tank. The infantry wanted a heavy tank that they could use for breakthroughs. Armored officers wanted a fast, mobile tank with adequate armor and a high-velocity gun. These requirements conflicted with those of the artillery, who felt that the tank was essentially a mobile artillery piece and therefore they should dictate the characteristics of the gun. It should be capable of firing at least five thousand rounds before being replaced. To do this, it was necessary to use a low-velocity gun. Artillery won on this point; the tank carried the short-barreled 75mm M2 gun.

Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that there was only a remote possibility that a tank would last long enough in combat to fire five thousand rounds. Ordnance intelligence had indicated that the Germans were rapidly replacing their short-barreled 75mm howitzers in the PzKw IV tank with long-barreled, high-velocity KwK41s for greater penetration against enemy tanks. There was also information that the Russians and Germans both were using tank against tank in massive battles. This information, which should have been the handwriting on the wall for future trends in high-velocity tank-gun design, was either misunderstood or completely ignored. It appeared inexcusable to me that our troops were furnished with such a deficient main battle tank. The M4 appeared to have been designed by a committee, and many young Americans bled and died as a result.

As the middle of July 1945 neared, the tension became more acute. Although the war in Europe was over, everyone knew that the war with Japan still had to be won. Future plans had to be put on hold.

Although we were never formally briefed, there were many bull sessions going on similar to those held before D day. Speculation ran somewhat along these lines: Two American armies, the Eighth and the Tenth, were already in the Pacific and were being reinforced with additional units. The First Army would be added to this new army group. The final assault would be on the main island of Honshu. The Eighth Army would land on the north and the Tenth Army on the south. The First Army would then land both north and south of Tokyo Bay and attempt to cut off the city before the Japanese command could escape.

Whereas the Germains, when they were cut off and completely isolated, had eventually surrendered to save further loss of life, I was not sure that the Japanese would do this; in many instances in the South Pacific, they had fought to the last man. In Japan itself, the casualties could be horrendous. Some estimates put American casualties at a million and Japanese casualties at perhaps 10 to 20 million. This, of course, was speculation, but the rumors became wilder as time went on.