Chapter 50: Mar 1945 Allies Take Cologne

“Sure, we all want to get home. We want to get this thing over with. But the quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards. The quicker they’re whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin.

And there’s one thing you’ll be able to say when you get home. When you’re sitting around your fireside, with your brat on your knee, and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to say you shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

• General George S. Patton, Jr., speech to his Third Army before it was sent to join in the Battle of France (July 1944).

Finally, the allies have reached a point where the Rhine is crossed, the Siegfried Line is broken and the Russian army is surging ever Westward with the full vengeance of a horde of locusts eating everything in their path.

The Thousand Year Reich is truly in a shambles and even the inner circle of the Fuhrer’s entourage is searching for an exit that might allow them or their families to escape justice for their crimes against humanity.

The speed of the advance into the fatherland is limited only by the condition of the roads for the “Red Ball Express” to feed their hunger for ammo, food and other supplies to enable them to grind their inevitable path to the bunker in Berlin where Hitler is seriously contemplating suicide as his only recourse to avoid punishment.

Germany is suffering like the countless millions they had persecuted ever since the swift rise of Hitler to the heights of power.

After the war, the German people usually stated that they had no idea of the horrors taking place in the concentration camps mostly located outside of the borders of Germany but the strange stench of death could not be hidden from the stream of conscious thought of the many thousands of Germans that lived close to the death camps inside Germany and the rumors of the “one-way journey” to the so-called labor camps was well-known to the general populace. They just choose to ignore it in the jubilation of military victory after military victory at the beginning of the war. Of course, Goebbels kept his propaganda machine of disinformation running around the clock all over the country to keep the facts hidden and to mold the brains of the Hitler Youth that he needed to complete his plan for “Today Germany, tomorrow the world!”

In early 1945, the allies were on the move inside of Germany with their troops moving forward meeting only light resistance from remnants of the once powerful Wehrmacht squandered on the Eastern Front with insufficient logistical support and in the crazy counterattack called “The Battle of the Bulge” in the Ardennes Forest in the West. Underage male children were pressed into the front lines to bolster the gaps in the ranks. They were filled with loyalty to the Fuhrer, but lacked the training and experience to excel in a combat situation like an adult enlisted man.

The SS and the true believer Nazis were doing their best to get away from the concentration camps before they were exposed to the eyes of the press traveling with the allied forces. The sights of the cruelty involved in the Fuhrer’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem managed to meet the light of day and was finally put into print in the American Jewish-owned newspapers that had remained silent on the subject throughout the war.

The foolishness of the so-called “Battle of the Bulge” had destroyed the German strategic reserve and created a lack of depth in the German defense of the fatherland that sealed the doom of the Thousand Year Reich.

German military losses just during the first quarter of 1945 were almost a half million men of which at least half were captured by the allies and made prisoners of war until the war was concluded.

When these losses were combined with the losses on the Eastern Front, the fact that Germany had lost the war was evident to even the most ardent Nazi and it utterly destroyed the morale of the German civilian population.

The city of Cologne was right in the heartland of the German industrial region. It had been subjected to heavy bombing for a lengthy period of time. The city was only a shell of its former glory. The cathedral was still standing but was heavily damaged. Not very many buildings were intact after the bombings. Most of the residents had already fled to the countryside to avoid the destruction.

German tanks were roaming in the ruins seeking to slow down the Allied advance into the center of the city. They wanted to keep the Americans away from the rail complex on the other side of the city as long as possible to move the equipment further inland and away from their fast advance. The city itself had no strategic importance and it was more a symbolic loss that illustrated the accelerating fall of the Third Reich. Only the younger more idealistic Germans not previously involved in combat operations like the chaos on the Eastern Front were willing to put up a stiff resistance to the allied advance. The older veterans were quick to surrender providing the circumstances were right and their captors would be Americans or British and could be depended upon to treat them with dignity.

The allied forces were also committed to reassuring the German populace that they were there as victors and not as “occupiers” in the true sense of the word.

We were all hunkered down in the deep trench created by using the tank cross tread shift to dig a nice hole for us to hide in to protect us from the constant bombardment from the lines of German tanks that encircled the city. At night we could hear the enemy tanks relocating ever closer to the city and we wondered if our reinforcements would arrive on time to save our bacon.

Early on the morning right after Christmas, we all woke to no more enemy fire raining down on us from the forest. The lead jeeps of the relief convoys from General Patton’s army waved at us as they passed us hiding by the side of the road. They were a welcome sight for all of us and we knew that we had truly been saved.

One of the jeeps stopped long enough to throw off a couple of cases of rations to us along with some ammo to stock up our depleted stores. In fact, I had no more bullets for my handgun and the rifle was welcome to add to our firepower as well. I wished it was one of those Tommy guns that the NCOs were toting around looking like a gang from Al Capone’s days back in Chicago.

My assigned driver’s helper Nancy whipped up a nice meal from the rations and some eggs from a nearby farm stolen from a chicken coop deserted in the chaos of war. I felt certain the farmer wouldn’t mind because we fed the chickens and restrained ourselves from sacrificing one or two of them more from our reluctance to get involved with the pulling of feathers or the cleaning needed to prepare the bird for the dinner table than any sense of right or wrong about the meaning of theft.