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<text>
<title>
(1940s) Victory In Europe
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights
</history>
<link 08175>
<link 08110>
<link 00095><link 00102><article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Victory in Europe
</hdr>
<body>
<p> [Allied troops landed on the Riviera beaches of southern
France in August, opening an important front that prevented the
Germans from drawing reserves from the south to help contain the
drive across northern France.
</p>
<p> Suddenly, deliriously, Paris was free, liberated by its own
resistance forces and by U.S. and Free French troops.]
</p>
<p>(September 4, 1944)
</p>
<p> The news that made the whole free world catch its breath last
week as the news that Paris was free. It was one of the great
days of all time. For Paris is the city of all free mankind, and
its liberation last week was one of the great events of all
time.
</p>
<p> This even was reported by the first U.S. newsman to enter
Paris, TIME's Chief War Correspondent Charles Christian
Wertenbaker. Excerpts from his eyewitness report:
</p>
<p> I have seen the faces of young people in love and the faces
of old people at peace with their God. I have never seen in any
face such as joy as radiated from the faces of the people of
Paris this morning. This is no day for restraint, and I could
not write with restraint if I wanted to.
</p>
<p> At 6 o'clock in the morning the tanks began to move, and we
followed as far as Antony, where a squad of Spanish Republicans,
now of the French 2nd Armored Division, stopped us. There was
still enemy resistance ahead. Presently the tanks cleaned it up,
and General Leclerc, who stood in the road with one hand in his
pocket and the other gripping a cane, decided to go into Paris.
It was 9 o'clock.
</p>
<p> We maneuvered our jeep just behind the General's armored car
and drove fast toward the Porte d'Orleans. The people, who up
to now had made small groups beside the road, suddenly became
a dense crowd packed from the buildings to the middle of the
street, where they separated to make a narrow line for the
General's car to pass through. No longer did they simply throw
flowers and kisses. They waved arms and flags and flowers; they
climbed aboard the cars and jeeps embracing the French and us
alike; they uttered a great mass cry of delight that swelled and
died down and swelled to a greater height. They cried: "Vive De
Gaulle!" and "Vive Leclerc!" But one word repeated over and over
rose above all the other words. It was: "Merci! Merci! Merci!"
</p>
<p> A little girl had given us a Tricolor, which we put on the
windshield of the jeep, but, seeing our uniforms and hearing
our accents, the people said: "You are the Americans?" "You have
come at last!" "For four years we have waited."
</p>
<p> The people said there had been little food in Paris, and in
the last weeks almost none. "Are you bringing food to us?" they
asked. We said the French had 300 trucks that would soon come
to Paris with food. "Merci! Merci! Merci!"
</p>
<p> The streets were full of people--Resistance groups armed with
any old rifles, white-clad doctors and nurses carrying
stretchers, and citizens old and young who, in spite of the
danger, could not stay at home on this day.
</p>
<p> We who had been with the armies knew that the decision to
enter Paris had been made suddenly, when the fighting in the
city made it necessary. We also knew that celebrations of the
fall of Paris were premature. Now, at 6 o'clock Friday evening,
Paris is free--it surrendered officially at 5--but the batter
of machine guns from the Chamber of Deputies still echoes in the
streets.
</p>
<p> General Charles de Gaulle's hour of triumph, ticked off by
snipers' fire at him, was one for history. Eyewitnesses recorded
it:
</p>
<p> Down the Champs Elysees into the Place de la Concorde went
the procession, at the pace of De Gaulle's brisk wall. There he
and the dignitaries got into cars and the procession proceeded
down Rue de Rivoli at 40 m.p.h. to the Hotel de Ville.
</p>
<p> In front of the Hotel de Ville the shooting started. A
machine gun let go from the top story of a high building across
from the Hotel de Ville. Then other machine guns and rifles
fired from above. Everything stopped. People dived under cars,
trucks, jeeps, while every man who had a gun or a pistol--and
hundreds had--started firing.
</p>
<p> The shooting started just as the procession reached the Notre
Dame cathedral. The time was 4:20. As the first shots rang out,
Leclerc and Koenig tried to hustle De Gaulle through the door.
De Gaulle shook off their hands and never faltered. While the
battle began outside, he walked slowly down the aisle. Before
he had gone many paces a machine pistol fired down from above.
</p>
<p> De Gaulle continued his slow walk up the aisle toward
Cardinal Suhard and Monsignor Beaussart, who never faltered
either. A Te Deum was playing from the organ where the machine
pistolers were hidden.
</p>
<p> The ceremony was brief. De Gaulle walked back down the aisle
as slowly and as calmly as he had gone up it. Thus ended his
first great public appearance in Paris. If there had been any
doubt about his acceptance by the French people, this hour
finished it.
</p>
<p> [The Germans responded to the Allied gains by lashing out with
a new and terrible weapon, the V-I, or "flying bomb."]
</p>
<p>(July 17, 1944)
</p>
<p> From the start London knew the robot bomb for what it was--a
new weapon of terrible power. It was never something to be
shrugged off with British humor and contempt for the bloody
Nazis. It was a weapon which struck again & again & again, 18
hours at a stretch. Even its sound-effects were potent: a
throaty roar, then a sudden silence when the jet motor stopped
and the bomb dived; then the blast. It kept thousands of
Londoners in deep shelters. It drove other thousands to the
country. It kept thousands, at work aboveground, in a state of
sustained apprehension which the Great Blitz never matched. As
inaccurate as it was impersonal, it was a weapon precisely
designed for sprawling London, precisely calculated to raise
havoc with civilian life.
</p>
<p> In the first four weeks, the robots killed 2,752, injured
8,000. Still, the robot's power to disrupt was greater than its
power to kill; the rate of casualties during the worst periods
of the 1940-41 blitz was twice as high.
</p>
<p>(September 18, 1944)
</p>
<p> In 80 days the robombs had damaged 870,000 English houses,
killed 5,817 people, seriously wounded 17,036 others.
</p>
<p> The Germans launched 8,000 one-ton robombs--an average of 100
a day, beginning June 16--of which 2,300 reached British
targets.
</p>
<p> One long-guarded secret: 92% of all casualties occurred in
London.
</p>
<p> [The Allies lanced through France with unbelievable swiftness,
paced by General Patton's racing armored columns and bolstered
by a supply system that was a miracle of logistics.]
</p>
<p>(September 4, 1944)
</p>
<p> Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. rapped the map with his
leather riding crop, which sheathes a glistening poniard. He
pointed with it to the next objective, a town 50 miles away.
Said he to a Third Army corps commander: "Get there--any way you
want to." As he had before, he was demanding the impossible of
his supply officers. As before, in this miraculous month, they
would get the impossible done.
</p>
<p> By last week "Georgie" Patton's supply lines reached more than
half-way across France. He was getting gasoline by parachute
for his forward tanks. Exactly how far along toward Germany's
borders his 35-ton daggers were by this week was something for
the enemy to worry about. As a rule, they did not find out
until the tanks were upon them, blazing away at their rear.
</p>
<p>(September 11, 1944)
</p>
<p> But by this week the Allies had smashed deep into the Low
Countries and U.S. forces probed at the outer hedgehogs of the
Siegfried Line. This week battles would boil on German soil.
</p>
<p> In 78 hours last week units of General Patton's Third Army
swept over the Marne near Paris, zipped through to Verdun and
a minor battle. Within another 48 hours they were in Alsace, at
Metz; then they were in reported stabbing into the Reich's rich
industrial Saar Basin. In four days they had covered an area
that, in World War I, had been fought over for four years.
</p>
<p>(September 25, 1944)
</p>
<p> In the first 100 days after D-day, over 1,000,000 long tons
of supplies (700,000 items) and 100,000 vehicles poured into
France. What was more, these supplies closely followed the
slashing, wheeling, speeding columns of Allied tanks and
infantry via plane, truck, pipeline and railroad.
</p>
<p> The North American Way. This miracle was in the American
tradition, a tradition the Germans have never really understood.
It was begotten of a people accustomed to great spaces, to
transcontinental railways, to nationwide trucking chains, to
endless roads and millions of automobiles, to mail-order houses,
department stores and supermarkets; of a nation of builders and
movers. It was also a miracle in the British tradition, begotten
of a people who for generations have sailed all waters, great
and small, and delivered their goods to every shore and harbor
of the world. It was a joint miracle, wrought by many hands.
</p>
<p> [A cleverly conceived plan to take the bridges of the lower
Rhine, where it crosses from Germany into The Netherlands, was
in initiated.]
</p>
<p>(October 2, 1944)
</p>
<p> The battle was fought in the undulating countryside just west
of where the Rhine divides (into the Waal and Lek) for its final
course to the sea.
</p>
<p> Here there were three fine towns: Eindhoven, Nijmegen and
Arnhem, rich in the histories of ancient wars and in the
traditions of peaceful living. And here Allied parachutists
dropped behind German units like pieces on a checkboard hopping
over their opposition.
</p>
<p> But in war, unlike checkers, the enemy pieces that have been
hopped over are not thereby swept from the board. They have to
be removed by force.
</p>
<p> The safety of the paratroopers depended on the Second Army's
speed. And the Second Army's speed depended in part on the
paratroopers seizing bridges so that its tanks and big guns
could roll ahead without interruption. The whole was a fine
calculation of military risks to gain a foothold across the
Rhine. In the first surprise the Second Army pushed to
Eindhoven. Thereafter, as often happens in war, the stroke did
not go according to plan.
</p>
<p> To take Nijmegen and its modern (less than ten years ago)
five-span, mile-and-a-half-long bridge was the task of American
paratroopers who were landed south of the town. They found the
Germans in command of both the north and south ends of the
coveted bridge.
</p>
<p> The U.S. paratroop commander decided to send his men across
the river in small, rubber assault boats, to storm the long
bridge from the north.
</p>
<p> The Americans had only 26 boats. They gathered their craft
half a mile downstream while British artillery raked the Germans
across the river. But when the first force of Americans pushed
off, the river splattered around them with machine-gun and
mortar fire. Each of the 26 boats carried a dozen men, but only
13 boats returned for more paratroopers. Some paddled, some
bailed with their canteen cups. This time only eight boats
returned (one carried back three dead and four wounded). After
the third trip there were only five boats. They kept going.
</p>
<p> Across the bridge suddenly appeared a U.S. flag: the north end
had been cleared. As if they had rehearsed it for weeks, the
infantry moved in to clean out the Germans on the slope behind
the Belvedere. At last the tanks moved out across the bridge.
</p>
<p> Nijmegen was a 24-hour sweet dream of tactical triumph.
Arnhem, ten miles to the north, was a week-long nightmare. The
British airborne division had descended north of Arnhem (pop.
80,000), which lies on the north side of its river. The airborne
British, storming in to seize the bridge, had run into hot
trouble half a mile short of it. Germans in force held houses,
parks and paratroops fought house to house, day & by big by big
guns, thumped by mortars, clipped by machine guns. They set up
field stations for their wounded--and wounded Germans straggled
into them. The Germans captured some of the stations, and Allied
and German doctors worked together.
</p>
<p> With the airborne was one reporter: Alan Wood, a British
correspondent with a shortwave radio, dubbed the airborne's
little island of rubble "this patch of hell." After five days
& nights Wood reported "Our men are being asked to do more than
ordinary flesh and blood can stand...
</p>
<p> "If in the years to come any man says to you, `I fought with
the Arnhem airborne force,' take off your hat to him and buy him
a drink...The few of Arnhem will rank in glory with the few of
the Battle of Britain."
</p>
<p> [As the summer of 1944 went on, the Russians swept past their
own frontiers and into the Baltic states and Poland. They pushed
to within a few dozen miles of Warsaw, then stopped while
another Polish tragedy in the long and tragic history of that
nation, took place. On August 1, Polish patriots in Warsaw had
risen against the Nazi overlords, and expected the Russians to
come to their aid. Inexplicably, the Russians did not. To this
day, it is not known whether the Red armies were really worn out
and at the end of long and uncertain supply lines, as they
claimed, or whether they stood cynically by until it was too
late to save the non-Communist leadership of the rebellion,
along with thousands of other Poles who died in the rubble of
their city. It just so happened that the Soviets had a
pro-Communist Polish regime waiting in the wings in Lublin.]
</p>
<p>(October 16, 1944)
</p>
<p> German might, Russian policy and the calculated indifference
of Britain and the U.S. last week wrote bloody finis to a
chapter of Polish history.
</p>
<p> In 1939, as the Germans stormed into blazing Warsaw after a
20-day siege, the Warsaw radio went off the air playing Polish
funeral hymns. Last week Warsaw died again. After a 63-day
siege, a ferocious fight from building to building and block to
block, the Partisan forces of General Bor (Lieut. General
Tadeusz Komorowski) surrendered to the Germans. This time there
was no aerial music.
</p>
<p> There had been little aerial help either. during the first few
weeks of the uprising, the Russian Army twelve miles away did
nothing to aid the Partisans, who were under the command of the
Polish Government in Exile. Instead it disarmed Partisans. When
Madame Helena Sikorska (widow of Poland's late great Premier and
commander in chief) and 15 leading Poles protested, Prime
Minister Winston Churchill fumed.
</p>
<p> Then Russia, stung in part probably by foreign criticism, in
part probably mindful of the effect on those parts of Poland
controlled by the Lublin government, began to send aid to
Warsaw. But when General Bor was made commander in chief of all
the Polish Government's forces, the Lublin government denounced
him as a "criminal," threatened to arrest and try him if he fell
into their hands. Promptly, when General Bor surrendered to the
Germans, the Lublin Poles cried: "Tailor!"
</p>
<p> [In the Pacific, the U.S. went after Tinian, Guam, Peleliu.
The fighting was hard, the Japanese resistance desperate, the
casualties proportionately high on both sides. But everyone was
waiting for MacArthur to make good on his
two-and-a-half-year-old promise to return and liberate the
Philippines.]
</p>
<p>(October 30, 1944)
</p>
<p> The Nashville bore shoreward. The first land sighted by
General MacArthur was the islet of Suluan, the first seen by
Magellan when he discovered the Philippines in 1521.
</p>
<p> His first major goal was Leyte, in the heart of the islands,
where devoted Visayan guerrillas had been heard calling by
secret radio for help a year ago.
</p>
<p> The Deceptive Blow. This was what Douglas MacArthur had long
advocated, with an intensity which seemed wholly justified
because he believed he had been ordered out of Corregidor only
in order to lead a counterinvasion soon.
</p>
<p> Five hours after the first wave of Army infantrymen dashed
across the shell-pocked beaches, General MacArthur and his party
filed down a ladder from the Nashville's deck into a landing
barge.
</p>
<p> MacArthur sat upright in the stern of the barge. When it
grounded in shoal water, he walked down the ramp and waded
ashore. He was wet to the midriff, but the sun glinted on the
golden "scrambled eggs" on his strictly individualistic cap as
he faced a microphone. To Filipinos his first words were the
fulfillment of a promise: "This is the Voice of Freedom." That
was how the last Corregidor radio programs began. Said Douglas
MacArthur:
</p>
<p> "People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of
Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippines soil...At
my side is your president, Sergio Osmena...The seat of your
government is therefore now firmly re-established on Philippine
soil...Rally to me...Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of
Divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail
of righteous victory."
</p>
<p> [As the troops stormed ashore on Leyte, the U.S. Navy, in the
last great engagement of naval forces, narrowly but decisively
defeated the Japanese in the three-pronged Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Admiral Halsey and the Third Fleet helped punish the central
Japanese force that had come through the Sibuyuan Sea, south of
Luzon, to interdict the landings. Then, taking a calculated
risk, Halsey took his carriers up north to counter the
northernmost Japanese threat, leaving the understrength Seventh
Fleet to cope with the third, southernmost Japanese attack force
attempting to force the narrow Surigao Strait into Leyte Gulf.]
</p>
<p>(November 6, 1944)
</p>
<p> The first-quarter moon had set early, and the morning darkness
was deep in Surigao Strait. At the southern end, squadrons of
PT boats lay in ambush. As the Huso and Yamasiro entered the
narrows with their screen, the PTs attacked. The tiny, bucking
craft made their reputation for dash and expendability in the
Philippines, and they lived up to it. They scored some hits,
lost several of their number.
</p>
<p> Still the Japs came on. Now it was the U.S. destroyers' turn.
at 3:30 a.m. they attacked with torpedoes. Then hulking Rear
Admiral Jesse Barrett Oldendorf, commanding a powerful, balanced
task force, put into effect his policy of "never give a sucker
an even break."
</p>
<p> His ships laid down a semicircular wall of fire, from guns of
all calibers, 5-inch to 16-inch. Laying it down were five
battlewagons salvaged from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor: the
California, Tennessee and Pennsylvania (14-inch), West Virginia
and Maryland (16-inch). Ultramodern fire control and crack
handling put the first salvos squarely on the targets.
</p>
<p> The Japs slowed from 20 knots to twelve. They hesitated as
their leading ships caught fire; then they turned and ran. In
a 40-minute hail of shellfire at ranges of eight to ten miles,
and a later hail of bombs as they trailed oil through the
Mindanao Sea, the Japs lost the battleships Huso and Yamasiro.
MacArthur proclaimed that every ship was sunk; Nimitz hedged,
saying all units were "sunk or decisively defeated."
</p>
<p> "Bull" Halsey's swift stroke against the northernmost force
had been brilliantly successful, but he was going to have to let
some of the cripples get away. In mid-battle, he got a desperate
call for help from Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet. Had Halsey stayed
too long at his appointment in the north? Kinkaid's jeep
carriers had already caught it hot & heavy from the Japs'
central force, which whipped through San Bernardino Strait
before dawn--before, the jeeps' aircraft could get off. The CVEs
were at no pains to hide their plight: they shrilled for help
in uncoded voice radio.
</p>
<p> And well they might. While the Japs' bomb-battered battleships
and destroyers hugged the coast of Samar, heading for the supply
ships, Jap cruisers and more destroyers swung wide into the
Philippine Sea, heading for the U.S. carriers. Their 6- and
8-inch guns outranged the jeeps' 5-inchers. Their speed was
vastly superior. It looked like murder.
</p>
<p> The CVEs executed the best-known naval maneuver: they turned
south, firing over their sterns. They claimed some hits. Luckily
the Jap's gunnery was bad.
</p>
<p> Two destroyers and a destroyer-escort covered the carriers'
retreat by a furious attack launched about 8:30. With torpedoes
and 5-inch guns they tore into the vastly superior enemy. Two
U.S. ships were quickly blown up. The third, hit in one engine
room, fired a spread of torpedoes at a heavy Jap ship, then
limped around to fire another spread. After an hour she was
abandoned.
</p>
<p> [The Japanese force was finally beaten with the extensive help
of carrier aircraft. In Europe, the Germans attacked Britain
with V-2 bombs, the first true rocket weapons.]
</p>
<p>(November 20, 1944)
</p>
<p> For weeks southern England had been under a bombardment as
lurid as something out an early Wells novel. Both London and
Berlin kept the business under wraps. Then, last week, Berlin
announced that London was under heavy fire from V-2, the second
Vergeltungswaffe or "vengeance weapon"--the long-range rocket
which Berlin had long threatened and London had long
anticipated.
</p>
<p> Best information at hand indicates that V-2 is a wingless,
cylindrical missile, 40 ft. long and 5 ft. in diameter, which
soars to the astounding height of 60 to 70 miles. Reports from
Sweden were that it has a range of 250 to 300 miles, and that
its maximum velocity is around 4,000 miles per hour.
</p>
<p> Witnesses who saw the V-2 falling at night said it looked like
a "falling star" or "the tail of comet." By day, it looked like
"a flying telegraph pole."
</p>
<p> V-2 seems to be far less accurate than V-1. According to one
expert, it has a radius of error of 30 to 200 miles. Like V-1,
it is more of a morale and propaganda weapon than an effective
military instrument, and Winston Churchill flatly characterized
it as such.
</p>
<p> [Throughout the autumn, coordinated advances from Belgium in
the north through Metz and Mulhouse were slowly but surely
bringing Allied forces to the borders of Germany itself. Though
a tenacious defense was to be expected, the steady Allied
pressure against an exhausted foe appeared about to take its
inevitable toll. In December, however, the Germans revealed
themselves to be far from exhausted.]
</p>
<p>(December 25, 1944)
</p>
<p> On a 60-mile front, from gloomy, bloodsoaked Hurtgen Forest
to the eastern bulge of Luxembourg opposite Trier, the Germans
finally smashed back. They struck with more weight and fury than
they had mustered at any time since their ill-fated attempt to
break the Allied line at Mortain, in Normandy.
</p>
<p> After a short spell of bad weather which grounded Allied
reconnaissance and attack planes, Rundstedt struck. Crack
German armored and infantry divisions drove in behind massive
artillery barrages. German paratroops landed behind the U.S.
lines, tried to snarl communications. Buzz-bombs, rockets and
a new, undescribed V-weapon came over the lines.
</p>
<p> In clearer weather, the resurgent Luftwaffe showed a burst of
offensive strength.
</p>
<p> Heaviest German thrust was delivered in the heart of the
Ardennes, east of Malmedy, where they overran the U.S. forward
positions entirely, advanced five miles into Belgium.
</p>
<p> Generals Bradley and Hodges had been surprised and caught off
balance. They now seemed to expect more blows before the
feverish explosion of enemy strength petered out. Until it did,
they would probably yield in one place, try to hold in another,
to make the push as costly for Rundstedt as they could. But U.S.
casualties would rise as the drive was broken.
</p>
<p>(January 1, 1945)
</p>
<p> At first everything was wild confusion. Germans suddenly
appeared over the crest of hills and shot up towns. They overran
rear-area supply points, pounded upon U.S. artillerymen before
they could get to their guns.
</p>
<p> Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's skillful breakthrough had
had the first great element of success: surprise. He had struck
the thinnest sector of the American line. He had cleverly begun
with light attacks, concealing his intentions, playing upon the
Americans' underestimation of his strength.
</p>
<p> Then savagely, the full force of the German blow was
unleashed. Its suddenness, its underrated force, sent the
Americans reeling like a boxer who has taken a terrific punch
to the solar plexus. The Germans followed through, hoping to
corner the Americans, to knock out the U.S. first Army.
</p>
<p> Through most of last week the Americans battled mainly for
time. But by week's end they had braced, were fighting back with
an aggressiveness that matched the Germans' savagery.
</p>
<p> After a week the Americans got two days of clear skies, turned
them to telling account. On the second day the Allies flew more
sorties than D-day's historic 11,000.
</p>
<p> Up from the Saar area came large forces of Lieut. General
George S. Patton's tankheavy Third Army to strike at the
Germans' southernmost penetration at Arlon. Heavy battles raged
for the wedges the Americans had been able to hold in the
Monschau-Malmedy-Stavelot area and to the west of Saint-Vith.
But they were perilous triangular salients. Lieut. General
Courtney H. Hodges' First Army had apparently stopped the
spearhead closet to Liege, focal point of U.S. supplies.
</p>
<p>(January 8, 1945)
</p>
<p> The U.S. command had given one order: hold Bastogne at all
costs. The Americans (some 10,000) worked like devils to make
some sort of defense. On a perimeter about two miles out of the
town they set up a line of foxholes, manned by the 101st's
paratroopers. Stationed nearby were groups of tanks and tank
destroyers. Slight ( 5 ft. 8 in., 135 lb.), salty Brigadier
General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, the 101st's acting commander
charged with holding Bastogne, called them his "Team Snafu."
</p>
<p> On Tuesday, Dec. 19, the Germans rolled up from the east and
collided with the American tanks, which had gone out to meet
them at neighboring villages.
</p>
<p> On the first night one of the worst things that could befall
an island of besieged happened to Bastogne: the Germans captured
its complete surgical unit. Bastogne's wounded would have to get
along without amputations, without fracture splints, without
skilled care at all.
</p>
<p> Through Wednesday and Thursday Bastogne battled almost
continuously on its perimeter, suffered tortures in the
overcrowded town. Shells poured in from all sides. Some 3,000
civilians huddled in cellars with the wounded. Food was running
low--the Germans had also captured a quartermaster unit.
Ammunition was dwindling--an ordnance unit had been taken too.
</p>
<p> By Friday Bastogne was a wrecked town, its outskirts littered
with dead. There had been at least four fighting Germans to
every American--the elements of eight enemy divisions. The dead
were probably in the same ratio.
</p>
<p> Through the lines on Friday came in enemy envoy carrying a
white sheet. He delivered an ultimatum: two hours to decide upon
surrender. The alternative: "annihilation by artillery."
</p>
<p> General McAuliffe did not hesitate. He had been touring the
aid stations, had heard the wounded beg him, "Don't give up on
account of us, General Mac." He sat at a debris-littered desk,
printed his reply with formal military courtesy: "To the German
Commander--NUTS!--the American Commander." So there would be no
misinterpretation, an officer translated for the blindfolded
German envoy: "It means the same as `Go to Hell.'"
</p>
<p> Christmas was the turning point. As darkness fell the next
day, a sentry spotted several U.S. Sherman tanks rolling down
a ridge from the south. He alerted the outposts; captured
Shermans had carried Germans up to the lines before, and
sentries had been shot down.
</p>
<p> Out of the leading Sherman's turret popped a bandaged head.
The man with the bandage and the big shiner on his right eye
yelled the proper password. He was Lieut. Colonel Creighton
("Abe") Abrams, commanding the 4th Armored Division's rescue
spearhead.
</p>
<p>(January 22, 1944)
</p>
<p> Battered and bedeviled, the German salient in the Ardennes
shrank, squirmed, changed shape. Allied counterblows from three
directions forced Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to make a
decision. He could stand and fight a battle that was turning
against him, or he could back up with his well-earned gains. He
chose retreat--and conducted it with consummate skill and
minimum losses.
</p>
<p> Top U.S. military sources were now agreed that Rundstedt had
aimed, primarily, to capture the Allied communications center
at Liege, seize or smash the great supply dumps there.
</p>
<p> But they failed even to capture Liege--and thus failed to
force a withdrawal of the Allied positions fronting the Ruhr.
</p>
<p> Yet Rundstedt had achieved what was, undoubtedly, his
secondary aim: to disrupt the Allied offensive for four to six
months. In casualties he had probably got an even break. The
Allies claimed some 50,000 Germans dead or wounded, 40,000 taken
prisoner. Last week Secretary Stimson gave a preliminary count
of 40,000 American casualties, including 18,000 missing, but
this obviously did not include all the categories of losses.
</p>
<p> [As the Battle of the Bulge was winding down, U.S. forces in
the Pacific moved to finish their recapture of the Philippines.
With Leyte in control, MacArthur looked toward Luzon and the
archipelago's capital, Manila. A huge armada spearheaded the
invasion of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf, and the landing forces met
only moderate opposition as they swept south.]
</p>
<p>(February 12, 1945)
</p>
<p> Douglas MacArthur came back to Manila, Pearl of the Orient.
</p>
<p> He came back as he had promised, through 4,000 miles--and 35
months. Far behind now lay the bitter campaign across New
Guinea, the dashing leapfrog drive along the 1,500-mile north
coast. Still fresh in the memory of his soldiers was the landing
in force on Leyte, the swift lancing drive to Mindoro and
Marinduque, the dazzling, varied attack that had baffled and
finally paralyzed the Jap on Luzon.
</p>
<p> No one doubted that there would be hard fighting aplenty
before the Philippines were entirely redeemed; but Manila was
the crown and symbol of the entire Southwest Pacific campaign.
The war that had begun in defeat and humiliation had yielded a
great victory: clear-cut, renowned--and semifinal.
</p>
<p> Neither Manila nor her liberators were garbed for a gala. The
city was drab and dirty after the Jap occupation. The incoming
soldiers were dust-caked and sweatstreaked. But next morning,
as the sun mounted, the miracle of freedom restored called forth
a rush of popular emotion that was louder than the music of
bands, gayer than whipping banners.
</p>
<p> Suddenly Manila's unkempt streets swarmed with men, women &
children, shouting "Veektory!" and "Mabuhay!"--the Tagalog
"Hurrah!" From the little the Japs had left them, from the
fullness of their hearts, the Filipinos pressed gifts on their
deliveries. A small boy darted out to hand a precious egg to one
startled American.
</p>
<p> [The second conference of the Big Three leaders was held at
Yalta in February. It appeared to be a great success. But the
meeting, along with its follow-up in Potsdam in July, was later
seen to have condoned the Soviets' creation of a sphere of
influence in the Eastern European countries they had liberated.]
</p>
<p>(February 19, 1945)
</p>
<p> By any standards, the Crimean Conference was a great
achievement. All doubts about the Big Three's ability to
cooperate, in peace as well as war, seemed now to have been
swept away. On the basis of the Big Three's communique, no
citizen of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., or Great Britain could
complain that this country had been sold down the river.
</p>
<p> Stalin gave his strongest support yet to the Roosevelt policy
of unconditional surrender. More important, the occupation and
control of defeated Germany is to be an Allied, cooperative job:
"The forces of the three powers will each occupy a separate
zone...A central control commission consisting of the supreme
commanders of the three powers (will have) headquarters in
Berlin."
</p>
<p> Russia gets eastern Poland up to the Curzon line (with some
minor adjustments "in Poland's favor"), and Poland will get
German territory to the west and north.
</p>
<p> "...A conference of United Nations should be called at San
Francisco...April 25, 1945, to prepare the charter of (a world
security) organization." The Big Three said that they had
settled the tough problem raised by Russia's previous insistence
that any major power should be able to veto any action against
itself, withheld the details of agreement until France and China
have been consulted.
</p>
<p> Where necessary, the Big Three powers reserve the right to
intervene in the affairs of liberated countries (as Britain did
in Greece) until the people of those countries can "create the
democratic institutions of their own choice."
</p>
<p> The Big Three's words presumably applied to Russia's sphere
(Bulgaria, Rumania, etc.): "They jointly declare their mutual
agreement to concert, during the temporary period of instability
in liberated Europe, the policies of their three Governments in
assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi
Germany, and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of
Europe, to solve by democratic means their pressing political
and economic problems."
</p>
<p> [Yalta had scarcely ended before some of its postwar
provisions were put to the test. Churchill had to use British
troops, who had just finished liberating Greece, against
homegrown Communist rebels who were sowing terror throughout the
country. And in Rumania, visiting Soviet Vice Commissar for
Foreign Affairs Andrei Vishinsky quickly arranged the removal
of a stubborn anti-Communist premier and the installation of a
minority pro-Soviet regime.
</p>
<p> In the Pacific, the Marines landed on tiny Iwo Jima, then on
Okinawa in the Ryukyus, less than 400 miles from Japan's
southern-most island of Kyushu. Allied preparations had been
thorough, naval and air support well coordinated. But fanatical
Japanese defenders exacted a terrible price in U.S. casualties:
6,800 killed on Iwo Jima, 12,500 on Okinawa. In the latter
battle, the defenders held out an incredible 82 days, lost
almost 100,000 men.
</p>
<p> At Okinawa, a new Japanese defensive air tactic born of
desperation was revealed.]
</p>
<p>(March 5, 1945)
</p>
<p> On Iwo Jima last week at least 40,000 Marines fought to the
death with 20,000 entrenched Japanese in an area so constricted
that the troops engaged averaged twelve men to an acre. Ashore
with the marines, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod radioed his
account of the battle:
</p>
<p> Two hours after the original landings on D-day, we had a toe
hold and it looked like a good one. But all hell broke loose
before noon. From the north and from the south the hidden Japs
poured artillery and 6-in. mortars into the marines on the
beachhead. Nearly all our tanks were clustered near the
black-ash beaches like so many black beetles struggling to move
on tar paper.
</p>
<p> The first night on Iwo Jima can only be described as a
nightmare in hell. It was partly the weather--Iwo is as cold as
Ohio at this season. The front line now has moved out of the
tropics into a region of high winds and long periods without
sunshine. All through this bitter night the Japs rained heavy
mortars and rockets and artillery on the entire area between the
beach and the airfield. Twice they hit casualty stations on the
beach. Many men who had been only wounded were killed. One group
of medical corpsmen was reduced from 28 to 11; the corpsmen were
taking it, as usual.
</p>
<p> Along the beach in the morning lay many dead. About them,
whether American or Jap, there was one thing in common. They
died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific
war have I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut
squarely in half. Legs and arms lay 50 ft. away from anybody.
Only the legs were easy to identify--Japanese if wrapped in
khaki puttees, American if covered by canvas leggings.
</p>
<p>(March 12, 1945)
</p>
<p> There is no longer any doubt that Iwo is the most difficult
amphibious operation in U.S. history.
</p>
<p> The end results of Jap tenacity, natural defenses and weapons
might have caused weaker men to falter, but the marines have
carried out their assignment with nobility and courage.
Everybody has had to take it. Even artillerymen, under the
heaviest fire they have seen in the Pacific, have suffered 15%
casualties. One division has lost seven doctors. Such "rear
area" troops as motor transport battalions have had 10%
casualties.
</p>
<p> But the troops who have had to charge impossible defenses have
taken it as never before. I came across one company that had
only 62 men left. Another had lost 109. Another had lost an
officer and 40 men in a vain but heroic charge.
</p>
<p>(April 30, 1945)
</p>
<p> There was no question that the harakiri tactic of Kamikaze
(Divine Tempest) airmen had been adopted as a chief effort.
There were strong indications that it had become the major hope
of a defense of desperation.
</p>
<p> Now nearly all Jap air attacks are suicidal. Last week the
Navy confirmed reports that the Japs were building a special
Kamikaze plane, with a cockpit into which the pilot is locked
before the take-off.
</p>
<p> A picture of what it was like on the receiving end of a
Kamikaze attack came from TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod, who
cabled:
</p>
<p> "The first suicide attack I saw was last winter, against a
ship from which I had recently been detached. I had the
excruciating experiencing of watching a flaming furnace which
contained many of my friends. Seven Jap planes got through the
fighter screen. Six were shot down, but the seventh crashed my
old ship. It poured a column of smoke 300 feet high. Through the
black an occasional explosion pitched roaring flames."
</p>
<p> [Allied forces began crossing the Rhine into Germany in March
1945, and by April 1, the defeat of the Third Reich was assured.
Air Forces continued to rain bombs on cities already reduced to
rubble heaps. The Russians were at the outskirts of Berlin.
Through collapsing German defenses, U.S. and British forces
drove swiftly toward the Elbe, the dividing line between zones
of occupation agreed on at Yalta. The Russians took Vienna in
a bloody battle. As the Allies advanced, they began coming on
the death campus, with their pitiful remnants of starved,
terrified humanity. The horror felt by those who liberated the
camps is conveyed by these excerpts from Time Inc.
correspondents' eyewitness accounts.]
</p>
<p>(April 30, 1945)
</p>
<p> From the Belsen camp LIFE Correspondent George Rodger
reported:
</p>
<p> During the month of March, 17,000 people died of starvation,
and they still die at the rate of 300 to 350 every 24 hours, far
beyond the help of the British authorities, who are doing all
possible to save as many as still have strength to react to
treatment.
</p>
<p> Under the pine trees the scattered dead were lying, not in
twos or threes or dozens, but in thousands. The living tore
ragged clothing from the corpses to build fires over which they
boiled pine needles and roots for soup. Little children rested
their heads against the stinking corpses of their mothers, too
nearly dead themselves to cry. A man hobbled up to me and spoke
to me in German. I couldn't understand what he said and I shall
never know, for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his
sentence.
</p>
<p> From the camp at Buchenwald TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth
reported:
</p>
<p> In this war we have had more than our share of atrocity
stories, but Buchenwald is not a story. It is acres of bare
ground on a hillside in Thuringia where woods and fields are
green under warm spring sun. It is miles and miles of barbed
wire once charged with electricity and guarded by machine-gun
towers built of creosoted pine logs. It is barracks after
barracks crowded with 21,000 living, breathing human beings who
stink like nothing else on earth and many of whom have lost the
power of coherent speech.
</p>
<p> Buchenwald is something of a showplace now, nine days after
it was liberated, and there are certain things you have to see.
There were two ovens there, each with six openings. It was a
clean room with no smell.
</p>
<p> The ovens were not clean. In some of them there were still
charred remains, a grinning, blackened skull, a chest from which
the flesh was still not fully burned away, skeletons half melted
down. The ovens were cold now but in recent weeks before the
Americans came their clean bright flame consumed between 150 and
200 people daily.
</p>
<p> You cannot adequately describe starved men; they just look
awful and unnatural. They walk or creep or lie around and seem
about as animate as the barracks and fence posts and the stones
on Buchenwald's bare, hard-packed earth, and when they are dead
they are corpses and then gone.
</p>
<p> It is terrible and beyond understanding to see human beings
with brain and skillful hands and lives and destinies and
thoughts reduced to a state where only blind instinct tries to
keep them alive. It is beyond human anger or disgust to see in
such a place the remnants of a sign put up by those who ran the
place: "Honesty, Diligence, Pride, Ability...these are the
milestones of your way through here."
</p>
<p>(May 7, 1945)
</p>
<p> Last week the U.S. Seventh Army entered Dachau and liberated
32,000 of its still living inmates. With them went TIME
Correspondent Sidney Olson. His report:
</p>
<p> Beside the highway into Dachau there runs a spur line off the
Munich railroad. Here a soldier stopped us and said: "I think
you better take a look at these box-cars." The cars were filled
with dead men. Most of them were naked. On their bony, emaciated
backs and rumps were whip marks. Most of the cars were open-top
cars like American coal cars. I walked along these cars and
counted 39 of them which were filled with these dead.
</p>
<p> The main entry road runs past several largish buildings. These
had been cleared; and now we began to meet the liberated.
</p>
<p> The eyes of these men defy my powers of description. They are
the eyes of men who have lived in a super-hell of horrors for
many years, and are now driven half-crazy by the liberation they
have prayed so hopelessly for. Again and again, in all languages,
they called on God to witness their joy.
</p>
<p> [There was still little realization that the vast majority of
people in the cramps, living and dead, were Jews. That fact
would not be fully known until the Nuremberg war trials revealed
the "Final Solution" envisioned by Hitler and his henchmen.
</p>
<p> Berlin, and the Third Reich, fell.]
</p>
<p>(May 7, 1945)
</p>
<p> The world's fourth city, in its dying hours, was a monstrous
thing of almost utter destruction. The once-wide Chaussees were
mere lanes in a jungle of enormous ruins. Even the lanes heaved
and quaked to underground expulsions. The Germans, driven from
the streets, had carried their final fighting to the subways,
and the Russians blasted and burned them out. The Germans had
burrowed into the sewers to get behind the attackers, and
Russian sappers went systematically about the foul business of
blowing out great sections. Avalanches of stone thundered into
the lanes and blocked them off.
</p>
<p> Towers of fire surged into the pall of smoke and dust that
overhung the dying city. Here and there Berliners risked a dash
from their cellars to the bomb craters filled with brackish
water. Berlin's water system had gone; thirst was worse than a
possible bullet.
</p>
<p> This was the Berlin that every Red Army man had dreamed of
entering in triumph. But in his wildest dream none could have
imagined these vignettes etched by a madman. Once the Red storm
had passed and the German shells had run out of range, waiters
from a Bierstube stood in the rubble with foaming steins,
smiling tentatively, offering them to the Russians, going
through the motions of tasting the brew, as if to say: "See, it
is not poisoned."
</p>
<p> But from the cauldrons of the subways came a hot, sour,
brownish odor--a smell of sweating men, of dank nests burned out
by flame-throwers. Out of the subway's stench emerged boys in
grew-green and hobnailed boots. These were among the last--the
Hitlerjugend. Some were drunk and some reeled from weariness,
some sobbed and some hiccupped. One more Platz in the last long
mile to the Wilhelmstrasse had been won, and one more Red banner
flapped over a scene of dead bodies and discarded swastika
armbands.
</p>
<p> Into that Platz, then into others, and finally into the vast
wreckage of Unter den Linden came tanks and guns. Katusha
rockets screeched over the Brandenburger Tor. Then, against a
background of flames, the Red banner of victory was unfurled
over the gutted Reichstag building. But, even after the ten-day
battle was won, Germans died hard.
</p>
<p>(May 14, 1945)
</p>
<p> Like spring, victory in Europe came at last--in its own sweet
time.
</p>
<p> For soldiers in Europe, war's end came variously, and at
various times. For some it ended long ago--at Dunkirk, at
Salerno, in Normandy, in the Ardennes, at many an unsung
roadside. But for each survivor the war ended on the day when
the prisoners' cage was opened or the field ahead no longer spat
death.
</p>
<p> For the commanders it ended over different tables at
different hours: for Alexander in Caserta on Sunday; for
Montgomery on Luneburg Heath on the following Friday; for
Devers, at Munich on Saturday.
</p>
<p> For heads of states, it ended when they got around to
announcing it--anticlimatically, after everyone knew it was
over.
</p>
<p> And for ordinary people, the war in Europe ended--not when
they heard the voice of the radio, nor when they saw paper
blizzards falling between skyscrapers, nor even when they ate
their first food in freedom--but slowly and silently, by
degrees, somewhere in each man's heart.
</p>
<p> But this week victory in Europe, like long-deferred spring,
was here.</p>
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