Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [194]
Late February was spent in the clearing of the remainder of Prussia, the taking of Danzig, and the occupying of parts of Pomerania. The Germans fought hard to hold on to these ancient Germanic lands, but there was nothing more they could hope to achieve than a temporary stemming of the tide. Behind the thin line of fighting troops was a gigantic sauve qui peut, as more hundreds of thousands of refugees fled in terror to the westward. To the south, in the Danube Valley, the Soviets at last broke past ruined Budapest; Vienna fell in April and by the middle of that month, Nazi Germany consisted of a long narrow strip, roughly fifty miles to a hundred miles wide, running from the Baltic coast down into Yugoslavia and northern Italy. Once more the Russians paused momentarily for breath, brought up their supplies, and gathered for the final leap that would carry them into Berlin.
In the west the fighting went on through the early months of 1945. Hitler still refused to believe that the Allies were as strong as they were, or the Germans as weak as they were. He now directed that there be a second offensive, this time farther south in Alsace-Lorraine against General Devers’ 6th Army Group. Launched on New Year’s Day, it made steady if slow going. The Americans were prepared to sacrifice territory for time, and the gravest problem presented by the whole offensive was political. American troops of General Patch’s 7th Army, and French of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s 1st French Army, had occupied the great city of Strassbourg. In Paris, de Gaulle feared Eisenhower was willing to give it up if tactically desirable and he absolutely refused to countenance the surrendering of a major French city to the Germans again, no matter how temporarily, or however sound the reason. The Americans held on the Moder River, and the Germans ran out of steam before the month was out. Once more they had frittered away badly needed troops; indeed, one of the reasons for the abortion of their offensive was the overriding necessity of drafting units off to the Eastern Front to try to stem the rampaging Russians.
Eisenhower then turned his attention to a large body of Germans still west of the upper Rhine around Colmar. Hitler refused to let them retreat in time, so American and French units surrounded them, and the “Colmar pocket” was effectively wiped out by the first week of February. It was some measure of the seriousness of Hitler’s Alsace offensive, and how much damage he could really do now, that the one Allied army group involved could both withstand the attack and undertake offensive operations of its own at the same time. The Germans had bought time, but to what purpose? so that more thousands of Jews and Slavs could be sent to the gas chambers and ovens? Now, in mid-February, their time was gone, and the Western Allies were ready for their drive into and over the Rhine.
In the second week of February the Western Allied armies fell on the Germans like an avalanche. It started in the north, where the British and Canadian troops of Crerar’s 1st Canadian Army drove into the heavily fortified and forested area of the Reichswald. Germans, including new SS units that seemed to the Canadians to consist largely of young fanatics, fought for every inch, and died in their holes as the tanks and infantry ground steadily forward. On Crerar’s right Dempsey launched a pincer movement, and to the right again Hodges’ Americans, after more than a week of fierce bludgeoning, fought their way past the Roer River dams, only to find that the Germans had wrecked them at the last minute, creating floods to the northward that temporarily slowed the British troops. But now the tempo increased on down the line, until battle raged from Nijmegen all the way up the Rhine to the Moselle. Twist,