The First Army’s Drive to the Elbe
With the
Allied Armies all across the Rhine and preparing for the final sweep across
Germany, General Eisenhower in concert with the American Combined Chiefs of
Staff modified his original plan and announced that General Bradley’s 12th
Army Group would lead the drive across Germany to Leipzig on the Elbe River
over 210 kilometers away to link up with the approaching Russians and cut up
the German forces into two with a view to hastening the end of the war.
His initial plan involving a drive
to Berlin by Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was now
abandoned in favor of this new plan as he didn’t see any sense in rushing his
forces forward to take Berlin ahead of the Russians as Berlin lay deep in the
Russian zone of occupation as agreed upon by the Allied leaders in the Yalta
conference in February of that year. Eisenhower felt that since Berlin lay securely
in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, they ought to be the ones to pay the price in
blood for the capture of the Reich Capital.
Even though Prime Minister Winston
Churchill and the British Combined Chiefs vigorously protested the change of
plans, Eisenhower stuck to his new position. He couldn’t be persuaded to shed
American blood for what ultimately would be in the Russian Zone of Occupation.
Shortly after the end of the war and the onset of the Cold War, General
Eisenhower was largely vilified by Western historians for granting the Russians
control of Berlin and undermining the Western Alliance in the eventual struggle
with the Soviet Union over the control of Eastern Europe during the Cold War
particularly during the Berlin Crises. Events since the 1991 collapse of the
Soviet Union have however since then, vindicated General Eisenhower’s decision.
The prestige of vanquishing the Reich capital would have been a poor
compensation in the face of the ultimate loss of over 200,000 Russian lives that
it took to conquer the German capital.
Had General Eisenhower capitulated to pressure particularly from British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British Combined Chiefs of Staff to
assault Berlin in April 1945, I wonder in the light of later Soviet
intransigence, what he would have held up as the ultimate gain, to the American
public for the anticipated heavy loss of American lives that would have been
involved at a time when the end of the war was clearly in sight, particularly
as he reiterated, Berlin lay deep in the agreed Soviet Zone of occupation.
Consequently the Ninth Army was re-assigned to the 12th Army Group
under General Omar N Bradley whose Army Group was ordered to lead the new
Allied offensive. General Courtney Hodges First Army in the centre was ordered
to make for Leipzig on the Elbe River, 210 kilometers away while the Ninth Army
also struck for Magdeburg also on the Elbe about 105 kilometers north of
Leipzig, and the Third Army made for Chemnitz 45 kilometers south east of
Leipzig from where it was to turn southeast to Austria and then to
Czechoslovakia to neutralise any attempts by Nazi fanatics to establish any Redoubts or last stand in
the forests of Bavaria as was been widely speculated then.
Of the three Armies, the First Army encountered stiffer resistance than
the other two armies even though German resistance was on the whole sparse and
sporadic. The fast armored spearheads had learnt to outflank and isolate
determined German pockets of resistance, leaving incoming infantry to do the
mopping up operation, and by so doing the momentum of the advance was
maintained, so that by the 20th of April, Leipzig had fallen even
though the First Army was subsequently directed to halt its advance on the Mulde
River.
As the First Army halted its operations on the Mulde /Elbe River,
attention now turned to the link up with the Russian forces advancing from the
East and this eventually became a race as to which unit will make the first
contact with the approaching Soviet forces. As a result deep patrols were sent
out by all units along the Elbe. By 11; 30 am on the 25th of April a
small unit of the First Army’s 25th infantry division met a lone Russian
horseman in the village of Leckwitz.
Several other patrols made several
other contacts with Soviet units that day and on the following day the 26th
of April, the 25th Infantry’s Division’s commander, Major General
Emile F Reinhardt met with Major General Vladimir Rusakov of the Russian 58th
Guards Infantry Division at Torgau in the official link up ceremony and April
25 became officially known as Elbe’s day. The First Army’s advance across
Germany had ended by the 26th of April and only local mop-up
operations now remained.
The war itself would end officially about
eleven days later after German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler with his bunker in Berlin
under direct Russian artillery attack took his life and left his designated
successor Grand Admiral Doenitz to handle the official capitulation.
This
finally took place at about 2 am on May 7th 1945 at Reims,
Eisenhower’s headquarters in Eastern France when Colonel General Alfred Jodl,
Germany Army headquarters Chief of staff leading the official German delegation
sent by Doenitz to negotiate with General Eisenhower signed the surrender
document on behalf of the Wermacht and brought the war to an end.
The end of
hostilities in the European Theater of Operations was not however to mark the
end of the First Army’s ordeal in World War Two, however as Washington had
penciled the First Army for re-assignment to the far East to participate in
operations planned for the invasion of the Japanese mainland code-named
Operation Olympic earmarked for November 1945.
The news
was heart wrenching for men who had led the spear head of the United States
Army into combat in Western Europe on June 6th 1944, and had fought
longer and harder than any other unit, had also borne the brunt of the fighting
in the battle of the Bulge suffering disproportionately huge casualties.
However the
choice to detach the First Army from the European front to fight alongside
General Echellberger’s Eight Army based in the Philippines spoke eloquently
about the fighting qualities of the First Army and the confidence the Pentagon
and General Marshal in particular had in the men and officers of the First Army.
The First Army became the only Army in
World War 2 to have the privilege of activating its headquarters in both the
European and Pacific fronts when its temporary headquarters was activated in
the Philippines in July 1945.
As the men
prepared to board troopships to travel to the Far East to participate in the
invasion of Japan proper, the stomachs and hearts of the men churned in agony
as to the fresh ordeal that lay ahead of them. Men who had not seen their
families in two years and had survived the European battlefields and were still
required by their nation as an elite force to participate in the invasion of
Japan the only remaining enemy of the United States still on the battlefield,
could never be justifiably described as anything but heroes, heroes not only of
the United States but of World War 2
As the men
agonized as to the fate that still peculiarly befell them, news came on the 2nd
of August 1945 that the United States had successfully exploded an Atomic Bomb
over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and three days later another one on the
city of Nagasaki bringing about the capitulation of Japan and the end of World
War 2.
The eruption of joy that swept through Europe
that summer over the news of the Japanese surrender must have been felt more
keenly amongst the men and officers of the First Army, who only then realised
that their fight to rid the world of tyranny and evil had finally come to a
successful end.
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