World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY: Death Rattle

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Throughout Germany the grey-green legions that once ruled Europe were now slack and disorganized in defeat—a soft, mushy mass of an army with only a few muscles of resistance. Cut in two by a U.S.-Russian meeting (see below), the Wehrmacht was all but cut into thirds and sixths. Bremen and Munich fell. The threat of a formidable national redoubt in the Alps was fast fading, and with it, the last German hope of delay.

In the two halves of Germany, Allied columns from the west were speeding down Autobahnen, hopping across rivers, rushing through white-flagged towns for more meetings with the Russians. General

George S. Patton's Third Army rolled along the Danube through Austria toward a junction with Marshal Fedor I. Tolbukhin's Third Ukrainian Army. Together they would cut Czechoslovakia from Austria, tear the entire side out of the mountain fortress the Germans hoped to hold. The British crossed the Elbe near Hamburg in the north for a drive toward Lübeck. The U.S. Ninth and the U.S. First, southwest of Berlin, broke out for more linkups with Russian troops.

Behind these armored needles lacing up the German shroud, the Allies tidied and mopped up. Regensburg, the Ratisbon where Napoleon won a battle and a wound in the heel; Augsburg, 95 miles from the Brenner Pass; Bremen in the north, Germany's second largest seaport, all fell within the week.

Munich, heart of Nazidom and Germany's third largest city, was torn by revolution but fought savagely nevertheless. The U.S. Seventh Army had plunged 20 miles through defenseless countryside to the outskirts of the old city where Adolf Hitler hatched his movement in a beer hall. Then suddenly nests of SS men had exploded into action and forced the Americans to battle their way in.

Other towns fell in Bavaria: Oberammergau of the Passion Play, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, scene of the 1936 Olympics, Dachau of evil concentration-camp fame. At Dachau 32,000 political prisoners were freed, and at nearby Moosburg the U.S. Third tore down the gates for 110,000 Allied war prisoners.

Clearly the German Army was in the stage of panicky crackup before final disintegration. This week the U.S. War Department announced the total of Germans captured by the western Allies since Dday: 2,629,000.

There were little groups of men who continued to fight, who here & there formed a hard core that had to be torn apart. But actually the phase of the "pockets" seemed to be ending before it had well begun. The Wehrmacht was through. This was its death rattle.