There wasn’t much resistance.
As individuals, squads, companies, regiments, divisions, corps-as entire armies the Germans were surrendering. The crazies were still fighting, like chickens with their heads cut off, even though Hitler had shot himself on April 30. But most of the shooting was over. The dominant thought in every GI’s head was home. On May 6 Don Williams of Stars and Stripes wrote an article that gave them the bad news: “No man or woman, no matter how long he or she has been in service, overseas or in combat, will be released from the Army if his or her services are required in the war against Japan.” There would be a point system for demobilization: so many points for length of service, time already spent overseas, combat decorations, and the number of dependent children in the States. Soldiers deemed essential for war duties would either stay on as occupation troops or ship out for the invasion of Japan. “In the meantime,” Williams wrote, “don’t write home and tell your mother or sweetheart that you’ll be home next week or next month. For most of you, it just ain’t so.”
On May 7 the campaign of the US Army in Northwest Europe came to an end. That morning, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, German delegates signed the unconditional surrender. The Russians insisted that there be a second signing, in Berlin, which took place on May 8.
Men reacted differently. Sergeant Ewald Becker of Panzer Grenadier Regiment 111 was near his home in Kassel. “We went out onto the streets to surrender. The first vehicle to come was an American jeep and as I raised my hands he waved and grinned at me and continued to drive. Then another jeep with four men. They stopped and gave me chocolate and drove on. Then a German vehicle came with a white flag. I asked him what was going on and he said the war has been over for two hours. I went back to the village and we tapped the first available keg. Within two hours, I can say with confidence, the entire village was drunk.”
Sergeant James Pemberton, 103rd Division, by the end of the war had been in combat for 347 days. “The night of May 8, I was looking down from our cabin on the mountain at the Inn River Valley in Austria. It was black. And then the lights in Innsbruck went on. If you have not lived in darkness for months, shielding even a match light deep in a foxhole, you can’t imagine the feeling.”
Many units had a ceremony of some sort. In the 357th Combat Team, 90th Division, the CO had all the officers assemble on the grassy slopes of a hill, under a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. The regimental CO spoke, and the division commander spoke. Lieutenant Colonel Ken Reimers remembered counting the costs. “We had taken some terrible losses-our infantry suffered over 250 per cent casualties. There was not a single company commander present who left England with us.”
The 90th Division had been in combat for 308 days-the record in ETO-but other divisions had taken almost as many casualties. The junior officers and NCOs suffered most. Some of America’s best young men went down leading their troops in battle. Dutch Schultz paid his officers and NCOs a fine tribute: “Not only were these men superb leaders both in and out of combat, but, more importantly, they took seriously the responsibility of first placing the welfare of their men above their own needs.”
THERE is NO typical GI among the millions who served in Northwest Europe, but Bruce Egger surely was representative. He was a mountain man from central Idaho. In October 1944 he arrived in France, and on November 6 he went on the line with G Company, 328th regiment, 26th Division. He served out the war in almost continuous frontline action. He had his close calls, most notably a piece of shrapnel stopped by the New Testament in the breast pocket of his field jacket, but was never wounded. In this he was unusually lucky. Egger rose from private to staff sergeant.
In his memoir of the war Egger spoke for all GIs: “More than four decades have passed since those terrible months when we endured the mud of Lorraine, the bitter cold of the Ardennes, the dank cellars of Saarlutem. We were miserable and cold and exhausted most of the time; we were all scared to death. But we were young and strong then, possessed of the marvellous resilience of youth, and for all the misery and fear and the hating every moment of it the war was a great, if always terrifying, adventure. Not a man among us would want to go through it again, but we are all proud of having been so severely tested and found adequate. The only regret is for those of our friends who never returned.”