The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy)

by Rick Atkinson

Occasional bad behavior reinforced the stereotype of boorish Yanks. GIs near Newcastle ate the swans at a grand country estate, Thomas Hardy be damned. Paratroopers from the 101st Airborne used grenades to fish in a private pond,

A single Sherman tank took three hundred man-hours to waterproof, occupying the five-man crew for a week.

“I’m no longer content unless I am with soldiers in the field,” he confessed, but added, “If I hear another fucking GI say ‘fucking’ once more, I’ll cut my fucking throat.”

Churchill’s color was also deepened by the “large number of whiskeys” he had tossed down in a bootless effort to calm himself.

One British wit observed that a staple of De Gaulle’s diet had long been the hand that fed him.

morphine syrettes (“one for pain and two for eternity”).

Brigadier Williams proposed a motto for Montgomery: “Alone I done it.”

When a V-1 was heard during a performance at the St. James Theatre, one patron muttered, “How squalid to be killed at this disgusting little farce.”

Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, “an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.”

A horse was shooed into the city carrying a German corpse lashed across the saddle with a note: “All you sons-a-bitches are going to end up this way.”

An OSS analysis concluded that Germany now averaged monthly casualties of a quarter million, while only 45,000 young

In what the OB West war diary called an “ignominious rout,” Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.

All this and more was the handiwork of the COMZ commander, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, known as John Court House Lee, Jesus Christ Himself Lee, and God A’Mighty Lee.

The Army’s official history, rarely astringent in describing senior generals, in this case captured the man: “Heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless … General Lee often aroused suspicions and created opposition.” The Army’s chief surgeon in Europe admitted that “he’s nobody I’d ever want to go fishing with for a week.”

The task might well have overmatched the most gifted administrator, and certainly it taxed Jesus Christ Himself.

MARKET GARDEN proved “an epic cock-up,” as a British major averred, a poor plan with deficient intelligence, haphazard execution, and indifferent generalship.

A tank or tank destroyer perforated each building with crashing fire, floor by floor from street to attic, forcing defenders to the cellars, where grenades finished them off.

National Socialist slogans on a broken wall reminded the faithful, auf Deutsch, “For this we thank our Führer,” and, “You are nothing, the state is all.” GIs chalked their own scatological exegesis.

“For over two years,” he had recently written his sister, “I’ve calloused my emotions with countless experiences that will never be recalled to memory if I can find power to erase them forever.”

Every commander wore a mask, and Eisenhower wore his while still conveying sincerity, rectitude, and humanity.

The Army was said to believe that every GI was fashioned from four elements—a belly, genitalia, a bundle of conditioned reflexes, and a pair of feet.

standard 88mm flak gun fired a 17-pound shrapnel grenade that climbed thirteen thousand feet in six seconds before bursting into fifteen hundred shards that could perforate any plane within two hundred yards. Fortunately for Allied crews, sixteen thousand 88mm shells were required on average to bring down a single heavy bomber.

British airman had just a one-in-five chance of surviving the loss of his plane, in part because the Lancaster had only a single emergency exit. For an American crewman, the chance was three in five. (The B-17 Flying Fortress had four exits.)

For every French soldier in Europe, the U.S. Army billed De Gaulle $6.67 per day in support costs.