Conqueror's Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945 (review)

The name Osmar White is not likely to be familiar to the readers of this journal, hence this digression. White, who died twenty years ago, was an Australian journalist who covered both the Pacific and European theaters during World War II for a British/Australian newspaper syndicate. After spending the early war years in the Pacific, he was badly wounded when a Japanese bomb struck his LST at Rendova, New Guinea. While recovering from his wounds, he produced a controversial book critical of the Allied command for sending men into battle poorly trained and equipped (Green Armour, 1945).

After his recovery, White was posted to Europe, ending up in early 1945 on the German border, assigned to (embedded in, to use the current terminology) Patton's Third Army. Conquerors' Road, drawn largely from his notes and dispatches written at the time, is his very personal account of that experience.

White finished his book at the end of 1945, found publishers in England and America, and waited expectantly for months, only to have both houses decide that the market for war stories was dead. He put his manuscript aside and spent the rest of his professional career in Australia, a strong advocate for various humanitarian causes. Incidentally, he never returned to Germany.

Then, in 1983, a year before his death, White dug out his old manuscript to make some minor editorial revisions. Conquerors' Road eventually appeared in 1996, edited by Sally A. White and Neil McDonald, and has now been republished. The above information and much more can be found in the Editors' and Author's Notes preceding the text.

White begins his odyssey with the Third Army on the banks of the Our River near Dickirch. He stays in fairly close contact with the 4th Armored Division and the 5th Infantry Division as they advanced across the Eifel, penetrated the West Wall, and closed on the Rhine. He was an eyewitness to the 11th Infantry's jumping of the Rhine near Oppenheim. He comments, without criticism, on the GIs' propensities to pinpoint pockets of German resistance, then call for artillery and air strikes to dislodge the enemy, and to ransack every cellar for hidden booze. The GIs' many frustrations were summed up for White while he was lying next to a young American corpsman in a German ditch, enduring an 88 shelling: "'The goddamn krauts know they're beaten . . . they want to give up. But they don't know how. They got no machinery for giving up. Holy tit, but a guy would be unlucky to collect his packet at this stage of the game! Airbursts, Jesus!'" Along the way we learn that White personally disliked Patton for his "childish love of notoriety," his foul mouth, and his preoccupation with enemy corpses. Yet, he thought that Patton was by far the tactical genius of the campaign.

White continued with the Third Army across Germany, viewing Herman Goering's stolen art collection shortly after it had been recovered and spending a harrowing two weeks experiencing the death camps. And, he was in Reims for the surrender. All the while he was constantly speculating on the attitudes of the Germans, civilian and military, whom he interviewed. Why did the Wehrmacht and the SS despise one another? Why were the German people so obsequious in defeat? Why were none willing or able to launch a counter-insurgency against the Allied forces spread so thinly across Germany—an apparent anomaly given our current experience with the Iraqis?

By all means grab a copy of this expensive little book. It will provide you with a detached observer's view of the fall of Nazi Germany and food for thought.