Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich

Chapter 4

THROUGH THE STEIGERWALD 93

THROUGH THE STEIGERWALD Having crossed the Tauber, units of the Twelfth Armored Division, primarily the Seventeenth Armored Infantry Battalion and the Twenty-third Tank Battalion, now moved rapidly eastward toward Aub, Uffenheim, and Ippesheim, hoping to skirt the ridges along the southern edge of the Steigerwald before turning south toward the Aisch River and the towns of Bad Windsheim and Neustadt, which controlled access to the Frankenhöhe. Subjected toconstantAmerican aerial attacks and strong artillery fire, faced with shortages of heavy weapons, artillery, food, and fuel, and deeply impressed by the overwhelming material superiority of its enemy, against which even personal bravery seemed futile, German commanders struggled to maintain the steadfastness of their troops. For the Germans, these were demoralizing days of hard fighting and heavy losses, with their only hope of delaying the Americans lying in the doggedness and courage of the Landser and the effectiveness of the remarkable Panzerfaust handheld antitank weapon.1 Although impressive as a tank destroyer,the Panzerfaust made deep demands on one’s reservoir of personal courage, for a Landser had to lie in wait (or approach stealthily) until a tank was at point-blank range, rise suddenly to fire the one-shot weapon, then scurry to safety, all the while hoping not to be seen or hit by supporting enemy infantrymen. A 4 ENDKAMPF 94 veteran of the Twelfth Armored Division remembered the fanatical Germans who“hunkered in fox-holes with Panzerfäuste at the roadside,ready to die for the chance of knocking out just one tank, and they often succeeded because the Panzerfaust was a superb weapon.” To combat it, GIs soon “rode on tanks, the tanks spraying the road with machine-gun fire, keeping the Germans in their holes, and the infantry tossing grenades with a looping trajectory very carefully into the holes from where they sat on top of the tanks, so that the fanatics ended with a squashy whump, and those who lived were really hell to take care of, all bloody scrambled. They crouched between pine-tree roadblocks until our tank guns blew them away in white flashes and splinters; they dug lines of fortifications that were target practice for our artillery. . . . Their lunatic heroism ended torn or dead.” The futility of the resistance notwithstanding, in three weeks of fighting in Middle Franconia some three hundred American vehicles fell victim to Landsers wielding the Panzerfaust.2 OpposingtheTwelfthArmored’sadvancewereremnantsofKampfgruppe Dirnagel; the Seventy-ninth, 212th, and 352nd Volksgrenadier Divisions (severely under-strength infantry units with fewer than one thousand men each); a battle group of the Second Mountain Division with perhaps 1,500 troops; and the newly formed Panzerkampfgruppe XIII, more commonly referred to as Panzerkampfgruppe Hobe, named for its commander ,Lieutenant Colonel Cord von Hobe,who tookcharge of the battle group on April 6. This latter outfit, although hastily cobbled together, posed particular problems for the Americans. With a mixed bag of tank destroyer units and no more than six hundred infantrymen, it included experienced officers, most with service in the east, and a highly motivated core of soldiers—military cadets, Hitler Youth adherents, and officer candidates—with an unusually high battle spirit at this late stage of the war.Despite the stiff challenge his Kampfgruppe ultimately presented, because of insufficient fuel and ammunition, poor intelligence and communication , and constant American fighter-bomber attacks, Hobe only managed to get a fraction of his available armor into action, the greater part of his tank force eventually being destroyed by their own crews. Indeed ,thechroniclackof fuelandgeneraldisillusionmentwiththeso-called wonder weapons that Hitler had promised would win the war resulted in a sardonic gibe about the latest such weapon, the one hundred-man tank: one man would sit inside while the other ninety-nine pushed.3 Stretched along a roughly thirty-mile line running southwest from THROUGH THE STEIGERWALD 95 Iphofen in the north through Ippesheim and Herrnberchtheim to Uffenheim, Hobe aimed to force the Americans to traverse the rugged terrain of the 1,300- to 1,500-foot heights of the Steigerwald. A heavily forested region traversed by Neanderthal hunters one hundred thousand years earlier, permanently settled at least seven thousand years before the birth of Christ, overrun by Celts, Germans, and Franks, all of whom left their mark, and the scene of dreadful slaughter in both the Peasants War and the Thirty Years War, the Steigerwald once again became the focal point of invading...