Voices of WW2

November 14, 1944. In the cold and rain of eastern France, the French First Army launches an offensive through the Belfort Gap, and within days French soldiers will stand on the bank of the Rhine, the first Allied troops of the entire western campaign to reach Germany's great river barrier. For the French, fighting to liberate their own soil, it is a moment of enormous pride.

The French First Army was one of the great stories of the war's later phase, the rebirth of the French army. After the catastrophe of 1940 and the years of occupation, a new French army had been rebuilt, around the Free French forces and, above all, the troops of the French empire, the North African divisions, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and the colonial forces from across the French territories, along with men of the resistance who flocked to the colors as France was liberated. This army, under General de Lattre de Tassigny, had landed in southern France in August 1944 and driven north up the Rhône valley, and now it held the southern end of the Allied line in the Vosges mountains and Alsace, fighting toward the German border.

The Belfort Gap was the key to the south. It is a corridor of lower ground between the Vosges mountains to the north and the Jura mountains to the south, the natural gateway from France into the upper Rhine plain and on toward Germany. If the French could force the Gap, they could break out of the mountains and reach the Rhine. On the 14th, de Lattre launched his offensive, in miserable late-autumn weather, cold, rain, and mud, against determined German defenses.

The attack went well. The French drove through the Belfort Gap, broke the German defenses, and pushed on down toward the Rhine. And within less than a week, around the 19th and 20th of November, French armored units reached the Rhine itself, at the Swiss border near Basel. It was a landmark: French troops were the first of all the Western Allied armies to reach the Rhine, Germany's historic western moat, the great river that was the last major barrier before the heart of the Reich. For an army that had been destroyed and humiliated in 1940, to be the first to the Rhine was a triumph of deep symbolic power, the French restored, back on the offensive, standing on the frontier of Germany.

The French went on to liberate the city of Mulhouse and much of southern Alsace, and to join in the long, hard fighting to clear the Germans from the rest of Alsace over the difficult winter that followed, including the grim battles around the Colmar Pocket, where the Germans clung to a bridgehead on the west bank into early 1945. The fighting in Alsace was bitter, and it was fought partly by Frenchmen for French soil that had been German for part of its history and was fiercely contested, with all the emotional weight that carried.

The offensive on the 14th, and the dash to the Rhine that followed, is one of the proud chapters of the French army's war, the reborn army of liberation, built largely on the soldiers of the empire, forcing the gateway into the Rhine plain and reaching the great river first. It was a long way from the disaster of 1940, and it was a reminder that France, defeated and occupied, had come back to help liberate itself and to stand, in arms, on the threshold of Germany.

November 14, 1940. For eleven hours through the night, wave after wave of German bombers pound the English city of Coventry, and by morning the medieval heart of the city, including its ancient cathedral, is a smoking ruin. The Coventry Blitz is the most concentrated air raid on any British city of the war, so devastating that the Germans coined a word for it, and it gave the world an early, terrible lesson in what the bombing of cities would mean.

Coventry was a major center of British war production, full of factories making aircraft engines, vehicles, and munitions, and that made it a target. On the night of the 14th, the Luftwaffe launched a massive, carefully planned raid against it, codenamed Operation Moonlight Sonata, timed for a clear, moonlit night that would help the bombers find their way. Nearly five hundred bombers came over in relays through the long night, guided to the target by radio navigation beams, dropping high explosives to blow the city open and incendiaries to set it ablaze.

Coventry burned. The incendiaries started fires across the compact old city faster than the firefighters could fight them, the water mains were wrecked, and the separate fires grew and merged into a great conflagration. The bombing went on and on, hour after hour, and by the time the last bombers left near dawn, the center of Coventry was gutted. Hundreds of people were killed, well over five hundred, and many more wounded, and thousands were left homeless, more than forty thousand homes damaged or destroyed. The city's symbol, the beautiful fourteenth-century cathedral of St. Michael, was burned out, leaving only its shell and its spire standing amid the ruins, an image that became famous around the world as an emblem of the destruction.

The raid was so thorough and so concentrated that it shocked even a Britain already hardened by months of the Blitz on London. The Germans were so pleased with it that they coined a verb, coventrieren, "to Coventrate," meaning to annihilate a city from the air, and they threatened to do the same to other British cities. Coventry became a byword for the obliteration of a city.

There is a famous and persistent legend attached to Coventry that is worth addressing honestly, because it is almost certainly false. The story goes that British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, reading the German Enigma messages, knew in advance that Coventry was to be the target, and that Churchill deliberately chose not to warn the city or evacuate it, sacrificing Coventry to protect the precious secret that Britain could read the German codes. It is a dramatic, terrible story, and it is told often. But historians who have examined the evidence have concluded it is a myth. The codebreakers did pick up signs of a big raid, Operation Moonlight Sonata, coming, but the specific target was not clearly identified as Coventry in time; there was confusion, with some believing London or other cities were the objective, and the certainty that it was Coventry came too late to matter. Churchill did not knowingly let Coventry burn to protect Ultra. The legend is a good story that the facts do not support.

What is true is terrible enough without the myth. Coventry showed, early and vividly, what the deliberate bombing of cities meant: a city's heart burned out in a night, its cathedral in ruins, hundreds of ordinary people dead in their homes and shelters. It was part of the Blitz, the German campaign to break British morale by bombing the cities, which failed in its aim, Britain did not break, but which killed tens of thousands. And it was a foretaste of what was to come on a vastly greater scale, when the Allied bombers would do to the cities of Germany, to Hamburg and Kassel and Dresden, what the Luftwaffe had done to Coventry, multiplied many times over. The burning of Coventry on the 14th was one of the opening chapters of the whole grim story of the bombing of cities, the night a word was coined for the annihilation of a city from the air.

November 14, 1944. A transport plane carrying one of the most senior air commanders of the Allied forces flies into bad weather over the French Alps and crashes into a mountainside, killing everyone aboard. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who had commanded all the Allied air forces for the D-Day invasion, dies not in battle but in an accident, on his way to a new command on the other side of the world.

Leigh-Mallory was a major figure in the air war. A veteran airman who had risen through the Royal Air Force, he had commanded a group of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, and he had gone on to the highest responsibilities. For the invasion of Normandy, he had been appointed commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, the officer in overall charge of coordinating the vast Allied air power, British and American, that supported the D-Day landings and the campaign in France, the thousands of fighters and bombers that won and held command of the air over the invasion. It was one of the most important air commands of the war.

With the campaign in Western Europe well advanced, Leigh-Mallory had been given a new assignment: to go to Southeast Asia to take command of the Allied air forces in that theater, the air war against Japan in Burma and beyond. In November 1944 he set off to take up the post, flying out from Britain toward the Far East, accompanied by his wife.

The journey ended in the mountains. His aircraft, flying over the French Alps in poor weather, ran into cloud and worsening conditions, and crashed into a mountainside. Everyone aboard was killed, Leigh-Mallory and his wife among them. For a time the wreck was not even found; the aircraft had simply vanished into the mountains, and it was only later that the crash site was located and the fate of the party confirmed.

It was a reminder, like the explosion of the ammunition ship Mount Hood that I told you about, of a category of the war's dead that is easy to overlook: the men, including the most senior commanders, killed not by the enemy but by the sheer hazard of moving around a world at war, by accidents, by weather, by the unforgiving dangers of flying thousands of miles in the aircraft of the day. Senior officers died this way with some regularity, in plane crashes and accidents, their deaths no less final for being unglamorous.

Leigh-Mallory's death removed one of the architects of the air victory over Normandy at the height of his career, on his way to help finish the war against Japan, killed on a mountainside in his own continent before he ever reached his new command. He was a figure of some controversy in life, his judgment and his relationships with other commanders debated then and since, but his loss was a real one, a senior Allied airman gone in an instant in the Alps, one more of the war's deaths that came not from the enemy's hand but from the dangerous business of war itself.

Red Army assault engineer-sappers and flamethrower operators fighting in the ruins of Küstrin, Germany

In March 1945, the Germans tried to blow up the last bridge over the Rhine. They hit the switch, the charges went off, and the bridge lifted into the air. Then it settled right back down.

By early 1945, the Rhine River was Germany's last great natural barrier in the west. As the Allies closed in, the Germans blew up bridge after bridge so nobody could cross. Dozens of them went into the river.

But one stayed up. The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen.

Part of the reason goes back to the fall of 1944. A bridge at Cologne had been destroyed when an Allied bomb set off the German demolition charges already packed inside it. Hitler was furious. So he ordered that bridges not be fully wired to blow until the enemy was close. Every bridge had to be destroyed at the last possible minute.

On March 7, 1945, troops from the US 9th Armored Division came over a hill and saw something nobody expected. The Remagen bridge was still standing. German soldiers and civilians were still streaming across it.

Lt. Karl Timmermann's company was ordered to take it.

The Germans set off a charge on the approach that blew a big crater in the road. Then, with the Americans moving in, they triggered the main demolition. There was a huge blast. The bridge rose up off its supports.

And then it came back down. Still standing.

Nobody knows exactly why for certain. A shell may have cut the main firing cable. The engineers had asked for military explosives and got a weaker industrial explosive instead, and not as much as they wanted. Whatever the reason, the bridge held.

Sgt. Alex Drabik was the first American across, running through gunfire while the Germans were still trying to figure out what went wrong. Others followed, ripping out wires and charges as they went.

Within a day, thousands of Americans were on the east side of the Rhine. Eisenhower said the bridge was worth its weight in gold.

Hitler was enraged. He set up a special court and had four officers executed over the failure.

The Germans threw everything they had at the bridge. Artillery, bombers, the brand new Me 262 jets, V-2 rockets, even frogmen. Ten days after it was captured, the battered bridge finally collapsed into the river, killing 28 American engineers working on it.

By then it didn't matter. Around 25,000 Allied troops were already across, and pontoon bridges were up. The door into Germany was open.

Hitler's own order to wait until the last minute, a bad batch of explosives, and maybe one lucky shell. Two months later the war in Europe was over.