CITIZEN SOLDIERS

May 31, 1999
		David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Stephen Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany.

June 5, 1997: The NewsHour's historians examine the impact of the Marshall Plan on its 50th Anniversary. Jan. 13, 1997: A report on the belated honoring of black soldiers from World War II with Congressional Medals of Honor.     A World War II commemoration from Grolliers A Web page devoted to the Battle of the Bulge	DAVID GERGEN: Steve, in recent years this country has twice celebrated the heroics of the men who took the beaches at Normandy in 1944, and appropriate celebrations. But now you come along and say that there’s a fascinating story about what happened after D-Day in the 11 months until the Germans surrendered.
	The battle of the hedgerows.
	STEPHEN AMBROSE, Author, Citizen Soldiers: Well, we got ashore on D-Day, and that was the big thing. It was a very tenuous hold, however, on the beachhead, and now the job was to expand it. It went very slowly because we had not recognized how tough those hedgerows are going to be to clear out of Germans. DAVID GERGEN: What was a hedgerow? STEPHEN AMBROSE: A hedgerow is a mound of earth about six feet wide and four to six feet high, with trees and brambles and rosebushes, and et cetera, growing up, and it’s impenetrable. And it encloses little, tiny fields. Now, each one of those little fields is a fortress, and the Germans were in the corners of the field with their machine guns dug in, and they had dug tunnels through the dirt at the base of the hedgerow to site their panzer fausts, their anti-tank rockets, and so--and the Americans had had no preparation for this. We hadn’t seen the hedgerows in an intelligence sense and hadn’t done any training of men on how to fight there, so everything had to be improvised--the use of tanks. Those tanks would get into the hedgerow country and drive up a hedgerow and expose their belly like this, and the German with a panzer faust over there would boom into that unarmored belly, and there goes that Sherman tanks. The solution to this problem came from a kid who had been a mechanic in Boston before the war. Joe Cullen was his name. He was a sergeant in one of the armor divisions. He said, Let’s take steel rails and weld them to the front of that tank, and they’ll dig into that hedgerow, and it won’t go belly up, and then those big Chrysler engines are powerful enough that it can go right through the hedgerow, and then at that point they can start turning the cannon on the corners where the Germans are with their machine guns, and they can start spraying the hedgerow with their 50 cals. And you can work your way forward in that way. Now, Rommel didn’t have a suggestion box outside his office door. It’s not the way the Germans fight a war. Bradley did. Cullen had that idea on a Monday. By Tuesday afternoon it had gotten to Bradley, and by Wednesday morning they were putting those steel rails onto the tanks, and it worked. So that kind of improvisation finally got us through the hedgerows. And at the end of July, the German line broke on the far right at Saint Lo. They did trap most of the German army in Normandy. A lot of individuals got out, but the Germans were now disorganized; they had lost their unit cohesion; and they left their equipment behind. And so now from mid August on there was no opposition left in France. The battle of France was over. The Germans were in full retreat back Eastward, with the allies coming as close behind them as they could.
	The Allies run out of gas.
	DAVID GERGEN: But they stopped them at the Siegfried Line. STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, then two things happened. The Germans got back to a prepared defensive position, the Siegfried Line, all kind of fortifications. Hitler loved poured concrete. He thought poured concrete could stop anything. So they got back into prepared positions, and they pulled off what they called the miracle of the West, the German army did, in getting itself reorganized, in coming back together, and getting units to take positions in the line. The other thing that happened was that we ran out of gas, literally. The tanks were getting less and less--the lines stretched out from the channel coast, and as more and more Americans in Britain came on to the continent, the supply situations became critical. So we ran out of gas just at the point that the Germans got behind their fortifications. And now a stalemate ensued.
	The Battle of the Bulge.
	In fact, Hitler was gathering reserves and reinforcements, and drawing them from the Eastern front over to the Western front, and preparing for the last great German offensive of the 20th century. And now the Battle of the Bulge was underway. In the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge the American Army, which had become very cocky--it was full of hubris--and thought of itself as the best army in the world, and had the best intelligence in the world, had been badly fooled, and had been attacked where the men were spread out far too wide, because nobody thought there would be an offensive in the Ardennes. And the result was we lost two divisions on the first two days, big losses, and the result was there were breakthroughs, and the result was there German tanks on the loose, behind the front lines. And the result was a humiliation for American generals. And the result was a lot of GI’s went into POW camps, and a lot of them got killed. So Hitler launched this attack with great initial success, and something close to panic set in on the allied side. But the real story of the Bulge is the one that captures everybody’s imagination is Bastogne and the 101st Airborne being surrounded there, and rightly so, but it’s a bigger story than that. It’s an American lieutenant with a platoon over here, and an American corporal with a squad over here saying, I ain’t gonna retreat no more. We’re going to stand and fight here. And they held up German columns all across the front and threw the German timetable completely out of kilter, and eventually some clear weather arrived, and with clear weather trucks could move on the road, planes could fly and hit at the Germans, and it was done, and the Germans were hurled back from the Battle of the Bulge, so that by January of 1945, the end of January, the lines were back to where they had been in September. Capturing the Ludendorff Bridge.
	Then they get to the Rhine River in March of 1945, the greatest river in Europe, and it looked like it was going to be a very, very tough proposition to get across this river and any bridgehead over it was going to be pure gold. An American lieutenant named Carl Timmerman spotted the biggest bridge over the Rhine River. It was a railroad bridge--the Ludendorff Bridge--and Timmerman saw it, and without hesitating, he took a squad that was a really wonderfully American squad. There was a Polish sergeant and an Irish corporal and a couple of Germans and an Indian in it, and--American. And Karl Timmerman, a German, of course, German-American, saw that bridge, and he said, "Let’s go." And he led his men across that bridge in one of the greatest actions of the Second World War, machine gun fire cutting everywhere. They knew the bridge was scheduled to be blown up; they expected it to be blown in their faces. What apparently happened, David, was a stray bullet cut the wire leading out to the demolition charges. Timmerman got across, took the bridge. Now we were over the Rhine, and then it was the time for the exploitation and rolling across Germany till we met with the Red Army at the Elbe River in April of 1945. Whew! Life in foxhole. DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) This is a remarkable story. What did you learn about the American character in this story of warfare from D-Day on? STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, you know, the fathers of the young men who fought World War II had fought World War I, and they had a feeling that people of our age have about the young; they’re not as tough anymore. They couldn’t do what we did. And that was very much the feeling in 1940, ‘41, ‘42. And it was certainly Hitler’s feeling. Now, you take these young Americans, 1943, they graduated high school; 1944, they graduated high school; 18 and 19 year olds--drafted, given insufficient and inadequate training, not well clothed for the rigors of what they were going to face, sent into the line as individual replacements, in a foxhole in Belgium. Now a foxhole in Belgium in the winter of 1944/45 meant down to 10 below in the Fahrenheit scale at night, about 40 degrees in the daytime. That meant that your foxhole was alternating between three and four feet of water and ice. It meant your--the boots they had were all leather, so the boots froze at night on them. They did not have adequate overcoats. They didn’t have adequate sleeping bags. They weren’t getting any hot food, and it was dark starting at about 4:15 in the afternoon, and it didn’t get light again until about 8:30 in the morning. And they had to stay up all night, and they couldn’t move around, couldn’t exercise, couldn’t smoke a cigarette, couldn’t eat anything, had to be watching always for Germans coming on. "The GI of World War II was a child of democracy." DAVID GERGEN: So they-- STEPHEN AMBROSE: Now, how did they do this? DAVID GERGEN: How did they do it? STEPHEN AMBROSE: How did they do this? The strongest motivating factor was their buddies, the unit cohesion, the guys that they had trained with, gone overseas with, fought with. And what was unacceptable to the GI in that foxhole was letting his buddies down. Now, they went into this combat with this fear--that they were going to be afraid. Every combat veteran I’ve ever interviewed tells me his biggest fear on going into combat was that--that I’m going to be afraid. What every one of them found out was I’m afraid. Fear is inevitable. It’s the natural reaction. The point is you’ve got to learn to control that fear and work with that fear and conquer that fear and act. And these guys were able to do it. And in the end, for me, the GI of World War II was a child of democracy, who had grown up knowing the difference between right and wrong. And, you know, I had a lot of them tell me, Steve, I was 19 years old, I was 20 years old, I had my life ahead of me, I didn’t want to live in a world in which Hitler ruled Europe and was threatening the United States; I knew that if I were going to have a good life, we had to win this war, and I had to do my part to see to it. They knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. DAVID GERGEN: Stephen Ambrose, fascinating story, fascinating men. Thank you very much. STEPHEN AMBROSE: Thank you.   --This dialogue was first aired December 8, 1997