The dispute over Strasbourg

In the first week of January 1945 the fate of Strasbourg was being decided not only at the front but also in the headquarters. The Germans were attacking northern Alsace as part of Operation Nordwind; on 5 January they crossed the Rhine at Gambsheim, barely a dozen or so kilometres north of the city, and on 7 January they struck from the Colmar Pocket in the south. A few days earlier the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, had ordered the front in Alsace to be shortened, which meant leaving Strasbourg almost undefended. General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, found this unacceptable. The dispute, in the course of which a threat was made to withdraw French forces from Allied command, ended on 3 January with Eisenhower giving way. By around 8 January, when the fighting north and south of the city intensified, Strasbourg was already being defended – above all by the French.

Under 8 January war chronologies record that “the battle for Strasbourg is under way, and the Americans are defending their recent conquest”. This calls for two qualifications. Strasbourg had been liberated on 23 November 1944 by General Philippe Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division – which, admittedly, was fighting as part of an American corps, but the liberation of the city was a French triumph, not an American “conquest”. In January 1945 the defence of the city itself was taken over by the French: units of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s First Army, above all the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, supported by units of the French Forces of the Interior. The American VI Corps was fighting further north at the time – at Herrlisheim and, from mid-January, in heavy battles at Hatten and Rittershoffen. Nor was there a single “battle for Strasbourg” in the city itself: the fighting took place on its approaches, while the city remained under fire from German artillery across the Rhine.

A front that was to fall back

In the autumn of 1944 General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group – General Alexander Patch’s American Seventh Army and de Lattre’s French First Army, which had landed in Provence in August – fought its way through the Vosges and reached the Rhine. The French took Mulhouse and Strasbourg, but between them the Germans held on to a broad bridgehead on the left bank of the Rhine around Colmar, known as the Colmar Pocket. The Seventh Army turned north, towards the border of the Palatinate.

When the German offensive in the Ardennes began on 16 December, Eisenhower had to gather reserves. General George Patton’s Third Army swung north to relieve Bastogne, and the Seventh Army took over part of its sector. Patch stretched his forces along a long, thin front from the Saar to the Rhine. In north-eastern Alsace this line formed a projecting wedge whose tip rested on the Rhine and the Maginot Line around Lauterbourg and Wissembourg.

According to the US Army’s official history (Forrest Pogue, The Supreme Command), Eisenhower was already considering shortening the front in Alsace on 26 December. At a meeting with his advisers he said that it might be necessary to pull the troops back to the Vosges, which would uncover Strasbourg; his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, questioned the sense of such a step. Eisenhower replied that he was considering it only because of the urgent need to rebuild a strategic reserve; giving up ground would be a disappointment, but Devers had not kept his main forces where Eisenhower had told him to concentrate them. Devers, who had flown to Paris on 26 December after a warning from Seventh Army intelligence of a possible attack on 1–3 January, returned with orders to go over to the defensive and prepare intermediate positions to which the troops could fall back. At the same time he asked his commanders to hold Strasbourg and Mulhouse if at all possible.

On 30 December General Alphonse Juin, chief of staff of national defence, was informed of the planned withdrawal. Juin strongly objected and offered to place newly formed FFI units at Devers’s disposal for the defence of the area around Strasbourg.

The order of 1 January

On New Year’s Eve, just before midnight on 31 December, the Germans attacked the Seventh Army south of Bitche. Under the impression of this attack Eisenhower on 1 January ordered Devers to shorten the line in north-eastern Alsace: the main body of VI Corps was to withdraw to the slopes of the Vosges, and the Alsatian plain, Strasbourg included, was to be covered only by reconnaissance and observation detachments. From a purely military point of view the order made sense – a shorter front could be held with fewer troops and would free reserves for the Ardennes. Politically, however, it was unacceptable to the French.

Strasbourg was a symbol. It had belonged to Germany from 1871 to 1918 and again, as de facto annexed territory, from 1940 until November 1944. Its liberation by Leclerc had fulfilled the oath sworn at Kufra in 1941 and became one of the defining moments of the reborn French army. Surrendering the city to the Germans without a fight, a mere six weeks later, would have been a blow to the prestige of the Provisional Government – recognised by the great powers only in October 1944 – which de Gaulle regarded as a danger to the very unity of the country.

On 1 January de Gaulle voiced his concern, and Juin asked for the order to be reconsidered. That same day – according to de Gaulle’s memoirs – the head of government instructed de Lattre that, should the Allied forces on his left withdraw, he was to take over the defence of Strasbourg himself. In practice this meant that the French army, formally subordinate to Eisenhower, was in this matter to carry out the orders of its own government.

On 2 January Juin had a stormy conversation with SHAEF’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. According to Pogue, he made it clear that if the Supreme Commander insisted on the withdrawal, the French might take their forces out from under his command. The threat was a serious one, because the French divisions fought within the Allied command system, yet at the same time – and this dependence weighed on both sides – they were armed and supplied almost entirely by the Americans.

Fear of reprisals

On 3 January Patch passed on to his troops the order to evacuate Strasbourg. The French military governor of the city, General Schwartz, then warned – as Pogue relates – of the terrible reprisals the Germans would take on the inhabitants in the event of a withdrawal, and declared that without a direct order from the French government he could take no action to that end.

These fears were not imaginary. In November the inhabitants had welcomed the French troops with tricolours; if the Germans returned, they faced arrests, executions and deportations, and young men faced conscription into the Wehrmacht, which since 1942 had taken some 130,000 Alsatians and Lorrainers (French figures). When news of the American withdrawal spread through the city, some of the population began preparing to flee. At the morning meeting at Eisenhower’s headquarters on 3 January – as Pogue reports – it was said that more than 100,000 people would have to be evacuated from Strasbourg, and that 300,000–400,000 inhabitants of the whole area could be exposed to German reprisals. It was also recognised that a withdrawal might lead to a French break with the coalition.

That same day de Gaulle sent Eisenhower a written protest: in his view, deliberately giving up Alsace and part of Lorraine without a fight would be a grave error from both the military and the national point of view. He announced that de Lattre had been ordered to defend his positions and Strasbourg “even if the American forces withdraw on his left”. At the same time he appealed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt did not wish to become involved and replied through the State Department that this was a military matter to be settled with Eisenhower.

The meeting at Versailles

On 3 January Churchill flew to Versailles, where SHAEF had its headquarters in the Trianon Palace Hotel. He lunched with Eisenhower and in the afternoon took part in a meeting with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, and the Supreme Commander’s closest aides. Later he was present at Eisenhower’s talk with de Gaulle and Juin.

Before that talk took place, Eisenhower – according to Pogue – had already decided on his own to change the order. VI Corps was not to fall back to the Vosges but merely to withdraw from the projecting wedge, anchoring its left flank on the mountains and extending its right towards Strasbourg. The French would take over the defence of the city. De Gaulle accepted this solution, and Churchill, who formally kept out of the discussion, supported it, saying that he understood French fears about the political consequences of losing Strasbourg.

Both principal participants later described the conversation in their memoirs, each in his own way. In his War Memoirs de Gaulle presented it as a confrontation in which he had made himself perfectly clear: France would not give up Strasbourg and, if need be, would defend it alone. By his account Eisenhower reminded him that the arming of the French army depended on American supplies, to which de Gaulle retorted that the French people, outraged at the loss of Alsace, might refuse the Allies the use of French railways and communications. In Crusade in Europe Eisenhower wrote that the threat to withdraw French forces from his command was unacceptable to him, but that he had changed his decision because he understood what consequences a withdrawal would have – not least for the people of Alsace. Both versions agree on the outcome: Strasbourg was not given up.

The city held

The change of orders caused confusion at army level; contradictory instructions arrived within the space of a few hours and – as Pogue admits – for part of one day Strasbourg was practically undefended. Devers accepted the Seventh Army staff’s proposal to hold the positions on the Maginot Line and the Rhine, and to prepare further lines in the rear to which the troops could fall back if necessary. From then on, as the official history stresses, the city was never again left without cover.

De Lattre sent General Augustin Guillaume’s 3rd Algerian Infantry Division to Strasbourg; it took over the sector from the American units and placed itself between the city and the German bridgehead at Gambsheim. Alongside it fought FFI battalions and units formed from Alsatian volunteers. South of the city, along the Rhine around Rhinau and Obenheim, the soldiers of the 1st Free French Division were holding out, and on 7 January they bore the brunt of the attack from the Colmar Pocket. The French suffered heavy losses – at Obenheim an encircled battalion was forced to surrender – but the Germans failed to reach the city.

In the north it was the Americans who did the fighting. At Herrlisheim infantry and the newly arrived 12th Armored Division attacked the Gambsheim bridgehead without success, suffering severe losses. Between 8 and 20 January, and most fiercely from 13 January, the German XXXIX Panzer Corps attacked Hatten and Rittershoffen, the scene of one of the heaviest tank battles on the Western Front. On 20–21 January VI Corps fell back to a new line along the Moder, from Haguenau to the Rhine – a limited withdrawal, but one that still covered Strasbourg from the north. At Kilstett, a dozen or so kilometres from the city, units of the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division beat off a German attack from the bridgehead in the second half of January. Throughout this time, and right up to the spring, Strasbourg was shelled by German artillery from Kehl, on the other side of the Rhine.

Place in the war

Operation Nordwind petered out on 25 January. The Germans had regained part of northern Alsace, but they had not destroyed VI Corps or taken Strasbourg, which Heinrich Himmler – in command of Army Group Upper Rhine – had promised Hitler he would recapture by 30 January. At the end of the month Eisenhower gave the 6th Army Group five divisions from his reserve and placed an American corps under de Lattre to eliminate the Colmar Pocket. Colmar was liberated on 2 February, and by 9 February the Germans had withdrawn across the Rhine. Northern Alsace was recovered in March, in the offensive that took the Seventh Army to the Rhine in the Palatinate.

The dispute over Strasbourg was the sharpest crisis in Franco-American relations during the war, but not the only one. De Gaulle’s government – with an army armed by the Americans but obedient first and foremost to its own authorities – showed once again that it would not give way on matters it considered national. A few weeks later new disputes broke out: over the pace of the reduction of the Colmar Pocket, over the French occupation of Stuttgart and over the Aosta valley. For Eisenhower the affair was a lesson that commanding a coalition also meant reckoning with politics and with the human consequences of purely military decisions.

For Strasbourg, January 1945 was the last time its fate hung by a thread. The city, which had changed hands four times in 75 years, remained French, and after the war it became the seat of the Council of Europe and a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. The dispute itself remains an example of how a decision carefully thought through on a staff map can prove unacceptable to the people who would have to bear its consequences.