The elimination of the Colmar Pocket

On 9 February 1945 the French I Corps broke up the German rearguard at Chalampé on the Rhine. Once the last units had crossed to the east bank, German sappers blew the bridge linking Chalampé with Baden. With that the Colmar Pocket ceased to exist – a broad enclave in central Alsace that the German Nineteenth Army had been holding since November 1944. On the stretch from the Swiss border to the outskirts of Strasbourg the Allies now stood on the Rhine.

A popular account of the day says that “the Colmar Pocket, the last German bridgehead west of the Rhine, was eliminated by the French First Army”. This needs two corrections. First, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army (PL) did not fight alone: from 28 January it had under its command General Frank Milburn’s American XXI Corps with four divisions (the 3rd, 28th and 75th Infantry Divisions and the 12th Armored Division), and Colmar itself was liberated on 2 February by French tanks and American infantry together. Second, it was not the last German bridgehead on the left bank of the Rhine. The Wehrmacht still held most of the Rhineland – from the Netherlands to the Palatinate – and in northern Alsace the front ran along the river Moder. The British and Canadians had begun clearing the left bank only the day before, on 8 February, and the fighting west of the Rhine went on until March 1945. The Colmar Pocket was the last German position on the Rhine on French soil in southern Alsace – and that is its real significance.

A pocket on the Rhine

The enclave took shape at the end of November 1944. When the French 2nd Armoured Division and the American Seventh Army liberated Strasbourg, and the French First Army broke through the Belfort Gap and reached the Rhine near Mulhouse, the German presence in southern Alsace shrank to a semicircular bridgehead around Colmar. It measured about 65 km from north to south and up to 50 km in depth, resting on the Vosges in the west and on the Rhine in the east. Supplies came in over two bridges – at Breisach and at Chalampé.

The Germans regarded Alsace as part of the Reich – in 1940 it had been annexed de facto and placed under the Gauleiter of Baden, Robert Wagner. For this reason Adolf Hitler, in decisions of 24 and 27 November 1944, forbade General Siegfried Rasp’s Nineteenth Army to withdraw across the river. On 26 November Army Group Upper Rhine was formed under the command of Heinrich Himmler – the head of the SS, with no experience of commanding troops in the field.

The French, exhausted by the autumn fighting in the Vosges, were unable to eliminate the pocket before winter; their attack of 15–22 December broke down. De Lattre’s army suffered from a shortage of replacements and from weaker artillery and engineers than the other Allied armies. In the autumn experienced Senegalese and other colonial soldiers had been sent south from the front and replaced by volunteers from the French Forces of the Interior – good in defence but inexperienced in attack.

The winter of Nordwind

In December and January the pocket became a springboard for the Germans. When Operation Nordwind began in northern Alsace on New Year’s Eve, and General Eisenhower was considering withdrawing troops from the Strasbourg area, Charles de Gaulle refused to give up the city without a fight. On 7 January the 198th Infantry Division and the 106th Panzer Brigade struck from the northern edge of the pocket towards Strasbourg in Operation Sonnenwende. The French lost a battalion at Obenheim but halted the attack on the Ill. At the same time the Germans established a bridgehead at Gambsheim, north of Strasbourg. The whole Nordwind offensive petered out at the end of January.

After its failure Eisenhower ordered General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group to eliminate the pocket. This was part of his plan: before crossing the Rhine, all the Allied armies were to close up to the river along the whole length of the front. As the forces around Colmar were mainly French, the task was given to the First Army, and Devers reinforced it with the American 3rd Infantry Division and the 28th Infantry Division, brought down from the Ardennes.

An offensive in the snow

The offensive was opened on 20 January by General Antoine Béthouart’s French I Corps, attacking from the south, from the Mulhouse area, towards Ensisheim. Launched in a blizzard, the attack at first took the Germans by surprise, but it soon bogged down. The winter of 1944/1945 was exceptionally harsh: de Lattre described the weather in Alsace as “Siberian”, with temperatures down to –20°C, strong winds and snow a metre deep. The Alsace plain offered no cover and was cut by streams and canals with soft beds. The Germans defended themselves in stone-built villages and woods, sowing the approaches thickly with mines. One combat command of the French 1st Armoured Division lost 36 of its roughly 50 tanks on mines. The I Corps attack did, however, draw the German armoured reserves south.

On 22–23 January General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert’s II Corps attacked from the north: the American 3rd Infantry Division under General John O’Daniel and the 1st Free French Division (1re Division de Marche d’Infanterie). The Americans crossed the Ill and intended to bypass Colmar from the north. Foxholes could not be dug in the frozen ground, and the bridge at Maison Rouge collapsed under the first tank. On 23 January a German counter-attack with heavy tank destroyers forced the 30th Infantry Regiment into a disorderly retreat.

On 26 January, near Holtzwihr, on the edge of the Riedwihr woods, came the episode that became the most famous of the battle. According to the official citation, Second Lieutenant Audie Murphy of Company B, 15th Infantry Regiment, sent his men back into the woods, climbed onto a burning M10 tank destroyer and for nearly an hour fired its heavy machine gun at the advancing German infantry, directing artillery fire onto his own position by telephone. The Germans withdrew to Holtzwihr. Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor for this action and after the war, as an actor, played himself in the film To Hell and Back (1955). The numbers of Germans he killed given in the citation and in later accounts vary and are hard to verify.

On the northern flank the French fought just as hard. On 28 January tanks of the 2nd Armoured Division, with the Foreign Legion, took Grussenheim at some cost, and on 28–29 January Americans, French tanks and paratroopers captured Jebsheim. On 31 January the French took Marckolsheim, and on 1 February they reached the Rhine. The 1st Free French Division alone lost, according to its own figures, 220 killed, 1,240 wounded and 96 missing in the pocket, as well as 550 men with frostbitten feet.

Americans in de Lattre’s army

All the units made such slow progress that de Lattre asked for reinforcements. Devers placed under him the headquarters of General Milburn’s American XXI Corps, which on 28 January moved in between the two French corps, taking over the 3rd and 28th Divisions and then the 75th Infantry Division and the 12th Armored Division. The French 5th Armoured Division, the 1st Parachute Regiment and the commandos of the 1st Shock Battalion were also placed under its command. It was an unusual arrangement: a whole American corps fighting under a French army command.

The Germans continued to misread the Allies’ intentions. During the night of 28/29 January Hitler agreed to the withdrawal of the exposed salient at Erstein, but forbade a general retreat across the Rhine. On 29 January Army Group Upper Rhine was disbanded – Himmler had already taken command of Army Group Vistula in Pomerania – and the troops in the pocket were placed under Army Group G of SS General Paul Hausser.

On the evening of 29 January, after a three-hour artillery preparation (16,000 shells), the 3rd Division forced the Colmar Canal and advanced south-east towards the Rhine–Rhône Canal and the fortress of Neuf-Brisach.

The liberation of Colmar and the splitting of the pocket

Colmar was to be taken by General Norman Cota’s American 28th Infantry Division together with the French armoured combat command CC4 of the 5th Armoured Division. On 2 February infantry of the 109th Regiment crossed the anti-tank ditch north of the town, and French tanks drove into the centre, reaching the Place Rapp at about 11.30 a.m. By 3 February the town had been cleared of Germans. In a symbolic gesture the French 152nd Infantry Regiment, which had been garrisoned there before the war, marched into Colmar. The town itself, unlike many of the surrounding villages, escaped major destruction.

On 3 February the American 12th Armored Division set off south from Colmar to link up with the French I Corps. On 5 February its tanks entered Rouffach and met the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division there – seventeen days after Béthouart’s attack had begun. The pocket had been cut in two. The German units from the Vosges, threatened with being cut off, fell back towards the Rhine under constant artillery fire and attacks by American and French aircraft.

On 6 February the American 30th Infantry Regiment took without a fight the fortress of Neuf-Brisach, built for Louis XIV by Vauban; two French children and another local resident showed the Americans the way through undefended passages in the walls. The Germans had already evacuated the garrison and blown the Rhine bridge to Breisach. In the south I Corps took Ensisheim, cleared the Harth forest on 8 February and linked up with units of the 2nd Armoured Division near Fessenheim. The last German strongpoint on the left bank was the bridgehead at Chalampé. After it was eliminated on 9 February and the bridge was blown, no sizeable German forces remained on the left bank of the Rhine in this area.

Losses

According to de Lattre, the French First Army lost 2,137 killed (1,595 French and 542 Americans) and 11,253 wounded (8,583 French and 2,670 Americans) in the fighting for the pocket – 13,390 men in all. The American official history (“Riviera to the Rhine” by Jeffrey Clarke and Robert Ross Smith) puts American losses at about 8,000, and German losses – depending on the method of counting – at 22,000–38,000 men, many of them prisoners. The Germans left behind 55 armoured vehicles and 66 guns on the left bank. The Nineteenth Army was not completely destroyed, but it lost most of its experienced soldiers and had to rebuild itself in Baden, filling its ranks with untrained Volkssturm units.

The civilians of Alsace

The inhabitants paid the highest price. The wine villages at the foot of the Vosges, which had lain on the front line for several weeks, had been razed to the ground in the December fighting – Bennwihr, Sigolsheim, Mittelwihr and Ammerschwihr had all but ceased to exist. According to Alsatian studies, across the whole Haut-Rhin department the war completely destroyed some 2,000 buildings and left about 40,000 people homeless. Civilians were killed by the shells of both sides, by mines and by the cold; the Germans evacuated some villages, while in others the inhabitants survived in cellars.

The war in Alsace had another dimension too. After the de facto annexation of 1940, in August 1942 the Germans introduced compulsory conscription into the Wehrmacht. The Alsatians and Lorrainers who were drafted were known as the malgré-nous (“against our will”). According to French estimates, some 130,000 were called up, and several tens of thousands were killed or went missing – mainly on the Eastern Front. For many families, therefore, liberation came while their sons were still wearing German uniform or were held in Soviet captivity.

Significance

The elimination of the pocket fulfilled Eisenhower’s order: the 6th Army Group stood on the Rhine from the Swiss border to the outskirts of Strasbourg and could concentrate on breaking through the Siegfried Line. For France the victory also had a political dimension. A few days earlier the leaders of the Big Three had met at the Yalta Conference without de Gaulle; a battle in which a French army commanded an American corps and recovered the last occupied scrap of southern Alsace strengthened French claims to a share in the decisions on Germany. The US 3rd Infantry Division and the 109th Infantry Regiment were awarded the French Croix de Guerre.

The fighting on the Rhine, however, was far from over. In the north the British-Canadian offensive in the Reichswald (Operation Veritable), begun on 8 February, was already under way; on 23 February the Americans struck across the Roer (Operation Grenade); and in March came Operations Lumberjack and Undertone in the Palatinate and the Saar, in the course of which northern Alsace was liberated by 20 March. Only on 10 March did the Germans abandon their last bridgehead on the west bank of the lower Rhine, at Wesel. The French First Army crossed the Rhine at the turn of March and April and ended the war in Baden, Württemberg and the Austrian Alps.