The last American battles in Europe

In the first week of May 1945 the US Army’s war in Europe died away gradually, sector by sector. In the north the Germans laid down their arms before the British; in Bavaria and the Tyrol one Wehrmacht unit after another surrendered without a fight; and in western Bohemia and Austria General George Patton’s divisions were still advancing, although more and more often they met columns of prisoners and refugees rather than a front. On 6 May tanks of the US 16th Armored Division rolled into Plzeň (Pilsen), greeted by the inhabitants as liberators.

Many chronologies of the war list 6 May as the day of the last fighting by American troops in Europe. That is a simplification. There was no single, clear dividing line: on that day the Americans were still fighting skirmishes, and isolated shots were still being fired on 7 and 8 May, right up to the moment Germany’s unconditional surrender took effect. It is more accurate to speak of the last days of fighting than of a single date.

The end of the “Alpine Redoubt”

Throughout the spring the American command had feared that the remnants of the Wehrmacht and the SS would shut themselves up in the Alps, in the so-called Alpine Redoubt, and hold out there for months. That was why Dwight Eisenhower sent a large part of his forces south – into Bavaria, Austria and western Bohemia – rather than towards Berlin. After the link-up on the Elbe on 25 April Germany was cut in two, and the fears of a redoubt proved largely exaggerated.

Lieutenant General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army, part of General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group, liberated the camp at Dachau on 29 April and took Munich on 30 April. Then its divisions moved into the mountains. On 3 May soldiers of the 103rd Infantry Division took Innsbruck almost without a fight, and the next day, 4 May, one of its patrols met soldiers of the Fifth Army’s 88th Infantry Division, coming up from Italy, near Vipiteno (Sterzing), south of the Brenner Pass. The Western Front and the Italian front had joined into a single line. That same day the Americans (together with the French 2nd Armoured Division) entered Berchtesgaden and the bombed-out Obersalzberg, and Salzburg surrendered without a fight.

On 5 May at Haar near Munich, General Hermann Foertsch, commander of the German First Army, signed the surrender of Army Group G before General Devers; it took effect at noon on 6 May. In Bavaria and the Tyrol the fighting was practically over, although SS units still put up resistance here and there.

Itter Castle

The most extraordinary episode of those days took place in the Tyrol on 5 May. At Itter Castle, administratively subordinate to the camp at Dachau, the Germans were holding prominent French prisoners – the former prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier, Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, the tennis player Jean Borotra, de Gaulle’s sister Marie-Agnès Cailliau and others. The SS guards had fled, and the castle was defended against approaching troops of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division jointly by a handful of American tank crewmen from the 12th Armored Division under an officer named John C. “Jack” Lee, Wehrmacht soldiers under Major Josef Gangl who had gone over to the Austrian resistance, and the prisoners themselves. Gangl was killed in the fighting while shielding Reynaud. Relief came from a regiment of the US 36th Infantry Division. According to popular accounts it was one of the few engagements in which Americans and Wehrmacht soldiers fought side by side; the details of the fighting are told differently in different accounts.

Patton in Bohemia and Austria

The longest fighting was done by Patton’s Third Army, part of General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Its right wing advanced along the Danube deep into Austria: on 5 May the 11th Armored Division took Linz, and one of its patrols reached the concentration camp at Mauthausen that same day, bringing about the liberation of Mauthausen. Its left wing, reinforced by V Corps transferred from the First Army, entered Czechoslovakia on 4 May.

Eisenhower set the Americans in Bohemia a stop line running roughly through Karlovy Vary, Plzeň and České Budějovice. When the Prague uprising broke out on 5 May and the insurgents appealed by radio for help, Patton wanted to march on Prague. As early as 4 May Eisenhower had proposed to the Soviet General Staff that, if necessary, his troops would advance as far as the Vltava, but its chief, General Aleksei Antonov, asked the Americans not to cross the agreed line, and Eisenhower had no intention of risking a dispute with an ally in the last days of the war. Prague was to be taken by the Red Army, which on 6 May launched the Prague offensive.

On the morning of 6 May Colonel Charles Noble’s Combat Command B of the 16th Armored Division passed through the lines of the 97th Infantry Division and set off along the road from Bor towards Plzeň. The city, where the inhabitants too had taken up arms the day before, was taken within a few hours; one of the main objectives was the Škoda armaments works. Most of the German garrison laid down its arms, although there was shooting in a few places. West and north of Plzeň the 2nd and 97th Infantry Divisions were still fighting, while the 1st Infantry Division – the “Big Red One”, which had come all the way from North Africa and Omaha Beach – was ending its war in the Sudetenland, around Cheb and Sokolov, where according to the divisional history it fought its last skirmishes. In communist Czechoslovakia the American liberation of Plzeň was passed over in silence for four decades; only after 1989 did it become an important part of the city’s memory.

On the southern wing, in the forests of the Šumava (the Bohemian Forest) and along the Vltava, the Americans ran into columns of German soldiers retreating before the Red Army, who wanted at all costs to give themselves up to the West rather than to the Russians. Most of them surrendered without a fight, but not all. On 7 May Private Charles Havlat of the 803rd Tank Destroyer Battalion was killed in an ambush near Volary; American historians regard him as one of the last – if not the last – American soldiers killed in action in Europe.

The last shots

During the night of 6–7 May, at Reims, General Alfred Jodl signed the instrument of Germany’s unconditional surrender on behalf of Admiral Karl Dönitz. Hostilities were to cease at 11.01 p.m. Central European Time on 8 May. On 7 May the American army headquarters received orders to halt the advance; units were to stay on the lines they had reached and to fire only in self-defence. Patton ordered his troops to cease fire on the morning of 8 May.

That did not mean silence everywhere. Where the Americans met the Soviet forces, and among scattered German units, isolated clashes still occurred. According to the account of the 80th Infantry Division, which at the end of April had crossed Bavaria to the River Enns in Austria, on 7 May the division’s reconnaissance platoon with Task Force Smythe was strafed by two German aircraft. The men returned fire and one of the machines flew off trailing smoke. The divisional history describes this episode as the last American shots of the war in Europe. Various units, however, claimed such “last shots” for themselves – some studies point to episodes in Bohemia – and it is impossible to say which of them really was the last.

During the night of 8–9 May quiet descended on the American sectors. On 8 and 9 May, on the Enns and near Linz, Third Army soldiers met Red Army men, as others had done earlier on the Elbe in Saxony. Tens of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers went into American captivity, while Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Centre tried for several more days to break out of Bohemia to the west. In line with the agreements with the Russians, the Americans turned many of them back, handing them over to Soviet captivity. The Central Europe campaign, as the official history of the US Army calls it, formally lasted until 11 May.

Toll and significance

Counting from the landings in North Africa in November 1942, the US Army’s war in Europe lasted two and a half years. From Normandy to Plzeň and Linz more than 130,000 American ground troops were killed in action, and total battle casualties in Western Europe exceeded half a million. In May 1945 there were more than 60 American divisions and over three million soldiers on the continent.

The last days of fighting also shaped post-war Europe. The line on which the Americans halted in Bohemia and Austria was not the boundary of the occupation zones: at the beginning of July 1945 the Americans handed over the parts of Saxony and Thuringia they had occupied to the Red Army, and they withdrew from western Bohemia in November and December 1945, at the same time as the Soviet troops. But the fact that Prague was liberated by the Russians and Plzeň by the Americans gained a lasting place in Czech memory. For the American soldiers themselves the war in Europe ended before they had time to catch their breath – a few weeks later many divisions began preparing for transfer to the Pacific, where the fighting against Japan was still going on.