New American corps in Europe and the Pacific

At the beginning of September 1944, as the Allied armies were liberating Brussels and Antwerp and the front in France was moving faster than anyone had planned, another wave of higher headquarters set out from the United States across the ocean. Popular war chronologies record several such events within the month: on 5 September the “arrival in the European theatre” of III Corps, on 20 September that of XVI Corps, and on 25 September the departure of IX Corps for the Pacific. The same lists give 11 September for XXI Corps, but that date is very probably a mistake.

In themselves these were not dramatic events. A corps headquarters brought no divisions with it – it was a staff of several hundred officers and men, with signals, corps artillery and service units, capable of directing two to five divisions in the field. The divisions crossed separately and were assigned to corps as needed. Yet the September moves show how the US Army grew and changed in the last year of the war, and they foreshadow battles in which these corps would play an important part: the relief of Bastogne, the elimination of the Colmar Pocket, the crossing of the Rhine and the preparations for the invasion of Japan.

The word “arrived” also needs care. In American records it sometimes meant the departure of a headquarters from a port in the United States, sometimes its landing in Britain or France, and sometimes its assignment to a theatre of operations. That is why the dates given by different sources vary by a few days, and sometimes by several weeks.

The ninety-division army

The September moves were the result of decisions taken much earlier. Pre-war estimates, known as the Victory Program of 1941, had envisaged that the US Army might need more than two hundred divisions to defeat Germany and Japan. In 1943, however, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and his advisers concluded that industry, the air forces, the navy and supplies for the allies were absorbing too many men, and they capped the expansion of the ground forces at about ninety divisions (89 in the end). The Army’s official history calls this the “ninety-division gamble”: it was assumed that the Red Army would tie down most of the German forces, and that superiority in the air and in equipment would make up for the small number of divisions.

With so few divisions, all of them eventually had to go to the front, and more corps and army headquarters were needed to direct them. Most of the new corps had been formed at the end of 1943 – XVI Corps was activated on 7 December 1943 at Fort Riley, Kansas, and XXI Corps on 6 December at Camp Polk, Louisiana – and for several months they trained divisions in the United States before these were sent overseas. The headquarters already fighting in France had gone the same way earlier: VII Corps and VIII and XV Corps, which had arrived in Britain in the autumn and winter of 1943.

By the autumn of 1944 three American armies were operating in Western Europe: General Courtney Hodges’s First Army, General George Patton’s Third Army and General William Simpson’s Ninth Army, whose headquarters took over command in Brittany on 5 September itself. From the south came General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army, which had landed in Provence in August. Since 1 September General Dwight Eisenhower had been in direct command of the ground forces in France. Each new army needed two or three corps, and each corps needed divisions, which were still on their way across the Atlantic.

III Corps: from California to Cherbourg

III Corps was the oldest of the four – it had been formed as far back as 1918 in France and had fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. After the attack on Pearl Harbor it was responsible for the defence of the California coast, with its headquarters at Monterey, and later trained divisions being sent to the war. On 23 August 1944 its headquarters left California and travelled to Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts, from where it set off for Europe. The unit’s history gives 5 September as the date the corps was assigned to the European theatre, and it is this date that the chronologies repeat; the headquarters came ashore at the port of Cherbourg.

Its commander was Major General John Millikin, a cavalryman who had taken over the corps in October 1943. On arrival III Corps was placed under the Ninth Army within General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group and given the code name “Century”. At first it did not fight. For six weeks its headquarters at Carteret on the Cotentin peninsula received and distributed, for the whole army group, the troops arriving over the Normandy beaches. The corps also organised 45 provisional truck companies, which carried fuel and ammunition as part of the Red Ball Express – the system of truck convoys used from the end of August to supply armies that were by now hundreds of kilometres from the beaches.

This was the main problem of September 1944. The Allied armies in Belgium and Lorraine were increasingly held up not by German resistance but by a lack of petrol. The Channel ports – Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk – were either still held by German garrisons or wrecked, and the port of Antwerp, captured intact, was useless as long as the Germans held the banks of the Scheldt estuary. Every new headquarters and every new division in France meant more tons of supplies to be brought up from Normandy. The corps that arrived in the autumn therefore often waited for weeks before being given a sector of the front.

XXI and XVI Corps

The date for XXI Corps raises the most doubts. Some chronologies give it as 11 September, but the corps’ own history and American records of unit movements say otherwise: the headquarters of Major General Frank Milburn, former commander of the 83rd Infantry Division, sailed for Europe in November 1944, arrived in England on 11 November and in France on 27 December. The September date is presumably the result of confusing the months (11 November and 11 September). XXI Corps went into action only in January 1945 in Alsace, as part of Patch’s Seventh Army, during the repulse of the German Operation Nordwind.

Major General John B. Anderson’s XVI Corps spent the first eight months of 1944 training divisions in the United States and testing new equipment, including the Weasel tracked carrier. In September 1944 it set off overseas – the chronologies give 20 September – and joined Simpson’s Ninth Army. Like most of the autumn arrivals, it waited a long time for a sector of the front; it went into action only at the turn of February and March 1945, in the Ninth Army’s offensive on the river Roer on the Dutch–German border.

IX Corps in the Pacific

The fourth corps went in the opposite direction. IX Corps had spent most of the war on the US West Coast, responsible for the defence of its central and northern sections, and in 1944 it was moved to Fort McPherson, Georgia, to prepare for departure. On 2 September command passed to Major General Charles W. Ryder, who had previously led the 34th Infantry Division in the landings in North Africa, in Tunisia and in Italy. On 25 September 1944 the headquarters closed down at Fort McPherson and set off for Hawaii – so this date marks the start of the journey, not the arrival in the theatre, as the chronologies suggest.

In Hawaii the corps was placed under the newly forming Tenth Army. It first planned a landing on the Japanese-occupied coast of China, which was eventually abandoned, and at the turn of 1944 and 1945 it helped prepare the Tenth Army for the invasion of Okinawa.

Place in the war

None of the four corps affected the course of the fighting in September 1944, but all of them played a part in the last months of the war. On 10 October III Corps passed to Patton’s Third Army and fought at Metz, where Fort Jeanne d’Arc surrendered on 13 December. When the German Ardennes offensive began on 16 December, Patton turned his forces north: III Corps, with the 4th Armored Division and the 26th and 80th Infantry Divisions, struck the German flank on 22 December, and on 26 December the leading units of the 4th Armored Division reached encircled Bastogne. In March 1945, by then part of the First Army, the corps crossed the Rhine over the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, captured on 7 March. A few days later Millikin was relieved, and Major General James Van Fleet took over.

From 25 January to 16 February 1945 XXI Corps fought under French command in the elimination of the Colmar Pocket; it then broke through the Siegfried Line near Saarbrücken, took Würzburg, Schweinfurt and Augsburg, and on 1 May at Bad Tölz its soldiers captured Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. XVI Corps liberated the Dutch town of Roermond, where a street was later named after General Anderson; in March 1945 it crossed the Rhine north of the Ruhr and took part in closing the pocket there.

IX Corps did not fight in this war. In July 1945 it was moved to Leyte, where, as part of the Sixth Army, it planned its part in the invasion of Japan being prepared as Operation Downfall. After Japan’s surrender its headquarters moved in October 1945 to Sapporo and directed the occupation of Hokkaido. It fought its only battles in the Korean War of 1950–1953.

The September moves were, in essence, the last stage in building up the US ground forces. By the end of the war, 61 American divisions were fighting in Western Europe in 15 corps, and the “ninety-division gamble” – although in the winter of 1944–1945 it forced the Army to transfer men from rear-echelon units and the air forces to the front – paid off, in the view of most historians.