XXII Corps in Europe

War chronologies record under 30 November 1944 the “arrival in the European theatre of operations” of the US XXII Corps. As with XXIII Corps, which according to the same chronologies arrived in October, this was not a combat-ready force but a headquarters: a few hundred officers and men with a headquarters company, signals and services, ready to direct several divisions in the field. The date, too, must be treated with caution. According to the history of the US Fifteenth Army, the XXII Corps headquarters was already in Britain by mid-November, at the Doddington Hall estate in Cheshire, where the advance party of the Fifteenth Army headquarters, which had arrived on 10 November, was quartered. The available studies give no single reliable date for the corps’ assignment to the forces of the European theatre; 30 November may mark a formal assignment rather than the day it landed.

The corps was one of the last headquarters sent to Europe in the great build-up that at the turn of 1944 and 1945 gave the US Army in the west two army groups, five field armies and more than a dozen corps. It went into action only in the spring of 1945, and left its longest mark on history as an occupation command – first in the Rhineland, then in western Bohemia.

A corps without a war

XXII Corps was created by an order of 9 January 1944 and activated on 15 January that year at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Its first commander was Major General Henry Terrell Jr., a Texan from San Antonio, who since 1942 had been forming and training the 90th Infantry Division and in January 1944, as the division was preparing to leave for England and the Normandy landings, moved to the new corps. For most of 1944 the corps headquarters practised directing divisions in manoeuvres and command post exercises in the United States, like many other headquarters created with the final phase of the war in mind.

Terrell did not lead the corps to war. In November 1944 he was sent to head an infantry replacement training centre, which he commanded until the end of the war. This transfer neatly reflects the situation of the US Army in the autumn of 1944: there were already enough headquarters – corps and army staffs – but there was a shortage of trained infantrymen to fill the divisions thinned out in combat. A new permanent commander took over XXII Corps only on 14 January 1945 (other listings give 23 January): Major General Ernest N. Harmon.

Harmon was one of the most experienced American armoured commanders. In North Africa he had commanded the 2nd Armored Division, and after the defeat at the Kasserine Pass he rebuilt the demoralised 1st Armored Division, which he then led in Tunisia and Italy, including at Anzio. In September 1944 he returned to the 2nd Armored Division, and in December his tanks stopped the German 2nd Panzer Division, which had come closest to the Meuse, at Celles in the Ardennes. He thus came to XXII Corps with a reputation as a tough and effective, if abrasive, commander.

With the Fifteenth Army

The fortunes of XXII Corps became bound up with those of the Fifteenth Army – the last American field army sent to north-west Europe. Its headquarters, activated in Texas in August 1944, arrived in Scotland aboard the liner Aquitania on 22 November, began work at Doddington Hall on 24 November and on 25 November was placed under General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group. XXII Corps, stationed on the same estate, was intended from the outset to be one of its subordinate headquarters; it formally came under the army on 21 January 1945, together with XXIII Corps. By then the Fifteenth Army was commanded by General Leonard Gerow, formerly commander of V Corps.

Dwight Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters assigned the Fifteenth Army supporting roles. It was to receive, train and equip newly arrived divisions, rebuild units bled white in combat, organise the rear areas and hold sectors of the front from which other armies drew forces for their offensives. From 15 March 1945 it was also responsible for the troops besieging the German garrisons that had been holding out since the summer of 1944 in the ports of the French Atlantic coast, above all Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. They were contained by the US 66th Infantry Division together with French units. These garrisons laid down their arms only in the days of Germany’s surrender, in May 1945.

XXII Corps was given a more combat-oriented task. In the spring of 1945 it took over a sector on the west bank of the Rhine, and in April, during the Battle of the Ruhr Pocket, its divisions – among them the 82nd Airborne Division and the 94th and 95th Infantry Divisions – held the western side of the encirclement and pressed on the pocket from across the Rhine while the Ninth and First Armies squeezed it from the north and south. According to American figures, more than 300,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner in the Ruhr.

An occupation corps

After the fighting ended, XXII Corps took on occupation duties in the Rhineland, in the Fifteenth Army’s zone, which in the summer of 1945 was handed over to the British and the French. In mid-June 1945 it replaced V Corps in western Bohemia, occupied in May by Third Army troops, including the area around Plzeň (Pilsen). It remained there until the withdrawal of American and Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia at the beginning of December 1945. Harmon commanded the corps to the end; XXII Corps was inactivated on 20 January 1946 in Germany. Harmon then became the first commander of the US Constabulary, the American occupation police force in Germany.

Place in the war

XXII Corps was one of the headquarters that the United States had prepared for a long war and which arrived in Europe in its final months. Together with the corps that arrived in September and October, it bore witness to the scale of the American effort: by the end of 1944 the United States was fielding more divisions in the west than Britain and Canada combined, and its superiority grew from month to month. Sustaining this army required ports – hence the importance of the opening of Antwerp two days earlier – and replacements, which were becoming ever harder to find.

The corps’ history also shows that in the final phase of the war higher headquarters more often organised, trained and stood guard than fought great battles. Two weeks after its arrival the Germans struck in the Ardennes, and many newly arrived units went into action sooner and in worse conditions than had been foreseen. The XXII Corps headquarters still managed to take part in the encirclement of the Ruhr, but its most important task turned out to be administering occupied areas of Germany and Bohemia in the first months of peace.