XXIII Corps in Europe

War chronologies record under 12 October 1944 the “arrival in the European Theater of Operations” of the US XXIII Corps. It was a modest event: what crossed the ocean was not a group of divisions but a corps headquarters – a few hundred officers and men with signals and service units, prepared to direct several divisions in the field. As with the corps that arrived in September, the word “arrived” has to be treated with caution. In American records it meant sometimes sailing from a port in the United States, sometimes landing in Britain and sometimes assignment to the theatre, and the available studies give no single reliable date for XXIII Corps. All that is certain is that in the autumn of 1944 the headquarters was in Britain and that it began operating on the Continent only in January 1945.

The arrival of XXIII Corps was one of the last links in the chain of transfers that saw the US Army in Europe grow, at the turn of 1944 and 1945, to two army groups, five field armies and over a dozen corps. At the same time that army began to feel the consequences of a decision taken a year and a half earlier: what it lacked was not headquarters but infantrymen.

A corps from Texas

XXIII Corps bore a number that had not been used in the First World War – the American army in France in 1917–1918 formed only nine corps. The new corps was activated on 15 January 1944 at Camp Bowie, a large training camp near Brownwood, Texas (some lists give 1943, but army records point to January 1944). It was one of the last corps formed by the ground forces during the war. For its first months it was commanded by Major General Louis A. Craig, and from 5 September 1944 by Major General James I. Muir, previously commander of the 44th Infantry Division.

Like other corps formed in the final phase of the army’s expansion, XXIII Corps spent several months in the United States supervising the training of divisions and support units, while its staff practised directing battle in manoeuvres. When the last divisions destined for Europe crossed the ocean in the second half of 1944, the headquarters that were to command them followed.

Armies and corps in the autumn of 1944

In the autumn of 1944 the American ground forces in Europe were undergoing their biggest reorganisation since the Normandy landings. General Omar Bradley’s forces formed the 12th Army Group, and from mid-September General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group, which had come up from Provence, was operating in the south. Above them all stood the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, who since 1 September had personally directed the ground forces.

The most important newcomer was Lieutenant General William Simpson’s Ninth Army. It became operational on 5 September in Brittany, where its VIII Corps was taking Brest; it then briefly took over a sector in the Ardennes and Luxembourg, and on 22 October moved north to the area of Maastricht, between the British Second Army and the US First Army. There it took over XIX Corps, which since the beginning of October had been attacking the Siegfried Line north of Aachen. Bradley preferred to have a new army on the boundary with the British rather than the experienced First Army, which he intended to keep for the main thrust to the Rhine.

A fifth field army was also on its way. The Fifteenth Army was activated on 21 August 1944 at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Its first commander was Major General John Lucas, who had earlier been removed from Anzio, and from 15 October General Lucian Truscott, who – before he could take up the command properly – was sent to Italy in December to lead the Fifth Army. The Fifteenth Army headquarters sailed to Scotland in November and began operating on the Continent at the turn of 1944 and 1945. In January 1945 it was taken over by General Leonard Gerow, until then commander of V Corps. The Fifteenth Army was to serve as a rear echelon: training and rebuilding divisions, guarding the rear areas and occupying captured territory. It was to this army that XXIII Corps was assigned on 21 January 1945.

The replacement crisis

As one headquarters after another arrived, the US Army in Europe was grappling with a problem the new staffs could not solve. In the autumn of 1944 infantry replacements began to run short. Planners in Washington had assumed that losses would be distributed among the arms of service much as they had been in the campaigns in North Africa and Italy. In Normandy and in the fighting on the German border, however, it turned out that the infantry – a small fraction of all the soldiers in the theatre – was suffering the overwhelming majority of the casualties, by some estimates more than three-quarters. On top of this came many cases of frostbite, trench foot and combat exhaustion, which in the autumn and winter put as many soldiers out of action as enemy fire.

This was the result of a decision by the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, who in 1943 had capped the expansion of the ground forces at about ninety divisions. Every division eventually went to the front, and there was nowhere to find new ones. The command in Europe therefore began retraining men from rear-echelon units, anti-aircraft artillery and the air forces as infantrymen, while in the United States students of the Army Specialized Training Program and aviation cadets were transferred to the infantry. According to the official history of the army’s logistics in Europe, in December 1944 the shortfall of riflemen in the infantry divisions ran to several tens of thousands of men. In the winter Eisenhower even agreed to let African American soldiers from rear-echelon units volunteer for the infantry – for the first time in this war they fought in the same companies as white soldiers, though in separate platoons.

Its place in the war

XXIII Corps took part in no major battle. While its headquarters was in Britain, the Americans fought hard battles for Aachen and in the Hürtgen Forest, and on 16 December 1944 the Germans launched their Ardennes offensive. From December to February the corps was temporarily commanded by Brigadier General Jesmond D. Balmer, and in February and March 1945 by Major General James Van Fleet, who then took over III Corps. From 17 March it was commanded by Major General Hugh J. Gaffey, formerly commander of the 4th Armored Division.

As part of the Fifteenth Army, XXIII Corps first helped rebuild units shattered in the Ardennes and then, in the spring of 1945, once the front-line armies had crossed the Rhine, held the left bank of the river and took over the captured territory. From April it was in effect an occupation headquarters: it administered the military districts around Trier and Koblenz, and its command post was at Idar-Oberstein. At this time the Fifteenth Army also guarded the German forces encircled in the Ruhr. In July 1945 the area held by the corps was handed over to the French, who had received their own occupation zone. XXIII Corps was inactivated in Germany on 10 February 1946.

The history of the corps illustrates well the place of the autumn transfers in the war. The headquarters arriving in Europe in October 1944 had been created for an army that was expected to advance into Germany on a broad front; before they could be put to that use, the front came to a halt on the Reich’s border and the biggest problem became a shortage of infantry, not of staffs. The Americans overcame the crisis by moving soldiers between arms of service. In the spring of 1945, 61 American divisions were fighting in Western Europe, and headquarters such as XXIII Corps took on tasks that the plans of 1943 had not foreseen: administering occupied Germany.