Eisenhower Buried This Victory
Here’s my verdict first before any of the evidence. An entire German field army was destroyed on the west bank of the Rine in the dead of winter by troops under American command in 19 days. Not encircled and allowed to slip away, not pushed back a few miles and left intact, broken to the point that it stopped functioning as an army and had to be rebuilt afterward out of Vulkerm levies and hastily trained replacement drafts.
That is one of the cleanest operational results any American commander produced in the European theater. It is also the one you would have the hardest time finding on the standard shelf of books about the war. That is the verdict. Now, the ground. The place is Alsace, the flat farmland between the eastern slope of the Voj Mountains and the Rine.
The fighting ran from January 20th, 1945 to February 9th. The Germans were holding a bulge on the wrong side of the river, roughly 850 square miles of French soil. Snow lay more than 3 ft deep. In the worst of it, the temperature sat at 20° C below zero. The formation holding that ground was the German 19th Army, and when the shooting stopped, it no longer existed as a fighting force.
The men who took it apart were the French First Army under General Jean de Latra de Tasini and four American divisions and a core headquarters lent into the fight. All of it under an American army group commander named Jacob Devers. And the man who commanded all of them, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, wrote a memoir of the war that runs to roughly 500 pages.
The fall of the Culmer Pocket gets one paragraph. I want to be exact about what I am claiming and what I am not because the title of this video is a strong one and it has to be earned rather than asserted. I’m not going to tell you Dwight Eisenhower sat down at a desk and decided to bury a victory.
I have found no evidence of that and anyone who tells you they have is selling you something. What I am going to argue is narrower and I think more damning. Eisenhower’s own account set the proportions of this story because he wrote first and because he wrote as supreme commander, those proportions became the shape of the record for everyone who came after him.
One paragraph at the top of the chain became a missing index entry at the bottom of it. That is not a conspiracy. That is a mechanism. And mechanisms are worse than conspiracies because nobody has to intend them and nobody ever has to answer for them. So let me show you the mechanism working and let me do it with the books, not with adjectives.
Take the standard general histories, the ones sitting on most of the shelves of the people watching this. John Keegan’s the second world war is the single volume a great many educated readers use to learn the shape of the whole conflict. Kmar does not appear in its index. Martin Gilbert’s The Second World War: A Complete History advertises dayby-day coverage of the entire war and gives Al-Sass in that winter a passing line.
Steven Ambrose in Citizen Soldiers mentions the Culmer Pocket three times and mostly to describe a quarrel between generals rather than the fighting itself. Charles Macdonald, who wrote two of the Army’s own green books on this front and knew the ground better than almost anyone, gave the pocket three paragraphs in the mighty endeavor and played down what it cost the American divisions in it.
Forest Pogue in the Supreme Command, the official study of Eisenhower’s own headquarters, gives the reduction of the pocket two brief paragraphs. Those counts come from a graduate study by Clinton Thompson at the University of Texas at Tyler titled Hell in the Snow, which went through the coverage volume by volume and tallied it.
I spent a good part of this week checking his tally against the books themselves, and it holds up. Now, hold that next to what the professional military literature calls this campaign when it does look at it squarely. In 2016, a United States Army officer named Rebecca Beard wrote a command and general staff college monograph on Davers and his command.
She titled it Footnote in history. That is the gap. an army group of 20 divisions at its peak. Threearters of a million men when it went operational and the army’s own staff college calls it a footnote. There is a second layer to the gap and it is quieter but it matters more. The Kulmar pocket has no campaign name that survived. The Bulge has a name.
The Herkin has a name. Anzio, Normandy, Raagan, Baston, all names a general reader can hold. This operation is filed under Rineland, which is a bookkeeping label the army used for a hundred different actions, or under Elsass, which most American readers cannot place on a map. A battle without a usable name cannot be looked up.
And a battle that cannot be looked up cannot be argued about, and a battle nobody argues about quietly ceases to have happened. Here is my thesis stated now rather than saved for the finish, because I would rather you test it against the evidence as it arrives than have it dropped on you at the end.
I believe the disappearance of the Culmer Pocket has four engines and only one of them has anything to do with how Eisenhower felt about Jacob Devers. The first engine is authorship, the Supreme Commander published in 1948 and the first draft of any war’s history sets the proportions of every draft after it. The second engine is nationality.
The larger share of this victory was won by a French army inside an American army group, and neither national memory has a comfortable place to file that. The third engine is silence. Every other senior commander in this story left the world an account of it. Jacob Devers never wrote a book in his life. The fourth engine is timing.
And I will show you at the end exactly how narrow the window was. Four engines. None of them requires malice. All of them point the same direction. That is the argument. The rest of this is the proof. Before I go further, credit where it belongs because this channel does not do hit jobs and Eisenhower does not deserve one.
Dwight Eisenhower was the finest coalition manager the Western Allies produced. And I do not think that is a close call. He held together an alliance of governments that had every structural reason to fly apart. And he did it while running the largest amphibious invasion in history and then a campaign across a continent. The specific proof is inside this very story.
In the last days of December 1944, with the German offensive in the Arden still running and a second German attack coming south into Alsace, Eisenhower ordered the Sixth Army group to pull its main line of defense back to the Voge. Militarily, that was entirely defensible. He was thin. He was being attacked in two places, and shortening the line is what you do.
Politically, it meant abandoning Strawborg, a city the French had liberated a month earlier and would not surrender twice. Charles de Gaulle told him French troops would defend Strawber no matter what came and threatened to withdraw the French first army from SHAF command altogether. On January 3rd, 1945, Eisenhower sat down with Churchill and de Gaul and reversed his own order.
He [snorts] put the alliance ahead of the map. A lesser man would have insisted on being right and let the French walk. Eisenhower chose to hold the coalition together. I think he was plainly correct to. He also, when Devs asked for help, gave it. On January 14th, his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, cabled devs that the sixth army group would receive the 10th armored and 28th infantry divisions.
The 35th and 75th followed. That is a supreme commander doing his job for a subordinate he did not much like, which is the harder version of the job. So, this is not a story about a bad general. It is a story about how a good general’s blind spot became the permanent record. And to see the blind spot, you have to know something about the man standing in it.
A lot of you in the comments have been asking for devers, some of you for years, and I want to do him justice, which means the criticism as well as the credit. Jacob Lux Devers came out of York, Pennsylvania, and West Point in 199 into the artillery. He was a gunner by trade and a builder by temperament, and the defining job of his pre-war career was chief of the armored force from 1941, which put him at the center of turning the American tank arm from a few experimental brigades into a mass force. That is not a combat command.
It is an industrial and doctrinal one. And it is the kind of work that wins wars and generates no anecdotes at all. In May 1943, Devers was given command of the entire European theater of operations. That was Eisenhower’s old job and would be his job again. And it made Devers for a stretch of that year the senior American officer in Britain responsible for building the base from which the invasion of France would eventually be launched.
And that is where the trouble starts and where I have to be careful because this is the part of the story most often told backward. In 1943, Devers as European theater commander flew to North Africa to see Eisenhower. Dr. John Quain reviewing James Scott Wheeler’s biography of Devers in military review put the consequence in one plain sentence.
Eisenhower probably believed Devers had been sent to relieve him. Read that again because the direction matters enormously. The received version of this feud has a supreme commander looking down on a mediocre subordinate. The documented version is closer to the reverse. At the moment the relationship soured, Dvers held Eisenhower’s old job, arrived from London, and Eisenhower read him as a man come to take his command.
Wheeler’s account is that divers reported nothing derogatory about Eisenhower back to George Marshall and that it made no difference. Eisenhower never fully trusted him again. Russell Wguley, one of the most careful American operational historians of the last century, wrote that Eisenhower’s coolness toward Devs went beyond the usual explanations.
Rick Atkinson, in the forward he contributed to Wheeler’s biography, put it in four words. Eisenhower sold him short. Devers was moved out to the Mediterranean at the end of 1943 as deputy to the British theater commander and ran the North African theater through most of 1944. Then on August 1st, 1944, he was given the sixth army group.
And on September 15th, it went operational at Lion with roughly 750,000 men under it. 400,000 of them were French. Sit with that ratio because every other problem in this story runs through it. Desvers commanded one of only three Allied army groups in Europe, and his was the only one built around a foreign national army.
The American 7th Army under Alexander Patch was one half of it. The French first army under Delatra was the other half and it was the larger half. By the end of the war, the army group counted 20 divisions, 12 American and eight French, with the French making up something close to 40% of the available force. Delatra’s army had begun the als fighting with two core and seven divisions, better than 250,000 men.
Delatra himself is worth a sentence because Americans rarely get one. He had commanded a French infantry division in the collapse of 1940, was imprisoned for resisting the German occupation of the southern zone, escaped and reached North Africa in October 1943. 18 months later, he would sign the German surrender on behalf of France.
This was not a garrison officer. He was a serious soldier commanding a serious army that had been assembled out of colonial regulars, free French troops, and resistance fighters under political constraints no American commander had to think about. Which brings us to the structural trap Devors was standing in.
Delatra answered to devers operationally and to de Gaul politically. And when those two lines of authority pulled against each other, Devers had no lever at all. Bradley could relieve an American core commander over breakfast and did. Desvers could not relieve a French division commander under any circumstances.
He had to command by persuasion across half his own army group. And he had to do it on a front that at one point ran 126 miles for the American half alone. 84 miles from the Sarbrooken area east to Lauderberg and another 42 mi south along the Rine held by six infantry divisions. Now the criticism because the man earned some. In November 1944, when the German 19th Army was reeling and this pocket was still forming, Devers left the job of closing it to Dilatra and turned his own attention north.
He admitted later flatly that he had underestimated German determination to hold that ground and overestimated Delatra’s ability to keep moving. That judgment is his own in his own words and it is a real error with a real bill attached. Part of the reason there was a Colemar pocket in January is that the man who might have crushed it in November did not believe it would last.
There is a second and much larger dispute from that same month about a rine crossing de wanted to make and Eisenhower forbade. I am deliberately not opening it here. It is an hour on its own and it deserves one. What matters for today is the residue. The 19th Army was left alive on the West Bank. Hitler refused point blank to give up reinext to the French and a bulge that both OKW and OB West privately expected to hold for about 3 weeks was still there 10 weeks later.
Dug in, reinforced, and waiting. Quick note, Jacob Devers is one of a hundred in a book we’ve compiled. American commanders, Admirals, and Airmen. Every entry the same. Final rank, commands, operations, decorations, fate. Then what the record holds against what was claimed. 716 credited photographs. All of them again in color.
High commandw.com. Now back to the pocket. Start with what the Germans actually had in there because the Allied intelligence estimate and the reality were not the same document. Clark and Smith in the Greenbook Riviera to the Rine give it straight. General Derek Infantry Sief Freed Rasp who had taken over the 19th Army in mid December had some 22,500 effectives inside the pocket.
The Allied estimate was 15,000. So the men who planned this attack were working from a number that understated the defense by roughly half. That is the kind of error that looks like nothing on a briefing map and shows up within an hour in a rifle company. RASP had two corpse, the 63rd under General Loitinet Eric Abraham and the 64th under General Loant Max Grimmace and something like eight divisions on paper.
[snorts] On paper is carrying a great deal of weight in that sentence. The 64th Corps held the North with the 189th and 198th Infantry Divisions and the 16th and 78th Vulks Grenadier. The 63rd held the south with the 338th, 159th, and 716th. Six of those formations had been nearly destroyed the previous November and rebuilt with whatever came off the trains.
Behind them sat the 106th Panzer Brigade, the Second Mountain Division, the 280th Assault Gun Battalion, and on the order of 65 operational tanks and assault guns across the entire pocket. 65. That is fewer armored vehicles than a single American armored division carried. And they held for 19 days anyway. Here is why. And the first part of the answer is a name most people would never expect to find on an order of battle in Alsace.
The German command holding the sector did not report through OB West. On November 26th, 1944, Hitler created a separate headquarters for the upper Rine running from the Benwald South to the Swiss border. And on December 10th, he gave it to Hinrich Himmler. The Reichkes Furer SS, a poultry farmer by training and a police administrator by career with no field command experience of any kind, was given operational responsibility for the German 19th Army and a collection of replacement army regiments, and he answered directly to Hitler rather than
to the professional soldiers running the Western Front. That arrangement is the reason the pocket still existed in January. Garrett von Runstet and Herman Balk, the professionals, had both recognized in November that the position on the West Bank was militarily indefensible and should be given up. Hitler refused to discuss surrendering re-enexed Alsas to the French.
And with Himmler holding the sector on a direct line to Hitler himself, there was no professional chain of command left through which the argument could even be made. Clark and Smith called the result a schism in the German high command. And I think that is exactly right. It bought the defenders political protection and cost them any chance of a rational withdrawal.
The headquarters was finally wound up in the last week of January with Paul Hower taking over on the 22nd and being moved to Army Group G 3 days later. So the Germans reorganized their command of this sector in the middle of the Allied offensive that destroyed the army holding it. De was not the only army group commander in Als fighting his own headquarters. Now, the ground.
The Alsas plane looks like the easiest ground in Europe on a map, and it is some of the worst in practice. It is flat, which means no cover and no dead ground. It is farmland cut by water, which means an obstacle every few hundred yards. The Ill River runs north through the middle of it. The Kmar Canal cuts across it east to west.
The Ran to Ryan Canal frames the southern end. Between those three lie irrigation ditches, drainage cuts, and flooded fields. And in that winter, the fields froze and thawed and froze again. Armor could not go cross country. Armor went on roads. The roads ran through villages. And every village was a strong point with an anti-tank gun sighted straight down the single street.
So the offensive had to be a sequence of opposed water crossings against prepared positions in deep snow, which is close to the worst thing you can ask infantry to do. It also had to be done by men who had just finished a defensive battle. On December 31st, 1944, the Germans had launched Operation Nordwind against the Sixth Army Group. And it was not a raid.
Roughly 20 divisions were arrayed against Devs, many of them at half strength, but all of them attacking. The 17th SS Panzer Grenadier and the 36th Vulks Grenadier Divisions came down the Sar Valley. Four VKs grenadier divisions, the 559th, 257th, 361st, and 256th went in around Behind them, the 39th Panzer Corps waited with the 21st Panzer and 25th Panzer Grenadier Divisions and something like 80 tanks.
The Sar Valley attack was finally called off on January 4th. Patch’s seventh army took on the order of 14,000 casualties, stopping all of it, and the Germans never broke through. That is the condition of the American half of this army group as the Kmar attack was being planned.
Fought out under strength and holding a front longer than any other American army in Europe. Now the attack itself, it began in the south. On January 20th, 1945, Delatra’s French First Corps under Emil Bettoir attacked out of the Mull House area toward the base of the pocket. Two days later on the 22nd the French second corps under Joseph de Gualar de Mosulabair came in from the north and with it the American third infantry division under John O’Daniel a division that had already fought from Sicily up the length of Italy and through the voj and that would
finish the war carrying the highest casualty total of any division in the United States Army. The third division’s assignment was to force the ill then the Kmar canal and cut off the northern shoulder of the pocket. The Northern Shoulder is where this operation very nearly came apart. On the night of January 22nd and into the 23rd, the 30th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Lionel Magcgar got across the ill at a place called Maison Rouge and found itself holding a worn timber bridge, the kind of span built for farm carts and hay
wagons. Engineers pushed armor onto it to support the infantry on the far bank. The first tank went on and the bridge gave way. Clark and Smith preserved the description that came back that the tank and its lieutenant went down like an elevator into the icy ill. That was the end of the armor for that crossing.
Two rifle companies and the men with them were sitting on the far side of a river in the dark with no tanks. Nothing heavier in the way of anti-tank weapons than they could carry on their shoulders and German armor already moving. The Germans counteratt attacked straight into it. The 30th infantry lost roughly 350 men in a day, most of them taken prisoner.
Companies I and K were overrun near a village called Holtzphere and more than 100 men went into the bag in one action. Across that regiment, rifle companies authorized 111 men were down to 72 and 73. And it got worse before it got better. On the 24th, the Seventh Infantry went at a fortified manor house called the Chateau de Shopenvier and paid heavily for it.
To the south, company B of the 15th infantry took 102 casualties out of 120 men before it even reached its objective. Read that as arithmetic and it is a bad day. Read it as a company and it is a company that has ceased to exist as a military organization. This is the part the general histories skip entirely and it is the reason I cannot accept the three paragraph treatment as proportionate.
You do not get to write three paragraphs about a battle in which American rifle companies were reduced to a dozen effectives and call that an account. Then on January 26th at Holtzphere, the fighting produced the single most famous individual action of the war. And here is the thing that should stop you cold.
Even this was not enough to carry the battle into public memory. A 20-year-old second lieutenant named Audi Murphy, commanding what was left of company B of the 15th Infantry in the woods outside the village, was facing something on the order of 250 German infantry supported by six tanks.
His tank destroyer support was hit and burning. Murphy sent his surviving men back into the treeine, climbed onto the burning M10 tank destroyer, and worked its 50 caliber machine gun against German infantry at close range while calling artillery onto his own position by field telephone. The citation credits him with roughly 50 enemy killed.
He held long enough for the position to be restored, then walked back and led a counterattack, was wounded doing it, and refused evacuation. He received the Medal of Honor and became the most decorated American soldier of the war. His name is the one thing about the Coar Pocket that a general audience can still reach for. The battle he earned it in has gone.
That is a strange kind of fame a man remembered and his battlefield forgotten. And I think it demonstrates that the eraser here has nothing to do with a shortage of drama. And Murphy was not alone. He was not even the only Medal of Honor in his own division inside those 19 days. On January 25th near Rosen CR, Private First Class Jose Valdez of Company B, 7th Infantry, engaged a German tank with a Browning automatic rifle at 75 yards, then volunteered to cover his patrols withdrawal alone. He was shot through
the stomach in the back, resumed his firing position, and held for 15 minutes against more than 200 of the enemy while calling artillery onto his own ground. He died of those wounds on February 17th, 1945. On February 3rd, near Bethheim, technician fifth grade Forest Pedin of Battery C, 10th Field Artillery Battalion, a forward observer, found roughly 45 infantrymen ambushed by a force outnumbering them four to one.
He gave first aid under fire, ran 800 yards back to the battalion command post, brought up two light tanks, climbed onto the hole of the lead tank to guide it into the fight, and was killed when that tank took a direct hit and burned. Three medals of honor, one division. 19 days, two of the three men killed by the action that earned it.
Hold that figure because I am going to set it against something at the end. Meanwhile, the northern attack had stalled and devs had a decision to make. By January 27th, he had concluded that the French could not finish this alone. The Green Book is candid about his reasoning and about its limits.
De’s judged that French units lacked the punch or the willingness to go all out, and he simultaneously acknowledged that the weather was flattening every formation on the field equally. I think both halves of that are true, and that the second half is the more important one. Delatra’s army was chronically short of trained infantry. He had spent the autumn folding resistance volunteers into regular formations while rotating colonial troops out of the line as the cold came on and that meant a genuine loss of combat power in precisely the weeks he
needed it most. It was not a failure of will. It was an accounting problem with rifles. So Dvers did something that I believe is the single most underrated command act of that winter and I will come back to it in detail because it is the thing about this battle that even well read people do not know.
He took an American corps headquarters and handed it to a foreign army. The 21st corps under Major General Frank Milbour had entered combat on January 17th. It was attached to the French First Army from January 25th. And on January 28th, it took over its sector. Milbour commanded the American 3rd and 28th Infantry Divisions, then the 75th Infantry and the 12th Armored, and with them the French Fifth Armored Division, the French First Parachute Regiment, and the First Chalk Commando Battalion.
an American twostar taking his orders from a French army commander and giving orders to French troops. With that headquarters in the line, the northern attack got its weight back and the change was fast. O’Daniel stopped battering at Maison Rouge and went around it, sidest stepping the 7th and 15th Infantry Regiments and putting them across the Kmar canal on the night of January 29th and 30th.
That crossing broke the shoulder. To the east, the 254th Infantry Regiment, borrowed from the 63rd Division as Task Force Harris, was fed toward Yepim, a village sitting on the north to south Road Net inside the pocket. This was a regiment going into combat for the first time in its existence, and its introduction to the war was a German minefield on a piece of ground. The maps called Hill 216.
New regiments are supposed to be broken in on quiet sectors. This one was broken in on a mine belt in front of a village the Germans had decided to hold and it took the ground. The Germans defended GBshime hard on the 26th and 27th. Jebshime is the kind of place name that appears in no general history and cost the better part of a brigade’s worth of casualties.
And one tally puts the American losses there at 870 against more than a thousand German prisoners taken. North and west of it, the fighting for the Reedir woods and the villages of Reed and Holtz ran from the 24th through the 27th. And it was the same pattern repeated house by house. Cross the water at night, take the wood line, lose it to the counterattack in the morning, take it again.
The third division’s regiments went through that cycle for four days to secure objectives you could walk between in an afternoon. And then the German position simply came apart because a defense with 65 tanks cannot plug two holes at once. Colmer itself, the city that gave the pocket its name, fell on February 2nd, and the American division in at the finish was of all formations the 28th Infantry.
This was the division that had been gutted in the Herkin forest in November with nearly 6,000 casualties. gutted a second time in the Ardens in December with more than 5,100 and sent south to Alsas to hold a quiet sector and rebuild. Instead, its 109th Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel James Earl Rudder, the same rudder who had taken the Rangers up the cliffs at Point to Hawk eight months earlier, spearheaded the division’s drive on the city and pushed into it at 9 in the morning on February 4th, two days behind
the French troops who got there first. The regiment lost 125 men killed, wounded, and missing doing it. And the French decorated it with the Qua de Gare. Think about that sequence for a moment. The same division inside 90 days was destroyed in Bradley’s forest, destroyed again in the Arden, and then rebuilt just enough to help finish a German army in Elsass.
Two of those three actions are famous. On February 5th, the 12th armored division drove south and linked up with the French first corps coming north and the pocket was cut in two. Rufos fell the same day. On the 6th, Nefbach was sealed off. Whatever could still run for the Ryan Bridges ran, and what got across was not an army.
The German remnant is generally put at four to 500 combat effective men per division. On February 9th, 1945, the last organized German resistance west of the Rine in that sector ended 19 days from the first French attack. The 19th Army had ceased to exist as a fighting force, and the Germans rebuilt it out of Vulkerm and replacement drafts, and it was destroyed for the last time around Stoutgard and Munigan in April.
Now, the numbers gathered in one place because I want them next to each other rather than scattered where they are easy to lose. The pocket, 850 square miles, 45 miles of rine frontage, more than 25 miles deep. The defenders, 22,500 effectives, two core, eight divisions on paper, six of them wrecked before the battle began.
65 operational tanks and assault guns. The clock, 19 days, the Allied cost. The French First Army’s casualties are usually given as 13,390. The American figure is usually given as about 8,000. Add them and you get roughly 21,000. I have to be honest that the totals are disputed. John Whittmann in the other Battle of the Bulge puts the combined Allied loss at 18,000.
Some recent tallies run as high as 24,000. The range most sources will support is 18,000 to 24,000. And anybody who quotes you one clean figure without the range is guessing at the third digit, the German cost. At least 22,000 permanent losses killed and missing with upper estimates running to 38,500. Prisoner counts in the 16,000 range circulate widely, and I have not been able to run them back to an official record, so treat that one with care.
The divisional cost. The third infantry division took a roughly 5,000 battle and non- battle casualties in 21 days of this fighting. That division finished the war with more than 27,000 casualties in total, the highest of any division in the United States Army. And a meaningful slice of that bill was paid in ALS.
The 75th Infantry Division, a single division, lost 105 killed, 439 wounded and 132 missing, plus 591 non- battle casualties from cold and exposure, and took 515 German prisoners. Look hard at that last pair. 591 men out of the line from frostbite and trench foot against 676 shot. In that winter, the weather was pulling nearly its own weight as an enemy.
And the 7th Army’s medical records show the same thing at scale. More than 10,000 psychiatric casualties between the middle of August and the end of December and another 3,700 in the first three months of 1945. Now, the comparison, and this is the one I want you to hold on to. set the CLR pocket beside the Herkin forest because the Herkin is the operation every one of you knows and it was run by named peers Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodes and Joe Collins fed American divisions into the Herkin for 88 days from September 19th to December 16th, 1944 to take 54 square
miles of pine forest. The American casualty figure most commonly cited is at least 33,000 killed and wounded with upper estimates reaching 55,000. No German army was destroyed there. The dams that were the strategic point of the whole thing stayed in German hands until the following February. 19 days at Kmar, 850 square miles, a German field army broken, about 8,000 American casualties.
That is roughly 16 times the ground for roughly a quarter of the American blood. And the campaign that produced the better result at the lower cost is the one missing from the index. And here is where the story stops being about Alsas and starts being about the filing system because the reason for that absence is not mysterious once you look at who wrote what and when.
Crusade in Europe was published in 1948. It runs to roughly 500 pages. On page 374, Eisenhower disposes of the reduction of the Culmer pocket in one paragraph. Culmer surrendered on the third and by the ninth, such Germans as survived had crossed the Rine. That is substantially the whole of it. A German field army destroyed, five American divisions, and an entire French army engaged, three medals of honor earned inside 19 days, and it occupies less space than a book of that length gives to a staff reorganization.
Now, the fair defense stated as strongly as I can put it, because a case is worthless if you have not steel manned the other side. Crusade in Europe is a memoir of supreme command, not a battle history. It compresses everything and it has to. Eisenhower was running a front from the North Sea to the Swiss border and a book that gave every operation its operational due would have run to 5,000 pages instead of 500.
He barely lingers over Mets. He is brisk about breast. Compression is not concealment and a memorist is entitled to write about his own level of the war. I accept every word of that and it still does not get him out of this. And here is why. Compression is a set of choices about proportion. When you look at what got room in that book and what did not, the proportions track his private estimate of the men involved rather than the results those men produced.
And unlike almost any other memoir of the war, this one had structural force. It was the Supreme Commander’s account published early by the man who would shortly be the most trusted figure in American public life. Every historian who came afterward inherited its sense of what had mattered. That is what I mean by authorship as an engine, not lying, waiting. James Scott Wheeler in Jacob L.
Devers, A General’s Life, states the consequence directly. Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s accounts of the general’s disagreements over strategy became received wisdom to the detriment of Devers’s reputation. Two men wrote the story of a war they had commanded, and the third man in the argument said nothing at all, which is the second engine, and I think it is at least as powerful as the first.
Dvers never wrote a memoir. Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe. Bradley wrote a soldier story. Patton’s diaries were published as war as I knew it. Delatra published his own account of this campaign in French. Dvers went home, commanded army ground forces for four years, retired in 1949, and published no defense of himself whatsoever.
He left diaries and letters, which is how historians can quote him now, and he never once put a book on a shelf where an ordinary reader would find it. And there is an irony in that which I still find hard to sit with. From 1959 to 1969, Jacob Devers was chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission. For a decade, the man whose largest victory had gone missing from the histories was the American official responsible for how the United States commemorated its war dead abroad.
He spent 10 years making sure other men’s battles were marked in stone. Never made a case for his own. If you have spent 30 years inside any large institution, you already know how this ends. The version of events that survives is not the accurate one. It is the written one. The man who files the report writes the history.
The man who was too busy or too decent or too tired to file gets whatever the other reports happen to say about him. I have watched careers settled exactly that way and so have most of you and it is the same mechanism here only with divisions instead of departments. Then the third engine and it is the one American writers have found hardest to handle honestly.
This victory was mostly French. Deltatra’s first army carried the larger share of the fighting and the larger share of the dead by a margin of roughly five to three. 400,000 of the 750,000 men’s army group were French. That army’s own composition was a political fact in itself. Colonial divisions from Morocco and Algeria, free French regulars and resistance fighters folded into the regiments, better than 250,000 men into core when the Als fighting opened.
An American narrative has no shelf for that. A French narrative has one and Kmar sits on it. Which is why there is a memorial museum for this battle at Turkheim and why French school children know the name and American ones do not. But a largely French victory inside an American army group under an American army group commander belongs fully to neither literature and it fell straight down the gap between them.
The 21st core arrangement makes the same point in miniature. An American corps headquarters attached to a foreign army from January 25th to February 16th, 1945. Which national history owns that? Neither comfortably. So it ends up in nobody’s chapter. And there is a mechanical consequence of that which I think historians underrate badly.
Unit histories are written by unit associations. And unit associations are built around divisions that own their battles. The first division owns Omaha Beach. The 101st owns Bastonia. The fourth armored owns the drive to Bastonia. Nobody owns Kmar. The third infantry division fought there, but its association understandably built its identity around Sicily, Anzio, and southern France.
Three campaigns with names people recognize. The 28th built its identity around the Herkin, where it was destroyed, which is the battle its veterans could never stop being asked about. The 75th was a new division that arrived in the middle. The 254th Infantry was a loaned regiment from a division that was somewhere else. The 12th Armored came in for the exploitation and left.
So there was no association writing letters to publishers, no divisional historian sitting on the primary documents, no reunion every August in a hotel ballroom keeping the name in circulation. That is how a battle goes quiet. Not by censorship, by nobody being institutionally responsible for remembering it.
Even the air campaign had no institutional owner. And the figures here are worth hearing. Air support for this operation came from the first tactical air force provisional a mixed American and French organization with 21,396 authorized positions flying 153 B26 bombers 268 P47 fighter bombers and 52 French Spitfires.
Set that against the 9th Air Force which had 167,337 personnel assigned as of January 31st, 1945. The air force supporting the destruction of a German field army had roughly 1/8 the manpower of the tactical air force supporting Bradley. It was half foreign and it was labeled provisional. Provisional organizations do not get commemorative histories written about them and they do not have veterans associations to write letters to publishers.
Then add the fourth engine timing and it finished the job cleanly. The pocket closed on February 9th. The Alta conference ran from the 4th to the 11th and owned every front page in the world. Four weeks after that, the Ludenorf bridge at Raagan fell into American hands and the entire press corps went to the Rine and stayed there. A 19-day winter battle in Alsace, won largely by a French army under an American general nobody was writing about, had a window of about 72 hours in which to become famous.
And in every one of those hours, the world was looking somewhere else. four engines, none of them requiring a decision to bury anything. All of them pointing the same way. That is my case, and I think it is considerably stronger than the version that needs a villain. Now, let me give you the thing a casual viewer has never heard because it is the detail that changes how you read the whole operation.
Go back to January 28th and that subordination of the 21st core because when I first worked through the order of battle for this one, I had to read the command chain three times before I believed it. follow it from the bottom up. A French commander battalion, the first chalk, along with the French first parachute regiment and the French fifth armored division took their orders from an American core commander, Major General Frank Milbour.
Milbour was at the same moment commanding four American divisions, the 3rd, 28th, and 75th infantry and the 12th armored. Milbour took his orders from General Dilatra, commanding the French first army. Data took his from Dvers commanding an American army group. Divers took his from Eisenhower. Read that chain again. French troops under American core command, under French army command, under American army group command.
The nationality alternates at every single level. There’s nothing else quite like it in the Northwest Europe campaign. American formations were attached to British and Canadian armies at times, and British and Canadian formations to American ones. But handing a complete American corps headquarters to a foreign army and then giving that headquarters the foreign army’s own divisions to command in the middle of a stalled offensive in February is genuinely exceptional and it worked.
Delatra singled out Milbour’s cooperation for praise. The northern shoulder broke within about 72 hours of the arrangement taking effect. I think that is the most impressive thing did all winter and it is invisible in the histories because it is an administrative act. There’s no photograph of a command relationship.
There’s no quotable line. It is a paragraph in an order. And it is the paragraph that won the battle. The rest of the operational detail runs the same way. Unglamorous and decisive. Bridging, for instance. This whole offensive was a sequence of water crossings, which meant the limiting factor was not tanks or shells, but bridge classification.
A Bailey bridge rated for a light load will not carry a 30-tonon Sherman. And the Mison Rouge collapse is exactly what that arithmetic looks like when somebody gets it wrong in the dark. Clark and Smith record that the French had to pull out existing Bailey bridges and replace them with timber structures in order to free the steel for the assault crossings and that devs had to go and obtain a bridge company from Patton’s third army to have enough engineer capacity to attack it all, an army group commander scrging one bridge company off a
neighbor in order to destroy a German field army. Or take the two rin bridges the Germans were using to feed the pocket. One was the crossing at Nyenberg opposite the French town of Shalumpe which Delat had thought about seizing back in November. The other was a single track reinforced railway bridge at Brisach 2 miles east of Nfrissach.
Allied air went after both of them repeatedly and could not put either down because both were too solidly built for what that provisional air force could throw at them. Clark and Smith preserved the black joke that went around the German garrison that a man deserved an honorary iron cross simply for having survived the bombing of that bridge.
Air power could not close the pocket’s back door. Infantry had to walk to it through three feet of snow. And then there is the arithmetic of the villages, which is the part that explains the casualty bill better than anything else. The Elsass plane between the ill and the rine is a grid of farming villages a mile or two apart.
And in 1945, every one of them was built of stone with a church tower in the middle and sellers under the houses. A German infantry company in a village like that does not need armor and does not need numbers. It needs one anti-tank gun covering the approach road, a couple of machine guns and upper windows, and sellers deep enough to survive the artillery preparation.
Against that, an attacking battalion has three choices. Shell the village, which takes hours, warns the defenders and blocks the road with rubble. Bypass it, which is impossible when the fields will not carry tanks, or walk into it and clear it room by room in the snow. The Americans and the French walked in village after village for 19 days.
Reed, Holtz, Yebshim, Ruf, Turkheim, and dozens whose names never made a report anybody reads. Each one cost a rifle company something. And the arithmetic of that is why a battle fought against a beaten and half-armed enemy still ran up the casualty bill you’re about to hear. The defenders were weak.
The defense was not. And the cold was not background scenery. It was an order of battle problem. The 75th Division put more men out of the line through cold injury in this operation than it did through wounds, and no plan accounts for that. Delatra in his own account described a landscape he called an immense city of the dead beneath a shroud of snow.
The next time you see the Herkin described as the worst winter conditions American infantry faced in Europe, put Alsas beside it in check. So what does the erasure actually tell us? Here is my verdict. And it is a verdict about a system rather than about a man. The American Army’s historical memory is organized around three things: divisions, campaign names, and the memoirs of the men at the top.
The Culmer Pocket fails all three tests at once. It has no owning division because the American units in it were borrowed from three different armies, and its core headquarters was on loan to a foreign one. It has no surviving campaign name because it is filed under Rhineland or Alsace, and neither means anything to a general reader.
and it had no memoirist because the one American commander with the standing to write it up never wrote anything at all. A victory that fails all three tests is not suppressed. It is unrecordable. And I have come to think that is the more disturbing finding because suppression can be exposed and reversed while unrecordability simply keeps producing the same absence book after book for 80 years with nobody at fault at any point in the chain.
On Eisenhower specifically, my view is this. He did not bury the Kmar pocket. He never thought it was very interesting and he happened to be the one man on earth whose disinterest could propagate through an entire literature. He gave Devers the divisions when Devers asked for them. He promoted him to full general on March 8th, 1945.
Dated ahead of Mark Clark and ahead of Bradley, which made Jacob Devers the second highest ranking American officer in Europe. Those are not the acts of a man running a vendetta. They are the acts of a man who did his institutional duty by an officer he never warmed to and who then wrote a book in which that officer’s largest victory takes up one paragraph.
Indifference at the top becomes absence in the record. Absence in the record becomes a hundred books that all agree with one another. That is the pattern and it is not unique to devers or to also. He misjudged the pocket in November and said so afterward in plain words. He leaned on an ally he had no authority to discipline and was slow to admit the arrangement had stopped working.
An American infantry paid the difference in January. Dr. Queen’s summary of his record is the fairest one I have read. Devers was not relieved of command and he suffered no defeat at the hands of the German forces he faced. In a theater where Eisenhower relieved core commanders and reshuffled army commanders, that is a genuine achievement and it is precisely the kind of achievement that generates no anecdotes and therefore no chapters.
On May 5th, 1945, General Herman Fch surrendered Army Group G unconditionally to Jacob Devers. An American Army Group commander accepted the surrender of a German army group. And if you asked a hundred well- read Americans who took that surrender, I doubt five could name him. So here’s the name to keep. Jacob Lux Devers of York, Pennsylvania.
Four stars dated ahead of Bradley’s commander of the only Allied army group in Europe built around a foreign army and the man who broke the German 19th Army in 19 days in the snow of Alsace at a cost in American lives around a quarter of what the Herkin forest cost for 116th of the ground.
Three medals of honor came out of one division in those 19 days and two of the three men died earning them. That is what the paragraph on page 374 is standing on top of. The victory is not lost. It is in the Green Books, in Clark and Smith, in Wheeler’s biography, in Atinson, and in a staff college monograph titled Footnote in History.
It is simply not anywhere a general reader would ever think to look. And that is a choice the record made. It was never a gap in anybody’s education. If your father or grandfather served in the 3rd, 28th, 75th, or 12th Armored Divisions, or in the 21st Corps in Alsace that winter, I’d like to hear about it.
Those stories matter, and for this battle, they are a good part of what we still have. That’s the story. The sources are in the description. I’ll see you in the next
