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World War II's Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together - The Daily Beast May 12, 2013

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Via: jsbach • 11 years ago • 15 comments

World War II's Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together

The Daily Best

May 12, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Days after Hitlers suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS divisionthe only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II. Andrew Roberts on a story so wild that it has to be made into a movie.

Author

Andrew Roberts

The most extraordinary things about this truly incredible tale of World War II are that it hasnt been told before in English, and that it hasnt already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945five days after Hitlers suicidethree Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. Jack Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lees beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?

The battle for the fairytale, 13th century Castle Itter was the only time in WWII that American and German troops joined forces in combat, and it was also the only time in American history that U.S. troops defended a medieval castle against sustained attack by enemy forces. To make it even more film worthy, two of the women imprisoned at Schloss ItterAugusta Bruchlen, who was the mistress of the labour leader Leon Jouhaux, and Madame Weygand, the wife General Maxime Weygandwere there because they chose to stand by their men. They, along with Paul Reynauds mistress Christiane Mabire, were incredibly strong, capable, and determined women made for portrayal on the silver screen.

There are two primary heroes of thisas I must reiterate, entirely factualstory, both of them straight out of central casting. Jack Lee was the quintessential warrior: smart, aggressive, innovativeand, of course, a cigar-chewing, hard-drinking man who watched out for his troops and was willing to think way, way outside the box when the tactical situation demanded it, as it certainly did once the Waffen-SS started to assault the castle. The other was the much-decorated Wehrmacht officer Major Josef Sepp Gangl, who died helping the Americans protect the VIPs. This is the first time that Gangls story has been told in English, though he is rightly honored in present-day Austria and Germany as a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance.

The books author, Stephen Harding, is a respected military affairs expert who has written seven books and long specialized in World War II, and his writing style carries immediacy as well as authority. Just after 4am Jack Lee was jolted awake by the sudden banging of M1 Garands, he writes of the SSs initial assault on the castle, the sharper crack of Kar-98s, and the mechanical chatter of a .30-caliber spitting out rounds in short, controlled bursts. Knowing instinctively that the rising crescendo of outgoing fire was coming from the gatehouse, Lee rolled off the bed, grabbed his helmet and M3, and ran from the room. As he reached the arched schlosshof gate leading from the terrace to the first courtyard, an MG-42 machine gun opened up from somewhere along the parallel ridgeway east of the castle, the weapons characteristic ripping sound clearly audible above the outgoing fire and its tracers looking like an unbroken red stream as they arced across the ravine and ricocheted off the castles lower walls. Everything that Harding reports in this exciting but also historically accurate narrative is backed up with meticulous scholarship. This book proves that history can be new and nail-bitingly exciting all at once.

[T]he French VIPs finally put aside their political differences and picked up weapons to join in the fight against the attacking SS troops.

Despite their personal enmities and long-held political grudges, when it came to a fight the French VIPs finally put aside their political differences and picked up weapons to join in the fight against the attacking SS troops. We get to know Reynaud, Daladier, and the rest as real people, not merely the political legends that theyve morphed into over the intervening decades. Furthermore, Jean Borotra (a former tennis pro) and Francois de La Rocque, who were both members of Marshal Philippe Petains Vichy government and long regarded by many historians as simply pro-fascist German puppets, are presented in the book as they really were: complex men who supported the Allied cause in their own ways. In de La Rocques case, by running an effective pro-Allied resistance movement at the same time that he worked for Vichy. If they were merely pro-Fascist puppets, after all, they would not have wound up as Ehrenhflinge honor prisonersof the Fuhrer.

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