The Liberator Read online

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  After five hundred days of combat, Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks fires his pistol into the air to stop his men slaughtering captured SS soldiers during the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945. [Courtesy David Israel]

  Copyright © 2012 by Alex Kershaw

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kershaw, Alex.

  The Liberator: One World War II Soldier’s 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau / Alex Kershaw.—First Edition.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Sparks, Felix Laurence, 1917–2007. 2. United States. Army. Infantry Regiment, 157th.

  Battalion, 3rd. 3. United States. Army—Officers—Biography. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Western Front. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Italy.

  I. Title. II. Title: Five hundred days. III. Title: One soldier’s odyssey from the beaches of Sicily to the gates of Dachau.

  D769.31157th.K47 2012

  940.54′1273092—dc23 2012017064

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88801-3

  Maps by David Lindroth, Inc.

  Jacket design by Eric White

  Jacket photograph by Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

  v3.1

  In memory of Jack Hallowell

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  PROLOGUE THE GRAVES

  Part One THE DUST BOWL

  CHAPTER 1 THE WEST

  CHAPTER 2 OFF TO WAR

  Part Two ITALY

  CHAPTER 3 SICILY

  CHAPTER 4 THE RACE FOR MESSINA

  CHAPTER 5 MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

  Part Three ANZIO

  CHAPTER 6 DANGER AHEAD

  CHAPTER 7 HELL BROKE LOOSE

  CHAPTER 8 A BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE

  CHAPTER 9 THE BATTLE OF THE CAVES

  CHAPTER 10 CROSSING THE LINE

  Photo Insert 1

  CHAPTER 11 THE BITCH-HEAD

  CHAPTER 12 THE BREAKOUT

  CHAPTER 13 ROME

  Part Four FRANCE

  CHAPTER 14 DAY 401

  CHAPTER 15 THE CHAMPAGNE CAMPAIGN

  CHAPTER 16 THE VOSGES

  Part Five GERMANY

  CHAPTER 17 BLACK DECEMBER

  CHAPTER 18 THE BREAKING POINT

  CHAPTER 19 DEFEAT

  CHAPTER 20 THE RIVER

  CHAPTER 21 THE SIEGFRIED LINE

  CHAPTER 22 CASSINO ON THE MAIN

  Photo Insert 2

  CHAPTER 23 DOWNFALL

  Part Six THE HEART OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 24 THE DAY OF THE AMERICANS

  CHAPTER 25 THE HOUNDS OF HELL

  CHAPTER 26 THE COAL YARD

  CHAPTER 27 THE LINDEN INCIDENT

  CHAPTER 28 THE LONG DAY CLOSES

  Part Seven LAST BATTLES

  CHAPTER 29 THE LAST DAYS

  CHAPTER 30 VICTORY IN EUROPE

  CHAPTER 31 PEACE BREAKS OUT

  CHAPTER 32 THE LAST BATTLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  American casualty in Europe, 1944. [National Archives]

  PROLOGUE

  THE GRAVES

  EUROPE, OCTOBER 1989

  THEY LAY BENEATH PERFECT rows of white graves that lined lush green lawns. He knew where they were buried. He had their names. Finding all of them meant walking back and forth, all across the graveyard, through avenues of thousands of white crosses. But he could manage the strain. His heart had given him problems for years, yet he still had the strength, the will, to search for his men. They had died near here, at Anzio, the bloodiest piece of ground occupied by American and British forces during World War II. Seventy-two thousand men lost in all—killed, wounded, sent insane, blown to shreds, missing, or captured, now a mere statistic in a history book.

  The men he had commanded had achieved something of lasting greatness, something of permanence. They had defeated barbarism. He had seen it. He had been there, poisoned and heartbroken but somehow blessed, or rather damned, with the strength to fight on, to beat Hitler’s most violent men.

  Often he had questioned what kept his men going. The American Army was on the attack all the time in Europe. He had kept thinking: Why do they go? It was hard to explain why his men had not hesitated. Many times he had said: “Let’s go!” Every time, they had gone. Now that he was back in Europe, he marveled once more at the American spirit, as he called it, that had kept them advancing toward death or at best debilitating injury. It was this spirit that had mattered so much when the odds had been even.

  The American soldiers under his command had performed magnificently. He wanted to pay his respects to some of those who had fallen. That was why he was back. There had been no time during combat to stand over them and grieve, no time to say how he felt, to show his love other than by trying his best to keep them alive. At that, he had failed, over and over, and over again.

  Never give up. That was what had counted most. He had never given up, not once in his entire life. He had fought since he could remember—to eat, to stay alive, to overcome everything a vengeful God could throw at him. He had survived, somehow, perhaps through grit and rage, perhaps because God took the good first and left the rotten until last.

  He had never been afraid of God or any man. Fear had never thrown him off balance, but he had felt great anxiety, mostly about what was going to happen to his men. Thankfully, he had always been able to think and act fast. In fact, he had functioned extraordinarily well in combat, remaining for the most part calm and focused. He had some of the fighting Irish in him plus a lot of anger. It was in his blood. His great grandfather had fought at the Alamo.

  The graves of his men stretched across Europe, over two thousand miles. They had died in Sicily, in France, at the dark heart of Nazi Germany. There had been several hundred killed under his command, half of them buried in Europe. Near a crossing over the fast-flowing Moselle, he looked for Sergeant Vanderpool and Lieutenant Railsback’s final resting places. Railsback had looked like a high school valedictorian with his confident, easy smile and neatly cropped hair. He had been a hell of an officer, like Sparks at his age. As for Vanderpool—he should never have died. He should have ignored the fact that he wanted to stay with his brother and pulled him off the line, but he had left it too late.

  On the German border, near a small village, he traipsed along the ridge where he had been beaten just that one time, where in snow and ice the SS had humiliated him. His men’s foxholes were still there as well as their spent cartridges. He had never gotten over their loss. How could anyone recover from losing so many men? Thirty platoon leaders and six hundred warriors who had never hesitated to carry out his every command.

  Then it was on into the dark forests where you could get lost after a hundred yards without a compass, a place of primeval fears, to the border of Germany and the Siegfried Line with its famous dragon’s teeth, now decomposing concrete and rusted iron; across the swirling Rhine to a city on the banks of the Main River where a grateful ma
yor and townspeople honored him and left him beaming with pride; south toward the Alps and a pretty town where he pointedly reminded the good burghers that the German government had authorized the building of a center for the study of the Holocaust. Why hadn’t it been built? Much as they might want to forget, future generations should not.

  He had never been able to forget that day. He could still picture the girl lying on top of all the bodies. It was as if she and others were looking at him with reproach, asking: “What took you so long?”

  Why hadn’t he been able to save them in time?

  He had lost control here, in the outskirts of this town in Bavaria, in this place of evil, for perhaps as much as half an hour. It had been impossible to stop his men from going crazy. The horrors had robbed their minds of reason. He had never liked to see people killed unnecessarily, no matter their color or nationality or whatever terrible things they had done. He had never allowed his men to kill without good reason. He had tried to take prisoners and treat them honorably. But at the end, with his back turned, near piles of dead, his men had killed unnecessarily.

  Events that day, one of more than five hundred at war, nagged at him like an old wound. The rumors festered still, the published falsehoods. Just once, just that time, among thousands of emaciated, stinking corpses, he had failed to control his men when they had gone on the rampage. But he had then done the right thing. He had stopped the madness. It was painful to think people thought otherwise.

  Time had not healed. It had not erased the memories. That fall of 1989, seventy-two-year-old General Felix Sparks wandered through towns he had set free, across battlefields, and through several graveyards. The white crosses were silent. The men who had died for him could not be resurrected. They could not be brought back. He knew one thing for certain. It didn’t matter how well he had waged war. The cost had been too great.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WEST

  Corporal Felix Sparks, U.S. Army Coast Guard Artillery, Camp Kamehameha, 1936. [Courtesy the Sparks Family]

  MIAMI, ARIZONA, 1931

  FELIX SPARKS WOKE EARLY. It was getting light outside. He pulled on his jacket, grabbed his shotgun, and headed out into the dusty canyon, past miners’ shacks and mountains of tailings from the nearby mine, and into the red-rocked canyons, eyes darting here and there as he checked his traplines. The Tonto forest and mountains surrounding his home were full of bounty and menace: snapping lizards, tarantulas the size of his fist, and several deadly types of scorpion. It was important to tread carefully, avoiding porcupines beneath the Ponderosa pines and always being alert for the raised hackles of the diamondback rattler and the quick slither of the sidewinder snake, with its cream and light brown blotches.

  Each morning, he checked his traplines and hunted game, hoping to bag with just one shot a quail or a cottontailed rabbit or a Sonora dove. He couldn’t afford to waste a single cartridge. As the sun started to warm the cold, still air in the base of canyons, he returned to the small frame house he shared with his younger brother, Earl, and three sisters, Ladelle, Frances, and Margaret. His mother, Martha, of English descent and raised in Mississippi, and his father, Felix, of Irish and German blood, counted themselves lucky to have running water. They had moved to Arizona a decade before to find work. But now there was none. Every animal their eldest son brought home was needed to feed the family.

  The economic panic and failure that followed the October 1929 Wall Street crash had swept like a tsunami across America; more than nine thousand banks had failed, and unemployment had shot up tenfold, from around 1.5 million to 13 million, a quarter of the workforce. There was no stimulus spending, nothing done to stop the catastrophe enveloping the nation like one of the dust storms that buried entire towns in Oklahoma.

  By 1931, the copper mines in Miami had closed down and a terrible silence had descended on the town that stood three thousand feet in the lee of Mount Webster. The rumble of machines far below, the distant growl made by their grinding and lifting, was gone. Over Christmas, at age fourteen, Sparks hiked far into the mountains with his father and Earl, laid traps and hunted for two full weeks, then skinned and dried pelts. They also fished for perch. But none of it was enough.

  When he was just sixteen, Sparks’s mother and father sent him to live with his uncle Laurence in Glendale, Arizona. There were too many mouths to feed. It hurt to see the anguish and guilt in his father’s eyes as they said good-bye. In Glendale, he had to pay his way by doing chores, milking cows and working in his uncle’s store on Saturdays.

  When he returned to Miami a year later, in 1934, a government program had been set up, part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, to provide people with basic food requirements. Families in Miami were able to at least eat, even if there was no work. Once a week, he went down to the train depot in town and drew free groceries, staples such as flour, beans, and lard, salt pork, so many pounds per person, per family. Nothing was wasted. His mother was a resourceful woman, cooking salt pork gravy and biscuits for breakfast, feeding her five children as best she could, making them clothes on an old sewing machine, and cutting their hair.

  When he wasn’t hunting or studying, he became a regular visitor to the public library in Miami. His passion was military history: the Indian Wars, tales of the mighty Cherokee and Custer’s Last Stand, and the heroics at the Alamo, where his great-grandfather, Stephen Franklin Sparks, had fought. He hoped someday to go to college and become a lawyer. But he was also drawn toward the military and applied to the Citizens’ Military Training Program. To his delight, he was one of just fifty young men from around the state accepted into the program. Those who completed it became second lieutenants in the U.S. infantry. Training took place every summer in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a hundred and fifty miles from Miami, at an old cavalry post. He hitchhiked to the camp, saving his travel allowance until he had enough to order a new pair of corduroy trousers from the J. C. Penney catalog.

  The long marches and drills in more than one-hundred-degree heat tested the hardiest, and many youths did not return after the first summer, but Sparks enjoyed playing war with real weapons in the desert and nearby canyons. Aged eighteen, he was fully grown, around 140 pounds, slim, and tall, as wiry as a mesquite tree, with a toothy smile, thick black hair, and a broad and handsome face.

  In his last semester at high school, he won a nationwide essay competition and received a 100 pocket watch. In June 1935, he graduated, the most gifted student in his senior year. He knew he had it in him to go far. Of one thing he was certain: He would never be a miner like his father. He would earn his living with his mind, not his hands. But he did not even have enough money to buy a suit for the graduation prom. Nor did he have a way to escape the poverty that had engulfed so much of America. There was not a spare dime for him to go to college, no loans to be had, and no jobs in Miami. He would have to leave home to find work of any kind.

  Late that summer, his father borrowed 18 from a friend and gave it all to his oldest child. It was a grubstake for a new life somewhere else. His mother, Martha, sewed a secret pocket in his trousers for the borrowed money, which would have to last him until he found a job. He had no clear plan other than to head east and maybe get a berth on a ship out of Corpus Christi, on the Gulf Coast. At least he might get to see some of the world he had read about.

  One morning, he put a change of clothes and a toothbrush in a pack, slipped a small metal club he’d bought for a dollar into a pocket, said a wrenching good-bye to his family, and then got a ride from a friend to Tucson, where he was dropped off near some rail tracks. Other men were hanging around, waiting to “catch out.” One of them pointed out a train due to go east, south of the Gila Mountains, through the Chiricahua Desert, toward El Paso, Texas. The hobo warned Sparks to make sure he got off the train before it arrived in the rail yards in El Paso; otherwise he might be beaten or shot by railroad security men—“bulls”—armed with clubs and Winchester shotguns.

  Sparks pulled himself up into a chest-hi
gh boxcar. There was the acrid odor of hot oil mixed with steam. He was suddenly aware of dark shapes in the recesses, movements in the shadows, other men. It was safer, he knew, to travel alone. He had bought the club just in case he had to defend himself. Instead of backing away, he moved to an empty corner and lay down.

  “THE JUNGLES,” THE DUST BOWL, 1936

  THE TRAIN JERKED to life, shuddering as it began to move. The shaking slowly became an almost comforting, rhythmic click-clack of iron wheels on rails. Then came the adrenaline rush. For the first time, Sparks felt the exhilaration and intense sense of freedom that came with all the dangers of riding the “rods.” It was like being on an iron horse, snaking back and forth through canyons, through the desert, headed east, toward the sea.

  When the train built up speed, acting like a runaway colt, it was wise to stand up and brace oneself. When the boxcars slowed, it was possible to actually relax, to lie on one’s back with a pack as a pillow and gaze out of the open doors, watching the desert pass leisurely by: the brittle mesquite trees, the greasewood bushes, and the cactus that dotted the horizon.

  He wanted to stay awake, in case he was jumped by the other hobos, but the sweet syncopation of the wheels on the tracks and the train’s rocking motion eventually sent him into a deep slumber.

  “Kid! It’s time to get off.”

  The train was approaching San Antonio, Texas, the city where he had been born on August 2, 1917. Its rail yards, patrolled by ruthless bulls, were up ahead.

  “We got to get off here, buddy,” the hobo added. “If they catch you, they put you on a chain gang or make you join the army.”

  When the train slowed, Sparks jumped down. He hiked into San Antonio, where he spent the night in a flophouse. In the morning, he walked to the other side of the city and hopped another train, bound for Corpus Christi. For several days, he watched what other bums did and copied them, learning how vital it was to carry a water jug and to hop freights with covered boxcars to protect him from sun, sandstorms, and rain. He adapted fast to the ways of the “jungles”—the rail-side camps—as did a quarter million other teenage boys during the height of the Depression, thousands of whom were killed in accidents or violent encounters with bulls or predatory older men.