February 1996 - World War II History Round Table



May 2001

Volume 9 Number 9

Published by The WW II History Roundtable

Edited by Jim and Jon Gerber

Welcome to the May meeting of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War Two History Roundtable. Unfortunately, it is also the last meeting of the season. As we look back, this has been quite a successful year. Our attendance has continued to grow through the support of our wonderful members such as you. Thanks for making this effort a success.

Tonight’s program is about the combat engineers involved in the Battle of the Bulge. While much information is known about the Battle of the Bulge, not much is written about this particular aspect of the battle.

Lethal Gas Attack

Allied armies in the West launched Operation Plunder on the night of March 23 - 24, 1945. It was the assault crossing of the Rhine River. The majestic Rhine River had been significant in German history since Julius Caesar had crossed it by building a wooden bridge over it 2000 years before. With the support of the largest parachute and glider attack by the US 17th Airborne and the British 6th Airborne Divisions, the Allies were across the river in strength.

Upon hearing of the crossing, Hitler flew into one of his rages. He issued orders for Tabun (a revolutionary new nerve gas) to be released against the invading armies in the West and against Great Britain. Researchers of the industrial giant I. G. Farben had secretly developed the lethal gas. There was no protection for the armies or the British civilians. If Tabun was put into the V2 rocket (Germany’s forty-six foot missile), it could wipe out the entire population of London.

Otto Ambros, I. G. Farben’s chief chemist, had two years earlier supervised the top-secret construction of a factory in Breslau, Germany, for the mass production of Tabun. Ambros had used the code-name Trilon, the label of an ordinary laundry detergent, to mask the lethal nerve gas being produced. Laboratory tests on animals had proved that Tabun could kill a human being in five minutes.

In his fury over the Western Allies being across the Rhine, Hitler ordered the collections of Tabun in the Breslau factory to be loaded onto barges on the Elbe and Danube Rivers. Then a V2 attack could be launched to massacre millions of British civilians. However, at this stage of the war, with mass confusion in the Reich, progress was slow on the nerve gas operation. Many containers of Tabun were loaded onto barges at Breslau, but the V2 missiles never arrived.

A Tiny Fuse

“Adolf Hitler is kaputt !” This is the sentiment expressed by a high ranking intelligence officer in the headquarters of General Eisenhower. It was also echoed by nearly all of the other Allied generals in the early winter of 1944. All that was needed was one more big push and Nazis Germany would be brought to its knees.

Suddenly, on the morning of December 16th, the air was shattered with the sound and fury of the German artillery. 1900 pieces rained down death and destruction on the American troops and installations. When the barrage lifted, tens of thousands of German assault troops, supported by thousands of Panzers, plunged into and through the thin American positions and drove into Belgium for fifty miles. For six weeks, the American GIs and the German stubble-hoppers (infantrymen) fought in the brutal cold and deep snow. No quarter was asked and no quarter was given.

By February 1, 1945, the defeated German armies made their way back to their starting positions along the border of the Third Reich. Some eighty thousand German soldiers never returned and seventy thousand Americans died in the bloody struggle.

Hitler would never know that the American scientists had developed a tiny device known as the proximity fuse, which had been fired in combat for the first time in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. That top-secret device had contributed significantly to the outcome of this brutal battle.

The proximity fuse was a miniature radar unit shaped to replace the customary ballistic nose of artillery shells. After a shell had been fired and was on its downward trajectory, the fuse sensed the proximity to a target and detonated the shell it rode. Because of the proximity fuse, the shell burst above the German troops in the foxholes and trenches. The shrapnel was sent downward, riddling the soldiers in the impact area. Conventional shells that exploded on contact with the ground usually sprayed shrapnel upward, thereby causing no physical damage to soldiers in foxholes and trenches.

After the Battle of the Bulge, General George S. Patton, Jr., commander of the Third Army, wrote to Major General Levin Campbell, chief of ordinance in Washington, D.C.:

“The new shell with the funny fuse is devastating. One night we caught a German battalion, which was trying to get across the Sauer River, with an artillery concentration and killed by actual count 702.

I think that when all our armies get this shell we will have to devise some new method of warfare. I am glad your [scientists] thought of it first.”

At the peak of the proximity fuse development project, more than ten thousand persons had been involved, along with the services of three hundred companies and two thousand industrial plants. All of this activity was cloaked by an intense security that matched that of the atomic bomb program then in progress.

A Bad Year

Nearly 80% of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 did not survive WW II. The war was also hard on the females born in that year, as many were unable to find husbands. Many of the elderly and impoverished Russian women seen in the wake of the Cold War are these same women, born in the early 1920’s, who saw their hopes for a family killed during the battles of World War Two.

More Reading on Tonight’s Topic:

Engineering the Victory

by David Pergrin

First Across the Rhine

by David Pergrin

Devil’s Adjutant

by Michael Reynolds

The Battle of the Bulge; Then and Now

by Jean Paul Pallud

Battle of Britain Prints Int. Limited

London, England 1984

The Bitter Woods

by John D. Eisenhower

Da Capo Press

New York, New York 1969

A Time For Trumpets

by Charles B. MacDonald

William Morrow and Company, Inc.

New York, New York

The Damned Engineers

by Janice Holt Giles

Houghton Mifflin Pub.

Boston, Mass. 1970

Battle: The Story of the Bulge

by John Toland

Random House

New York, New York 1959

Crusade in Europe

by Dwight D. Eisenhower

Doubleday and Co.

New York, New York 1948

Have a safe summer; see you in the fall.

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