Coblenz rubble -- xxviii

April 7:

Everybody  is busy getting ready for the trip. Nobody, not even the colonel, knows where we are going. Orders were secret. 

1944: Between April and the end of the war, 3772 flights by 40 air attacks threw 10,000 tons of bombs at Koblenz. By 6 November the city will be 87 per cent destroyed. 15,000 of 25,000 apartments have been destroyed, 1000 dead to lament.

1984: Koblenz counts 115,000 residents in 50,000 households. The city is growing and has significantly recovered. 

April 11:

Since we were traveling under secret orders, we were unaware of our final destination. The colonel went to the military governor of Coblenz to inquire about our destination. He said according to the information he had received, our destination is Coblenz. But he said there is absolutely no room in the entire city for 500 additional soldiers--the entire city is in rubble, except for an ancient German fort outside the city. . . .It is 80% destroyed. . .It received direct hits by our block busters. . . The rooms were littered with shoes, uniforms, clothing, women's and babies' clothes.

Coblenz has been completely destroyed, the streets are full of rubble and cannot be used by vehicles. It seems like every building was hit by our guns. No electricity or water. 

When the war began, Koblenz (German spelling?) was not an Allied target--no garrisons, no major highways or rail stations. Until 1944, Koblenz seemed outside of the war grinding destruction, even though nearby cities lay in ruins. 

After D-Day, however, the city (about 90,000 inhabitants) caught far, far more than its share of Allied bombs. The Bulge made its railways more  strategic. By that time  of 1944, Allied bombers let up a bit, especially when the Allied armies fought their way into the Eifel region. The bombing raids ended in January of 1945. As Chaplain Van notes, the entire infrastructure in and around Koblenz was destroyed. On March 19, 1945, American troops captured the city.

It's impossible to imagine what kind of world Chaplain Van saw and felt around him, just two weeks or so after the fighting ceased. 

April 12

We entered Germany on  Tuesday and went through quite a few German villages. When the army approached a village, the rulers were told to surrender. If they refused, the air force came over and bombed the village. Thus many villages were destroyed. Many people fled before the bombers hit. Now they were slowly coming back with carts loaded with household goods, drawn by cows or oxen. In some towns not a soul was in sight--ghost towns.

Chaplain Van and his rebuilding units keep following the path created by the fighting front, moving in and through small towns, all of which, it seems, have suffered immensely from the superior air power of the Allies as well as the marching armies of the Allies and the Russians.

Frankfort's railroad yards must have been beyond imagination: "The rail center of Frankfort is in awful shape--rails sticking up, locomotives demolished, tranns smashed, huge piles of dirt plowed by bombs. It seemed as if our bombs turned the city upside down.

Chaplain Van is in Frankfurt when he hears significant news.

Frankfort in 1945

We received thenews yesterday that Presidnet Roosevelt had died of a stroke. He performed a magnificent job in reorganizing our industrial complex into a mighty war effort. Our armies are only 40 miles from Berlin.