|
Early in March, 1945, there had reached XII Corps headquarters copies of the super-hush-hush
super-duper Plan, called "Second Draft Outline of 12th Army Group Plan for Operation 'Eclipse'." This
massive piece of lofty thinking provided "for the occupation of Germany after the German surrender or
collapse." In addition to the "basic document" there were 12 Appendices, 19 "Eclipse Memoranda" and
uncounted references to directives and manuals. The whole pile of mimeographed "poop" which was
originally dumped into this fighting headquarters was perhaps 4 inches thick and ran to a weight of 10
pounds. Now it was clear what all those people had been doing back there at 12th Army Group
Headquarters during the war. The thing looked pretty tedious and irrelevant with the main fighting still
on the west side of the Rhine, but something had to be done about it. Third Army had been told to make
up their plan to occupy initially "the Provinces of Hessen, Kurhessen, and Nassau" and to be prepared to
take over later from 6th Army Group forces, Wurtemberg and the "entire U. S. Western Military
District."
Third Army had naturally lost no time in delegating most of the work on this plan to its
component corps. Corps, in the ordinary course of such matters, would have immediately passed the
bulk of the job on down to Division. But The Thing looked like a pretty high level stuff at this stage of
the game; it was "classified" so secret as to make it an accursed nuisance to handle; and in XII Corps
there was always a slight impediment to such delegation of work to be found in the principal handed
down from the days of "Doc" Cook: "Personnel of the headquarters will never put off on lower
headquarters any job that they can do themselves." It looked as though XII Corps Headquarters were
stuck with doing some of the work on it, and in the middle of a war, too. Fortunately there had recently
arrived in headquarters an officer fresh from the Zone of Interior, who was consequently, to borrow an
idea from Sgt Mauldin, full of vitamins and enthusiasm. The Chief of Staff immediately dumped the pile
of "poop" on him, gave him some sage counsel on the necessity for care and handling "Top Secret"
documents, and directed him to see that XII Corps did not "miss the boat on 'Operation Eclipse'."
The matter turned out to be more interesting than it appeared on the surface, for it was in general
"The Shape of Things to Come" for XII Corps. "Eclipse" was to be successor and heir to "Overlord," the
underlying plan which had brought American armies across the channel on D-Day, and all the way
across France and Germany since. It was to cover "an advance by the Allied Forces, conducted at
maximum speed consistent with security, to secure important strategic areas deep inside Germany, to
gain contact with the Russian Forces, and to extend the Allied air threat." Thereafter it was to provide
for deployment to "secure additional strategic areas; to establish firm control throughout the Supreme
Commander's sphere of occupation in Germany; to carry out the disarmament and disposal of enemy
forces in Germany … and the redisposition of national forces to coincide ultimately with the National
Zone of Occupation." It informed the personnel of the headquarters for the first time that partition of
Germany into national zones had been agreed upon by the Big Three, and by means of maps and
description it defined those zones much as they stand today. Third Army, originally assigned to occupy
the Western Military District, in the event so completely out ran the forces scheduled to occupy the
Eastern District, that a "Third Draft" of the plan had to be issued exactly reversing the areas of
responsibility. By the end of the war, XII Corps had driven far beyond the easternmost limits of the
Eastern Military District. It had to be called back to occupy the sub-district ultimately assigned to it as a
part of the Third Army's forces in occupation of the "US Eastern Military District, comprising of the
state of Bavaria."
XII Corps did not "miss the boat on 'Operation Eclipse'." The corps plan, considerably less
encyclopedic than 12th Army Group's, went out to its divisions comfortably before the end of the war,
|