Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French
prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against
an SS division—the 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.




The
most extraordinary things about this truly incredible tale of World War
II are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t
already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic
facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three
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, Lee’s 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 Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the
Waning Hours of World War II in Europe’ By Stephen Harding. 256 pages.
Da Capo. $25.99.












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
Itter—Augusta Bruchlen, who was the mistress of the labour leader Leon
Jouhaux, and Madame Weygand, the wife General Maxime Weygand—were there
because they chose to stand by their men. They, along with Paul
Reynaud’s mistress Christiane Mabire, were incredibly strong, capable,
and determined women made for portrayal on the silver screen.







There
are two primary heroes of this—as I must reiterate, entirely
factual—story, both of them straight out of central casting. Jack Lee
was the quintessential warrior: smart, aggressive, innovative—and, 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 Gangl’s 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
book’s 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 SS’s 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 weapon’s 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 castle’s 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 they’ve 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
Petain’s 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 Rocque’s 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 Ehrenhäflinge—honor prisoners—of the Führer.



Read the rest here. ...and why isn't this a movie already?!?!