World Battlefronts: West: Battle of Mons (Cont’d)

The first great field battle of World War I took place at Mons in Belgium, where a victorious German army, driving hard after the outgeneraled and defeated Allies, came up with Britain’s “contemptible little” professional army (80,000 men). General von Kluck threw 250,000 men against-them. But the Old Contemptibles stood their ground until their ranks were shot through & through.

TIME Correspondent Jack Belden cabled the following account of the Battle of Mons (continued from World War I), as it was fought last week with victorious Americans driving hard after an outgeneraled and defeated German Army:

The German general sat on the iron ladder inside the sugar refinery and stared at his black polished boots. From behind the stilled forms of the factory machinery a score of German officers peered questioningly at him but he gave no sign. There was no motion around him save the wisps of smoke that curled up around his bowed head as he puffed pensively on a fat Manila cigar.

Outside the refinery the dead peopled the fields in attitudes of grotesque helplessness. The wounded lay amid the still burning wreckage of smashed German motor columns; they were so many that there was no way to evacuate them. On the roads the prisoners marched eight abreast in a column a mile long and a Belgian woman danced up & down with her finger across her throat screeching “Kaput Hitler!”

The Home Stretch. It was the end of the trail for the German commander. He and other generals with remnants of five divisions had tried to dash out of Belgium into Germany to get behind the West Wall. But they had failed. Within 48 hours one U.S. armored and one U.S. infantry division had trapped and virtually destroyed them. Nearly 25,000 prisoners had been taken and two or three thousand killed.

The battle of Mons will rank as one of the most decisive actions in our campaign in Europe, for it was here that the German rear guard was smashed. Regardless of its importance, however, it will rank as one of the most curious battles of the war—curious in that neither the German nor American commands, both marching north on parallel roads, expected a battle of such magnitude.

Rain of Death. The two forces collided on the morning of Sept. 3, southwest of Mons. Fighter planes operating with the advance armor early discovered nearly 1500 enemy vehicles heading eastward toward the American lines, and immediately attacked them. Jammed on the roads in double and triple columns, the Germans still pressed eastward, for to them that was the way to safety and Germany.

By 9 a.m. two enemy columns began converging on Mons, striking the tail of our advanced armored unit in that city. The armor was soon cut off and encircled and the commander asked the infantry, which was following for mopping-up, to hurry to his aid.

This infantry had already prepared for an attack and was moving northward. Their advance soon carried them against the whole length of the German columns which, thus caught on both flanks, were squeezed between the armor and infantry and raked by a murderous cross fire. Soon every highway, road and country lane in the area was a mass of burning, wrecked vehicles. There seldom has been such a quick mass slaughter as this. The battle of the Falaise gap was several days in the developing, but the slaughter, decimation and dispersion of 20,000 to 30,000 Germans in the Maubeuge-Mons area took place within a few hours.

German tanks in the middle of truck and passenger-vehicle columns were shot and blasted, careening over cars, blocking the columns. I saw one double column over a mile long—and I did not discover the end of it—in which only a few vehicles had not been burned or smashed. Volkswagen, sedans, ack-ack trucks, ammunition carriers, 47-mm. guns and hundreds of bicycles were irretrievably snarled.

Roundup. By 10 in the morning Lieut. General Ruediger von Heyking had surrendered. When the masters of the master race capitulated, the rank & file became totally bewildered. Some fled south to escape through the fields but fell in droves before our small-arms fire. Within the perimeter organized by our armored division around Mons no front or rear existed. Headquarters troops and MPs who normally do not do any fighting captured over 600 thoroughly demoralized Germans. Confused and rioting German enlisted men often broke away from officers to surrender. Some German officers sent notes to our lines saying that they would surrender 50 men an hour.

One American company captured over 2,000 prisoners. A captain in that company took 200 himself merely by going out with a white flag to the German lines. Battalions often could not fight because they were overwhelmed by prisoners. At one time a division cage had 10,000 men in it.

Free Parking. Throughout Sept. 3, 4 and 5, German columns following behind the original columns and unaware of the trap that had been sprung continued to bump into our lines around Mons. An American MP directing traffic during the night discovered that he had just motioned a Mark V tank into the assembly area and the German tank had obediently followed his hand signal. Another civilian car loaded with German officers blithely rode into the middle of an American tank column before it was discovered by an officer in a jeep and shot up.

While our armor was pushed on toward Germany, our infantry has stayed in position acting much as a shortstop catching everything that the Germans have batted their way. It is no longer a question of individual Germans surrendering here & there. They are surrendering in groups of three, four and five hundred. There are no longer enough trucks to handle the prisoners still pouring in.