Historical Perspective: Occupying Austria in 1945

I found this interesting note in Ambrose's famous book, "Band of Brothers," about the 82nd Airborne's occupation of post-war AUSTRIA (hardly the equivalent of modern-day Iraq when it comes to having guerillas):

"In the first three weeks in Austria, there were seventy wrecks, more in the six weeks of June and July. Twenty men were killed, nearly 100 injured."

War is dangerous, reconstruction only slightly less so. Without an enemy constantly in one's face, people naturally drop their guard, and even the best become careless. It is interesting, though, that what is happening in Iraq is quite common for a reconstruction phase of post-combat operations.

I was looking at an auto restoring magazine reading an article about restoring different types of Jeeps. One of the Jeeps had a strange device mounted on its front. In the article it was called a "wire cutter".

Seems like the defeated Germans, in Germany, liked to string cables across roads to catch any Jeep drivers and if lucky, remove their heads. Sounds like a similar response is occuring in Iraq.

One of my uncles was the VMO for a transportation company in WW2, and while they were basically a GMC deuce-and-a-half outfit, they had their quota of jeeps. His scrapbook shows them equipped with field-expedient wire defeaters during the winter of 1944-45, when he would have been in France/Belgium/Luxembourg.

Technology aside, there is not much new under the sun.

You may be interested in 2 books written by Perry Biddiscombe. One is called "Werwolf" (German spelling) the other is called "The Last Nazis".

Here is an excerpt from a page about the Werwolf movement.

What did the Werwolf do? They sniped. They mined roads. They poured sand into the gas tanks of jeeps. (Sugar was in short supply, no doubt.) They were especially feared for the "decapitation wires" they strung across roads. They poisoned food stocks and liquor. (The Russians had the biggest problem with this.) They committed arson, though perhaps less than they are credited with: every unexplained fire or explosion associated with a military installation tended to be blamed on the Werwolf. These activities slackened off within a few months of the capitulation on May 7, though incidents were reported as late as 1947.
The problem with assessing the extent of Werwolf activity is that not only official Werwolf personnel committed partisan acts. Much of the regular German fighting forces disarticulated into isolated units that sometimes kept fighting, even after the high command surrendered.. In the east, units that had been bypassed by the Red Army tried to fight their way west, so they could surrender to the Anglo-Americans. In the west, the final "strategy" of the high command was to stop even trying to halt the Allied armored penetrations of Germany, but to hit these units from behind and cut off their supplies. Perhaps the most harrowing accounts in the book are those relating to the expulsion of the ethnic German populations from the Sudetenland and the areas annexed by Poland. The latter theater in particular seems to have been the only point in the European war in which a civilian population was keen about a "scorched earth" strategy.

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