ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 18
On the morning of Sunday May 6, 1945, five days after the announcement
of Hitler's death in Berlin, troops of the U.S. 16th Armored
Division pushed cautiously through an eerie, soulless landscape that its
soldiers described as "neither German nor Czech." The local people—
German-speaking, terrified by their Slav neighbors to the east and
undecided whether to remain in their homelands or flee westward—were
powerless to resist the U.S. troops.
The war was all but over and everyone knew it; everyone except a hard
core of Waffen-SS in and around Prague, southern Czechoslovakia and
Austria that had signaled their intention to defend this, one of the final
remaining pockets of the Reich, to the very last.
As the half-tracks rolled deeper into Czech territory, the U.S. soldiers
passed ragged columns of Wehrmacht troops rolling westward to the
comparative safety of the U.S. zone of occupation. The U.S. objective
was Pilsen, a place known to the soldiers of the 16th Armored for its beer,
not the giant armaments factory where Skoda had cranked out guns and
munitions for the Nazis for the best part of seven years.
Inside the U.S. half-tracks, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.
No one wanted to end up a statistic in the last few days of the war. But
still, the pace was relentless. Rumor had it that Patton wanted to reach
Prague ahead of the Russians. And that meant a confrontation with
the SS.
Approaching Pilsen, the atmosphere changed. The U.S. troops
noticed a scattering of red, blue and white Czech flags in place of white
flags of surrender. As the half-tracks left the Sudetenland behind and
pushed on into the heartland of Czechoslovakia proper, the people came
out into the streets, waving and cheering as the 16th Armored swept past.
"It was Paris all over again, with the same jubilant faces, the same
delirium of liberation," one soldier recalled in the 16th Armored
Division's official account of the liberation of Pilsen.
By 0800 hours, the U.S. troops were in the center of Pilsen, their
advance all but halted by the crowds that had spilled off the pavements
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