All Hell Let Loose (96 page)

Kotlowitz lay motionless until nightfall, when he was evacuated by medics to become a combat-fatigue case. He never served in the line again. British Lt. Tony Finucane described a battalion ‘advance to contact’ in Holland: ‘We strung out across the flatland in what looked and felt like a casual stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Suddenly nearing the objective, and with men feeling for their shovels to get well dug in before nightfall, we saw a hundred yards ahead of us lots of men in grey advance in a similar formation. Imagine it! Two battalions head on in the open! Within moments a real infantry small arms battle – and pandemonium – started. We had no supporting fire, the enemy (usually referred to by ourselves as “the wily Hun”) opened up with what looked like a 20mm ack-ack gun. But in the event, with odds about evens we were better at it than they were. They backed off about half a mile.’

But each such small encounter, victorious or no, imposed a loss of momentum, and irreplaceable British losses. By the time Finucane found himself at Cleve in December, his platoon was reduced from thirty-five men to eleven. When his Brigadier visited the forward positions and was told of the battalion’s depleted rifle strength, he said with a sigh, ‘That’s what I keep telling the general. The casualties don’t look much considering the total number of men involved, but they are all fighting troops.’ Alan Brooke was heard to say that he wished circumstances had placed the British on the right rather than the left of Eisenhower’s line. The British CIGS believed that opportunities existed in the south which Montgomery’s army could have exploited more effectively than the Americans. In this, he was assuredly wrong. His view reflected only a manifestation of mutual Anglo–American mistrust, which became more pronounced as each nation’s generals balefully examined the other’s failures and disappointments.

Stalin, curiously enough, displayed more enthusiasm for the Western contribution to the war that winter than at any previous period, despite the Allied tensions provoked by Russian refusal to aid the embattled Poles in their ill-judged Warsaw Uprising. ‘A new feature of the struggle against Hitler’s Germany in the past year,’ he told a Moscow Party conference on 6 November, ‘is the fact that the Red Army has not been fighting the Germans alone as was previously the case. The Tehran conference was not held in vain – its resolutions on the joint offensive against Germany from the west, east and south are being implemented with real conviction. There is no doubt that without the second front in Europe, which has engaged up to seventy-five German divisions, our forces would have been unable so quickly to break German resistance and expel Germany’s armies from the Soviet Union. Equally, without the Red Army’s powerful summer offensive, which engaged up to two hundred German divisions, our allies would have been unable so rapidly to throw the Germans out of central Italy, France and Belgium. The challenge, the key to victory, is to keep Germany in the grip of the two fronts.’

By December, when snow came, Eisenhower’s armies had resigned themselves to shivering through the winter, then resuming their offensive when conditions allowed. It is hard for civilians to comprehend the miseries of an outdoor existence week after week and month after month in such conditions. ‘With our tent and clothing wet and half-frozen,’ wrote American soldier George Neill, ‘I felt numb to the point of almost not caring what happened to me.’ In his foxhole in darkness, ‘the temperature moved well below freezing. The half-frozen slush in the bottom of the hole froze solid. We just lay there in a fetal position and swore to ourselves … My buddies and I agreed it would be impossible to exaggerate how hopeless, miserable and depressed we felt.’ Such was the normal condition of millions of men on both sides of the line between October 1944 and March 1945. Trench foot became endemic, especially in formations in which morale was low and thus hygiene discipline slack. Dysentery was commonplace. The working or malfunctioning of excretory processes became an obsession for millions of men deprived of control over their bowels. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine, or were unable even to lower their trousers before defecating.

If it was miserable to fight at all, it was more so in soiled clothing. Tank crews suffered special indignities. A German driver wrote: ‘Through my vision slit I saw many hilarious sights of brave soldiers, hanging on for dear life to the turret of a moving panzer with their trousers round their ankles and screwing up their faces in a desperate attempt to do the almost impossible.’ Infantryman Guy Sajer lost control of his bowels during the retreat from the Don, and grew accustomed, like all the fellow passengers in his truck, to jolting through the snow in a mess of his own excrement. Pfc Donald Schoo suffered the same miseries during the Bulge battle. After defecating on a wooden ammunition box, ‘your butt hurt too much to wipe so you just pulled up your pants and went back to your hole. No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.’

Robert Kotlowitz was crouched in a foxhole in Alsace when his bowels suddenly exploded. He leapt forth, tore down his trousers and squatted. His buddy shouted, ‘Jesus Christ! Get back where you belong!’ Kotlowitz, preoccupied with the demands of his body, looked on him pityingly.

Vastly worse indignities were visited on those who suffered intestinal wounds. US Army nurse Dorothy Beavers noted that some patients in her field hospital bore the loss of limbs with outward stoicism, while those who had undergone colostomies often ‘burst into tears at the sight of their own faeces in a bag’. There were no limits to the miseries imposed by bullets, high explosives, sickness and vulnerability to the elements.

In the winter of 1944, Hitler knew he faced another looming Soviet offensive. Dismissing the constraints imposed by the weather and his shrunken resources, he determined to make a crippling thrust at Eisenhower’s armies before turning to meet this. Against the impassioned opposition of his generals, he launched a western offensive in the worst season of the year, at the place the Allies least expected it – the Ardennes forest, on the frontiers of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. The objective was to reach Antwerp, splitting the Allied front. To execute it, two new panzer armies were created, thirty divisions assembled, reserves of precious fuel stockpiled. ‘If you are brave, diligent and resourceful,’ an order of the day told shivering Volksgrenadiers on 16 December, ‘you will ride in American vehicles and eat good American food. If, however, you are stupid, cowardly and supine, you will walk cold and hungry all the way to the Channel.’

Two days later, on the 18th, Operation
Autumn Mist
was launched against the weakest sector of Hodges’ First US Army. It achieved absolute tactical and strategic surprise, a breakthrough on a forty-mile-wide front as panic-stricken American troops broke and fled in disarray in the path of the SS panzers; because of thick fog, the Allied air forces were impotent to intervene. Within two days, German troops were pouring through a gaping hole – ‘the bulge’ – in the American line. Eisenhower’s British chief of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, bore a substantial share of responsibility for failing to recognise the significance of the German build-up in the Ardennes, flagged by Ultra. Strong told the Supreme Commander that German formations identified in the area were merely resting and refitting. The fundamental failure, in which many senior American and British officers were complicit, was that they were convinced of their own mastery of the campaign, and thus discounted the possibility of a major German thrust.

Lt. Tony Moody was one of a host of young Americans who found themselves overwhelmed by the experience of retreat. ‘I wasn’t scared at the beginning – I got more scared: it was the uncertainty; we had no mission, we didn’t know where the Germans were. We were so tired, out of rations, low on ammo. There was panic, there was chaos. If you feel you’re surrounded by overwhelming forces, you get the hell out of it. I was demoralized, sick as a dog. I had frostbite. I felt pretty bad about it. I kept thinking “oh my God, what I have got into? How much of this can I take?” I suddenly found myself quite alone, and wandered off. I stumbled into a battalion aid station and I just collapsed … slept twenty-four hours. The mind washes out a lot of images, but you remember the feeling of hopelessness, despair. You just want to die. We felt the Germans were much better trained, better equipped, a better fighting machine than us.’

‘Fear reigned,’ wrote Donald Burgett. His formation, the 101st Airborne, played a critical part in stabilising the front, while watching soldiers of some other units flee for their lives. ‘Once fear strikes, it spreads like an epidemic, faster than wildfire. Once the first man runs, others soon follow. Then, it’s all over; soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild-eyed and driven by fear.’ Pfc Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, became so desperate in his misery that he found himself gazing with envy at German corpses. ‘They looked peaceful. The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.’ He even felt pangs of envy towards comrades desperate enough to maim themselves: ‘No one would ever know how many accidents were genuine and how many self-made.’ An infantry company commander wrote of an action at Stoumont on the 21st: ‘It was so foggy that one of our men found himself ten yards from a German machine-gun before he knew it … Everyone had been pushed about as far as he could be. Nerves were being broken on men whom one would have thought would never weaken.’

A young infantryman described his predicament one late December day when his foxhole buddy was hit: ‘Gordon got ripped by a machine-gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He … told me he was hit through the stomach as well … We were cut off … We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain] so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it as hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death, he bled to death.’

Belgian civilians suffered terribly at the hands of both sides. The Germans, during their brief reoccupation of liberated towns and villages, found time to execute scores of civilians either deemed guilty of resistance activity, or more often murdered merely as examples to others. The savagery of some of Model’s men reflected a venom characteristic of 1944–45: if they themselves were doomed to lose the war and probably to die, they were bent upon depriving as many enemies as possible of the joys of survival and liberation. Allied bombing and shelling compounded civilians’ plight: in the small town of Houffalize, for instance, 192 people died, all but eight of them from Allied bombing. Twenty-seven of the victims were younger than fifteen, and the survivors were left with ruins and destitution. Twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angèle, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renée, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette, nine; Lucien, eight; and Noël, six. Throughout the battle areas of Belgium and Luxembourg there was wholesale looting by Allied as well as German troops.

Model’s panzers were exultant in the wake of their early successes, while Allied commanders were stunned and appalled. German deployment of small numbers of English-speaking commandos in American uniforms, led by Otto Skorzeny, inspired an epidemic of ‘fifth-column fever’ that prompted the Americans to execute every such disguised enemy soldier they captured. A New Year’s Day air assault on Allied airfields cost the Luftwaffe three hundred aircraft, to achieve the destruction of 156 American and British planes which were easily replaced. The raids further rattled Eisenhower’s commanders, but in truth the strategic predicament of the Anglo-American armies was never as bad as those in the eye of the storm at first convinced themselves. They had mass, while the Germans were desperately short of tanks, aircraft, fuel and quality manpower. Behind the formidable SS panzer divisions were infantry quite incapable of matching the driving aggression that had yielded so many Wehrmacht victories in 1940–41. The logistical difficulties of supplying the German spearheads through the defiles of the Ardennes were immense; within days, Model’s tanks were crippled by fuel shortages.

Sufficient American units offered stubborn resistance, especially at the vital shoulders of ‘the bulge’, to prevent the breakthrough from becoming a rout. American reserves, notably two airborne divisions, were rushed forward. One of Bradley’s soldiers watched survivors of the bitter fighting at Cheneux on 20–21 December pull back from the line. ‘The shattered remnants of the 1st Bn came straggling listlessly down the road, a terrible contrast to the happy battalion which had only two days before gone up the same road wisecracking and full of fight. They were bearded, red-eyed, covered with mud from head to foot, and staring blank-facedly straight to the front. No one spoke … They had written a page in history which few would ever know about … such was the confusion of places, units and deeds being churned around in the witch’s brew which was the present battle.’