Armageddon (19 page)
“The Americans seemed to us very green,” said Captain Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, a veteran gunner officer with 9th Panzer Division.
They operated by the book. If you responded by doing something not in the book, they panicked. It usually took them three days after an attack to prepare for the next one. We became accustomed to leave only an outpost screen in front for them to bombard, with the main defences positioned further back, so that their initial attack hit thin air. It took the Allies a ridiculously long time to get into Germany. If they had used our blitzkrieg tactics, they could have been in Berlin in weeks.
“With the Allies it was always the same,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a twenty-four-year-old regular officer who was adjutant of the 18th Volksgrenadiers.
They attacked in daylight, starting with artillery, then the tanks. If we had just one or two machine-guns still operational, we could make them stop and wait until next day. There was a basic difference between the Allied approach and our own. The Allies would never move without reconnaissance and preparation. We often expected to have to do it on the run, off the cuff. The last time we attacked in Russia, we formed up on the start line straight off the train.
Yet Sergeant Helmut Günther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers observed sensibly: “It wasn’t that the Allies were cowardly—they just didn’t need to take chances. Slow? They were careful.”
The most vital and difficult tactical relationship was that between tanks and infantry. Advancing armour had to be protected by accompanying footsoldiers. It was the job of a tank to use its gun to deal with its enemy counterparts, preferably at a range of several hundred yards. But when, as constantly happened, armoured vehicles found themselves facing enemy infantry equipped with the deadly Panzerfaust, or meeting well-concealed anti-tank guns, then a tank crew could see little through the narrow vision slits of their steel box. They could not readily use their guns upon short-range targets. Yet “tank terror” was a phenomenon familiar to the Allied infantryman, who also convinced himself, usually fallaciously, that every enemy armoured vehicle was a giant Tiger. “The tank’s inherent weaknesses scarcely featured in [the infantryman’s] thinking,” in the words of a British analyst of the problem. Unskilled footsoldiers failed to perceive that the monsters became chronically vulnerable at close quarters, if defenders kept their nerve. When Allied tanks encountered a German blocking position, they were obliged to stop or even pull back a few hundred yards, until supporting infantry could work their way forward and eliminate the enemy with small arms and grenades.
It was standard German practice to create blocking positions with a mix of one or two well-concealed tanks or assault guns—turretless tanks which profited from their low silhouette—protected by a ring of infantry with Panzerfausts. Which attackers should approach first—footsoldiers or armour? Throughout the north-west Europe campaign, again and again advancing Allied forces played out a black comic music-hall sketch: “After you, Claude—no, after
you,
Cecil.” Soldiers argued under fire about who should do the business. “Teach the men to work with tanks and not be afraid of them,” urged Lieutenant Jack M. Brown of the U.S. Army. Attacking infantry often huddled behind their own tanks for protection from small-arms fire, which was fair enough. But then, if a Sherman suddenly lurched backwards down the road after spotting Panzerfausts—or, more likely, after two or three of its consorts had been knocked out—the accompanying infantry were prone to scamper backwards too. It was physically difficult for infantry leaders to communicate with armoured crews, shut down in their steel boxes under fire, even when telephones were installed at the rear of tank hulls. In both American and British armies, there was constant reciprocal backbiting. Tank crews complained that their supporting infantry lagged behind, often wilfully. Corporal Patrick Hennessy’s squadron commander said bluntly to his accompanying infantry officer: “If you won’t get in front and clear the fausts, we’re not going on.” Hennessy said: “The infantry were always trying to crowd against the tank for protection, and we kept telling them to keep away. If we hit a mine, the tank would only throw a track, but they would all be blown to bits.”
Infantrymen, in their turn, protested that their supporting tanks were too cautious. “During the advance to Metz the tanks . . . worked wonderfully with doughboys, [but after Metz] I began to notice the change,” wrote Major William Sheehan, a staff officer of the 377th Infantry. “As we went on further the tanks became more and more cautious, and the doughs were asked to do more and more. Of course the tanks are going to suffer losses. Who doesn’t? But the faith first established in the tanks is now lacking.” There was an ugly incident during 30th Division’s actions on the Siegfried Line in September, when Shermans of 2nd Armored Division supporting the infantry against a German counter-attack suddenly discovered that they were all in need of “urgent maintenance.” Lieutenant Roy Dixon, a Sherman troop commander, said: “The infantry always thought: ‘As soon as anything nasty happens, the tanks push off.’ ” Captain “Dim” Robbins, an infantryman, said: “One always felt that the tanks were having a rather cushy time. Co-operation between infantry and armour was pretty poor.”
It should be remarked, however, that the Germans were not immune to the same problem. “The infantry commander sees in the tank a cure for all difficult battle situations,” lamented a combat report of 1/24th Panzer Regiment on the Eastern Front in February 1945.
The infantry commander sees in the tank a powerful armoured monster with a huge gun, without recognising its limitations such as weak side armour, limited vision and manoeuvrability . . . Some infantrymen expect tanks only to move in one direction—forwards. Every necessary halt and pause for observation required by armoured tactics makes them impatient . . . On 14 February tanks were engaged in street fighting in the village of Croesz. Our own infantry didn’t close up with them, even though our gunfire had pinned down the Russian positions. The tanks were obliged to pull back to the infantry positions. In addition, two tanks became total write-offs after hitting mines. Many absurdly extravagant proposals made by infantrymen are simply ignored by tank officers, otherwise the losses would be higher.
When an Allied advance was going well, a tank troop or company led the way until it met resistance or—most frequently—until its leading vehicles were knocked out. Many units rotated the dubious honour of heading a column, because in the course of a given day whoever fulfilled this role could expect to lose his tank if he was lucky, and his life if he was not. It was impossible to avoid heavy tank losses in an advance, whichever army was doing the attacking. But it was a source of constant dismay and frustration to Allied commanders that, after a couple of Shermans had been brewed up by a small German force on the edge of a wood or at the entrance to a village, it frequently required hours to organize and carry out the necessary infantry attack to clear the way for tanks to renew the advance. Armour–infantry co-operation worked best when footsoldiers worked with the same tank battalion for weeks at a stretch, officers getting to know each other. But this was often impossible. Every armoured commander complained that he lacked sufficient infantry support, a reflection of the chronic Allied shortage of riflemen. The British 21st Army Group was armour-heavy, because armoured formations required less manpower. Montgomery’s forces suffered from their imbalance of infantry and tanks throughout the campaign.
The faust, vastly superior German counterpart of the American bazooka anti-tank rocket and British spring-loaded bomb-throwing PIAT, was the decisive weapon in enabling Hitler’s armies to continue the war until May 1945, given the weakness of their artillery and almost complete absence of air support. German units were prodigally supplied with fausts. Even a poorly trained teenager with the courage to ambush a tank at a range of thirty to sixty yards could expect to cripple it with a faust in his hands, and many did so. The Germans also exploited the use of mortars, “poor man’s artillery.” Experienced German units equipped themselves with machine-guns—the excellent MG42, with an alarmingly higher rate of fire than its allied counterparts—on a scale far in excess of their paper entitlement. They knew that on the battlefield few men fired their rifles, and even fewer hit anything when they did so. MG42s gave a small number of troops the ability to generate formidably heavy fire, and enabled German units to “punch above their weight” to the end. Their ingenuity was remarkable. It was not uncommon for a German machine-gunner covering an important line—a road or rail track—at night deliberately to fire tracer well above head-height. This encouraged Allied soldiers who saw the streaks above them to suppose that it was safe to walk upright. Meanwhile, a second gunner without tracer would fire much closer to the ground, his bursts invisible until they caused men to fall.
As S-3 of the 357th Infantry, Captain William DuPuy analysed German tactical skills:
In defence, they took pieces of terrain and knitted them together into positions from which they were able to fire in all directions . . . they used cover and concealment, and they used imagination . . . A handful of Germans could hold up a regiment by siting their weapons properly. If they had two assault guns and 25 men, they put one assault gun up one side of the road, perhaps on a reverse slope firing through a saddle, and another one behind a stone house, firing across the road. They protected these with some infantry and had a couple of guys with Panzerfausts up on the road itself, or just off the road in pits or behind a house. An imaginative Allied commander could send a company round them in a wide encircling movement. But sometimes a unit would stay there and fight all day against 25 men and two assault guns. That happened all too often.
In attack, they were masters of suppression using machine-pistols. They’d spray our front, drive our soldiers to the ground, and then they’d come in on us. The more they shot, the less our people shot, and the more dangerous it got, until finally, when our people had stopped shooting, we knew the Germans were either going to overrun us, or capture some of our people, or kill our people by getting right on top of us.
DuPuy described his horror on finding that a company commander in his unit had positioned his men on a forward slope in full view of the enemy: “It was murder. Finally, after they killed and wounded maybe 20 men . . . the rest just got up and bolted out of there and went over the reverse slope, which is where they should have been in the first place.”
Every German soldier was taught the doctrine of so-called “active defence.” This required a focus not upon holding forward positions to the last man, but rather upon launching fierce counter-attacks while attackers were still milling in disarray upon captured positions. Especially towards the end of the war, on both Eastern and Western Fronts the Germans would man their forward positions thinly, deploying their main forces further back, hopefully beyond the reach of artillery bombardment. When Allied attackers had made their initial advance, occupied German forward positions and given way to physical and mental weariness after a great surge of effort, the Germans counter-attacked, repeatedly evicting Allied troops from positions they had just won. Allied commanders sought to drum into every unit the importance of digging in quickly on an objective. But this was easier said than done. German will and energy for such aggressive tactics remained astonishing to the end, even if there was a decline in the skill of the soldiers available to carry them out. It was a precept of the entire war, that the German Army always detected and punished an enemy’s mistakes.
The qualitative superiority of German tanks to American and British ones was another critical factor in the Wehrmacht’s performance against the Allies. Allied planners, and especially the U.S. War Department, made a fundamental error in 1943. They recognized the weakness of American tank guns and protective armour against those of the enemy. But they concluded that the Allies’ quantitative advantage was so great that the qualitative issue did not matter. “Before we went into Normandy,” wrote an American armoured officer, “we had been led to believe that the M4 Sherman was . . . thoroughly capable of dealing with German armor on an equal basis. We soon learned that the opposite was true.” His own 3rd Armored Division took 232 Shermans into France, and lost 648 completely destroyed, together with another 700 crippled but repairable—a total loss of 580 per cent of strength. The fact that such losses were readily replaceable reflected the Allies’ huge resources. But, for men obliged to contest the battlefield against panzers, awareness of the inadequacy of their own tanks against those of the enemy profoundly influenced their combat behaviour. After painful early experience, most U.S. armoured units gave orders for platoon commanders to ride third in a column, not first.
For a tank crew, it was irrelevant to know that their own army possessed an overall superiority of anything up to ten to one. They were confronted only with the immediate reality that if they fired at a German Tiger or even Panther, their shell was likely to bounce off, unless it struck a weak point below the gun mantle or on the flank. Meanwhile, if an enemy’s shell hit a Sherman, the notorious “Ronson” or “Tommy cooker,” it was likely not merely to stop, but to burn. “The Sherman was a very efficient workhorse, but as a fighting tank it was a disaster,” said Captain David Fraser. The first time Corporal Patrick Hennessy fired his Sherman’s gun at a Tiger tank, he watched the shell hit its hull, then ricochet straight up into the air. “I thought: ‘To hell with this!,’ and pulled back.” Who could blame Allied armoured units for displaying caution amid such realities?
The Germans envied the quantity of U.S. weapons and equipment. But American soldiers complained about the poor quality of much of their own fighting matériel against that of the enemy. A deluge of field reports descended on the U.S. War Department almost to the end of the war demanding more infantry for armoured units, a better tank gun, fewer dud shells, a better-armoured tank destroyer, tent poles which did not snap, combat jackets without a sheen that glittered dangerously in sunshine, a less clumsy sub-machine gun than the Thompson, genuinely smokeless ammunition, an anti-tank gun more impressive than the feeble 57mm, better field glasses, stronger divisional artillery with a less extravagant allocation of transport. Commanders wanted an infantry anti-tank weapon of the quality of the faust: “Numerous cases have been reported where bazooka teams have succeeded in immobilizing tanks, but since they are unable to destroy them, they themselves have been killed by retaliating fire from the tank, and the tank retrieved by the enemy.”