Armageddon (20 page)

By contrast, every German was dismayed by the ubiquity and impact of Allied air power. Any German vehicle movement in daylight was likely to be rewarded by fighter-bomber attack, of an effectiveness unknown on the Eastern Front. The Russians never matched the sophistication of Allied wireless ground control. The Allies profited hugely, of course, from the fact that their own vehicles could move freely behind the front by day or night, with the Luftwaffe driven from the skies. Yet almost all Germany’s soldiers found it less painful to fight in the west than the east, because the Americans seldom troubled them during the hours of darkness. When Corporal Henry Metelmann was transferred to the west after three years on the Eastern Front, he was amazed to discover that the enemy seemed to undertake no patrolling: “Had they been Russians, they would have given us no rest. Psychologically, I found the drastic change from Russia very confusing.” Especially during the winter months, with only some eight hours of daylight, night respites were priceless to the Germans. They enabled units to rearm, resupply and redeploy without interference save from random artillery harassing fire. It is also important to remember that there were many, many days in the winter of 1944 when characteristic European overcast prevented the Allies from using their air power even in daylight.

O
N THE
W
ESTERN
F
RONT
, the war was conducted with much greater humanity than in the east. A man had a better chance of being taken prisoner alive and treated decently. Attitudes in the rival armies varied widely, however, according to the circumstances of the moment. An angry German officer emptied a Luger at “Dim” Robbins after the British captured his positions. Fortunately, Robbins was wearing a heavy tweed coat, which absorbed most of the bullets. Only one hit flesh, removing the end of a finger holding a Sten gun. Soon afterwards, the German was brought in, covered in blood. Robbins’s sergeant-major said comfortingly: “I’ll take him behind that hedge, sir, and finish him off.” Robbins had to dissuade the NCO from doing so. Wehrmacht Sergeant Otto Cranz’s father, who had been a PoW of the Russians in the First World War, always advised his son that if he was captured he should do his utmost to reach the enemy’s rear areas as quickly as possible. Front-line troops were most likely to shoot a prisoner, not least out of envy that a man destined for a camp was being granted a ticket to survive the war, denied to those left behind to continue the struggle.

Captain John Regan of the 357th Infantry “considered it bad psychology to treat prisoners well when first captured . . . [It] would be like congratulating a loser of a football game. We are here to kill Germans, not to baby them.” Lieutenant Tisch of the German 5th Infantry offered a mirror image of Regan’s view: “Front line troops deplore the attitude towards prisoners displayed by the rear echelons, such as giving them cigarettes, candy bars and other familiarities. Our soldiers must be endowed with a hatred and distrust of the enemy in order to pursue the war successfully.” During one of the bloody Moselle crossings Captain Jack Gerrie, a company commander in the 11th Infantry, was enraged to see the Germans shooting down American medics trying to retrieve wounded men after the action. Instead, his men forced German prisoners to go out and retrieve the casualties. When the enemy shot them too, “finally we said ‘to hell with it’
and shot the whole damn bunch
[of prisoners].” The highlighted phrase has been deleted in pencil from the U.S. National Archive’s copy of the divisional after-action report. Some sixty German PoWs were killed by the U.S. 11th Armored Division, new to combat, whose men believed for some hours that they were not supposed to take prisoners. Patton wrote in his diary of “some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. (I hope we can conceal this).”

Almost every soldier on both sides shared a hatred of snipers, which frequently caused them to be shot out of hand if captured. There was no logic or provision in the Geneva Convention to justify such action. Sniping merely represented the highest refinement of the infantry soldier’s art. Its exercise required courage and skill. Yet sniping made the random business of killing, in which they were all engaged, become somehow personal and thus unacceptable to ordinary footsoldiers. Snipers were readily identified by the bruise and sometimes cuts inflicted by the recoil of a rifle with a telescopic sight tightly affixed to a man’s right eye. The CO of the U.S. 143rd Infantry reported that his men were most reluctant to use sniper rifles themselves, “because they think they will be shot if captured.” This was not a delusion.

Local truces not infrequently took place between Germans and British or American troops, to allow wounded men to be removed from the battlefield. There was a notable incident in the Belgian village of Bure on 3 January 1945. During three days of bitter fighting between the British 13 Para and German panzergrenadiers supported by a tank, the battalion doctor David Tibbs was treating wounded men when his sergeant, Scott, reported that there were some badly wounded men in a house on the front line, and he was going to get them out. Tibbs, preoccupied with his work, acquiesced: “the Germans had a pretty good record of respecting the red cross in our sector.” Accompanied by the battalion padre, Sergeant Scott slowly drove an ambulance with a large red-cross flag up the main street. Firing on both sides stopped. Stretcher-bearers had begun to bring out the wounded when they heard the roar of a tank engine. A Panther clattered up the street towards them. It stopped by the ambulance, and the hatch opened. A German appeared, and admonished them in perfect English: “This time I let you do it—next time, I shoot!” He closed the hatch. The tank lurched back to the German line. The ambulance finished its work and drove to the rear. The battle resumed. Even on the British front, this episode provoked lasting astonishment. “Why were the Germans so accommodating?” mused Dr. Tibbs. “They must have hoped that we would behave in the same way in similar circumstances, and by and large, we did.” It was unthinkable that anything of the kind could have happened in the east.

Most men were less fearful of death than of being maimed. As Private Tony Carullo of the 2nd Infantry walked up a road, he heard a shell and leaped aside into a ditch. When he climbed out again, he found that four men carrying a casualty in a shelter half (or groundsheet) had been obliterated: “There were body parts all over the road, one guy’s nerves were still reacting, everything was mangled. You weren’t scared you were going to die—you were scared of getting mangled up like those guys.” This fear was echoed on the other side of the hill: “You were not afraid of being killed—you feared being horribly wounded, or taken prisoner by the Soviets,” observed Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt of the Luftwaffe flak.

Because battles are fought by men who wear uniforms and carry weapons, it is easy to forget that, in the Second World War, the vast majority of those who served in every army did not think of themselves as soldiers. They were civilians, who strove even upon the battlefield to secrete a part of themselves from their military superiors and soldierly functions, from all the horrors around them. Even as they saluted, fired weapons or sheltered from bombardment, in their innermost selves most cherished the conviction that these horrors did not represent reality, that real life remained the small town or great city from which they had come; their loved ones; the civilian jobs they prayed desperately to survive to return to. Corporal Iolo Lewis said: “The whole experience didn’t seem real to me. It was something big going on, that I was just a tiny part of. We knew so little about what was happening—our field of vision was so small.” Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger of the U.S. 84th Division observed drily: “I cannot say that digging foxholes or carrying a heavy pack was my idea of fun. It’s not what you’re brought up to do, as a nice middle-class Jewish boy. But, for me, it was the way I got to know America.”

Some American soldiers enjoyed the chance granted to them by the war to see the world, especially if they were not required to earn their passage by service with infantry or armour. “For my generation,” wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who served in France with America’s intelligence service the OSS, “the Second World War was the supreme experience. And for many not killed or maimed, it was a liberating experience, annulling routine expectations, providing new contexts and challenges, testing abilities, widening horizons and opportunities, nourishing honesty, individuality, complexity, irony, stoicism. Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.” Private Rueben Cohen came from the lower east side of New York. He enjoyed a much harsher and less glamorous war than Schlesinger, yet as he travelled from North Africa through Sicily into France as a field artilleryman with the 1st Division, his thoughts often veered along the same path as those of the historian, albeit expressed in less elegant language: “Gee, I’ll have something to talk about if I get through the war.” But Cohen was a mature man of thirty-one, whom the boys of his battery called “Pop.” Most soldiers were at least a decade younger, naive and innocent.

Like millions of young Americans, twenty-year-old Corporal Roy Ferlazzo from Jersey City found Europe a bewildering place. He was disgusted by primitive French notions of hygiene, and by his first sight of a bidet. A teetotaller, he felt no urge to join off-duty drinking orgies, nor for that matter to chase girls: “Very few of us were sexually active.” Where some men became ambitious looters of cameras, pistols, binoculars, Ferlazzo’s simple tastes confined him to pipes—the smoking kind—of which he amassed an impressive collection by the end of the campaign. From being a confused, frightened, very homesick young soldier at the outset, he learned to accept the army, and the war, without deep commitment, but also without much complaint. He simply lived each day as it came, and did the job he was asked to do, in the manner of millions of other young Americans shipped to Europe. Even the ubiquitous destruction of villages and cities made little impact on him: “I guess it was the same in the Crusades with swords and shields.” His unit was lucky. It suffered a few casualties from shrapnel, but lost not a single man killed. Like most soldiers in the Western allied armies who were spared the whitest heat of combat, he traversed Europe amid the grimmest events of the twentieth century without being significantly touched by them.

An American officer combing abandoned Belgian houses for furniture for the mess was embarrassed to come upon a girl of seven, living with her three-year-old sister and eighty-year-old grandmother “in indescribably cold and dirty conditions.” He sought consoling words for them only to be cut short by a Belgian. “They are collaborationists,” he said dismissively. Few soldiers engaged in any meaningful fashion with the local civilians who clung to their ruins in the middle of the battlefield. The passing warriors merely drove or fought their way past them, throwing occasional gum or candy. Most men regarded local people with little more interest than exhibits glimpsed through the bars of a foreign zoo, unless they were young, female and pretty.

The American and British armies contained a few eager warriors, from Patton downwards, who embraced the experience of combat. “I remember wondering what life after the war would be like,” wrote Brigadier Michael Carver, a professional soldier commanding a British armoured brigade. “Would I miss the intensity of an active life, lived to the full close to nature, as life on the battlefield, for all its fears and frightfulness at times, undoubtedly was? I was afraid I might.” By contrast, the vast majority of those who fought in infantry or tanks simply yearned desperately for the war, and their own exposure to risk, to be over. Most men who thought at all—and many did not—felt quietly conscious of the justice of the Allied cause. “We were absolutely certain we were right,” said Captain Lord Carrington, a future British foreign secretary. “It made a lot of difference.”

Yet a critical divide persisted between the Eastern and Western Fronts in the Second World War: most American and British soldiers did not share the bitter hatred for their enemy which prevailed among the Russians. GIs or Tommies were subject to flashes of passion and rage when they were frightened, or when their unit was suffering heavy losses. But, once the adrenaline rush of battle slowed even a little, it was striking how little ill-will Allied soldiers, and especially Americans, sustained towards the Germans. “Hate them?” said nineteen-year-old Private Tony Carullo. “No, no, we respected them. Even if you captured them, they’d look you in the face and ask: ‘What are you people doing here?’ It was the French we didn’t care for.” RAF Squadron Leader Tony Mann said: “I never hated the Germans as I hated the Japanese.” Mann had flown Hurricanes in Burma before being transferred to north-west Europe.

This was a view shared by Corporal Roy Ferlazzo. “The Germans were just soldiers like us.” He found it impossible to regard them with the same hostility as the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. “I never hated the Germans—I just wanted to beat them,” said “Dim” Robbins. “Once we’d won a battle, I never liked shooting Germans just for the hell of it.” Over the sights of his Bren gun, Sergeant Reg Romain of the 5th Wiltshires watched a badly wounded German crawling away from the wreckage of a half-track near Westerbreek: “I let him go, because it was plain his fighting days were over.” “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,” sang the great English actor and writer Noël Coward, master of the drawing-room comedy. With hindsight, it is interesting that Coward’s words found favour even as satire, in the midst of a bloody contest of arms. Yet, until the revelation of the concentration camps, many Allied soldiers fought their battles with remarkably little passion, save the desire to survive.

American and British historians have expended immense energy in recent years arguing the issue of whether the German soldier was superior to his Allied counterpart. To all save the most dogged nationalists, it must be plain that Hitler’s armies performed far more professionally and fought with much greater determination than Eisenhower’s men. Allied generals were constantly hampered by the fact that, even when they advanced bold and imaginative plans, these were often incapable of execution by conscientious but never fanatical civilian soldiers, opposed by the most professionally skilful army of modern times. Yet it seems wrong to leave the matter there. There is a vital corollary. If American and British soldiers had been imbued with the ethos which enabled Hitler’s soldiers to do what they did, the purpose for which the war was being fought would have been set at naught. All soldiers are in some measure brutalized by the experience of conflict. Some lapses and breaches of humanity on the part of Allied soldiers are recorded in these pages. To an impressive degree, however, the American and British armies preserved in battle the values and decencies, the civilized inhibitions of their societies. It seems appropriate for an historian to offer military judgements upon the failures and shortcomings of the Allies in 1944–45, which were many and various. But there is every reason to cherish and to respect the values that pervaded Eisenhower’s armies.