Armageddon (30 page)

Third Canadian Division finally completed the capture of the Breskens Pocket on 4 November, having lost 314 killed, 231 missing and 2,077 wounded. They took more than 12,000 German prisoners. On 1 November, British and Canadian troops staged three amphibious landings on Walcheren. They fought their way through the streets of Flushing to secure the town. On 3 November, after several Canadian attempts had been bloodily repulsed, 52nd (Lowland) Division finally forced the causeway to west Walcheren. On 5 November, Allied troops entered the town of Middelburg. In all, it took eight days of fighting and cost some 7,700 casualties to secure the island. Bitterness persisted within both Canadian and British units over the manner in which they had been driven again and again to assault the Walcheren causeway, at heavy cost, even as the island was being taken from the other side by amphibious assault. The Scheldt actions have been given scant attention by students of the north-west Europe campaign because they seemed inglorious and lay far from the direct path to Germany. Yet for all those who took part, including the Dutch people struggling to survive in the midst of a battlefield, they provided a dreadful experience. Wilhelmina Helder, a twenty-year-old girl in Middelburg, spent two weeks among a hundred people in a cellar while bombs and shells thundered down above them. On 6 November, the trapdoor opened to reveal a very dirty Canadian soldier peering down at them. Her eighty-six-year-old grandmother said thankfully, almost euphorically: “I can go home.” Yet she emerged to find her house submerged beneath the floodwaters which now covered huge areas of the Dutch battlefield. The old woman died that night.

The guns did not finally fall silent on Walcheren until 8 November. The opening of the Scheldt had cost 18,000 casualties. The Royal Navy was obliged to clear 267 sea-mines before the estuary was navigable. The first Allied ship unloaded at Antwerp only on 28 November, eighty-five days after “Pip” Roberts’s 11th Armoured Division first seized the docks. Until that date, almost every ton of Allied supplies had to be trucked or carried across the devastated French rail net from the Normandy beaches or the Channel ports, most of which had now been cleared of their German garrisons. It is scarcely surprising that the Americans showed little patience with Montgomery’s professions of eagerness for a rapid dash into Germany when he and his forces made such heavy weather of performing one of the most vital strategic tasks of the campaign. The operations to open Antwerp were the overwhelming preoccupation of 21st Army Group between the failure of Market Garden and November 1944. By the time the job was done, it was plain that the British would make no important progress towards Germany until the wet, dismal winter was past its worst.

First Canadian Army was left to hold a long line east–west along the estuary of the Maas and up the Waal, then turning south down the Arnhem–Nijmegen salient. Northern Holland remained in German hands. The difficulties had now become apparent of attacking across the Dutch flatlands. The British focused their main forces upon the eastern axis towards Germany, and maintained only a holding front against the German forces occupying northern Holland.

Dempsey’s Second Army began a long series of operations to make ground into Germany. The Siegfried Line ended some miles north of Aachen, so the British faced no major German fortifications. They were now fighting eighty miles from the heart of the Ruhr. But through October and November, in awful weather and on difficult terrain, they encountered disappointment after disappointment as they struggled to find a way through. An attack by VIII Corps into the Peel Marshes took five days to cover three miles, where the few roads were heavily mined and fiercely defended by Student’s paratroopers.

That operation was broken off on 15 October. The Germans launched an impressive counter-attack of their own twelve days later, against the American 7th Armored Division on the British right. The Germans regained some ground, caused considerable mayhem and prompted Bradley to relieve the commander of 7th Armored. The British VIII and XII Corps spent the entire month of November clearing the Peel Marshes, closing up to the River Maas early in December. The neighbouring XXX Corps pushed painfully through Geilenkirchen, twelve miles north of Aachen, to touch the Roer in mid-December. The officer commanding 5th Royal Tanks, Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Leakey, reflected the mood of many British units at this time: “The regiment had seldom been out of the action throughout the war . . . and they had certainly had their bellyful. The 5th fought as hard as any . . . even so, I missed that ‘urge to go.’ ” The CO of 1st Herefords, George Turner-Cain, found it painful to contrast the lack of enthusiasm among his own men with the dogged performance of the Germans:

. . . hard fighting and heavy casualties had a depressing effect on morale all round. Men became jumpy and unwilling to go forward in the face of fire or possible fire, unless led by their leaders. The Germans, who were highly disorganized, fighting in penny packets and not in formations, were showing splendid spirit and defiance, fighting until told to withdraw . . .

Major-General “Pip” Roberts wrote of the difficulties that winter: “Now, mistakes and failures could only delay the end. Of course we wanted to finish the war as quickly as possible, but at what cost? Unless morale was high, we would not achieve our objectives; heavy casualties in a fruitless battle will not help morale. We must try to win our battles without heavy casualties; not very easy.” Montgomery once described his unhappiness when Churchill conveyed to him American reproaches that the British seemed unwilling to take their share of casualties. “It was you, Prime Minister,” responded the field-marshal, “who told me that we must not suffer casualties on the scale of the Somme.”

Familiar tensions resurfaced between British and Americans. “The
Sketch
had a big write-up for the Yanks about their attack at Overloon,” George Turner-Cain wrote on 19 October. “We had to clear part of the wood for them. Rex took in a couple of platoons, killed about 20 Huns and brought back 17 prisoners. The Yanks had sat looking at the place with a battalion of infantry plus tanks. They appear to sit down opposite the enemy and wait for them to retire, rather than pushing continually. They use an abundance of artillery and air bombardment to break the enemy will to defend, then follow up on the ground.” Yet throughout this period Montgomery continued to press for a reinforcement of U.S. divisions to strengthen the British axis of advance. It is hard to overstate the scepticism which these demands provoked among the Americans. “When you analyse how difficult it would have been for the British to accomplish anything, even in the beachhead or coming across France, except where we were pulling them along,” said Bradley scathingly after the war, “why would he [Montgomery] think the British would step out and win the war while the Americans stood still? He wanted to take a bunch of Americans to do it with.” Bradley’s aide Hansen observed not without satisfaction: “The British have had tough going in attempting to clear out Antwerp. They have grabbed a tiger by the tail in attempting to flank the Siegfried line . . . they know now it cannot be done.”

To put the matter bluntly, and in a fashion that would deeply dismay those British and Canadian soldiers who suffered so much “at the sharp end,” 21st Army Group’s only substantial strategic achievement since the great dash across France and Belgium in August was the clearance of the Antwerp approaches, a task that should have been accomplished at negligible cost early in September. Even if some American commanders such as Patton and Gavin expressed doubts about the determination and skill of their own soldiers, they saw nothing about the British performance in Holland in the winter of 1944 to persuade them that their allies possessed grit or military gifts greater than those of the U.S. Army. The Australian Chester Wilmot, generally an admirer of British rather than American military conduct in north-west Europe, nonetheless observed brutally “what was at this stage the gravest shortcoming of the British army: the reluctance of commanders at all levels to call upon their troops to press on regardless of losses, even in operations which were likely to shorten the war and thus save casualties in the long run.”

Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, confided to Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay on 28 November (according to the admiral’s diary) that he was “rather depressed at the state of the war in the west . . . the SHAEF plan had achieved nothing beyond killing and capturing a lot of Germans, and that we were no nearer to knocking out Germany . . . The higher direction of the war had been bad in the last 2 months . . . Ike’s policy was only skin-deep and anyone could deflect it.” Between the beginning of November and mid-December 1944, British Second Army advanced just ten miles.

LIVING AND DYING

T
HE WEATHER INFLICTED
much misery upon the combatants before the compound of enemy action was added. It was the wettest winter in Holland since 1864. “Some people begin to believe that Our Dear Lord has become pro-Nazi,” wrote a Dutch doctor. Incessant rain reduced the battlefield to a quagmire, on which the movement of men and supplies was a Sisyphean task. The concentration of millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of trucks and armoured vehicles among the waterlogged fields and woods of north-west Europe made a mockery of mobility. The simplest military operation became a movie translated into slow motion. The living conditions of infantry in the forward positions resembled those of Flanders thirty years earlier. British boots and serge battledress were notoriously pervious to damp. Sodden canvas web equipment stiffened. Mould and rust became endemic. Men snivelled relentlessly, with common colds and ’flu, even without more violent threats to their well-being.

The soldiers of the Western armies were products of modern industrial societies. It is hard to overstate the transition inflicted upon them by warfare. Young men possess remarkable powers of adjustment to new circumstances. British and American soldiers had been expensively trained to endure hardship. But few became wholly inured to battlefield life. They were required to become creatures of the wilderness, perpetual campers and boy scouts, living in foxholes which allowed their occupants to sleep sitting, but seldom to lie prone. Every soldier spent far more time digging than shooting. It required the labour of many weary hours to contrive a hole deep enough to shelter a man effectively from shellfire. Within days of creating such a refuge, he was required to move on and repeat the process. Soldiers performed every natural function in the open; ate clumsy alfresco picnics of nourishing but monotonous food; lived in filthy and often damp clothing that went unwashed for weeks, even months; and were subject to the arbitrary authority of those appointed to lead them. This allowed individuals negligible discretion over their own lives in small things or large, through the seven days of the week and the eleven months of the campaign. Intelligent men found that among the hardest parts of war was the need to accept orders from stupid ones.

Routine was interrupted only by injury, death, spasms of movement from one drab patch of countryside to another or brief periods of rest. Mysteriously, attacks always seemed to be scheduled for Sundays. It became a luxury to enjoy the occasional opportunity to occupy quarters in a ruined building, a few days billeted in a farmhouse or factory. This was a life stripped of privacy and culture, in which men struggled to retain self-respect. A few enjoyed the opportunity to use weapons and to kill people; rather more learned to take pride in soldiering well; but many remained uneasy prisoners of their uniforms. Each day, they were forcing themselves to do things which did not come naturally, and indeed it would have been a tragedy for their societies if it had been otherwise.

Then the enemy took a hand. Mines, booby traps and skilfully sited German guns inflicted a toll on each small advance. There was none of the exhilaration of dashing charges across great swathes of country. Men were permanently filthy and wet, and often frankly demoralized. “There was a change of mood after Arnhem,” said Captain “Dim” Robbins. “One just didn’t feel the same. We were getting rather tired.” One of Lieutenant Roy Dixon’s comrades warned him dourly when he joined his unit: “We don’t want any Victoria Crosses in this troop.” Everyone knew that there would now be no big breakthrough before spring. It seemed a sorry business to risk one’s life to attack some battered Dutch hamlet or marshy map reference when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. Even when nothing important was being done, there was a relentless round of digging, patrolling and manning positions which could steal a man’s life as irretrievably as a big attack.

George Turner-Cain commented ruefully on the aggressiveness of German patrolling, the manner in which the enemy often reoccupied ground which the British thought was cleared. “Dim” Robbins’s CO rebuked him for walking upright when German tanks were firing airburst shells among the trees above them. Robbins said: “I’d simply got into a state of mind in which I didn’t care any more.” A shell fragment hit the officer beside Robbins, decapitating him. The man’s head fell into Robbins’s hands. He himself was hit in the eye by a splinter, which removed him to hospital almost until the war’s end.

Two mornings in succession, Corporal Denis Thomas’s Honey light tank dashed down a road to reconnoitre German infantry positions, hosed them with machine-gun fire and returned safely to the British lines. The third day, 6 October, proved once too often. The tank found its usual path blocked by felled trees. On turning right into a village, there was a heavy explosion against the hull, which stopped the engine and severed the electrics—a Panzerfaust impact. The crew bailed out, Thomas more slowly than the others because he was injured in the leg and side. He had to struggle to pull himself over the breech of the gun. Once on the ground, he ran clumsily into a nearby house. He regretted his choice of refuge as soon as he saw a rifle barrel protruding from a window. Then several Germans clumped in, carrying rations and other booty they had taken from his tank. At first, they did not see Thomas. He tapped the shoulder of one man, whose startled hands instinctively shot up in surrender. The injured tank gunner explained that he was the one who was giving up. An English-speaking lieutenant appeared, who genially introduced Thomas to the huge soldier who had fired the faust which crippled the Honey. Then the prisoner was led out of the back of the house to a motorcycle sidecar which took him to a field hospital. A German doctor who tended his wounds inquired how old Thomas was. Nineteen, said the Englishman. The doctor shook his head disbelievingly and muttered: “Sixteen.” Of the tank’s crew, the wireless-operator was also captured. The lieutenant in command escaped up a drainage ditch. The driver was killed by “friendly fire” as he sought to re-enter the British lines.