Armageddon (31 page)

The crusade to liberate Europe, upon which many men of the allied nations embarked with real idealism in June 1944, had degenerated into a series of sodden local manoeuvres. These roused few expectations among higher commanders, and cynical resignation among those who had to carry them out. Many men remarked upon the changed mood in Belgium and Holland that winter, the faltering of the commitment displayed by those who had landed on the Norman beaches in high summer. “After the airborne operation failed, we seemed to run out of ideas,” remarked Bill Deedes. “We moved very slowly. We did what Julius Caesar used to do two thousand years earlier—we went into winter quarters.” There was never any open admission by British commanders that they had abandoned hopes of a breakthrough, but the facts speak for themselves: until the German assault in the Ardennes, 21st Army Group moved nowhere far or fast.

For those occupying forward positions during the hours of daylight, positional warfare imposed immobility and boredom, while requiring constant vigilance. Beyond the enemy’s line of sight, men laboured on the daily round of fatigue duties—ration-carrying, washing and repairing vehicles, priming grenades, filling magazines, cleaning weapons. Intense activity began when darkness fell. During the hours when civilians slept, soldiers were obliged to exploit their invisibility. There were trenches to be dug, mines to be laid, units to be relieved, supplies to be brought forward. Even where there was no gunfire, the night silence was broken by the muffled thud and clink of spades, subdued voices and distantly moving vehicles. Patrols were sent out, often across a river or canal, to probe the German lines and sometimes bring back a prisoner for intelligence purposes. Each such small operation was a nerve-racking ordeal for those required to creep in darkness across water-logged countryside, poised every moment for the explosion of a mine or trip-flare, the rattle of enemy fire. Men were always tired, because even when there was no great battle to be fought, the simplest everyday tasks—cooking, finding a tolerable place in which to sleep, wash, defecate—become major challenges on a battlefield.

Thoughtful men, reared on the tradition of British bungling in the First World War, were pleasantly surprised by the administrative competence of the 1944–45 army, in which mail and rations never failed to appear. It is hard to overstate the importance of letters from home to morale in every theatre of war, and commanders knew it. “I was terribly impressed by the sheer efficiency of everything,” said Roy Dixon. “Everybody talks about the chaos of war, but to us it didn’t seem that chaotic at all. All the ordinary worries of peacetime life were taken away from us. We simply had to drive our tanks, and fight.” Above all, American and British soldiers could take for granted a privilege denied to the rest of Europe—a sufficiency of food.

One of the more squalid manifestations of the presence of more than three million men in open country beyond reach of sanitation and—not infrequently—even of properly dug latrines was the ubiquity of human waste, as well as every other form of garbage. Ammunition boxes, half-empty ration packs, tins, paper, shell cases, signal wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned foxholes, decaying human body parts, bomb craters, discarded munitions polluted great tracts of Belgium, Holland, France and now also Germany. Most of the metalled roads of Europe were ravaged by the passage of tracked vehicles. Men learned to live in a world of drab camouflaged greens and browns, in which the only primary colours were those momentarily generated by explosives.

“There was something happening all the time,” said Edwin Bramall, “but it was all small-scale stuff—patrol actions where you threw a few grenades, lost men on schu-mines, took one or two prisoners. We were advancing inch by inch.” Before the chilly grey light of dawn, each side’s snipers took up position in front of the lines, commencing motionless observation with binoculars and telescopic sights. It was a cold-blooded business, studying so closely the humdrum activities of men whom it was one’s duty to kill. A British sniper watched “Fat Hans,” as he christened a portly German private, for several days. The man’s routine was always the same. At dawn, he lifted his MG42 machine-gun on to the parapet of his trench and fired a test burst—what Bill Deedes described as “the grim rasp of a spandau clearing its throat.” Then Fat Hans stamped backwards and forwards, swinging his arms across his chest in search of warmth—and rashly exposing the top half of his body. One morning a single British rifle bullet terminated his appearances, to the mild regret of those of his enemies who had been diverted by his homeliness.

Even after years of war, some men retained scruples about licensed homicide. “It is believed that certain individuals are not suited for the business of killing,” observed a U.S. Army report regretfully. A Swedish soldier of the U.S. 563rd Field Battery practised for months handling his .50 calibre machine-gun. Yet when a Luftwaffe fighter made a rare appearance, flying so low that its pilot’s face was visible in the cockpit, the soldier’s fingers froze impotent on the trigger of his gun. Lieutenant Peter Downward commanded the sniper platoon of 13 Para. He had never himself killed a man with a rifle, but one day he found himself peering at a German helmet just visible at the corner of an air-raid shelter—an enemy sniper.

I had his head spot in the middle of my telescopic sight, my safety catch was off, but I simply couldn’t press the trigger. I suddenly realised that I had a young man’s life in my hands, and for the cost of one round, about twopence, I could wipe out eighteen or nineteen years of human life. My dithering deliberations were brought back to earth with a bump as Kirkbride suddenly shouted: “Go on, sir. Shoot the bastard! He’s going to fire again.” I pulled the trigger and saw the helmet jerk back. I had obviously got him, and felt completely drained . . . What had I done?

A British report on the autumn fighting showed overall casualty rates per thousand of 7.71 battle; 1.27 accident; 0.05 self-inflicted wounds; 2.06 battle exhaustion. Almost a third of all wounds were caused by shell splinters, 15 per cent by mortars, 30 per cent by gunshot. Blast, burns and mines each accounted for 10 per cent. Mishaps with weapons were a constant source of grief. Corporal Stan Proctor was proudly displaying a captured Luger when it went off, hitting a dispatch rider in the leg. The man fell to the ground moaning: “It hurts, it hurts.” An angry sergeant-major said unsympathetically: “You don’t expect it to tickle, do you?” Proctor felt deeply embarrassed, because it was his third accident with firearms.

Sometimes it seemed that something more than chance decided a man’s fate. Dr. David Tibbs was driving up a snowclad hillside, recovering British dead. With him was a stretcher-bearer, Billy Roper, a pacifist like many of his kind. Roper suddenly cried out: “Please sir, stop, sir!” Tibbs did so. “Why, Billy?” he demanded. “Because the Lord tells me I should, sir,” said the man earnestly. Next day, another officer who saw their jeep tracks in the snow reported that they had halted on the edge of a German minefield. God meant a lot to many men of that generation, especially Midwestern Americans. “I could worry every minute of every hour if it were not for my faith and trust in God,” Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema from Wisconsin wrote to his wife. “I know his presence is everywhere, and I have resigned myself to his will. Army life has been and always will be a shroud of uncertainty.”

Most of Dr. David Tibbs’s work consisted of patching up men for transfer to field hospitals, but he also found himself treating puncture wounds, for which he had little training, and even carrying out tracheotomies. One of the harshest tasks for every battlefield medic was to make an instant judgement about which men might survive and which were hopeless cases. Many doctors gave the latter swift and massive injections of morphine. Bullet wounds were usually clean, but mortar and shell fragments inflicted grotesque injuries. Tibbs was horrified to find himself confronted by one man whose shoulder had been pierced by a falling baulk of timber, which protruded from his chest. He was still alive and conscious, though plainly doomed. Men sometimes shouted aloud: “I’m not going to die! I’m not going to die!,” despite having had all the flesh stripped from their lower limbs by blast. No normal soldier ever grows wholly inured to the spectacle of other young men hideously mangled by deliberate human intent.

Almost all soldiers found disposal of the dead a distasteful task. Corporal Iolo Lewis put his hand on a shrivelled body and felt the flesh hardened into carbon, which upset him deeply: “Nothing had prepared me for the smells of war, above all that of roasted flesh. It was very unnerving for a young lad.” Corporal Andy Cropper, a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers, was sent to identify some dead comrades:

I saw a line of soldiers in uniform, feet towards me. Slowly I walked along searching. Sometimes, I had to step between them to get a better look at a face, half turned away, or a regimental insignia that was partly obscured. None of them appeared to be grossly mutilated. No separate messes here—officers rubbed shoulders with privates, a sergeant-major with a corporal. All had the same waxen pallor, some eyes were closed, some open, but all unseeing. At last, I had found one of the lads—old Harry, who was never on net. I touched him. He was icy cold, and somewhat rigid. Carefully I removed one of his identity discs. I did it as if he were asleep and I didn’t want to awaken him. I stood before him for a few seconds. I didn’t pray. I didn’t think. It wasn’t homage really, just a sort of “cheerio, Harry.”

Recovering bodies often demanded the collection of mere human fragments, sometimes hanging on bushes and trees. David Tibbs, though a medical officer, recoiled in revulsion from the spectacle of pigs snuffling around the separated torso of a much respected sergeant, who had been leading his company into an attack. “When people ask me what war is like,” Tibbs said afterwards, “I tell them to imagine that.” Some commanders of fighting units refused to allow their own men to handle corpses, arguing that it damaged morale. The task then fell to Field Hygiene Sections. Sometimes it was impossible to reach the dead for days. Even veterans flinched at bloated corpses, the skin of their fingers swelling green over the nails. Some remains had to be sprayed with oil and creosote before they could be handled, especially if they had been badly burned in armoured brew-ups. During the Scheldt battle, 52nd (Lowland) Division’s Reconnaissance Regiment found scores of German dead, who had been lying in the Leopold Canal for a fortnight. Their padre Captain Charles Bradley asked for volunteers to help bury them. Not a man came forward. “That’s quite all right,” said Bradley mildly, “I do understand.”

Shortly afterwards, an astonished soldier reported that the padre was digging graves entirely alone. One by one, men sheepishly drifted over to assist him. When the awful job was done, the priest asked: “Do you mind if we have a little service? I know they are our enemy, and it’s through them that we are here. But they all belong to someone. They are all somebody’s son, husband or father. They have come and paid the price for their country, as we are paying the price for our country. Whoever they are, everyone deserves a proper burial.” Padre Bradley held his service for the German dead.

It was an even worse task to clear human body parts from damaged tanks. In the U.S. 3rd Armored Division, the repair crews one day baulked at addressing a mess of twisted steel and charred flesh which had been towed into the depot. A tall, weedy soldier from the maintenance battalion stepped forward, and surprised his comrades by doing the job single-handed. He said afterwards: “I figured somebody had to do it. I have a younger brother who’s a rifleman in 1st Infantry somewhere forward of us. If he was killed, I would like someone to recover his body so it could be given a decent Christian burial.” It was hard to remove the lingering stench of death. Maintenance units did their best, by respraying the interior paintwork before handing over a repaired Sherman to a new crew.

Just as in the First World War, infantrymen cherished periods of quiet on their front, and were happy to pursue a policy of “live and let live” with the Germans opposite, especially at night. But most commanders considered it their duty to keep the enemy awake and to dislocate his activities. Thus, unless there was a friendly patrol out in front, in darkness flares were sent up at irregular intervals to illuminate no-man’s-land. Machine-guns fired on fixed lines where German troops were likely to be moving. There were spasmodic mortar barrages. The business of attempting to kill your enemy was seldom adjourned for long.

Fear seized men in different ways. Corporal Patrick Hennessy’s troops were embarrassed one day when their young officer burst into tears. One wireless-operator would never leave his tank in the forward area, even at night. A sergeant-major bringing up supplies to the tanks, who back in England had seemed a rock-like figure, turned and bolted for the rear in his jeep when German shelling started. In “Dim” Robbins’s company, a sergeant-major and his own batman sought to escape action through self-inflicted wounds. He sent both men for court-martial. “All the ones who said before we landed in France ‘Can’t wait to get at ’em!’ turned out to be useless,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon. “We had an ex-boxing blue who ran away.” A squadron commander of 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry was dismayed to find one of his men hiding in a barn to escape going into action. The trooper was persuaded to return to duty. Another soldier narrowly escaped court-martial after leaping out of his tank in action and pelting towards the rear.

“The British soldier is a little slow-witted,” suggested a German intelligence report of November 1944. “The NCO is for the most part very good. Junior officers are full of theoretical knowledge, but in practice generally clumsy . . . not really trained to be independent. The rising scale of casualties has led the British Command recently to behave more and more cautiously. Favourable situations have not been exploited, since the leadership has not responded to the new situation quickly enough.” The Germans, however, praised British intelligence, reconnaissance, camouflage and ground control of air support. A report from 10th SS Panzer Division suggested that some recent German attacks had been compromised by noisy and visible preparations which had attracted British attention. The most successful tactic in winning ground against Montgomery’s men, it concluded, was “an inconspicuous infiltration into an enemy sector weakly occupied by infantry.” Propaganda loudspeakers were deployed by both sides during static periods. In 15th (Scottish) Division’s sector late in September, a British officer broadcast a brutal running commentary to the German lines during an incoming Typhoon strike. This, he claimed, yielded a useful trickle of prisoners and deserters.