Armageddon (32 page)

Given the overwhelming Allied superiority of resources, the Germans’ psychological dominance of the battlefield was remarkable. A British intelligence report on the morale of German prisoners, composed after the Scheldt battles, concluded in some bewilderment: “Few thought that Germany had any hope of final victory; most had had their fill of fighting and recognised the futility of continuing the struggle. Nevertheless, they all fought hard. The deduction would seem to be that no matter how poor the morale of the German soldier may be, he will fight hard as long as he has leaders to give him orders and see that they are obeyed.” Patrick Hennessy said of the Germans: “We felt they were more professional than we were.” “Dim” Robbins, a career soldier, “always felt conscious that German small arms were better than ours. And if you spotted a Tiger tank, you simply stopped. They handled those tanks with such dexterity and accomplishment, it was fascinating to watch. There was a marked difference between their performance and ours.”

Professor Sir Michael Howard, who possesses the unusual distinction of being both a military historian and a veteran of combat against the Wehrmacht, wrote frankly:

Until a very late stage of the war the commanders of British and American ground forces knew all too well that, in a confrontation with the German troops on anything approaching equal terms, their own men were likely to be soundly defeated. They were better than we were: that cannot be stressed too often. Every Allied soldier involved in fighting the Germans knew that this was so, and did not regard it as in any way humiliating. We were amateurs . . . drawn from peaceful industrial societies with a deep cultural bias against all things military . . . fighting the best professionals in the business . . . We blasted our way into Europe with a minimum of finesse and a maximum of high explosive.

For even a modest local attack, the firepower deployed was awesome. Operation Clipper on 18 November involved four battalions of 43rd Division in an attack on the town of Geilenkirchen. The outlying village of Bauchem was bombed before 5th Dorsets began their assault. Then ten minutes of artillery fire delivered forty-nine tons of explosives on to the objectives. Three hours of mortaring provided a further forty-four tons, together with eighteen tons of 20mm, 40mm and 75mm tank ammunition. All this was followed by thirty minutes of medium artillery fire—73.5 tons of explosive. When the infantry attacked, they met little resistance and suffered only seven casualties, four of which were due to British shells falling short. The enemy’s positions were found to be held by 150 demoralized men of 183rd Volksgrenadier Division, mostly Austrians occupying open trenches. Of these around 15 per cent had been killed or wounded. Next day, a British battalion attempted a further advance without a barrage, but halted after suffering eleven casualties and insisted upon waiting for artillery support. In a subsidiary attack on Bauchem, the 4.2-inch heavy mortars of 8th Middlesex fired 10,000 bombs in three hours.

Statistics for Clipper highlight the scale of fire support the Allies routinely employed. They also demonstrate that, while mortar and artillery barrages could be effective in demoralizing poor-quality enemy troops, they inflicted remarkably few casualties against men occupying entrenched positions. Finally, the aftermath of Clipper illustrates the lack of enthusiasm displayed by infantry for pressing home an attack without massive “softening up.” Their psychological dependence upon artillery and air power was very great. And given such colossal expenditures of ammunition, it is scarcely surprising that there were chronic shortages. Throughout November and December, British twenty-five-pounder guns were restricted to forty-five rounds a day. Supplies of medium artillery ammunition had to be diverted from the Mediterranean. The Americans were in no better case. Allied troops often considered themselves to be suffering heavy German artillery fire, but nowhere on the front in the winter of 1944 did the enemy possess either the guns or the ammunition to match the weight of British and American fire.

It is sometimes supposed that Allied problems of supply disappeared once Antwerp was opened. In reality, severe difficulties persisted until late January 1945. Though Antwerp possessed a discharge capacity of at least 80,000 tons a day, for months stores moved from the dockside to the armies at a much slower rate. Even in early January, only 10,500 tons a day were being cleared off the quays. The Germans maintained a ferocious V-weapon barrage—between September 1944 and May 1945 nearly 7,000 rockets and flying bombs landed in the city and port, inflicting more than 10,000 casualties, most of them civilian. There was a strike among Belgian dockworkers in January, in pursuit of more rations and better working conditions. As for the rail system, it was easy enough to replace track, but far more difficult and time-consuming to repair French bridges and tunnels systematically destroyed by the air forces before and after D-Day. The Allies burdened themselves with supply requirements which were wildly extravagant by German or Russian standards, but deemed essential to sustain the armies of the democracies. In the autumn and winter of 1944, some U.S. divisions were diverted on their transatlantic passage to holding camps in Britain because the means to support them on the continent were lacking. Vast logjams of rail cars persisted east of Paris, and supply-stock record-keeping remained deplorable. Confidence among the fighting commanders in General Lee’s handling of the supply system, which was widely deemed a scandal, remained at rock-bottom. Still Eisenhower would not sack him.

There was a marked contrast in the outlook, background and behaviour of different British regiments. The old county infantry units did their business quietly and without fuss or illusions. They looked askance at aggressively smart cavalrymen like the 13th/18th Hussars, whose commanding officer Lord Feversham, a portly Yorkshire landowner, slept in blue silk pyjamas, and displayed an unaffected reluctance to wake up in the morning. As Feversham fought his way through Holland, he was considering an alternative offer of employment as governor of Madras. His officers’ mess was famous for its addiction to high-stakes roulette and chemin-de-fer. General James Gavin remarked of some British units led by professional soldiers: “They seemed to be much more relaxed about the war than we were, and made themselves as comfortable as they could whenever they could . . . At times, they seemed to enjoy the war.” The attitude noted by Gavin partly reflected a familiar, studied British upper-class nonchalance in adverse circumstances. Yet it is perhaps true that some British soldiers resented the war less than their American counterparts. Brigadier Michael Carver of 4th Armoured Brigade observed: “I just accepted how long it took to finish the business—I was fairly cynical then. This was life for me—it was what I did.”

Carver was a professional soldier wholly intolerant of amateurishness or inadequacy in others. He had risen to command an armoured brigade at the age of twenty-seven. He said later: “You couldn’t afford to let a man remain in command if he had ‘lost it.’ I got rid of the CO of the Sharpshooters, who had a DSO and two MCs, when I found him cowering behind a tank, shaking under shellfire. His regiment had become scruffy and idle.” To some, it seemed remarkable that an officer as abrasive in addressing superiors and subordinates escaped dismissal. Carver said unapologetically: “I kept my job because I did it bloody well.”

A
FEW MILES
behind the lines stood the thickets of camouflage-netted tents and vehicles which marked formation headquarters. Every Allied divisional HQ required the services of some 150 men, a corps slightly more, and their German counterparts significantly less. Those who served generals in the rear areas incurred little physical risk, save from the road accidents which took an appalling toll in the theatre of operations. Bradley’s 12th Army Group HQ somehow found employment for 5,000 men, and Eisenhower’s notoriously bloated staff was three times larger. There were many idle and useless mouths among the “pen-pushers.” Yet, for the men at the heart of directing operations, the strain was daunting. There is a myth cherished by some front-line soldiers and amateur students of war that staff officers enjoyed a “cushy” life. Yet those doing the vital operational planning and organization of logistics worked far harder than any peacetime civilian. There were no weekends or holidays, only relentless labour until the small hours of morning, underpinned by awareness that the welfare and indeed survival of hundreds of thousands of men were in their hands.

More than a few senior staff officers succumbed to exhaustion or nervous collapse. Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, the highly respected Freddie de Guingand, had to spend several weeks in an English hospital bed in the autumn of 1944. The health of General Sir John Kennedy, British Director of Military Operations, broke down after four years in his post. Most senior commanders worked punishing schedules. Guderian complained that he was sometimes unable to go to bed until 0500 if Hitler was in talkative mood. The German Chief of Staff, a man of fifty-six, had to be at his headquarters again three hours later. Sir Alan Brooke found Churchill’s midnight monologues an acute strain. The CIGS was unable to take the afternoon naps favoured by the British prime minister. Most of the men making the vital decisions of the Second World War had been born in the nineteenth century. They were now in their fifties at least, yet obliged to work at a pitch of intensity few civilians of their age could tolerate. “Every day I feel older, more tired, less inclined to face difficulties,” Brooke wrote gloomily in his diary. Montgomery, usually among commanders, adhered to a rigorous personal routine which allowed him to go to bed each night at 9:30 p.m. His immediate subordinates were not so fortunate. Chronic exhaustion was as normal a state for generals and staff officers as it was for the young soldiers who did their bidding in waterlogged foxholes.

The horizons of fighting soldiers of all nationalities became entirely bordered by their own company, the view discernible from the parapet of a foxhole. Most knew the name of the unit’s colonel, but few generals registered upon their consciousness. The thoughts of even intelligent and educated men were dominated by tiny matters such as whether the day’s rations would contain canned stew, whether the unit might get to a mobile shower unit. “The outside world didn’t seem to matter much,” observed Bill Deedes. “Every soldier was overwhelmingly preoccupied with getting through the day, and avoiding being killed or wounded. I never remember being very frightened, because I was so preoccupied with doing whatever job I had been given—getting my company to wherever they were supposed to be on time.” Opinion was divided over whether family ties at home were a help or an impediment in supporting the strains of battle. Some men believed that it was better to be unattached, but “Dim” Robbins thought that being married with a small daughter helped him a little as a soldier: “There was always someone who was interested in you—somebody you could feel that you were doing this for.”

It was a curiosity of the campaign that British newspapers reached men in the front lines, often within forty-eight hours. Many fighting formations published their own modest newssheets, to provide a minimum of information about events outside their own sector, but most men scarcely bothered to read them. A proposal was put forward to produce a British Army newspaper, matching the Americans’
Stars & Stripes
. The British secretary of state for war, Sir James Grigg, commented scornfully to Montgomery on the two journalists who were suggested as its editors: “[Tom] Driberg—Austrian, Jew, Anglo-Catholic, churchwarden, homosexual, communist. Hannen Swaffer is Jew, unwashed near-communist, toady of Beaverbrook.” Grigg’s tone suggests that he could have enjoyed a congenial dinner-party conversation with the men whom the war was being fought to destroy.

Many British soldiers were both jealous of the Americans’ vast resources and sceptical about their allies’ manner of fighting a war. “The contrast with our own way of doing things was enormous,” said Major John Denison. “They fought in a quite different way, approaching every operation like a gang of builders—very informal. We thought U.S. officers did not look after their men in the way we did. It was sacred in the British Army to ensure that your soldiers got a hot meal every 24 hours.” Almost every British soldier resented the power of American wealth in his battered homeland. A private of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, passing a column of American troops newly arrived from Britain, shouted sourly at them: “How’s my wife?”

“The Americans seemed very strange to us, and not terribly friendly,” said Lord Carrington. “We asked some of their officers to dinner once, at the time of the Ardennes, and they never even bothered to reply.” David Fraser shared his view: “We thought of the Americans without a great deal of respect, as unsoldierly and slovenly. Our views were ill-informed and unfair. The truth was that they had everything we would have liked and didn’t have.” Corporal Patrick Hennessy said: “Funny lot the Americans—we felt they were roughly on our side, but we resented the way they lorded it in England.” Edwin Bramall, who later became a field-marshal, greatly admired the U.S. Navy and air force, and the specialist arms of the U.S. Army. But he argued: “The Americans are least good at small-unit leadership.” There may be some truth in this, but when David Fraser spent time as a liaison officer with the U.S. Airborne, his respect grew. “They did things in a different way from us, but it was impressive. At first I thought their planning left too much in the air, but then I decided that this was a plus. We were too precise about telling people how to do things.” British criticisms and resentments were reciprocated, of course, by Americans, who often found the British snobbish, patronizing, slow and lazy. A USAAF pilot arriving to join a squadron in England late in 1944 recorded “a general feeling that the British were no longer pulling their weight in the war.” It is less remarkable that these beliefs and tensions existed than that they were overcome to make the alliance work as well as it did.